Matthew was asleep in his armchair when I arrived. I stoked up the fire and sat opposite him to examine him for signs of the illness that we were to believe he was harbouring. He did seem thinner. The V of his jumper fell away from his shirt; the collar was loose around his neck. Was he waiting for us to ask? I wondered. Would it be better to know and to incubate his death with care and warmth, or would he be doing us, or himself, a favour, by permitting death to jump him from behind? Were these the questions my father had asked himself? I wondered about Oliver’s mother – she must still have been young, in her fifties only. I had forgotten to ask how it was that she died.
Later, when I went to bed, I found that Corwin had placed a book on my bedside table. It was one of the ones I had bound for him – the most recent: A Coastal Curacy. I opened it, but already I was bored by it. On the title page were pencilled the words:
John Venton.
His book.
1960.
Matthew, I thought. Matthew had taught him to do that. Matthew and his anachronisms – he plants us with them. And I also thought, This is what Corwin wants me to know about this book: that it belonged to our father. And I put it aside. And I slept. And when I went back to London the following day, leaving before dawn to make it to work in time, I left the book lying there.
18.
Willow was easy to find. I told myself I was looking for her because I’d been bullied into it by Corwin, but perhaps I needed to find out more, if only to shut Corwin up. She popped up on Google with her own PR firm. The girl I had known had disappeared, the one in the Edwardian camisoles and the patched jeans with the criss-crossed shoelace in place of a zip. Her website photo showed her as Cleopatra – sharp black fringe, kohled eyes. Intimidated by her powers of self-reinvention, I looked at myself in the mirror. Seventeen years but, still, it was me. Greenish eyes, brownish hair, freckles, a jumper with too-long sleeves.
‘Look at her,’ I said to Corwin on the phone. ‘That’s someone else. How can you expect that person to remember anything for us?’
But then she was on the phone. ‘Morwenna! Oh, my God! How are you?’ Her speech had always been full of exclamation marks. It had been like being in a room of bursting balloons. ‘We must have lunch!’ she shouted. I remembered to ask if she was still in touch with Oliver, but she hadn’t seen or heard from him since school.
Oliver didn’t show up on the web. I phoned his father’s number. It rang and rang. There was no answer.
I googled Corwin. He was quoted in a couple of newspaper articles. His was a world of plight. Poor Corwin. I wanted to say to him: I know I’m bad at this, the soothing, caressing thing that women do. But look – the box is not empty. Look: that little unhoused mollusc in the bottom there – that’s Hope!
I googled myself. I was not there.
Oliver and me, I thought. We do not appear.
Summer loomed. It’s so ruthless – either relentless light or unwelcome rain. It’s such a relief to reach autumn. And this summer would be full of trials: Mum’s wedding, Matthew’s decline.
I prepared myself in the only sensible way: I pretended that nothing was happening and left Corwin to himself. He said he’d been climbing a couple of times with Mickey. He didn’t mention our father, and it was easy for me, so far from the coast, and with so much daylight, to ignore what I preferred to think of as Corwin’s affliction. Corwin said that Matthew was much the same – he would let me know if anything changed. Mum called regularly to discuss arrangements. She had got it into her head that it was important Corwin and I were happy with the details of her wedding – perhaps because we could be at best only indifferent to the fact of her marriage.
As I worked on Mum’s wedding present, I was forced to think about her. I made choices for her: the palest of grey leathers rather than silk damask or printed Indian cotton; plain endpapers, but with a subtle shimmer to reflect the occasion. I considered tooling flowers into the leather, but felt that she would prefer it unembellished. In the end, it was a straightforward, elegant object that ought not to be exposed to dirt. On the front, in a simple unserifed font, it said, in silvered-blue lettering: Robert and Valerie, 19 June 2005. There, I thought, pushing away the memory of that other wedding album at the bottom of a cardboard box: that’s that.
That was May. I allowed myself to wish Mum well and was at peace with myself. At the bindery we worked on a huge order of journals that were to be party favours at some celebrity feast. It was soothingly repetitive. I was lulled.
I tried on the outfit that Mum had asked me to wear: an oyster chiffon concoction with very little stride-room. It was a while since I had worn a dress and heels. Ed said that I scrubbed up well, but wondered why women did that to their feet, and waited for me to ask him to join me for the wedding. Eventually I did. I thought it would be good to have a buffer.
I met Willow in the week before the wedding. She threw her arms around me. ‘Oh, my God! Look at you!’ Her hands waved as she talked. Her fingernails were painted pillar-box red.
‘How’s Crow?’ she asked. ‘Is he still gorgeous?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother. Was he?’
‘God, yes! You must have noticed! You two were always so …’
‘What?’
She settled on ‘… close.’ But that wasn’t what she had been intending to say.
‘He’s very thin,’ I said.
‘Ah! Poor love. Well, it’s hardly surprising, considering. Is he back for good?’
‘I don’t know. He’s having a bit of a mid-life crisis.’
‘Aren’t we all, sweetie! Aren’t we all!’
‘I’m not.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. She contemplated me for a moment. ‘Well, perhaps not. You always were Little Miss Contrary.’
‘He’s got compassion fatigue,’ I said, not prepared to pretend to talk about myself. It seemed to me that reunions only reminded you of all the things you hadn’t liked about a person. I knew that once I had felt towards Willow something approximating love, but now I couldn’t remember why. ‘And he’s got it into his head that Dad committed suicide and he wants to know what happened. That’s why he’s pretending to be all nostalgic. He thinks you might have noticed something back then.’
Willow’s wine glass stopped halfway to her mouth. She put it down again. ‘God!’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how harsh you can be.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a minute or so. The food was Asian fusion – there were artistic crispy noodles, which were complicated to eat when you were embarrassed. A coffee machine hissed expensively.
I relented a little. ‘I’m sure Corwin genuinely wanted to catch up as well,’ I said.
‘But you don’t. Well, thanks a million!’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
Willow was doing her best not to sulk.
‘How’s your mum?’ I asked.
‘Oh. You know. She’s moved to Totnes.’
‘Where old hippies go to die!’ It was an old sixth-form joke.
She laughed. Willow had never held grudges – life was too short. She would much rather enjoy herself. ‘So,’ she said, in a tone of intrigue, deciding that there was something to be rescued from the meeting, after all. ‘Tell me all about it!’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘Corwin’s got this idea that Dad committed suicide. He thinks we missed something.’ Saying this made me feel very tired. ‘He’s combing the past,’ I said, and ran out of words.
‘Why now?’ asked Willow.
‘I don’t know. It never occurred to us before, and then it occurred to Corwin, and here we are.’
‘Oh, Morwenna! Really? You must have thought about it!’
‘No! People keep saying that. I never did. Is there any reason I should have?’
‘What would I know about fathers?’
‘Honestly, Willow,’ I said, suddenly wanting to confide, ‘I don’t know what to do. Corwin’s become completely obsessive
about this. I’m worried about him.’
‘And I thought we’d spend lunch talking about house prices and soft furnishings!’
‘Sorry,’ I said again. ‘But Corwin’s not going to get off my back until I’ve had this conversation with you. And then … I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but hopefully he’ll piss off back to Sudan.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Willow, correctly. ‘So? Why does he think all of a sudden your dad committed suicide?’
‘I don’t know. He won’t say. He wants me to draw my own conclusions.’
‘The little shit! He always was a didactic bugger!’
‘I’ve been missing and missing him for a decade and a half, and now there he is, at Thornton, filling the house with dour frowns and deep silences.’
Willow was framing her thoughts. ‘I’m not sure I’m qualified for this,’ she said, and beckoned the waiter over to order coffee. Then she leaned forward and said, ‘OK! So! Are you ready?’
I nodded.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘when your dad died, we all talked about it, obviously. You know – Ooh! How weird! One minute there he was playing his fiddle and the next minute he’s falling off a cliff and we were so close and we didn’t even know.’
I must have flinched, or something, because she stopped, and said, ‘Sorry – that came out wrong. But you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘And everyone said how your father was the last person anyone would expect to have an accident like that. You know. He was so … grounded.’
She paused again. ‘Are you all right with this?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. Go ahead.’
‘Well, there had been some gossip …’
‘About?’
‘About … your mum and Bob. They seemed … intimate. People thought that perhaps they’d been having an affair and your dad had found out about it. Especially, later, when, you know …’
I did know. I was flooded with a sense of self-disgust that I should have been so naïve. Willow’s expression was full of concern for me. She said, ‘Mickey and I saw them once, your mum and Bob, having a cup of tea together at The Sands. They were just sitting opposite each other drinking tea, chatting. They weren’t doing anything, not touching or anything. It just looked – wrong, somehow. You know. Comfortable. Together. Like a couple. We talked about it afterwards. We wondered.’
She put her hand on mine. ‘I’ve upset you,’ she said.
‘No, it’s OK.’ Then I said, ‘Sorry,’ for the third time, aware that since Corwin had come home my life was full of apologies. I wanted my unapologetic life back.
The coffee arrived. I looked at my watch. ‘Oh, God, I have to go!’ I said. ‘My boss is really strict about lunch breaks.’
It wasn’t an excuse. I did have to go. I wanted to stay and show her that I was grateful – she had liberated me.
I said, ‘Thanks, Willow. Really.’ I dropped a kiss on her cheek. ‘And it is good to see you. Honestly. I’m just … you know.’
‘I know, sweetie!’ she said. ‘Off you go! Give Crow a kiss from me.’
All afternoon I stitched away, glowing with self-righteousness. But when I got home and was about to call Corwin, something else struck me: a detail of my conversation with Willow. And when he picked up the phone the first thing I said was, ‘Corwin, what happened to Dad’s fiddle?’
19.
Ed was silent as we approached Thornton. He had seen photographs, of course, but I had underestimated the effect of that first view, when the hedgerows shoot you out at the top of the combe and you look down on the scattering of houses above the church and the solitary mill perching just where the sea presses the land, which was all velvety with the lush green of June. Ed gasped, and looked at me. He said, ‘You don’t do it justice.’
‘I’ve forgotten how to see it,’ I said.
I stood in the hall and shouted but no one answered.
‘What do you want to see first?’ I asked.
‘The beach, of course.’
We took our bags up to my room, and I had the sensation that Ed was observing everything and attaching the new information to what he already knew about me. I didn’t like the idea that I could be explained by Thornton and began to regret bringing him.
I paused as we went downstairs. Something had altered. It had flickered in the corner of my eye. I looked back to see what it was. The key was in the door of my parents’ room.
We went for a long, long walk, which looped up through the woods and came out onto the high cliffs and down into Thornton Mouth, where we paused for tea in the cabin. I could see that Ed was love-struck.
‘It is beautiful,’ I said. ‘But there is a “but” – same as anywhere.’
Ed didn’t believe me. He had a glazed look in his eye. He was staring at the photo hanging on a nail in its broken frame – the one of Great-grandfather James standing before the wreck of the Constantia.
‘Who’s that?’
‘James Venton. Matthew’s father,’ I said. ‘He was the one who built the cabin.’ I pointed to his boots. ‘He always wanted to go to America. He had these boots made especially.’ I pointed to the beached ship. ‘And this is the last sailing ship to wreck off The Sands – the Constantia. Look,’ I traced the twisted sails. ‘Her masts are swinging against each other in opposing arcs. They’re wrenching at her hull and any minute now she’ll split open and spill her cargo of pit props onto the water and they’ll roll to the shore on the waves and James will buy a lot or two at the salvage sale and build this cabin from them and pretend he’s on Cape Cod, or somewhere like that. That’s why that stag’s head is hanging over the stove. He never hunted in his life, but it adds to the illusion.’
It had always bothered me, that photo. Everyone else has their backs to the camera and is watching the death of the ship. But James is caught looking inshore, past the camera – he has been caught by accident, hunched up in his heavy pea-coat. I will always wonder what could possibly have turned his gaze.
When we returned to the house we found Corwin helping Sandra in the kitchen garden. They were tying peas and beans to their supports of hazel tents. I had a sudden memory of being very small and chatting away to my father while snapping pea pods from their tendrils and popping them open, the sweet green taste of them. I remembered the hazel branches, cut too late in the season, taking to leaf.
Corwin shook Ed’s hand. I hoped that Ed would continue to resist his charm, but already he seemed to be softening. His idea of Corwin was improved by the setting, and, what was more, here was an opportunity for Ed to help out. I left him playing with balls of string and went to unpack.
The key was gone from my parents’ bedroom door. I carried on upstairs and hung up Ed’s suit and my dress, then went to the kitchen to see if the key was where it should be, but the hook was empty.
As I closed the key-cupboard door, I heard Matthew’s shuffle in the back porch. I found him sitting on the bench, removing his walking boots. He didn’t hear me, and I watched him for a while. I could see now that he was ill. Each movement required planning. He rocked himself forward incrementally, each ratcheting motion taking him a little closer to his foot. Once he arrived at his shoe, he pulled first one end of the lace and then the other. At last I recollected myself and said, ‘Matthew, let me help.’
He looked up and smiled, but had no breath for speech. He straightened up again, almost as slowly as he had bent forward. I knelt down and loosened the laces and pulled off first one boot, then the second. I slid his slippers onto his feet.
I said, ‘I worry about you, on your walks.’
‘Ah, Morwenna,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t worry.’
That night, I didn’t hear Corwin come to bed and, after Ed had fallen asleep, I left my own bed and went downstairs. There was light under the door of our parents’ room. The key was in the keyhole.
I placed my hand on the doorknob. I knew I would find Corwin in there, but at that moment I ha
lf expected to surprise him in another form, one that I never saw – something fanged and clawed. I was just about to turn the knob when the door opened and he stood there.
For a moment I did recoil. There was something wrong with his face. He was pink – as though he had been peeled. I thought: His skin has been flayed! Then I realized that he had shaved off his beard.
‘What are you doing?’ he said. ‘Are you coming in, or what?’
I hadn’t been inside that room for over ten years. I remembered a junk room, everything covered with dust. But now it had been ordered. The furniture was neatly stacked to one side, and next to the bed was a pile of boxes. The bed was covered with papers.
‘What’s going on?’
‘I’m looking for Dad’s fiddle.’
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Well, I am, actually – among other things.’
‘Why don’t you just ask Mum, or Matthew?’
‘I have. They can’t remember what happened to it. And I asked Bob too, but he can’t remember anything much.’
‘Dad was probably holding it.’
‘Not if he was taking a piss, he wasn’t.’
‘Can’t we do this after the wedding?’
‘Aren’t you curious? Some of this is really interesting. These are all his old school reports,’ he said, pointing to a pile of papers on the corner of the bed. ‘He was a crap pupil, apparently.’
‘Well, he hated it there,’ I said. Corwin handed me a pile of papers. The reports read: ‘Disappointing. Distracted. Daydreamer.’
My father’s letters home were bland, unilluminating – censored, probably. He had written: ‘It is very flat here. I miss the sea.’
Homesick, I thought. Poor homesick boy.
There were letters from my father to my mother – I placed them aside. I did not have Mum’s permission to read them. Corwin had no such scruples. He read out snatches to me: ‘“Let’s have our babies in winter, when Thornton is asleep and we have time to gaze at them. We’ll lay them by the fire and tweak their toes and I will find you all the more beautiful by firelight.”’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 14