The Inn at the Edge of the World (20 page)

‘So keep away from him,’ said Harry.

‘What can I do about it?’ asked Jessica.

‘Just keep away,’ said Harry. ‘He can be accused of nothing but walking in a stealthy fashion.’

‘And wearing a funny look on his face,’ said Jessica. ‘It’s like those cases you read about where the police say they can’t take any action until the person has killed you. I see now why the intended victims get so wrought up about it. They usually have much more than me to complain about, and I feel really cross only because he
may
have had the impertinence to try and murder me. How shall I comport myself towards him?’

‘It’s unprecedented in my experience,’ said Harry. ‘I’ve met the enemy after the war and we’ve had a drink together, but there was nothing personal in the hostilities.’

‘It feels almost as bad as being raped,’ said Jessica. ‘A gross intrusion on one’s privacy. Where is he now?’

‘Seems to have disappeared again,’ said Harry, looking round. ‘He’s nowhere to be seen.’

‘It’s rather sinister the way he disappears,’ said Jessica, scoring another black mark against him. ‘I’m going to buy you a pint for saving my life. I didn’t think I much cared about it earlier in all this damp, but now I feel I would’ve missed it badly.’

‘You’re young,’ said Harry, ‘with your life before you.’

‘Oh, come on,’ said Jessica. ‘You’re at it again. I must be nearly half-way through, only now I find I want to sit through the second half – see what happens – for instance, what’s for lunch?’

‘Turkey,’ suggested Harry.

‘I think Eric’ll be more subtle than that,’ said Jessica. ‘You forget we’re not doing Christmas.’

‘Melon,’ said Eric, ‘consommé, roast beef, potatoes and carrots and peas, trifle, cheese and biscuits, coffee, and I don’t give a damn.’

He had originally intended to serve thin slices of marinated salmon, a hot and herby soup, a haunch of venison from the supermarket on the mainland and bread-and-butter pudding with brandy in it, but he couldn’t be bothered: he had discovered for himself what most women know – that to cook well and with imagination you have to be in a cheerful and contented frame of mind, and thus inclined to be generous. Things were getting Eric down to the point where he was beginning to think in terms of oven chips and frozen cod in batter and Walls ice-cream. Why not? he asked himself as despair crept up like an unwholesome tide. The longer Mabel was away the more he remembered her as really rather sweet: her ferocious aspects dimmed by her absence and his own loneliness. Finlay’s sister-in-law, to whom he had addressed this reminder of the menu, had restored the Raeburn to life and was cutting up two melons, discarding the bruised parts.

Eric morosely fondled the beef to ensure that it had thawed properly and wondered about Christmas Day in Glasgow. He was glad of the assistance offered by Finlay and his sister-in-law, without which he would have been lost, but he could not rid himself of an ungracious sense of faint resentment: it seemed to him that the pair of them behaved as though they owned the place, not in any flamboyantly possessive style, but with a quietly secure assumption of right of tenure. They knew where everything was, and went about their business without ever referring to him, silently assured except when Finlay drank too much and gave vent to utterances which, while largely meaningless to Eric, were treated by his sister-in-law as indiscreet. This in turn made Eric feel rather like the victim of a conspiracy, as though something was going on under his nose about which he knew nothing. The island mentality, he thought, fearing that he was developing paranoid tendencies and wondering whether he should refer them to Ronald. Did he have any horseradish sauce or had they used it all up with yester day’s smoked mackerel? He didn’t give a monkey’s.

He left Finlay’s sister-in-law opening tins of consommé to which he would later add, in order to take the taste away, a good slurp of sherry, and went reluctantly to the bar. You’d think that the owner of an inn, particularly one at the edge of the world, might feel like the captain of a ship in sole charge of the crew and passengers, but he didn’t: he felt like a small, sad and put-upon person, reeking of kitchen steam and harassed almost to death. His expectations were disappointed – not of his guests, for on the whole they were more than he could have hoped for – but of his own response, since he had had a confident image of himself in the mode of those urbane and self-confident owner/chefs of pastel-painted restaurants, mingling on equal terms with the customers and gracefully (although always with wit) accepting their sycophantic observations. There were, as there always had been, chefs of uncertain temper who threw the hollandaise about when the fish had not arrived on time or a punter demanded the salt, but Eric had not aspired to such self-indulgence. He’d just wanted a peaceful, profitable and possibly satisfying time. Fantasy was self-defeating. That morning the strange boy had passed again on the way to the sea and Eric wished he’d gone fishing with him.

Nevertheless the scene in the bar was less dispiriting than his imaginings in the kitchen. The people, whether due to an excess of liquor the night before or because of some residual awareness of the nature of the season, were being well behaved and polite to each other. Even the professor and Mrs H. were conversing in low, equable tones, while a girl had pinned Ronald into a corner and was addressing him earnestly. Jessica was looking rosily bright and positive and more like an actress than usual, while Anita was questioning Jon about some aspect of the island’s topography. Harry, as always, was his gentlemanly self, unfailingly polite and reassuringly sane.

‘You had it back at the end of August, you creep,’ Mrs H. was saying. ‘Finlay took it down on the back of the tractor.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said the professor. ‘I was looking for it this morning and it’s not there.’

‘Well, I haven’t got it,’ said Mrs H. ‘You must’ve left it somewhere.’

‘How could I leave it somewhere?’ said the professor. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you leave somewhere.’

‘How do I know?’ said Mrs H. ‘How do I know what you do with things you borrow?’

‘
You
borrowed it from
me
,’ said the professor. ‘I bought it from you last year and then you borrowed it back.’

‘Then I gave it back,’ said Mrs H. ‘Finlay took it down on . . .’

‘He didn’t,’ said the professor. ‘I’d’ve remembered.’

This was not an unusual discussion on the island where people were constantly borrowing things from each other – items of machinery to move boats around, mow grass, mend the guttering, replace the aerials. It was perhaps a primitive form of social intercourse.

‘I expect it’ll turn up,’ said Mrs H. ‘Whose round is it?’

‘Yours,’ said the professor.

Ronald was asking himself yet again why people should imagine he might be interested in their dreams. He wasn’t even interested in his own dreams. He was interested in lunch and frequently consulted his watch without bothering to be surreptitious.

‘. . . so then I flew to the top of the chimney,’ said the girl. ‘I expect that’s very significant.’ She awaited his diagnosis, gazing at him.

‘What do you make the time?’ asked Ronald.

‘What would that prove?’ asked the girl. ‘I make it 12.30. What does that tell you?’

Ronald gazed back at her, bewildered, while she awaited his pronouncement.

‘That it’s 12.30,’ he said. His watch said the same.

She pondered on the profundity of this as she drank her rum and Coke: she had heard somewhere that psychiatrists seldom said much to their patients, marshalling the salient psychological facts in neat order and leaving it to them to realize the significance for themselves; to recall the forgotten events which re-emerged in dreams in disguised form. Something must once have happened to her at 12.30, something to do with a chimney . . .

‘I can’t imagine how I should be feeling,’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t think anyone ever tried to murder me before. They may have wanted to, if we’re being perfectly honest, but they never tried it on. If I was
acting
someone who someone had just tried to murder I’d know how to behave, but as it is I only feel a bit insulted. It doesn’t seem normal somehow. Shouldn’t I be clutching my throat and moaning with terror?’

‘Not now,’ said Harry. ‘Everyone would be very surprised unless you went on to explain.’

‘It would positively
ruin
Christmas lunch, would it not?’ said Jessica.

‘It would certainly go some way towards putting a damper on the proceedings,’ agreed Harry. ‘You must just be careful to stay away from him. I don’t suppose he’ll try it again.’ In saying this Harry was assuming that Jon, apart from the occasional aberration, was basically as sane as himself.

Jessica was for once more clear-sighted. ‘Not if he’s nuts,’ she said. ‘If he’s nuts he’ll go on doing it. Maybe he’s got an
idée fixe
and nothing will do but that he should murder his mother.’

‘You’re not his mother,’ Harry pointed out.

‘He may
think
I am,’ said Jessica. ‘He may identify me with his mother who locked him in the coal cellar when he was an infant child so that she could have a cocktail in peace with a gentleman caller – or possibly she had another little tot whom she liked better and she took it to the pictures while he . . .’ she found she didn’t want to say his name ‘. . . cried in the coal dust until his face got positively filthy, and then when she came back she smacked him for getting dirty. I probably resemble her. What’s he doing now?’

Harry looked across the room to where Jon leaned against the bar. ‘He’s talking to Anita,’ he said. In this he was less than accurate. Anita was doing most of the talking.

‘You go on down the road until you come to the part where the sign’s fallen down. If you bend over to look at it it says something about the castle, but because it’s fallen down you can’t tell which way it’s pointing, so you go on up a little road until it stops, and there’s a cottage there . . .’

‘Is there?’ said Jon, sucking a swizzle-stick absentmindedly, and thinking of broken bones.

‘If you’ve been up there you must have seen it,’ said Anita. ‘You couldn’t miss it. Did you see it?’

‘I honestly can’t remember,’ said Jon. He never liked to give the impression that there was something he didn’t know, even if it was only the whereabouts of a tumble-down cottage on the way to a fallen castle. ‘I must’ve passed it but I was thinking about something else.’

‘It’s so exasperating,’ said Anita. ‘I
might
have gone another way and got mixed up, but I can’t believe it. I really wanted to look at those sweaters again. They knit them in different patterns so when their man gets washed up they can . . .’

‘So you said,’ said Jon.

‘Do you suppose,’ whispered Jessica to Harry, ‘that, with any luck, he might transfer his feelings of filial murderousness to Anita? No, forget I said that,’ she added. ‘That wasn’t very nice. I didn’t mean it – not really, not altogether.’

‘He shows no signs at the moment,’ said Harry. ‘He’s going out again.’

‘I wonder where he goes,’ said Jessica. ‘Maybe he goes looking for mothers to murder. I don’t think there are many round here since there aren’t any children.’

‘A lot of the young people leave,’ said Harry. ‘It’s hard for them to make a living now. A bit of farming, a bit of fishing . . .’

‘How does Finlay manage?’ asked Jessica, as he came into the bar in his antique oilskins.

‘He does a bit of everything,’ said Harry. ‘Anything that needs to be done – if Finlay’s sober, he’ll do it.’

‘It must give him a lovely sense of power,’ said Jessica. ‘What sort of thing?’ she added as she found she was unrealistically visualizing Finlay as a creature of myth, ensuring that the corn sprang at the expected time, the blossom bloomed correctly and finally transformed itself into fruit, and the tides turned when Finlay bade the moon to cause them to do so.

‘More or less anything,’ said Harry. ‘There are people like that in most small communities. There have to be or no one would survive. And then there’s his sister-in-law – she copes with confinements and medical emergencies when the doctor can’t get across.’

‘Like the blacksmith and the wise woman,’ said Jessica, back in the ravelled realms of ancient legend.

‘Very like,’ said Harry, finishing his beer.

Finlay had removed his outer covering and was leaning on the bar: he was wearing a shapeless knitted garment with a few stray fish-scales adhering to the wool. Anita peered at it as closely as was compatible with the usages of polite society and inquired whether his woman had knitted it for him. Finlay, who was sober as yet, replied, as far as Anita could tell, that, on the contrary, she had bought it for him from the Oxfam shop in the town. Anita was quite sure he was lying.

‘What’ll you have, Finlay?’ asked Eric, hoping he wasn’t planning to get drunk, since he had chopped up a great deal of driftwood for the fires that morning and sometimes seemed to assume that this task gave him licence to drink whisky for the rest of the day.

‘Whusky,’ said Finlay as Eric had foretold.

‘I think I may have a whisky too, please,’ said Ronald, sidling away from the girl who was presently trying to recall a pre-birth experience.

‘You shouldn’t drink whisky before lunch,’ said Anita. ‘Put a lot of ice in it,’ she instructed Eric, wondering whether she could maintain her newfound authoritativeness when she returned to her department, if indeed, she ever did decide to return. She felt a new Anita emerging from the sloughed persona of the old, as bossing Ronald about gradually increased her confidence and self-esteem. Ronald briefly clasped her hand.