Sometimes Edward came to visit. He came on his bicycle bringing large golden oranges tucked into the spokes of the wheels and books in a hessian bag strapped onto the bar. He brought Matthew copies of Treasure Island and The Gorilla Hunters and Robinson Crusoe and White Fang and The Call of the Wild and when he was gone Matthew sat in the sun on the step of the back verandah and lost himself in foreign lands that the writer had never visited but which took on a reality from the words that created them.
Edward was Gran’s friend, not his mother’s. Gran and Edward talked for hours but sometimes Edward took him to the sea. He sat Matthew on the crossbar of his bicycle and rather wildly and erratically they made the two-mile journey. Where they stopped the sea was mostly gentle, lying in aqueous strands of clear green between sandbars. Here everything smelt cool, the breeze salty and sharp. On still hot days a mist hung on the horizon, heavy, oysterish. Tinged with mauve, it rested on the sea but as it climbed into the sky it melted in air which glittered and glanced from the surface of the water.
The gulls squabbled and squarked and squatted in white-backed flocks where the shallows washed their pink legs. Edward said that on still days the clearness of the water was as lucid as good thought and he stretched his arms wide and breathed deeply. He said he was breathing in miles and miles of space and filling his lungs with timelessness and he laughed a deep, throaty laugh and grabbing Matthew’s hand ran with him along the edge of the water. Matthew’s thin white legs twinkled like sandpipers and their two shadows mingled and moved together.
Finally exhausted he was the first to collapse in giggles on the sand and Edward fell beside him and rolled him over and over as a mother dog a puppy and tickled him until Matthew shrieked. Edward stopped then. He never went beyond the point where excitement and pleasure became a painful rejection of sensation. Sometimes Matthew just lay at his side. Sometimes he took Edward’s hand and played at burying the fingers one by one. Edward teased him by popping them out of the sand just when Matthew thought he had succeeded in covering them all beneath a mound. Or he just flexed them so that the sand cracked and seeped into the tiny valleys breaking the surface. The game was for Matthew to try to repair the little mound faster than Edward could dislodge it. Of course he did not want Edward to either dislodge the mound entirely or to leave it whole. Both suggested an end to the ritual, the wordless communication between them.
Sometimes when Edward’s hand lay lifeless and unresponding Matthew sat on his chest or put his hands on either side of his face and shook it a little. And then Edward’s eyes would fly open and he would grin, not smile, but grin with half the real warmth of himself and half the actor’s grimace and he would clutch Matthew to him and hug and shake him and growl a little. He would jump up, a lithe, strong movement with Matthew still in his arms, plump him on the sand on his feet, brush himself clean of sand and say: ‘Come on, let’s find some pippies.’ And the two of them would walk slowly along the tide edge turning the wet sand with their toes or occasionally kneeling to dig with their hands where the wet sand slithered between their fingers, more water than grains, and grey below the surface.
‘It won’t hold,’ Matthew said once as he sat back on his heels and watched the sand slip together. ‘I can’t separate it. It just joins up again. Even when I put my fingers at the side of the hole it just fills up.’ And he tried frantically with both hands to hold the walls of a tiny hole apart.
‘Why can’t I stop it, Edward?’ And in frustration he jumped up and kicked the sand away from where it had slid together.
‘Hey!’ Edward laughed and picking him up swung him around in a great circle. ‘Hey! What’s the use of trying to do what’s impossible and then getting angry over it? There are things you can control and things you can’t. Things you want to control and things you’re happy to leave alone. You didn’t want to stop a bird flying.’
‘No, but I could. I could kill it.’
‘What a bellicose boy. All puffed up with human power. You couldn’t kill all the birds and stop everything from flying.’
‘I could! I could!’ Matthew shouted, insulted by Edward’s adult amusement and logic.
‘Would you want to?’
‘I could! I could!’
‘Yes, but would you want to?’
‘I might …’
‘Really?’
‘Or I might not. But I could choose.’
‘Oh, yes, we can all choose but why get so mad about sand in a hole?’
‘I hate it.’
‘What a sulk. Well, you keep trying then but I don’t intend to waste my afternoon.’ And Edward strode off leaving Matthew to trot after him. Their difference didn’t last long and soon they were eating ice creams and wandering along the pier.
Sometimes Matthew heard Gran and Edward talking, in words that were strange to him, and the quietness of their tone and the seriousness of their faces distanced him from their enclosed and secret world. Sometimes his mother interposed with raucous, rough comments, but on these occasions neither Margaret nor Matthew were minded. Seeing the frustration on his mother’s face he would stand close to her and reach for her apron or her hand and she would cling to him as if afraid.
‘Anarchists, presses, pamphlets, revolution!’ she shouted at them one day. ‘You’re all buffoons! Jokes, just great big jokes! Who’s going to start a revolution here? Yesterday you were paddling on the beach and eating ice creams.
