The Inn at the Edge of the World (22 page)

‘Harry,’ said Jessica, at the door of his room, ‘could I have a B and S?’ She made no apology.

‘You don’t look well,’ observed Harry.

‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Only I’ve just been reading about Hell again. I think nineteenth-century Hell is probably worse than the Hell of other ages – like nineteenth-century medicine – just beginning to be modern so they tried every which way to keep you alive and you couldn’t die as fast as you’d have liked. They were always experimenting with new methods to prolong the agony. How do I know that? Is it true, do you suppose? What’s it got to do with Hell anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Harry, ‘but I see what you mean.’

‘Diphtheria and whooping cough and scarlet fever and caustics and disinfectant, and all the curtains drawn, and the fear of Hell,’ said Jessica. ‘I know what today feels like. It feels like a Protestant’s Sunday. No joy. Worse – a reminder of Hell. I shan’t try and skip Christmas again, it isn’t worth it.’

‘Gordon was good on hell,’ said Harry. ‘Shall I tell you?’

‘Will it cheer me up?’ asked Jessica.

‘It might,’ said Harry.

‘I’m not sure if I’m frightened of death or Hell,’ said Jessica, ‘or both, or neither, or whether I’ve merely got indigestion, or maybe I was last incarnated in some Victorian villa with bad drains, and I can’t shake the memory off. Tell me about Gordon and Hell.’

Harry turned to his notes. ‘“I may say . . .”’ he read, ‘ “. . . I have died suddenly over a hundred times; but in these deaths I have never felt the least doubt of our salvation. Nothing can be more abject and miserable than the usual conception of God. Accept what I say – namely, that He has put us in a painful position (I believe with our perfect consent, for if Christ came to do His will, so did we, His members) to learn what He is, and that He will extricate us. Imagine to yourself, what pleasure would it be to Him to burn us or to torture us? Can we believe any
human being
capable of creating us for such a purpose? Would it show his power? Why, He is omnipotent! Would it show His justice? He is righteous – no one will deny it. We credit God with attributes which are utterly hateful to the meanest of men. Looking at our darkness of vision, how can He be what we credit Him with? I quite wonder at the long time it has taken us to see that the general doctrine of the Church is so erroneous.” I suppose the climate of opinion at the time was still clouded by Calvinism.’

‘I wonder if he believed in the transmigration of souls?’ said Jessica, who had lived with a Buddhist convert for a while.

‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Harry.

‘I wonder if the churchmen were mad with him?’ said Jessica, entertaining an image of a crowd of the clergy wearing shovel-hats and clutching hymn books, pursuing a camel-mounted Gordon through a wilderness of dust.

‘If they were they probably couldn’t say much,’ said Harry, ‘because during and after Khartoum he was the darling of the public’

‘I wonder if I’ll ever be the darling of the public,’ said Jessica, selfishly, ‘or would that only mean that more people would want to murder me?’

And Harry, much as he liked her, wished that she would go away and read her book, for he had his own thoughts to contend with.

It was getting beyond a joke. Jon had stood for nearly an hour in his room with the door ajar, watching and waiting for Jessica to emerge from Harry’s room. He was conscious of no discomfort, but stood quite still behind the door, unblinking, and looking madder than usual, as people are wont to do when they stand too long without moving, their heads poked forward and their gaze glued to some expected or imaginary happening.

When at last Jessica appeared he still did not move but his eyes followed her as far as they could. She had passed beyond his vision when he heard her swear, and then she turned and came back. What she had done was to drift along the corridor with her hand on the banister rail and the key dangling from her finger, so not surprisingly she had dropped it into the hall. She walked back more swiftly, cursing. To Jon she bore the appearance of a person who has wrenched herself unwillingly from the beloved object, got to the end of the corridor, said to herself, ‘Stuff it – I
won’t
leave him,’ and is on her way back to the aforesaid beloved object. He suddenly shut the door and turned to face the window, shaking with what might have seemed to an impartial observer like the onset of a fit. An observer would undoubtedly have considered his demeanour most alarming. Jessica found her key on the mat in the hall and walked back to her room, unseen by anyone. Jon, also unseen, permitted himself overt expression of his
malaise
: he grimaced and thrust at the air with his head and hands, and growled quietly. After a while he washed his face in cold water in the peat-stained basin, looking in the glass as he dried it. Now that he had an observer, even though it was only himself, he composed his features and watched them until they seemed normal again. After a while he went to Harry’s room and stood with his ear to the door, listening for sounds of sinful rapture. There was no noise at all, so Jon found the silence even more suggestive than sound would have been, opened the door without knocking and went in. Harry was standing looking out of the window, but to Jon the room had an unfinished air since there was no sign of Jessica with her clothes off and her hair tumbled. He had been so certain that she would be there, had had such a clear vision of
how
she would be that he thought her absence a hallucination, and stepped forward with his hands outstretched, feeling for her invisible presence.

‘Yes?’ said Harry.

‘Where is she?’ said Jon, turning round and turning again.

‘She isn’t here,’ said Harry.

‘She is . . .’ said Jon, and stopped with the caution of the madman. He said reasonably, ‘You’re much too old for her, you know.’

Harry watched him and said nothing.

‘Not that she’s so young,’ continued Jon, ‘but you’re too old for her.’ He lowered his voice. ‘She’s a nympho maniac, isn’t she?’ he said. ‘She comes to my room in the night . . .’ he stopped again, not sure that that was what he had meant to say. ‘You’ve got a good view from here,’ he observed, joining Harry by the window. ‘You can watch them coming from the shore.’ He hadn’t meant to say that either and closed his eyes for a second. ‘I’ve been drinking,’ he confided after a while as Harry still said nothing. ‘I’ve been drinking a bottle of whisky and eating peanuts. She’ll be angry when she sees how much I’ve drunk and I haven’t left any peanuts for her. She’ll say . . .’ He laid his hand against the cold of the window pane. ‘There’s someone watching me out there,’ he said. ‘Out in the sea. They have grey eyes – grey as the sea. They’re looking at me.’

‘The owl was a baker’s daughter,’ said Harry.

‘Yes, she was,’ said Jon, unsurprised at this disclosure. Then he left.

Harry stayed by the window, looking out to sea – to where the grey eyes were watching. He wondered what he should do.

It was night-time in the bar and outside the snow was at last beginning to fall, bringing an illusion of warmth and safety to the denizens of the inn.

‘Isn’t this cosy,’ said Mrs H., taking off her anorak to reveal a blue dress, sequinned on the shoulders and hips. It was, supposed Jessica, what is known as a cocktail frock, one of a species now largely extinct except on remote islands. ‘I’d’ve thought they’d shot the last one years ago,’ she said to herself, feeling out of place again; lost and defenceless in the alien and unfashionable ambience. ‘It must have been hiding in a corner all lonely and afraid. It’s probably terrified now that a collector will bag it . . .’

‘Did you have a nice lunch?’ asked Mrs H. ‘I’ve left John washing up.’ She looked round to see if by any chance there were any new men available for the evening and was disappointed, though unastonished. ‘What a dump,’ she said, not critically nor even sadly, but as one remarking on a fact. Eric frowned but did not contradict her.

‘Sorry,’ said Jessica, ‘I was thinking about something else. What did you say?’

‘I said, did you have a nice lunch,’ repeated Mrs H.

‘Very nice,’ said Jessica. ‘Did you?’

‘It was all right,’ said Mrs H. ‘He overcooked the sprouts but I don’t really mind that. I don’t like vegetables the way they do them now – just show them the hot water and slap them in front of you.’

‘Al dente
,’ said Eric, defensively.

‘Undercooked,’ said Mrs H. ‘Doesn’t even kill the germs.’

‘Some vegetables are better raw,’ said Anita, ‘if you wash them well.’

‘We have a murderer in our midst,’ said Jessica.

‘Pardon,’ said Mrs H.

‘I was thinking aloud,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s a line from my new play.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ said Mrs H.

‘Sometimes you only need to blanch them,’ said Anita.

‘My wife used to cook little marrows – in a lot of butter, I think,’ said Ronald, reminiscently.

‘Courgettes,’ said Anita. ‘I do them with garlic and tomatoes.’ She hated Ronald’s wife.

‘I wonder if you can eat ladder fern,’ said Jessica. They looked at her inquiringly. ‘If you tied bits of it in bunches you could steam them like asparagus.’

‘Why would you want to?’ asked Anita.

‘I don’t really,’ said Jessica, ‘only there’s such a lot of it about it seems a waste not to eat it.’

‘You don’t have to eat everything,’ said Anita.

‘I suppose not,’ said Jessica. Only one more day and she could go home and see what Mike had been up to. She would stay close to Harry on the train and not go near the platform’s edge in case Jon should take it upon himself to mince her under the train wheels. He had just come into the bar and was standing to one side, looking at her.

The professor entered with a girl in the duffel coat. He seemed annoyed and Jessica wondered what he had to be cross about when, so far as she knew, nobody was trying to kill him. At present she felt she was the only person in the world with something to be really cross about.

‘They’ve been at it again,’ he said. ‘I nearly caught them this time. There’s just enough snow to show up the footprints on the lawn.’

‘They were playing music,’ said the girl in the duffel coat unexpectedly.

‘Bollocks,’ said the professor. ‘They weren’t. It was the wind in the wires.’ This was clearly the continuation of an argument which had begun earlier and was leading nowhere.

‘They were,’ said the girl, and Mrs H. brightened at the prospect of discord.

‘It was probably the ghosts again,’ she said. ‘You’re haunted.’

‘I’m not haunted,’ said the professor, as though he’d been accused of having lice. The distinction of having a ghost was obviously outweighed for him by the nuisance of trespass. If the dancers on his lawn came from another element he still resented them pushing his fence down. ‘It’s bloody-minded locals,’ he said and stroked his crotch fretfully, which made Jessica think of Mike again. Perhaps it was the fault of the feminists, she thought, which caused so many men to have to keep publicly checking on their masculinity.

Mrs H. reached over and smacked his wrist. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said in a playful voice.

‘Bollocks,’ said the professor.

Yes, thought Jessica, they did know each other well.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Ronald becoming aware of tension.

‘Someone keeps tearing down my fence,’ said the professor. ‘Some yobs.’

‘If you didn’t have a fence,’ said Ronald, ‘they couldn’t tear it down.’

The professor didn’t bother to answer him.

‘To some personalities,’ said Ronald, ‘the mere fact of prohibition is sufficient to trigger an anti-social response. Without the challenge of imposed boundaries, what might be classed by the layman as the mentally subnormal – the “yobs” of whom you speak – will not even realize that an area is intended to lie beyond their reach and competence, and therefore their resentments do not become unmanageable.’

‘He means that if you see a sign saying “Keep off the grass”,’ translated Anita who was beginning to understand his style after hours in his company, ‘you won’t. You’ll walk on it because the sign says it’s there. Isn’t that so, Ronald?’

‘That,’ agreed Ronald, ‘at its simplest, is more or less what I mean.’

‘Bollocks,’ insisted the professor, determined to retain his fence and embrace his grudge.

A chill draught swept into the bar and Jessica looked up to see who had come in. It was Finlay wearing his oilskins and lurching a little. He took his flute from a pocket and blew into it, whereupon his sister-in-law leaned across the counter and took it from him. He laughed, requesting whisky and she served him silently. ‘Whaur’s the colonel?’ he said, looking about him. ‘I hae a message.’ His sister-in-law gave him a warning glance and he laughed again.

Eric watched them coldly. Their seemingly meaningless exchanges served, as always, to make him feel left out. He was overwhelmed by anticlimax and he wanted his wife even though she could be so disagreeable. He was lonely. ‘I’m going to get some mineral water from the back,’ he said, but nobody seemed to care.

It was snowing steadily in the inn yard and through the drifting flakes he could see the boy sitting on the wall. He watched him for a while and it seemed the boy watched him back, as the seals sometimes watched him when he stood on the foreshore, but neither of them spoke.