The Inn at the Edge of the World (24 page)

‘He must have seen someone in trouble out there,’ said Jessica, and she went herself to the phone in the hall and carefully dialled the number. The phone was dead.

‘The phone’s dead,’ she said to Eric as he tore in, dripping. He snatched it off the hook and listened, then banged it down again.

Jessica wanted to say ‘Told you so’, but she didn’t. She said: ‘What’s the matter?’

Eric, by now, had his hands in his hair. He stood still, trying to think. ‘The professor,’ he cried. ‘The professor’s got a dinghy. Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’ asked Ronald as they all automatically followed Eric’s summons. The rain was coming down in sheets when they got to the door and visibility was what is known as ‘limited’.

‘Shit,’ said Jessica. Ronald and Anita were putting on their coats with considered care but there was something in Eric’s urgency which drew Jessica after him, and she grabbed the first garment to come to hand from the hall-stand. ‘What
is
it?’ she asked as they ran.

‘It’s that boy,’ said Eric, gasping for breath. ‘He’s gone out in the inn dinghy and it’s full of holes . . .’ There was a figure walking towards them in the rain. ‘Finlay?’ shouted Eric.

‘Harry,’ said Jessica.

The professor’s cottage door was closed against the weather and Eric hammered against it, still shouting.

‘What’s the panic?’ asked the professor unwelcomingly, as he opened it, clad only in an insufficient towelling dressing-gown. Jessica took time to consider again her theory about men who habitually threw off their clothes, since he had obviously only just thrown on the gown and there were two girls in the kitchen. She determined to discuss it further with Harry.

‘Can we use your phone?’ said Eric.

‘Why?’ asked the professor.

‘Because it’s an emergency,’ said Eric with commendable reserve since he wanted to shriek,
‘Because it’s an emergency, you mean, close-fisted bastard
.’

‘I’ll have to unlock it,’ said the professor, reluctantly, and Eric put his hands in his hair again.

‘What is it?’ said Harry to Jessica.

‘It’s Jon,’ said Jessica. ‘He’s gone out in a holey boat and Eric’s trying to raise the coastguard.’

‘This one’s dead too,’ wailed Eric when the phone had been made available to him. His voice cracked.

‘Calm down,’ said Harry. ‘There’s no time to wait for the coastguard anyway.’

‘Then it’s got to be his dinghy,’ said Eric, pointing malevolently at the professor and daring him to refuse its use. ‘Where is it?’

‘It’s pegged on the foreshore,’ said the professor. ‘But Finlay’s borrowed the outboard-motor.’

‘Then I’ll have to row it,’ said Eric.

‘The tide’s out,’ said the professor, and Eric looked as though he might cry.

‘It’s all right,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll drag it to the end of the causeway and launch it from there. The water’s deep enough and it joins a channel . . .’

‘You?’ said Eric.

‘I know this coast,’ said Harry, and Jessica remembered that that deep water was where his boy had drowned.

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘I’ve done some sailing . . .’ I sound like Jon, she thought.

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘The dinghy won’t take more than two and if . . .’

‘If you have a return passenger,’ said Jessica.

‘Yes,’ said Harry.

The causeway was hard and cold and wet; the world at its worst and most inimical. The rain its cruel collaborator, and the sea – the end.

‘Don’t go . . .’ said Jessica, her shins bleeding from where she had fallen on the rock, her blood diluted in the salt rain. And then she said, ‘You must take this,’ and she took the old fur from her shoulders and passed it down to Harry in the bobbing dinghy, and she crouched in the seaweed, watching.

The rocks stretched out beyond her. She stared through the rain, half blinded, and saw shifting figures rising, and falling again, as though through a semi-opaque curtain, and she heard the wind. She saw a woman and a boy standing free of the sea. She saw their grey eyes. She saw the woman hold out her arms, and she saw the boy hold out his arms and Harry put the fur around him, and she said to herself, ‘It is Jon, and Harry has saved him,’ but then she looked again and as she saw a wave fall she saw the dinghy in its trough; saw someone clutch at its sides, fall back and clutch again, and then she saw it overturn and saw no more.

‘Jessica,’ someone was saying. ‘Jessica, Jessica – are you all right?’

She opened her eyes. She had heard someone else speaking a minute ago; had heard Jon cry out in fear, and a woman saying, ‘. . . poor child. Don’t be afraid.’ Heard Harry saying, ‘There is nothing to fear, nothing to fear at all.’ Heard a younger voice saying, ‘Father.’ Heard Harry’s voice again, changed by joy. Heard the music of a flute playing a tune so sweet and strange it might never have been heard on the earth before . . .

‘Jessica,’ she now heard faintly. ‘Jessica, Jessica . . .’

‘Bugger,’ said Jessica and tried to sit up. Her head hurt.

‘We thought you’d gone too,’ said Eric hysterically. ‘You were jumping round on the rock and you nearly went in.’

‘I don’t remember that,’ said Jessica, putting her hand up.

‘You’ve banged your head,’ said Anita.

They were all there. All except Harry and Jon, and they had gone with the seal people to the edge of the world . . .

‘What did you say?’ asked Anita, kneeling beside her out of the wind.

‘She’s delirious,’ said Eric. ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ He felt delirious too. He looked from the psychoanalyst to the dentist as they stood uselessly by and watched. ‘Don’t either of you have any medical training?’ he asked, not at all in the tone of a respectful innkeeper.

‘It’s only a graze,’ said the professor.

‘I’ll examine her when we get her back to the hotel,’ said Ronald. It seemed much harder as they struggled back along the causeway. Probably, thought Jessica, because now there was no hurry. And no Harry . . .

‘Don’t cry,’ said Anita in her new, nice voice.

‘I’m not,’ said Jessica.

Finlay was in the bar when they got back to the inn. He hadn’t been there long, because he was quite as wet as any of them.

‘Where the flaming hell were you?’ asked Eric. He’d lost two guests. There’d be an inquiry. The bodies might never be washed up. There was a curse on the inn. Nobody would stay there ever again. Mabel would say it was all his own fault. Mabel might never come back. He wished he’d stayed in Telford. He wished he was dead, drowned and gone with his erstwhile clients.

‘I had things to do,’ said Finlay and, unbelievably, he blew a swift trill on his flute, and laughed.

‘I’m packing it in,’ said Eric that evening in the bar. ‘I’ve had enough.’ He had abandoned any attempt to keep the usual cordial yet respectful distance between an innkeeper and his guests. ‘They don’t want us here and I don’t understand them. I’m off as soon as I can put this place on the market. What am I supposed to do now?’ He had been to the police station and informed the policeman of the mishap and gained the impression that he would somehow be held responsible. ‘I’ve
had
it,’ said Eric.

‘You can’t be blamed,’ said Anita, thereby implying that he could.

‘Happens all the time,’ said the professor. ‘Treacherous coastline.’

‘And what do I do with their things?’ inquired Eric. ‘Tell me that.’

‘You send them back to their next of kin,’ suggested Anita.

‘Harry hadn’t got any next of kin,’ said Jessica, speaking for the first time that evening.

‘Oh, great,’ said Eric. ‘And what about Jon? I guess he had none either?’

‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘I don’t think he did.’ She could be helpful and ask her agent but she didn’t want to. Her agent would be mildly annoyed with her for landing herself in trouble.

‘So what do I do with the stuff?’ Eric went on. ‘I suppose I have to keep it here, shoved in drawers so there’s no room for anything else.’ He remembered all the old sweaters and furs he had had to dispose of. Half of them were still lying around somewhere.

‘Get the police to take them away,’ said Anita.

‘I don’t think they’d do that,’ said Eric. ‘I’ll probably be accused of stealing them.’

‘I have heard,’ said Jessica, ‘that drowning is rather pleasant. I have heard it said that when there is a fire on board the sailors take with delight to the water. I know it could be held that they have no option . . .’

‘I don’t see how it could be pleasant,’ said Anita.

‘I have heard,’ continued Jessica, ‘that being drowned induces a sense of euphoria. Although I don’t see how anyone could really know.’

‘I don’t see that it matters,’ said Anita.

‘I don’t suppose it does,’ said Jessica.

‘How’s your head?’ asked Anita.

Ronald had pronounced the injury superficial and Eric had put a plaster on it.

‘It hurts,’ said Jessica, but she smiled because Mrs H. had arrived and would find it more interestingly tragic if one of the morning’s survivors was in great pain.

Mrs H. was thrilled to bits. A double drowning so close to home was even more exciting than the fouling of fishing-nets by trespassing submarines. ‘What a terrible thing,’ she said. ‘What a dreadful thing to happen.’ But now she was the one to be uniquely excluded from the company for she had not been on the causeway; not suffered the wind and the blinding rain and the feeble astonishment at seeing people with whom you had breakfasted being swept to destruction by a careless element. ‘How did it happen?’ she asked.

‘Accident,’ said Eric. ‘The gale . . .’ The wind had dropped, the sea was as still as a sleeping child and the air on the water as sweet as milk. Such an innocent world it seemed, now that it had eaten. Jessica put her hand to her head.

‘What gale?’ said Mrs H. ‘There’s been hardly a breath of wind all day.’

‘You must be very sheltered up there,’ said Eric. ‘It’s been blowing great guns down here.’

‘It didn’t say anything on the weather forecast,’ said Mrs H.

‘It never does,’ said Eric unfairly.

‘Sudden squall,’ said the professor. ‘Treacherous coastline.’ He seemed obsessed by this anthropomorphic quality in the geography of the island, and Eric couldn’t blame him. He thought on the whole it was quite an accurate summing-up. Wives and islands – thought Eric – each as untrustworthy as the other.

‘Maybe it’s the sea that brings down your fence,’ suggested Mrs H., ‘if it can get so rough down there.’

‘I’d’ve noticed, wouldn’t I?’ said the professor. ‘I’d’ve been bound to notice if the sea was in the garden.’

‘Not if you weren’t there,’ said Mrs H.

‘It happens when I
am
there,’ said the professor. ‘It happens all the time.’

Mrs H. could have kicked herself for bringing up the subject of his blasted fence: she wanted details of the day’s catastrophe about which she was still vague.

‘The dinghy’s gone too,’ said the professor.

‘So’s mine,’ said Eric.

‘Yours was knackered already,’ said the professor. ‘Finlay’d just finished working on mine.’

‘
Finlay
,’ said Eric. ‘Finlay’s a dead loss if you ask me. He’s never around when you need him.’ He did not care that Finlay’s sister-in-law was behind him somewhere, and probably within earshot: he hoped she’d tell Finlay his candid opinion of him, although he suspected that Finlay would not be unduly discomposed at the hearing. ‘Why wasn’t he here with his damn boat?’ he demanded. ‘He could’ve prevented all this.’

‘Finlay’s boat’s moored a couple of miles down the coast,’ volunteered Mrs H. ‘I saw it the other day.’

‘What’s it doing down there?’ asked Eric. ‘What’s the use of that?’ It was another instance of the maddening ways of the locals, irresponsible and inscrutable. They were just like the weather: the fiendish, carefree, murderous weather.

‘I’d rather go back on the ferry,’ said Anita.

‘It looks as though you’ll have to,’ said Eric.

‘Have you told their next of kin?’ asked Mrs H., since no one seemed prepared to talk about what had happened.

‘They haven’t got any,’ said Eric. ‘Anyone want another drink?’ Tonight he didn’t care if he gave it away. All his hopes had been finally dashed, and now he was missing his wife unbearably. He knew perfectly well that if she came back she’d continue to make his life a misery, and he didn’t care: she gave him moments that almost made up for it. He wouldn’t care if she was rude to the Procurator Fiscal. It didn’t seem to matter any more compared to the way she smiled when the weather was warm, basking on the inn wall where the boy had sat, laughing at the eel that Finlay had brought in a bucket and that had frightened Eric nearly to death.

‘You all seem very casual about it,’ said Mrs H. at last, petulantly.

‘About what?’ asked Eric.

‘You know . . .’ she said and gestured with her hands.

‘We’re all in shock,’ claimed Anita.

‘They have not yet had time . . .’ said Ronald, electing now to exclude himself from the rest, ‘. . . to fully appreciate the nuances and repercussions of what has happened today. A sudden, unexpected and traumatic event such as they witnessed this morning will require time and possibly informed assistance before they will be able fully to assimilate and hopefully to come to terms with it. In some cases they may feel a residual sense of guilt at either what they perceive as a lack of due preparation for one of the major circumstances of existence, or a failure to preclude and forestall it. It is not impossible that some may feel they should have offered further endeavours to prevent what they consider an accidental occurrence. They are not however . . .’ he continued, ‘. . . in shock. Shock is a pathological state typified by hypothermia, a swift and shallow pulse rate . . .’