The Inn at the Edge of the World Page 10

  ‘That’s one of the things I like about you,’ said Jon. ‘When people ask me what I see in you I say, “She knows about wild flowers, she knows their names and where to find them, and when they come out.”’

  Jessica, who had been having enough trouble finding things to say, was struck dumb at this. Her first thought was that, in fact, she knew virtually nothing about wild flowers and that, anyway, her ragged robin was probably scarlet campion or even maiden’s bedstraw, or a spray of earl’s evil: she had learned to distinguish dandelion from coltsfoot during the course of a documentary on a tract of countryside for which she was doing the voice-over, and she had an average ability to recognize wild roses and may-blossom and such-like seasonal blooms, but she was far from familiar with the more esoteric flora which lurked shyly in ditches or blew in far-flung meadows and was truly entitled to the term ‘wild’. As to the little pink number shivering at the roadside – any fool could have told that it was no time for it to be out. Her next thought came in the form of a question – who the hell would be asking Jon what he saw in her, and why? A faint wisp of memory floated into her mind and away again before she could grasp it, elusive as a dandelion clock. Then she thought, without anger, since the whole thing was too curious to be infuriating, that it was the most terrible cheek on the part of everyone concerned to discuss her at all in relation to Jon whom she’d never met before; and positively cosmic cheek on the part of Jon to ascribe her attractions to a facility for naming plants when she was really quite famous, very amusing and often looked beautiful. She decided he must be mad.

  The road levelled above the hollow before beginning its ascent to the hill’s summit.

  ‘I think we’ve gone far enough,’ said Jessica, turning to look down at the sea and noticing a gorse bush which had also gone mad and burst into flower in December: she didn’t draw Jon’s attention to this phenomenon since that might have led him further into a baffling discourse on her horticultural skills. The only explanation she could think of that would make sense of the situation was that, once, she must have got very drunk in a rural setting and Jon had been among those present as she leaped about naming flowers. It seemed implausible, but she’d done a few unlikely things in her time.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Jon. ‘No. Now we’ve got this far we must go to the top. Come on, I’ll hold your hand.’

  ‘You must be joking,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s at least ten miles to the top and uphill all the way.’

  ‘No,’ said Jon, ‘no more than two.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m not going up any more hills. I’m going down. I want my tea.’ Involuntarily she looked up and saw his face.

  ‘All right,’ said Jon, after a moment. ‘Race you to the bend.’ He won easily as Jessica didn’t run but walked behind wondering who had spoiled him to the point that to be thwarted in so small a matter should make him look like murder.

  The bar was unusually busy that night. It would be, thought Eric, when he had so much to do in preparation for the next day: he resented the presence of the islanders, who contributed little to his income, when he wanted to look after the comfort of his guests, who would, if he got it right, return to civilization singing his praises to their wealthy friends. ‘Did you have a nice day?’ he asked Anita, who was sipping a half of shandy.

  ‘It was very interesting,’ she said.

  Eric was gratified to hear this, for over the past few days he had been contending with a suspicion that Mabel was right; the island was possibly the most dreary collection of rock on the face of the globe and he had made an error in coming here.

  ‘I’m thinking of buying some of the local produce,’ said Anita.

  ‘Pardon?’ said Eric: what local produce there was – hedgerow jam, jars of mustard, tea-cloths, mugs – was made in English and foreign factories, appropriately labelled and imported to the island; as it was, indeed, to those villages where tourism flourished all over the Isles of Britain and the Western world. Surely a person who had made commerce her profession could not have been so deluded as actually to purchase any of this rubbish.

  ‘The knitwear,’ said Anita, ‘the local knitwear.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eric. As far as he knew the local knitwear was also imported.

  ‘I walked for miles,’ said Anita, ‘and I saw a woman sitting by a cottage window, knitting, so I stopped to ask directions to the castle ruins and she asked me in and gave me a cup of tea. She’d just started knitting on these huge needles so I asked her what she was making and she said it was a sweater for her man. She said each village on the island and round the coast on the mainland used a different pattern so that when the men were drowned and washed up on the shore they could tell where they’d come from and take them home to be buried.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Eric again. It sounded improbable: the story of the different patterns might once have been true enough, but he doubted that any of the local women still knitted with that practical if macabre purpose in mind: most of them went to the mainland and bought their men’s sweaters in Marks and Spencer. Either Anita had encountered an incomer who had fled like himself from the world and was planning to build up a cottage industry (and good luck to her, he thought) or she had met a genuine local who was making a blanket or a matinée jacket for the next jumble sale and was telling lies.

  ‘I thought I might take a few back and try them out as a special line,’ explained Anita, who, now that she was away from the pressures of work, was beginning to feel more confident of both her talents and her stamina: so far from her department anything seemed possible and if she returned with a brilliant idea and the goods to back it up she might truly get herself transferred to one of the fashion sections and became truly powerful.

  ‘You could try, I suppose,’ said Eric, wondering whether it would be more charitable to leave her with her delusions or advise her now to remember to snip out the labels bearing the legend ‘Made in Taiwan’. He decided to say nothing.

  Mrs H. appeared in the bar wearing tight jeans and a nylon blouse under her anorak. She was followed by the professor and a girl in the duffel coat. ‘We’ve come from the Crown and Thistle,’ she said. ‘It was so crowded in there we could hardly breathe.’

  The Crown and Thistle was the next pub along the coast, and while it too was run by an incomer it attracted many more of the locals than Eric’s, far superior, inn. It had fruit machines and a pool table. Eric felt the bewildered wrath of the simple, virtuous maiden, modestly conscious of her worth, who is rejected in favour of the painted, flouncing fire-ship, all empty promise and implicit hazard. Certainly he did not, at the moment, wish to see his own bar filled to capacity with sweating revellers, but nor did he want to hear about the one up the road.

  ‘Nice, was it?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs H. ‘Much too crowded. You can’t breathe in there. I’m going to have a half of bitter as it’s Christmas.’

  Eric looked at her carefully. Since she usually drank water he had always assumed that she was an ex-alcoholic. So far he had not had that kind of trouble with her: she was an undeniably ghastly woman, but – Eric touched the wood of the counter – she had not yet gone on a bender in his bar. He took his time and served her begrudgingly.

  The professor also broke his habitual rule and ordered a real lager, although still with lime.

  ‘Pushing the boat out?’ inquired Eric with concealed sarcasm. ‘Christmas comes but once a year,’ he answered himself. There were no signs in the bar that it had come again: no tinsel, paper chains, or holly . . .

  ‘You’ve got no mistletoe,’ said Mrs H. ‘Christmas isn’t Christmas without mistletoe.’

  ‘We’re not doing Christmas,’ said Eric. ‘That’s the whole idea.’

  ‘I think that’s letting the side down,’ said Mrs H. Her remark might have puzzled a person who was familiar neither with Mrs H. nor with the ways of the island: he might have supposed her to mean by ‘the side’ all of Christendom and its long traditions: he might have im
agined Mrs H. herself to be a woman of religious susceptibility, but he would have been mistaken. By ‘the side’ Mrs H. meant the English contingent, the visitors and incomers: she had as strong a tribal sense as the islanders themselves, which was one reason for the mutual and cordial, if lightly hidden, detestation which characterized what dealings they had with each other. If questioned, Mrs H. would have said that it was all a matter of ‘class’, since her vulgarity had corrupted even her deeper human awareness. She considered the islanders’ failure to observe the seasonal rites to be evidence, not of a residual paganism, but of a swinish ignorance of the ‘done thing’.

  ‘I’ve put up my little tree and the fairy lights,’ she said, ‘and I’ve left John stuffing the turkey. He’s a marvellous cook.’

  Eric said nothing: he wanted to talk of pudding and flaming brandy, and he did not care to picture the poor cuckold bent over a dead turkey, his hands greasy with corpse fat, while his wife sought diversion in crowded places. Oh, Mabel . . .

  ‘I wanted a rest from all that this year,’ said Anita. ‘I usually make such an effort – I buy everything fresh and I spend hours peeling and chopping and making gravy – I just wanted a change this year.’ She always entertained a few elderly girls from the store and, when they were available, a few men who hadn’t been invited anywhere else.

  ‘Hallo,’ said Ronald. He was standing close behind her so that as she turned his beard brushed her upturned face. ‘Where did you get to today?’ He liked to hear a woman talking about cooking and he liked Anita’s modest dress of dark paisley wool under a cream-coloured cardigan. He liked her low-heeled shoes and her lightly lacquered dark-red hair. It could well be true, he thought, that red hair was evidence of spirit in a woman, for he had noticed that, at one point, she had grown quite impatient with him. He could not be expected to know that Anita’s hair was dyed and that once a month she sat for an hour with her head in a plastic bag to set the colour.

  ‘I went as far as the village,’ said Anita. ‘I met a local woman knitting a sweater for her man . . .’

  Eric was summoned by the professor ordering a second lager, alcohol-free this time.

  ‘Where’s Jessica?’ asked the professor with the confident grin of the ageing flirt, still unaware that his very confidence makes him look silly.

  Jon, sitting a little away from the rest, heard him and stiffened.

  ‘She’s standing right behind you,’ said Eric. Jessica had entered a moment before and was waiting for a chance to approach the bar counter.

  ‘Good evening, everyone,’ she said in her commercial voice.

  ‘There you are,’ said the professor who did not, however, offer to buy her a drink.

  ‘Two brandies, Eric,’ said Jon, slipping from his stool and contriving, as it were, to surround Jessica in the way the male positions himself beside the female who is his possession.

  ‘What did you do today?’ asked the professor of Jessica.

  ‘We walked to the top of the island,’ said Jon before she could open her mouth.

  ‘Enjoy it?’ asked the professor, still addressing Jessica, and somehow managing to give a lewd connotation to this simple query.

  ‘She loved it,’ said Jon. ‘She told me the names of all the trees and flowers and birds.’ He smiled down at the top of Jessica’s head and slid his hand further over her shoulder towards her breastbone.

  Birds? thought Jessica. She could recognize a bird when she saw one, largely because they had the habit of flying around in the air: she could tell a pigeon from an owl; and then there were robins and seagulls, and ostriches of course, and parrots and ducks – although, now she came to think of it, ducks weren’t really like birds at all; they were like – well, ducks. And trees. Trees looked like very large weeds and from a distance some of them looked like broccoli. The broccoli that Eric served at dinner had resembled a felled tree as it lay on her plate in the blood, but she couldn’t positively identify many trees: laburnums when they were flowering, oaks when they bore acorns, willows when they wept – but not many more . . .

  ‘Have you noticed my fir?’ asked the professor. Jessica, emerging from the sparse and anonymous forests of her imaginings, misunderstood him. Fur? Was he speaking of his own body hair? Was he perhaps a werewolf? Or was he drawing attention to some unappreciated mink, ocelot or garment of beaver?

  ‘. . . planted it years ago,’ he was saying. ‘Whipped off the tinsel and the gewgaws, stuck it in the garden and now it’s nearly sixty feet tall.’

  Ah, thought Jessica, reassured – a fir. She could identify Christmas trees. She looked round for an empty table at which she could sit and saw Harry by the sea-facing window: he was looking through it into the darkness.

  ‘May I join you?’ she asked in her natural voice. ‘How is General Gordon?’ She sat down opposite Harry and drew in her chair. ‘You didn’t come for a walk. I expect he was too engrossing. You must tell me; but first I must tell you what Helen Huntingdon’s done now. Shall I?’

  ‘Do,’ said Harry.

  Jessica leaned closer. ‘She put tartar emetic in Arthur’s wine,’ she said in a low, confidential tone.

  ‘She didn’t,’ said Harry.

  ‘She did,’ said Jessica. ‘Not enough to kill him – just enough to produce nausea and depression.’

  Harry glanced round, then leaning towards Jessica he asked in a whisper: ‘Who is Arthur?’

  ‘Her little boy,’ explained Jessica, also in a confidential whisper.

  To the watchers at the bar it seemed that the two of them were deep in an intimate discussion of common friends: which was what Jessica had intended. Harry had entered into the spirit: it was many years since he had played games with a child, but he had not forgotten how. Jessica knew what he was thinking and didn’t care: it was one thing to be considered a child by Jon, who by the term had meant ‘babyish’, and quite another to be seen so by Harry who had sufficient insight to realize that all acting was game-playing and that therefore all actors were, by definition, children. At least when they were on stage, amended Jessica in her mind.

  ‘Her husband was just like my second one,’ she explained. ‘Pissed as a rat all the time, and he was trying to make a man of Arthur by teaching him to drink and swear.’

  ‘How old was Arthur?’ asked Harry.

  ‘About six, I think,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Harry.

  ‘So, she kept giving him wine, and gin, and brandy and water with tartar emetic in it, and she’d say, “Arthur, if you’re not a good boy I shall give you a glass of wine,” or, “Now Arthur, if you say that again you shall have some brandy and water,” so that by the time he was seven the poor child had taken the pledge for life.’

  ‘Gordon drank brandy and soda,’ said Harry. ‘B and S, he called it. There’s a school of thought which holds that he had occasional drinking bouts, hidden away in his tent, a flag and a cutlass crossed on the ground outside to indicate that he shouldn’t be disturbed – and after a few days he’d come out, refreshed.’

  ‘You couldn’t blame him,’ said Jessica.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Harry. ‘His contemporaries tried to play it down, the iconoclasts make much of it, but it seems to me a matter of little importance . . .’

  ‘Do you mind if I sit here?’ asked Ronald. ‘There are some people smoking at the bar.’

  ‘No, do join us,’ said Jessica. There would be no room for a fourth person round the small table so close to the window. ‘I was just telling Harry,’ she said, ‘about a woman who gave a child tartar emetic in his wine to put him off drink.’

  ‘Aversion therapy,’ said Ronald. ‘She belonged to the Behaviourist camp. They try it on homosexuals too. It doesn’t work,’ he added, his tone disapproving.

  ‘There are those who hold that Gordon was homosexual,’ said Harry. ‘Chiefly because he never married . . .’

  ‘I’d never have married myself,’ said Jessica, ‘if I’d known . . .’

  ‘Then he
took a lot of interest in ragged boys,’ said Harry. ‘But he also took a lot of interest in the derelict old, and no one has so far accused him of perversion in that respect.’

  ‘Attitudes change so,’ said Jessica. ‘Look at Helen Huntingdon. Although a lot of people still seem to think she was an admirable character – they think she was an early women’s libber or something.’

  Ronald’s attention had been drawn by the word ‘perversion’. ‘I’ve been reminding myself of the theories of Krafft-Ebing,’ he said. ‘Reading up on Psychopathia Sexualis. There was a case in 1892, a man called Ardisson – belonged to a family of criminals and insane – small man with a protruding jaw. He used to dig up corpses and . . .’

  ‘Eat them?’ asked Harry, suddenly back in the horrors of Khartoum.

  ‘No,’ said Ronald. ‘He used to . . .’ he stopped, remembering again that he was not in his consulting room, and there was a lady present.

  ‘Why did he do that?’ asked the lady, who understood perfectly from Ronald’s omissions what the small man with the protruding jaw had done.

  ‘If we knew,’ said Ronald moodily, ‘we’d know more about the mainsprings of human behaviour than we do.’ He was sometimes tempted to say, with the rest of the population, that some people were just plain crazy, and leave it at that.