The rain squatted above me all the way from Taunton, a cold sleety rain. But around the headland the sky cleared. A single bolt of pink unfurled across the blue. Sudden stunted bare trees reached over the lanes like supplicant souls. By the time I arrived in Thornton the dark was rising up the sides of the combe. There was light in the hall and in the kitchen – Matthew still had the habit of putting the hall light on at twilight; some ritual of regard for the stray wanderer, perhaps.
Matthew inhabited only a part of the house now: the kitchen, his study, his bedroom. When we came down he would venture with us into the living room, which smelt damp until we cranked up the heating. Mum never visited us there.
He was at the kitchen table, reading and nibbling on a plate of bread, cheese and tomato chutney. He looked up and I searched his face for sign of illness. He was a little more drawn, perhaps. ‘Ah! Morwenna!’ He wasn’t expecting me so soon, but he couldn’t be sure that I hadn’t told him I was coming straight down and, anyway, he had long since given up being surprised by anything. I kissed his forehead.
‘Are you hungry?’ he asked.
‘Starving!’
He fetched a plate and put the cheese and the butter dish in front of me and sliced a piece of bread. It was fresh, elastic under the butter.
‘How’s Corwin?’ asked Matthew.
‘He’s on his way home.’
‘Oh, is he?’ Matthew looked up. ‘From where?’
Once Matthew had kept track of Corwin in an old atlas, which acknowledged neither the independence of African states nor the break-up of the Soviet Union. But Corwin had been gone so long that he had given up trying to distinguish between the different kinds of elsewhere that held him. There was only Thornton now. Unchanging, set in granite against the Atlantic. He no longer even quite believed in London, although he was occasionally persuaded of it by me.
‘Sudan,’ I said.
‘Goodness! How fascinating that must be. What has he been doing there?’
‘Oh. The same thing he does anywhere – everywhere else but here.’
We washed up. ‘Let’s have a nightcap in the study,’ Matthew suggested. ‘Have you anything to read?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why don’t you find me something, and I’ll get the fire going?’
I switched off the light in the kitchen. For a moment I stood in the dark and listened. There was nothing but ancient sound – the rushing of the brook, the hoot of an owl – then Matthew’s step in the hall. He had found something for me.
I lit a fire in his study, and brought some logs in from the wood shed. Matthew poured two glasses of malt whisky. He laid a book on the coffee table – a tatty limp-bound book called The Ghosts of Dartmoor. ‘I thought you might make something of that,’ he said. ‘It has some lovely woodcuts. You could turn it into a nice little book.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Oh, and I’ve brought you a present – chilli chocolate,’ I added, handing the bar to him. ‘I thought we could try it tomorrow with coffee.’
‘Goodness!’ said Matthew. ‘Do you really think so?’
I stood up and took my glass over to the map. ‘Is there anything new?’ I asked.
I expected him to say, ‘You’ll have to use your eyes.’ That was the old game – catch him at it or find it yourself. But instead he said. ‘Ah, yes! I knew I had something to show you. Stand back. No. Not there. Further back. So that you can see it all.’
Taking my arm he steered me around his desk and manoeuvred me until my back was against the bookshelves on the opposite wall. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Look at it. Really see it – as a whole.’
I tried to see it. All of it. All at once. Somewhere beneath, all that glowing colour was anchored on the contours of the Ordnance Survey map. I tried to intuit them, to disregard the painting’s wandering saints and wronged women and poet priests; its contradictory seasons, snowdrops and roses, fruit and blossom, spring cubs and autumn hunters. I thought, belatedly, that it was interesting that Matthew had allowed the half of his circle that was sea to be blue, when it was almost never that. More often, almost always in fact, it was the colour of cloud and rain, of bruised skin. Bisecting his circle of land and sea were the cliffs, rising out of the water and receding into the top right quarter of the circle, as they would appear to a walker approaching from the south-west. Off the coast was the jagged line of a reef. Except that I knew that this reef was a ships’ graveyard, and that Matthew had recorded every ship wrecked off our coast by painting their watery ghosts, in full rig, and, though this was only visible under the magnifying-glass, I knew that he had written each of their names in his minuscule hand along with the dates of their deaths. And I knew all their names: they repeated themselves. Perseverance, 22 April 1842, and Perseverance, 30 June 1866, and Perseverance, 24 October 1897. There was Hope, and again Hope, and yet still more Hope. There were Hannahs and Elizabeths and Mary Anns. The world had sent its ships to die there: the Pacquebot de Brest, and the Maria Kyriakidis, and Matthew’s favourite, the Dulce Nombre de Jesus. And, of course, the Constantia, out of whose entrails Great-grandfather James had constructed the cabin.
‘Now,’ said Matthew. ‘Let me show you.’
He rummaged around in his plan chest and pulled out a large roll of tracing paper. Then he pulled up his library steps and began to tape the top edge of the roll to the top of the canvas with masking tape. Carefully, he unrolled the paper and secured it to the edges of the stretcher so that it overlay the whole painting, but tightly, so that the painting was visible beneath a pattern of pencil lines. As he smoothed it over the map and fiddled with the tape and the edges until it fitted tightly, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’d never seen it before. Do you see it yet?’
I didn’t. He came over to stand beside me. ‘This is quite extraordinary. If you join up these points, church, Devil’s Stone and cabin, you mark a triangle from which you can build a pentagram that fits exactly within the circle. There it is, Morwenna. Divine Proportion!’ You’re mad, I thought. Quite mad. You have placed yourself at the centre, and now you detect divinity in your design. And at the same time I thought: I want to grow to be old and mad and afire with conviction.
We contemplated Matthew’s golden secret for a couple of minutes, until Matthew asked, ‘When are we expecting Corwin?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. He just told me to meet him here.’
‘What brings him home?’
‘Perhaps he’s homesick,’ I said. ‘Do you think he gets homesick?’
‘How could he not?’
Carefully, I removed the tracing paper. The firelight flickered over the figure of a sleeping giant, almost invisibly folded, like a foetus, into the belly of Squab Rock. When I turned back to Matthew, he was in his armchair and his eyes were closed. His pipe, unlit, lay loosely in his hand. I sat by the fire, sipping whisky and waiting, as ever, for Corwin.
13.
The curse figure was grinning at me when I woke up in my room. It was another leaden day. I could hear a Hoover banging around in the hall below and wondered when Matthew had taken on a cleaner. Corwin and I had been nagging him to do so for years, but until now he had insisted on looking after himself. By the time I got downstairs the mystery vacuumer was no longer there. Matthew, also, was gone, off on his meanderings. I made myself tea and toast and walked out into the garden to look for signs of spring. The trees were poised and secretive. I went from bed to bed, bending every so often to push away the covering of decayed leaves from emergent bulbs.
My circuit brought me to the entrance to the kitchen garden and, wrapping both hands around my mug of tea for warmth, I wandered through the brick arch and into a perfectly cultivated plot, all dug over, ready for planting. At the far end a skinny woman in blue dungarees was pushing a wheelbarrow. For a moment I didn’t recognize her. I had last seen her from a distance in some pub or other, plump with puppy fat in skinny white denims and silver heels – or, at least, that was how I chose to picture her.
‘Sandra?’ I said
, too late to suppress the outrage in my voice.
She glanced over her shoulder without stopping and continued to push the wheelbarrow in the direction of the compost heap. Then she turned and came towards me.
‘What brings you home, then?’
She was able to sink the ‘you’ to an enviable depth of disdain, by losing the h in ‘home’.
‘I wanted to see my grandfather.’
‘Well. Fancy that!’ she said, in reproach.
‘Sandra – what are you doing here?’
‘Your granddad needs keeping an eye on – that’s what I’m doing here. And the arrangement is he pays me a little and I get use of this garden.’
‘Oh. He never mentioned it to me!’
‘Well, he probably thinks he did. His memory’s not so good these days.’
‘I know that!’
I wanted to say that it was my house, my garden, and that Matthew ought not make arrangements without consulting me and Corwin, but while I was not saying that, Sandra had already become bored with me and asked, ‘Where’s Crow to these days?’
‘Sudan,’ I said.
‘He doesn’t stay put for long, does he?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t stay put for long. But he’s on his way home.’
‘About time,’ she said.
‘I didn’t know that you were a gardener,’ I said.
‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you?’
She was snipping cuttings into small pieces with secateurs; they piled up in the wheelbarrow. ‘Did you want something?’
‘No,’ I said, retreating. ‘I was just out for some air. I didn’t know you were here.’
‘See you, then,’ she said.
I had forgotten about the existence of Sandra Stowe. One summer at primary school – I think it was the year of the Silver Jubilee – she fixed me with a pointing finger in the playground, framed by the Gothic window of the infants’ classroom, and declared me ‘Wi-itch! Wi-itch!’ in front of the whole school. ‘Witchy face!’ she shouted. ‘Witchy name!’
The day before, each of us had been asked to draw up a family tree as a homework assignment. Our teacher, Miss Arden, a pretty young curly blonde incomer who basked in our adoration, had enthusiastically pieced together the jigsaw of cousins, aunts and uncles and established that two-thirds of the class could trace a line back to only four sets of great-grandparents. A neat diagram connecting them all together was displayed on the classroom and the class was invited to marvel at its inbreeding. The Venton name was not on it – we didn’t marry into the village. We were posh, and my poshness, I vaguely sensed, even at the age of seven, lay at the root of the attack on my given name. The objection was not simply that I was posh, it was that I was posh and not at posh school, where I belonged, and where I was not, despite my mother’s protests, because my father had hated posh school.
All the other kids joined in: ‘Morwenna Venton is a witch! Morwenna Venton is a witch!’ I don’t remember minding. Matthew had us living in our imaginations in a magical netherworld and it was appealing to be ascribed supernatural powers. The sun was warming my back and I felt my spine curve up and my neck contract into my shoulders and I raised my arms, spreading out all my fingers – my ten pointing digits for Sandra’s one – and produced from deep in my chest a rasping, cursing kind of voice and said quietly: ‘I know your name, Sandra Stowe. I know your name and the names of your father and your mother and your grandfathers and your grandmothers. I know all your names.’
Suddenly Miss Arden stood in front of me. I knew immediately that I was in trouble – it was clear that I had been ill-wishing my classmates. She couldn’t exactly punish me for invoking curses, so I was sent to sit in the book corner for ‘being mean’, which was not much of a punishment as I preferred to be in the book corner.
Remembering this now, having forgotten it for almost thirty years, I wondered if Sandra also remembered it in this way. Probably not. I thought that it would be interesting to ask her, one day.
A couple of nights later a north-easterly wind blew in, a lullaby gale that sang me in and out of my sleep. At around three o’clock I woke fully for a minute or two and lay there. I thought of Mum and how she used to lie fretting awake on storm nights, resenting the rest of us who had been born to these storms and who wrapped ourselves up in them, deeper and warmer in our dreams. I realized that my heart had been missing this sound and that I had not known it. Then I turned over and slept through the rest of the night.
In the morning the wind was gone and the grey air was languid with exhaustion. The faint arrhythmic squeak of Matthew turning the handle on the coffee grinder came from the kitchen. I had given him an electric grinder as a Christmas present one year, but he never used it. I got up and looked out of the window. A hire car was parked on the driveway below. Corwin – blown in on the storm.
I crept into his room. The bed was in disarray and a duffel bag was thrown in the corner, but he wasn’t there. He wasn’t in the kitchen, either.
‘Where’s Corwin?’
‘Oh,’ said Matthew. ‘Is he back?’
‘He’s back, but he’s not in his room.’
‘Goodness,’ he said, pouring out a cup of strong black coffee and applying a significant amount of sugar. ‘How you two come and go!’ Then, ‘He’ll be in the cabin, I expect.’
I filled a Thermos flask with coffee and ran down to the beach. At the bottom of the combe an oak lay, up-tipped across the mill leat, its violated roots obscenely exposed. On the beach the storm had done its usual work of dragging up a tideline of battered Atlantic plastic, entangled blues and reds and greens – snapped fishing line, lost net buoys, discarded bottles and abandoned buckets and spades.
A weak column of smoke dribbled out of the chimney. Corwin lay asleep, his face hidden under the multi-coloured bedspread. Only a hand and forearm and some strands of dark hair were visible on the pillow. I put some pieces of driftwood in the stove and blew the fire back to life, then poured myself a cup of coffee and sat and waited for him to wake up. What had changed in him in the last five years? What had changed in me? Less in me, I thought. There had been less to change me. There was Ed, of course. But he was not so much a change as a logical progression.
A drum tap of light rain fell on the metal chimney cap and echoed down the stovepipe. The soles of Corwin’s boots were caked with mud, but the creases around the ankles were packed with a fine dun-coloured sand – African dust. I hated to think of Africa. It made such enormous demands on the conscience.
The cabin was heating up. Corwin turned, pushed off the blankets and opened his eyes. ‘Hello,’ he said.
‘I’ve brought you some coffee.’
He sat up. He was thinner, but more muscular. There was a military tautness to his face, dark rings under the eyes, and he had grown a beard, which was still dark. ‘I couldn’t sleep in the house,’ he said. ‘The bed felt too big.’ This only added to the impression he gave of being a recently released hostage.
I handed him his coffee. ‘How’s Matthew?’ he asked.
‘Mum says Mark implied that he was dying, but he seems just the same. He doesn’t change. As eccentric as ever.’
Corwin laughed, but a little cynically, I thought.
‘You look different,’ he said. ‘Smoother and shinier. I hope you’re not going to go all soignée on me, like Mum did.’
‘How can you possibly tell? I’ve just got out of bed! I’m still in my pyjamas! I hope you’re not going to go all sanctimonious on me just because you’re a fucking war junkie.’
‘Ah!’ He smiled. ‘My lovely foul-mouthed Morwenna. I really have missed you. Come and cuddle up.’
He shifted over on the narrow bed, and I slipped off my boots, climbed in next to him and laid my head on his bony shoulder. I could smell coffee and sleep on him. ‘How long are you back for?’ I asked.
‘Sh!’ he said, ‘Listen!’
I listened: rain, wind, waves, shingle, seagulls.
Matthew was
cooking breakfast when we got back to the house. Yesterday’s left-over potatoes were frying with onion. He had obviously been watching out for us, because he came to meet us on the steps at the kitchen door, holding out his hands to Corwin, solemn and joyful like a priest on Easter Sunday. They clasped their hands together, Corwin stooping slightly, both beaming – with relief, I realized: they had not been sure that they would see each other again.
Matthew broke some eggs into the potatoes. ‘I will have to ask you all about it, but we won’t know where to begin,’ he said, ‘so we’ll just let it all come out in its own good time. Morwenna, dear, would you grind some more coffee?’
‘There’s a tree gone over, down by the footbridge,’ said Corwin.
‘One of the old oaks? What a shame!’
Corwin tucked into an enormous pile of potatoes. I had never seen him eat so fast. I turned the handle on the coffee grinder. Matthew put some ketchup on the table and wandered off to the pantry to search for brown sauce.
‘How long are you staying?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Corwin. ‘It depends on a lot of things. I’m in no hurry to leave. What about you? Can you stay for a while?’
‘I can sort something out, I guess.’
‘How’s Ed?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I stole his car.’
‘You should marry him and have children,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Lots and lots of children. And live here. With chickens and geese and that goat Dad always wanted.’
He was concentrating very hard on pouring ketchup.
‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve got married, or something?’ I felt quite sick at the thought. ‘Is that what this is all about?’
Corwin laughed. ‘No, Morwenna. It’s not what this is all about. But I release you from our vow.’
‘But I never made that vow.’
‘So much easier,’ he said. ‘I only have to release myself. Can I, please? I want to fall in love with someone – anyone. It doesn’t look that difficult.’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 10