As I manoeuvred my bike into the hall, I noticed that there was light on the stairs. It would be Ed. Fair enough, I thought – and so tactful of him to wait until the weekend. I hoped he would forgive me, and I noticed that I hoped and, at the same time, assumed that he would.
He was sitting at the kitchen table, as though it would be inappropriately informal to wait for me on the sofa. I poured us each a glass of wine and sat opposite him.
‘So,’ he said. ‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’
‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘I don’t really know what’s going on.’
He drank his wine and waited for me to come up with something better than that.
‘I’m very cold,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have a bath. You can come and talk to me if you like.’
I ran the water and lit candles and lay there drinking my wine. Eventually Ed came in and sat on the edge of the tub.
‘You seem upset,’ he conceded.
‘Yes.’
‘Corwin?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s brooding over my father. But I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘You and he have a very strange relationship.’
‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But I have no point of comparison. We just are. There has never seemed to be an alternative.’
The blind at the bathroom window glowed a weary orange from the streetlamp below. I wondered what Ed required of me for normality to resume. To offer an explanation of Corwin? To denounce him? Strange, how that word popped into my head: ‘denounce’. What for? Ed was strangely colourless – like a moth. I wondered if it was deliberate camouflage, so that the CCTV cameras would not pick him up.
‘What about me?’ asked Ed. ‘Aren’t I an alternative?’
That was far too difficult a question. ‘Did I ever tell you,’ I asked, ‘about how Matthew came to draw the map?’
Ed sighed a patient sigh. He was counting to ten. I thought about all the hundreds and thousands of tens he had counted to since we met. They stretched out into a long, long line, disappearing off into outer space. But then they re-formed to make clumps of pinpricks in time – tiny voids, which merged together to form an awful soul-sucking black hole.
… nine … ten. Deep, self-controlling breath. ‘Yes,’ he said.
I ignored him. He was missing the point. Some stories are meant to be told more than once – they have multiple applications. This was one of them.
‘First of all,’ I said, ‘you need to understand that Matthew is absolutely terrified of the sea. He loves it – or “her”, as he would say. But she terrifies him. Why that is, is another long story, which belongs elsewhere.’
I let in a little more hot water. Ed was sitting on the edge of the bath. His fingers were pushed into his hair and he leaned his forehead against the palms of his hands. His eyes were closed.
‘So, this is the story of Matthew’s Disappointment,’ I continued – not at all discouraged by Ed’s despair. ‘Matthew was nineteen, and he liked being in Thornton, although he thought perhaps he should go to university, or something character-developing like that. But there was a war on, and even in Thornton it could not be ignored.’
‘And the doctor told him he had a limp, and the very next day,’ said Ed, ‘he set out at dawn and walked as far as he could by midday and marked it on the map and came home and made a circle around himself and that’s how he came to paint the map.’
‘Matthew tells it better.’
‘I don’t want to talk about Matthew.’
‘My mother thinks,’ I said, ‘that it’s “egotistical, bordering on hubristic” to place himself at the centre of the world like that.’
‘I think I’m probably on her side.’
I was sorry that Ed looked so forlorn. I said so. I said, ‘I am sorry. Will that do?’
‘It looks like it’s going to have to, doesn’t it?’
‘Do you want to get into the bath?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Let’s do something different tomorrow,’ I said, deciding that that was enough for the time being.
‘Like what?’
‘Let’s go to the Saatchi Gallery. I haven’t been there in years.’
‘You hate all that stuff.’
‘Yes, I do,’ I admitted. ‘But I’m bored with myself. I think I should challenge my own prejudices.’
‘Why are you bored with yourself?’
‘Corwin once described me as a “collection of detachments”,’ I said. ‘Do you think that’s fair?’
Ed stood up. ‘I think “a collection of self-indulgences” would be more accurate!’
‘Ed!’ I called out. ‘You’re cross!’
But he was already gone.
Poor Ed.
Morwenna’s Last Chance.
It was a couple of weeks before I visited the gallery. I had made up with Ed, but our truce still felt a little fragile and I thought it better to go on my own. The figure was smaller than I remembered it. It appeared waxen, pliant, as if the cold, blue-veined flesh of it would dimple under the warmth of my finger, but the label said ‘silicone and mixed media’. A hard material, then – unyielding. I sat down on the floor next to it and crossed my legs. In the few years since I had seen it I had given it my father’s face; or the approximation of my father’s face that had settled upon my memory. It came as a surprise to see another man’s face there, an older man’s. One who had taken death slowly, given himself to it piece by piece, rather than launching into it whole and healthy.
As I thought that word, ‘healthy’, its antithesis launched itself into my mind: ‘diseased’. Matthew was diseased, probably – cancerous, probably – although he had told us nothing and we could only speculate.
The gallery was filling with disappointed damp people, who had been looking forward to a turn on the London Eye but had found the queues too long for a rainy April day. Dead Dad and me on the floor, the smell of wet trainers, a small child’s arm being pulled back by her father – her instinct was to touch the figure.
Could my father have had cancer? I wondered, fully giving myself up to the thought that he might have committed suicide. What if death had been inside him already? What if he had been growing it somewhere in the strange universe of his body, massing an invisible malignancy, and he had wished to spare us all?
The thought would not quite complete. Spare us all what? Leave-taking? Certainty? I could not make it make sense – my father was not a messy person: he liked order. His death was not orderly.
I left the gallery and went out into the rain and leaned on the embankment wall. Even after all these years of living in London I was surprised by the river, its rise and fall, its secret tributaries, flowing beneath the tangled traffic, cascading from the embankment walls. And the boats – somehow I always forgot that there were boats, and that there had been boats long before there had been a city, and that the river connected with the sea, and that its connectedness with the sea was the whole history of the city. Matthew never lost sight of these things. He would chide me if he knew.
My father had never seen this river – nor ever wanted to. Mum came regularly now, as she had done before she met my father, to visit the galleries, to shop. We lunched together in West End restaurants. (‘Making up for lost time, darling,’ she said. ‘Thanks a lot, Mum!’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean you, darling. It’s not always about you.’) I forced my thoughts back to my father. If suicide, then why? Was that Corwin’s question? I could not imagine that our father would wish us to poke around asking why – he was too private. And then that struck me as the answer – he had wanted a private death!
I rang Mum, and when she answered, I said, ‘Mum. My battery’s about to go. Can you get me Mark Luscombe’s number quickly?’
Mum didn’t ask why. She assumed that I wanted to talk to him about Matthew. She gave me the number, said, ‘Call me soon!’ and I hung up.
‘Mark! Hi. It�
�s Morwenna Venton.’
‘Morwenna! What a nice surprise.’
‘I need to ask you something.’
‘Is this about Matthew?’ His voice was cautious.
‘No. It’s about Dad.’
A hesitation. ‘About John?’
‘Yes. I’ve been thinking … about Dad. Was he ill when he died?’
Another hesitation. He was working out where this was leading – had worked it out. There was sadness in his voice when he replied: ‘No, Morwenna. There was nothing physically wrong with him.’
There was a spasm in my chest. My heart was hurting. Hearts could actually hurt!
‘“Physically”? What does “physically” imply?’
‘Morwenna? Are you still there?’
‘I said, “What does “physically” imply?”’
I was shouting, but he couldn’t hear me. ‘Morwenna? Morwenna?’
There was rain inside my phone. A boat full of tourists went by on the churning brown river. I remembered someone telling me that there is a reward for fishing bodies out of the Thames – she was a rower, and more than once, she told me, a dawn training session had been interrupted to tow a suicide to the bank. I remembered this, now that the word ‘suicide’ had introduced itself into my thinking. No one, in the last seventeen years, had so much as whispered the word in relation to my father – at least, not in my presence. And yet now there it sat, right in the middle of my forehead, pulsing gently.
Back at home I called Corwin. It was the first time we had spoken since I had left him by the fire.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Let’s say I allow the possibility that it wasn’t an accident. Then what?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, you’ve planted the idea now. I’m stuck with it.’
‘What idea?’
I forced myself to say it: ‘Suicide.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘Fuck’s sake, Corwin. Just stop it!’
The rain was on my window and sneaking into my flat through the warped frame. ‘Is it raining at your end?’
‘Pissing down!’
‘Good! But why would Dad kill himself?’ I asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why would he?’
‘Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t,’ said Corwin, infuriatingly. ‘I don’t know. But we ought to know. Clearly, we missed something.’
‘Do we need to know?’
‘I need to know.’
‘Why? What does it change?’
‘That’s what I need to know.’
‘Christ, you’re being annoying. How’s Matthew?’
‘Old. Increasingly absent.’
‘I suppose I could come down for the weekend.’
‘Yes. That would be good.’
Perhaps, I thought, my father had not been to see Mark but had been to see some other doctor in order to preserve his secret. Or – another thought – unhappy people commit suicide. Had my father been unhappy? Was that what Corwin was brooding about? We – all of us, Mum included – had cast Mum as the Unhappy One. It had been selfish of him to be unhappy, to feed and indulge his unhappiness, when he was the one who had got his own way. Privacy. Unhappiness. Either way he had been secretive and selfish, and Mum knew it. That was why she had been so furious. I had been too hard on her, and it was my father’s fault. Now I was furious too. I resolved to go and see her, make friends. It was time that we made friends, anyway. It was the grown-up thing to do.
16.
I didn’t dare either to ask for more time off or to borrow Ed’s car, so I rented a car for the weekend and set off before sunrise on the Saturday. I baulked at my first approach to Mum’s, veered off-course and ended up stomping through bluebell woods with mud up to my ankles, preparing myself to behave well. When the woods opened out, I could see Mum and Fuck Off Bob’s newly built oak-framed house tucked into the hill, and acknowledged, painfully, that what Mum had chosen for herself was a version of the life she had already had: a large country house, but dry and warm and unburdened by any history – including that of Corwin and me.
At last I got back into the car and made my way up the gravel drive and parked below a row of fashionably pleached hornbeams, which I intended to remember to admire. Mum came to meet me at the front door, saying, ‘Look at the state of you. Take your jeans off – they’re soaked and you’ve got mud all over them.’
The house was supernaturally clean, even the crystals on the chandelier, which Bob had no doubt wrested from some ancient widow, sparkled dust-free. Mum had an arsenal of sprays under the kitchen sink lined up ready to zap any incipient stain. I imagined a pixie living in the cupboard, held captive housekeeper by an imprudently granted wish, waiting to be released from his magical bond. I imagined his sleeping malevolence, tucked beneath the weary face of servitude.
‘Oh, I’m sure Bob would love that! Me in my knickers,’ I said, before I could remember to be nice, but Mum wasn’t rising today.
‘Bob’s out. And in any case you can borrow something of mine.’
I took off my jeans in the hall and Mum came down with some trousers for me to put on. They were a little too small.
‘I was expecting you earlier!’
‘I was feeling a little nauseous,’ I lied. ‘I had to stop for some air.’
‘Are you pregnant?’
‘God, no!’
‘Oh, well!’ she said, cheerfully. ‘Sugar in your tea?’
‘Please.’
‘Let’s go into the snug, darling. I’ve put on a fire. And there’s something on the mantelpiece, for you – you go first.’
On the mantelpiece was a cream envelope with ‘Morwenna Venton’ written on it in Mum’s most exuberant fountain-penned italics. I put my mug on the coffee table, sat back in the charcoal-felt Italian sofa, pulled my feet under me and slipped my thumb under the flap of the envelope to open it.
Mum said, ‘It’s just that all the legal ins and outs took so long, and then Corwin has never been home for more than two seconds and now that he’s finally back for at least a while we thought better late than never!’
There was a thick-laid card inside, embossed print: Robert Marsden and Valerie Venton request the pleasure of your company on the occasion of their marriage.
‘You will come, won’t you, darling?’
She was gabbling a little – it wasn’t like her. Oh! I thought. She’s a tiny bit scared of me. That had never occurred to me.
‘Of course I will,’ I said expansively, and thought about leaping from the sofa to give Mum a forgiving hug, but my awkwardly folded feet stalled me and it was already too late. Instead I gushed, ‘Of course! It’s time. You know, I’d sort of forgotten that you weren’t married and, you know, it’s nice that you still want to be married.’ Now I was gabbling. Thank God, I managed to shut up before I said ‘at your age’. I would make them a beautiful wedding present – a photo album, bound in cream silk. (Actually, no, that was a little too virgin-bride. Leather would be better.) And with their names and the date debossed into the cover.
I took refuge in the sweet tea and tried again. ‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Dad recently. I’ve been wondering if he was happy.’
‘Happy?’
‘Oh, never mind! I didn’t mean to bring him into the conversation, just when you and Bob are announcing your wedding!’
‘What do you mean by “happy”?’
There was that word, deceptively innocuous, unleashed. I suddenly discerned its full load of implicit rights and responsibilities, incurred and failed duties.
‘I don’t mean anything by it – I just mean that I’ve been trying to remember things. How Dad was. How you were as a couple.’
‘And how do you remember it?’
‘Not happy. At least … I remember you as not being happy. And I don’t remember being able to tell if Dad was happy or not.’
‘Well, darling. You’ve just described your father!’ The cup in Mum’s hand circled gently; a slice of lemon bobbed at the surf
ace of her tea. ‘What brought all this on?’
‘Oh, nothing, really. Have you seen much of Corwin?’
‘Yes. A fair bit, actually. He’s been bonding with Bob.’
‘He has?’
‘Yes.’ She scrutinized me – with a mother’s forensic gaze. ‘What do you think that’s all about?’
‘Oh, you know Corwin. He’s big on appeasement. He can’t bear not to get on with anyone. Please don’t tell me they’ve been playing golf.’
‘No, darling. That would be overdoing it. They’ve just been on a couple of walks together. Pint at the pub. That sort of thing.’
‘Oh. Well, that’s nice, I suppose.’
‘“Nice”?’
No word was safe with my mother. I stayed silent.
‘Are you and Corwin up to something?’
‘I’ve hardly seen Corwin!’
‘So – yes?’
‘No.’
Mum drank up her tea. ‘How do you find Corwin?’
‘Different,’ I said. Sorrow tugged at my throat. ‘Brooding.’
‘Yes,’ said Mum, reaching into the bottom of her cup and taking out the lemon slice between finger and thumb, ‘there’s a touch of Heathcliff about him, these days. Well, it’s hardly surprising. God knows where he’s been!’ She ripped at the crescent of tea-stained lemon with her teeth, and dropped the rind into the bottom of her cup.
‘What are you going to wear?’ I asked.
‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s so difficult. At this stage in life, you’re caught between mother-of-the-bride and mutton-dressed-as-lamb. I’m thinking a very pale silver silk and a quiet bouquet – and at my age a piece of Interesting Jewellery is compulsory. It will probably rain, of course. Am I allowed to choose a dress for you?’
‘You haven’t already?’
‘Well, I have. Will you wear it?’
‘Yes, Mum. Of course. Will I like it?’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 12