The House at the Edge of the World

by Rochester, Julia

  The barman looked over his shoulder and said, ‘That’s John Greenaway.’

  34.

  We stayed at the bar, then, and stood and watched. The shock of his being there was less his being at all, but that it had been so simple, in the end. How easy it was for him to be dead and hide and be only ten miles away from all that had been his everything. That he had turned that everything to nothing, and how few steps he had had to take to do that, and then how few steps we had had to take to find him. All we had had to do was to look. It was an insult, almost. Or a test, maybe, I said to Corwin. In which case, we had failed – or, rather, fallen short.

  Corwin said, ‘Remember that birthday party? Ellen and Alice. Do you remember them? Remember how they always had to have their parties together, and the year that Alice hid under the table to see if anyone would notice that she was missing from her own party? And no one did notice.’

  ‘I remember,’ I said. ‘She never really forgave us.’

  ‘What if …’ said Corwin, discussing this man, our father, some stranger, whom we had thought dead for the last seventeen years, and whom we were now watching, fiddling away contentedly. A sentimental tune – he had always been a touch sentimental, I had forgotten that about him; he felt too deeply, saw mermaids where there were none, communed with vegetables. Corwin and I felt very light in our conjoined soul, a dizzying release of tension – the end of doubt. We found that we were giggling. It was too absurd to take seriously, all our grieving and atrophying for this man who had been simulating all along, and who, despite his musicality, appeared quite, quite ordinary. We drank and watched (the music stopped and our father withdrew his fiddle from beneath his chin and cocked and straightened his head on his neck, a gesture that had always meant ‘And now’ – ‘And now, children, to bed’). The bar had filled up, and the musicians’ corner, framed as it was by the high Victorian bar, seemed illusory: a puppet theatre – you could see the mechanics, the figures didn’t move by themselves, and still you believed in them. That was the magic. The music sank under the rising voices in the bar. To anchor myself back in the world, I looked around. We were among people, nothing more. Why would someone put himself through the inconvenience of being dead simply to end up among people – and, of all people, these people? They wore roomy zip-up fleeces and well-worn hiking boots. Perhaps they knew John Greenaway. Perhaps one or several of these women were or had been his lovers. That one, perhaps, who was in her early fifties, probably, and who had made the effort to dye her hair but hadn’t got around to touching up the roots. Or that one, younger, my age – old men did that, didn’t they, made themselves ridiculous over women as young as their own daughters? That one there with the tattoo on the inside of her wrist, some pagan symbol that signified something of great pagan significance.

  ‘What if,’ said Corwin, ‘actually, he just didn’t care whether we found him or not?’

  We began to calibrate a scale for our father’s betrayal, with wanting to be found and rescued at the top (best case). We argued a little – should not caring whether or not he was found go above or below him simply not wanting us to find him? Corwin felt it was worse: ‘Indifference is always worse.’

  ‘Not always,’ I said. I often felt indifferent. There was nothing personal in it. You couldn’t possibly go through life taking a view on everything; feeling, responding, to everything. It would be exhausting. No one could possibly live like that.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ said Corwin. ‘I live like that.’ He glared in the direction of our father, the fiddle-playing puppet, who gave the illusion of being alive. ‘Or at least,’ he said, ‘I used to.’

  ‘There you go,’ I said, ‘that only proves my point. It wore you out.’

  Corwin gloomed into his beer glass. I said, ‘I suppose we ought to make some attempt not to get drunk and form a plan.’ It was ten thirty. Soon it would be time. They still called last orders in the country.

  ‘I think we should follow him,’ said Corwin. ‘See where he goes. Observe him.’

  ‘We should wrap up warm,’ I said wisely. I was finding myself most amusing. I felt slightly hysterical. ‘I’ll get the coats. You keep an eye on him.’

  Back in the bedroom with the thick pink carpeted bouncy floor and the romantic bed, I realized I was going to vomit and brought up beer-bile into the toilet bowl. It had one of those plastic things in it, which release Mediterranean-blue chemicals when you flush. I had forgotten to eat. There were individually wrapped shortbread biscuits in a bowl on the tea tray. I stuffed them all into my coat pocket.

  The bell rang: ‘Time please, ladies and gentlemen!’ Outside it was snowing with gentle conviction. We sat in our car and watched the pub doors. The man, our father, came out with two other musicians. One of them seemed to offer him a lift, which he declined, and he turned with a wave and began to walk away. Corwin and I got out of the car and began to follow. His shape moved against the snowflakes, which fluttered in the dim street lighting. Over his shoulder was the curve of his fiddle case. Even if he turned he would not be able to recognize us: two figures, like him, made shapeless by the layers of coats and scarves and hats.

  While we were still on the main road we kept about twenty yards behind him, close enough to call out. But we didn’t call out. We hadn’t discussed what we intended to do, but we weren’t ready for words. We were in a wonder of watching, not yet able to take in what we were seeing. When he turned off the main road into the sediment of dark between the hedgerows we held back a bit, sure that the narrow lane would compress our presence, make it felt to him, and when we too turned, he had disappeared and I felt a moment of furious despair that we had lost him, but we sank into the dark after him and as our eyes adjusted we could see in front of us a neat trail of footsteps laid out in the freshly settled snow and, of course, immediately I started to sing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ in my head, and so I followed my dead father’s footsteps in the snow with the tune going round and round and round: La la la la la la laa, la la la la laa laa.

  The footsteps turned abruptly at a stile. We climbed over, and could now make out his shape at the opposite corner of the field – a negative black space in the swirl of white – and still we followed. Over another stile, then another, then up a track overarched with trees, and down the other side, until after about a mile we came to a farmyard and the trail seemed to stop, but Corwin pointed and I could see the footsteps resume beyond a patch of cow-churned mud, and we skirted the farm buildings and I thought: This is it, this is where he has settled. But there was further to go, into the woods, and there were no more footsteps, because these were fir trees and the snow had not penetrated the canopy, but Corwin took my hand and we felt out the path with our feet and eventually we came down out of the wood and into a clearing by a stream where the snow fell, thickly now, onto a tiny stone hut. There was light in the window.

  We watched the snow fall through the dark onto the roof of the hut, then Corwin took my hand, and very slowly we approached and sneaked up to the window to peep in. There were no curtains. There were only two rooms: a kitchen and a tiny bedroom. We watched our father move around his home. It was lit with candles. There was nothing decorative, no pictures on the walls. A table, a couple of cupboards, stacked boxes of fruit, potatoes and onions, shelves of preserves. We watched him peel and chop an onion, fry it in a small pan on his range, crack eggs into the onion, eat the onions and egg piled onto a slice of bread. I thought: He’s pretending. That’s what he’s been doing for the last seventeen years, that’s what he abandoned us to do – make believe.

  After his meal he washed up in a stone sink and went to the door. We tiptoed around to the back of the house and crouched by the woodpile and heard his footsteps go off in the direction of an outhouse, and when he came back we followed him round and looked through his bedroom window. There was a bed and four walls of books – dog-eared paperbacks, mainly. We watched him undress. Naked he looked older, but wiry and muscular under his pale skin. I wondered when he had las
t allowed someone to touch him. He put on some thermal leggings and a sweatshirt and climbed into bed, turned, blew out the flame on his candle.

  We turned and walked back to the pub. I would never have found my way back without Corwin. I had trusted him to do the navigating, had abdicated it to him. The hysteria had subsided. I felt so tired. I wanted to lie down there on the snow and go to sleep.

  Back at the pub, we let ourselves in quietly, taking off our boots at the door and carrying them up the stairs. We lay on the bed on our backs fully clothed under the blankets, staring at the polyester lace and not speaking, until at last I whispered, ‘I still don’t understand why.’ But by then Corwin was asleep.

  I must have slept, too, because then it was light and the room was full of the silence of fresh snowfall. Corwin was awake with his head propped on his hand, watching me, and when I opened my eyes, he smiled and said, ‘Come on, lazybones.’

  I said, ‘Look at you. All triumphant.’ And it was true. He was iridescent.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘It’s not over yet.’

  I still had an ice block where my heart should have been. I felt nothing, except a desire to know why, so strong that it was physical. Why? Why? Why?

  ‘When do we talk to him?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not ready to talk to him,’ said Corwin. ‘I think we should watch him for a bit first.’ It was as though we were discussing how to discipline a child. As though ‘watching him’ was meting out a punishment that would cause our errant father to mend his ways.

  We ate breakfast. I forced down porridge. My gorge rose with each mouthful. It was Christmas Eve and from the kitchen radio we could hear a relentless stream of Christmas hits. Corwin fortified himself with sausages and bacon. His lapses into meat-eating were becoming ever more frequent, as though his anger called on flesh for nourishment. Then we paid our bill.

  In daylight, the walk did not seem nearly so far. Still, it was well off the beaten track. We would never have found him if he hadn’t come to the pub. The cows were emerging from the milking shed when we got to the farm, milling around in the yard, steam rising from their flanks, white into the winter air. We walked around the farm and into the woods and found ourselves an observation post among the fir trees. Smoke rose from the chimney of the hut. A pile of logs was stacked behind the building, almost to the height of the roof. In front was a row of fruit trees, neatly pruned, the snow sliding from the branches in the morning sun. Some golden fruit still hung from a crab apple and drew a chatter of birds. A stream circled the hut and garden so that it looked as if it sat on a tiny island. There it was, our father’s dream of a smallholding, all laid out in miniature in the sunshine, sparkling and clean and white, like a fairytale.

  We walked around the clearing. There was a chicken run, a winter garden with fleece-covered brassicas. Tucked back in the trees well away from the stream was the outhouse. There was even a couple of beehives, but no sign of a goat. Then we returned to our look-out position. I sipped black coffee from a Thermos flask until I felt stretched to the point of snapping.

  After a while our father came out to use his outhouse and feed the chickens and to split a few logs. As we watched, we began to remember things about him: his love of birds – the way he would pause mid-task and fix on a tiny bird in a tree, studying its markings, and would not return to his work until he could name it, pronouncing the name out loud, releasing himself. Through the binoculars we saw his lips move. The logs were slower to split now. We used to watch him, the swinging axe, thud, thud, thud, waiting to be old enough to wield the axe ourselves. We remembered his walk, the set of his shoulders, the way that one eyebrow was slightly higher than the other so that he seemed to be asking an eternal question. He fetched a bucket of water from the stream. He appeared to be quite alone. Treacherous, heartless Rumpelstiltskin, I thought, who parted children from their parents, in his clearing in the woods, alone and content. But we knew his name.

  It was beautiful, though; truly a most beautiful morning. I whispered to Corwin, ‘You know that poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”?’

  Corwin shook his head. I murmured into his ear, as if it were a secret.

  ‘Whose woods these are I think I know.

  His house is in the village, though;

  He will not see me stopping here

  To watch his woods fill up with snow.

  My little horse must think it queer

  To stop without a farmhouse near

  Between the woods and frozen lake

  The darkest evening of the year.

  He gives his harness bells a shake

  To ask if there is some mistake.

  The only other sound’s the sweep

  Of easy wind and downy flake.

  The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

  But I have promises to keep,

  And miles to go before I sleep,

  And miles to go before I sleep.’

  I felt very sorry for myself then, because sleep seemed unattainable; I could not remember what it was to sleep, really sleep, deeply. I craved oblivion. Corwin said, ‘It’s amazing that you have all that in your head and you can’t remember fighting with Sandra over marbles.’

  ‘It’s a very clever rhyme scheme,’ I said, ignoring the mention of Sandra. ‘Deceptively simple.’

  We watched a bit more.

  ‘I see what we’re doing,’ I said, at last.

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘We’re watching him, and he doesn’t know.’

  Corwin smiled; my lovely malevolent brother. I said, ‘It’s a sort of power over him, isn’t it? We have knowledge. We decide when to strike.’

  Corwin smiled again. I loved him very much at that moment, for being so clever after all.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘When do we strike?’

  ‘Let’s get Christmas over with.’

  It was delicious, this waiting. ‘Merry Christmas, Dad,’ I whispered, as we turned to go back through the woods.

  At Thornton the lichgate and gravestones were capped with snow. The Atlantic was quiet and black. I could taste it on the air. By the time I went to bed, the snow was melting. I slept without dreaming and on Christmas morning the snow was all gone.

  We were invited to Mum and Bob’s for Christmas lunch. Mum said, ‘Morwenna, darling! You look lovely! You’ve made an effort! Merry Christmas, darling!’ I had made an effort. I had woken up feeling clear-headed and vengeful and incandescent with knowledge, and I wanted to look my best for this, my last day of orphanhood.

  The oak banister was wrapped with evergreen branches and glass baubles. The table was laid with red and gold. There was goose and honeyed parsnips and spiced cabbage. I said, ‘Thank you, Mum. That was absolutely wonderful.’ And ‘Great choice of wine, Bob.’ And ‘Oh, is that a new painting? When did you get it? It’s lovely, isn’t it?’ And things like that. Mum brought in a flaming Christmas pudding, topped with a holly sprig. Her eyes flitted back and forth between me and Corwin, but she didn’t say anything because it was Christmas Day.

  After lunch, Corwin and Bob went for a walk and Mum and I sat on the sofa and watched Great Expectations. I said, ‘I’m sorry about your wedding, Mum.’

  She said, ‘You’ve already apologized. One apology is enough.’

  I said, ‘But I was only half sorry then. I’m really sorry now.’

  ‘OK, darling. There’s no need to overdo it!’

  ‘I would like to talk to you about Dad properly, though. One day. Soon. Before I go back up to London.’

  ‘OK, darling. But not right now.’

  Later, though, while Corwin and Bob were washing the dishes, Mum poured me a nightcap. She said, ‘Perhaps we should get it over with. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Was he unhappy?’

  I expected her to make some flippant comment, but she thought about it. The red wine swirled in her glass. Eventually she said, ‘I don’t think your father aspired to happiness. He thought it was frivolous to pur
sue it. When Mark compared him to Sir Galahad at the funeral, I remember I felt an icy hand grip my insides! They were terrible those Arthurian Knights. Implacable! Your father was like that – austere and noble. Impossible in a husband. He was so single-minded. He thought that, because he loved me, I would transform into a farmer’s wife. Me, of all people! So totally unsuited to nature. As you know, darling, I’ve never aspired to harmony with nature. I’m perfectly content to be a parasite upon it!’

  She pulled back a little, as though reminding herself to take the question seriously. ‘It’s hard to live with someone who is always disappointed,’ she said. ‘He hated that job, and he blamed me – I think he felt that I’d trapped him in it. Perhaps I should have tried to get a job of my own, but, I don’t know … I’m not sure it would have made any difference. And we should never have stayed in that lonely, spooky house, with Matthew always, always, always there. And the weather! Jesus! I just wanted to be safely back on the London borders where there is no weather.

  ‘But,’ she said earnestly, ‘there was no affair. There was no thought of an affair. It wasn’t a loveless marriage. It was just an unsuccessful one. Your father and I were simply a mismatch. It never occurred to me that it might be possible to do anything about it.’

  We sat in silence for some time. Then I said, ‘It was the view, probably. It fools everyone. You should have seen Ed when he came down. You’d have thought someone had slipped him a drug.’

  Mum laughed. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you’re right. And then I always felt slightly cheated, as if I’d woken from an enchantment to find myself knee-deep in mud.’