I leaned my head on his shoulder. ‘Have you noticed how we’ve been talking in euphemisms? I have no vocabulary for this.’
‘No.’
‘Do you think we love each other too much?’
‘What’s too much?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘are you finally going to tell me what you’ve been doing for the last five months?’
‘Better than that. I’m going to show you.’
He stood and reached out his hand to help me up to standing. Then he pulled shut the door of the cabin and returned the key to its hiding place. I kept the blanket around my shoulders as we held hands and walked along the beach. Then I followed him up onto the cliff path and zigzagged up to the ridge where the lighthouse flash up-coast beckoned us on. As I walked behind Corwin I thought of seven-league boots. Each of our steps was taking us a great distance. There might not be a way back.
Just before Brock Tor we turned into the hidden path between the furze bushes, which caught on the delicate fabric of my dress and scratched at my legs. We came out above the chine. ‘It’s OK,’ said Corwin. ‘I’m not going to make you stand too close.’ I moved as close to the edge as I dared until I could just see the glitter of the waterfall.
‘Now,’ said Corwin, ‘where do you think Dad was when he fell?’
I pointed ahead of me, over the falling stream, to where I had thrown in the box of secrets. But Corwin shook his head. ‘That was the assumption, wasn’t it? That he went over there?’ I thought of the great shards of granite below; of my father, sliced.
‘I brought Bob up here,’ said Corwin. ‘He wasn’t that pleased about it, but I think he thought he owed it to me. Bob said he pissed over the waterfall, but Dad walked around.’
He took my hand again and started to lead me around the horseshoe curve of the cliff. ‘So Dad walked around, and Bob started to go after him. Then Bob gave up about here, and sat down and watched Dad walk around a bit further.
‘Here,’ said Corwin. ‘Bob said that he remembered Dad being about here.’ He pulled something out of his jacket pocket and handed it to me. ‘This is the book you sent me,’ he said. ‘I want you to read it – I’ve marked the passage.’ He took his jacket off. ‘You’re freezing,’ he said. ‘Put this on.’ He pulled the blanket from my shoulders and held it while I put on his jacket. Then he wrapped me up again and stepped away from me.
‘Corwin,’ I said. ‘You’re getting too close to the edge. You’re making me dizzy.’
‘Wait for me at the cabin,’ he said. ‘If I’m not there in six hours, do whatever you think is right.’
Then he turned and spread out his arms. Crow, I thought. Crow: about to take flight.
And then he tipped himself forward into the deep black air.
PART THREE
* * *
22.
Corwin dropped into the blinding dark. Something ripped from my chest as I lurched after him – my voice: it was gone, falling with him. He himself made no sound. I thought: I should have heard him hit the water by now. Or the rocks; I would have heard him cry out if he had hit the rocks. I crawled towards the cliff edge, but he had fallen into the black hiss of the sea and the whispering of the grass. The lighthouse flashed, and then flashed, and then flashed.
I found that I was curled on the ground and that I was very cold and that something like thought nuzzled at my brain. I held something hard to my chest. It was the book. I raised myself up and started to walk, and then my legs began to run and they ran me back along the cliff and down towards the glowing shingle and splashed me through the edge of the tide. It didn’t occur to me to disobey Corwin and go for help. I had only one instinct: to get to the cabin and to warm myself so that I might think.
The skirt of my dress was soaked and clung in gorse-torn shreds around my calves. I undressed to my underwear and put Corwin’s jacket back on and fired up the stove and filled the kettle and placed it on the hob. Then I pulled the great-aunts’ bedspread from the bunk and wrapped myself in it and sat next to the stove and watched the kettle, fiercely. This kettle-watching required an enormous amount of willpower and concentration. It took a very, very long time to boil. I thought of watched kettles. I thought that I would never speak again, that Corwin had silenced me. I resented him for it. Corwin might be dead and bumping about on the tide leaking blood onto the water. I hoped he was. Then I made tea.
The book lay on my lap in its periwinkle-blue binding. A Coastal Curacy. I didn’t need to read it to know what it was: the country memoir of a well-educated Victorian. It would contain observations on flora and fauna and on the architecture of churches and stately homes: the gentle pursuits of the English. It was a conventional book with nice enough engravings. I opened it at Corwin’s marker and tried to read, but my mind would not receive the words so I put it down again and fed the fire and sat some more. I pulled the bedspread closer around me and thought of the great-aunts making it. I thought of them pulling apart old socks and jumpers and winding the wool around cards and steaming it with a damp cloth and a heavy old iron and then unwinding the wool around hands held apart and rewinding the skeins into neat compact balls. I thought of them sitting and crocheting. I wondered what they had talked about. I wondered if they had laughed.
I had no way to measure time but the sound of the tide edged further and further away off the shingle until it was silenced by the soft sand. I slept, open-eyed, starting awake over and over again into the nightmare of Corwin’s madness. Night began to lift. I stood and went to the cabin steps to feel the sunrise. I found that I was crying. That’s interesting! I thought. I licked at my tears and went back inside to look at myself in the cracked mirror on the shelf above the photo of Great-grandfather James. My face cried at me. I disliked the sensation and made myself stop.
I refilled the kettle. He will be here soon, I thought. And then I noticed the conviction I had that he was alive. If he were dead I would know. We were conjoined at some point of the soul. It was a terrible epiphany. Combined, we made a monster. Somewhere I had read that in a case of conjoined twins one tends to be stronger, sapping the other’s blood and organs. I wondered which of us was the parasite.
The sea glinted a mackerel silver. I went to stand on the steps again and watched for Corwin. The tide was right out. The sun had breached the horizon and the blush evaporated from the sky. At the end of the tumble of rocks that spilled onto the beach dividing Thornton Mouth and the cove below Brock Tor, I caught a scribble of movement on the dark granite. I watched hard. It was Corwin, climbing down the jagged slabs. I watched him reach the sand. I went back into the cabin. I knew that now I would be able to read.
Corwin limped in through the door clutching his shoulder and fell on the bunk, turned on his back and closed his eyes. He was shivering, a trembling right through every muscle of his body. I drank my tea.
Eventually he said, ‘Did you read it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And? What do you think?’
‘I’m not thinking. I’m too exhausted.’ I held my cup out. ‘Tea?’
He propped himself up to drink; the tea shuddered in the cup. ‘I think I may have dislocated my shoulder. It really hurts!’
‘That’ll teach you!’ I said. ‘So? Apart from any physical damage you may have done to yourself, do you feel better now?’
Corwin looked a little surprised. ‘Yes!’ he said. ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I do. I feel better. It was amazing, actually.’ The words stuttered in his mouth, his teeth were chattering so much. ‘The jump, I mean. The rest was a little hairy. But I do. I feel better. My head is clear now.’
‘Oh, good! That must be nice for you. Better than being dead.’
‘I knew I’d be OK.’
‘You did? Well, I didn’t.’
He was trying to take off his wet clothes, but couldn’t raise his arm. I helped him ease his T-shirt over his shoulder and take off his trousers. I draped them over the drying rack and placed it close to the
stove. His skin was white and blue, his lips almost black. He had lost his shoes. His socks were shredded and his feet grazed and bleeding. When I touched his skin it was so cold that I was shocked out of my numbness and suddenly I felt anxiety for him. I stoked up the fire, then lay down next to him and cocooned us both in the bedspread, trying to give him some of my warmth. I pulled his hands between my thighs and took his feet between my own. His jaw vibrated at my temple. After a long while, the shivering stopped and the warmth returned to his hands and feet; the red returned to his mouth.
‘So you read it?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
‘I can see what you’re thinking.’
‘Did you see the pencil marks?’
‘Yes.’
‘I never realized that you didn’t read the books,’ said Corwin. ‘I wondered at how bad some of them were! I read them all, looking for hidden messages. I thought I’d finally found one.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There were no messages. Or, rather, there was just one message. You missed it.’
After a pause I said, ‘I never realized that you did read them.’
‘Well,’ said Corwin, ‘there are only so many times you can play Trivial Pursuit. Especially with people who don’t have the cultural references.’
‘You are cruel,’ I said. ‘Cruel and flippant.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. I’ve had to think a lot about that – can I be that cruel? But I had to be. Can I have some more tea?’
I made more tea. He took the chair next to the stove and warmed himself there.
‘So,’ I said, ‘are you going to explain yourself?’
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Well, I had this friend, when I was working in Congo. He was called François. He’d been a teacher in Rwanda and he was very articulate – good company. He spoke really good English and acted as my interpreter for a while. He had this incredibly deep voice. It was like the rumble of the earth. He could have said anything and it would have sounded wise. We played chess together in the evenings.’
‘Is that what you’ve been doing for the last decade?’ I snapped. ‘Playing board games?’
‘Don’t interrupt!’ said Corwin. ‘This is important.
‘Anyway, François was my interpreter for about four months and I learned so much from him. We talked about Africa mostly – about the genocide, obviously. About the future for Africa. But he never told me anything about his family. And I never asked, because – who knew? – he might be a mass murderer, or his family might have been wiped out, or he might have been forced at gunpoint to rape his mother …’
‘Jesus, Corwin!’
‘Oh, don’t be so precious! The one time I put an unpleasant image into your head you split my lip!’
‘Unpleasant image! What a nice little euphemism! The way you wallow in the excrement of humanity is perverse!’
‘Just shut up and listen! One evening, François comes over and says he’s sorry but he has to leave. He says he’s seen someone from his village and he doesn’t want to be recognized and he begs my forgiveness. He says his name’s not François. He says his family thinks he’s dead and he wants it to stay that way. And then he says, “I want to reassure you that it was nothing that I did, I was not a participant. It was simply that I was presented with the opportunity to be dead and I took it. And afterwards, when so many were returning from the dead and I might have resurrected myself, I found that I did not wish to.”’
‘What – in those exact words?’
‘That was how he talked. He spoke slowly, always. His sentences came out fully crafted. It’s a form of courtesy. Not all cultures encourage the idea that every connection of the synapses should be inflicted on other people.’
Corwin leaned over and took my hand gently. ‘And then he said, “Sometimes it’s lonely being dead, but it suits me well.”’
‘No!’ I flinched. ‘It’s all just coincidence.’
‘I thought about that conversation a lot over the years. And then you sent me that book.’
We sat in silence for a while. I imagined François walking out into the dark, into the vastness of Africa. I thought of the sweeping arrows on historical maps that represent the mass movements of peoples after wars and of his feet moving along them.
‘You think Dad didn’t die. You think … what? He jumped off a cliff and then just walked off into a new life somewhere?’
‘Yesterday I still thought that. Now I know it.’
‘That’s not true! You don’t know!’
He was looking at me with enormous pity. His was the face of the torturer, the face that says, This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you.
‘I don’t understand why you had to jump. Why couldn’t you just tell me what you were thinking?’
‘Because I thought I was going crazy. I wanted to see if you’d get to the same place without me. But you were being so obtuse. And in the meantime, I was going over and over the cliff, trying to work out how he did it. I got Mickey to show me all the tombstoning spots – he knows all those extreme sports types – and I knew it could be done here. It’s simple in the end – once you know where to jump. It’s a bowl. You just need a high enough tide so that you have enough depth and so that the tide pulls back far enough to give you enough beach at low tide to get out to the end of the rocks to climb over. The worst thing was the cold and the waiting. I was planning for a better tide, actually. But things came to a head.’
‘Were you waiting in the water? All that time?’
‘No. I got up onto the rocks – which wasn’t easy. In fact, it was fucking scary. I sort of tucked in while the tide went out. Then I climbed down, but that was hard because I’d hurt my shoulder, and then I walked out and made the climb.’
‘I still don’t understand why you had to jump.’
‘Because that’s what he did. Why jump off a cliff – why not just leave? I had to know. I’d rather die than not know.’
I thought that I would rather not know. I said, ‘It might be possible in Africa, but it’s not so easy to make the better-off-dead lifestyle choice here. What’s he supposed to be doing? Hanging out with Essex gangsters on the Costa del Sol?’
‘Of course not,’ said Corwin, firmly. ‘You’re right. It would be harder here. But not impossible.’
I didn’t want to believe him. I wanted to believe that he was unwell, that these were delusions. My father grew things. He had been training a peach tree into a fan against the southern wall of the kitchen garden. He kept telling us it was a ten-year project. A man like that didn’t fake his own death – but, then, a man like that didn’t commit suicide either.
‘Corwin,’ I said. ‘Please stop. You’re driving yourself mad – you’re driving us both mad. You don’t know anything. All you have is a strong hunch and a lucky escape. After all this, we’re still where we began. The original explanation is still the most likely.’
‘I do know.’
‘So you know,’ I said. ‘So what’s the answer to your own question? Why jump off a cliff?’
‘Don’t you see? It had to be one thing or the other – life or death. It was a gamble with fate. Like Russian roulette, or something.’
‘So where is he? What’s he doing? What’s he living off?’
‘That I don’t know. We have to find him.’
‘You need help!’
‘Morwenna!’ He took my face in his hands and looked hard at me. ‘We have to find him!’
He let go, sat back on the chair and warmed the palms of his hands against the stove. ‘And then,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’
Steam was rising from our wet clothes. They had already dried in patches. The cabin smelt of scorched cloth, of seawater, of hot stove metal. Corwin stared at his hands. ‘I really don’t know. Then I have to stop and consider what to do. Because right now if I saw him, I think I might have to kill him.’
Quietly, coaxingly, I said, ‘But how, Corwin? How would we even start?’
Corw
in looked at me, incredulous. ‘With Matthew, of course. How do you think? If I’m right, then he certainly knows, the old bugger. He has to.’
23.
The following Sunday I determined to visit Thornton in order to worship there at the pretty Norman church, which was famous locally, so I had been informed, for its pew carvings.
I set out on foot, taking a steep climb to the top of the cliffs, after which the walking was easy and pleasant along the ridge and I eventually began to descend around a high granitic outcrop beneath which a stream flung itself into the sea over a sheer slab of rock. A lonely mill soon came into view, pressed up against the sea, and, further along the beach, tucked into the lee of the cliff, a dwelling on the foreshore. I was surprised to see a fishing boat pulled up beside it. It is rare to find safe landing for a boat along that stretch of coast, but the cove, I surmised, was protected from the battering of the sea by a long sheltering cliff wall.
The hamlet lay in a deep combe, which now, in spring, was white with hawthorn. Uphill of the mill was a scattering of houses and cottages around the church spire. My path led me past the mill and over a small footbridge along a twisting stream, which disappeared, at times, beneath cascades of tumbling thorn, which soon turned to ancient dwarf oak, laden with moss. The church itself was guarded by two enormous cedars, which, as I later observed, appeared when viewed uphill of the hamlet to form a gateway to the sea.
I arrived while the church was empty, in order to make some sketches of the pew carvings. I had copied into my sketchbook an intricately scaled mermaid and the profile of a Red Indian in fine feather head-dress when the bell-ringers arrived. They were curious to see my work, and one, an old man who could barely climb the ladder to the bell tower, declared it ‘as good as any I’ve seen’, for they were used to visitors with sketchbooks and had tales at the ready about the smuggling days when the church had been used to hide contraband. Such tales are told up and down the coast, but, having seen the landing down at Thornton Mouth, I could well believe that this spot had been indeed a favoured haunt for smugglers.
The House at the Edge of the World Page 16