The House at the Edge of the World (12 page)

He said, ‘Would you like a
coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

Without his coat he seemed less obsessive.
He hadn’t commented on the fact that I was still in my pyjamas; perhaps he
hadn’t noticed. When it grew dark Ed made a law-abiding fire of smokeless-fuel
briquettes in the grate and lit some candles. The walls of photos transformed into
velvet drapes. It was the start of something: brushing fingers, sighs in and sighs out,
all of that. I found that I didn’t object.

On New Year’s Eve, Ed and I drank
cava with an Indian take-out and liberated ourselves from the cameras by removing the
photos and burning them in a midnight ceremony. Afterwards the room was bigger, blanker.
Tiny bits of BluTack were left studding the wall. It felt a little lonely.

‘What’s next?’ I
asked.

‘I’m going to give up alcohol
for twelve months.’

‘No! Really?’

‘It’s something I’ve
always wanted to do.’

‘It is?’ I couldn’t help
feeling that the timing was poor. He was the first person in my life to eclipse Corwin –
a moon passing in
front of the sun. I wasn’t sure that sobriety
created the right conditions for an experiment in attachment.

I now think of that time as my aspidistra
year, when I was determined to give myself up to a future of traditional domesticity. We
would go to Ed’s parents for Sunday lunches along with his brother, sister,
in-laws and their offspring. They were gracious and drew me into their conversations
while I helped to peel potatoes. Over lunch the parents told amusing stories about when
Ed and his siblings were young, and Ed and his siblings told amusing stories about their
parents’ eccentricities.

One Sunday, to enter into the spirit, I told
the story of my parents’ engagement. ‘Your grandmother,’ Mum would
say, ‘couldn’t wait to marry your father off.’ And my father would
smile at her while she talked. ‘And she knew that he’d rather die than go
into a shop and buy an engagement ring.’ We understood her perfectly – it was
inconceivable that our father should discuss anything as personal as a marriage proposal
with a stranger, a shop assistant. ‘So as soon as she caught whiff of a girlfriend
she foisted this hideous ring on him!’ Our great-grandmother’s emerald ring
would glitter on Mum’s waving hand.

They had taken tea in what was then the rose
garden. And Mum had sipped from a porcelain cup in a haze of rose scent and thought:
Yes. This would be a nice way to live. And after tea my father took her to the cabin to
watch the sun go down. He knew, he said, that the sunset would be more articulate than
he, and he offered it to her as a betrothal gift. Being June, it was a gentle, peachy,
undemanding sunset, very flattering to my mother’s complexion.

And Mum had cried a lot and her mascara had
run. That was our favourite part of the story: our weeping mother. Her generous sobbing
seemed exotic to us, free-spirited. But the story wore out. We learned to feel
embarrassed about our mother’s incontinent tears. And my father came to realize,
after he had dug
them up, that it had been the roses that had moved
her, not the inexorability of the sinking sun.

As we drove back to London, Ed was quiet.
Eventually he said, ‘I don’t know how you managed to turn that story about
your parents into a bad story.’

I said, ‘I don’t know
either.’

‘You’re pretty hard on your
mother!’

‘Well, you’ve never met
her.’

‘Well, I’d like to.’

This was a sore point. I wanted to keep Ed
separate.

‘You never talk about your father.
What was he like?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t
know?’ Ed was upset – I had drawn a shadow down on the afternoon.

‘I was eighteen when he died,’ I
said. ‘Did you know what your father was like when you were eighteen?’

‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘I
think I did. Go on. Give it a go.’

I wanted to say that I didn’t really
know how to describe my father without Corwin there to help me, but I had noticed that
Ed didn’t like Corwin. He was the only person I knew who didn’t like Corwin,
and I assumed that that was simply because he had never met him.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘he was
quiet, but not antisocial – he liked gatherings. He loved the pub. He loved the wall of
smoke as he walked in and he loved the nicotine-stained ceilings and the smell of
beer-soaked nylon carpet. And he loved being able to sit for hours on his own in a
corner if he wanted to and be left alone with his one slow pint. Or he could sit in a
group and say nothing and just smile and stand his round, or play his fiddle.’

I stopped, suddenly realizing that I was
describing my last sight of him. ‘He was very thrifty,’ I said, trying to
redirect my memory. ‘Everything was done sparingly: speech, movement, everything.
He liked to fix things. He made things grow. You didn’t really
notice him until he spoke – when he spoke it meant that he expected something of you,
and you’d be anxious that you wouldn’t be able to meet his expectation. I
don’t know how to describe it. And then he wanted to share his enthusiasms, and
Corwin and I didn’t really care to know the things that he knew. He was always
trying to drag us off to observe a badger’s set or to take an interest in growing
aubergines or something.

‘He was out of his time, I
think,’ I said. ‘He studied architecture, but everyone was building
high-rises. He wanted to design houses with turf roofs that disappeared into the
landscape. He always talked about “simplifying”. Nowadays, he’d be
right with the zeitgeist. As it was, he was stuck in an architect’s office making
technical drawings for shopping centres. He found it soul-destroying.’

I ground to a halt. ‘It’s
pointless trying to describe him,’ I said irritably. ‘It won’t make
sense if you haven’t met Matthew.’

Ed allowed my irritation to subside, and
said, ‘He sounds like someone I would have liked.’

I thought about that. ‘Yes,’ I
said, surprised. ‘I think you and he would have got on well.’ I looked at
his profile. He was a safe driver: eyes on the road, hands at ten to two on the steering
wheel, and now he had my father’s phantom approval. ‘Yes,’ I said
again, in connection with nothing in particular. Something about the conversation called
for the affirmative. Yes, I thought. I can learn this. I can grow into this. I can put
out little shoots and they will thrive on his generosity, on his competence, and that
will be enough. That will be plenty.

But it was London winter, and, try as I
might, I could make nothing grow.

I was still in my flat – Linton must not
have been offered the right price for his building, after all. All colour was leached
from the city apart from in the street below, where the Bangladeshi wedding-shop windows
shone bright light onto sequined red saris and gold-embroidered turbans. I bought myself
armfuls of flower garlands and hung them about my bed, swathes of vermilion and gold and
cinnamon to brighten my mornings.

It was a Sunday and I was sitting at my
window reading. I intuited the pigeon before it hit the window. Some presentiment caused
me to look up as it resolved itself out of the February grey and smashed through the
glass sideways, wings askew. It must have tried to turn at the last moment. The window
shattered at the centre sending cracks out to the corners of the frame and the pigeon
hurtled over my shoulder in a shower of glass fragments. My hand flew up protectively
and a shard sliced across the skin. I grasped it in pain and already the blood welled up
between the fingers of my right hand. The pigeon, panicked, flung itself from wall to
wall shedding feathers and shooting out great streams of green-grey shit all over the
room, then landed in a heap in the middle of the carpet, shook itself out and hopped
about a bit. It didn’t seem to have come to any harm.

I recognized it immediately as a bird of ill
omen. My coffee had spilled all over the table. I looked at the pigeon, harbinger of
what, I didn’t yet know. The feathers around its neck rippled iridescent pinks and
purples and blues. I have always liked the idea of birds: the beauty of flight, the
great mystery of their
navigation systems. But pigeons can’t
escape their verminous associations. It fixed me with a rodent eye.

Shaking, I poured myself a glass of wine and
sat dazed at the kitchen table watching the blood seep through the twenty layers of
kitchen paper that I had wrapped around my hand, until I heard Ed’s key turn in
the door.

I had given Ed a set of keys as a New Year
gift – an act that now seemed to me inexplicably sentimental and which I was regretting.
He had taken it all very literally, and now used the keys without warning. It would not
occur to him to ring the doorbell before invading my privacy. He had also suggested that
we share his New Year resolution for 2005 and both learn Mandarin, with a view to taking
a three-month sabbatical in China, an idea I didn’t like at all. I heard him go
into the living room and mutter, ‘Jesus!’ Then there was some scuffling and
he appeared in the kitchen doorway clutching the pigeon in both hands. He looked at the
mess of bloodied tissue on my hand, and muttered, ‘Jesus!’ again. Then he
said, ‘How about opening the window?’ I fumbled with the window lock,
clumsily slid up the sash with my left hand, and Ed released the pigeon into the iron
sky with a dramatic flourish, as if it were the dove of peace. Then he carefully
scrubbed his hands with soap and hot water before addressing himself to my wound.

‘What the hell happened?’

There was no point in stating the obvious. I
was the only person of Ed’s acquaintance who would lure a pigeon through a pane of
plate glass. I was talking – it was happening quite without volition: ‘You know, I
read something recently about flight. They found some fossil in China or somewhere that
was the missing link between dinosaurs and birds. There have been decades of
disagreement, you see, between scientists who think that flight developed by creatures
leaping from tree to tree and those who think that it developed from running around and
jumping up to catch insects or something.’

Ed found a bandage in a kitchen drawer and
began to clean the
cut. ‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘it
turns out that the running and jumping faction were right – there they are, these
dinosaurs, running around through the bubbling Jurassic forest, jumping away, and, hey
presto, they take off! Imagine the surprise.’

‘Wen,’ said Ed, ‘please
shut up.’

I hated to be called Wen. It made me sound
like an abbreviated Wendy. I said, ‘Poor tree-top leapers. All those decades of
research. All for nothing.’ Ed looked up sharply. He suspected that this was a
snipe against his career as an academic.

I looked at my neatly bandaged hand and
wanted to do something for him. Something tangible – a kiss, perhaps. Some unbuttoning.
But then the phone rang.

It was Mum.

‘Mum!’ I said. ‘To what do
I owe this rare and unexpected pleasure?’

Mum sighed. ‘You really can’t
help yourself, can you?’

My hand had begun to throb.
‘No,’ I said, contrite. ‘I’m sorry. It just slips
out.’

‘Have you spoken to your grandfather
recently?’

‘Yes. A couple of days ago.
Why?’

‘Has he said anything?’

‘Christ, Mum. Stop being so cryptic.
About what?’

‘Well, we dropped in at Thornton over
the weekend.’

‘Ah! The cosiness of that word
“we”.’

‘Oh, just drop it for five minutes.
Matthew’s clearly not well. He’s lost a lot of weight. So I went and had a
chat with Mark Luscombe and he told me that obviously he couldn’t tell me anything
but he did say that we ought to start preparing ourselves.’

‘But …’ I said. I knew the
futility of this ‘but’ and stopped speaking. Then I said,
‘Mark’s discussing Matthew’s health with you?’

‘No. He’s not. But he’s
very fond of your grandfather and he knows that Matthew won’t ask for
help.’

‘He has no right to discuss it with
you. If Matthew doesn’t want us to know, then he should respect that.’

‘Whatever,
darling!’ said Mum. We both knew that Matthew was my problem, not hers.
‘Anyway, how are you?’

‘I
was
fine,’ I said.
‘A pigeon just flew through my window pane.’

‘The strangest things do seem to
happen to you,’ said Mum, clearly, like Ed, thinking that it was somehow my fault.
‘How’s Ed?’

‘He’s fine.’

She sighed. ‘Poor Ed.’ Corwin
had told me that Mum called Ed ‘Morwenna’s Last Chance’. There was a
pause in which she contemplated my lack of accountability. ‘Well. Let me know how
Matthew is. Have you heard from Corwin recently?’

‘Not for a while. Have you?’

‘Oh, you know what a dutiful son he
is. He emails every week and tells me absolutely sweet FA!’

‘Oh, well!’

‘Indeed. Well, bye, darling. Come and
see us – me – soon.’

Ed had found a piece of hardboard that I
didn’t even know I had – perhaps he had brought it to my flat without me noticing
because he thought it might come in useful one day. He was screwing it to the window
frame using the cordless screwdriver that he had given me for Christmas. Buzz. Buzz.
Buzz. I wished he would go. I dialled Thornton. Matthew took a long time to pick up.

He said, ‘Ah! Morwenna.’

I said, ‘I’m thinking of coming
down soon.’

‘Oh, good! Remind me when you get here
that I have something to show you.’

‘What is it?’

‘You’ll see.’

I said, ‘How are you? Is everything
all right down there?’

‘Everything’s fine.’

‘OK, Matthew. Bye. See you
soon.’

I wiped coffee and bird shit off the cover
of my laptop and logged on to my email. In the subject line I wrote: ‘Matthew
dying. Time
to come home.’ I was just about to press
‘Send’ when the phone rang again. I let it ring. Ed said,
‘Aren’t you going to get that?’