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

driveways, hydrangeas, acres of carpet, a lot of rules. Children were not allowed in the
     drawing room.
    ‘Actually,’ Mum said defiantly,
     ‘I’m thinking of signing up for an art-history degree.’
    ‘Oh, God, no! Really?’
    ‘Why,’ asked Mum, icily,
     ‘would you say that?’
    ‘Well, it’s such a cliché,
     isn’t it? Bored, middle-class, middle-aged housewives and all that.’
    ‘Thank you, darling. You’re
     always so tactful!’
    But when we walked around the gallery, I
     could see that sheresponded to the paintings – drew energy from them.
     She sighed as we left. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘I could never persuade
     your father to come to London. He didn’t see the point.’
    ‘I don’t see why that stopped
     you coming.’
    Mum smiled. ‘Well, Morwenna.
     You’re eighteen. You wouldn’t.’
    As I settled into my London life, I thought
     often of Corwin and Matthew, rarely of my mother and almost never of my father and began
     to resign myself to my limited capacity for love. It was sufficient, I told myself, to
     love only two people and not to whore around with my affections. The enthusiastic and
     indiscriminate flirtations of my fellow students appalled me – their profligate
     copulations, all that mascara-streaked post-coital regret. I made … not what I could
     call ‘friends’ yet, but close enough. We met between lectures in the Nelson
     Mandela Bar and drank half-pints of Guinness, and at the weekends we took never-ending
     bus journeys to go to parties in Victorian terraces in parts of town too obscure even to
     be labelled unfashionable. We danced earnestly in flock-wallpapered rooms; the cheap
     lino on the kitchen floors swam with beer. We slept on sofas. It took all of Sunday to
     find the way home.
    To Corwin I wrote of other, more important,
     things. How, on these homing Sundays, I gathered gifts to myself: the circles of gas
     holders against thunder clouds; the profane poetry of a drunk’s rantings; the blue
     of painted angels’ wings. His replies came on flimsy airmail paper. After a while
     I noticed that his letters were full of people and mine were not.
    That first summer, when Corwin came back
     from India, I found him a little less like himself. Or, perhaps, he made me feel less
     like myself: pallid, too sharp in my movements. Or, perhaps, we were each more like our
     own selves. There was an Indian languor still in his limbs, and his skin was very dark.
     With his black hair andeyes he looked as though he had been claimed
     for the south. He shivered in the July sunshine. (It passed. His skin paled and he soon
     speeded up again. But later, when his periods away became much longer than those at
     home, he would find it harder to reset himself.)
    The house was a little shabbier – this was
     how we felt our father’s absence, in the stiff door handles, the swelling of the
     wooden draining-board around the sink, the drip of the bathroom tap. A fox had taken
     advantage of the neglected chicken run, and had made off with the chickens. My father
     had been so quiet that we only noticed now how his constant activity had resounded like
     a bass note through our lives. Thornton was strangely silent without him. ‘I must
     get a man in,’ said Matthew, sadly.
    On the anniversary of our father’s
     death, Mum held a family dinner in the garden. She laid out a white tablecloth and the
     ancestral dinner service, all set off with a vase of flowers freshly picked from the
     garden. We ate summer food – gazpacho and fresh bread, lightly steamed courgettes tossed
     in olive oil and lemon juice with char-grilled chicken, late strawberries. When we had
     finished eating, Matthew brought out the coffee and the porcelain tea cups. He had saved
     the cream from the top of the milk for the occasion.
    Corwin talked. He had discovered his
     vocation. He would move water! All that water, all his childhood, how could he ever have
     imagined, clinging to his hot-water bottle