The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew, ‘of course. It’s time.’

  But he assumed we were asking about his dying, so he told us. ‘Cancer, of course,’ he said pleasantly. ‘Riddled with it, apparently. And I really don’t want to be poked and prodded and experimented on. At eighty-five I’m far too old for all of that. No. I shall let nature take its course. I have agreed with Mark upon palliative care. They will make me comfortable – I think that means industrial doses of morphine. There’s this marvellous organization called Hospice at Home, apparently. And I’d really much prefer to die here. I do hope that you won’t object?’

  We were humbled, then. Each of us utterly alone, and Matthew already beyond reach.

  When we were in that time, the summer of Matthew’s dying, it seemed like an eternal season of damp mornings, rose petals scattered on the grass by the night’s rain. It was as though Matthew’s admission that he was dying unleashed his cancer. He gave himself up to it. Almost overnight he became thinner and weaker. We moved his bed down to his study and positioned it so that with the curtains open he could look out over the sea from his pillow. Some days I pushed him to the map in a wheelchair. I had to get it down off the wall so that he could reach it. His hand shook and I had to support his wrist to allow him to paint. He painted bluebells. He said, ‘They have always raised my spirits, Morwenna, and I shall never see another bluebell wood – unless I’m wrong, of course, and there is a heaven. Goodness! How fascinating that would be!’

  One day, he painted his own name on his own tombstone, beneath my grandmother’s name. ‘Matthew!’ I said. ‘That’s perverse!’

  ‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss, Morwenna! Every painting must be signed off. If you decide to keep it, by the way, you must remember to varnish it.’

  I was still staring at his name on the tombstone when I noticed something else. The top half of a child’s face peered out from behind a neighbouring gravestone. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s Death,’ said Matthew. ‘Your grandmother said that Death was a small child. She could hear him calling.’

  ‘When did you put him there?’

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t remember.’ Suddenly, he was disoriented, distressed. ‘I don’t remember. I’m very tired all of a sudden, Morwenna. Please, be so kind and help me back to bed.’

  His name was the last thing he painted. After that, there were nurses and drips and bedpans and soiled sheets. It was my first death. Not my first bereavement, obviously, but my first acquaintanceship with the business of dying – the routine of it, the maintenance of the failing life-support system. The mess of it. Corwin and I lifted him, turned him, supported his head. We undressed him and washed him. Death moved in with us. Matthew absented himself, fragment by fragment, to spend time with him. They chatted together while I held Matthew’s hand. I could almost see his face; the wide, frank stare of a child. He was not so terrifying after all, and so very patient.

  I was waiting for Matthew to confess, if that’s the right word. I had more faith in him than did Corwin. I kept saying, ‘Don’t ask him yet. Wait a little longer.’ While he slept we sat on the bed in our parents’ room and went through boxes looking for clues. Where could our father be? If he was going to run away, where would he run? We put a baby monitor in Matthew’s study so that we could hear him if he called. The monitor crackled into life every few seconds as Matthew stirred and moaned.

  There were no clues. Everything in my father’s life led back to Thornton. When Matthew was lucid, I tried some gentle leading questions.

  ‘Why did Dad hate school so much?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Matthew, ‘your poor father. He hated to go anywhere. We had to take him out of school, you know. It was too flat for him. He felt exposed to the sky. He said he expected always to be swooped upon and caught up in great talons.’ Speech was hard for him now. Each sentence required recovery time, snatched breath. ‘And all those games! He couldn’t think of anything more pointless and soul-destroying than chasing around after a ball. He said that he imagined Hell to be one endless ball game. We couldn’t leave him there.’

  ‘Did he ever try to run away?’

  ‘John? No. He was a good boy.’

  One morning, Bob appeared in the garden at Matthew’s window. He could tell that I had seen him. Neither of us made a gesture; he simply waited until I came out. The garden looked neglected but happy to be left alone. The plants had knitted themselves into each other. Sandra had no time for flowers.

  Bob was very tanned and wearing red deck shoes – my eyes kept being drawn to his feet, perhaps because if I met his gaze I was going to have to speak, but he said, ‘Can we have a chat?’

  ‘OK.’

  I gestured to the bench on the terrace. ‘Is this something you and Corwin cooked up?’ I asked.

  ‘No. This is all my idea.’

  We sat at opposite ends of the bench and stared at the sea.

  ‘When did you get back?’ I asked.

  ‘A couple of days ago.’

  ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yes. It was great.’

  ‘I suppose you want an apology?’

  ‘I don’t give a shit. But I think Val deserves one.’

  ‘I’d had too much to drink. I behaved badly.’

  ‘Well, that ought to make you and me even, then.’

  I hadn’t thought of that. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s not even that any more. It’s just decades of habitual dislike – that and the golf club and the Range Rover and the fact that you call Mum “Val”.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Bob. ‘I thought you might have grown out of that by now. But you’re still just as much of a snob as ever!’ He was laughing. ‘Poor Val. A hippie, snob daughter, and a sanctimonious, do-gooding son. What did she ever do to deserve that?’ I was laughing too. It was a warm, comfortable feeling to be out in the open with our enmity.

  ‘I’ll go and see her,’ I said. ‘I’m getting the hang of this apology business. Not that she’ll care. We don’t like each other very much.’

  ‘Mothers don’t get off so lightly.’

  I supposed not. I stared at his tanned feet.

  ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he said, standing up. But I followed him to the gate.

  ‘I’ve been going through Dad’s old things,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood why you and Dad were such good friends. Why were you?’

  ‘We grew up together,’ he said.

  ‘That doesn’t seem enough,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it was,’ he said, exasperated. Then, relenting: ‘We’d known each other for ever, climbed together, played music together. That was enough.’

  ‘Do you think it was us?’ I asked. ‘Me and Corwin? Was he depressed about us?’

  Bob had been reaching for his car keys, but stopped to sigh the sigh of the exasperated stepfather. ‘I think you and Corwin are a couple of drama queens. John was pissed. He fell off a cliff. Let it go!’

  ‘I can’t reconcile it,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You used to play music. I can’t reconcile that music with this waxed-coat lifestyle.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. He’d had enough of me. ‘What can I say, Morwenna? I don’t need you to.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I said. He climbed into the Range Rover. Through the open window I asked, ‘Does the name John Greenaway mean anything to you?’

  ‘No? Why?’

  ‘Just something I came across in something of Dad’s.’

  Bob raised his hand from the steering wheel as he drew away. It was as though he was thanking me for pulling over.

  26.

  Corwin said that John Greenaway was a distraction. It was code for an idea. Who or what he had been was an irrelevance. ‘Matthew holds the answer,’ he said. ‘Let me ask him.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’ Because I didn’t want him to hurt Matthew, and because I didn’t want to know, because I remembered now the ache and bewilderment of bereavement and I didn’t want to b
elieve that my father could knowingly inflict such pain upon us.

  Matthew’s body had shrunk. It was nothing more now than the casing of a tired spirit, which escaped from him in curls of vapour. Somewhere inside was an answer, hard and shining: a diamond truth.

  ‘What if the answer is, he doesn’t know?’ I asked. ‘What if the truth is, he doesn’t know? What if he believes that Dad fell off a cliff and is dead? What will you do then?’

  ‘There’s only one way to find out.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  We were whispering. I took a sketchbook from the shelf. I ignored the ones he had kept from his childhood – and took up the one dated 1941, the year of Matthew’s Disappointment. ‘We look for John Greenaway,’ I said. ‘Matthew must have put him somewhere. Then we’ll know whether he knows or not.’

  That was when we started to go through the sketchbooks. We were systematic about it, as Matthew had been; every sketchbook entry had a corresponding cipher on the map. We needed to enter into his way of thinking to work it out. I started in 1941 and worked forwards while Corwin worked backwards from 2005, and we gridded off the map so that we could catalogue the image that corresponded to the sketchbook entry.

  As Matthew had told me, he started with the farting Devil. I pictured him returning from his day’s walk, spreading the Ordnance Survey map out on the kitchen table, piercing Thornton with the sharp point of his compass and extending it out to meet the mark he had made in the middle of a field twelve miles away and turning the circle. Then scaling it up onto the large canvas, a canvas of undulating lines with a tiny red and black devil at its centre.

  Much of it was familiar, and we already knew where to look on the map. On one page, two enormous cedars framed the church and beneath the sketch he had written, ‘The Thornton Sentinels’. And then, in an older, smaller hand, ‘Lost in the Great Storm of 1959’. Not lost to Matthew’s map, though, where they still stood guard. But not all were so literal. At other times, we would find a page full of details, then search and search for its cipher. Matthew had devoted two pages to the story of a Civil War skirmish between cousins. In the sketchbook the exact location was mapped out, but when we looked at the map, we could find no obvious reference to the event. We were tempted to dismiss it and allow ourselves to believe that it was a story Matthew had rejected for inclusion. But we kept going back to it – Matthew was consistent: what appeared in the sketchbooks had a symbol on the map. We kept looking. Eventually I found it by standing back: the family coat of arms was painted into the bark of a trunk of a bifurcated oak tree. Once I knew it was there, it was obvious, but my eye had slid over the image countless times.

  By now I had read A Coastal Curacy twice; Ambrose Pearce, with his stranger’s eye, storm-shocked by both the weather and the poverty. The people of the coast loomed misshapen and lonely out of the mists. He imagined them wild and murderous, the beaches littered with their lantern-lured victims, the fingers hacked off. But there was only one mention of the occupant of the strange cabin at Thornton Mouth.

  I went looking for Ambrose Pearce. He was easy to find. He had been curate at St Peter’s for three years in the mid-1860s, before returning to the civilized south-east, where he wrote two other books about being the vicar of a land-locked village with a pretty duck pond.

  I went looking for John Greenaway in the Thornton Parish Register, starting with the time of Ambrose Pearce’s curacy. I looked for him among all the dead children, the bled-out young mothers, the consumptive, the poxed, the drowned, and those who had managed somehow to outlive their teeth. They must have felt a grim sense of achievement, those old women who had laid out God knew how many sons and daughters and grandchildren in sheets fragranced with herbs. I was thirty-four and had never seen a corpse. I thought: It will not be me who lays out Matthew. Someone else will do that. Someone else, whose job it is. Someone who doesn’t know him. There will be no lavender or rosemary scattered on his sheets.

  Names, names and more names, excised from their stories. John Greenaway was not among them. I went to the churches in The Sands – I found a couple of Greenaways, but no Johns, and no one of the right age.

  ‘He must have moved on and out,’ I said to Corwin. I had said ‘on and out’ as though Matthew’s circle were a geographical feature.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘He’s not important.’

  But now, when I went down to the cabin, I thought about John Greenaway living on that spot. I could smell the tarred rope. Here was a ghost that I could grapple with, a good honest ghost, who might be relied upon to rattle a few pebble chains and appear with a warning hand raised, pointing even; he had seen the Devil, after all – he was a ghost to heed. There were ways to dispatch a ghost like him. Matthew knew them all – they were in the sketchbooks: you could throw churchyard soil at it, or declaim, ‘In the name of God, be gone!’ Or you could set it an impossible task. If I met John Greenaway’s ghost I would banish it from the cabin until it had translated into English each and every scribbled stone at Thornton Mouth. That would keep it occupied for all of eternity.

  My life was full of shades: John Greenaway, John Venton, the child, Death. I felt as though I was being called to the Underworld.

  I went to visit Mum. She bestowed her forgiveness on the threshold, all graciousness, freshly pedicured – Rouge Noir to go with the tan. ‘Tea?’ she asked, prescribing my penance. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘you’re the only person I know who still takes sugar in their tea.’

  Her tea, I wanted to say. Not their. I had apologized, but she hadn’t.

  ‘What lovely flowers,’ I said, because that was the kind of thing I had to say from now on.

  ‘From your brother,’ she said, allowing me to infer the unfavourable comparison. ‘How’s Matthew?’

  ‘Fading fast.’

  ‘I suppose I’d better come and say my goodbyes.’

  ‘I think he’d like that.’

  That night, as I took over the vigil, I pulled a sketchbook from the shelf. It was from 1951, and in the moment that I grasped the spine to slide it out I knew that I had found something. The book felt wrong. I knew how a book should feel, and this one was slightly hollow to my touch. There were pages missing. I didn’t need to open it to know this. When I did open it I saw immediately that the stitching was loose. I counted the pages and compared them to the previous sketchbook. Two leaves had been removed. Matthew, surely.

  I waited until he opened his eyes. I sat there for two hours watching him, listening to his breath. Eventually, he stirred, looked around in confusion. I took his hand. ‘Matthew,’ I said, ‘it’s me, Morwenna.’ He recognized my face then and his own relaxed and he made a mewing sound of contentment. I gave him some water through a straw.

  ‘Matthew,’ I said, ‘what do you know about John Greenaway?’

  But I had left it too late. He had no full sentences left, only single words. And, in any case, he showed no sign that he had understood the question.

  27.

  Corwin and I began to take turns to sleep in Matthew’s room. We lived within his breathing now. It was the first sound we listened for each time we woke. But at the beginning of August, on our thirty-fifth birthday, Corwin suggested that we ask Sandra to sit with Matthew so that we could go out. Sandra agreed without hesitation, generously. I had to thank her, not so much for the favour but for loving Matthew, which cost me.

  We didn’t talk much that evening. There had been so much talking. We sat next to each other in the pub, enveloped in a brown leather sofa, and drank beer and ate chips. It was quiz night and we paid up to take part. ‘You and me against the world, Morwenna!’ Corwin said, clinking his glass against mine. He became quite animated. It had given him something else to think about.

  I thought: Why always against the world? Most of the quiz questions went over my head – I didn’t watch television, had no interest in sport and had given up paying attention to the news. I looked around me, the intense debates over each question, the laughter. Why
not of the world? I wanted to join in, but I didn’t know how.

  Corwin did pretty well on the questions. ‘All that Trivial Pursuit,’ I said spitefully.

  ‘Look at your face!’ laughed Corwin. He imitated Matthew, perfectly capturing Matthew’s anachronistic upper-crust closed a’s: ‘Morwenna, I do believe that you are some strange scowling woodland creature that has strayed into the human world by accident!’

  ‘Very funny!’ I said. And then I realized something. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘I’m in there. I’m in the map, after all!’

  I had seen it so many times recently, sitting in the branches of the oak in the middle of the cow field, a cross creature with enormous hazel eyes, but hadn’t yet decoded it. Matthew must have been waiting decades for me to work it out. I felt forgiven – what for, I couldn’t have said.

  We walked home through the middle of town. Some teenagers were gathered at the high raised flowerbed that surrounded the shopping-centre clock. It was still the triage point, just as it had been when we were that age. We carried on past the closed-up Boots and WHSmith. A man was walking towards us. He was wearing a denim jacket. I wouldn’t have paid him any attention (I was thinking about Matthew, hoping that he hadn’t woken up and felt abandoned) except that he made a sudden movement of avoidance, a shoulder-led swerve into the alley that led to the car park, and in the moment of that movement I recognized him and saw that Corwin had too. Corwin began to run after him, shouting his name: ‘Oliver! Oliver!’

  I followed Corwin into the alley and out into the empty car park, but Oliver had disappeared. Corwin stood in the middle of the tarmac looking wildly around him. Then he threw his head back and yelled one abrupt, despairing ‘Fuck!’ into the night sky and sat down.

  My lungs were hurting from the effort of running. I went over to where Corwin sat and stood over him. ‘When was the last time we saw Oliver?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. All I can remember is him crying at the funeral.’