Very quickly, surprisingly so, he came to land that he did not recognize. As far as possible, he followed a straight course, but the hedgerow forced him left and right, sucking him along the high-banked lanes. Without his compass he would soon have lost his bearings. After a while he dipped into a wood, then out again. He was passing houses and farmyards he had never seen before, yet nothing was quite unfamiliar, so that he began to feel this was like dreaming, when the known shifts into the unknown and back again. Every so often he stopped to check a landmark against the map – a task made harder by the wartime removal of all the road signs. But he was a good map-reader and was able to plot his wavering course in a series of pencil marks against bridges and crossroads and farmyards.
Mid-morning his reverie was broken by the foul blood-and-urine stench of a tanner’s yard, and then he was walking through a small market town that he recognized from some childhood visit. And because all the signs had been removed it was as if he secretly knew its name but could not speak it, and he walked through the town from one end to the other, where everyone was going about their business, buying bread and buttons and newspapers, as though he were invisible. Only then did it occur to him that what he was doing was a very suspicious activity in wartime, and the marked map in his rucksack suddenly acquired a great weight. He walked on past the school, where the shouting children were on their morning break, through the churchyard and on out of the town into more fields and hedgerowed lanes until eventually it was midday exactly and he stopped.
He was in the middle of a field of cows. An enormous chestnut tree stood in the centre. He walked over to it and touched it with the flat of his hand. He could make out the roofs of some farm buildings and was able to work out his position on the map, which he now marked with a large cross. Then he sat down under the tree to eat his lunch and retraced his steps all the way home.
A crack of light had opened on the horizon when he got home – a white line upon the sea. It was about six thirty. He took off his boots and went to his room and rolled out the map on the floor. He took a pair of compasses, stuck the point into the cross of Thornton church and opened them out to meet the mark in the chestnut-tree field. As the crow flew it was only about twelve miles. The lead turned around the compass point, and the circle was drawn that would contain him for the rest of his life.
Matthew gridded up the circle and transferred the lines of the map onto a six-by-six-foot canvas. It hung, untouched, on his wall for several weeks before he decided how to start. In the meantime, he finished the portrait of James. It turned out truer than he had intended – he had brought his own disappointment to the painting. That was Matthew’s last portrait. He used to say, ‘Worlds in grains of sand, Morwenna. Worlds in grains of sand.’
But the war came to him anyway. Matthew performed his secret service, for ever unacknowledged. The Atlantic war dead washed ashore, in pieces, and he gathered them up, brought them up the cliff face to the churchyard for their anonymous interment. He never dropped his ritual of stopping when he passed a war memorial to say each name out loud. ‘Because you never know,’ he said to me, ‘how and where they might have ended up. Their names may be all that was left of them.’
No one ever suggested that we put up a stone to my father. I imagined Matthew on his evening walks to the cabin, standing at the edge of the tide and saying his son’s name out loud, into the wind: ‘John Venton!’
10.
For seventeen years after my father died nothing much happened, and then a pigeon flew through my window. It still feels to me now as though it was the pigeon that precipitated events, as though it had been winging its way towards me for years. It was like the butterfly in the Amazon that launches the avalanche, or tidal wave, or whatever it’s supposed to launch. Of course, it was Corwin, not the pigeon, but the pigeon’s entrance was more dramatic. Perhaps it was part of Corwin’s subconscious, unleashed. Or perhaps even of mine.
After Mum moved out, Corwin and I claimed Thornton for ourselves. Corwin declared that he was taking over our father’s desk, which had always fascinated him with its secret drawer in which our father had allowed him to conceal a hundreder conker and a Swiss army knife. Corwin swept the contents of the desk into a box and placed it on top of the box on Mum’s side of the bedroom wardrobe. Then I took down the Laura Ashley curtains from the garden room and moved my workbench down there. That was how it started.
During term breaks, we dared to do what had never been permitted our mother. We filled boxes with the domestic clutter of centuries: dusty single balls of saved wool, battered fans, bunches of dried lavender. We threw nothing out. Some superstition prevented us actually removing anything from the house and upsetting the delicate chemistry of its atmosphere. We stored everything in what had been our parents’ bedroom. At first we stored the dusty, broken, useless things. Then we began to curate. We asked Matthew, ‘Do you mind if we move this or that?’ And he never did seem to mind, so we stopped asking. Over the next three years boxes piled up under the bed, on the floor, on the bed.
And we cleaned. We applied buckets of lemon-scented Jif to every surface. We lifted furniture and hoovered up the mouse droppings. We pulled woollen blankets out of the corners of cupboards and released clouds of moths. We hung the rugs over the washing line and beat the dust out of them. When the house was clean, we painted. We started in the attic – we painted everything in my room white: the floors, the walls, the mantelpiece, the furniture. I took down the curtains and left the windows undressed so that when I woke in the mornings I could tell from the light in the room what colour were the sky and sea even before I opened my eyes. We boxed up everything from Corwin’s room: Che Guevara and The Communist Manifesto and The Dark Side of the Moon. We took his bed apart and rolled up the carpet and shoved it in with everything else. All that remained in Corwin’s room was a mattress on the bare floorboards and a wardrobe. Then we shut the door on our parents’ room and locked it. We hung the heavy key in the key cupboard in the kitchen.
After storm-tides we collected debris from the beach: wraiths of driftwood, which we balanced on string and hung over the landings; runic stones and spheres of rusted iron, which we placed on the ledges. We strung garlands of sea-perforated pebbles on frayed fragments of rope and arrayed bleached bird and sheep skulls on the mantelpieces.
Matthew never objected to this desecration of the ancestral seat – occasionally he would ask after a painting or an ornament that had been part of his home-scape for seventy years. When we said, ‘We packed it up,’ he would say, ‘Oh, did you?’ It was as though the house slumbered in hibernation behind the door of my parents’ bedroom. Matthew didn’t change a detail of our arrangements, although I noticed, with each visit, that something we had packed away had found its way into his study, things that must have had sentimental value – a decanter that had once sat on a shelf in the living room, a picture that had once hung in the hall, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, which must have belonged to our grandmother.
We began importing new acquaintances for weekends in the country and made them drink strong cider and laughed at their inappropriate footwear as we dragged them up and down the coast in all weathers. In the mornings we took coffee and chocolate with Matthew. Sometimes we visited Mum, Corwin more often than I. She was always smiling and made us take off our shoes in the hall.
But this little game of domesticity didn’t last because Corwin had the addict’s craving for pure experience. Immediately after he graduated, and without ceremony, so that at first I didn’t grasp the magnitude of his defection, he banished himself to the rainless, warring places where he moved through seas of confused, displaced human beings, digging and piping and irrigating. And the number of such places was infinite. He spun off so far into the unknown that I assumed he would eventually rewind in my direction. But then he had been gone for a year or two, and soon five, and, before long, ten. Of course, every so often he returned laden with gifts and he spoke as Corwin always had done and cracked the same
jokes at which Matthew and I laughed overmuch and gratefully.
My bedroom at Thornton filled with objects that spoke nothing to me of my brother, the family peacemaker. Red and gold Afghan rugs patterned with tanks and Kalashnikovs; unlovely fertility figures with swollen bellies and knife-hacked genitals; strings of enormous crude beads of crackled blue and coral red and embossed silver. They intruded so violently upon the white of my room that I began to believe they were given not in love but in anger.
I turned out to be a villager after all – I made of London my village and lived there quietly. That gift of my father’s, that first book press, turned out to be the gift that shaped my life. One morning in the autumn after I graduated, I walked into the bindery outside which I had been hovering for the preceding three years, like a street-child outside a bakery. It was one of those places that occupied its own temporal dimension: you could find it only if you knew exactly what you wanted from it. When I entered I sensed immediately that it was a place of great discretion, somewhere safe from intrusive questions and uninvited confidences. It was no bigger in floor-plan than the living room at Thornton, but with twice the ceiling height, and every square inch of wall and floor was taken up with chests of drawers and shelves of papers and cloths and leathers. At the back, squeezed between presses and piles of books and slip-boxes, was a large table at which three or four people worked in silence. The owner of the bindery perched behind a high counter, which was shoved into a corner by the display window. She was small, very thin. Her hair was pulled back into a plait, and the scattering of grey in it made it impossible to determine her age. She might have been anywhere between forty-five and sixty. She wore dark makeup around large eyes and a bright red lipstick, which, strangely, had the effect of austerity. Her name was Ana. She looked at the books that I had bound and brought to show her, said nothing about the many imperfections that I now know them to have contained, and took me on as an apprentice. And there I stayed put and there nothing ever changed. All around us London primped and preened while we sheltered in our time-loop. I began to understand Matthew better.
Still, shiny London was more enjoyable than grim London had been. Grey buildings returned to pale limestone, light bounced off multiplying panes of glass. I permitted myself some vicarious sparkling. In the semi-legal jerry-rigged industrial spaces that were my homes, I strung up fairy lights and held parties to which my few slow-won friends came, bringing with them smiling strangers.
Corwin came home to see in the new millennium with us. That Christmas, I unwrapped from a paper printed with robins and snowmen a malignant fist-clenched figure. It was about two feet high and was pierced all about with spikes of different shapes and metals. I placed it on the coffee table, where it bristled aggressively.
‘Goodness!’ said Matthew.
‘Powerful, isn’t he?’ said Corwin, smiling affectionately. ‘These,’ he said, gently fingering the end of a metal shard, ‘are petitions. They’re driven into the statue to bring down curses. It’s a bit like the principle of a wax doll, except that he doesn’t represent the victim. He’s the spirit who has the power to exercise the curse.’
I put the curse spirit on my bedroom table and contemplated him. I thought of Corwin’s weightlessness: how little he carried with him; how I was his proxy consumer of interesting ethnic artefacts, so that he might drift through the world alleging passion but committing to nothing. I thought about Thornton and how firmly it sat in the combe, how weighted it was with a heavy ballast of furniture and books, and I set to devising a counter-punishment. I knew how to slow Corwin down. I would send him books. And he would not be able to give them away because I would bind them myself and make them personal to him, and over time his bags would fill with books and they would all be about Here, and he would have to take Here with him, wherever he went.
I raided Matthew’s collection of forgotten local histories, excavated from the dustiest corners of failing second-hand bookshops, and started with Cove and Combe: Secrets of the Devon Coast, a gentleman’s vanity publication, as so many of them were. It had been nicely produced, with engravings of looming cliffs and fishing vessels tossed on unlikely waves, but the cover was coming apart, which was the only reason that Matthew allowed me to wrest it from his collection. I gave it an inappropriate periwinkle-blue cover and overdid the endpapers with extravagant marbling – the books must be conspicuous and the materials too expensive to discard. I wanted the periwinkle blue to mass, book by book, so that Corwin might take measure of the extent of his abandonment of me. At the base of the spine I tooled a device: it was Matthew’s farting Devil.
Later, as Matthew receded, I stopped asking permission to remove books from the shelf. I sent Corwin West Country Myth and Mystery and Tales of the Moors and Fairies, Pixies and Knockers. I plumped up earnest limp-bound parish histories. They were as you would expect: a lot of health-giving striding of the coast punctuated with amusing bursts of buzzing Devon dialect.
Every time I went down to Thornton and lifted another book to weigh down Corwin, my curse spirit seemed to grin at me a little more obscenely, as though I had tasked him with another metal spike to his head. I would grin back, and think, as I drifted to sleep: I curse you, Corwin Venton. I curse you to Here.
11.
I didn’t see Corwin again for five years. Perhaps (although I was still sending him books) I had almost learned to do without him. The weather had already turned cold, and I sensed another eviction coming, if you could call it an eviction when you didn’t have a tenancy agreement. I was beginning to wonder if, at thirty-three, I wasn’t getting too old for this. My homes had become precarious – every last garage in the East End was being bought up by developers and turned into a construction of sheets of glass set in a material that looked like the grey plastic from which Corwin used to build model aircraft. My landlord, Linton, had begun to look shifty. He ran a factory that made things out of fake fur from the three floors of warehouse beneath my flat. Rolls of artificial leopard and bear leaned stacked against the walls on all the landings and moulted onto the worn stair carpets. There was a layer of synthetic lint on every surface of the building. Maybe ‘shifty’ was unfair. Linton had always been considerate of me. When we met on the stairs we danced awkwardly around rolls of pretend zebra, which lodged between us and caught in the wobbly banisters. I had seen men with expensive mobile phones and stripy suits looking up at my window, but didn’t want to upset Linton by asking about them. ‘Regretful’ was a better description of his expression – he didn’t want to displace me.
I began to spy on my own front door. I had to stand on my workbench to get an oblique enough view into the narrow cut of street below. One Sunday morning there was a man pointing his camera up at me, taking photographs. I pulled on a jumper and sheepskin boots over my pyjamas and sprinted down the four flights of shaky stairs to confront him. He was taken aback by the sudden opening of the door of a building that had been shuttered up for the weekend. I said, ‘What are you doing?’
He was strangely rectangular, I noticed. It was the coat he was wearing, some kind of military surplus parka. He said, ‘I don’t think that’s any of your business.’
I said, ‘You’re photographing my home. I think that’s my business.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s my point … sort of.’
He pointed up to a glass-studded ledge level with the second-floor window – an area of flat roof between my building and the next. ‘That’s what I’m actually taking a picture of. There’s a CCTV camera up there.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘You should pay more attention,’ he said sternly.
‘I prefer not to,’ I said. ‘Paying attention just makes me anxious. Why are you taking a picture of the camera?’
‘It’s an act of resistance.’
‘To what?’
‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that the average Londoner is captured on CCTV three hundred times a day?’
‘Yes,’
I said, although it wasn’t true. ‘And?’
‘I’m capturing them back.’
‘What? All of them? Is it conceptual art, or something?’
‘Not at all! It’s about basic principles of civil liberty.’
‘You sound like my brother. What are you, then? Some kind of urban guerrillero?’
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s private. A sort of secret subversion – like spitting in soup.’
‘Do you spit in people’s soup too?’
‘No!’ He sounded offended. He looked far too noble to stoop so low. ‘I was speaking metaphorically.’
‘What do you do with the pictures?’ I asked.
That was how I acquired Ed: by accident, in November, over a bacon butty under the railway arch. His hands were strangely delicate, protruding incongruously from the block of khaki that he was wearing. He said that what he did with the pictures was print them off, passport-photo size, label them with date and time, and stick them to the wall. He had been doing it since January. It had been his New Year resolution to photograph every CCTV camera that he walked beneath.
‘I’m surprised you haven’t been arrested,’ I said.
‘Oh, I have,’ he said proudly.
‘Well, there you go!’ I said, not asking for details. ‘Can I see them?’
A new landscape opened up to me as I looked for CCTV cameras. At ground level, London was a flickering sequence of shop windows, or the same front door flashing up in different colours, but now I looked up and it became more geometric, stepped and zigzagged, embellished by rolls of barbed wire and boastfully inaccessible graffiti. There were unexpected ornamentations and vanities: a mosaic panel of birds; the face of a woman in relief above the arch of a doorway. I felt pleasantly dizzy. We stopped to document six cameras.
The House at the Edge of the World Page 8