The Inn at the Edge of the World Read online

  Back in the bar Eric was making conversation with his bêtes noires, remembering the words of one of Mrs H.’s friends earlier that year. ‘She,’ he had said, indicating Mrs H. with a forward motion of his thumb, ‘ ’as ’ad every bloke on this island, bar ’im,’ whereupon he had indicated with a backward motion of his thumb the pitiful form of Mrs H.’s husband, John. Eric, who did not consider adultery a laughing matter, had frowned upon the friend. Nevertheless the words had been just. Mrs H., thought Eric, who should perhaps have been a minister rather than an innkeeper, was an uncleanly woman, and the professor was an unregenerate chaser of skirt. They both, probably, were incubating dreadful diseases, and if they weren’t they doubtless would be before very much more water had passed under the bridge. He would leave their glasses twice the time in the wash.

  A group of men in a corner were gossiping and laughing too loudly, like adolescents who have come across something unfamiliar but suggestive and are faintly nervous of it. Eric ignored them contemptuously, serving them in brisk, unsmiling silence when they came to replenish their glasses. They were all locals, but one of them had been away and come back. He it was who had found something – a woman in Glasgow by the sound of it. ‘Never knew her name,’ he was saying. ‘Don’t know where she came from . . .’ Eric sniffed scornfully and ran a wet cloth over the bar counter. ‘Never saw anything like it,’ said the venturer and his cronies sniggered.

  Eric wished perversely that Anita and Jessica had not gone to the dance. Not that he wanted their ears to be sullied by the corner conversation, but the presence of ladies – real ladies, unlike Mrs H. – had a freshening effect on a room defiled by loutish behaviour. They resembled a bunch of flowers in their polite purity. Eric realized that his train of thought was taking an unrealistic turn and paused to wonder what the guests really thought of his inn: he hoped that the old soldier wasn’t monopolizing Jessica and causing her to be bored. From what he had overheard of their conversation it seemed not improbable, but she appeared content in Harry’s company. There was no accounting for tastes and the old boy was undeniably a gentleman. A further rumble of vulgar mirth from the peasants set his teeth on edge. ‘You never saw anything like it,’ the man said. ‘Black rubber and a rose in her . . .’ Eric grew horridly alert. There was probably hundreds of women who behaved naughtily in the anonymity of cities, but he couldn’t help wondering whether it was Mabel of whom this creature was speaking. He turned away resolutely, determined to think about something else.

  ‘Sex . . .’ began the professor, so Eric said he had to change a barrel, and went out to the inn yard for his own complement of fresh air. He stood in the cold watching the moon-path over the sea, and as he watched he saw the form of a boy crossing it from left to right. In the uncertain light he could have been walking on the strand or on the sea, and as Eric blinked he had gone again, into the shadows. A mist was rising.

  Harry standing at his window, looking far out, saw nothing but the gibbous moon. Nothing at all.

  Jessica was growing sleepy and the noise was growing louder since a young man had arrived with a drum. Earlier the music had been supplied by a record player, and a few couples had jiggled vigorously around in a corner. Jessica and Anita had sat on folding chairs behind a table drinking canned lager out of paper cups and hoping they had not taken places reserved for local notables; but nobody had confronted them and, indeed, nobody had taken any notice of them. Four girls had provided the cabaret, hopping about over four swords laid on the floor, clad in kilts and bedecked with bits of white heather, and Jessica had supposed that their turn must have required more skill than was immediately apparent, for otherwise why would they have bothered? ‘I could do that,’ she had said and Anita had not argued. Then another girl had sung the ‘Skye Boat Song’, unaccompanied, and somebody had recited a work by Burns. It’s all very tartan, thought Jessica, but not very authentic. Since the locals were clearly not performing for the benefit of tourists she could only imagine that their culture had ossified into self-parody under the influence of the media and a plethora of communication. The most remote and isolated savage, having once seen himself on telly, would find his attitudes to himself and his rites subtly altered, and these people must have been constantly bombarded by reflections and images of Caledonian mores and behaviour. Sad, thought Jessica. Hoots mon and Haggis.

  The door opened, several more people entered, including Finlay carrying a flute. The drummer put down his sticks, and someone turned the record player back on. The lights were lowered. The door opened again and someone who looked like Finlay’s sister-in-law slid in along the wall.

  ‘Either of you two ladies care to dance?’ asked the professor of Jessica and Anita. They declined: Jessica on the grounds that her feet were hurting, and Anita because she was already too hot. ‘Let me know when you want to go,’ he said, ‘and I’ll run you back in the Jag.’ He shuffled away in time to the music.

  ‘I’m ready for bed,’ said Anita. ‘I don’t want to wait. Shall we walk back?’ It was dark outside: the moon hidden in cloud. Jessica tripped against a low wall.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said of the cool air. ‘Let’s sit here a moment until we get used to the dark.’

  The door opened and the professor emerged flanked by two girls. ‘Hang on,’ he said, ‘I’ve just got to have a pee.’ He moved a foot or so from his companions and urinated over the wall on which Anita and Jessica were sitting. Perhaps he hadn’t seen them there. Jessica gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  A hush followed the racket as the professor’s Jag rumbled away along the sea road. All sound had ceased in the village hall behind them. Then there came the strains of a flute: a wild melody, sweet and sorrowful and piercing – and so unfamiliar, thought Jessica, that it could seldom have been heard on the earth before. They waited until it had stopped and the moon had come out from the clouds before they started home, not speaking.

  Jessica looked out to sea, and in the light from the suddenly soaring moon she saw dark shapes at the water’s edge; so many she thought she must be seeing things. ‘Seals,’ she said. ‘Look. There are hundreds of them out there . . .’ but when Anita looked they had gone.

  Jon, walking soundlessly behind them on cushioned soles, saw nothing but the white drift of Jessica’s cashmere scarf. It covered her brown hair and swathed her pale neck, guiding him through the shadows.

  ‘Do you suppose this place is haunted?’ asked Anita the next morning. She had skipped breakfast because her waistband was feeling tight and had joined the others for elevenses. ‘I heard noises in the night.’

  ‘People go to the bathroom in the night,’ said Ronald.

  ‘I know that,’ said Anita rather shortly. ‘They weren’t those sort of noises.’

  Jessica, too, had heard noises in the night: half awake she thought she had heard the handle of her bedroom door being slowly turned, but as she had always locked her bedroom door when alone – ever since her second husband had returned, six months after the divorce, to pick up his pyjamas – she had gone back to sleep. ‘What sort of noises?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of people coming and going,’ said Anita. ‘A lot of people.’

  ‘A lot of people come and go in an inn,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Not usually at three and four in the morning,’ said Anita, getting cross. ‘And I could hear people talking, only I couldn’t hear what they were saying.’

  ‘Did you listen?’ asked Ronald.

  ‘No,’ snapped Anita. He sounded as though he thought she was an eavesdropper. ‘I just heard.’

  Ronald ate a double triangle of shortbread and watched her thoughtfully. He looked as though he might be going to say something else sensible and Jessica broke in before he could utter whatever it was. There is nothing more infuriating than resolute rationality in the face of the inexplicable, and Jessica was entirely on Anita’s side. Whether or not she had heard phantoms in the dark she should not be subjected to the chilly scepticism of the narrow minded. ‘Gho
sties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties,’ she said, adding lamely, ‘and things that go bump in the night.’ She sipped her coffee.

  Finlay’s sister-in-law brought in a fresh pot. She was moving rather more slowly than usual: Anita noticed that she seemed to be limping slightly and bent upon her a look of smiling concern. It was wasted as Finlay’s sister-in-law, having put down the coffee pot, was gazing through the window. She lifted a hand and Anita turned to see whom she was waving to. Nobody as far as Anita could tell. The woman was probably the result of too much in-breeding, and wanting in the head.

  Jon sat down beside Jessica, in two minds as to whether or not she should be forgiven. He had thought last night when he saw the women climbing into the professor’s Jag that they were Jessica and Anita and had dreamed of death. He had been relieved when he realized that they were walking home, although he felt strongly that Jessica should have hung behind and waited for him – but maybe she was shy. But then he had waited, lying naked on his bed, for her to come to him. It had been nearly dawn when he had tried her door and found it locked. There was no excuse for that. How would she talk herself out of it if he challenged her? ‘What did you do last night?’ he asked.

  Jessica was thinking about Bannockburn, and the ghosts of Highlanders, and the horrid ways of Sawney Bean and didn’t really notice the abruptness of his question. ‘What?’ she said. ‘Oh, I went to the dance . . .’ She took another sip of coffee.

  ‘Were you so terribly tired?’ he asked. Tiredness would not be a perfect excuse but it was better than nothing.

  Jessica looked up at him. She had the feeling that they were at cross-purposes. ‘It must have been after midnight when I got to bed,’ she said.

  So she was still playing with him, laughing at him. He felt his mind clear suddenly as though a great wave had passed over it. If she meant to carry on like that he would show her that in this game he was her master. He laughed, and to a casual watcher it would seem that he relaxed. His beautiful face lost the set smoothness it had worn; small, human lines of mirth appeared at the corners of his eyes, wrinkled the top of his nose. He seemed, in an instant, attractive and full of humour. ‘I’ll race you to the beach,’ he said.

  Mesmerized, Jessica rose and followed him. Ronald sat with an unchewed mouthful of shortbread. Over the past few minutes he found he had unwittingly made a clear clinical diagnosis: one of his fellow-guests was quite, quite mad – far gone in paranoia and with marked schizoid tendencies. What a nuisance, thought Ronald; but he was on his holidays and there was nothing he could do about it. He swallowed his shortbread.

  ‘Scotland is haunted,’ said Anita. ‘Everywhere there are ghosts of the past.’ Finlay came into the room with an armful of logs. ‘Is the inn haunted?’ she asked him.

  Finlay put down his logs and stood, considering. ‘Aye,’ he said, and went out again.

  ‘There,’ said Anita. ‘I told you so.’

  Jessica ran along the sand after Jon, leaping the ridged sea streams, until it occurred to her that she was getting on a bit for this sort of thing. She wondered what her agent would say if she saw her, and slowed down.

  ‘Tortoise,’ said Jon, waiting for her to catch up with him. He took her hand as they walked and let it go before the gesture could seem too intimate. ‘There’s a deserted house just before the point,’ he said. ‘Let’s explore.’

  He led her over the shingle and across the road. The Old Manse stood as she had seen it the day before, blind with an empty, pathetic haughtiness at the top of the slope. ‘Come on,’ he said as she hesitated.

  ‘I don’t . . .’ said Jessica.

  ‘Come on.’

  Reluctantly she followed him up the path across which trailed bare briars and strands of honeysuckle. She felt uneasy, with a fugitive sense of disloyalty – as though she was trespassing not on the property of the bloke from London who came down with a crowd in the summer for the sailing but on Harry’s memories.

  ‘It feels as though no one’s been here for years and years,’ she said. They stood on the gravel in front of the porch, and then looked through the windows.

  ‘Sitting room,’ said Jon. ‘Looks as though they haven’t made many changes here since the olden days. There’s a three-piece suite.’ He went to the window. ‘Dining room,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s go round the back.’ The small yard behind the house was paved with slate. ‘Hallo,’ he said. ‘Not so deserted after all. Look . . .’ There was a row of wet, bare footprints leading to the red-painted back door.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jessica. ‘Let’s go . . .’

  ‘It’s only local kids,’ said Jon, laughing. ‘Tough little brutes – going round with no shoes on in this weather.’

  Jessica shivered at the mere thought – at least she told herself that was why she was shivering. ‘We’ll be late for lunch,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not midday yet,’ said Jon and he laughed again. Jessica wished he wouldn’t laugh so much. It sounded out of place in the sorrowful, dignified hush.

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘It’s not even midday,’ said Jon. ‘Two minutes to midday.’ It seemed to Jessica that they had been out together much longer than that.

  ‘Well, I want a drink,’ she said, and she thought in her inconsequential way of the noon-day devil who slingeth arrows about.

  On the way back she noticed a white cottage down near the shore’s edge. ‘I suppose that’s where the professor lives,’ she said.

  Jon, who had been humming a tune from The Phantom of the Opera, stopped in mid-cadence. ‘Prat,’ he said venomously. Jessica, unperceptive as ever, heard in this not the sourness of jealousy but only the echo of what appeared locally to be received opinion.

  The cottage looked neglected; a few tiles missing from the roof and the garden fence half flattened. Jessica had often wondered whether she was rich enough to invest in a small villa in Tuscany, or a farmhouse in Provence, or even a cottage in the Shires, but now she wondered whether it was not unkind and thoughtless to buy a house only to leave it alone much of the time and fail to look after it properly. She wondered whether it even made economic sense and whether it was not wiser to take your ease in small hotels, which if not perfect, did not require you to re-tile the roof or maintain the grounds.

  They were still talking about ghosts in the bar. ‘. . . and one room which was always freezing cold even in the middle of summer,’ Anita was saying.

  ‘Probably rising damp,’ said Eric.

  ‘Don’t you believe in ghosts?’ asked Anita.

  ‘I’ve never seen one,’ said Eric.

  ‘No, but do you believe in them?’ insisted Anita.

  ‘Since I’ve never seen one, I don’t see why I should,’ said Eric.

  ‘You’ve never seen an electric current but you believe in them, don’t you?’ said Anita.

  ‘That’s different,’ said Eric.

  ‘There is undoubtedly a phenomenon known as projection which under certain circumstances might appear to take on corporeal substance,’ said Ronald.

  Anita wasn’t sure what he meant by this, but it sounded as though he was on her side, and she warmed to him again.

  ‘It need not even necessarily be seen as a function of hallucination,’ added Ronald.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ said Eric as he caught sight of Jessica, ‘there was a phone call for you earlier. They said they’d ring back.’

  ‘But nobody knows where I am,’ said Jessica.

  ‘Somebody does,’ said Eric.

  Jon listened carefully.

  ‘What did they say?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘Just that they’d ring back,’ said Eric. When he’d heard a female voice he had thought for a moment that it might be Mabel.

  ‘Does anybody realize that tomorrow is Christmas Eve?’ asked Anita. ‘I’d almost forgotten – it’s so peaceful here.’

  ‘They don’t bother much with Christmas – the islanders,’ explained Eric. ‘They celebrate New Year, Hogmanay.’

  T
he said celebrations encompassed a week, during which barely a living soul took a sober breath.

  ‘That’s why this is a good place to get away from it all,’ said Eric. ‘It doesn’t happen.’

  ‘I think it’s going to snow, though,’ said Anita. Perversely, she was missing the atmosphere evoked by robins and shepherds and fat-tailed sheep: there wasn’t so much as a sprig of holly to be seen.

  ‘If it does,’ said Eric, ‘there’s a couple of pairs of skis in the old stable, and some good slopes on the other side of the island.’ The skis had been left by the previous owner, who wouldn’t need them on the Costa del Sol, where he had gone to end his days sunnily and cheaply.

  ‘I was still hoping to get in a bit of sailing,’ said Jon.

  ‘You must be crazy,’ said Jessica involuntarily, chilled by early memories of grey, heaving seas; trying to sleep in salty, wet blankets in a space half the size of a coffin, boiling cans of soup on a tilting stove, and trying not to go to the lavatory because what they referred to as the ‘heads’ was two inches away from the table where the rest of the party would be endeavouring to eat its soup before it pitched itself on to the floor – or, as her father would have insisted, ‘the deck’. Jessica was not being personal, nor unusually perceptive, when she accused Jon of insanity: she thought the same of anyone who chose to spend time at sea when nothing actually compelled him to.

  ‘Most you can do this time of year is doddle round the coast in a dinghy,’ said Eric, ‘and even that’s a bit dodgy. Fishing vessel went down with all hands this time last year.’

  ‘That was a submarine,’ said Mrs H., coming in from the cold and removing her fur gloves. ‘Fouled her nets and took her under.’

  ‘That’s what some say,’ interrupted Eric, not because he doubted the theory, but because he liked interrupting Mrs H. ‘According to the locals ships have been going down there since the year dot.’