35.
It was time. I was ready.
I counted the church bells throughout the night until, at four, dazed by insomnia, I went downstairs and sat in the dark in the kitchen. Soon, Corwin followed. We found that we were talking in hushed voices, as though we didn’t want to wake our sleeping rage.
It was still dark when we left Thornton, and dawn was breaking as we parked the car and set off down the lane. At the farmyard, the cows lumbered towards us and, suddenly, we walked right into him, driving them towards the milking sheds. He wished us good morning, surprised, perhaps, to see walkers out so early, but he didn’t see us for who we were under our winter wrappings. He was treading slowly, like the cows, a familiar path that allowed no margin for the unexpected.
When we reached the woods we stopped. My heart was thudding. He had spoken to us. We had heard his voice. I looked at Corwin. He was shaken and turned to lean against a tree, pressing his forehead into the bark.
At our father’s hut I sat on the doorstep, listening to the stream, the waking birds, the chickens gently clucking. Corwin was pacing, bracing himself. All at once he stopped. ‘I can’t do it!’ he said. ‘You have to do it on your own.’
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Calm down. We agreed.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it.’ He began again to stride up and down. ‘I feel …’ He looked at me imploringly. ‘I feel … Shit! I think I might harm him. I just want to kill him. I just want to fucking kill him. And I think I might. I think I might.’
‘Coward!’ I said. ‘Fuck off back to the car, then. I’ll meet you there.’
I watched him disappear into the woods and sat back down. I was surprised to find that, as my anger with Corwin subsided, I began to feel very peaceful, very patient. I was apprehensive, obviously, but suffused with a sense of expectancy that gave the morning a pleasant glow. I must have sat for a couple of hours, because a weak light was coming through the top branches of the fruit trees by the time I saw him come out of the woods. He saw me sitting there, and walked towards me with his questioning eyebrows, and still I sat and looked at him. And then I saw, in his eyes, the quizzical look of half-recognition, then the full glimmer of understanding, but I didn’t say anything. And he walked right past me, where I sat, and went into his house and shut the door.
So I waited.
After about ten minutes, the door opened again. My father said, ‘I’m sorry. Please come in.’
I followed him into the house. He said, ‘Please. Take a seat.’
I sat down. He sat opposite me and laid his hands on the table. He still takes care of his hands, I thought. And remembered him carefully washing and creaming them after manual work, ‘So that I can play,’ he once explained.
Still I waited, while he looked at me. He is searching my face, I thought. But I won’t let him find anything.
He took a deep breath, and said, ‘You will have to excuse me. I have lost the habit of speech.’
I waited. I thought: Let him speak. I, too, can be implacable. I am magnificent in my hatred of him. I am Boudicca in her chariot. There are knives on my wheels.
Outside, the winter solstice had passed and there was the kernel of the idea of spring. From where I sat I looked out onto a plum tree, perfectly centred in the window. This is what he does, I thought. He sits here and can sense the bud forming in the bark. He watches this tree all year. And then the next year. It is sufficient for him.
‘How did you find me?’ he said at last.
‘The map.’
He nodded – of course, the map.
‘Matthew painted you as a viper,’ I said.
He nodded again. Then asked, heavily, carefully, ‘How is Matthew?’
‘Dead,’ I said. I admit to enjoying that, inflicting pain. I enjoyed my father’s flinch.
‘How did he know?’ I asked.
The question took some time to penetrate his grief. He was crying, silently, for the death of his father. He drew back on his pain, forced a voice: ‘I sent him a grid reference.’
‘When?’
‘Not long after …’
He was looking for a word, a name for the point between Before and After, but there was only one point – the point: there was no need to name it.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why did you want him to know?’
‘For the map,’ he said. ‘I thought that he would know and that he would need it for the map.’
‘That’s not good enough,’ I said pleasantly.
He tried again. ‘I thought,’ he said slowly, ‘that he would know, and that he would think it was his fault. We had been a little … estranged for a couple of years, and I thought he would understand that I had settled. That it was all right.’
‘That it was all right?’ I repeated. ‘Interesting choice of words! Did he ever seek you out?’
‘No. I just sent him the grid reference. No words. Nothing else.’ An appeal formed on his face. He was about to express it. I held up my hand to stop him.
‘Once or twice,’ he said, ‘I thought, perhaps, that there was someone watching me. I thought, perhaps, that Matthew was there. But it was just a feeling. Nothing more.’
The tears dripped off the end of his nose – for his father. Not for me. I had never seen him cry – almost, that time, when Matthew sold the land. But he had stopped himself then. Now, apparently, he allowed himself everything. He wiped his face and said, ‘Where’s Corwin? Was that him and you I passed at the farm?’
I said, ‘What should I call you? I can’t call you “Dad”.’
‘John,’ he said. ‘My name is still John.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Well, I shall call you John. Well, John, I think I would like a cup of tea.’
He looked at me then, as though remembering something he disliked about me – my tendency to flippancy, perhaps. But I wanted a cup of tea, and I wanted to watch him, see what he was made of, what held him up.
‘Of course,’ he said, and stood up and went to the large jug in which he stored water. I thought: Every morning he draws water and he says to himself, I am drawing water from my stream. In the haze of his memory is the action of turning on a tap with its effluence of chemically altered water and this act of taking water from the stream is akin to a morning prayer of thanks. He poured into his kettle the amount of water required for a cup of tea and a top-up each. This, I thought, is the same about him, the way he measures water into the kettle. He placed the kettle on the range and we waited for it to boil.
‘I’m surprised,’ I said, ‘that you permit yourself tea.’
‘Some things,’ he said, ‘I can’t produce myself. I have to work. I help out with the cows. It’s impossible to do completely without money. There are rates. I can’t risk the attention of not paying them. I buy oil, flour, tea. I found that I was unable do without tea.’
I left that sentence to float about the room with all the things – the people – that he had found himself able to do without.
He took the pot to the kettle and warmed it and counted out three teaspoons of the precious tea for which he had milked however many cows at dawn. Pedant! I thought. Fuck you! That is your legacy to us? Your pedantry? The parsing of tea leaves?
It was pleasant, though, this slow life – I was prepared to grant him that. I drank his tea without asking if he allowed himself sugar. I assumed that he didn’t.
‘So this was it,’ I said. ‘Your dream? You just stepped off the world?’
He said, ‘Will you tell me about Corwin? About your mother?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re dead. The dead don’t ask questions. What happens is that the living send out soundings, and echoes come back from the Other Side.’
‘I had forgotten,’ he said, ‘your cynicism. Your inability to value anything that can’t be expressed in a pithy sentence.’
‘And now,’ I said, ‘you remember! Do ghosts remember? Or are they simply trapped memories? Am I this way because you remember me like this, over and over again
? No, John! Don’t answer. I’m not looking for your opinions. I have a set of questions. I will ask them. You will answer. And then I will go.’
And this, I thought, is different about him: he has forgotten how to smile – it is too arduous, this being dead, even if he believes that he has corrected himself. And despite his care of them, his hands are coarser, the knuckles beginning to swell. And he has the skin of a peasant, which perhaps is his secret vanity.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Ask.’
‘I’ll tell you this,’ I said. ‘But only because I want you to know it: these are our questions, mine and Corwin’s.’
He nodded.
‘The first question is: how?’
He looked surprised that this was my first question – the technicalities rather than the emotions. He had to think. Then he said, ‘I had often thought about it. Since childhood. Whether or not it could be done. I was pretty sure that it could.’
He stopped. It was a lot of speech. He wasn’t sure that he had the stamina to continue. ‘May I ask you one question?’ he said.
‘You may,’ I said. ‘But I may not answer it.’
‘How did you know to look for me?’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is a long story. And we don’t have time for it. But,’ I relented, ‘in a nutshell: John Greenaway.’
He looked relieved then. He said, ‘So you know.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t. You have to tell me.’
He closed his eyes – his stern grey eyes that admitted of no colour other than grey, so that life was always in earnest. It was a relief to see him blind and not to have to return his gaze. He said: ‘I hadn’t planned it. I had always wondered about that jump, whether it could be done, or whether John Greenaway was simply a great romancer. And then there I was, standing on the edge of the overhang, looking down. It was such a calm tide. I had never seen a tide like it, a mirror tide. It seemed like an invitation. I had fifty pounds in my pocket – I can’t remember why. I remember thinking: That will do.’
He opened his eyes. ‘I did think about my children,’ he said, as though I wasn’t one of them. ‘Yes, I did. I thought about how they had outgrown me and that that was only natural. And I thought about my wife. I thought: I can free her. She might stop being so sad. It was such a waste, her sadness. She wasn’t built for it. I thought about Matthew, of course. I worried about him.’
I said, ‘Gosh! You’ve been rehearsing that, haven’t you?’
He looked grey, spent. I allowed him some recovery time.
‘You didn’t go very far,’ I said. ‘It’s almost insulting – just popping around the corner to buy a hut!’
‘When my mother knew that she was dying, she gave me some money. Just for me. It was our secret. By then it was obvious that your mother and I were … incompatible – that I would never persuade her to share in my dreams. And I put the money away, in an account. No one knew about it. Not even Matthew. I thought, When I have my land I’ll use it as seed money.
‘And then, when Matthew sold the land, I took out the money and closed the account and bought this. For me. My sanctuary. I bought it in cash, from an old farmer, without a lawyer. My old name is on the deeds. Then the old farmer died, no one knew me here, no one knew I had the land. I just started calling myself John Greenaway.’
‘So you did plan it?’
‘No. I don’t think so. I just wanted somewhere for me. Somewhere safe. And I used to come here regularly to renovate the hut, clear the garden. I planted the fruit trees.’
‘So you’ve been here all the time?’
He nodded.
‘And you’ve never bumped into anyone who knew you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I limit my movements. And people are like rats. They move along runs. None of the people I knew come out here. Their runs don’t extend out into these lanes.’
I laughed. ‘So you never even left Matthew’s circle. You went to all that trouble simply to come here! Why?’
‘He sold the land!’
It was the closest I had ever heard him come to shouting. He composed himself. ‘I begged him not to. After that, there was nothing left for me. I wasn’t interested in the house – all that stuff. Things and more things. I don’t know how it happened, but Valerie and I were in different camps: my wife and her radio and her television, the constant stream of banalities. And it has only got worse. I see how it has become. People walking along, talking into the air, like morons. Everyone has quite forgotten how to look about. No one sees anything. I was absolutely right to take refuge.’
‘But you can’t do completely without people. We saw you playing in the White Hart.’
‘I can’t do completely without music.’
‘So,’ I said, after a while. ‘You despised your wife. You thought your children were in an incestuous relationship. Your father wouldn’t give you your perfect fifteen acres, so you jumped off a cliff. You didn’t think, for example, that divorce might be a less drastic option?’
‘Stop! Please. Stop.’
I stopped.
‘What did you think,’ I asked finally, ‘you were doing?’
‘I didn’t plan it,’ he said pleadingly. ‘I just jumped, and then I thought, I could have some peace. I just wanted some peace. I thought we could all have some peace. Divorce – it’s so messy. People are so messy.’
‘What? You think you didn’t leave a mess?’ I was incredulous now. It mitigated my rage, my disgust.
He rallied, straightened up, said, ‘I thought – I still think – that grief is better than slow, torturous alienation between people who have loved each other.’
I was stunned by the neatness of his self-exoneration. Corwin was right – he hadn’t faked his own death, he had faked ours. I wanted, for a heartbeat, to scream this into his face, but I stopped myself. He should have nothing from us – not our thoughts, not even our anger.
I said, ‘You haven’t used my name since I arrived. Say it. You gave it to me.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘That was your mother’s idea. She was over-compensating for not being local. She wanted you to have West Country names. Matthew explained to her that it would be false to give you Cornish names. You can imagine. That absolutely set her mind in opposition. I wanted to call you Anne, after my mother, and Corwin, James, after my grandfather. Those are real names.’
I was glad of this note of bitterness. It allowed me to leave.
‘You never got a goat,’ I said, standing. ‘You always wanted a goat.’
‘I had one for a while,’ he said, taking my question seriously. ‘But they are unruly animals. It kept chewing everything.’
He had no sense of humour, I realized. I wondered if he had ever had one. ‘One last question,’ I said. He looked up at me and nodded. ‘Did you see the Devil in the water?’
He had to think about this. Then he said, ‘I didn’t see him, but I met him there.’
‘I’m going now,’ I said. ‘You won’t see me again.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’
He didn’t stand to see me out.
I had been there a long time for so few words. The sun had moved above the hut. I left the man who once, seventeen years before, had been my father, but who had not been since then. I felt nothing for the person sitting in the hut.
Corwin was waiting in the car. I got in. ‘You drive,’ I said. ‘And I’ll tell you on the way home.’
36.
The imaginary falling man picked up his fiddle and stretched out his arms. He laughed and tipped himself forward into the air. He hadn’t planned to jump. Simply, he found himself standing there on the edge of the overhang, looking down onto the bowl of water and the sea was calling to him. Bob was sinking to a sitting position, about to pass out. John had seen him do that many times before. Once out, he would be out for a while.
John Greenaway had survived it – if he was to be believed. And he had not known, as John Venton did, that this was a tube, a hollow – there were no
rocks directly beneath – and that on a spring tide, such as this one, the water was deep and descended to sand. John knew this because he knew every last fold in the rock on that stretch of coastline.
He might still die, of course. But anyone might die. It would not be such a bad thing. And he might live, and that would be most interesting. Then he could decide. He could continue to be John Venton, or he might be a ghost, move invisibly through the world. Nothing would attach to him. He would be free to look, to think, and not to speak. What a boon that would be – to shed the weight of language.
Bob was lying on his back, laughing at the moon. It was important to lean forward, as the fall would rotate him backwards. John Venton pushed off the edge.
He felt nothing as he fell, and thought that this might already be death. They say that a person is killed by the fall itself. Perhaps he and his body had already parted, which would be a surprise, because he did not believe in a life separate from the body. The fiddle fell from his hand. Some instinct told him to straighten out, and he sent that message to his body, which, indeed, responded and he fixed his arms to his sides and pushed out his legs and entered the water feet first. For a moment he was suspended, he was under and in and of the sea. He put his head back and looked at the moon through the water, broken into a million silver fragments by his impact on the surface. And then his body began to rise and as he reached the air a pain in his ribs told him that he still inhabited his body. He swam back towards the cliff face, where he would be obscured by the overhang. This was instinctive, he did not think about it in those terms at the time. There he felt about for a hold – despite the calm of the tide, the sea was buffeting him against the shards of rock, and for the first time he felt panic. It was not so easy to die, after all. Not a slow death by abrasion. But the panic came to his aid. He found a foothold under the water, and a sort of seat where he might perch and wrap his arm around a rock and wait for the tide to go out. He clung there, and experienced something like sleep. In his dream he was found and returned home, and self-pity welled up from his navel like bile and burned his throat. Then he started awake.
The House at the Edge of the World Page 23