The Inn at the Edge of the World (11 page)

‘I know that,’ said Anita rather shortly. ‘They weren’t those sort of noises.’

Jessica, too, had heard noises in the night: half awake she thought she had heard the handle of her bedroom door being slowly turned, but as she had always locked her bedroom door when alone – ever since her second husband had returned, six months after the divorce, to pick up his pyjamas – she had gone back to sleep. ‘What sort of noises?’ she asked.

‘Sort of people coming and going,’ said Anita. ‘A lot of people.’

‘A lot of people come and go in an inn,’ said Ronald.

‘Not usually at three and four in the morning,’ said Anita, getting cross. ‘And I could hear people talking, only I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’

‘Did you listen?’ asked Ronald.

‘No,’ snapped Anita. He sounded as though he thought she was an eavesdropper. ‘I just heard.’

Ronald ate a double triangle of shortbread and watched her thoughtfully. He looked as though he might be going to say something else sensible and Jessica broke in before he could utter whatever it was. There is nothing more infuriating than resolute rationality in the face of the inexplicable, and Jessica was entirely on Anita’s side. Whether or not she had heard phantoms in the dark she should not be subjected to the chilly scepticism of the narrow minded. ‘Ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties,’ she said, adding lamely, ‘and things that go bump in the night.’ She sipped her coffee.

Finlay’s sister-in-law brought in a fresh pot. She was moving rather more slowly than usual: Anita noticed that she seemed to be limping slightly and bent upon her a look of smiling concern. It was wasted as Finlay’s sister-in-law, having put down the coffee pot, was gazing through the window. She lifted a hand and Anita turned to see whom she was waving to. Nobody as far as Anita could tell. The woman was probably the result of too much in-breeding, and wanting in the head.

Jon sat down beside Jessica, in two minds as to whether or not she should be forgiven. He had thought last night when he saw the women climbing into the professor’s Jag that they were Jessica and Anita and had dreamed of death. He had been relieved when he realized that they were walking home, although he felt strongly that Jessica should have hung behind and waited for him – but maybe she was shy. But then
he
had waited, lying naked on his bed, for her to come to him. It had been nearly dawn when he had tried her door and found it locked. There was no excuse for that. How would she talk herself out of it if he challenged her? ‘What did you do last night?’ he asked.

Jessica was thinking about Bannockburn, and the ghosts of Highlanders, and the horrid ways of Sawney Bean and didn’t really notice the abruptness of his question. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Oh, I went to the dance . . .’ She took another sip of coffee.

‘Were you so terribly tired?’ he asked. Tiredness would not be a perfect excuse but it was better than nothing.

Jessica looked up at him. She had the feeling that they were at cross-purposes. ‘It must have been after midnight when I got to bed,’ she said.

So she was still playing with him, laughing at him. He felt his mind clear suddenly as though a great wave had passed over it. If she meant to carry on like that he would show her that in this game he was her master. He laughed, and to a casual watcher it would seem that he relaxed. His beautiful face lost the set smoothness it had worn; small, human lines of mirth appeared at the corners of his eyes, wrinkled the top of his nose. He seemed, in an instant, attractive and full of humour. ‘I’ll race you to the beach,’ he said.

Mesmerized, Jessica rose and followed him. Ronald sat with an unchewed mouthful of shortbread. Over the past few minutes he found he had unwittingly made a clear clinical diagnosis: one of his fellow-guests was quite, quite mad – far gone in paranoia and with marked schizoid tendencies. What a nuisance, thought Ronald; but he was on his holidays and there was nothing he could do about it. He swallowed his shortbread.

‘Scotland
is
haunted,’ said Anita. ‘Everywhere there are ghosts of the past.’ Finlay came into the room with an armful of logs. ‘Is the inn haunted?’ she asked him.

Finlay put down his logs and stood, considering. ‘Aye,’ he said, and went out again.

‘There,’ said Anita. ‘I told you so.’

Jessica ran along the sand after Jon, leaping the ridged sea streams, until it occurred to her that she was getting on a bit for this sort of thing. She wondered what her agent would say if she saw her, and slowed down.

‘Tortoise,’ said Jon, waiting for her to catch up with him. He took her hand as they walked and let it go before the gesture could seem too intimate. ‘There’s a deserted house just before the point,’ he said. ‘Let’s explore.’

He led her over the shingle and across the road. The Old Manse stood as she had seen it the day before, blind with an empty, pathetic haughtiness at the top of the slope. ‘Come on,’ he said as she hesitated.

‘I don’t . . .’ said Jessica.

‘Come on.’

Reluctantly she followed him up the path across which trailed bare briars and strands of honeysuckle. She felt uneasy, with a fugitive sense of disloyalty – as though she was trespassing not on the property of the bloke from London who came down with a crowd in the summer for the sailing but on Harry’s memories.

‘It feels as though no one’s been here for years and years,’ she said. They stood on the gravel in front of the porch, and then looked through the windows.

‘Sitting room,’ said Jon. ‘Looks as though they haven’t made many changes here since the olden days. There’s a three-piece suite.’ He went to the window. ‘Dining room,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go round the back.’ The small yard behind the house was paved with slate. ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Not so deserted after all. Look . . .’ There was a row of wet, bare footprints leading to the red-painted back door.

‘Oh,’ said Jessica. ‘Let’s go . . .’

‘It’s only local kids,’ said Jon, laughing. ‘Tough little brutes – going round with no shoes on in this weather.’

Jessica shivered at the mere thought – at least she told herself that was why she was shivering. ‘We’ll be late for lunch,’ she said.

‘It’s not midday yet,’ said Jon and he laughed again. Jessica wished he wouldn’t laugh so much. It sounded out of place in the sorrowful, dignified hush.

‘What?’ she said.

‘It’s not even midday,’ said Jon. ‘Two minutes to midday.’ It seemed to Jessica that they had been out together much longer than that.

‘Well, I want a drink,’ she said, and she thought in her inconsequential way of the noon-day devil who slingeth arrows about.

On the way back she noticed a white cottage down near the shore’s edge. ‘I suppose that’s where the professor lives,’ she said.

Jon, who had been humming a tune from
The Phantom of the Opera
, stopped in mid-cadence. ‘Prat,’ he said venomously. Jessica, unperceptive as ever, heard in this not the sourness of jealousy but only the echo of what appeared locally to be received opinion.

The cottage looked neglected; a few tiles missing from the roof and the garden fence half flattened. Jessica had often wondered whether she was rich enough to invest in a small villa in Tuscany, or a farmhouse in Provence, or even a cottage in the Shires, but now she wondered whether it was not unkind and thoughtless to buy a house only to leave it alone much of the time and fail to look after it properly. She wondered whether it even made economic sense and whether it was not wiser to take your ease in small hotels, which if not perfect, did not require you to re-tile the roof or maintain the grounds.

They were still talking about ghosts in the bar. ‘. . . and one room which was always freezing cold even in the middle of summer,’ Anita was saying.

‘Probably rising damp,’ said Eric.

‘Don’t you believe in ghosts?’ asked Anita.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ said Eric.

‘No, but do you believe in them?’ insisted Anita.

‘Since I’ve never seen one, I don’t see why I should,’ said Eric.

‘You’ve never seen an electric current but you believe in them, don’t you?’ said Anita.

‘That’s different,’ said Eric.

‘There is undoubtedly a phenomenon known as projection which under certain circumstances might appear to take on corporeal substance,’ said Ronald.

Anita wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but it sounded as though he was on her side, and she warmed to him again.

‘It need not even necessarily be seen as a function of hallucination,’ added Ronald.

‘Oh, by the way,’ said Eric as he caught sight of Jessica, ‘there was a phone call for you earlier. They said they’d ring back.’

‘But nobody knows where I am,’ said Jessica.

‘Somebody does,’ said Eric.

Jon listened carefully.

‘What did they say?’ asked Jessica.

‘Just that they’d ring back,’ said Eric. When he’d heard a female voice he had thought for a moment that it might be Mabel.

‘Does anybody realize that tomorrow is Christmas Eve?’ asked Anita. ‘I’d almost forgotten – it’s so peaceful here.’

‘They don’t bother much with Christmas – the islanders,’ explained Eric. ‘They celebrate New Year, Hogmanay.’

The said celebrations encompassed a week, during which barely a living soul took a sober breath.

‘That’s why this is a good place to get away from it all,’ said Eric. ‘It doesn’t happen.’

‘I think it’s going to snow, though,’ said Anita. Perversely, she was missing the atmosphere evoked by robins and shepherds and fat-tailed sheep: there wasn’t so much as a sprig of holly to be seen.

‘If it does,’ said Eric, ‘there’s a couple of pairs of skis in the old stable, and some good slopes on the other side of the island.’ The skis had been left by the previous owner, who wouldn’t need them on the Costa del Sol, where he had gone to end his days sunnily and cheaply.

‘I was still hoping to get in a bit of sailing,’ said Jon.

‘You must be crazy,’ said Jessica involuntarily, chilled by early memories of grey, heaving seas; trying to sleep in salty, wet blankets in a space half the size of a coffin, boiling cans of soup on a tilting stove, and trying not to go to the lavatory because what they referred to as the ‘heads’ was two inches away from the table where the rest of the party would be endeavouring to eat its soup before it pitched itself on to the floor – or, as her father would have insisted, ‘the deck’. Jessica was not being personal, nor unusually perceptive, when she accused Jon of insanity: she thought the same of anyone who chose to spend time at sea when nothing actually compelled him to.

‘Most you can do this time of year is doddle round the coast in a dinghy,’ said Eric, ‘and even that’s a bit dodgy. Fishing vessel went down with all hands this time last year.’

‘That was a submarine,’ said Mrs H., coming in from the cold and removing her fur gloves. ‘Fouled her nets and took her under.’

‘That’s what some say,’ interrupted Eric, not because he doubted the theory, but because he liked interrupting Mrs H. ‘According to the locals ships have been going down there since the year dot.’

‘Giant squid, I suppose,’ said Mrs H.

‘I’ve sailed a four-masted Baltic schooner through a typhoon in the China Seas,’ said Jon improbably. Nobody bothered to challenge this statement and even Jon saw that he would do well to qualify it in the interests of plausibility. ‘Well, it was more of a squall, actually,’ he said, ‘and there were five of us.’ Nor had this squall occurred in the China Seas: it had happened off the Hook of Holland with a hired crew to man the vessel, and a camera crew to immortalize the image of Jon shinning up the rigging to the crow’s nest where there awaited a maiden clad in Dutch bonnet and clogs, holding tantalizingly aloft a platter of fishfingers. In the end this scene had actually been shot ashore with special effects, but Jon
had
hung in the rigging for a while until the director had given it up as a bad job. The commercial had been shown only on the continent, where they had lower standards. ‘We were researching for a film,’ explained Jon. ‘Only it was going to go so far above budget that they gave it up.’

This could have been true and Jessica was disposed to be sympathetic, for she knew too well the broken promises, the blighted schemes, the failed hopes attendant on film-making. ‘Poor you,’ she said.

The others, who were not conversant with the inflated enterprises, the hazards and the sheer financial lunacy of this business, remained sceptical, and Jessica found herself momentarily at a small remove from the company, isolated with Jon in a shared appreciation of the fantastical, the unreal elements of their common profession.

‘Do you suppose there
are
any giant squid?’ asked Anita, trying to bring the conversation down to a more practical level and out of the Munchausen realms of fevered exaggeration and falsehood.

‘There are recorded instances,’ said Ronald, ‘but I can’t remember the exact dimensions of the largest. Down in the lowest depths are things we may never learn about. It’s quite possible that mankind will know more of the furthest galaxies than it will ever know about the creatures of the sea. It may be easier to fly beyond the stars than plumb the depths.’ He became aware of the metaphorical psycho logical implications in this observation and lapsed into reverie clouded by self-doubt. If he followed the metaphor through and it held, then it was to the visionaries, the mystics – even the religious – that the human race must turn in its search for enlightenment, while he and his kind continued poking round with a stick in the mud at what ever level they could reach. This disheartening reflection kept his attention until teatime.