The Inn at the Edge of the World

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  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.

  ‘Come on,’ said Mrs H. ‘The spooks walk on Christmas Eve. If we all go together we’ll be all right. We’ll have to hold hands. Maybe we’ll see the ghost in the cottage – he makes everything go cold – doesn’t he?’ she said to the professor.

  There was a rumour that once this chilly phantom had proved so alarming that all the ladies in the vicinity had leapt, for comfort, into the professor’s bed. He had not had the chance to either affirm or deny the allegation as no one had ever directly taxed him with it, since, in those matters, frothy speculation is frequently more satisfying than the truth. ‘Very cold,’ said the professor, smiling knowingly, for he liked to keep the rumour alive.

  Mrs H. would have pursued the topic, but Ronald interrupted. ‘If the cottage is by the sea,’ he observed, ‘it must quite often be cold.’

  ‘It isn’t that sort of cold,’ said Anita.

  ‘What sort of cold?’ asked Ronald. ‘How do you know what sort of cold is under discussion?’

  ‘Rising damp,’ said Eric again.

  ‘Ghostly cold is quite different from other sorts of cold,’ said Anita, looking Ronald straight in the eye.

  Again he was swift to recognize the warning signs. ‘I’m not saying it isn’t,’ he explained. ‘I merely wish to know how y
ou know?’

  ‘You just do,’ said Anita, indicating by her expression that only a perfect idiot could fail to know. She began to remind him of his wife.

  ‘What I say is,’ said Mrs H., ‘we’d be silly to waste the chance of seeing the ghost when the time’s right. They always come out on Christmas Eve – it’s the only night they can talk to you.’

  ‘Why do you want to see it?’ asked Ronald.

  Most of those present considered that this question required no answer: for one thing there were few people who wouldn’t want to see a ghost, and for another seeing the ghost was not Mrs H.’s true motive. She wanted to have a party and not go home. It was obvious.

  Anita spoke: having once experienced an uncanny cold she felt herself qualified to state a preference. ‘I’d like to see it,’ she said.

  ‘Has anybody actually seen it?’ asked Ronald. ‘I thought it was merely a sensation of cold.’

  ‘You see it out of the corner of your eye,’ said Mrs H. ‘It’s very frightening. Isn’t it?’ She appealed to the professor, who was, after all, the proprietor of the phantom.

  ‘So they say,’ said the professor. ‘It frightened the girls all right.’

  Mrs H. cackled.

  ‘Why do you laugh?’ asked Ronald, thinking of a theory which held that mirth was a response to fear, deprivation, all manner of unpleasant things, and therefore a sign of neurosis. A truly well-balanced person would never laugh out loud. He had read that the Red Indian, the well-brought-up Chinaman and Lord Chesterfield had all considered laughter to be a social solecism, characterizing the coarse and the low-born who, it was true, would have had much to deplore in their circumstances and little on the surface to giggle about – which went some way to endorsing the theory. Ronald had tried to explain this to his wife when she had accused him of lacking humour, but she had never taken in what he was saying. He was in two minds about the subject: or rather he felt he was keeping an open mind, since received lay opinion at present considered the lack of a sense of humour to be a drawback, and he was increasingly feeling the need to live in the world as well as in his consulting room. His wife had one day wondered aloud whether he had taken up psychiatry because he was barking mad, or whether daily dealings with the unbalanced had driven him so. Even now the memory stung. He smiled, surprising his whiskers which previously had been disturbed only by those jaw movements attendant upon speaking, masticating or the cleaning of the teeth which they surrounded. ‘I suppose it is funny,’ he said.

  ‘What’s funny?’ asked Anita.

  ‘Everything,’ said Ronald inadequately, and Anita felt sorry for him because he looked so lost.

  ‘I was laughing at everybody standing round trying to decide whether to go and see the ghost or not,’ said Mrs H. untruthfully. ‘I think you’re all scared.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re scared exactly . . .’ began Ronald.

  ‘It’s not that I’m scared at all,’ said Anita. ‘Only it’s cold enough out there already, and it was trying to rain earlier. I think I’d rather go to bed.’

  ‘You can’t go to bed on Christmas Eve,’ said Mrs H.

  Jessica was beginning to feel restless. ‘Do you want to go to a party?’ she asked Harry.

  ‘I think I’ll have an early night,’ he said. ‘Tired . . .’ He did look tired, Jessica now saw. He was pale. She hoped she hadn’t wearied him. ‘You go,’ he said. ‘Young people . . .’ She stared at him, suspiciously, and he smiled. ‘Comparatively young,’ he said, and she was reassured: people on the brink of death seldom felt sufficiently vigorous to tease those who were likely to outlive them.

  Anita changed her mind again. ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘You just said you didn’t want to,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Well, before that I said I did,’ said Anita, ‘and I do.’

  ‘I’ll run the girls there in the Jag,’ said the professor, resigned to parting with some of the contents of his cellar.

  ‘We’ll walk,’ said Jon, bestirring himself from a sullen daydream in which a woman resembling Jessica begged for his forgiveness: in the daydream she was covered in mud and looking far from her best. ‘Come on,’ he said to her.

  ‘I’ve left my coat upstairs,’ said Jessica. ‘I’ll have to go and get it.’ She went into the hall and nearly tripped over Finlay, who had abruptly stretched out his legs. He opened his eyes and gazed at her. ‘Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘Why don’t we borrow one of these?’ said Anita. ‘They’ve been hanging here for days and nobody’s collected them.’ She reached out for the dark fur and Finlay rose up and silently but firmly took it away from her, replacing it on the peg.

  ‘I’ll get your coat too,’ said Jessica, observing this interplay of thoughtlessness and rudeness. ‘Is your door unlocked?’

  ‘No,’ said Anita, who hated above all things to be humiliated and was briefly wishing that she could condemn Finlay to a lingering death. ‘I’ll go without.’

  ‘You’ll be cold,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Not in the car,’ said Anita, who was warm with rage and embarrassment.

  Mrs H. sidled up to Jessica and whispered in her ear. ‘Maybe he’s got another coat,’ she said, indicating, at once, the promiscuous garment which sat on the shoulders of a girl who could have been one of the recent wearers or could just as easily have been a different one, and the professor – the master of the robe. She suppressed a laugh as he turned and looked at her, and made histrionic movements relative to zipping up her anorak.

  Jon watched as Jessica squeezed into the back seat of the car, trying to make room for Ronald: she showed a great deal of leg as she did so. It wasn’t her fault but Jon thought it was.

  The professor’s cottage was remarkably cold, though not, decided Jessica, for any supernatural reason but because he hadn’t lit the fire: it was neatly laid and grimly unwelcoming. He ignited one bar of the Calor gas stove and invited them to retain their coats until the atmosphere warmed up.

  ‘Let’s light the fire,’ said Mrs H., approaching the grate purposefully.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said the professor, impeding her way. ‘What’s the point of lighting the fire at this time?’

  ‘It would be warmer,’ said Mrs H.

  ‘If you want to come down first thing in the morning and clean it out and lay it again then go ahead,’ said the professor.

  ‘OK,’ said Mrs H., ‘where’re the matches?’

  The professor lost his temper. ‘If you’re going to take charge,’ he said, ‘just carry on. You open a bottle – or better still, go back to your place and open your own bottles.’

  ‘Temper, temper,’ said Mrs H. She would have persisted and struck a match, but looking round she couldn’t see any.

  Ronald regarded this display with moderate professional interest. The man was clearly obsessional: people of loose morals were often neurotically economical in other ways. He was quite sure that if the professor saw a pin he would pick it up and conserve it until it came in useful. ‘What do you do with your empty cans and old newspapers?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ said the professor, controlling himself.

  ‘You must have a lovely view here in the daytime,’ said Anita, peering through the window into the murk.

  ‘The cold ghost happened in the summer,’ said Mrs H. whose vaguely proprietorial attitude had not been modified by her host’s outburst, ‘so it was more noticeable.’

  Jessica wondered for a moment how she knew so much about it and concluded that she and the professor must once have been closer than they now appeared to be. It was unusual, she thought, for lecherous people to care for each other: they mostly preferred to debauch the virtuous.

  ‘How’s the fence holding up?’ asked Mrs H. spitefully.

  The subject of the fence was a sore spot with the professor: somebody kept pulling it down. Every time he arrived on the island he put it up, and every time somebody came along and pulled it down and danced on his lawn, or so it would appear. The grass wo
uld be flattened and parts of the lawn balded, the nasturtiums which trailed the edges thrust carelessly aside. It fronted the sea and was intended to deter tourists from presuming that the professor’s garden was a public place suitable for picnics. The odd thing was that even out of the tourist season somebody came along and pulled it down. He had suspected each of the locals in turn, but had no evidence with which to back an accusation and had to content himself with casting unfriendly glances and making veiled remarks, which did little to enhance his popularity.

  ‘I’m going to get Finlay to put it up this time,’ he said. ‘I’m fed up with hammering in stakes.’

  ‘He’ll charge you,’ said Mrs H., surprised at this evidence of extravagance.

  ‘He owes me,’ said the professor. ‘I lent him my outboard-motor last month.’

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Mrs H., ‘considering the amount of time Finlay spends along the shore that he hasn’t caught somebody at it.’

  ‘You don’t imagine Finlay pushes it over,’ said the professor. Finlay was about the only islander he hadn’t suspected.

  ‘Why not Finlay?’ asked Mrs H. ‘Why shouldn’t it be him? He’s always down there.’

  ‘Why should he?’ said the professor.

  ‘Why not?’ said Mrs H.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said the professor, who would have found it inconvenient if Finlay should prove to be the culprit, for when his own outboard-motor broke down he often borrowed Finlay’s.

  Jon, walking as rapidly as he could through the night without falling over, came to the kitchen door and stalked in. Jessica was glad to see him since new blood might help to dilute the bad blood presently pulsing through people’s veins: if it went on blood might be spilled. ‘Isn’t this nice?’ she said.

  ‘It reminds me of my grandfather’s place in Ireland,’ said Jon. ‘He has a little place like this that he keeps for the fishing and sailing.’ This might have been true, but when people had been with Jon for any length of time they ceased to believe a single word he said. If he claimed to have a nose, mouth and ears they would disregard the evidence of their senses and automatically assume that, in one way or another, he must be exaggerating.