Read The House at the Edge of the World for Free Online Page B

onto our stomachs and buried our faces in the pillow
     so that no one could hear us and we shook as we laughed into the pillow because it was
     the end, you see, of allour surrogate sympathies. We were going to
     have to experience pain for ourselves.
    On the edge of our world people searched
     for my father. The coastguard were sending abseilers, we had been told, down the chine
     ‘to have a look’, which I took to mean, ‘for bits of your
     father’s brain’. But that brilliant day turned out to have been the last day
     of summer. In the afternoon the rains came over. If there was anything to find, it had
     been washed away.
    After two days of rain came the sea mist.
     Trapped in our attic, Corwin and I watched it roll up the combe towards us and wrap
     itself around the house. It sat there like the suspension of time. Three days after my
     father’s fall, Matthew called us all together. The police wanted to speak to us.
     They were not hopeful of finding him alive, they said, as though this was not obvious to
     us. Matthew said, in pain, ‘Ah, well. We have lived so long with the sea. The
     tribute is long overdue.’
    Mum let out an incredulous choking
     ‘Christ!’ And Corwin, not meaning to, laughed – but not unkindly, and not at
     anyone in particular.
    Matthew placed his hand over Mum’s and
     said, ‘Valerie dear, it’s time to call off the search.’
    Her hands flew to her head, but he insisted.
     ‘The sea has had him now,’ he said. ‘Believe me, dear. We don’t
     want what’s left over when she’s done with him.’
    I thought of my father in the sea’s
     embrace. He once told me that mermaids mate with drowning men and that he remembered
     seeing a mermaid from the cabin steps. He knew that they didn’t exist, he said,
     and that she could not have been real. But still, he said, the memory was clear. She was
     very dark, and not at all pretty: ‘Sly, she was,’ he said. She scowled at
     him and slid into the water. There she is, on Matthew’s map, sitting on a rock,
     her tail in the water. She is the colour of granite, of mackerel.
    When Matthew said that we
     owed the sea tribute, in the moment between Mum’s choke of despair and
     Corwin’s laugh, I thought: She was jealous. The sea was jealous of our moment of
     inattention, our one act of fire worship, and she took my father in retribution.
    But, of course, I had to remind myself, it
     would probably not have been the water that killed my father. It would have been the
     rock.

5.
    The house was besieged by well-wishers. There
     are few cruelties to compare with the solicitude of concerned neighbours. We hid in the
     house, not daring to go out. Offerings began to appear on our doorstep: chicken pies and
     apple crumbles and Lancashire hot pots, labelled with freezing instructions, as unwanted
     as the little corpses left there over the years by our semi-feral cats – mice, voles,
     the odd disgusting rat, birds (always to my father’s distress) and, once (to
     mine), a rabbit kit.
    Some of the bolder and more curious simply
     opened the front door and strode into our house to tend us. May Rowsell, whose purple
     rinse cunningly disguised her steely meddlesomeness, took to dropping by, coming in
     without knocking and chirruping, ‘Just checking to see how you are, dears!’
     When she talked to Mum her voice took on the same Edwardian music-hall contortions that
     she applied to her appearances in those village entertainments, which were never over
     before she had minced across the stage in a hat and embroidered shawl, swinging a
     birdcage and squeaking out ‘My Old Man’. Corwin and I thought about rescuing
     Mum from her, but didn’t feel up to it.
    We didn’t dare lock the front door, as
     though conscious that this would cause offence. Our bereavement placed upon us the duty
     to receive sympathy. Matthew hid in his study, Corwin and I in our rooms. On the rare
     occasions when I ventured downstairs I encountered yet