The House at the Edge of the World (15 page)

Corwin could not relax. He would disappear
before I woke and return at nightfall. Once or twice I went down to the cabin expecting
to find him there, but the cabin was empty. He would not talk about Africa, except to
say that he had no intention of going back for the time being. He said he had come back
slowly, covering as much of the journey as possible overland. He had not wanted simply
to fall asleep in an aeroplane and wake up at Heathrow. He had needed to put enough
hours and miles into the journey to place distance between There and Here.

Then one night, about a week after he had
returned, and after Matthew had gone to bed, he asked, ‘Did you ever read that
last book you sent me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s
just something I found on the shelf. I liked the engravings.’

‘You should read it.’

‘I never read them,’ I said.

He seemed to change the subject. ‘Did
you ever see that movie,
The Gods Must Be Crazy
?’

‘No. I don’t think
so.’

‘The one where an empty Coca-Cola
bottle falls out of the sky and it lands on a Bushman’s head?’

‘No.’

‘So, someone throws an empty Coke
bottle out of a plane and the tribe thinks it’s a gift from the gods because
it’s such a useful tool. It’s great for mashing yam and breaking nuts and
stretching hide but there’s only one, so pretty soon they’re fighting over
it and on the verge of killing each other with the thing. So they hold a council and
send one of the Bushmen on a journey to the
end of the world to return
the bottle to the gods, because it has brought
strife
where before there was
harmony
. I laughed like a drain the first time I saw it. But then I watched
it again, a few years later, and that time it just didn’t seem that funny any more
because it was such a neat metaphor for the central contradiction of my career, which is
that something that appears helpful often just makes things worse.’

I contemplated my brother, his restlessness,
his irritability. I didn’t believe in talking about things. I believed that
talking about things only inflated problems, but just in case it was something I ought
to do, I ventured, ‘Did something happen, Corwin?’

He ignored the question. ‘It’s
like time travel – you might go back in time and interfere in order to avert a tragedy,
but how can you possibly know what your interference might unleash? Dozens of bad films
have been based on that premise. Anyway, the answer is, you can’t. You can’t
know.’

I said, ‘I wish you’d shave off
that beard. I don’t recognize you with it.’

‘Are you listening?’

‘You’re speaking in parables.
You know how much that pisses me off.’

He pretended that I had said something else.
‘Let me tell you about my first Coca-Cola-bottle experience.’

At the heart of the house the central
heating clanked off with a shudder; it was as if I could see the heat beginning to seep
out through the cracks around the window frames and to see the sucking cold pull in
under the door of the living room from the stone hall floor.

‘It was in Mozambique,’ he
continued. ‘I was living in this village in the hills. These hills were like
nothing you see here – imagine vast termite mounds, and as red as termite mounds, and
orange dust everywhere, and the sun going down as orange as the dust.’

I said, ‘I’ve never seen a
termite mound.’

‘Of course,’
he said, his voice getting harder, ‘I was deeply in love with the country and had
made valiant efforts to absorb the lore and dialect of the district. I had learned how
to wash my underpants, clean my body and brush my teeth using only a single cup of water
and I had been made aware of the explosive radii of various types of
landmine.’

I said, ‘You’ve told me that
before, at least five times, your single-cup-of-water story. I bet it’s one of
your pick-up lines.’

‘I shared a house with this German
girl called Inge, who had the most beautiful feet. We slept together whenever we’d
had too much to drink. There was no electricity and we were a long way from town and
there was very little to do in the evenings. Inge, like me, was enchanted to be in a
place where, only about a year before, the population had been at each other’s
throats, murdering, raping, and dragging each other’s children off to be soldiers.
All that sublimated violence in the air made for great sex. Some nights, when the rains
came, we would sit on the veranda and listen to the thunder and watch the lightning play
around the hills. We’d be totally transported, as if we were watching a firework
display.

‘Anyway,’ he said – fixing the
word, like a threat, ‘I was there to dig a well – or, rather, to supervise the men
of the village in building the well, and to teach them how to maintain it. The women of
the village were having to walk about eight miles to the nearest source of water,
carrying babies and pots. There was this one woman who limped along on a badly fitting
prosthetic leg, and there was another who was so ancient and so thin and so folded over
that her shoulder-blades rose out of her back like wings. They liked me, because it had
been explained to them that I was about to improve their lives for them, and because I
was something exotic. People used to reach out to touch me to see what my white skin
felt like. Sometimes, in the morning, when they walked past my veranda they sang and
clapped out a rhythm and my heart swelled, because I wanted them to love me, each and
every one of them, especially the girl who had lost her leg.

‘So we built them
their well. And do you know what happened? No? Haven’t I told you
this
story before? Well, what happened was, they stopped singing as they passed my veranda.
Instead, whenever I came near they made that sound, which is the most efficient and
devastating expression of contempt on the whole planet: the sound of sucked teeth. Inge
and I used to try to imitate it, but we could never get it right. It’s a kind of
inverse snake hiss, and only the centre of the lips may move. And then you have to get
the head movement, a sharp but subtle bird-like jerk away from the object of your
disdain.

‘You see, it turned out, after
I’d been to a couple more outlying villages and dug a couple more wells, that,
while it had seemed a good idea at the time not to have to spend five or six hours a day
fetching water, the women had discovered that they had liked being away from the men. I
had lost them their hours of freedom and they blamed me for interfering.’

‘Are you going to tell me what all
this is about?’ I asked. ‘Why are you back?’

‘She went south – Inge,’ he
said. ‘Married a Dutch peacekeeper.’

He stopped abruptly, and composed himself.
‘All of which,’ he said, looking at me kindly, ‘is a rather
long-winded way of saying that it is extremely difficult to know if and when to
intervene in the course of things and it is not something that I take lightly. I am a
cautious time traveller.’

‘You’ve lost me,’ I said.
‘I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’

‘Two things happened,’ he said.
‘And I don’t know which happened first or if, perhaps, they’re
interdependent. But the first is what I’ve told you already, although you thought
I was being flippant. I lost my compassion. It is the greatest loss I’ve ever
experienced – my whole life, you see, I’ve had a tenderness for my fellow human.
It was what I had instead of faith – my belief in human dignity, in the value of doing
what you can to shore up
the dignity of others. And then that sense
just disappeared. The noise, the fucking noise, you can’t imagine, those refugee
camps – radios and dogs and chickens and screaming children and constant arguing and
bickering. I began to feel this deep, corrosive contempt. It was like a virus. It
completely took me over. For years you think of the children as beautiful and exuberant
and vulnerable, and then suddenly you see them as voracious parasites who would kill you
for a packet of paracetamol.’

Corwin stopped again. ‘It’s
getting cold,’ he said, and stood up to get some more logs. While he was out of
the room I moved closer to the hearth and fiddled with the dying embers. I desperately
wanted to go to bed but that would have been unforgivable. He came back and stoked up
the fire into a flaming roar.

‘You’re very quiet.’

‘You’re very talkative. You
sound like you could do with a proper break.’

‘Well, like I said, I got
homesick.’

‘What was the second thing?’

‘Ah, yes, the second thing. That
concerns us both. You see, this idea lodged in my head, and I couldn’t shake it
free. I need to test it on you.’

‘On me?’

‘Yes. I want you to think about what
it would mean if Dad’s fall wasn’t an accident.’

This came at a complete tangent. ‘What
do you mean?’

‘We never questioned what
happened,’ said Corwin. ‘And then one day I did – the question was there.
What if it wasn’t an accident? What if there was
deliberation
?’

‘Why are you saying this? What are you
saying, exactly?’

‘I just need you to give it some
thought – I don’t want to influence you. But I need to know from you, if it
wasn’t an accident, what was it?’

‘You’re not making sense,’
I said. ‘Nothing you’re saying makes sense to me. Dad was pissed.’

Corwin said,
‘Please, Morwenna. Just think about it. Did we miss something?’

I stood up. ‘I’m going back to
London. It’s time I got back to work. I’m going to lose my job and my
boyfriend if I carry on like this.’

‘He knew every square millimetre of
that coast path!’ Corwin said quietly. ‘He could have danced home backwards
with a bottle of vodka inside him and not fallen off!’

‘This is your mid-life crisis.
I’m not sharing it with you.’

Corwin said nothing more. He was
allowing his words to settle
. I left him sitting on the floor beside the
fire. I packed my bag, then made myself a coffee, wrote my excuses in a note for
Matthew, which I placed on the kitchen table, and left the house.

Outside I caught my breath. I had forgotten
the moon. The combe was glowing, as though revealing its soul – the daguerreotype plate
of itself. The sharp shadows cut into the fields, like deep, dark secrets. It was as
though the moon were not casting the light but drawing it from the sea. And it was then
that I asked myself for the first time: Did, on such a night, my father deliberately
step off the cliff at Brock Tor? The doubt was seeded. I climbed into Ed’s car and
lanced the moon’s enchantment with the slam of the door and the yellow of the high
beams and drove back to London. I could not have slept now even if I had wanted to.

In London the moon was lost in the
streetlight glow. I parked Ed’s car on his street and posted the key through his
letterbox. At home all trace of pigeon was gone, and when I went into the living room, I
saw that Ed had had my window re-glazed.

At the bindery no one, not even Ana,
commented on my two weeks’ absence. I experienced a delirium of love towards
everyone there, even though there was an atmosphere of disapproval and no one was
commenting on my absence because no one was really speaking to me. This was the only
safe place left. I worked through my lunch break and long after everyone else had gone.
I thought quite seriously of simply lying down on the floor and sleeping there, but was
able to laugh off the thought and cycled home late, stopping off at the corner shop for
soup and sliced bread. And that was how I spent my week. I unplugged the landline, kept
my mobile switched off and ignored my computer. But on the Friday, as we all drifted off
for our weekends, a fear set in. This was a feeling I had never experienced before –
anxiety, yes, and jolts of adrenalin, but not this. This sat like extreme cold in my
pelvis, which ached with it. I couldn’t shake the idea that somehow Corwin had
become dangerous to me.

With the fear came an animal furtiveness and
alertness. I noticed smells I had not noticed before – the Friday-night stench of
end-of-week cigarettes, exhaled Pinot Grigio, and happy-hour perfumes sprayed on in
workplace washrooms. The girls looked unsafe on their enormous heels. I felt acutely
concerned for them. How would they run if they needed to?

As I manoeuvred my bike into the hall, I
noticed that there was light on the stairs. It would be Ed. Fair enough, I thought – and
so tactful of him to wait until the weekend. I hoped he would forgive me, and I noticed
that I hoped and, at the same time, assumed that he would.

He was sitting at the
kitchen table, as though it would be inappropriately informal to wait for me on the
sofa. I poured us each a glass of wine and sat opposite him.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Are you
going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘I don’t think I can,’ I
said. ‘I don’t really know what’s going on.’

He drank his wine and waited for me to come
up with something better than that.

‘I’m very cold,’ I said.
‘I’m going to have a bath. You can come and talk to me if you
like.’

I ran the water and lit candles and lay
there drinking my wine. Eventually Ed came in and sat on the edge of the tub.

‘You seem upset,’ he
conceded.

‘Yes.’

‘Corwin?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s wrong with
him?’

‘He’s brooding over my father.
But I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘You and he have a very strange
relationship.’

‘Possibly,’ I said. ‘But I
have no point of comparison. We just
are
. There has never seemed to be an
alternative.’

The blind at the bathroom window glowed a
weary orange from the streetlamp below. I wondered what Ed required of me for normality
to resume. To offer an explanation of Corwin? To denounce him? Strange, how that word
popped into my head: ‘denounce’. What for? Ed was strangely colourless –
like a moth. I wondered if it was deliberate camouflage, so that the CCTV cameras would
not pick him up.