The Inn at the Edge of the World (13 page)

‘You’re a child,’ said Jon. He spoke indulgently but she couldn’t take offence at what he said, even though he was at least fifteen years younger than she was.

‘I sort of expected snow,’ she said, sounding, to her own irritation, childish. She was beginning to notice that Jon had an odd ability to guide her responses: it was he who had caused her to gallop along the sands like a two-year-old. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘snow can be most inconvenient.’

‘In the Arctic . . .’ began Jon, and she feared he was about to spin a yarn, but he was careful. ‘In the Arctic,’ he went on, ‘they think of Hell as cold.’

‘I do myself sometimes,’ said Jessica, ‘when it
is
cold. When I’m too hot I think of Hell as hot. I suppose it’s only natural.’ She hadn’t meant to sound dismissive, but Jon flexed his fingers, unseen in his pockets.

‘Do you think the sea will ruin my boots?’ asked Jessica after a short silence, gazing down at the Spanish leather.

‘Not unless you walk in it,’ said Jon and fell silent again.

Jessica began to look beautiful. She could not have explained how she performed this feat, but it was some thing she often did when people were displeased with her. At the same time she observed aloud that there were a couple of Highland kine in a distant field. Jon, of course, took this as a sexual advance and relaxed, putting an arm around her shoulders: he laughed and drew her closer to him.

Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, thought Jessica resignedly, inwardly deploring the multitudinous complexities and resultant misunderstanding inherent in human intercourse. All she had wanted was to go for a walk and exercise away some of the consequences of three meals a day, with added snacks, and already she had nearly quarrelled with a comparative stranger who now showed every sign of being about to make love to her. It could only be due to some deep flaw in her character – or possibly sheer thoughtlessness.

The church had been deconsecrated some time ago, since it lacked both minister and congregation, and was now used as a boat-shed, being conveniently adjacent to the sea. It reminded Jessica of an unfashionable and discarded hat, than which there is nothing more redundant. The road wound round it and up the hill towards the thin toupee of snow which now reminded Jessica of an actor with whom she had once worked in
Nicholas Nickleby
. She determined not to mention this since she knew it would sound winning and give a further wrong impression. They passed an untidy and ill-assorted gathering of gorse, rhododendron, bramble, clematis and infant pine imprisoned in a deep hollow at the roadside. The ham-fisted hand of man was evident here as the wild, the cultivated and the transplanted strove for dominance in a gladiatorially herbaceous fashion. They also made Jessica think of a number of legitimate, illegitimate and stepchildren competing for attention as they struggled up towards the light. Man sows discord, thought Jessica, but she said: ‘Crikey, here’s some ragged robin in flower. What can have possessed it to come out at this time? It’s positively months premature.’

‘That’s one of the things I like about you,’ said Jon. ‘When people ask me what I see in you I say, “She knows about wild flowers, she knows their names and where to find them, and when they come out.”’

Jessica, who had been having enough trouble finding things to say, was struck dumb at this. Her first thought was that, in fact, she knew virtually nothing about wild flowers and that, anyway, her ragged robin was probably scarlet campion or even maiden’s bedstraw, or a spray of earl’s evil: she had learned to distinguish dandelion from coltsfoot during the course of a documentary on a tract of countryside for which she was doing the voice-over, and she had an average ability to recognize wild roses and may-blossom and such-like seasonal blooms, but she was far from familiar with the more esoteric flora which lurked shyly in ditches or blew in far-flung meadows and was truly entitled to the term ‘wild’. As to the little pink number shivering at the roadside – any fool could have told that it was no time for it to be out. Her next thought came in the form of a question – who the hell would be asking Jon what he saw in her, and why? A faint wisp of memory floated into her mind and away again before she could grasp it, elusive as a dandelion clock. Then she thought, without anger, since the whole thing was too curious to be infuriating, that it was the most terrible cheek on the part of everyone concerned to discuss her at all in relation to Jon whom she’d never met before; and positively cosmic cheek on the part of Jon to ascribe her attractions to a facility for naming plants when she was really quite famous, very amusing and often looked beautiful. She decided he must be mad.

The road levelled above the hollow before beginning its ascent to the hill’s summit.

‘I think we’ve gone far enough,’ said Jessica, turning to look down at the sea and noticing a gorse bush which had also gone mad and burst into flower in December: she didn’t draw Jon’s attention to this phenomenon since that might have led him further into a baffling discourse on her horticultural skills. The only explanation she could think of that would make sense of the situation was that, once, she must have got very drunk in a rural setting and Jon had been among those present as she leaped about naming flowers. It seemed implausible, but she’d done a few unlikely things in her time.

‘Oh no,’ said Jon. ‘No. Now we’ve got this far we must go to the top. Come on, I’ll hold your hand.’

‘You must be joking,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s at least ten miles to the top and uphill all the way.’

‘No,’ said Jon, ‘no more than two.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m not going up any more hills. I’m going down. I want my tea.’ Involuntarily she looked up and saw his face.

‘All right,’ said Jon, after a moment. ‘Race you to the bend.’ He won easily as Jessica didn’t run but walked behind wondering who had spoiled him to the point that to be thwarted in so small a matter should make him look like murder.

The bar was unusually busy that night. It would be, thought Eric, when he had so much to do in preparation for the next day: he resented the presence of the islanders, who contributed little to his income, when he wanted to look after the comfort of his guests, who would, if he got it right, return to civilization singing his praises to their wealthy friends. ‘Did you have a nice day?’ he asked Anita, who was sipping a half of shandy.

‘It was very interesting,’ she said.

Eric was gratified to hear this, for over the past few days he had been contending with a suspicion that Mabel was right; the island was possibly the most dreary collection of rock on the face of the globe and he had made an error in coming here.

‘I’m thinking of buying some of the local produce,’ said Anita.

‘Pardon?’ said Eric: what local produce there was – hedgerow jam, jars of mustard, tea-cloths, mugs – was made in English and foreign factories, appropriately labelled and imported to the island; as it was, indeed, to those villages where tourism flourished all over the Isles of Britain and the Western world. Surely a person who had made commerce her profession could not have been so deluded as actually to purchase any of this rubbish.

‘The knitwear,’ said Anita, ‘the local knitwear.’

‘Oh,’ said Eric. As far as he knew the local knitwear was also imported.

‘I walked for miles,’ said Anita, ‘and I saw a woman sitting by a cottage window, knitting, so I stopped to ask directions to the castle ruins and she asked me in and gave me a cup of tea. She’d just started knitting on these huge needles so I asked her what she was making and she said it was a sweater for her man. She said each village on the island and round the coast on the mainland used a different pattern so that when the men were drowned and washed up on the shore they could tell where they’d come from and take them home to be buried.’

‘Oh,’ said Eric again. It sounded improbable: the story of the different patterns might once have been true enough, but he doubted that any of the local women still knitted with that practical if macabre purpose in mind: most of them went to the mainland and bought their men’s sweaters in Marks and Spencer. Either Anita had encountered an incomer who had fled like himself from the world and was planning to build up a cottage industry (and good luck to her, he thought) or she had met a genuine local who was making a blanket or a matinée jacket for the next jumble sale and was telling lies.

‘I thought I might take a few back and try them out as a special line,’ explained Anita, who, now that she was away from the pressures of work, was beginning to feel more confident of both her talents and her stamina: so far from her department anything seemed possible and if she returned with a brilliant idea and the goods to back it up she might truly get herself transferred to one of the fashion sections and became truly powerful.

‘You could try, I suppose,’ said Eric, wondering whether it would be more charitable to leave her with her delusions or advise her now to remember to snip out the labels bearing the legend ‘Made in Taiwan’. He decided to say nothing.

Mrs H. appeared in the bar wearing tight jeans and a nylon blouse under her anorak. She was followed by the professor and a girl in the duffel coat. ‘We’ve come from the Crown and Thistle,’ she said. ‘It was so crowded in there we could hardly breathe.’

The Crown and Thistle was the next pub along the coast, and while it too was run by an incomer it attracted many more of the locals than Eric’s, far superior, inn. It had fruit machines and a pool table. Eric felt the bewildered wrath of the simple, virtuous maiden, modestly conscious of her worth, who is rejected in favour of the painted, flouncing fire-ship, all empty promise and implicit hazard. Certainly he did not, at the moment, wish to see his own bar filled to capacity with sweating revellers, but nor did he want to hear about the one up the road.

‘Nice, was it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Mrs H. ‘Much too crowded. You can’t
breathe
in there. I’m going to have a half of bitter as it’s Christmas.’

Eric looked at her carefully. Since she usually drank water he had always assumed that she was an ex-alcoholic. So far he had not had that kind of trouble with her: she was an undeniably ghastly woman, but – Eric touched the wood of the counter – she had not yet gone on a bender in his bar. He took his time and served her begrudgingly.

The professor also broke his habitual rule and ordered a real lager, although still with lime.

‘Pushing the boat out?’ inquired Eric with concealed sarcasm. ‘Christmas comes but once a year,’ he answered himself. There were no signs in the bar that it had come again: no tinsel, paper chains, or holly . . .

‘You’ve got no mistletoe,’ said Mrs H. ‘Christmas isn’t Christmas without mistletoe.’

‘We’re not doing Christmas,’ said Eric. ‘That’s the whole idea.’

‘I think that’s letting the side down,’ said Mrs H. Her remark might have puzzled a person who was familiar neither with Mrs H. nor with the ways of the island: he might have supposed her to mean by ‘the side’ all of Christendom and its long traditions: he might have imagined Mrs H. herself to be a woman of religious susceptibility, but he would have been mistaken. By ‘the side’ Mrs H. meant the English contingent, the visitors and incomers: she had as strong a tribal sense as the islanders themselves, which was one reason for the mutual and cordial, if lightly hidden, detestation which characterized what dealings they had with each other. If questioned, Mrs H. would have said that it was all a matter of ‘class’, since her vulgarity had corrupted even her deeper human awareness. She considered the islanders’ failure to observe the seasonal rites to be evidence, not of a residual paganism, but of a swinish ignorance of the ‘done thing’.

‘I’ve put up my little tree and the fairy lights,’ she said, ‘and I’ve left John stuffing the turkey. He’s a marvellous cook.’

Eric said nothing: he wanted to talk of pudding and flaming brandy, and he did not care to picture the poor cuckold bent over a dead turkey, his hands greasy with corpse fat, while his wife sought diversion in crowded places. Oh, Mabel . . .

‘I wanted a rest from all that this year,’ said Anita. ‘I usually make such an effort – I buy everything fresh and I spend hours peeling and chopping and making gravy – I just wanted a change this year.’ She always entertained a few elderly girls from the store and, when they were available, a few men who hadn’t been invited anywhere else.

‘Hallo,’ said Ronald. He was standing close behind her so that as she turned his beard brushed her upturned face. ‘Where did you get to today?’ He liked to hear a woman talking about cooking and he liked Anita’s modest dress of dark paisley wool under a cream-coloured cardigan. He liked her low-heeled shoes and her lightly lacquered dark-red hair. It could well be true, he thought, that red hair was evidence of spirit in a woman, for he had noticed that, at one point, she had grown quite impatient with him. He could not be expected to know that Anita’s hair was dyed and that once a month she sat for an hour with her head in a plastic bag to set the colour.

‘I went as far as the village,’ said Anita. ‘I met a local woman knitting a sweater for her man . . .’

Eric was summoned by the professor ordering a second lager, alcohol-free this time.

‘Where’s Jessica?’ asked the professor with the confident grin of the ageing flirt, still unaware that his very confidence makes him look silly.

Jon, sitting a little away from the rest, heard him and stiffened.

‘She’s standing right behind you,’ said Eric. Jessica had entered a moment before and was waiting for a chance to approach the bar counter.