The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  ‘Memorial service,’ snapped Corwin. ‘It wasn’t a funeral.’ He stood up and grasped my hand and started pulling me along behind him.

  ‘That treacherous little fuck!’

  Corwin dragged me across town to what we still thought of as Oliver’s house. The cul-de-sac struck me as a vision of pure loneliness, a ring of identical houses lit by a weak orange light from the streetlamps, each emitting a blue flicker from behind the curtains of one or two rooms.

  We stole up to the house. There were pots of red geraniums on the front doorstep. We clicked the gate open gently and prowled around to the back, but there was light only in the living room. We tried to peer through a chink in the curtain, but there was nothing to see. We returned to the front door and Corwin put his hand out to ring the bell. ‘It’s the middle of the night!’ I whispered, but it was too late. Corwin’s finger pressed the button. Ding dong went the bell. It seemed to reverberate right around the circle of houses. ‘Ding,’ said Corwin, grimly. ‘Dong.’

  For the longest time, nothing happened. Then we heard a shuffle in the hallway, and a light went on and an old man’s voice, suspicious, scared, called out: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mr Finch? It’s Corwin Venton. Sorry to disturb you so late at night.’

  There was a pause during which he must have been looking through the peephole to satisfy himself that it was indeed Corwin. Then the door opened on the chain and Oliver’s father peered through the crack in the door. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Mr Finch, we thought we just saw Oliver. We thought he might be here, and we’d really like to talk to him.’

  The harsh hall light fell across Mr Finch’s face. The skin under his eyes was a deep purple, his eyes dark with bitterness. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Have you seen him recently?’

  ‘I told you. He’s not here. He’s nothing to do with me.’

  ‘But do you know where he is?’

  The door moved towards us, but he was simply removing the chain, so that he might open it wider, the better to display his anger.

  ‘I don’t know where he is. But I know where he’s going,’ he said. ‘That filthy little sodomite. I told him where he’s going. I said, “You, boy, are going straight to Hell!”’

  Now that he had us there, he was glad. There was no one else to tell. He pointed his right hand towards the ground to show us how forcefully he had dispatched his son into the flames. He was wearing checked slippers, which made his righteous fury all the more terrifying.

  ‘When did you tell him that, Mr Finch?’ Corwin asked calmly.

  ‘He comes round here,’ said Mr Finch, ‘to tell me the world has moved on! But I asked him, “And God?” I asked him. “Does He move on?”’

  ‘Do you have an address? We really need to speak to him.’

  He gave us a fiery look, which told us that we were going the same way as Oliver, and shuffled off into the kitchen, then came back with a piece of paper in his hand. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I have no use for this!’ And he shut the door. The hall light went off, but the blue continued to flicker through the crack in the curtains as we walked away.

  I wasn’t able to sleep, trying to remember the last time I had spoken to Oliver. I could never get beyond the morning after the memorial service. I revisited desultory evenings in the pub during university term breaks and couldn’t picture him there. I must have written to him. At four in the morning I got up to trawl through the box of school memorabilia and old letters that was among the boxes in my parents’ bedroom – there were letters from Willow, postcards from other sixth-form friends, but only one postcard from Oliver. I recalled a long-since-forgotten sensation of having been interrupted in a conversation with him. Now I realized that I had never heard from him again. I can’t explain what instinct told me – us – that Oliver had something to conceal, but in that shying away from us he told us and we understood.

  We flipped a coin. Best out of three: heads, you go, tails, I go. Corwin flicked it in the air a third time, caught it, and slapped it on the back of his left fist, pausing ostentatiously before lifting his right hand. ‘Heads,’ he said. ‘You go!’

  He looked disappointed. He was in need of confrontation. Sandra came into the kitchen to make herself some tea.

  ‘What are you two up to now, then?’

  ‘Assigning things to Fate,’ said Corwin.

  Sandra snorted. ‘Don’t you ever get tired?’ she asked.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of talking like that?’ She was filling the kettle. ‘Who wants tea?’

  ‘I think you should go,’ I said to Corwin. ‘You’re the one who really wants to.’

  ‘No,’ said Corwin. ‘It’s the right answer. He’ll find it harder to lie to you.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  Sandra was laughing. ‘I don’t even know who you’re talking about, but I can see why!’ She pulled three mugs from the cupboard. ‘Tea all round, then?’

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s something about you makes people want to smack you in the face with the truth,’ she said simply. ‘Who are you talking about, anyway? Not that it’s any of my business,’ she added, pre-empting me with a smirk.

  ‘Oliver,’ said Corwin. ‘Do you remember him? Oliver Finch?’

  ‘The Fairy?’ She put a mug of tea in front of me. ‘Don’t you give me that look, Morwenna Venton. That’s what we called him: the Fairy. You can’t stop kids saying stuff like that.’

  Before she went home that afternoon she came to find me. ‘Say hello to Oliver for me,’ she said. ‘He was always nice to me.’

  28.

  I left at dawn the following day. Oliver had tucked himself between the moors. I drove along the edge of a river. There was light rain on flat water. Horses waded through the morning mists. I half expected him to have fled, but as I pulled into the courtyard of converted farm buildings I found that he was not hiding, after all, but alert to my arrival, coming to the door of his cottage and standing there while I switched off the engine.

  His long hair was gone – now it was very short: salt and peppered, the hairline far back on his forehead. He wore small, thick gold hoops in both ears. As he came towards me the muscle shifted in his arms and under the fabric of his T-shirt and his jeans. He had exercised the girl out of his body, but when I got close enough to see his eyes they were still a little too full for his face, the lashes a little too long and curled, the expression a little too close to hurt.

  ‘Hello, Morwenna,’ he said. He kissed each of my cheeks. The cool gold touched my skin. ‘No Crow?’

  ‘Matthew’s not well. Corwin’s looking after him.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. I was just about to take the dog for a walk – do you mind? Come on in while I grab a jacket.’

  Inside, I remembered his sobriety. The room was fastidiously clean. There was a range, a fridge, a large wooden table and chairs, a desk under the stairs, a laptop and mouse pad arranged geometrically upon it, and an empty floor space in front of a statue of Buddha and a candle. There was nothing soft to compromise his principles. The closest thing he had to a sofa was a large hairy blond dog.

  ‘Do you live on your own?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have a partner: Andrew.’

  ‘How does that go down around here?’

  Oliver laughed – he hadn’t even smiled until then. ‘Oh, they have some euphemisms for us. I’ve heard “nice boys” and “our gentlemen”. I don’t know what they call us behind our backs.’

  We walked down to the river – it was still the flat water of early morning, moving in smooth dark planes. Oliver threw things up the path for the dog and the dog brought them back. Oliver said, ‘You’re looking very thin. And tired.’

  ‘It has been a difficult couple of months,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry I ran away from you,’ he said. ‘That was childish. I don’t know why I did it.’

  ‘You must have some idea.’

&
nbsp; ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It had been an overwhelming day. Every so often I try to make peace with my father. It’s always upsetting when I can’t. And I wasn’t expecting to bump into you two.’

  The river ran over furred stones. Trout shadows moved beneath the surface. The sun had appeared and was burning off the mist and the morning’s rain. On the other bank was a tangle of red campion.

  ‘How’s Crow?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s got compassion fatigue,’ I said. ‘It’s turned him into a lunatic.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Oliver, for the second time. ‘What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Nursing a fixed idea,’ I said.

  It was akin to flirting, this verbal dancing. There was an electric tingle. I had no doubt that he felt it too.

  ‘What are you doing, these days?’

  ‘Working for the Wildlife Trust.’

  ‘That sounds very worthy.’

  ‘It’s OK. A lot of it seems to involve sitting in an office at a computer.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you in an office,’ I said. ‘Somehow you and strip-lighting don’t go together.’

  ‘Most people don’t get to love their jobs, Morwenna.’

  I remembered the sensation of being permanently admonished by Oliver. He may have avoided us after school, but we had let it happen because it had been tiring always to be found wanting.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m lucky, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m still binding books. Living in London. Trying to avoid change – only Corwin won’t let me.’

  He was fussing over the dog, letting it lick his face. ‘How do you like London? I don’t think I could bear it.’

  I’d had enough of this. I said, ‘Do you know why I’m here, Oliver?’

  Oliver’s hands were still buried in the dog’s deep fur. ‘I have an idea.’

  ‘Good. Well, let’s stop pissing about. You see, Corwin thinks that Dad didn’t die when he fell off the cliff. He thinks you know that.’

  There was a pause in which a breeze hit the water and set off the first ripple of the day. The long grass swayed.

  ‘Why does he think that?’

  ‘Gut feeling,’ I said. ‘He’s having a lot of those. I don’t seem to get them myself. I just channel Corwin.’

  ‘You always did!’

  ‘Possibly.’ I shrugged.

  Oliver had been talking to the dog. Now he straightened up and said, to me, ‘I really loved your father.’

  ‘Yes. I remember you saying that before.’

  ‘No!’

  The dog jumped to its feet suddenly, guardedly, attuned to the pitch of misery in Oliver’s single word. Oliver was undoing – dematerializing in the way that he had done as an adolescent. His eyes were awash. I felt the wonderful clarity of pitilessness. ‘No?’

  ‘I mean, I was in love with your father.’

  His confession settled upon me gently, as if someone had dropped the lightest cashmere shawl on my shoulders.

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ I said. ‘And I always thought it was Corwin!’

  ‘Well,’ he looked straight into my eyes – a flash of defiance beneath the tears, ‘Corwin too. We were all in love with Corwin. Even you!’

  ‘Gosh, what a lot of tongues must have been wagging way back then!’ I said. ‘I’m amazed my ears aren’t burned to cinders! But we seem to be straying from the point. Let’s get back to my father.’

  ‘You and Crow,’ Oliver had re-formed, was solid again, ‘you were so self-obsessed. You never saw anything. Crow was too busy looking off into the distance pursuing some grand idea of himself as a humanitarian – and you!’ He paused, relaxed his shoulders, relenting, and said kindly, ‘Well. You were just a bitch.’

  I waited.

  ‘You took your father completely for granted. He was a wonderful man. A wonderful, wonderful man. The soul just shone out of him.’ Oliver was crying now, for his long-lost love. He wiped his eyes on the heels of his palms. ‘I tried to kiss him once.’

  My stomach moved in a lurch of pure revulsion. ‘Did he kiss you back?’

  ‘No. He rejected me very carefully and gently.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh. A long time before that night. I used to help him in the garden, sometimes. I loved that garden. And he was sitting there, on the bench, and when I went over I realized he’d been crying. It was just after your grandfather had sold that land. And … Well. I tried to kiss him.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘You can’t have been more than sixteen!’

  ‘Yeah. I suppose,’ he said, as though I had missed the point. ‘He was amazing. He was so kind about it.’

  Mainly, I felt rage. We stood in silence for a few minutes but there was a cacophony of rage in my ears. Rage that Oliver had dared to try to appropriate my father for himself and, worse, that he took it upon himself to make judgement upon the quality of our love. In the end I reached into my handbag and pulled out a tissue and handed it to him.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s move on. The night my father “died”.’ I waved my fingers in the air in the sarcastic gesture of quotation marks.

  He wiped his eyes and blew his nose and looked at me. He hated me, pure and simple. I wondered if he always had.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I fell asleep and you and Crow went off to the cabin to do whatever it was that you and Crow always had to be so private about in that cabin of yours and eventually I woke up because I was freezing and it was about five thirty and I started to walk home.’

  He stopped. I waited. I was all patience, all clarity.

  ‘And when I got to the top of the cliff …’ Oliver sighed – he wasn’t looking at me: he was looking at the damp tissue in his hands ‘… I stopped. Because it was such a beautiful morning. I just stopped to look at the morning. The tide was right out and the sand was shining. And then I saw him – walking across the cove, across the sand. Just walking. And I didn’t know then that he was supposed to be dead. I saw him walking straight ahead and I just thought he was out there, being part of the morning. And later, when I heard, I realized that I’d been watching him walk away.’

  With this vision of my father – walking the length of the low tide, his feet shredded like Corwin’s had been, perhaps, bleeding into the salt-glazed sand, walking right past us as we slept in the cabin – I felt my skin cool into an exquisite transparent fragility; a hoar frost encased me. I understood now why we had not been able to feel anything when we lost our father. The thief, Oliver, had stolen our grief. The thief, Oliver, had been crying our tears, and he was still crying them.

  ‘What makes you so sure that it was him?’ I asked – I knew that this was my last question for him. ‘At that distance?’

  ‘I’d have known him anywhere,’ said Oliver. ‘And, anyway, I remember thinking how strange it was that he was carrying his fiddle.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’m going now.’

  ‘I couldn’t tell anyone,’ he protested. ‘It would have been a betrayal.’

  ‘It was a betrayal, Oliver. And I bet you have told someone. I bet you anything you’ve told your Andrew all about it – all about your strange and painful first love. I bet it lends you quite the air of romance.’

  He started and opened his mouth as if to deny it, but he couldn’t. As I walked away he called out to my back, ‘I still look for him all the time.’

  Without stopping or turning I called back: ‘You don’t get to keep my father, Oliver. He was never yours to claim – he was ours, mine and Corwin’s.’

  I drove for half an hour, my chest tight with rage, until I had to pull over to breathe. The river had widened its cut through the fields. I walked to the bank, stripped down to my underwear, climbed into the soothing water and put my head under. It was so, so cold. The water flowed over me and I let it wash away my vengefulness towards Oliver, and towards Andrew, whom I would never meet, but who had shared in the secret – they had nourished themselves
on my father’s deception. But I was calm. I had forgotten Oliver before. I knew I could forget him again.

  29.

  The imaginary falling man now spread out his arms, as Corwin had done, and leaned towards the moon and stepped purposefully out. But I didn’t know why.

  Corwin wasn’t surprised by Oliver’s story. He said simply, ‘That makes sense,’ as though it did make sense, all of it. Except that it didn’t – not to me.

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think we must have cornered him, somehow. He hated that job – he was never meant to sit at a desk. You should have asked Matthew while you still had the chance.’

  ‘What about Mum – do you think she knows? Should we ask her?’

  ‘What do you think? She’s totally transparent. Just like somebody else I know. Leave her out of it!’

  ‘How come she gets left out of it and Matthew doesn’t?’

  ‘You know the answer to that.’

  So I whispered into Matthew’s dreams of dying. ‘Why did John jump off the cliff, Matthew?’ I whispered into his ear, because I imagined the connections in his brain as a mass of soft filaments floating on the exhalations of my questions. I hoped for a gentle collision that might still produce a word. ‘Where did he go?’ I whispered. ‘To take up with a lover? To unearth pirate treasure? To travel into Fairyland? Do you know where he is?’

  But Matthew only breathed. What was left of him existed only to service his breathing and the plucking of his hands on the bed-sheets. I had read about this in novels: the plucking of sheets by the dying. I had thought of it as something only the Victorians did, like fainting and sending children up chimneys. But then the nurses increased the morphine and the plucking stopped and we were left with the breath, percussive and persistent. And Corwin and I dozed in the room. Matthew rattled as if his organs had dried and crisped, like autumn leaves, and were being blown about inside him.

  And then, one evening, it stopped. And Corwin and I both looked up at the interruption to the rhythm of this dream of ours, which had been Matthew’s dying and in which there had been no time or substance and which had seemed like an always, as though we had stepped into a parallel life in which we existed as other versions of ourselves. We looked up, as if a blind had sprung open and let in the bright sunshine. It was late September; there was sun on the fields.