The Inn at the Edge of the World Read online

  The Innat at the

  Edge of the World

  The Innat at the

  Edge of the World

  ALICE THOMAS ELLIS

  Constable & Robinson

  55-56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  This edition published by Corsair,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2012

  Copyright © Alice Thomas Ellis 1990

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78033-661-9

  eISBN: 978-1-78033-888-0

  Printed and bound in the European Union

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Cover illustration: Diane Law

  Cover design: www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

  For Stephanie

  ‘It is not given to the Seal People to be ever content . . . for their land-longings shall be sea-longings and their sea-longings shall be land-longings.’

  ‘The island mentality,’ said Eric. He gazed out at the inn yard from where he sat in his tiny office, wondering what he had meant by this remark and why he had spoken aloud. Perhaps he was going mad.

  ‘You’ve got a hangover,’ said his wife. ‘You always talk to yourself when you’ve got a hangover.’

  Eric jumped. His wife walked about as silently as a house fly. She stood in the doorway, and to prove how cold she was feeling she clutched her cardigan across her chest with both hands. ‘It’s so sodding cold,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve lit the fire in the bar,’ said Eric.

  ‘Waste of money,’ said his wife. ‘There’ll be nobody in.’

  Not for the first time Eric tried to imagine how he’d feel if he murdered her. Not how he’d feel while he was doing it – the act, no doubt, would give him a momentary satisfaction – but how he would react afterwards. His principal emotion, he thought, would be embarrassment. Murder was neither respectable nor sophisticated; for the rest of his life he would feel miserable and shy if anyone so much as glanced at him. The whispers – ‘He murdered his wife, you know.’ He had no real fear of the immediate consequences since he thought he would only spend a few years in jail with remission for good conduct. He could give a course on engineering to the other inmates. A number of wife-killers had got off very lightly recently. He had once asked a customer, a solicitor from Edinburgh, about the complexities of divorce. The man had advised against it these days. It was a lengthy, expensive and disruptive business, fraught with recrimination and ill-feeling. It was quicker and neater, he said, to murder your spouse, plead intolerable provocation or insanity, or what you would, pay your debt to society and emerge from open prison to resume life with your property intact and no maintenance payments to worry about. Eric had been shocked, but as the solicitor had spent the day fishing and was presently warming himself up with a number of whiskies he had made allowances for him. The man could not be serious, for if he meant what he said he would endanger his own livelihood. It was popular wisdom that lawyers grew fat on the legal fruits of marital disharmony. Sometimes he reflected that an innkeeper convicted of murder might prove a draw to the morbid, but he had never cared for the limelight and did not relish the idea of himself as a sideshow. Besides, every now and then his wife still made him catch his breath. She had a way of looking up with a sudden smile that changed her face, changed the whole of her. At the moment she looked as sullen as a bull, bored and rather dangerous.

  ‘So wear your fur coat, Mabel,’ he said, spitefully. She loathed being called Mabel, and she had wanted a new fur coat for a long while. Once upon a time he had called her Ma Belle. Then, as he got more used to her, he had called her Maybe and sometimes Maybe Baby, until the time came when she had felt she knew him well enough to ask him not to do that; she preferred being called Poppet. Now, as a compromise, he usually called her Mab, but when she was being too awful he called her Mabel.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked. He tried to hide the paper he’d been typing on but she walked up behind him and took it from his hand. ‘Dreading Christmas?’ she read in an unnatural tone. ‘Then get away from it all in a small hotel at the edge of the world . . .’ Eric reached for the paper but she held it above her head. ‘Oh, honestly . . .’ she said.

  ‘Why do you use that silly voice?’ asked Eric.

  ‘Because it’s a silly advertisement,’ said Mabel.

  Eric lost his temper in a minor way. He pushed back his chair without considering the consequences, fetching her a shrewd blow in the stomach as the arm-rest revolved. It was what is known as a captain’s chair.

  ‘Ouch,’ said Mabel with an unjustifiable degree of outrage considering the circumstances. ‘Can’t you watch what you’re doing, you ape?’

  ‘I can’t see out of the back of my head,’ explained Eric, regaining self-control.

  ‘If you ask me you can’t see out of the front of your head,’ said Mabel, fondling her diaphragm.

  His control slipped again. ‘Give that to me,’ cried Eric, lunging forward to seize the paper.

  Alarmed, Mabel shrank back. ‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me,’ she said. ‘I told you that last time – you ever lay a finger on me again and . . .’

  ‘That was an accident,’ said Eric, weary now. ‘You know perfectly well it was an accident.’ A small barrel of beer had once rolled out of his hands in the inn yard and Mabel had put her foot under it. That was the way Eric saw it.

  ‘Accident my foot,’ said Mabel, unaware of the subtle resonance of this remark. ‘You knew damn well I was there. I told you then – you ever lay another finger on me . . .’

  It was guilt, thought Eric, that made her so determined to blame him for the occurrence. She had been particularly bad that day, taunting him as he had struggled all by himself to perform the multifarious tasks of a small innkeeper; asking him whether he was satisfied now that he had dragged her away from the comfort of their modern luxury home in Telford and dumped her here in the teeth of the Atlantic gales with no one to talk to and nowhere to go.

  It was partly because of the people she had talked to and the places she went that Eric had resolved to realize a vague ambition and buy himself an inn at the edge of the world. It wasn’t as though she had contented herself with talking to the sleek-suited sales executives who had thronged the lounge and patio of what the estate agent had described as their detached luxury house, winter and summer; and it wasn’t as though she had habitually gone to museums, theatres and picture galleries, back in what she referred to as ‘civilization’. No, she had frequented dubious night spots, endangering her health, while claiming that she organized her social life only to further his career by mingling with influential people. The absurdity of this was such that he had never found words to refute it, and it was now quite possible that Mabel herself believed it to be so. He had left it too late to tell her she was talking crap, and had put himself in the wrong by bringing her away without due explanation. She thought him eccentric, unfeeling and irresponsible – completely lacking in sex appeal, in fact – and there was nothing whatever he could do about it.

  ‘Well, I’ve warned you,’ said his wife. ‘You just touch me once more . . .’ She dropped the paper on the desk, bored with it, and went off, moodily caressing her midriff.

  Eric now hated his advertisement. He felt as exposed and shamed as if
he had written a delicately secret poem about his soul and his wife had mocked it in the market place. He crumpled it up in his hand, walked across the narrow road to the sea’s brink and threw it on the waves.

  There was a grey seal out there. He watched it and thought it watched him back, head raised for a while from the waters that must surely, surely stretch to the world’s edge.

  As usual Eric felt less melancholy with the evening. If he was put to the torture he would never admit that he sometimes felt oppressed by the grey wastes of the ocean, the vastness of the sky with its set, cold stars. It was for these that he had left the smallness of the Midlands, the horrid comfort of modern houses where the bathrooms had no windows and begonias grew in boxes. He had come to find peace in the timeless spaces, but he wasn’t making enough money and sometimes felt that he had been conned – as indeed he had been. He had been deceived by the previous owner, who had given him an inaccurate estimate of the benefits accruing from the tourist trade and a wholly untrue assessment of the year’s average profits. In a corner of his mind he knew this; had known it at the time, but declined to take it into account. He had wanted the pub too much to be put off by its disadvantages, and he didn’t even resent the previous owner’s dishonesty; it was only to be expected. What he did mind was the indifference of the land and sea about him, and if he had had the resolution to examine his feelings he would have found that he resented the way they ignored him. They just sat there. He might have been anyone. He had come prepared for a love affair with the sea and land, but his love was unrequited and now it was dying. Sometimes he felt afraid, for he was a rational man and rational men do not shrink from the loneliness of everything. Rational men do not acknowledge it, having more important matters to think about.

  He closed the inner door of the bar against the wind from the sea, and went to kick the sparking log in the grate; the red-shaded lamps gave an illusion of warmth and his first two whiskies supplied the reality. Mabel was in her customary place at the bar. Not behind it, as he had naively expected she would be when they left Telford, but slumped on a stool, still clutching her cardigan about her with one hand and grasping a glass in the other. Since only her husband and the boatman were present she kept her skirt pulled well down over her knees to protect them from the draught.

  The boatman spoke. ‘Och,’ he observed, ‘there’re no’ many folks around for the time of the year.’

  ‘Finlay,’ said Eric, exasperated by this needless observation, ‘it’s October. Of course there’re no’ many folks around. The season’s over.’

  Finlay, who was a big Scotsman with a big Scots nose and a brow more geological than anatomical, went on talking. Usually the ingratiating native, when attempting to describe the customs of his country to an outsider, wears an expression that combines modest pride with self-deprecatory reservation, for while he may value his traditions and feel affection for them, he cannot believe that they truly hold much interest for the stranger, since strangers, by definition, have come from a wider, more sophisticated world – or so it is assumed by the innocent. Finlay did not wear this expression: Finlay appeared to regard the stranger with mildly amused contempt. He gave the impression that he knew what he knew and did not care in the least for the experience or opinions of the outsider – whatever they might be. As he got into his stride his accent became nigh impenetrable, but no matter: ‘When Allan Maclean had the place,’ he said, ‘there were folks sleeping in heaps on the floor.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Mabel, in a better mood now that she too had had her first whiskies.

  ‘Because all the bedrooms were full,’ said Finlay.

  ‘Why?’ asked Eric in his turn. ‘Why was the place full in October?’

  ‘For the shooting,’ said Finlay. ‘For the game.’

  ‘What game?’ asked Eric, beginning to sense again the feeling of being somehow excluded, of not under standing. As far as he had been able to gather, it was at least two centuries since Allan Maclean had had the place.

  ‘Why, the isle was wild with game,’ said Finlay, who was doubtless exaggerating. ‘With partridge, and capercaillies, pheasant and duck and deer.’

  ‘I’ve never seen any,’ said Mabel. ‘All I ever see is poxy seagulls.’

  “There’re oyster catchers too,’ said Eric defensively, ‘and cormorants, and I’ve seen ducks.’

  ‘What’s happened to all this game then?’ asked Mabel. ‘I suppose they’ve shot it all.’ Her tone was scornful, and Finlay gave her a brief impassive glance.

  ‘Times change,’ he said, unanswerably.

  ‘We could restock it,’ said Eric. ‘Get some chicks from the mainland, a breeding pair of deer . . .’

  Nobody took up this suggestion and the conversation died for a while until Eric’s whiskies had restored his will to live. ‘Finlay,’ he said, ‘if I get, say, half a dozen guests to stay over the Christmas period do you think your sister-in-law would come in and give me a hand?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Finlay, ‘aye, she would.’

  No one found this assurance on the lady’s behalf surprising. Finlay’s sister-in-law was out on almost constant loan, like a lawn-mower or a piece of farming equipment too valuable to be permanently owned by any one individual or organization. She was always available in a crisis, to rub the backs of the bedridden, watch the dying, mind those children whose mothers had gone off to Glasgow on the rampage, and help out in the inn – either behind the bar or behind the scenes, making beds and scones for tea and cleaning the rooms. Finlay made sure that her utility was well rewarded, for his sister-in-law lived with him and her sister, and he was responsible for her.

  ‘Aye,’ said Finlay again. ‘Just let me know when you want her.’

  ‘When the moon is made of green cheese, I should think,’ said Mabel.

  ‘I’m going to put an ad in some of the London weeklies,’ explained Eric, whose courage was high again since night had flooded day, and the inn, all closed and sealed against the indifference of the wilderness, might have been a small boat bobbing through eternity, endlessly seaworthy. I obviously suffer from agoraphobia, thought Eric, but what he said was, ‘We’ve all heard people moaning about Christmas, about how they’re never going to go through another one, how they’re going to find some small hotel at the end of the world and ignore the whole thing. Well, I’m going to give them the opportunity. There must be thousands of them out there.’

  ‘You won’t have room for them all,’ said Mabel.

  ‘I shall accept the first six,’ said Eric with the calm dignity of the third whisky.

  Mabel stared at the row of optics asking herself whether this deserved replying to. On the whole, she decided, it didn’t: an argument of this type was always won by the person who could shout the loudest and, as she knew this would certainly be herself, it didn’t seem worth the trouble.

  A man who used to be a farmer came in from the dark for a pint. He had sold his livestock when the smallholding had proved uneconomic. Now he spent his time mending other people’s tractors, catching lobsters in pots and encouraging visitors to the island to stay in the secondhand caravan he had installed in a disused field. Eric resented his enterprise since, as an incomer, he himself was not qualified to diversify his energies in the same fashion. He had an unexpressed sense that as long as he confined himself to running the inn he would be accepted, albeit somewhat reluctantly, but if he began to compete with the indigenous population by using his engineering skills or potting lobsters things untoward might begin to happen. He thought, with some indignation, that it was unfair for the islanders to offer accommodation to travellers who might otherwise have stayed at the inn in the way they were meant to, while denying him any opportunity to augment his income. It was, he supposed, something to do with the island mentality.

  He wrote out his advertisement again that night, after closing time, and next day he posted it off to the various publications he considered fit to carry it.

  ‘. . . inn at the edge of the world . . .’ r
ead Harry. He had read every word of the Spectator, starting as always at the back and going through like an Arab, from right to left. He had considered trying the competition and deferred the exercise. Now he was reading the small ads. The remains of his breakfast – the shell of his egg, the crumbs of his toast and bitter marmalade, the dregs of his tea – he had meticulously disposed of, and had washed the dishes in cold water. He was a military man, disciplined and tidy, and he had been sad for almost as long as he could remember. In a moment he would put on his overcoat and go for his daily walk in Hyde Park: then, since it was Thursday, he would lunch at his club. Occasionally, or perhaps most days, he thought of death, but he was a Christian and had been a soldier and the option of suicide was not available to him.

  His admiration for and envy of General Gordon who had died comparatively young, albeit in a possibly unenviable fashion – but then what mattered the means to so desirable an end – had led him to attempt an essay on the last days of Khartoum. The essay had grown and had stretched backwards to encompass all that he could discover about Charles George Gordon and now, to his surprise, he found he was well on the way to writing a book. He had never intended to do that, but he had realized that it was as good a way as any other to fill up the endless hours, and better than many. There was an emptiness inside him that once he had thought might be filled – by love or happiness or peace – but he had grown to understand that it could merely be lessened, contracted until the void ceased to exist, and he would be healed and whole. This, he knew, could only be fully accomplished with the assistance of the Grim Reaper, but writing helped a little.

  He dreaded Christmas no more than any other time, and ‘dread’ was not the word for his response to life. It was more a weary astonishment at being confined in so seemingly purposeless an existence. His faith served only to illuminate and, to some extent, define his bewilderment: faith revealed the presence of a window opening to freedom, but the window was barred – faith itself forming the defining grille.