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

detail of our arrangements, although I noticed, with each visit, that something we had
     packed away had found its way into his study, thingsthat must have had
     sentimental value – a decanter that had once sat on a shelf in the living room, a
     picture that had once hung in the hall, a porcelain figurine of a shepherdess, which
     must have belonged to our grandmother.
    We began importing new acquaintances for
     weekends in the country and made them drink strong cider and laughed at their
     inappropriate footwear as we dragged them up and down the coast in all weathers. In the
     mornings we took coffee and chocolate with Matthew. Sometimes we visited Mum, Corwin
     more often than I. She was always smiling and made us take off our shoes in the
     hall.
    But this little game of domesticity
     didn’t last because Corwin had the addict’s craving for pure experience.
     Immediately after he graduated, and without ceremony, so that at first I didn’t
     grasp the magnitude of his defection, he banished himself to the rainless, warring
     places where he moved through seas of confused, displaced human beings, digging and
     piping and irrigating. And the number of such places was infinite. He spun off so far
     into the unknown that I assumed he would eventually rewind in my direction. But then he
     had been gone for a year or two, and soon five, and, before long, ten. Of course, every
     so often he returned laden with gifts and he spoke as Corwin always had done and cracked
     the same jokes at which Matthew and I laughed overmuch and gratefully.
    My bedroom at Thornton filled with objects
     that spoke nothing to me of my brother, the family peacemaker. Red and gold Afghan rugs
     patterned with tanks and Kalashnikovs; unlovely fertility figures with swollen bellies
     and knife-hacked genitals; strings of enormous crude beads of crackled blue and coral
     red and embossed silver. They intruded so violently upon the white of my room that I
     began to believe they were given not in love but in anger.
    I turned out to be a villager after all – I
     made of London my village and lived there quietly. That gift of my father’s, that
     first book press, turned out to be the gift that shaped my life. One morningin the autumn after I graduated, I walked into the bindery outside
     which I had been hovering for the preceding three years, like a street-child outside a
     bakery. It was one of those places that occupied its own temporal dimension: you could
     find it only if you knew exactly what you wanted from it. When I entered I sensed
     immediately that it was a place of great discretion, somewhere safe from intrusive
     questions and uninvited confidences. It was no bigger in floor-plan than the living room
     at Thornton, but with twice the ceiling height, and every square inch of wall and floor
     was taken up with chests of drawers and shelves of papers and cloths and leathers. At
     the back, squeezed between presses and piles of books and slip-boxes, was a large table
     at which three or four people worked in silence. The owner of the bindery perched behind
     a high counter, which was shoved into a corner by the display window. She was small,
     very thin. Her hair was pulled back into a plait, and the scattering of grey in it made
     it impossible to determine her age. She might have been anywhere between forty-five and
     sixty. She wore dark makeup around large eyes and a bright red lipstick, which,
     strangely, had the effect of austerity. Her name was Ana. She looked at the books that I
     had bound and brought to show her, said nothing about the many imperfections that I now
     know them to have contained, and took me on as an apprentice. And there I stayed put and
     there nothing ever changed. All around us London primped and preened while we sheltered
     in our time-loop. I began to understand Matthew better.
    Still, shiny London was more enjoyable than
     grim London had been. Grey buildings returned to pale limestone, light bounced off