Now Corwin said, ‘You see – we have a connection with Sandra.’ I could tell that he had been thinking. A dread chill seized me. I steered him off the subject, whatever it was. He had been thinking far too much in general.
I bumped into Sandra in the boot room as she was getting changed out of her work clothes. She always wore jeans and DMs, but now I stumbled across her in red lacy underwear. She was all sinew except where her four kids had stretched her belly. There was a rose tattoo on her left hip. She had a smoker’s face, rippled by the weather; brown eyes, bright with disdain. She belonged to the house now – whether I wanted her there or not.
‘You and Corwin will be announcing your engagement next,’ I said childishly.
‘Crow!’ She laughed. ‘He’s too pretty, and he’s got all that going on in his head. I like my men simple: the sex, food and football kind. You know where you are with them. And,’ she said, sitting to lace up her boots, ‘they’re easy to replace.’ She pulled on her leather jacket. ‘Don’t worry, Morwenna. I’m not going to steal your precious brother.’
But Corwin cornered me. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said, ‘about all this space. We don’t need it all. It’s too much for the two of us. We could split up the house – Sandra and her mum and kids could rent half of it from us for what they pay for their council house, and the place would be productive. It would be alive again.’
‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘Alive with sex, food and football men and a giant Sky Sports screen.’
‘You’re such a snob, Morwenna!’
‘Yes, I am. So what? That’s my idea of Hell. It’s not happening. And you need to think about what you’re going to do next. When are you going back to work?’
‘When we’ve found Dad!’
I said, ‘I’m giving you until the end of the year. If we haven’t found him by then, we stop this nonsense. I can’t do this for much longer. I’m exhausted.’
‘You think we can just do that? Just set a deadline? And then what? We stop wondering? We get on with our lives? Don’t you see what he’s done, Morwenna? He’s put us in limbo. Disappearance is the worst bereavement. I’ve seen it so many times: there’s no resolution – ever.’
And so we came to the crux of the matter: Corwin and his abstractions. I said, ‘Don’t come over all I’ve-been-to-Africa with me. Finding him doesn’t help anyone – you don’t get to do any saving by it.’
Corwin said, ‘He did this to us deliberately.’
‘No,’ I shouted. ‘You did this to us deliberately. I was perfectly content when Dad was just dead! And what about Mum? She’s remarried, for Christ’s sake – you’ve turned her into a bigamist!’
‘She won’t ever need to know.’
‘I didn’t ever need to know, you selfish fuck! I’ve had enough of this. I’m going home.’
It was Sunday morning. I didn’t say goodbye.
I was grateful for autumn, its shielding dark and thick knits. I didn’t contact Corwin and he didn’t contact me. I made dutiful calls to Mum, and we told each other nothing – she said, ‘I’ve resigned myself, darling!’ Although not, apparently, enough to resist exclaiming: ‘God, Morwenna! Sometimes, surely, you must want something to happen.’
‘No,’ I said truthfully. ‘I really don’t.’ Because I wanted my father to be dead. My father, with his slow grace, could never have done to me what Corwin said he had done.
I felt nauseous most of the time. I was losing weight. I worked on Aesop’s Fables. The crows’ skulls that Corwin had given me hung on the wall above my workbench. I took one and held it between the fingers of my left hand, away from me, at eye level: this tiny fragile miracle of nature’s engineering. I let my right hand begin to make sketches. Dead, I thought. Dead.
I pared the black leather, shaped it, pressed it into the cover, gave the crow a small dark eyeball and attached ragged wings.
Vain, stupid Crow who couldn’t keep his beak shut.
At the end of November there was the designer binding exhibition. The books were put out for display in glass cases in a wood-panelled guildhall. Ana came up to me and laughed. ‘Morwenna, you have no pity! I’ve always felt rather sorry for the crow, myself!’
My book fetched eight hundred pounds. The buyer wasn’t even in the room. Somewhere there was a library where my book would end up, to be looked at by … how many people? A handful of guests glancing over it after dinner? Its owner prising it gently from its slip case: ‘Look at the workmanship. There aren’t many people left who know how to do this.’ Or maybe no one would look at it. It would sit on a shelf in a row of books that had cost more than my annual salary. The book was just paper and leather. It was all vanity. That was why Matthew had never bothered to make more than one painting.
An arm slipped around my shoulders. It was Corwin. He kissed my cheek. ‘What are you doing here? And how did you know where I was?’
He didn’t answer, but handed me a piece of paper. It was a photo, printed on copier paper, of a section of the map. An enlarged image, grainy, but clearly distinguishable: a pile of brown leaves, and protruding from them, the head of an adder, with its muted markings.
When you hear the word ‘adder’ you think: Poor shy endangered creature. It is almost your patriotic duty to love it. But then I said viper. You feel quite different about them. Vipers are viperous – they are untrustworthy, they betray. The V of brown scales was quite distinct on the creature’s head, where it poked out from the twigs and dead leaves. Matthew had painted his son as a snake. He must have felt both things: poor shy vulnerable creature, who doesn’t want to be found. But he would have thought traitor too.
Me – I felt, mainly, traitor. This man, our father, who had cheated us, who had tried to cheat nature, who had cost me my mother, my boyfriend, perhaps my most beloved brother, had cost me perhaps my self – perhaps there had been another, one who, at eighteen, had been about to launch herself into the world. I also felt – Leave him. He made his choice. Let him live with it. But, you see, he had stopped us. Corwin and I were stopped, stuck together. Simply put: It wasn’t fair.
I said to Corwin, ‘OK. I will do this. For you. For us.’ I looked again at the image – there he was, in Matthew’s map; he had been unable to escape. I went cold at the thought, and said, ‘But then we sell the house.’
‘OK,’ said Corwin. He was shining, gently vibrating with vindication. ‘You have a deal.’
‘So where is he?’
Corwin had blown up a section of the Ordnance Survey map. ‘In this section, here. It’s about ten miles inland.’
‘So close,’ I murmured. ‘I almost feel sorry for him. I wonder how Matthew found him.’
‘Maybe they were in touch.’
‘No. Matthew would never have done that to us.’
‘You’re always defending Matthew,’ said Corwin.
There was nothing on the map but a couple of lonely farms, patches of woodland, a warren of tiny roads, which would be lost between high, thick hedgerows.
‘How do we even begin?’
‘We’ll just begin – grid it off like we did with the map. Walk it a bit at a time. Talk to people. We’ll take our time.’
The following evening I went and knocked on Ed’s door. When he opened up and saw me standing there, he winced at my poor taste in arriving unannounced. But he took command of himself and invited me in.
He said, ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again.’
‘I told you I would give you an explanation when I had the chance.’
He twitched with irritation. ‘I feel that the moment for that has passed, don’t you?’
I handed him the bag I was holding. ‘This is for you,’ I said. ‘It’s a present.’
‘Oh,’ he said, looking inside the bag. ‘Thank you. What is it?’
‘It’s an aspidistra,’ I said. ‘They’re ugly plants, but they’re impossible to kill.’
He pulled it out and set it on the table and looked at its unprepossessing dark, leathery leav
es. ‘Is this supposed to mean something to me?’
‘Not really. It doesn’t matter.’
Red Post-it notes were stuck all around the room. They had Chinese characters drawn on them in thick felt-tip pen.
‘Is this for next year? Are you going to go?’
‘Sort of. Yes,’ he said. Then he said, ‘Wen?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m seeing someone else now.’
‘Ah!’ I said. ‘Is she going too?’
‘Yes. In fact, she’s Chinese.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t suit you to be single.’
‘Don’t patronize me!’
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’ I pointed to a Post-it note stuck to a chair. ‘How do you say that?’
‘Are you serious? Is that what you want to talk about?’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Would you like a drink?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re right. The moment has passed. I’m just tidying a few things up.’
33.
So we made a start. On Friday night I took the train down. I didn’t tell Mum I was going. Corwin was in the kitchen, looking through old photos, trying to find one of our father. But we weren’t a photo-taking family, and somehow he had contrived always to be behind the camera, or at the back of a group of people. Corwin had found one of him and Bob in their climbing gear from the 1970s. It was a good clear photo of him, but impossibly young. He could have been anyone.
Corwin had drawn a square mile around where the viper might be – Matthew’s map had abandoned scale, and he had filled that empty landscape with outsize hedgerow plants, so we could begin only with a guess. We were to set off from the north-west corner of Corwin’s square and work across.
We had an early breakfast and drove inland. The sky was closed. It seemed to be raining liquid slate, which settled and massed in darkness on the road, trapped by the hedgerows. We parked the car by a gate into a field, and began to walk. Corwin had scaled up the Ordnance Survey map and marked out our tangled route with a yellow highlighter. We were in a maze of narrow lanes. We waded through the gloom and found ourselves at road signs we had already passed. Every so often the wall of hedge opened into a gate and we had a view of winter fields, the cattle turned in against the rain, huddled together for warmth. We walked down driveways into empty farmyards, trespassed around the edges of fields. Corwin carried the photo of our father in his pocket, but there was no one to show it to.
After six hours of this, relieved only by a sandwich, we returned to our car and went home. My hands and feet were frozen.
Then we did exactly the same thing on Sunday.
And in the evening I went back to London.
During the week Corwin wrote to me. The email had been sent at three in the morning. I had not stopped to think of him alone at Thornton – whenever I saw him there he was in movement: waving his long arms, talking and doing. But now I pictured him sitting, still and silent, in that dark house, bereft of Matthew, quietly sinking into insanity:
I imagine his conversations. He must say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ and talk about the weather and I keep asking myself what he has gained by our eradication. Perhaps he has another family? Although somehow I doubt it. He was so overwhelmed by the one he had already. Until recently I felt as though we were chasing a ghost. But now I feel as though we are ghosts chasing him. We are silenced. We don’t exist.
I watched the sun come up over frost-trees this morning. I wish you could have seen it.
The frost gifted us a weekend of winter-blue skies, filigreed tree branches, ice-crusted puddles. We extended our search outwards by half a mile. Neither of us was getting much sleep and our trudge through the lanes took on a hallucinatory quality, so that when, as it grew dark, we turned into a driveway and came upon a farmhouse flashing with coloured Christmas lights in the shape of a giant Santa sleigh, I truly believed, for a moment, that I had conjured it from my own mind.
What did we think we were looking for? There was nothing rational about our search, although we tried to give it logic with our grids and highlighters. On our third weekend of searching we walked around a tiny village with our father’s photo and enquired at shops, and the people we approached were curious and asked friendly questions. Corwin answered with blithe lies. I hadn’t foreseen this, and it made me feel furtive and sullied. It seemed as though we were cursed to do this for all time. I sat down on a bench in the village car park and refused to move and tried to make myself cry. Corwin stood over me. He was hollow-eyed and pitiless. He was never, ever going to give up.
But Corwin did relent, in as far as he decided that we should treat ourselves to a couple of nights at the only inn for miles around, the White Hart, which was one of those places that you normally drive past and wonder who stops there. The nearest building had a petrol pump outside it that looked as if it hadn’t been in use since the 1960s. The pub was done up for Christmas with shiny fringed Merry Xmas banners over the bar and a flashing Christmas tree in the corner. There were dusty bowls of dried orange and cinnamon in the loos. A fire languished on a pile of ash.
We let them think we were a married couple. The room had a four-poster bed with lacy white polyester hangings and a deep window-seat overlooking the cobbled courtyard in front of the main entrance. We made tea from the plastic kettle with stale tea-bags and UHT milk. I sat in the window-seat and drank my tea and watched the slushy rain turn to water on the cobbles. At around six we went down for dinner. We were the only people in the bar. Corwin ordered vegetarian lasagne and chips. I wasn’t hungry and nibbled stale bread from a basket delivered by an unhappy-looking fourteen-year-old.
‘Don’t despair,’ said Corwin to me, as though the despair was all mine.
A few more people came in. They sat at the bar and chatted with the landlord and each other. They sat spaced widely apart and called to each other in loud voices. It was part of the ritual. ‘We should make some friends,’ said Corwin. ‘They might know something.’ He was cheering up with beer and festive kitsch.
‘I can’t just talk to people!’ I said, horrified.
He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Later. When everyone’s a bit pissed. I’ll make some friends.’
We drank slowly. The fire burned gently. The landlord came over and threw on a couple more logs. On the other side of the pub, someone started to tune a guitar. My whole being constricted briefly – a single pulse of instinct. Corwin and I looked at each other. He turned slowly to the landlord. ‘You have music nights here?’
‘Every Saturday.’
I was overcome with a desire to run away. I said, ‘I need some air,’ and left the bar. Outside in the courtyard the slush was turning to snow. A couple of smokers, shifting to keep warm, pulled on their cigarettes and chatted. I walked to the other end of the pub to peer in through the window at the musicians. I could make out the guitarist, and another man, holding a drum. They looked up to greet someone who had just come in – his body moved across my line of sight. I thought: I might not be able to recognize my father, even if I saw him. I can’t remember him. How would I even know it’s him?
As I stood there, a figure approached, a man, in his sixties, carrying a fiddle case. I thought, This could be him, and stared at him so hard that he looked up through the cold and asked, ‘Are you all right, love?’ And it wasn’t my father.
I went back into the bar and sat down again. ‘Feeling better?’ asked Corwin.
‘No,’ I said.
The musicians began to play a simple slow reel. I said, ‘What are we doing? This is pointless. Hopeless. We have nothing. We don’t know he’s ever been here. We don’t even have a name for him.’
Corwin said nothing. He said nothing because I was right and there was nothing to add. I said, ‘It’s funny, you know. I really hate him now. I always thought of hatred as a hot emotion, but this is very cold … very heavy. I know now why people talk about hearts turning to stone.’
Corw
in leaned forward and placed his hand flat over my heart. He said, ‘It’s not cold in me. Not at all.’
I said, ‘You know that vow you wanted me to make? The one I said I couldn’t … didn’t?’
Corwin’s hand was still on my heart.
I said, ‘Well, I did make it, really.’
‘I know you did.’
‘But I was young. I didn’t understand what it meant.’
‘Neither did I.’
He sat back in his chair. I said, ‘I think I want to go to bed.’
‘One more round,’ said Corwin.
‘OK,’ I said. And I was looking at him and thinking: I must sever myself from you – from your will – or I will be extinguished, when someone started singing. We immediately recognized the song, because it was one that Fuck Off Bob used to sing all the time.
Corwin and I were still looking at each other, but now we were waiting, because we knew that we were on the point of something. We didn’t move, just listening to that voice, that stranger’s voice, singing:
‘A sailor’s life is a merry life.
They rob young girls of their hearts’ delight,
Leaving them behind to sigh and mourn,
They never know when they will return.’
It’s a good tune, and I had always liked it before I started to despise Bob. The singer sang the first verse unaccompanied, and still we were poised, and then a fiddle started and immediately we recognized the playing. Corwin’s eyes blackened in triumph and purpose, and I understood that while I had been looking, not expecting or even wanting to find, Corwin had been hunting.
He scared me then. He whipped up straight and alert. He had our father’s scent. I stood up very slowly and walked the long miles between our table and the bar, putting out my hands to the shiny mahogany for support and lifting onto my toes to look over the length of the bar into the room beyond, and there was my father, and of course I did recognize him. He was exactly as I had last seen him, sitting, playing, swaying. Only he was quite grey now and he was bald with a close-cut ring of hair and a well-trimmed beard and he wore glasses and looked more like Matthew, but it was him. And then I felt Corwin standing behind me, leaning into me, his hands either side of mine gripping the gleaming mahogany, his chin digging into my shoulder. And we watched, until the barman came over and asked us what he could get us, and Corwin asked, ‘Do you know who that is, playing the fiddle?’
The House at the Edge of the World Page 21