The Inn at the Edge of the World (18 page)

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Jessica, looking at the window. ‘It’s all grey and horrible.’

‘It’s got quite warm,’ said Anita. ‘It doesn’t feel cold at all this morning. The snow’s all gone from the hilltop.’

‘How
depressing
,’ said Jessica.

This put Anita in a difficult position: she, too, regretted the melting of the snow, but if she had said so she would have seemed to be complaining, and she meant to be optimistic and cheerful for, no matter what everyone said, today was Christmas day after all. ‘It’s quite pleasant,’ she said.

‘Well, I’ll come for a walk with you later,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m having haddock for breakfast, so it can go down and beat the hell out of the alcohol in my system, and then I’ll have to go and walk it off or it’s going to lock the doors against lunch.’

‘I shall have grapefruit,’ said Anita, who was beginning to manifest, by the day, a greater independence of spirit than she had shown in the store, subjected, as she had been, to the tyrannical whims of a higher authority.

‘It’s nasty,’ said Jessica gloomily. ‘Little and dry and sour, and all its vitamins have fallen out.’

‘It isn’t fattening,’ said Anita.

‘It isn’t
anything
,’ said Jessica: she stopped talking as Eric came in with the haddock.

‘Hot rolls?’ he offered. ‘They’ve just come out of the oven.’

‘I mustn’t eat hot rolls,’ said Jessica. ‘I shouldn’t eat anything really. I think I’ve put on a stone.’

‘Not at all,’ said Eric, annoyed. If the inn food was so delicious that she couldn’t resist it she should not be complaining, but congratulating him.

Jessica, too, realized this. ‘Everything is so
delicious
,’ she explained.

‘We do our best to give satisfaction,’ said Eric, mollified. He had been up for a long time, putting things to rights before he had started agitating himself about his culinary arrangements for the day. There had been a number of dead fish in the inn yard, flung up by some freak wave or gust of wind, and he had had to shovel them up and dispose of them: he had decided against putting them in the bins and had eventually carried them in the log-basket and thrown them back into the sea. The log-basket still smelled fishy, but the inn was on the edge of the ocean and people must be prepared for an oceanic atmosphere; it could be regarded as an added attraction.

Jessica did not so regard it: she had eaten her haddock, and when Finlay’s sister-in-law had leaned over her to remove her plate with its bones and skin she had been nearly overwhelmed by the odour of fish. The whole family must have been wallowing in the things all night, she thought. Perhaps they were running a canning industry on the side, or perhaps they never washed. ‘I feel sick,’ she said. ‘Tired,’ she added, as Eric was within earshot. ‘I think I’ll go and lie down.’

‘What about your walk?’ asked Anita.

‘Bother my walk,’ said Jessica. ‘I’ll go later.’ And she went back to bed, so that when Jon came into the dining room he saw no sign of her.

‘Good morning,’ said Anita.

‘Good morning,’ said Jon with a smile that he had last used in a commercial for tinned soup, when his supposed mother had placed before him a plate of supposed minestrone: it was the sort of smile that the Elect might wear for the Second Coming, and Anita was considerably disconcerted by it. She looked round to see at whom it might be directed and narrowed her eyes when she realized it could only be herself. What’s
his
game? she surmised suspiciously.

Ronald also caught the afterglow of this smile, and inwardly deplored it. He shook his head as he took his place at the table.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Anita solicitously. ‘Do you have a headache?’ Ronald thought about it: he hadn’t noticed it before but now he was conscious of a mild discomfort in the top of his head.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I have.’

‘I’ve got a paracetamol in here,’ said Anita, grasping her handbag. ‘Drink it with a lot of water and you’ll feel better.’ Since she had perceived Ronald as a little boy she had grown to disregard his medical qualifications. Ronald did as he was bid.

‘You are a very sensible woman,’ he said, which had she but known it was the highest praise he could offer. She would have preferred to be described as a ‘proper’ woman: she sometimes dreamed that someone would so categorize her. ‘Now take Anita,’ they’d say, ‘there’s a proper woman.’

‘I think that wine was off,’ she said. ‘I felt rather bad in the night. I had to get up. What happened to you?’ she said to Jon. ‘Why didn’t you come back?’

‘Because the wine was off,’ said Jon, idly unoriginal since his mind was elsewhere.

‘You didn’t miss much,’ said Anita. ‘We came back soon after you. There was quite an unpleasant scene developing.’

‘Oh, yeah?’ said Jon, who had no interest in other people’s scenes, pleasant or unpleasant.

‘Have you got a headache too?’ asked Anita sharply as she noticed the expression which had moved in to replace the smile.

Jon recalled himself. ‘Me? No,’ he said. ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ and he smiled again and stretched out his arms in his lazy panther style.

If Jon had been his patient, thought Ronald, he would now be hurriedly consulting a colleague as to the immediate necessity of having him sectioned. ‘Do you ever hear voices?’ he asked, but Jon, now dreamily smiling, had lowered his arms and left the room.

‘Why did you ask him that?’ demanded Anita.

‘He’s mad,’ said Ronald, putting it in the simplest terms for the layman: he was prepared to trust Anita with a few professional confidences.

‘What sort of mad?’ asked Anita.

‘Paranoiac,’ said Ronald, reaching for a roll. ‘Where’s my breakfast?’

‘You mean he thinks people are getting at him?’ persisted Anita.

‘I think I’ll have kippers,’ said Ronald. ‘What . . .?’

‘Do you mean he thinks people are trying to kill him?’ said Anita.

‘Not necessarily,’ said Ronald. ‘It’s more complicated than that.’ He was not prepared to go into the complexities of paranoiac hallucination, of persecution dread and omnipotent fantasy.

‘Is he dangerous?’ demanded Anita.

‘Probably,’ said Ronald.

‘But . . .’ said Anita.

‘I’m so hungry,’ said Ronald pathetically. ‘Where’s my kipper?’

Anita stood up and went to the kitchen door. ‘Could we have a kipper here?’ she asked sweetly and politely. Ronald found her lovely, seeking food for him.

‘Sorry,’ said Eric, panting slightly. ‘I didn’t realize you were down.’ The Raeburn had chosen this morning to start playing up. ‘Pair of kippers just coming.’

‘But what might he do?’ said Anita.

‘Who?’ asked Ronald.

‘
Jon
,’ said Anita. ‘What might he
do
?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Ronald. ‘He might do anything.’

‘Yes, but
what
?’ asked Anita, her voice rising.

Finlay’s sister-in-law entered with the kippers.

‘I always have trouble with the bones,’ said Ronald, ‘but I do like a nice kipper.’

‘Kippers!’ said Harry as he came into the dining room. ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ he said to Finlay’s sister-in-law. ‘I lost track of time. Can I have a kipper?’ He sat down opposite Ronald and poured himself a cup of coffee.

‘That’s a bit cold,’ said Anita, resigning herself to abandoning the subject of high mania for the time being. ‘I’ll ask for some fresh for you.’

Ronald, as he picked a fish bone out of his whiskers, reflected that Anita was that rare being, a proper woman.

‘How was your evening?’ asked Harry. ‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘Well, not really,’ said Anita. ‘Did you, Ronald?’

‘Did I what?’ asked Ronald, pushing a kipper’s eye to the edge of the plate.

‘Did you enjoy the evening at the professor’s?’

‘No, not really,’ said Ronald, considering the matter. ‘I don’t think I did.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Harry, ‘what was wrong?’

Ronald, inartistically splitting the backbone from the flesh of his fish, did not immediately respond.

‘It was uncomfortable,’ said Anita. ‘I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I didn’t feel easy there. If you didn’t find me silly I’d say there was a feeling of evil about the place . . .’

‘Funny you should say that,’ said Harry.

‘Why?’ asked Anita.

‘Jessica was saying something similar.’

‘Oh,’ said Anita, who still had her doubts about Jessica: she found her fanciful.

‘What gave you that impression?’ asked Harry as his kipper arrived.

Anita waited until Finlay’s sister-in-law had gone out again. ‘I don’t want to sound
fanciful
,’ she said, ‘. . . it’s hard to describe. I didn’t get any sense of welcome, of friendship . . .’ She paused as she strove to find words to illustrate the sense of lovelessness she had felt. She had never been in a brothel but she thought the atmosphere might have been the same.

‘It was freezing cold,’ said Ronald. ‘They wouldn’t light the fire.’

Anita was surprised he’d noticed. ‘And the wine wasn’t very nice,’ she said.

‘And there wasn’t much of it,’ said Ronald, surprising her further with this evidence of flawed humanity.

‘It’s not that we’re greedy,’ she explained. ‘It’s the thought.’

‘Perhaps it was just as well,’ said Harry. ‘If you’d drunk too much bad wine you’d be in no condition for today.’

‘What time is lunch?’ asked Ronald, fishing a final bone from its hiding place behind a molar.

‘You can’t think about lunch yet,’ cried Anita. ‘You’ve hardly finished breakfast.’

‘I thought between two and three,’ said Eric bearing in another plateful of rolls. ‘I don’t want to tie you down too closely today, but if anyone’s hungry there’s always elevenses.’ He was still having trouble with the Raeburn. Bloody thing. He had also been overcome by a jealous curiosity as to what his wife might be up to today of all days. It was almost unbearable, and between that anguish and his responsibilities to the guests he thought he might scream, throw back his head, hurl down the plate and howl.

‘That’ll be fine,’ said Anita firmly as Ronald showed signs of speaking. Already she had taken a decision not to allow him to make a spectacle of himself and certainly not today by demanding his lunch at the usual time.

Eric relaxed a little. She wasn’t a bad old stick, this guest.

‘Do you think the islanders would mind if I called on them today?’ asked Anita.

‘Do I . . .?’ said Eric, bewildered by her unexpected query.

‘You say they don’t bother about Christmas,’ said Anita. ‘And as I haven’t got much longer here, I thought I’d go and see that lady about the knitting again.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Eric. ‘No, I shouldn’t think she’d mind at all.’ If he was right in his suppositions the lady would be only too enchanted to get the chance to rip off a mug from the city. ‘No, go along and try it out. I’m sure she won’t mind.’

‘Are you more or less ready, Ronald?’ asked Anita.

‘What for?’ asked Ronald.

‘You are coming with me,’ explained Anita patiently, ‘to talk to a lady I met, who knits special sweaters with a special pattern so that when her husband and sons get drowned she can identify the bodies.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Ronald. ‘I remember now. I said I’d come, didn’t I?’

‘Yes,’ said Anita. ‘You did.’

‘I’ll go and get my coat,’ said Ronald after a short silence, illustrative of some reluctance.

‘You can’t spend the morning pigging crisps and nuts in the bar,’ said Anita on a sudden surge of gaiety.

So that’s the way the wind’s blowing, thought Eric. For she had sounded quite like a wife in a not unreasonable humour.

‘It’s me again,’ said Jessica when Harry opened the door. ‘You are the soul of courtesy and I – I am an unmannerly wretch, and things like that, to take advantage of your good nature.’

‘Come in,’ said Harry, making his customary allowances for other people’s tiresome ways.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessica. ‘Sometimes I forget you’re not the sort of person . . . oh, never mind.’

‘Chair?’ invited Harry.

‘I mean, I sometimes forget I don’t always have to behave the way I imagine people expect actresses to behave,’ continued Jessica. ‘You’ll have to make allowances for me.’

‘I do,’ said Harry.

‘Oh,’ said Jessica.

‘Is Jon bothering you again?’ asked Harry.

‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘He’s disappeared. It’s something else. I’m frightened of Hell. It’s Helen Huntingdon’s fault. No it isn’t, it’s the fault of this island . . .’

‘No it isn’t,’ said Harry.

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Jessica.

‘No,’ said Harry.

‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Do you mean I’m going off my head?’

‘No,’ said Harry.

‘What do you
mean
?’ she asked.

‘I don’t mean anything much,’ said Harry, ‘but Hell isn’t here and evil doesn’t crawl out from the rocks. You could say the island is indifferent but you can’t say it’s malevolent.’