The Inn at the Edge of the World (14 page)

‘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.

Harry, belatedly catching up with the conversation, remembered the surprising passage in Herodotus where it is revealed that, in ancient Egypt, when a beautiful or well-connected lady died her body was kept some days, until she was past her prime, before it was delivered to the embalmer, since one of the practitioners of this craft had been discovered in carnal intercourse with an attractive corpse and been denounced by a work-mate.

‘Yuk,’ said Jessica. What an odd conversation for Christmas Eve – but then she was ignoring Christmas, so tonight was no different from any other.

Eric came to collect the glasses from their table and looked at his watch. Finlay’s sister-in-law had promised to come in at nine to give him a hand. It was one minute to. As he looked up he saw her behind the bar pulling a pint for Finlay who stood in front of it swaying a little.

‘She’s an odd-looking woman,’ said Anita to no one in particular and unaware of the relationship of the boatman, who stood beside her, to the barmaid. She had noticed for the first time that the barmaid had webbed hands: a thin membrane stretched almost to the second joint of each finger, facilitating the management of the heap of loose change which Finlay offered her.

‘She’s a selkie,’ said Finlay.

‘A what?’ asked Anita, but Finlay only laughed.

She edged her way to the corner of the bar counter where Eric stood, polishing glasses. ‘What’s a selkie?’ she demanded of him. She was a little drunk for she had told herself that it was, after all, Christmas Eve.

Eric was annoyed. ‘It’s just one of their stories,’ he said. ‘Some nonsense . . .’

‘Yes, but
what
?’ insisted Anita, her curiosity inflamed by his reticence.

‘They say some of the island people are descended from seals . . .’

‘. . . and they come ashore,’ interpolated Finlay, ‘and they take off their skins and they dance on yon strand, and sometimes they wed with the children of men . . .’

He was interrupted by his sister-in-law, who leaned over and gave him a shove in the chest with her webbed hand.

‘Ach,’ he said, as he spilled a little of his beer, and then he laughed again and wandered unsteadily into the hall where he sat down on the chest beneath the coat rack.

‘Then what?’ asked Anita, buttonholing Eric.

‘Oh, they say if their skins are stolen they can’t go back to the water, and that’s why some of them are still here,’ said Eric impatiently. ‘It’s a load of nonsense. Just because some of them have got webbed hands and feet – it’s all garbage. My wife . . .’ he paused.

‘What?’ asked Anita. ‘What about your wife?’

‘Nothing,’ said Eric. ‘She had to go to the mainland. I’d hoped she’d be here to help out over Christmas. That’s all. Finlay’s sister-in-law is helping out instead.’

‘Oh,’ said Anita. She looked round to see where Ronald had gone: this primitive myth would be of interest to a student of the human mind. He was talking to Jessica: he was actually addressing himself to Harry, but as Jessica was also sitting at the table Anita assumed he was talking to her, for was she not famous and glamorous? Her first awe of Jessica had been superseded by common sense as she realized that stars were made of flesh and blood, and this in turn had given way to slight contempt: Anita tended to think of all good-looking women as shallow, and by a natural progression of ideas, since most men seemed to prefer the company of good-looking women, she assumed that most men were also shallow – and foolish. But she was disappointed in Ronald, of whom she had expected better.

‘Why don’t we all go round to my place?’ said Mrs H. ‘This is no way to celebrate Christmas Eve.’

Eric could have throttled her. The few locals who had been in the bar had left, and now she was proposing to take away his guests and the other two incomers, leaving the place empty. Worse than that – his advertisement had guaranteed a clean, clear freedom from seasonal distractions and she was threatening to plunge the fugitives into the very atmosphere they had fled. He wished he’d had the foresight to bar her at the onset of Advent. He wished he could sit down and cry.

‘I’ve got to get another crate of tonic water,’ he said to Finlay’s sister-in-law, and went out into the inn yard telling himself he needed a breath of air. Through the blur of tears, which Eric put down to the atmosphere in the bar, he saw a boy sitting on the low wall. ‘Oi,’ said Eric, blinking and sounding more aggressive than he had intended, ‘what are you doing there?’

The boy was very still and for a moment Eric thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, ‘I’m waiting for my father.’

Eric was about to say ‘Your father’s not here,’ when a pile of empty crates fell down behind him, so instead he cried, ‘What the bloody hell?’ and spun round, his heart beating frighteningly fast. He expected to find that somebody too ill bred to use the gents had come out to relieve himself in the yard, but there was no one there. By the time he had restored the crates into an orderly edifice under the light from the kitchen window, he had forgotten about the boy.

‘What’s all the noise?’ asked Jon, when he returned to the bar.

‘What noise?’ said Eric shortly. If his inn had the custom it deserved nobody would have noticed a slight crash outside.

‘Sounded like the outbreak of war,’ said Jon, looking let-down.

Eric knew that look: some people enjoyed riots and commotion. Jon had doubtless hoped that a party of Picts had descended to wreak havoc for his diversion. Mrs H. was the same: she enjoyed nothing more than observing trouble from a safe distance: boats foundering, the mink in the hen-run, breaking relationships, the tattooed ones searching for iron bars to stun whomsoever they might identify as an adversary, anything to add colour to island life.

She was fidgeting on her stool, her anorak half off her shoulders, looking round restively for congenial playmates. In the absence of paramours she had the option of finding somebody to amuse her or going home to her husband, who would probably by now be peeling parsnips. ‘Tell you what,’ she said, singling out the professor, with whom she had an adolescent, back-of-the-class relationship – they teased each other unkindly while tacitly recognizing that their common status of outcast put them, for better for worse, in the same category – ‘Why don’t we go to your place? It’s nearer.’

Despite his depression Eric watched to see how the professor would respond: he was notoriously loth to pour drink down people’s throats, although he had arrived with his car boot full of cans of beer and cheap Rioja from a cut-price establishment in London. Eric knew because Finlay, who knew everything, had told him. ‘He’ll be having a party,’ Finlay had said, and laughed. It looked as though, if he wasn’t careful, the party would be tonight.