The Inn at the Edge of the World (19 page)

‘It feels it sometimes,’ said Jessica.

‘I know,’ said Harry.

‘Maybe it
is
the people,’ said Jessica. ‘Not so much the islanders, but I get the feeling a number of people come here to do things they wouldn’t do in their own back yards – making the place a sort of moral dustbin – if you follow me. Or am I being over-sensitive? Maybe it’s only the holiday atmosphere.’

‘Tourism always has a corrupting influence,’ said Harry. ‘Perhaps that’s what you’re conscious of?’

‘I hate everybody today,’ said Jessica. ‘Everybody is so selfish and self-regarding and I wouldn’t mind, except when I see them being like that I’m reminded that I’m the most selfish and self-regarding one of all. I thought if I ignored Christmas it would be all right, but there’s always
something
.’

Or nothing, thought Harry, but he said: ‘Do you think the antics of Jon have upset you more than you realize?’

‘He didn’t help,’ said Jessica. ‘That sort of thing’s always depressing, but it isn’t only him. Anita’s depressing and Ronald’s depressing and the dentist – or the professor, or whatever he is – is depressing and Mrs H. reminds me of a rat – I think it’s her nose, it twitches – and the weather’s depressing and I’m depressing. I wonder if Eric would let me help in the kitchen? I’d like to feel I was of some use to someone. I could make bread – up to my elbows in flour.’ She saw herself, rosy-cheeked, wearing a white apron, mingling her skin cells with the sacredness of bread and earning the approbation of God and the angels.

‘Are you good at making bread?’ asked Harry.

‘I never tried,’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t suppose I would be.’

‘It’s quite simple,’ said Harry.

Jessica didn’t ask him how he knew, because she knew how he knew – they would have made their own bread at a table in the Manse kitchen, and they would have cried to the young Harry: ‘Take off your uniform or you’ll spoil it, put up your sword, and wash your hands and you can help us make the bread . . .’

She stood up and straightened her skirt. ‘I can make cakes,’ she said, ‘only there’s seldom any point.’

‘You needn’t go,’ said Harry. ‘I’m not doing anything.’

‘It’s the oppression,’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t know where to go to get away from the oppression. Don’t you feel it?’

‘Not the way you do,’ said Harry, who was aware only of emptiness, weightless and waiting.

‘You’re so lucky,’ said Jessica without thinking. Anyone who did not feel as she presently did was fortunate.

‘Do you want to go down to the bar?’ asked Harry.

‘I suppose that’s all I can do,’ said Jessica. ‘Though I don’t want to end up like Huntingdon. He’s got the horrors, and old Helen keeps telling him there’s nothing the matter with him except what he brought on himself against her earnest exhortation and entreaty, and then he says if she doesn’t shut her trap he’s going to order another six bottles of wine and sink the lot. And I don’t blame him. I wish I had something else to read. Helen would drive a saint to drink. I expect it’s her who’s made me feel like this.’

‘A brandy and soda will do you little harm,’ said Harry.

‘Try telling that to Helen Huntingdon,’ said Jessica, ‘and she’ll slip you an ipecacuanha.’

The bar was deserted. ‘Tell me some more about Achmet Pasha,’ requested Jessica as they stood at the counter. ‘He sounds exactly my type.’

‘I don’t know much more,’ said Harry.

‘They do that sort of thing in films,’ said Jessica. ‘When the hero is tied hand and foot in the dentist’s chair surrounded by his enemies, who are mostly half-wits, he starts insulting them, which always strikes me as most ill-advised, but apparently what he’s trying to do is rattle them so that they make an unwary move. Then the arch villain wastes valuable time boasting about how clever he’s been to get the hero into the dentist’s chair and that gives the hero time to unshackle himself, or let his friends pop in through the window – and right triumphs. Real life isn’t like that, is it?’

‘No,’ said Harry, ‘although it must have been satisfying for Achmet Pasha to unburden himself. Those words are the sort of thing you might have wished you’d said, but he had no time for
l’esprit d’escalier
. . .’

‘Right, ladies and gentlemen,’ said Eric, hurrying behind the bar. ‘What are you having?’

‘Do you like it here?’ asked Jessica.

‘Do I?’ said Eric, glancing over his shoulder as he pressed up the brandy optic. ‘Yes, it’s very peaceful after Telford. I used to be in engineering, then I got on the sales side and it all got me down.’ He was glad to be able to state his case aloud. It went some way to making him believe it.

‘Don’t you ever feel lonely?’ asked Jessica.

‘Lonely?’ said Eric stoutly. ‘Not I. No time.’

‘No, I suppose not,’ said Jessica.

‘No problem,’ said Eric.

‘Will you have one yourself?’ invited Harry.

‘I believe I will,’ said Eric, as though drinking alcoholic liquor was foreign to his nature, ‘and no cold tea for me today. I’ll have a brandy, and here’s to your healths.’

‘Cheers,’ said Jessica, lugubriously. She lit one of her cigarettes and when she’d smoked that she had another, which made her feel slightly ill. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said.

‘I must go and tidy away some papers,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll see you at lunch.’

Jessica walked in the green Christmas morning with her coat unbuttoned and her spirits round her ankles. ‘Cursed, cowardly dogs . . .’ she said under her breath, ‘I fear you not.’ She walked and walked, but the oppression went with her. She came to one of the rock formations for which the island was admired: it started at ground level and rose gradually, and then abruptly, until it terminated in a sheer drop to the snarling waves, foaming round its feet. Jessica walked, then climbed until she had reached its limit, where she sat down, out of breath, and lit another cigarette in the soggy stillness. She was coughing so hard that she could hear nothing. The turf was damp, the view unimpressive. She wouldn’t have cared if she died.

Jon lay on his stomach in a small, wet declivity where the rock just started to rise. From here he could not see Jessica, but he knew where she was. He had followed her, had stood and watched her until she reached the heights and had stopped.

He was, he told himself, displeased with Jessica. She was not, he reminded himself, a particularly good actress, and she had no grace: she was, he considered, in all probability a lesbian. He had for a while intended to remonstrate with her and demand to know why she pretended not to desire him; to confront her and insist that she gave up all subterfuge, but now that he saw her sitting on the edge of a cliff he thought the best thing he could do would be to push her off. The move would undoubtedly teach her a lesson. He began to crawl forward.

Jessica finished her cigarette and threw the butt down into the sea, watching it as it fell. The sizzle as ember met water would be inaudible from where she sat, but she could imagine it. ‘I curse you,’ she remarked aloud, experimentally, ‘and the foul harlots that bore you . . .’

Jon, hearing her talking to herself, concluded that she was crazy as well as devious, and was reaching out a hand when he felt he was being watched. There was a seal out there with an unblinking eye on him. He hesitated . . .

‘What on earth possessed you to climb so high?’ inquired Harry, panting a little. His daily walks in Hyde Park kept him fit, but he was no longer a young man.

‘Crikey,’ said Jessica, turning and noting that she now had two companions. ‘Piccadilly Circus.’ She looked at Jon and then looked away, embarrassed.

‘I nearly didn’t make it,’ said Harry. ‘I’d forgotten how the rock rises.’

‘I thought you were fiddling with your papers,’ said Jessica.

‘Got bored,’ said Harry, getting his breath back.

Jon smiled straight at him. ‘It’s nice up here,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ said Harry.

‘We can walk home together,’ said Jessica. ‘I hope all this exercise has given you an appetite for lunch.’

They caught up with Ronald and Anita on the way back to the inn. Anita was waving her hands around and speaking shrilly. ‘. . . I tell you that’s where the cottage was,’ she was saying. ‘I remember the wall ending there and the tree on one side and the pillar box on the other . . .’

‘It isn’t there now,’ said Ronald, obviously not for the first time.

‘I
know
it isn’t there now,’ said Anita, ‘but it
was
. I saw it. I spoke to the woman. She was knitting a sweater for her man and she spoke to me. She was eating a cough sweet – I smelt it. She gave me a cup of tea.’

‘It must have been further along the road,’ said Ronald.

‘There isn’t any further along the road . . .’ said Anita, but she stopped arguing as the others came level.

‘Nice walk?’ asked Jessica.

‘Yes, thank you,’ said Anita. ‘Most refreshing.’

‘How far did you go?’ asked Jessica, noting that these two fellow travellers had clearly been having a row, and adopting a friendly, eirenic tone.

‘Right to where the little road stops,’ said Anita.

‘Not as far as the castle ruins, then,’ said Jessica.

‘No,’ said Anita.

‘Oh,’ said Jessica. She stumbled and Harry took her elbow to steady her. ‘These shoes aren’t as sensible as they look,’ she said. ‘It’s a funny sort of Christmas Day,’ she continued as no one else said anything. ‘I keep thinking there ought to be children. I haven’t seen any since I came.’

They passed a field with some cows in it and she wondered if Harry had once taken his little boy on the Eve of Christmas to see them kneeling in the stable, except that cows didn’t frequent stables much these days and she hadn’t noticed a stable in the Manse yard. Perhaps they knelt in the fields. When they lay down it meant it was going to rain. It was raining; a thin drizzle was drifting down from the hills.

‘Oh hell,’ said Jessica, buttoning her coat, ‘why are those lying cows standing up? They’re supposed to lie down when it’s going to rain.’

‘I expect they stand up when it starts,’ said Anita, her temper improving as they neared the inn.

The regulars were in the bar. Ronald was saddened to see that his would-be analysand was among them. She became animated when she saw him. ‘When are you going to tell my fortune then?’ she cried.

‘He’s not a soothsayer,’ said Anita, wondering why the girl did not turn her attentions to the golden-haired Jon if she wasn’t getting any change out of the professor. Although she had fallen a little in love with Ronald, she couldn’t see that he might have any attractions for anyone else. The girl looked her up and down and again dismissed her as negligible. She didn’t much care for Jessica either: she had recognized her but was damned if she’d give her any satisfaction by saying so, not being what could be called a woman’s woman. Anita, who had grown accustomed to thinking of herself in spinsterish terms – although she would not have put it like that – imagined that more red-blooded females, well, the tarty sort, would have found Jon irresistible, and here she did herself less than justice: most females, when they had got over the shock of his beauty, found Jon unsatisfactory. Ronald, who if not much fun was undeniably masculine, approximated more closely to what they thought they were looking for.

‘Why are you so quiet?’ asked Jessica of Harry.

‘I was thinking,’ said Harry. ‘I was thinking you’d be wise not to find yourself alone with that boy. Come and sit down.’

‘I know,’ said Jessica, following him to a table. ‘I told you . . .’

‘I don’t mean that,’ said Harry. ‘He followed you today. I went straight upstairs after you’d gone, looked out of the window and he was following you. Now that would’ve been all right, nothing wrong in that, you might say, just looking for a little companionship on a walk – only he wasn’t trying to catch up with you. I found it worrying.’

‘I see,’ said Jessica. She could – she could see Jon in dark sweater and pants, following her, out of earshot, careful to keep out of sight in case she should turn. He would have been in the role of a secret agent, a guerrilla, a member of the SAS or possibly a Red Indian brave. She remembered the look on his face when eventually, she had turned to find him behind her, and Harry speaking. She had seen that look before – once when she had refused to climb with him to the top where the snow lay, and once . . .

‘What is it?’ asked Harry, as she was quiet.

‘I remember where I met him before,’ she said. ‘It was a party after some commercial. I was drunk – we were all drunk. He must’ve been playing some part in the thing – I don’t remember what, and I was talking to him in a corner when Mike – he’s my boyfriend – came and said it was time to go home. He – Jon – had that look on his face then. I must have said goodbye, I’ll ring you, or something, and we left. I do that sometimes. I tell people I’ll ring them and I don’t and they resent it. It was all quite trivial.’

‘I thought he might have been going to push you over,’ said Harry.

‘Crikey,’ said Jessica.

‘Although I could of course be wrong,’ said Harry.

‘And there was me worrying because the other two had had a little tiff,’ said Jessica. ‘How ironical.’ She felt not afraid, but annoyed. ‘He’s got a cheek,’ she said. ‘If anyone was going to murder me I’d prefer it to be somebody I knew well, somebody with some
real
cause.’ She imagined herself hurtling into the sea, propelled by the hand of a bit-part actor. ‘And they’d never have known,’ she said. ‘They’d have thought it was an accident – all my own fault for wearing silly shoes.’