Free The House at the Edge of the World by Julia Rochester

folded it back together and carefully tied it up.
     ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’d better be going.’
    ‘I’ll go with you as far as the
     footbridge,’ I said.
    We walked down the hill in silence; the
     morning was chilly, blue edged with gold. As we passed the lichgate Oliver asked,
     ‘Do you think this has changed you?’
    ‘Probably,’ I said.
    I remember, now, his look of slight
     disappointment. I ought to have been transfigured by something so momentous. At the
     footbridge we hugged goodbye, and he walked on towards the coast path, his long hair
     shining in the low sun.
    I stopped at the church on the way back up,
     sat and read the memorial tablets for a while, then ambled home. And a week or two later
     we all scattered off to our adulthoods and began to forget each other.

7.
    Corwin left for India. I gave him the copy of
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
. I re-read it recently and, of course, it is a
     completely different story from the one I remembered. In the sixth form we read it as a
     noble battle against the Money God. Gordon Comstock was our hero. I had forgotten that
     he fails to escape the conventional course of job, wife, child, and aspidistra on the
     occasional table.
    I went to London. Nowadays, it is all shiny,
     with pale pressure-washed pavements and
al fresco
foamy coffee. We have stopped
     worrying about Mutually Assured Destruction and the demise of the trade unions and we
     worship the Money God without shame. But the London that I found when I first arrived
     was depression grey with tired, smoke-filled buses. Coffee was instant, the pavements
     lined with
al fresco
sleepers, young, male, northern or Scottish. There were no
     Poles, Bulgarians, Estonians or Russians. They were all corralled behind the Iron
     Curtain, which at the time seemed unfair on them, but also to keep them safe, at least,
     from Margaret Thatcher and The-Americans. There were three student tribes: the Political
     (donkey jackets, Dr Martens boots), the Apolitical (vintage pillbox hats, mohair batwing
     jumpers) and the Tories (stripes and pearls, rugby shirts). Safely beyond the range of
     Corwin’s social conscience, my sense of outrage at injustice, both national and
     global, dissipated. It was sad, it really was, for all those lost young men along the
     Strand and under Waterloo Bridge, but it had ever been thus (I took comfort from the
     phrase – it lent a certain historical distance to the problem). I took to rooting around
     Oxfam shops and wearing diamanté brooches and clicked on uncomfortable sixties stiletto
     heels pastthe buckets rattled at the university gate on behalf of
     The-Palestinians and The-Sandinistas.
    Already by the Christmas break of my first
     year, Thornton seemed improbable. I was far more comfortable alone among the shoals of
     solitudes slipping through London than I had been intimately sharing the cavernous
     loneliness of the coast. I began to think of Thornton as a caricature of itself, one
     populated by the creatures that inhabited Matthew’s map.
    Mum suggested that we spend the Christmas
     holidays in London. ‘It will just be too grim in Thornton, darling! I’m
     going slightly mad – I actually miss your father pottering about in his vegetable patch!
     And Matthew and I have nothing to say to each other so we have to be meticulously polite
     all the time, which is utterly exhausting! Let’s go out. I’ll take you
     shopping.’
    I was glad. I had been dreading Christmas.
     Matthew wouldn’t come up, of course, so Mum stayed in a hotel and we met up on the
     steps of the National Gallery. ‘Darling, you lucky thing!’ she said, over
     tea. ‘I used to love coming here. My parents used to bring me – as you know, they
     didn’t have an imaginative bone in their bodies, but they had the idea that young
     ladies should look at art.’
    My maternal grandparents had been old
     parents, and my memory of them was fragmented. I remembered houses side by side, sloped