The Inn at the Edge of the World

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  ‘Come and sit by me,’ said Jessica, again feeling sorry for him. She patted the worn cloth of the sofa and moved up to make room.

  ‘Well, would anyone like a drink?’ asked the professor. He sounded as though he hoped that, with any luck, they might decline.

  ‘I’d love one,’ said Jessica firmly.

  ‘Get some glasses,’ said the professor to the girl in the duffel coat. ‘They’re in the bottom cupboard in the kitchen.’

  She returned with an assortment of receptacles, none of which matched. Jessica supposed it didn’t matter, but it was indicative of the mean-spiritedness that distinguished the evening and she asked herself what she thought she was doing, sitting in a clammy cottage on Christmas Eve with a bunch of people she didn’t know. A stiff scotch would go some way to improving matters.

  ‘Beer or wine?’ demanded the professor.

  ‘Wine, I guess,’ said Jessica resignedly.

  ‘Bring a bottle from the scullery,’ said the professor to the girl. ‘It’s through that door and on the left.’ It seemed that she was not altogether familiar with the premises, and Jessica began to reflect on the other women the professor was credited with. Perhaps they were all hanging from hooks in an outhouse like the victims of Mr Fox; perhaps he planned to eat them for lunch next day . . .

  ‘I think I’m homesick,’ she said to Jon who was sitting so close she could feel his warmth. She was, indeed, very lost. It was a fault that she was aware of in herself that, in the company of those she found unimportant, her spirits sank: she felt insignificant, plain and ordinary as though ordinariness was contagious. If she wasn’t careful she’d start showing off to remind herself that she was quite famous and rich, and could soon be back in the Coach and Horses in Greek Street with all the amusing people she had come here to escape from. She would do this purely for her own benefit and peace of mind and not to impress the others who weren’t worth the effort. Jessica was ashamed of her attitude, which made her feel worse.

  Jon, though he could not be described as a messenger from the gods, was, at least, a part of the world she was missing. She wished she could ask him when they had met before but she had left it far too late. As the girl pushed a glass of wine into her right hand she found that Jon had taken her left and was fondling it as though he had every right to do so. In order to find a legitimate use for her left hand she demanded of the company if anyone had a cigarette – although she had given up smoking – for she had grown too sympathetic towards him to demand that he unhand her, or to snatch away the member in question with an indignant gesture.

  ‘Oh, no smoking,’ said the professor. ‘I don’t allow smoking here. Anyone who wants to smoke can go outside.’ This had the usual effect of inflaming, not only the desire for nicotine, but the urge to swear. All prohibition, when not based on taboo, has a similar consequence. If the professor had requested Jessica to refrain from incest she would have meekly submitted and agreed with his demand: if he had been a bedouin and had forbidden her to use her left hand to pick up a helping of barbecued mutton she would have acquiesced. As it was she determined to get hold of a packet of twenty or die in the attempt.

  ‘I’ll have to go back to the inn,’ she said. ‘I’m gasping for a fag.’

  ‘Try doing without,’ said the professor. ‘Use some willpower.’

  Jessica was accustomed to hearing this phrase on the lips of those who knew her well: it had never had the desired effect on her. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ said Jon.

  ‘You don’t need to,’ said Jessica. ‘I can see my way.’

  ‘You never know who’s around in the night,’ said Jon. ‘It could be dangerous.’

  Jessica thought that walking in the dark with a man who had designs on you was, statistically, more dangerous than walking alone with the off-chance that a stray sex-maniac might leap from behind a hedge and do you a mischief, but she didn’t say so.

  ‘Hurry back,’ said the professor.

  ‘I have no intention of going back,’ said Jessica as they went through the gate. ‘Have you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Jon, who had instantly assumed, and was now convinced, that Jessica was leaving, not in search of cigarettes, but in order to be alone with him.

  ‘Listen,’ she said when they had gone a little way along the road, ‘I can hear singing.’

  ‘Probably the locals,’ said Jon. ‘Probably drunk.’

  ‘No, sshh,’ said Jessica, standing still. ‘Listen a minute.’

  ‘I can only hear the sea,’ said Jon, taking the opportunity to put both arms round Jessica as they stood on the dark road.

  ‘If we go on standing here and they are drunk,’ said Jessica, ‘we’ll get mown down as they drive home. Come on, I’m freezing again.’

  The bar was empty except for Eric who had settled down to drinking a small proportion of the profits, but was, nevertheless, feeling unhappily sober.

  ‘Have you got twenty Silk Cut?’ asked Jessica, sitting on a stool and shrugging her coat off. ‘The professor wouldn’t let me smoke.’

  ‘He wouldn’t,’ said Eric.

  ‘What’s he a professor of?’ asked Jessica who had, intermittently, wondered about this for some time. He didn’t strike her as being cast in the donnish mould.

  ‘Teeth,’ said Eric contemptuously. ‘He’s a dentist.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jessica. ‘How revolting.’

  ‘He makes a fortune in one way and another,’ said Eric, ‘and he gets months of holiday.’

  There followed one of those satisfying discussions, in which all parties are in agreement, about the iniquities of the medical and dental professions and the shortcomings of the NHS, leavened by individual accounts of appalling experiences, both surgical and financial, which each participant had undergone at the hands of one or more practitioners of these humane skills.

  ‘They call him the gas-poker,’ said Eric indiscreetly. He tried, most of the time, to be the ideal innkeeper, never discussing the idiosyncrasies of the clients, and certainly never while presiding in his own professional capacity in his bar, but misery and whisky made him bitter and loosened his tongue. ‘Nothing’s ever been proved, but they say he takes advantage of his patients. I don’t really believe he’s a professor at all. I think they just call him that. I think he’s a common-or-garden tooth-puller.’

  ‘Give me a large whisky and ginger,’ said Jessica, ‘and I’ll go back and ask him.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Jon.

  ‘Because I want to know,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m curious.’

  ‘It seems terribly boring to me,’ said Jon. ‘Who cares what he is?’

  ‘I don’t precisely care,’ explained Jessica, ‘I’d simply like to know for my own satisfaction.’ She glared at Jon, thinking that he was accusing her of being nosey, and not realizing that he was seized in the throes of jealousy at hearing her express interest in their erstwhile host.

  ‘That cottage is the most uncomfortable dump I’ve ever been in,’ said Jon.

  ‘I thought it reminded you of your grandfather’s place,’ said Jessica vengefully.

  ‘Only its position,’ said Jon, ‘only the way it stands by the edge of the sea. My grandfather’s place is furnished with family heirlooms and there are huge log fires.’

  ‘I thought they burned peat in Ireland,’ said Jessica and immediately regretted it. She was annoyed with Jon but not sufficiently annoyed to question his fantasies. She didn’t care enough.

  ‘They bring in logs from the estate,’ said Jon.

  ‘Oh,’ said Jessica. She changed the subject. ‘Where’s the barmaid?’ she inquired of Eric.

  ‘I let her go home,’ said Eric. ‘She’s coming in early tomorrow to help.’

  ‘How lucky you are to have found staff,’ said Jessica, who believed, correctly, that it was growing increasingly difficult to persuade anyone to work for a living.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Eric. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without her
. . .’ He paused, not wanting to give an impression of insecurity, of near desperation.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ll have to,’ said Jessica, comfortingly. ‘She looks very content with her lot.’

  Jon found this conversation about the work force tedious in the extreme since it had no relevance to himself and did nothing to further his relationship with Jessica. He could think of no satisfactory way to wrench her from the bar: he didn’t want to go back to the cottage and he was sufficiently clear-sighted to realize that he couldn’t suggest they go up to her room. He was baffled by her behaviour.

  ‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ said Jessica, deciding against returning to the cottage to interrogate the professor on his vocation.

  Jon smiled.

  The atmosphere in the cottage was slowly warming up. Two more girls had arrived and had insisted on opening another bottle of wine and turning on the second bar of the Calor heater. They both seemed to know the professor quite well and to be familiar with his ways.

  ‘And what do you do?’ asked one, seating herself beside Ronald.

  ‘I’m a psychoanalyst,’ said Ronald, unwarily. He wondered if he’d ever learn.

  ‘I might have known,’ said the girl, delighted. ‘You look like one of them.’ She patted his beard. ‘Tell me about myself. What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘You haven’t got any manners,’ said Ronald, averting his beard from her affectionate fingers. This was the sort of female he couldn’t stand.

  She laughed, even more delighted. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. ‘How can you tell? Let’s go into the other room and you can tell me all about me.’

  ‘He doesn’t give free consultations,’ said Anita. The girl eyed her up and down, unsmiling and then disregarded her. Anita moved closer to Ronald on his other side.

  ‘Come on,’ said the girl. ‘I need some help. I keep falling in love with the wrong men.’

  ‘How unfortunate for you,’ said Anita.

  ‘I don’t have any trouble finding them,’ said the girl, ‘only keeping them.’

  Ronald found this totally unsurprising. ‘I can give you the name of a good man in Edinburgh,’ he said, which was untrue but was his usual method of coping with this type of thing when he had his wits about him.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind having the name of a good man anywhere,’ said the girl, and shrieked with merriment. She was the worst girl Ronald had seen for some time.

  ‘Ronald,’ said Anita, in a confidential undertone, ‘you know I met this woman who knits special sweaters. Do you remember? Well, I know tomorrow’s Christmas Day, but I want to go and find her again before we go home, so will you come with me?’ This was the only claim to his attention that she could think of on the spur of the moment.

  ‘What time?’ asked Ronald.

  ‘I don’t know what time,’ said Anita exasperatedly. A literal response to a ruse is both disconcerting and infuriating and does nothing to advance matters. ‘Any time. Before lunch or after.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Anita. ‘Thanks very much.’

  Ronald understood from this that she was angry with him and was conscious of a renewed interest in her. He thought detachedly of one of Krafft-Ebing’s case histories. Z, who had noticed that females, no matter how ugly, always excited him sexually when he discovered anything domineering in their character. An angry word from the lips of such a woman was sufficient to give him the most violent erections. Thus, one day he was sitting in a café when he heard the (ugly) female cashier scold the waiters in a loud voice, which threw him into the most intense sexual excitement which soon induced ejaculation. In fairness to himself Ronald acknowledged that he was not precisely similar to the unfortunate, or possibly fortunate, Z, but he decided to have another look at the romances of Sacher-Masoch and reacquaint himself with the various theories arising therefrom.

  ‘You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,’ said Anita, who was about to relapse into a sulk.

  ‘I do,’ said Ronald tenderly, ‘I do want to.’

  She turned to look at him in surprise, thinking that she’d never understand men, and then her gaze went past him to the window and she yelped.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ asked the professor, startled.

  ‘There’s somebody at the window,’ said Anita. ‘I saw somebody staring in.’

  ‘It’ll only be one of the girls,’ said the professor serenely. The door blew open on a gust of wind and the flames in the Calor heater flared. ‘There,’ he said, ‘she’ll be coming in now,’ but nobody appeared. ‘Funny,’ he said, getting up and closing the door. ‘She must’ve thought better of it when she saw us all here.’

  ‘It didn’t look like a girl,’ said Anita. ‘It looked like a boy.’

  ‘A lot of my girls look like boys,’ said the professor, with the same serenity, and Ronald regarded him, his professional interest again aroused.

  ‘Brrr,’ said a girl, ‘it’s freezing in here. I wonder who the silly cow was. She’s let in the draught.’

  ‘Don’t be rude about her,’ said the professor, with one of his smiles. ‘She’s probably shy.’

  ‘It was a boy . . .’ began Anita.

  ‘One of my adoring women,’ said the professor, giving rise to a scene as two of the girls fell upon him to reward his conceit by pulling his hair and disarranging his clothing. The third girl observed them sullenly and then went out, to return with another bottle of wine which she proceeded to open, pour into a tumbler and drink.

  ‘Hey,’ said the professor, struggling up from his chair at this evidence of profligacy.

  ‘Get knotted,’ said the girl, retreating with both glass and bottle.

  ‘I think it’s time we went home,’ said Anita, standing up and putting her glass down. ‘Thank you for a lovely evening.’ She put her arm through Ronald’s as they reached the road. ‘He’s a vulgar man,’ she observed.

  ‘He has pronounced homosexual tendencies,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Has he?’ said Anita. ‘How do you know?’ She wondered if the professor, unnoticed, had pressed his attentions on Ronald.

  ‘I’ve had patients like him,’ said Ronald.

  ‘Or is it because his girls look like boys?’ asked Anita, inspired.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ said Ronald. ‘No, it is merely that I have had several patients who have manifested a similar behaviour pattern, and when I have observed them over a sufficient period of time, have gained their confidence and probed sufficiently profoundly into their unconscious processes . . .’

  ‘. . . they’ve turned out to be queer as coots,’ supplied Anita, translating what she guessed he was about to say into a more comprehensible form, partly to illustrate that she was familiar with the vernacular and partly as a gentle snub.

  ‘Yes,’ said Ronald, gratified by her ready comprehension, and unperturbed by her manner of expressing herself. They walked slowly, in accord.

  ‘We didn’t even see a ghost,’ said Anita, pressing closer to her companion.

  Harry sat alone in his room long after midnight had passed, trying to make sense of his sorrow. He knew that if you lived long enough you would inevitably, to a greater or lesser extent, become disenchanted with everybody in your life, from your nearest and dearest right down to the amiable newsagent on the corner. All the people in the inn were in the throes of disappointment: that was why they were here. How fortunate they were, thought Harry. How strangely blessed to have learned that love is illusion, to have been given time to see its blossoms moulder and spot and not to have had it snatched away from them in perfection. He told himself that if his wife had lived she might now be a false-toothed harridan, sitting up in the bed behind him demanding to know what he thought he was doing staring out of the window like that. His son, if he had lived, might now be a pompous middle-aged man with a plump-wristed wife of his own and a tendency to gout. How peaceful that would be, thought Harry; how painless to have learned to the full that love withers and nothing mat
ters. How pleasant to have realized completely the tedium of life and to have no fear of loss and no pangs of remembrance. That would be the consolation of age, and he had no such solace, for his wife and child had gone in beauty and youth, cheated him of disillusion and left him endlessly bereft. Perhaps it was perversity that had kept him from remarrying, a determination to mourn without distraction. It had seemed at the time like integrity, and indeed, a second wife would have devalued the first – that was undeniable – but that very betrayal would have eased the cold and barren purity of his heart: infidelities, what are known as ‘small human weaknesses’, by their cor rupting processes warmed a man, blurring his perceptions, negating his strength and – permitting him to roll round in the midden – thought Harry, suddenly impatient with all this self-pity. It was nearly two of the clock on Christmas morning.

  ‘Psst,’ came a whisper at the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessica when he opened it, ‘but I saw your light was on . . .’

  ‘Come in,’ said Harry, relieved at any distraction. She closed the door behind her.

  ‘Can’t you sleep either?’ asked Harry.

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Jessica. ‘I could, easily, but that boy has gone completely mad and I can’t.’

  ‘What’s he doing?’ inquired Harry, indicating that she should sit in the armchair.

  Jessica sat back. ‘He’s not doing anything,’ she said, ‘not really. That’s what’s so peculiar. We got back from the professor’s – and he’s pretty peculiar too, I can tell you – and I said good night and went up to bed and Jon followed me and I couldn’t quite screech like a maiden, “Get out of my chamber, you brute,” so I waited, and he took his sweater off, and then he took his shirt off, and he was watching me all the time and smiling. And then I said I’d go and get a bottle from the bar, and here I am.’

  ‘I see,’ said Harry.