The receding tide was showing a patch of sand below where he sat, a good twenty feet above the base of the cliff. He climbed carefully down the cliff face. The sun was coming up. When he came to rest on the soft sand the knees of his jeans were shredded and his fingertips were bleeding. He sat for a few minutes before pushing himself awkwardly onto his hands and knees, and from there to a standing position. And then he saw, as though the sea had affirmed his act, that twenty yards away on the seaweed tide-line lay his fiddle case. The instrument would be ruined, but, out of habit, he picked it up.
Already the freak stillness of that night had passed and there were waves on the outgoing water. The spring tide had peeled so far back that all he had to do was walk along the shining dark sand and make his way carefully over the rocks. Then he walked across Thornton Mouth, leaving a trail of footprints on the rippled surface of the sand, as though he were the only inhabitant of this shore. He walked on, past the cabin where Corwin and I slept, and on and up onto the coast path. He kept on walking in his wet clothes but he removed his shoes and walked barefoot, turning inland, past the cows moving towards the milking sheds, past the tourists sleeping in their caravans, invisible at last.
37.
Corwin was silent as he drove. I talked and he listened. When we got back to Thornton he went down to the cabin for a few hours.
When he came back he said, ‘It’s not enough. How could you sit there and not speak? He should know! He should know what he’s done. What it’s cost us.’
‘There was nothing to say,’ I said. ‘If there was something you wanted to say, you should have stayed.’
‘You can’t just disconnect!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t just stop and turn in on yourself! We’re all connected. We are all responsible for each other or we are nothing.’
‘You should have stayed,’ I said. ‘Then you would realize. He is nothing. He has nothing to do with us.’
‘I want him to pay, somehow. He stole seventeen years from us.’
‘It’s not like you to be so vengeful,’ I said.
‘I went away and stayed away,’ he said, ‘because that was the last thing my father asked of me before he died. To go away until my relationship with my sister “corrected itself”.’
‘You didn’t tell me that bit.’
‘Well, I’m telling you now. It was my father’s dying wish – only he didn’t fucking die. I want him to suffer.’
‘He is suffering,’ I said. ‘We’ve punctured his dream. He can’t dream it any more.’
When I got up the next day, Corwin was gone with the car. I went down to the church to sit there quietly and read the memorial tablets: the novels they contained, the potted tragedies. I thought about my father reading them, and Matthew: the one with its litany of dead sons ending with the extinction of a ‘most antient and respectable family’; the couple who had married there but ‘died in South Africa where they lie in widely separated graves’; the soldier ‘who received a wound at Waterloo’; and the one that warns:
See. See. Spectators, and behold
Whether you’re young or whether old
What you in time must be
For Strength nor Beauty cannot save
Nor wealth protect you from the grave
You shall be dust like me.
I did that because I knew that I was done with Thornton, now. I would be leaving the circle. I went down to the cabin to say goodbye to the sea, stopped at the war memorial on the way back and recited the names out loud. Corwin showed no sign of coming back, so I ordered a taxi to take me to the station. Two evenings later he phoned. He said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve thought it through. I have clarity again.’
I didn’t ask him where he had been.
We sold the house, but without the cabin. We gave the cabin to Sandra so that she could do it up and rent it out to holidaymakers – it seemed apt that she should have it. We donated the contents of Matthew’s study to The Sands Museum and auctioned off everything else, apart from the map, of course, and the curse spirit – we thought we might need his protection. And we bought a nice little terraced house in central London not too far from the bindery, so that Corwin can have somewhere in England to come back to. And I have drawn a circle around myself, but not too tightly. I will permit myself to leave it now and again. I think I might go to Zürich. Perhaps I will visit Corwin in Africa. Perhaps I will even go on my own to Chile. I like the sound of Chile – it is hard to be too far from the sea there. I am reading Neruda, just in case.
But I kept thinking about what Corwin said: that our father should know the cost. I thought, perhaps, he was right. We had let him off too lightly. So I wrote it down. For John Greenaway. So that he might know.
I won’t bind it. I will print it out on unbleached eco-friendly copier paper and tie it up with jute string, and perhaps – but only perhaps – I will go at night and leave it on his doorstep, and then, when he is done with it, or if he does not care to read it, or if, for any reason, he has disappeared from there, it will compost nicely.
Acknowledgements
I owe thanks to readers of early stages of this book for their insight and encouragement: Katie Burns, Leo Klein, Ralph Rochester, Sophie Rochester, Sibylle Sänger, Lydia Slater and, especially, Martin Toseland, who can always be relied upon to re-orient me when my writing goes astray. I am indebted to Kate Rochester, for bringing her book-binding expertise to the manuscript, and to Peter Moffat for drawing my attention to Robert Frost’s poem ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’.
Thanks also to my agent, the unstoppable Karolina Sutton, and to Norah Perkins at Curtis Brown; to my deft and tactful editor, Mary Mount; and to Hazel Orme for her incisive copyedit.
For everything else that matters, I thank Scott and Inês.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2015
Text copyright © Julia Rochester, 2015
Cover art by Mark Hearld
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reproduce lines from ‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep’ and ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, published by Jonathan Cape, reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited
ISBN: 978-0-241-97170-3
The House at the Edge of the World Page 24