It was a lively service. The congregation had descended from the surrounding farms to hear the old rector, who was more ancient still than my approving bell-ringer, and who was of the fire and brimstone variety, to the obvious satisfaction of his flock. Upon hearing that I was the new curate at St Peter’s, he invited me to take lunch with him at the rectory, which invitation I gladly accepted, and while we were at table he regaled me with the story of Thornton’s Devil Stone.
The church at Thornton had taken many years to build. This was not the fault of the workmen, who were diligent and skilled. But each morning, when they returned to work, they discovered that their tools and materials had been removed a mile away and thrown to the foot of the cliffs at Thornton Mouth, and each morning, before the work could continue, the workmen must move it all back up the hill to the site of the church.
One night, the youngest of the builders hid in a tree and waited for the culprit to reveal himself. At midnight he was assailed by a terrible smell of sulphur, and he thought he might faint and fall out of the tree, but he held fast and soon he heard voices. He climbed up higher into the tree and looked down upon a troop of demons who were being overseen by the Devil himself, and he watched as they marched down the combe carrying on their shoulders the builders’ bricks and tools.
The next day, the young builder told his fellows what he had seen, and they sought the advice of their priest, who told them to pray to St Michael, for it was he who always knew how to get the better of the Devil. Thereupon they prayed, and the very next night they watched for the Devil, and when he and his demons were gathered a great light appeared in the sky and St Michael came down and grabbed the Devil by his forked tail and flung him over the parish boundary, then picked up a great boulder and hurled it after him, pinning the Devil beneath it. And there the Devil was stuck, his demons all scattered, until such time as the building of the church was completed and could be consecrated, whereupon the grateful worshippers of Thornton dedicated their church to their protector, St Michael.
The rector rounded off his story with a spirited quotation from Revelation, Chapter 20: ‘“And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years, and cast him into the bottomless pit.” Yes,’ said the rector, ‘the Devil likes it here. The sea entices him. He hopes one day to bounce off her belly back into the middle atmosphere, out of which he was cast into the earth. Above all else,’ he warned, ‘the Devil is an optimist.’
As I took my leave of the rector, I thought to enquire about the strange dwelling on the beach. ‘Ah!’ said he. ‘Now there’s an interesting fellow. You must drop in on your way home and see for yourself. He enjoys a bit of Christian company, and his mortal soul is much in need of it!’
It was upon this advice that I approached the hut at Thornton Mouth, although I hesitate to dignify it with that designation, the ‘hut’ resembling an upturned boat, being a precarious clinker-built pile of old ships’ bones with portholes for windows. As I approached I observed that it was garlanded about with glass fishing floats and strings of perforated pebbles and was buttressed by coils of thick, tarred rope. Before the entrance were piled crab pots and driftwood. Smoke issued from a stovepipe that protruded from the roof.
I hesitated to knock at the door, and instead attempted to peer discreetly through an open porthole, but before I could so much as glimpse its occupant, a voice called out from within: ‘If you’re from the dead, be off with you. Unless you come to take me with you!’
I was so taken aback that I believe that I turned my head to look about for a ghost, and only then understood that the voice spoke to me. I returned that, indeed no, I was alive and well, and stated my business: that the rector had sent me with his greetings.
‘In that case,’ said the voice, ‘you’d do better to come round by the door.’
Bending to enter, I was met by the stench of damp rope, tar, smoke and stale fish. The walls were piled high with insulating coils of rope, and a hammock stitched from sailcloth hung from a beam formed from a broken mast. A crate served as a table, and crude shelves and benches sawn from ship’s planks made up the remaining furniture. A driftwood fire smouldered in a stove, which stood on a pile of sand in the middle of the floor.
The man sitting there might have been old, or he might not have been more than forty. He had that look of the sea, which disguises age. His forearms bore the inkings of a mariner. He sat on a bench, working at his nets. As I entered he looked up and said, ‘Take your place by the fire and be welcome.’
His speech bore some trace that was not of the West Country. ‘No,’ he acknowledged. ‘I’m not from these parts.’ I asked from where he hailed, but he would not say. ‘They all ask me that,’ he said. ‘But I never tell.’
He stood to take from the shelf a bottle and two pewter mugs. ‘If the rector sent you,’ he said, ‘you must drink with me.’
I was apprehensive of the concoction that the proffered glass must contain, but was surprised by the taste of a good brandy. Noting my surprise, my host laughed and, waving the bottle, said, ‘This is how I’m paid for my services.’
‘And what might those services be?’ I enquired.
‘Well,’ he replied, ‘I serve as sexton to this cove, here.’
Naturally, I sought to understand what he meant by this. ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘you know how it is. This is a bad stretch of coast. The dead wash ashore, for the sea don’t always want them. And I bring them home, to their final resting place, to the church. The rector and I used to share the work, but he’s too old for the climb now.’
‘Are there no survivors?’ I asked, thinking with a shudder of the tales of murderous wreckers with their lanterns and their knives.
‘Only me,’ he said. ‘I’m the only one ever washed up alive on this beach.’
This I recognized to be a cue for a tale, and so I permitted him to refill my glass and settled in to hear what he had to say.
‘As you so rightly observed,’ he began, ‘I’m not from these parts. And I took to sea when I was a lad and stayed afloat until I was a young man. I didn’t much take to the life. All the hours they let a man call his own, and he believes it: needle and ink, whittling at whalebone. I spent days put together over a fine waistcoat, but what for? Who was ever to see me wear it? So I was the quarrelsome sort. And one day we were harboured up for repairs and I took off. And they took after me, for I had enemies aboard and they were only too glad to hunt me down. And I ran for three days and they came after me and I found myself up on these cliffs and there was a big pile of rock sticking out over the sea and I went around it to hide. Now my enemies had caught up with me, and I found myself looking down into the water, and I thought to myself: Jump or you are lost. So I jumped, right off the edge of that cliff and into the sea.
‘Well, when I hit the water I felt pain all over, like a thousand slaps with the back of the hand, it was. And I went down, down, down. And when I popped back up, who should be waiting for me in the water, but the Devil himself, red eyes, jack-o’-lantern grin, horns and all. And he said my name, and he said, “You’re coming with me.” And I said, “No, I’m not. Not if I can help it.” And he leaped at me off the top of a wave, and I fought with him right there in the water. He thrashed like a conger, but I caught hold of him by the tail and twisted him over and over until at last I climbed up onto his back and I rode him through the waves till he was tired and spent, and he shot off into the sky, shouting and cursing.
‘Next thing I knew, I was lying on this shore, all betangled with seaweed and spewing like a baby. I thought I must be dead, but when I looked down I saw that my leg was bleeding, and so I told myself that if my blood was running I must be alive still. And I lay there until the rector found me, and he took me with him and nursed me. And I believe that my enemies must have thought me dead, because they saw me fall. So then I thought to
myself: No one knows me here. My enemies think me dead, and only the Devil knows my name, so he may have it, and I will take another one.’
Twilight was now upon us, so I thanked my strange host and took my leave. I had twice encountered the Devil during my short stay at Thornton, and had no wish for a third meeting, and I hurried back along the cliffs to return to The Sands before dark fell.
24.
Underneath the sentence ‘only the Devil knows my name, so he may have it, and I will take another one’ was a faint pencilled line – drawn lightly, neatly. In the margin was written the name ‘John Greenaway’. I recognized the tiny pedantic handwriting, but I could not tell if it belonged to my father or to Matthew.
At the hospital we had said that Corwin had slipped on the rocks, which was almost true. They patched him up and gave him some strong painkillers. It was around midnight by the time we returned to Thornton. The ghosts were active. We passed the memorial cross and I thought of Matthew, who never passed it without saying the names out loud. He always appeared to read them from the plaque, but even I, by the age of eight, knew them off by heart. I can recite them still: from Arthur Cornish all the way down to Peter Thompson.
Once, in winter, I told Matthew that I was frightened to be calling out the names of the dead on such a dark night, and Matthew said, ‘What do you think those poor boys could possibly want with you? The dead aren’t to be feared, only the living.’
And I trusted him, and was persuaded, and have never since feared the dead. But now Corwin and I had allowed ourselves to imagine a different kind of haunting, by the shade of a living being. We didn’t even have a name for such a terrifying spirit.
I was frightened to leave Corwin. ‘You have to promise!’ I said. ‘Promise me. No further action until I get back. I don’t even want you going into Mum and Dad’s room.’
I said, ‘Patience, Corwin. Without patience, we’ll just go mad.’ I had patience, I suddenly realized. I had a virtue. I had patience for things that no one else noticed. I could spend days standing at a vice, sanding spine papers until they were smooth as silk. I could pare leather until it was as thin as tissue. I could take as long as it took. Corwin, on the other hand, was skittish. I didn’t trust him alone with Matthew.
The book came back to London with me. On the long train journey I turned it in my hands: A Coastal Curacy, by Ambrose Pearce, published by some long-forgotten house in 1887. On the frontispiece the words: John Venton. His Book. I must have noticed at the time, and then immediately forgotten it, this conventional book, with nice enough engravings that I had spent precious hours of my short life in rescuing, that I had carefully teased apart and re-stitched and pasted and pampered, when it was just a molecule in a mountain of vanity and self-regard and utterly deserved to be forgotten and left to decompose.
I put the book back into my bag and listened to my messages. There was nothing from Ed. There were two messages from the bindery. One from a colleague confirming that they’d received my message saying I’d be a day late getting back, and one from Ana saying that she would like me to keep my lunch-break free so that we could have a chat. In fourteen years I’d never had lunch alone with Ana. I assumed that she was going to fire me.
The green hills end long before London begins. I looked out on the rainy suburbs. I was altered, irrevocably, by the last forty-eight hours. A mutation had occurred in my soul or, perhaps, it had simply completed. Maybe it had started with the imaginary falling man, or before, with the simple act of removing my T-shirt in the middle of a hot night. The words from that song in Oliver! leaped incongruously into my head: ‘I am re-view-ing the situation …’ Corwin and I used to love that film. I found myself irritated by the exclamation mark. Why was it Oliver!, not simply Oliver? It was a very annoying piece of punctuation.
Fagin and the Artful Dodger clowned off into an East End sunset. They sang in my head: ‘I think I’d better think it out again.’
When I returned to the bindery, there was a stranger working at my stool. ‘That’s Birgit,’ said Ana. ‘She’s going to be here for a few weeks. You can help out on repairs while she’s with us.’
Birgit looked up and smiled at me, from behind owlish glasses. She was wearing a black waistcoat, embroidered all over with what looked like birds in flight. Meekly, I set myself up at another bench and began to take apart a book that had been brought in for repair. It was a beautiful book, badly damaged. An eighteenth-century copy of Gulliver’s Travels. It would take time to restore. I watched Birgit from the corner of my eye. On closer examination, I saw that the waistcoat was not covered with birds: they were books. Their pages fluttered like the wings of parrots and birds of paradise.
Ana suggested that, as the weather was so warm, we take some sandwiches to the Priory Church Garden. I was terrified of Ana. She had been perched on the edge of my life for all those years like a beautiful hawk, black-feathered with a red beak and bright collar, watchful and indifferent. I had never heard her say anything foolish or unguarded so my respect for her was boundless. I feared her disapproval more than Matthew’s.
We sat on a bench. Angels looked down on Christ hanging from the cross. I had always thought that Ana came from Argentina. ‘No,’ she corrected. ‘But close. Chile. How strange that you don’t know that after all these years, Morwenna.’
I didn’t try to defend myself. It was true. It was strange. She said, ‘You seem troubled, Morwenna. And it’s beginning to affect your work.’
‘Do I? Well, yes. Everything’s falling apart a bit. I’m sorry.’
‘Are you?’
‘Am I what?’
‘Are you sorry? I never know what English people mean when they say that.’
‘Oh.’ I had to stop to think. ‘Yes. I mean, I am sorry. I regret my unreliability. I am racked with guilt,’ I added.
Ana sniffed, annoyed, and lit a cigarette. She smoked in the way that people smoked before they knew it killed them: with panache. ‘That,’ she said, ‘is another word you English throw around. You say things like “I feel so guilty because I haven’t washed the dishes for two days.” Guilt arises out of sin. Whether or not to wash the dishes is simply a matter of choice.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I see what you mean.’
We ate our sandwiches silently for a few minutes. Then I said, ‘I don’t really believe in sin.’
‘In that case,’ she said, ‘you are not racked with guilt.’
‘Do you believe in sin?’
‘Of course not. It’s a patriarchal construct designed mainly for the bullying of women.’
‘Oh!’ I said.
‘In my experience,’ she said, ‘people are troubled when they are too close to love or death or sex or power. Or they have betrayed someone or themselves – their own ideals. I don’t need to know what’s going on in your case – it’s always complicated to the individual and a little sordid to everyone else.’
‘It is complicated,’ I said. ‘But mainly my grandfather’s dying. I ought to be looking after him.’ This surprised me a little. I hadn’t realized until I said it that, among all my current concerns, Matthew took priority.
‘Morwenna. At the moment, you are either absent or tired and distracted. You hurtle off to the end of the country and back as if you are popping out to Tesco. Consequently, you are not much good to me at work at the moment,’ she said. ‘Would you like to take a short sabbatical?’
‘Yes, please,’ I said.
‘You can have four months.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘Another thing,’ she said. ‘Birgit is journeying. She did her apprenticeship in Switzerland, and now she is travelling and working for free and needs somewhere to live. Can you put her up for a while?’
I recognized this as a condition of Ana’s tolerance. ‘Yes, of course,’ I said. I didn’t mind, I’d be going away. And, anyway, I wanted a chance to hold the waistcoat; see how it was worked.
The smoke streamed from Ana’s mouth into the June sunshine. I studied
her for uncertainties. I couldn’t find any. I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind doing that – journeying for a while.’
‘My grandfather did it,’ said Ana. ‘On my mother’s side. He was German. But I never met him. My grandparents were Nazis. My mother hated them. But that’s how I inherited the habit of punctuality.’
‘When did you come to London?’
‘A long time ago, Morwenna. A long time ago.’
‘Were you a binder before you came here?’
‘My father had a bindery. He was Italian.’
She smiled at me. ‘You know, Morwenna, when I came to London I thought: This is exile, this grey city, these strange people who never say what they mean. But observe this garden, this peace, here in the middle of the city. London is a sanctuary, Morwenna. A sanctuary.’
I packed for four months and handed over my flat to Birgit. I had stayed and worked for the rest of June in a daze, waking every morning with a heart-flutter of panic. I called Ed a couple of times. He didn’t answer, so I left a message. I said that I was sorry, really and truly, and that I had to go down to Thornton for the summer, and that when I got back I would like to talk to him, if he would listen.
Corwin was waiting for me at the station, black rings under his eyes. ‘You’re not sleeping,’ I said.
‘Matthew’s in a lot of pain at night,’ he said. But I knew that that wasn’t it. I put my hand on the back of his neck as he drove.
‘I’ll sleep better now that you’re here,’ he said, smiling.
‘Have you heard from Mum?’
‘I got a postcard from Bermuda.’
They were on a once-in-a-lifetime round-the-world cruise, but I was still too ashamed of myself to make any snide comments about it.
The Hare and Hounds loomed on the side of the road – a boundary marker. We had entered Matthew’s circle.
25.
The following day, when we sat down to coffee, Corwin said, ‘Matthew, there’s something really important we have to ask you.’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 17