The Inn at the Edge of the World (9 page)

‘This sounds to me like shop,’ said the professor, eyeing Jon’s blond curls with dislike. ‘We don’t allow shop on the island.’

‘No, no,’ said Eric in an undertone. ‘No, no, no. We’re not going to have any of that.’ He glanced round to check that there were enough large men to sit on people should the need arise and started out from behind the bar.

The locals discouraged violence because it could draw the attention of the police. They only had one policeman on the island, and since they didn’t want the number to increase they assisted him
in absentia
whenever they could. It was part of the island mentality. Islanders are used to handling their own problems and resent outside interference. It was only in the season when the bald-headed ones came over that the locals tended to stay discreetly in the background. They were accustomed to disarming those of their number who had had a dram too much and taken it into their minds to shoot their womenfolk – or lifting the hopelessly inebriated out of snow-filled ditches, drying them off and drying them out before hauling them home in tractor-drawn wagons filled with sheep nuts. They treated these eventualities as matter-of-factly as might a mainlander confronted by a person with hiccups and humanely dropping a cold key down the back of his neck, or a caring Muscovite rubbing snow on the nose of a passing fellow citizen who is himself unaware that frostbite is setting in. There was an element of altruism in their behaviour, but it was also very little trouble to assist in these small ways and it kept the authorities at bay. Medical men were not held in high esteem because of their attitude to alcohol.

‘I think I’ll have a pint,’ said Harry. ‘What’ll everyone else have?’ He had stepped between Jon and the professor and was feeling for money in his back pocket: the angle of his elbow forced Jon away to a small but safe distance from the professor.

‘My, my,’ said Mrs H., and giggled.

Eric leaned over the bar and gave her a look; she subsided. Ronald and Anita arrived in time to be included in the round and the tension faded – largely because neither of them had noticed it.

‘It’s very beautiful from the top of the hill,’ said Anita. ‘You can see for miles, except it was a bit misty. I’m quite damp.’

‘You need to wrap up,’ said Eric. Of course it was a bit misty. It was December. ‘There’s a place over the brow where they do pony-trekking. You can go right round the top.’ He felt he should warn them that the cliff top could be dangerous in the mist: many an unwary beast and occasional holidaymaker had walked thoughtlessly over the edge, but he didn’t want to denigrate the island. Anyway, the advantages far outweighed the hazards for those with eyes to see.

‘Do you get much crime here?’ asked Ronald. His attention had been caught by the locals in the corner: they looked villainous, and none too clean. The theories of Lombroso was one of his interests. They might be worth re-examining if approached in a judicious, clinical fashion by an impartial person with a deep knowledge of the complexities of the human organism.

‘No,’ said Eric.

‘Murder, incest, rape,’ said the professor, laughing. ‘Just the usual.’

Ronald, who would have expected nothing less, was not surprised, but Anita looked disconcerted.

‘There’s very little theft,’ said Mrs H. fairly. ‘I can leave my cottage open all day and night.’ She bore three love-bites on the side of her neck. Tart, thought Eric.

‘I’m hungry,’ said Jessica to the company at large. ‘Are you hungry?’ she said to Harry.

Jon watched them go together to the dining room. He did not fear the old man as a rival but he didn’t like the way Jessica was ignoring him – playing hard to get.

The professor turned his attention to Anita. ‘Do you think women have fantasies of raping men?’ he asked. ‘Do men have fantasies of being raped by women?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Anita. The professor reminded her of a man in the accounts department who said this sort of thing at office parties. Her mother would have described it as dirty talk, and while Anita was too modern to use this turn of phrase she found it definitely lacking in romance.

‘No,’ said Ronald, who didn’t need to ponder over the question because he knew the answer. ‘Women don’t have fantasies about raping men because women haven’t got . . .’ He paused as he became aware that this was not his consulting room where such matters were tossed freely about and where he was meticulous in calling a spade a spade, but a public bar.

‘Not got a what?’ asked Mrs H. brightly.

‘They haven’t got the barely subliminal libidinous thrust of the oedipal compulsion which in the vulnerable psyche can lead to the overt and societally unacceptable expression of psychotic malfunctioning,’ said Ronald.

‘Come again,’ said Mrs H., her ardour chilled by this meaningless remark. Ronald was pleased with himself. He had found he didn’t like the professor and Mrs H. and he had shut them up with this well-chosen phrase. Already the holiday must be doing him good if he could relax so far as to use his professional expertise to silence people he didn’t take to. Obviously he would have to stop short of behaving irresponsibly, but he wondered if perhaps he was acquiring a more developed sense of humour – a quality in which his wife had considered him deficient. He felt himself smiling.

Eric was pleased with him too. He didn’t encourage heavy discussions at the bar but anything was better than the way those two had been taking the conversation.

Anita was impressed. She had bumped into Ronald as she walked home from the hill and had found him heavy going. Now she realized that she had underrated him, for here, clearly, was a man both clever and serious. She wondered if he was married.

‘What a
crasher
,’ said Mrs H. as Ronald walked, head high, to the dining room, Anita at his heels.

‘He’s a brilliant man in his field,’ said Eric. ‘World famous.’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ said Mrs H.

‘No?’ said Eric. ‘Well, we’d hardly expect you to, would we?’ which was as about as rude as he ever permitted himself to be to the punters.

‘Well, I must love you and leave you,’ said the professor, rising from his stool. The girl followed him. Nobody showed any regret.

‘The reappraisal of a historical figure always presents a difficult problem, particularly when his history is comparatively recent, and during the intervening years other people have given their own versions of his character and the events of his life – some of them nearer to him in time than others, and those not infrequently hostile to the principles and ideas which guided him through his span on earth. The heroes of yesterday are often mocked and reviled by the rising generation, who are trying by all means to free themselves from the restraints of the past.’

Well, that’s true enough thought Harry, but he had never been satisfied with his opening paragraph and kept, as it were, creeping up on it, hoping to take it by surprise and stun it into submission. The next eighty pages, written in his neat, soldierly hand, had steadily improved as he increased in confidence and facility, but the beginning remained intractable. Then too, how could he convince a largely secular readership of the power and conviction of Gordon’s belief in God? They probably wouldn’t be interested. Gordon famed, as much as anything, for being an eminent Victorian, had been something of an anachronism in his time. What, for instance, would his coreligionists have made of this: ‘I find the Mussulman quite as good a Christian as many a Christian, and do not believe he is in any peril. All of us are more or less Pagans. I like the Mussulman; he is not ashamed of his God; his life is a fairly pure one; certainly he gives himself a good margin in the wife line, but, at any rate, he never poaches on others. Can our Christian people say the same?’ This approval of Mohammedanism would cause raised eyebrows in some quarters even today, although for rather different reasons. Harry wondered if he was too old to communicate anything at all to the younger generation.

Jessica tapped on his door. ‘Oh,’ she said, when she saw the papers lying on the table under the window and the fountain pen unsheathed. ‘You’re working. I’m sorry.’ She wondered what he was writing, but was too polite to ask, and stood near the door so that she could not seem to be peering inquisitively at the closely written sheets. ‘I’ll go away again.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve finished for today.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Jessica. ‘Because I don’t want to interrupt but the Greek god is driving me crackers. Jon, I mean. He keeps talking about some time we were on location together and I can’t remember it at all. Either I was paralytic or it never happened and it’s him who’s crackers.’ It was possible that she had been engrossed in a performance, concentrating on not forgetting her lines, or agitating herself about Mike or someone, but it was worrying to think that the episode had really happened and she couldn’t remember a thing about it. ‘I do daydream,’ she said.

‘Perhaps you see too many people,’ said Harry. ‘I had a brother in the diplomatic corps who had the same trouble. He said after a while everyone looked exactly the same to him and in the end it didn’t matter. He had two expressions – one of serious interest and one of affability, and after he’d listened to the other chap for a minute or two he could tell which one he should be wearing. Then, if he concentrated enough, after a while he’d usually remember who the chap was. He said if you let them do the talking they nearly always talked about themselves.’

‘There’s a lot of Greek gods around in my business,’ said Jessica. ‘Dozens of them. I think they should wear labels – like jam. “Blackcurrant: best before 25 Dec. 2000”. Did he go far – your brother?’

‘To the top,’ said Harry.

‘You think I’m daft,’ said Jessica. ‘What are you writing?’ She hadn’t meant to ask, but Harry made her feel at ease.

‘It’s about Gordon,’ said Harry. ‘Chinese Gordon. Gordon of Khartoum,’ he added as Jessica looked unenlightened.

‘Oh him,’ said Jessica. They’d made a film about him with Olivier as the Mahdi. ‘Why?’ she asked.

‘I was just asking myself that question,’ said Harry.

Jessica was embarrassed. He was entitled to ask himself questions, but she wasn’t. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to be nosey.’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘You can help. What do you make of this?’ He turned over the pages and read: ‘One day a Moogi Balaam cursed him from the bank of the river and Gordon noted that it was odd that a disaster happened shortly afterwards. He wrote: “I believe that God may listen to the cries for help from the Heathen who know Him not. These prayers were earnest prayers for celestial aid, in which the pray-er knew he would need help from some unknown power to avert a danger. That the native knows not the true God is true, but God knows him, and moved him to prayer and answered his prayer.”’

‘Well, I call that magnanimous,’ said Jessica. ‘I’d’ve been swearing back at the Moogi whatsit myself.’

‘I know,’ said Harry. ‘Gordon was a complex man. He was a Christian but when he was in the hands of the King of Abyssinia, who said, “You are a Christian and an Englishman,” Gordon said he was just as much an Egyptian and a Mussulman. He believed in reincarnation too . . . am I boring you with this?’

‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘I think it’s extremely interesting. I don’t know anyone like that.’

‘That’s the problem,’ said Harry, ‘I don’t think anyone does any more, so how do I paint a convincing picture of a type of man who seems to be extinct? He believed in being cheerful too; he couldn’t bear people with what he called the “cruet-stand expression of countenance”. Listen: “Why are people like hearses, and look like pictures of misery? It must be from discontent with the government of God, for all things are directed by Him. If by being doleful in appearance it would do any good, I would say, be very doleful; but it does not do any.” And on top of that when the King of Abyssinia was rattling sabres at him he told him he was wasting his time because, far from dreading him since his life was in his hands, he would be exceedingly obliged to anyone who would relieve him of that burden . . .’

‘Like Humphrey Bogart,’ said Jessica. ‘In
Casablanca
. Ingrid Bergman’s threatening to shoot him and he says, “Go ahead. You’ll be doing me a favour.”’

Harry did not say that he understood this attitude very well. Reading of men, younger than himself, who had died by one means or another, he was often conscious of feeling only a painful, longing sense of envy.

‘Anyway,’ he said, snapping the cap decisively on to his fountain pen, ‘let’s go and see what’s for tea.’ He noticed, surprised, that he had been needing to talk to somebody about what he was doing, and Jessica felt the sleepy gratification of a child who has been told a story.

Jon had disappeared when they got downstairs and went into the dining room, Harry being careful, as he had learned to be, not to leave an eye on the brooding antlers which dipped above the doorway.

‘The awful part about full-board,’ said Jessica, ‘is that you eat absolutely everything
and
afternoon tea. They’ll have to widen the doors to get me out.’

‘Yes, isn’t it?’ said Anita. ‘I swore I wouldn’t have any tea but it looks too delicious.’

Finlay’s sister-in-law, who had returned from her rest, silently added a bowl of her sister’s homemade raspberry jelly to the things on the table and went silently back to the kitchen.

‘I’ve never heard her say a word, have you?’ asked Anita.