The Inn at the Edge of the World

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  ‘Giant squid, I suppose,’ said Mrs H.

  ‘I’ve sailed a four-masted Baltic schooner through a typhoon in the China Seas,’ said Jon improbably. Nobody bothered to challenge this statement and even Jon saw that he would do well to qualify it in the interests of plausibility. ‘Well, it was more of a squall, actually,’ he said, ‘and there were five of us.’ Nor had this squall occurred in the China Seas: it had happened off the Hook of Holland with a hired crew to man the vessel, and a camera crew to immortalize the image of Jon shinning up the rigging to the crow’s nest where there awaited a maiden clad in Dutch bonnet and clogs, holding tantalizingly aloft a platter of fishfingers. In the end this scene had actually been shot ashore with special effects, but Jon had hung in the rigging for a while until the director had given it up as a bad job. The commercial had been shown only on the continent, where they had lower standards. ‘We were researching for a film,’ explained Jon. ‘Only it was going to go so far above budget that they gave it up.’

  This could have been true and Jessica was disposed to be sympathetic, for she knew too well the broken promises, the blighted schemes, the failed hopes attendant on film-making. ‘Poor you,’ she said.

  The others, who were not conversant with the inflated enterprises, the hazards and the sheer financial lunacy of this business, remained sceptical, and Jessica found herself momentarily at a small remove from the company, isolated with Jon in a shared appreciation of the fantastical, the unreal elements of their common profession.

  ‘Do you suppose there are any giant squid?’ asked Anita, trying to bring the conversation down to a more practical level and out of the Munchausen realms of fevered exaggeration and falsehood.

  ‘There are recorded instances,’ said Ronald, ‘but I can’t remember the exact dimensions of the largest. Down in the lowest depths are things we may never learn about. It’s quite possible that mankind will know more of the furthest galaxies than it will ever know about the creatures of the sea. It may be easier to fly beyond the stars than plumb the depths.’ He became aware of the metaphorical psycho logical implications in this observation and lapsed into reverie clouded by self-doubt. If he followed the metaphor through and it held, then it was to the visionaries, the mystics – even the religious – that the human race must turn in its search for enlightenment, while he and his kind continued poking round with a stick in the mud at what ever level they could reach. This disheartening reflection kept his attention until teatime.

  The professor entered alone, which made him look a little strange, like a person who habitually wears glasses but has mislaid them, or a woman without her make-up.

  ‘On your own?’ asked Mrs H. ‘Not got a girl today?’

  ‘Several,’ said the professor complacently. Jessica supposed that he’d left them to cook lunch in the cottage by the sea. One would be saying, ‘. . . he doesn’t care for too much pepper’, and another would be saying, ‘. . . he likes his carrots raw’, and a third would be saying, ‘. . . that’s too much chutney’, and a fourth would be washing her stockings in the sink while a fifth tried to drain the spaghetti . . .

  Intent on the choreography of the scene she didn’t hear the professor offering to buy her a drink until he repeated himself. He leaned over her and she noticed that he smelled of cooked meat.

  ‘Oh, no, thanks,’ she said and he moved down to the other end of the bar to try it on with Anita.

  ‘Does he try it on with absolutely everyone?’ Jessica asked Eric.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eric.

  ‘He must get a lot of refusals,’ said Jessica as she saw Anita also making a negative gesture.

  ‘It’s like this,’ said Eric. ‘I’ve known other blokes the same. I said to one of them once what you just said to me – you must get a lot of refusals – and he said yes, he got a lot of refusals but he got a lot of acceptances too. If ninety per cent of all the birds in the world turned him down, that left ten per cent, and it’s still a hell of a lot of birds. It’s like selling double-glazing. You knock on a thousand doors and in nine cases out of ten it’s slammed in your face. Then you score. There’s a lot of money in double-glazing.’

  ‘Doesn’t give you AIDS, though,’ said Jessica.

  ‘What doesn’t give you AIDS?’ asked Jon, returning from the gents.

  ‘Double-glazing,’ said Jessica.

  ‘I’d love to see a giant squid,’ said Anita.

  ‘You should come scuba-diving with me,’ said the professor, who was irrepressible.

  ‘I do scuba-diving,’ said Jon competitively.

  Poor little soul, thought Jessica. He was so desperate for the limelight he’d admit to anything. She thought she might take his education in hand: teach him how to show off without alienating people; explain to him that nice men didn’t go scuba-diving, that scuba-diving was the modern aquatic equivalent of Old-Tyme Dancing, a pursuit followed by people who knew no better, and who frequently owned caravans or fibreglass boats. She was beginning to feel protective towards him.

  The phone rang in the hall. ‘It’s for you,’ said Eric to Jessica. ‘You can take it at the reception desk.’

  ‘Hallo,’ said Jessica and was answered by a crackle as of some toothless being grinding cornflakes between its jaws. ‘I can’t hear you,’ she said. ‘Ring back.’

  The phone rang again and the crackle again assailed her ears. ‘It’s no good,’ said Jessica. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s me,’ said an unrecognizable voice through the cornflakes. ‘Listen.’

  ‘I am listening,’ said Jessica. ‘All I can hear is crackling.’

  ‘. . . trouble . . .’ said the voice.’. . . careful . . .’

  ‘What?’ said Jessica. ‘Who are you? What trouble? Oh, damn?

  The phone crackled frenziedly.

  ‘You’ll have to try again later,’ said Jessica, projecting her voice as to the furthest corners of the auditorium and nearly deafening her agent who could hear her perfectly clearly.

  ‘Oh sod it,’ said her agent to the liar who was standing by. ‘I tried. I won’t have time to ring again before I get the plane. I only hope she’s got the sense she was born with.’ For the agent, in her omniscient fashion, now knew where Jessica had gone and that Jon had followed her to her secret destination. It had come through on the grapevine, a more efficient medium than BT.

  ‘She’s not stupid,’ said the liar.

  ‘No, but you never know with islands,’ said Jessica’s agent obscurely.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ asked Eric.

  Jon was poised with his head inclined to where Jessica was speaking on the telephone. He looked as though he was listening with more than his ears and Eric was uncomfortably reminded of himself. Just so had he sometimes listened from behind the bar when Mabel was talking to the men: unable to hear, yet listening with his whole body.

  ‘No,’ said Jon as Jessica came back into the bar.

  Murder, thought Eric. When he had been forced to listen like that, wary and tranced, the prospect of murder had often come into his mind. He only hoped that, at the time, he had not looked as crazy as Jon was looking now. The spectacle of another man in the throes of jealous suspicion was almost enough to cure you. Eric was glad he hadn’t killed his wife since such an action would have revealed to the world, not only that he couldn’t cope with her moods, but that he feared himself cuckolded. It would, without a doubt, have stripped him of dignity. Only Latins, mad people and the local drunks, thought Eric severely, went round killing their women. He remembered, uneasily, times when he had lurked in bushes to observe what Mabel was up to, and vowed that if she returned he would change his attitude. He would make his position clear in a calm and authoritative way and say no more.

  ‘Well,’ said the professor, rising to perform his habitual leave-taking as no one was talking to him. ‘I must love you and leave you.’

  Everyone wondered crossly why he stuck to this outmoded form of words.

  ‘In January 1876, Charles Georg
e Gordon wrote: “I would that all had the assurance of future life . . . No one is indispensable, either in this world’s affairs or in spiritual work. You are a machine, though allowed to feel as if you had the power of action. When things turn out in a way we do not wish, we quarrel with God when we feel put out. Most difficult is this lesson, and only to be learned by a continual thought of this world being only a temporary one – i.e. by continually thinking of death as a release.”’

  Harry contemplated these words, trying to put out of his mind the part he understood and concentrate on the part he didn’t. He had long thought of death as a release, but he wondered what precisely Gordon had meant by the term ‘machine’. He had grown increasingly interested in Gordon’s cast of mind and less in his campaigns – a symptom of age, considered Harry impartially, wishing that he had himself died in battle when he was young enough to face the final change with vigour and a positive acceptance, rather than the weary resignation which was all that was left to him.

  When Jessica knocked at his door he felt the relief of the author interrupted in the midst of a welter of fruitless speculation, when inspiration has ceased and the mere application of the brain seems insufficient to get the pen moving again.

  ‘Am I a person from Porlock?’ asked Jessica who was no different from anybody else in that she rather enjoyed disturbing people who were attempting to work. There was not any malice in the urge: it was a primitive, tribal response to the individual intent on private concerns – ‘Kindly rejoin the community and let us play.’ The man engrossed in solitary pursuits is always a little threatening.

  ‘No,’ said Harry, ‘or if you are you’re welcome. I’ve had enough for today.’

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked Jessica, reassured. She sat down in a wicker armchair covered in Eric’s cut-price chintz, and ate an apple she’d saved from lunch. ‘The awful thing is,’ she said, ‘that the more meals I get put in front of me the more I eat in between them, and what’s worse I can’t seem to stop talking about it. Have you noticed that when one stays in an hotel one’s powers of conversation desert one and one grows boring? Do you think it’s because one eats so much?’

  Harry, who had not taken lunch, had been reading with sympathy of nineteenth-century army rations in Egypt – tinned soup, tinned beef or mutton and biscuits – and later of the inhabitants of the garrison of El Obeid who had dug up the buried carcases of dogs, donkeys and camels; had stripped the leather thongs from the native bedsteads, soaked and eaten them; had dug up the rotting gum which the fleeing merchants had buried for safe-keeping, and eaten that; had killed and eaten the vultures, carrion crows and kites, and – it was hinted – had fallen upon the burial grounds of their own kind, long dead, and had disinterred and eaten them too.

  ‘Did you have lunch early?’ asked Jessica. ‘You’d gone by the time we got there.’

  ‘I wasn’t hungry,’ said Harry.

  ‘Nor was I,’ said Jessica, ‘but I ate it all the same. Perhaps I starved to death in a previous incarnation and I’m trying to make up for it now.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Harry.

  Jessica was disconcerted: she wasn’t used to having her thoughtless fantasies taken seriously by people she respected.

  Harry sighed, alarming Jessica who imagined that she really wasn’t wanted and had intruded on some profound and nourishing solitude: but Harry was thinking of Gordon and his elusive views, as seemingly incompatible with Victorian Protestantism. ‘I think,’ Gordon had written, ‘that this life is only one of a series of lives which our incarnated past has lived. I have little doubt of our having pre-existed; and that also in the time of our preexistence we were actively employed.’ Gordon had greatly valued active employment. ‘If we are reincarnated,’ said Harry, ‘it’s unfortunate that we can’t remember the details of past lives. It would make writing history a lot simpler.’

  ‘Is that what you’re writing?’ asked Jessica. ‘A history book? I thought it was a biography, but then if the subject’s been dead for ages I suppose it’s more or less the same thing.’

  ‘More or less,’ agreed Harry, wondering how the Victorians had so easily entertained the concept of the soldier as Christian gentleman, and whether Gordon had lived up to the ideal: on the evidence it seemed that he had. Harry, in his youth, had aspired to the same condition, but war had disillusioned him. He didn’t know whether this was due to his own inadequacy or whether it had been the climate of opinion that enabled men to become heroes with a clear conscience and to continue in the ways of belief. With all the years of final peace the soldier had lost his accepted purpose, the national acclaim and respect that had been his due; had reverted to the state of the mercenary or become a stealthy feral creature, camouflaged, and alien to the mass of society: his weapons no longer mere extensions of his limbs but complex aspects of a murderous technology. With warfare and mass destruction dependent on merely political decisions, the psychopathy of rulers and the pressure on a button, the simple soldier-man was useful only in conflicts too foreign or insignificant to merit such drastic measures. Inevitably this meant that he would be involved in the unjust suppression of the innocent in foreign lands. Revolution against tyranny was a matter for indigenous populations – or anyway, that was how Harry saw it. It devalued, in retrospect, all that he had lived for. Harry tended to identify, when he thought about it, more with the brutal and licentious soldiery than with his peers who had gone on to positions in industry, banking and Parliament, nor could he identify with the polished pageantry of the Brigades. There was no longer a mess in the world where he would have felt at home.

  ‘But then – if we’d been earthworms,’ said Jessica, ‘we wouldn’t have much of interest to remember, would we?’

  ‘No,’ said Harry.

  ‘Most people say they want to come back as a pussycat,’ said Jessica, ‘specifying, of course, that they should be well cared for and beloved and not thrown to the bad dogs.’ She was feeling depressed and inclined to jabber meaninglessly. She had awakened early to a dull, grey sky, hanging over the dull grey island, while the dull, grey sea whinged fitfully at its shore. All this presented a melancholy enough appearance, but still was not sufficient to account for the lowness of her spirits. She supposed she must be missing Mike more than she had realized, for if it wasn’t that, there must be a different cause: she had suffered no other recent loss and the time had not yet come to fear death, not as far as Jessica was concerned.

  She had told herself she was too old to wish for snow and reached out for The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in order not to think about the next topic in her train of thought. If she had lain there brooding, she would have understood that she was missing the preparations for Christmas, and since she had gone to such lengths to avoid them it would have made her feel a fool.

  ‘I’m going for a walk,’ she said, remembering that the sea was less boring when you got close to it than when it lay around like a wet rug. There would be details of spume and wave and twisted driftwood, shells and the bodies of wind-torn sea birds.

  ‘I might follow you later,’ said Harry. ‘I’ll tidy up these papers first.’

  ‘I’m going along the shore as far as the church,’ said Jessica, ‘and then up the hill.’

  When she went downstairs she saw Jon leaning in the bar doorway. ‘Heigh ho,’ she said. He took this as an invitation to join her and stepped forward, reaching for his jacket which hung on the hall rack. Jessica didn’t really mind, having no particular desire, at the moment, to be alone: she hoped he was prepared to think of something to talk about since she could not – except for Helen Huntingdon whom she was finding increasingly annoying but who, she felt, would not serve to sustain a conversation with Jon. Jon, thought Jessica, did not look the intellectual type. She wondered if he’d ever gone to school.

  There was a sifting of snow on the hill tops. ‘I wish the snow would come down here,’ said Jessica.

  ‘You’re a child,’ said Jon. He spoke indulgently but she couldn’t take o
ffence at what he said, even though he was at least fifteen years younger than she was.

  ‘I sort of expected snow,’ she said, sounding, to her own irritation, childish. She was beginning to notice that Jon had an odd ability to guide her responses: it was he who had caused her to gallop along the sands like a two-year-old. ‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘snow can be most inconvenient.’

  ‘In the Arctic . . .’ began Jon, and she feared he was about to spin a yarn, but he was careful. ‘In the Arctic,’ he went on, ‘they think of Hell as cold.’

  ‘I do myself sometimes,’ said Jessica, ‘when it is cold. When I’m too hot I think of Hell as hot. I suppose it’s only natural.’ She hadn’t meant to sound dismissive, but Jon flexed his fingers, unseen in his pockets.

  ‘Do you think the sea will ruin my boots?’ asked Jessica after a short silence, gazing down at the Spanish leather.

  ‘Not unless you walk in it,’ said Jon and fell silent again.

  Jessica began to look beautiful. She could not have explained how she performed this feat, but it was some thing she often did when people were displeased with her. At the same time she observed aloud that there were a couple of Highland kine in a distant field. Jon, of course, took this as a sexual advance and relaxed, putting an arm around her shoulders: he laughed and drew her closer to him.

  Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, thought Jessica resignedly, inwardly deploring the multitudinous complexities and resultant misunderstanding inherent in human intercourse. All she had wanted was to go for a walk and exercise away some of the consequences of three meals a day, with added snacks, and already she had nearly quarrelled with a comparative stranger who now showed every sign of being about to make love to her. It could only be due to some deep flaw in her character – or possibly sheer thoughtlessness.

  The church had been deconsecrated some time ago, since it lacked both minister and congregation, and was now used as a boat-shed, being conveniently adjacent to the sea. It reminded Jessica of an unfashionable and discarded hat, than which there is nothing more redundant. The road wound round it and up the hill towards the thin toupee of snow which now reminded Jessica of an actor with whom she had once worked in Nicholas Nickleby. She determined not to mention this since she knew it would sound winning and give a further wrong impression. They passed an untidy and ill-assorted gathering of gorse, rhododendron, bramble, clematis and infant pine imprisoned in a deep hollow at the roadside. The ham-fisted hand of man was evident here as the wild, the cultivated and the transplanted strove for dominance in a gladiatorially herbaceous fashion. They also made Jessica think of a number of legitimate, illegitimate and stepchildren competing for attention as they struggled up towards the light. Man sows discord, thought Jessica, but she said: ‘Crikey, here’s some ragged robin in flower. What can have possessed it to come out at this time? It’s positively months premature.’