The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  We straightened Matthew’s sheets and arranged his hands and kissed his forehead, and I was about to call for a nurse when Corwin laid his hand on my arm and said, ‘It can wait.’

  I thought we would sit down again and simply stay and contemplate, but Corwin started rummaging about in the old cupboard in which Matthew stored his materials. I said, ‘What are you doing? Leave his things alone!’ But Corwin ignored me. He pulled out a bottle of white spirit and a box of cotton buds and went over to the map.

  I said, ‘Stop it. You can’t do this now. Now’s not the time. You’re upsetting me.’

  But he soaked the cotton in spirit, and picked up the magnifying-glass with his left hand and began to wipe over the canvas, over the sea below Brock Tor, saying, ‘I’ve been patient. Now is the time.’

  And Matthew lay dead with the sun from the west on his face and I held the magnifying-glass while Corwin desecrated the map with tiny, gentle strokes of soft cotton and the paint lifted, until there, at the base of the cliff, where it meets the sea, a creature appeared, looking out from a fissure in the rocks; a grinning creature, camouflaged in colour to blend in with the granite of the cliffs. It had horns and a forked tail and leered up at Brock Point – it was John Greenaway’s Devil.

  30.

  I asked myself, When did Matthew know?

  And I remembered him, on the day of my father’s death.

  ‘Where did he fall?’ asked Matthew. This was his first question.

  ‘Just below Brock Tor,’ said Corwin.

  After the police had gone, Matthew left Valerie and Bob facing each other in the living room and went into his study and stood. There was only this standing and the absence of thought, and both the not moving and the not thinking drew all of his energy to a balancing point beneath the balls of his feet. Any loss of focus, and he would tip and injure himself. He had experienced something similar before, when his wife died, but this was different. When Anne died it was simple bereavement; his soul was stunned. But this …

  An idea squirmed at the edge of his consciousness – a voracious maggot of an idea trying to bore its way into his brain, and he must keep it out or he must unbalance. And so he stood, still.

  Fifteen minutes passed before he dared a movement. He took three steps, turned and allowed himself to re-form in order to sit down in his chair. Not a maggot, he thought. Maggots are for the surface, not the water. An eel. An eel with its blind vacuuming eel mouth twisting at the flesh to feed its black electric flicker. And in the time that it took to complete that thought the idea had perforated the membrane and was in.

  At last he fell asleep, sitting in his chair, and slept for two hours the sleep of a man who was too old for this. After a while he completed the sentence: too old for this counter-betrayal. He should never have sold the land. John had begged him. Matthew had forced his silent son to speak: made him rehearse his plea. Working in the garden, out with Matthew on their evening walks, John had painstakingly fitted together the words. It had taken him ten days, and he had voiced them only the one time: ‘Please, Father. Let me have that land. Please.’

  Matthew had thought only of legacy and, for Matthew, legacy had always meant the house and the objects within the house and the stories that attached to the circle around the house and, within the circle, the triangle: house, church, cabin. The land, the soil of it and what the soil could achieve, was incidental. He had missed it. He could name every flower and tree, but still he had missed it. And John had punished him for it – was punishing him for it, perhaps. Or perhaps he was in the water, after all. How desolating, not to know, not to have proof.

  Matthew waited for the house to fall silent. It was only one day off the full moon, but the rainclouds had come over; he couldn’t see it. There were footsteps on the stairs. The plumbing shrieked, briefly. He couldn’t imagine that anyone was sleeping, but no one, thankfully, could be heard to be weeping.

  He pulled his stepladder over to the map and angled his light and his magnifying-glass towards the chine below Brock Tor. He picked up his palette and began to overpaint.

  31.

  At Matthew’s funeral I looked for my father. I thought, He must intuit it somehow. He’ll come. But it doesn’t work like that. Matthew had kept our grandmother’s ashes and had requested for his own to be mixed with hers and dug into the soil around the climbing rose that they had planted on their wedding day: the rose that on his map wrapped itself around the house and which had grown year by year, a rose at a time, so that by now the house in the painting looked as if it were held together by the rose and would disintegrate without it.

  I worried about what would happen when we sold the house. What if they dug up the rose?

  Corwin said, ‘We’re not selling the house!’

  And I said, ‘We can’t afford the inheritance tax.’

  And Corwin said, ‘Yes, we can. I’ve got it.’

  ‘What do you mean, you’ve got it?’

  ‘I’ve been saving,’ he said.

  For all those years he’d been saving. I’d had no idea. But, then, what should he have spent his money on?

  ‘I’m not living here. You can’t make me!’

  Around me, the house, empty of its people, seemed to come out of hiding and reveal itself to me in its true state. Water seeped in; I watched it spread. The doors jarred on twisted frames. There were broken slates, gouges in the plaster. The weft appeared in the carpets.

  Corwin said, ‘I can’t make any decisions until we’ve found Dad.’ As though we needed to save the house for him. ‘No,’ said Corwin, ‘that’s not it. But don’t you see? We are stuck now.’

  I sulked, and as I sulked I thought about Ed. It was as if he were my connection to the outside world, so I phoned him.

  ‘Morwenna,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  I said, ‘Matthew’s dead.’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes.’

  We were silent for a while, and then he said, ‘Why are you phoning?’

  He made it sound as if there was a right answer to the question, but I didn’t know what it was. I said, ‘I don’t know, really. I just thought that I owed you a call.’

  ‘When will you be back in London?’

  ‘Soon, I guess.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you call me when you’re back?’

  I wanted to explain to him that I had come into the world with my affections, my love, already parcelled out for me and that I was doing my best to reapportion them, it, my love, and that, with Matthew gone, surely there must now be some love released for me to bestow where I wished. But it wasn’t the moment for that conversation. It must wait.

  We carried on looking for our father. It was all we did, day in, day out, apart from when Mum insisted that we come over and eat sensibly; she assumed that we were taken up with sorting out the house. She was gentler than usual – had us bring our laundry, fabric-conditioned and ironed it. She made chocolate cake. We were grateful for it.

  If Matthew had taken so much trouble to conceal, then there was something to find. We turned away from the map and the sketchbooks and started to go through the bank of wooden cabinets that contained his files. Matthew was an archivist – it was not in his nature to discard. Somewhere in his study, we were convinced, was a clue to our father’s disappearance.

  Matthew’s sources hung in hundreds of drop-files, organized geographically by parish and, within each parish, by subject, alphabetically. Thornton alone took up an entire filing cabinet. We started there and lost ourselves in Matthew’s mind. We began to see the world as he had seen it – not in the two dimensions of canvas and paper but in multiple dimensions. In his view of the world there was no chronology: he experienced time through the finest historical layers, like so many sheets of the sheerest fabric, floating on the breeze, brushing against each other, lifting and curling at the corners to reveal other times altogether. In his world truth co-existed with invention, embellishment might be more truthful than fact, fact might be more magi
cal than myth. Roses held up houses. Demons guarded names. Now when we walked down to the cabin in the evenings to bid the sea goodnight on his behalf, the landscape shifted, broke up, rearranged itself. Matthew had lived within a kaleidoscope. Nothing had looked the same to him twice.

  And then, suddenly, my four months were over. I wasn’t ready. It was the end of October. At Thornton Mouth the sky was a violent orange, as if there had been a celestial tantrum. It was still warm in the evenings. We made a small fire on the beach and pulled in some mackerel for supper. We cast in silence, the fish so stupid that we caught them with the glint of metal. We gutted them quickly – they are bloody fish, mackerel; they quickly grow rank. We returned their heads and entrails to the sea.

  Corwin said, ‘I wonder what he calls himself now.’

  I saw myself trapped in a tower with a chamber full of straw to be spun into gold. ‘Rumpelstiltskin!’ I said.

  ‘Yes!’ laughed Corwin. ‘That works.’

  I imagined the little wizened man, my father, dancing around the fire, singing out his secret name.

  ‘I’ll come back at the weekends,’ I promised. ‘We’ll keep looking.’

  Corwin drove me to the station. It was the season for dead badgers on the road – the young, setting out on their own. I worried about leaving Corwin alone with his bitterness.

  In London, a pile of mail lay on the table by the front door. I left it there and climbed the stairs, soothed by the familiarity of the sound and feel of each loose stair tread. I pushed open the door to my flat. Birgit was long gone. She had left a note and a couple of bottles of wine on the table. The flat smelt of neglect, of rain, of mice. Something clinked against my shoe. Ed had returned his keys. I opened the windows, poured a glass of wine and set mousetraps. In the early hours I heard a trap spring, unfeasibly loud; and then, half an hour later, another. I dreamed of mouse corpses, their stiff little tails, their flattened jaws.

  Ana’s black eyebrows lifted as I returned to work. She was pleased to see me back. ‘I’m sorry about your grandfather,’ she said, and asked, ‘Everything else resolved?’

  ‘Just about,’ I said. She didn’t want to know the answer: she was just reminding me that, even if nothing was resolved, I owed her the pretence that it was.

  My hands were out of practice and ached at night. In the evenings I soaked them in warm water and massaged them with oil. If Corwin had been there, he would have done it for me – taken my hands one by one in both of his. Could it be enough – the life he wanted for us? I thought, If there were more words for love, if there was a word for Corwin and me, for our twin-ness and all that attached to it, could we make ourselves better understood? If Mum or Ed or Oliver or my father could have named it and said simply, It is this not that, would it all have been defined and obvious? Would they have been spared anxiety about it? Would my father have stayed? But there was no word for us.

  I went through the pile of mail. Most of it was junk. There was a manuscript I had ordered for a book-design competition. It was Aesop’s Fables, printed on beautiful thick ivory paper, into which the woodcut illustrations sank deep. I smiled. There would have to be a crow on the cover. I put it aside to think about later, and picked up a postcard – it was from Birgit. Her journeying had taken her to a bindery in Italy. She thanked me again for letting me stay and wrote that I was always welcome to stay with her in Zürich – the bindery there would be delighted to have me if I ever decided to do some journeying of my own.

  I turned the card over and put it on top of the manuscript and went to the kitchen to make supper. I was cracking eggs into a bowl, the butter was foaming in the pan, when I stopped and wiped my hands and went back to the postcard. The image was from a Roman mural. At its centre a snake writhed within an eagle’s beak. A sensation that was like heat, but which was fear and triumph and revelation combined, shot through me. I reached for my phone and dialled Thornton. The phone rang and rang. Eventually someone picked up. It was a woman’s voice. I said, ‘Who the hell is that?’

  ‘Hello, Morwenna,’ said Sandra. ‘It’s Sandra.’

  ‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Have you moved in or something? Where’s Corwin?’

  ‘Out.’

  In the kitchen the butter was burning.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Well, when he gets back, tell him he needs to go back to the map. He needs to look for something small – like a mouse or a vole or something. Maybe even a snake. Something that a hawk might prey on.’

  ‘OK,’ she said slowly, appeasing.

  ‘I mean,’ I said, ‘would you mind taking a message from me? Please. And thank you. And if you leave before he gets back, could you write it down? He’ll know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Of course, Morwenna,’ said Sandra. ‘Whatever you say.’

  Corwin didn’t call back. And still he didn’t. And he didn’t answer the phone, and it was only Wednesday and I couldn’t go back down until Friday night. I wondered if Sandra could have been spiteful enough not to leave the message, and then I realized she couldn’t have been. She wasn’t spiteful. I just wished her to be. I felt ashamed of myself.

  I couldn’t sleep. At last, at three in the morning, he called. ‘I can’t find anything.’

  ‘Keep looking,’ I said.

  32.

  I went back down that weekend. Corwin met me at the front door. ‘I’ve found something,’ he said. I felt light-headed, almost nauseous. ‘Not Dad,’ he said quickly. ‘And not on the map. I’ve found John Greenaway. He was in with the rector.’

  It was obvious, really. Matthew had a whole drawer on John Greenaway’s rector. He had lived a long life and had saved all his sermons and his correspondence, making copies of his own letters. There were some notes of Matthew’s – he had toyed with the idea of writing a book about him.

  ‘Where did Matthew get hold of all this stuff?’ I asked.

  Corwin shrugged his shoulders. ‘Where did he get hold of any of this stuff?’ He handed me a piece of paper. I tried to read it, but couldn’t make out the handwriting. Corwin took it from me and read it out to me:

  Dear Reverend Wingate,

  You say you cannot hear my confession. That you don’t hold with all that papist nonsense. Although some in the parish would say that your fancy collars might tell a different tale. Yet I know you to be my friend and will tell you, shriving or no. I came out of the sea named John Greenaway that day you pulled me off the beach. Now God and the Devil will sort out who will have me but I have fathered children in the village and left them without a father’s name. I want them to know their father’s true name and if they are not ashamed of it to use it for their own. Lastly I beg that I may be buried with my true name.

  These are my last wishes.

  Nathaniel Parvin

  That was John Greenaway of Thornton

  Corwin handed me something else. ‘This was clipped to it,’ he said. They were the pages pulled from the sketchbook. Across two pages was the Devil in various forms, grinning from the rock, as we had uncovered him, but also scowling, furious, being ridden through the water by a man.

  I turned the pages over. On the reverse side of one was an illustration that took up the whole page. It was the cabin, but not as described by Ambrose Pearce. It was our cabin, our beach. The tide was out and there was a thick high-tide mark, which resolved itself into body parts. A man lifted an arm into a wheelbarrow, but it wasn’t a portrait of John Greenaway. It was a portrait of Matthew. He had written two words at the centre of the bottom of the page: The Sexton.

  My hands were shaking. ‘We’re getting closer,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Corwin. ‘This gets us no closer at all.’

  The next morning I woke early and went to look in the graveyard. I found him eventually, his headstone half buried in the ground, the words almost weathered away by the salt wind: Nathaniel Parvin, died 1879.

  I went on down to the cabin to spend time with John Greena
way’s ghost. I had the sense that I had seen the name Nathaniel Parvin very recently, but I couldn’t think where. It was not until much later, when Corwin and I were sitting down to eat, that I remembered it. I jumped up from the table and ran upstairs to my parents’ room and pulled out the box in which I had looked for letters from Oliver. I tipped it upside-down. There were all the things that Mum had kept from my primary-school days – pictures, my story-writing books and a folded piece of paper, which I took back to the kitchen.

  I unfolded it on the kitchen table. ‘Look,’ I said to Corwin. ‘It’s the class family tree. The one we did with Miss Arden. She made a copy for everyone. You remember – when Sandra called me Morwenna the Witch.’ There was the name, on the top row: Nathaniel Parvin. Not John Greenaway himself, but his grandson, probably. I followed the lines down, to our generation. He had several great-grandchilden. One of them was Sandra Stowe.

  ‘That’s how he knew the story!’ I said. ‘Matthew – that’s how he knew the story. He got it from the Crab Man.’

  But Corwin was right. None of this brought us any closer to knowing where our father might be. Corwin had now been home for eight months, living off his savings, and when he hadn’t been caring for Matthew or obsessing about our father, he had spent his days walking and climbing and working in the kitchen garden with Sandra. Between them they had restored it to productivity, and had now turned to reviving the scrubby little orchard. They worked well together, trading light-hearted jocular insults. Corwin had filled out again. He was becoming strong and tanned from the work outside. Sometimes Sandra brought her children over. Corwin had given them their own corner of vegetable patch where they had planted pumpkins and sweetcorn. They had made a scarecrow – I recognized an old jacket and hat of Matthew’s.