The Inn at the Edge of the World Page 7

  ‘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 a
sking 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.

  None of them had. Ronald was eating bread and butter, wondering how it was done. Since he had been so well fed and his bed was made for him he had ceased to mind much about his wife. He found this interesting, for the theory was that sexual desire lessened with physical deprivation and increased on four square meals a day. Either the theory was incorrect or he was not normal.

  ‘There’s a dance at the village hall tonight,’ said Eric from the doorway. ‘I know you’re mostly here for a rest, but if you wanted a spot of local colour . . .’ He looked over his shoulder to make sure that no islander had crept in to listen: unlike some obliging natives the locals resented being called upon to sing and dance for the delectation of the tourist. They were a dour lot, he thought exasperatedly.

  Ronald, who was eating a quantity of Black Bun, flinched: a dance at the village hall sounded rather worse than The Phantom of the Opera. His spirits lifted as he realized that if his wife had been with him she would probably have made him go: she saw it as her duty to ingest culture whenever and wherever it was offered. There had been an evening of flamenco once in Andalusia . . .

  *

  ‘Will you go?’ asked Anita.

  Ronald, deep in masochistic reminiscence, did not, at first, appreciate that it was he whom she was addressing. When he did he responded with a vehement No. Realizing that this abrupt refusal had caused a startled hush to descend upon the company, he went on to qualify it. ‘I don’t like dancing,’ he explained.

  ‘You wouldn’t have to dance, you could just watch,’ said Anita.

  ‘I don’t like watching dancing,’ said Ronald. Anita began to readjust her recently formed assessment of his character and capabilities . . . ‘Watching others perform,’ said Ronald, who was also aware that he had sounded like a recalcitrant five-year-old, ‘is as extrovert an expression of personality as the overt demonstration itself.’ He clamped his teeth into a slice of Dundee cake.

  ‘Then you,’ said Anita, thinking about this, ‘must be an introvert.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ronald, measuredly. ‘If we are to accept the validity of the concept and employ its terminology – then yes – I would describe myself as an introvert.’ He wasn’t too concerned, at the moment, with the obscure niceties of his inner self since he was examining his developing response to the absence of his wife. She wasn’t here, and . . . it was really something of a relief. Astonished, he sat with his mouth a little open. A few crumbs of Dundee cake fell into his beard.

  ‘I think I’ll go,’ said Jessica to Anita. ‘Shall we go together?’ She knew that Harry wouldn’t avail himself of the evening’s entertainment.

  ‘I’d love it,’ said Anita.

  Jon, who had decided to adopt the hard-to-get gambit himself, and was sitting by the ladder fern at the furthest point from Jessica, wondered what her motives were. Why was she inviting the shop-lady to accompany her to the village hall? She was even trickier than he had thought. So – if she wanted to play games . . .

  Ronald was still gazing into space. He looked profound or half-witted, according to your point of view, as he made a rapid reappraisal of all he had held sacred. He had accepted, without question, that inter-personal relationships were the pivot, the mainstay, the be-all and end-all, the purpose and meaning of all human existence. Now – the fuck with interpersonal relationships, he thought, reaching absent-mindedly for the last round of bread and butter. He did not delude himself that he would necessarily continue in this frame of mind, but it was interesting that he had become aware of it.

  ‘I’ll see you in the bar at seven,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Right,’ said Anita.

  *

  That evening the bar was as full as ever it was for the time of year. A few locals, Mrs H., the professor and a girl in the duffel coat.

  ‘This is Patricia,’ said the professor.

  ‘G and T,’ said Jessica to Eric.

  ‘Going to the hop?’ asked Mrs H.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jessica. ‘We thought we might as well. Are you going?’ she added out of politeness.

  ‘Me? No,’ said Mrs H. She leaned forward and pinched Jessica lightly on the arm. ‘He’s going,’ she said. ‘You want to bet?’ She spoke in a whisper.

  ‘Eh?’ said Jessica.

  ‘Him,’ said Mrs H., ‘the professor. He’s got his little red scarf on.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Jessica.

  Mrs H. correctly recognized this as a sign of incomprehension. ‘It’s his pulling scarf,’ she said. ‘When he’s pulling birds he wears his little red scarf. In the summer he goes round in his underpants and in the winter it’s hi
s little red scarf.’

  ‘But he’s with a girl,’ said Jessica. She found, to her annoyance, that she too was speaking in a whisper. There was nothing so catching as whispering, except for yawning.

  ‘Ha,’ said Mrs H., ‘that makes no odds to him. He’ll’ve made a date with three more by the end of the evening. You mark my words.’

  ‘Good heavens,’ said Jessica, feebly.

  Eric, who had been listening to these whisperings, gave Mrs H. one of his looks. It meant – you’re no slouch in that direction yourself, lady.

  ‘I’ll have another mineral water, please, Eric,’ she said, in her ordinary tone, except that she had pitched it at a more imperious level than usual. Eric wished he was rich, because then he could afford to pour it down her jumper. ‘I have to watch my figure,’ she said to Jessica, all girls together.

  Jessica thanked her stars that the days had passed when someone would have cried at this: ‘No, no. Let me watch your figure.’

  The professor leaned forward on his bar stool. ‘You don’t,’ he said. ‘Leave it to me to watch your figure.’

  Once upon a time, thought Jessica remotely, Mrs H. would have responded, ‘Ooh, don’t try your wiles on me, you handsome rogue.’

  Mrs H. too leaned forward. ‘Ooh,’ she began, ‘don’t try . . .’

  Jessica, seeing Anita in the hallway, fled before she could hear the end of this. She had once played in a modern version of Aladdin, much of the script of which, she felt, could have been written by the people at the bar. Bawdiness she did not object to; just the predictability of the lines.

  ‘There’s a moon,’ said Anita, ‘so we won’t need a torch. It’s only about half a mile along the road. Eric said he’d take us in the van, but I said we wouldn’t mind walking. Do you mind?’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘I couldn’t half do with a spot of fresh air.’

  ‘It’s stuffy in the bar,’ agreed Anita. ‘Have you got flat shoes on?’ The air was cold and salty and clean.