The Inn at the Edge of the World Read online

  The inn door creaked, signalling an arrival, and Eric went reluctantly to the hall, wondering which stereotype of mine host he could assume in time: he knew of several, ranging from the hearty to the sardonic, but he didn’t now feel sufficiently confident to carry off any of them. He didn’t need to, as it happened. Not immediately.

  ‘Oh, hallo, Professor,’ he said without enthusiasm. It was only one of those incomers who had bought a house on the island for the purposes of holidaying there: a mean man in Eric’s view, who drank alcohol-free lager with lime and not too much of that. There was a girl with him wearing the guarded, faintly sulky air of a girl who is not too stupid to know that she is the latest in a series of similar girls. Eric had noticed, over the months, that several incomers had bought houses on the island apparently for the sole purpose of conducting clandes tine affairs. The professor kept an old duffel coat which he made all his women wear, probably so that he would recognize them if his memory slipped.

  ‘Hallo, Isabel,’ said Eric.

  The girl did not respond.

  ‘Sophie?’ he ventured.

  Silence.

  ‘Agnes . . .?’ Oh shit, he might have learned to keep his mouth shut by now. He would have done if he hadn’t been so discomposed.

  ‘This is Jennifer,’ said the professor cheerfully.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ asked Eric, slipping behind the bar. ‘Down here for long?’

  ‘Two halves of lager, alcohol-free, with lime,’ said the professor. ‘Just till the New Year.’

  He sat on a bar stool and began to ask questions to prove that he was conversant with island ways and the inhabitants. Eric polished a glass and wished he’d go. Those locals who did frequent the inn were wont to melt away when they saw the professor. The girl stood, restively twisting her glass. Poor cow, thought Eric, without compassion. The door opened and he looked up, hopeful now, but it was yet another incomer. ‘Evening, Mrs H.,’ he said. This was the female of the species. When her husband was away on business she brought men with her to her white house on the hill. ‘How’s Graham?’ he inquired nastily, for he happened to remember that her husband was called John.

  ‘He’s fine,’ she said without turning a hair.

  No shame, thought Eric. None of them had any shame. They treated the island like a brothel. He looked back to the time when he had pictured his bar full of local characters gathered for the edification and amusement of the gently bred guests who had just unpacked their pigskin suitcases in the charming ambience of their bedrooms before coming down, talking animatedly among themselves, to drink a lot of expensive liquor before dining, while his wife chirruped and shone like a budgerigar in crisp cottons, scent and fresh lipstick. His ideas of marriage and the typical hostelry were hopelessly out of date. Mrs H. ordered a mineral water with ice and a slice of lemon.

  Finlay tied up his boat and helped his passengers ashore by way of the amateurish pier which the locals begrudgingly held together, each hoping that somebody else would do something to make it more stable, and if not that the council might. There was enough light from the lamp hanging outside the inn to show them where they’d be when they got there, but not enough for them to see where they were going. Consequently they shuffled along the narrow shore road, carrying their luggage and wondering what they’d let themselves in for. It was beginning to rain.

  Hearing the sound of a number of people putting down their bags, Eric went into the hall. Seeing through the open door that rain was sifting through the lamplight he felt guilty. They were here for Christmas after all. ‘That’ll turn to snow by the morning,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll show you to your rooms and then perhaps after you’ve signed in you’d like a drink before dinner . . . on the house,’ he added, as he noticed their downcast mien, and he wondered whether he should have met them at the pier with the van, even though it was only a hundred yards or so. He had a moment of terror as he realized that he was solely and personally responsible for keeping these people contented for the length of their stay. Maybe he should have listened to Mabel. Oh, Mabel . . .

  One by one they gathered in the bar.

  Anita and Jessica had both changed their clothes for the evening: Anita because she’d been well brought up, and Jessica because the bottoms of her trousers had got splashed walking from the boat. She had a lot of fashionable clothes that she had gathered, in one way or another, from kindly wardrobe mistresses who seemed to know what would suit her better than she knew herself. It saved a lot of trouble and thought, but she always felt guilty when she dirtied them.

  Eric was delighted with these ladies: already they had added tone to his establishment. He felt quite recovered and able to handle the responsibilities of the landlord; and now he thanked God that Mabel had gone. No longer need he worry that she would shock, alienate or sleep with any of the guests. As he regarded Jon his thankfulness increased. Mabel would have had him for breakfast. It was also fortunate that the guests were all single, since he usually had trouble with married couples. Men, who would not if left to themselves complain, were often impelled by the presence of their wives to mention that the soup was a little cold, the cup cracked or the steak tough; while the women could be worse, tracking him through the hotel to tell him, tight-lipped, that the creaking of the inn sign had kept their husband awake all night and with the pressure of work he’d been under he needed all the sleep he could get and they’d come here to rest didn’t he realize. Sometimes they complained that the waitress had insulted their husband, and as, at one time, he had employed casual labour from the mainland, Eric had to admit that they were probably right. There had been an incident in the summer when Mabel’s Glaswegian mates were making merry and a wife had come down in her nightie, beckoned him from the bar and abused him in front of everyone. She hadn’t tackled the mates. Oh no. They were wearing black leather, and some of them, male and female, had their bald heads tattooed. What, Eric had wondered, did she expect him to do? He was running a business, wasn’t he, an inn? People came to inns to drink, didn’t they? It was bad luck if the interests of the residents and the passing trade proved to be incompatible, but what was he supposed to do about it? It was also exasperating to observe, when these married couples were together, that they didn’t seem unduly devoted to each other, eating in silence unless one of them found something untoward in the salad. Eric had not, himself, been married long enough to appreciate the nuances of the married state.

  Sometimes, still, he pictured himself throwing out the mates in ones and twos to lie in the seaweed, but it would have been impracticable to try. He hoped they wouldn’t take it into their tattooed, bald heads to come over during the next few days, bringing Mabel with them. It was an unlikely contingency, since they enjoyed comfort and the caravans they usually lay around in would be cold at this time of year. Eric crossed his fingers.

  He was ambivalent about the continued presence of the professor and Mrs H., who seemed to be glued to their bar stools, and had got involved in a covertly acrimonious discussion on the rival merits of wooden and fibreglass boats. Neither of them held any particular brief for either form of craft: rather each was concerned to prove that he, or she, was more familiar with the complexities of the matter than the other. It made tedious listening, but they gave the bar something of a lived-in air. He only hoped the professor would not make one of the curious remarks with which he was wont to startle ladies. He supposed the man had some sort of inferiority complex, but it could be embarrassing. Mrs H., too, could swear like a parrot when she felt like it. The girl seemed negligible: the only danger there was that she might start crying.

  ‘What’ll you have then?’ Eric asked his guests. He was satisfied with all of them except for the one with the golden curls. Mrs H. was already eyeing him speculatively, while he was addressing the brown-haired woman and calling her Jessica as though he’d known her for ever.

  ‘I’ll have a brandy,’ said Jessica. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And I,’ said Jon, thus furthering the impression t
hat he and Jessica were very old and good friends and were in the habit of slugging down pints of Napoleon together. Jessica made no demur since it was possible that she did know him quite well. Off the stage most people looked more or less the same to her so she treated everybody with a warmly respectful informality which was not as easy to practise as it appeared: it had taken some time for her to gauge it correctly, but once perfected was as efficacious as a mask. Nobody really knew Jessica very well.

  ‘Whisky and soda,’ said Harry.

  ‘A glass of white wine, please,’ said Anita.

  ‘I’ll just have water, thank you,’ said Ronald.

  Another big spender, thought Eric sourly, forgetting for the moment that this water was on the house, and toying with the idea of giving him a glass from the tap.

  ‘So you’re all here for Christmas then,’ said the professor, twisting round on his bar stool to look at them. ‘The island’s a fine place in winter,’ he added in order to prove that he was familiar with it in all its moods.

  ‘It’s better in summer,’ said Mrs H., for the same reason.

  ‘I imagine it gets very crowded then,’ said Anita. ‘I don’t think I’d like that. I think everywhere is nicer when the season’s over.’ She thought of the stationery department in the week before Christmas and felt a small pang of insecurity. It was chaotic but lively and it was hers. She was somebody there. Here she could be anybody. She looked down at her velvet skirt to reassure herself of her identity. ‘What do you do?’ she said to Ronald as they were standing together, a little apart from the others.

  ‘I’m a psychoanalyst,’ said Ronald. This word had the usual effect of creating a pause in the conversations which were going on at the bar, and Ronald wished he’d only said he was a doctor. It was bad enough when he said that, since people sooner or later would slither up to consult him about the side effects of the drug they’d been prescribed, or the pain in the middle of their upper back; but when he said he was a psychoanalyst people, according to temperament, either clamped their jaws firmly shut in case they uttered some remark which would immediately reveal to him that their psyches were in a horrible and unhygienic condition, or expected him to help them sort out their love lives – free.

  ‘Goodness,’ said Anita.

  ‘And what do you do?’ asked Jessica, moving away from Jon, who had drawn her into a confusing exchange involving an experience on location which apparently they had shared and of which she had no recollection.

  ‘I’m a buyer,’ said Anita. ‘A fashion buyer,’ she added, realizing as she spoke that these words had emerged from somewhere in her subconscious where she kept unuttered desires. Ronald would find that interesting, she thought bleakly. Why was it, she wondered, that whenever she was out of her milieu she tended to behave uncharacteristically. Perhaps everyone did. The thought was no consolation, for she had realized at once that even if she grew fond of her fellow guests, and friendly with them, she would not be able to reunite with them in London because they would find out the truth.

  ‘How fascinating,’ said Jessica. ‘Where?’

  ‘Oh, just one of the stores,’ said Anita, for she didn’t want this vivacious woman bouncing into the fashion department and demanding to see her in order to get a discount on a little Jean Muir. ‘Nowhere you’d know.’ What a waste of time. By not adhering to the truth she had now given the impression that she was a person of no real significance, employed in a back-street frock shop. She wished she knew what was wrong with her.

  ‘And you,’ said the professor, leaning forward on his bar stool to peer closely at Jessica. ‘What do you do?’

  Jon stepped forward and put his arm round Jessica’s shoulders. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you know who this is.’ But Jessica was not wearing one of her acting faces, nor had she been talking in her commercial voice. There was a rather puzzled silence, not without embarrassment in some of those present.

  ‘Tea for three?’ mimicked Jon, quoting the tea-bag commercial in which Jessica was flanked by rival suitors while presiding over a Queen Anne teapot and shadowed by a jardiniere holding a ladder fern.

  That bloody fern, thought Jessica. It appeared in every commercial, every drama, every sit-com, every documentary, every chat show, every newsreel. It reared its head in living rooms, kitchens, offices, churches, police stations, filling stations, burial parlours, warehouses. It was ubiquitous. No director, no producer would embark on a project without first ensuring that the ladder fern was in place. Jessica had gone so far as to make a fuss, insisting that they must be kidding as they carted in the loathsome foliage; protesting that she couldn’t act with that plant, weeping that she was weary of the sight of it; that she and Mike had a game whereby they only watched television together in order to see which of them would first spot the ladder fern and gain a point. What, she had demanded, would happen to their relationship when Mike saw her actually seated beneath it? He’d laugh himself sick. All to no avail. The director had said he was surprised at her: she was well known and widely appreciated for her lack of artistic temperament, her avoidance of public tantrums. What, he had asked, had come over her? He had been rather cold. And the ladder fern had stayed in place.

  She emerged from her bitter musings to hear cries of recognition. One of her ways of coping with this sort of exposure was to remove herself in reverie, but she always had to come out again. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at first when off-stage acclaim had made her feel diminished and soiled. Now she had adopted two methods of dealing with it: either she put on an act, or she became exceedingly, exaggeratedly dull – which was also an act but too subtle to be perceived as such.

  ‘So you’ve come to get away from it all, have you?’ said the professor. ‘Get away from the bright lights and the roar of the greasepaint. I wondered what a beautiful woman like you was doing down here.’

  He’s off, thought Eric resignedly, beginning to polish glasses with neurotic speed.

  Why, wondered Jessica, couldn’t they have had roses, or love-in-a-mist, or chrysanthemums, or even a vase of gladioli, or a cheese plant, or a banana plant, or a potted palm . . .

  ‘Do you want another of those?’ asked Harry.

  ‘Yes please,’ said Jessica. The atmosphere had altered in some degree now that everyone knew who she was. Only Harry was the same because he never watched television and still didn’t know who she was, except that she was the nice woman he had met on the train. Ronald had seen her in Hedda Gabler because his wife had hauled him to the theatre: she was always doing that, and had even made him go to The Phantom of the Opera. Ronald shuddered at the memory. His wife, when he came to think of it, had actually been far from perfect. Anita knew all about Jessica from reading magazine and newspaper articles. She was thinking it would be sucks to the buyer when she told her who she’d spent her hols with. Eric, as the realization sank in, was beginning to, feel a sense of deep gratification. He had not associated the name on the letter which Jessica had sent him with the radiant star of the tea-bags who frequently interrupted his viewing when he found time to watch telly and conditions permitted transmission to the island. That name would add a great deal of lustre to the visitors’ book. Jon had always known who she was, and he, of course, knew her better than anybody.

  Eric had made the bold decision to seat all his guests at one table without first asking their approval. He had given the matter careful consideration, and having entertained a mental image of five people sitting at separate tables sucking defrosted asparagus stalks in solitary state, he had enlisted Finlay’s help in removing the small tables and installing the large, round Victorian one from the parlour where it had taken up too much space anyway. As far as the locals were concerned the restaurant – or, as he preferred to call it, the dining room – would be closed for Christmas. Some of them and several of the incomers would be annoyed by this: they liked to drift in for chicken and chips when they felt like it and couldn’t be bothered to cook. They could boil their heads, thought Eric vengefully. The
little tables were out in the old stables. Ha. ‘Any chance of a meal tonight, Eric?’ the professor had asked. ‘No,’ Eric had said. Ha, Ha. He wondered briefly if all innkeepers detested some of their customers as much as he did.

  ‘Dinner’s ready when you are, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘There’s not a great deal of choice, but what there is is all home-cooked.’ He was modestly proud of this speech, which he considered to be frank, open and serenely confident. Finlay’s sister-in-law was a more than adequate cook with occasional flashes of inspiration: her soups, broths and potages were particularly good, since not only was she Scotch but she had spent a little time working in an auberge in Dieppe. Finlay, when he was half seas over at festival times, was apt to remark that she had swum the Channel to get there, and then fall down laughing. Eric had never understood why Finlay found this so funny. She also had a way with fish, and her cakes rose in the middle in the proper fashion. She wasn’t so good with meat: she made the steak go tough – still, you couldn’t go far wrong with a roast, and you couldn’t have everything.

  For breakfast (seven to nine) the guests could choose between bacon and egg and eggs – boiled, fried, poached, scrambled, en cocotte, or flattened into an omelette. Or they could opt for kippers or finnan haddie, or have the continental with hot rolls, which were no trouble to prepare since you just got them out of the freezer and bunged them in the Raeburn for a minute or two, and which always made a good impression; and marmalade or rowan jelly boiled up by Finlay’s wife. Such homely little touches made all the difference. Lunch was to be a simple affair of soup followed by ham and cheese and tomatoes and cucumber and things like that because Finlay’s sister-in-law went home to rest at midday; but they could have more hot rolls with their soup. If they wanted to go out and wander round the dripping island they could take sandwiches. Everything was under control.