The Inn at the Edge of the World

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  Eric moved round, pouring sherry, it tasted very similar to the soup, which wasn’t surprising because he had absent-mindedly poured more of it than he had intended into the consommé as it simmered. Nobody seemed to mind: their thoughts, mostly, were elsewhere.

  ‘This is very good,’ said Ronald.

  Anita smiled at him indulgently. His wife must have been a bad housekeeper if he meant it sincerely. She could show him what was really good – proper soup made from a ham-bone, cooked slowly and skimmed carefully; fresh salads and bean stew and coq au vin and all sorts of things that took hours to prepare with tenderness and skill. When they were married she would never be cross with him, never let him see if he irritated her, never say a harsh word to him. They could be very happy together once she had cured him of a few faults: she would do that before the wedding and then they could get on with life without distraction. As the wife of a psychoanalyst she would have no need to work, either for financial reasons or to give herself something to think about. She might make him shave off his beard because he had soup in it, and in the evenings they would discuss the theories of Freud.

  Harry was thinking of Christmasses past with the resignation of the mutilé de guerre whose life, previous to the catastrophe, had given no cause for complaint. He had never triumphed in his loss as some people do, saying, ‘There, I told you so. Everything has always been against me, and now this.’ He had accepted the deaths with a sense of surprise that anything could hurt so much and had gone on living, albeit with some reluctance. He praised God for bringing death to all the children of men, for if only some were taken the rest would live lives of raging madness, tortured by loss and burning with horror at the strange thing . . .

  ‘What are you thinking about?’ asked Jon, and everyone looked at him, wondering to whom he had spoken. ‘You,’ he said, staring at Harry.

  ‘I believe I was thinking about Christmas,’ said Harry. ‘Only we are forbidden to mention the subject, are we not?’

  ‘I’m getting tired of not mentioning it,’ said Jessica. ‘It feels like a funeral with everyone trying not to mention the body or its name, or even if it ever existed alive, or why they’re there. I feel that if I said “Happy Christmas” it would be unladylike.’

  ‘You weren’t thinking about that,’ said Jon, but he said it softly, to himself and not to Harry, and no one took any notice of him because they were suddenly all speaking at once.

  ‘We always had turkey,’ Ronald was saying, ‘with stuffing and some sort of jam. It took my wife hours of preparation the night before.’ He spoke with melancholy pride, as though of Florence Nightingale and the conditions at Scutari.

  ‘It really isn’t very difficult,’ Anita told him sharply. ‘Not if you organize it properly. I always have the menu clear in my head from the beginning of November.’

  ‘We didn’t have Christmas pudding because she didn’t like it,’ said Ronald regretfully. ‘We used to have some sort of cake with nuts in it.’

  ‘If you want Christmas pudding I can organize that,’ said Eric, bearing in the plates of roast beef. He had two left over from last year: Christmas pudding never went off, and even if it had, he thought, he would have no hesitation in offering it to this perverse, ungrateful, irrational mob. He hoped they might choke.

  ‘I hate Christmas pudding,’ said Jessica. ‘And I don’t want nuts and crackers and wishbones. I just feel odd pretending nothing’s happening out of the ordinary.’

  Eric relented a little, towards her at least: she was making some attempt to play the game according to the rules they had tacitly agreed.

  ‘They never celebrate Christmas here,’ he told them again. ‘They never have.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Anita, and Eric confessed that he didn’t really know. ‘Does anyone know?’ she said.

  ‘It’s partly a hangover from fundamental Protestantism,’ said Harry. ‘There was a time when everyone round here worked on Christmas Day, but that was when everyone worked on all the other days as well . . .’

  ‘And partly what else?’ asked Anita as he stopped speaking.

  ‘Partly a relic of paganism,’ said Harry. ‘The old beliefs never really died out until the ferry made the place accessible to strangers.’

  ‘What old beliefs?’ asked Anita.

  ‘You’ll have to ask Finlay,’ said Harry.

  ‘I can’t understand anything Finlay says,’ said Anita. ‘And I don’t think he’d tell me anyway.’

  Harry knew that.

  ‘It’s the island mentality,’ said Eric, bringing in the vegetables. ‘They all hang together,’ and the others knew what he meant by this seeming irrelevance for they, too, had felt the sense of exclusion which troubled him. Only Harry appeared momentarily set apart as they sensed he knew too much and too little, and would tell them nothing; would not share either his awareness or his doubt. He had been here before, had left and returned, and dimly they wondered whether he was flesh or fowl or good red herring: one of them, or aligned with the islanders. Harry also wondered, but he had felt like something of a stranger on the face of the earth for a long time now: he was used to it.

  ‘The collective unconscious,’ began Ronald, who was nothing if not eclectic, ‘may in some circumstances, congenial to the de-suppression of the individual unconscious, surface without the realization of the participants, and without trauma to what could be termed the psychic tissue of the community, and express itself in group activity.’ He meant by this to evoke an image of those tribal manifestations of an ancient culture, whose roots are obscured in the past; where the living members of the tribe, having led secluded lives, carry on in much the same way as their ancestors did in the year dot; painting themselves, doing war-dances, placating their deities and behaving in what seems to themselves, if to no one else, an entirely reasonable fashion. To Jessica, however, his final words had conjured up a vision of the charismatic movement in the church, of bearded people falling trustfully backwards into other people’s arms in encounter sessions, of Americans saying earnestly, ‘We must talk,’ and similar distressing scenes. She shuddered.

  ‘Are you cold?’ inquired Anita: she had considered Ronald’s contribution both scholarly and enlightening, although she hadn’t understood it.

  ‘Goose over my grave,’ explained Jessica, wishing she could stop thinking about death and still blaming Jon, basically, for her lowness of spirit. ‘It’s just clannishness,’ she said. ‘Peasants are always clannish. If you stay in any village you’ll feel like an outsider.’

  ‘I don’t find that,’ said Anita. ‘I find most people are willing to accept you if you’re open and friendly towards them.’ She knew that this was not so, but she thought it should be: she also wished to indicate to Ronald that she was good with people because this could only be a useful quality in the wife of a psychoanalyst.

  ‘There’s a storm brewing,’ said Eric as he came to carry away the vegetable dishes. ‘It’s getting dark outside. We may be in for some snow.’

  It was too late now for the full glamour of snow, but even a little might stay in their memories, leave them with a picture of the inn roof innocently white rather than rope grey, the whole island lost in a christening gown instead of the threadbare subfusc of dead grass and naked branches. When he had first seen it it had been clad in leaves and now, sometimes, when he thought of it he saw, not the reality, but the green slopes under a sky as bright as silk. It was the same with his wife: often now he thought of her as she had been when they first met and not of the pale, discontented creature she had become. Eric occasionally wished he had less imagination: it would make everyday life less painful.

  Finlay’s sister-in-law removed the rest of the dishes and a hush fell over the table as those diners who could see through the window without undue contortion looked out at the darkening afternoon and listened to the rising wind. It occurred to them that, if conditions got really bad, they would not be able to leave for some days.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Harry. It matt
ered little to him if he couldn’t get away, but he felt concern for the others: if they were forced to overstay they would lose whatever holiday feeling they had and begin to feel imprisoned. Years ago he had watched frustrated holidaymakers standing on the quay willing the ferry to brave the tossing waters and save them from exile, glum with the impotence of the castaway; luggage packed, bills paid, all ordered for departure and left in limbo with even the time they had enjoyed becoming devalued as it began to stretch meaninglessly on with no end in sight. He knew the feeling but, to him, it didn’t matter where he was.

  ‘If it does snow,’ said Jon, ‘perhaps I’ll get in some skiing.’

  ‘We’ve only got a day left,’ said Anita.

  ‘A day would do,’ said Jon. He would cut a heroic figure swooping down the gleaming slopes on the last day. ‘It’s some time since I got to Klosters.’

  ‘When did you last get to Klosters?’ asked Ronald out of professional habit, before he could think what he was doing. The others again began to talk at once.

  ‘If it only snows,’ said Anita, ‘that won’t stop us going, will it?’

  ‘Listen to the wind,’ said Jessica.

  ‘I go most years,’ said Jon, and the rest of them who, being human, were all accustomed to lying with a greater or lesser degree of skill, wondered, not why he did it, but why he did it so badly. Anita in particular hoped uneasily that she was not as transparent when she veered from the truth, while Jessica thought that if he hadn’t tried to murder her she would possibly have taught him better, both from the kindness of her heart and out of respect for the business of acting. Ronald, whose task in life was the dissection of other people’s fantasies and the overt acceptance of what is known as reality, applied himself to his pudding, wondering whether dentists, when off duty, felt inclined to advise comparative strangers about the unwisdom of sucking sweets. Habit was harder to break than he had realized.

  Jessica, seeing Jon framed by the ladder fern, perceived him for a moment as a cross between a damned nuisance and a jungle beast: someone who wished to kill you was worse than, although not dissimilar to, the hotel bore; necessitating caution and a wearying degree of circumspection as you endeavoured to keep out of his way, creeping round corners on stockinged feet and squinting into rooms before you dared enter for fear that he would pounce. It was such cheek, thought Jessica; such an intrusion on privacy. And as for jungle beasts – she had no objection to them as long as they stayed in the under-growth, gnawing the decaying carcases of wildebeest, but once they developed a taste for human flesh they could not be ignored. She found that she was beginning to hate him and fought against it, not wishing to allow such intimacy between them. She looked at him but his eyes were blank, his thoughts elsewhere. He was probably engaged in leaping a snow-clad precipice with a box of poisoned chocolates clutched between his teeth, on his way to present them to an older woman. Jessica wasn’t far wrong.

  ‘I think we should drink to our host,’ said Harry as the pudding plates were removed.

  Eric stood smiling modestly, rather wishing he had given them a better lunch, but thankful that they hadn’t seemed to notice its shortcomings. ‘As long as you’re enjoying yourselves . . .’ he said.

  Jessica retired to her room with The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the taste of port in her mouth. Huntingdon’s excesses, she noted, had finally caught up with him and he was – most reluctantly – about to die: apart from a natural disinclination to do this he was gripped by a terror of Hell and kept imploring his wife to save him. Every now and then he told himself that the after-life was all a fable, but doubt assailed him. Poor man, thought Jessica, but he was so demanding and unreasonable that she began to feel sympathy for Helen who despite her sanctimoniousness was clearly a good sort. If anyone had addressed Jessica as his ‘immaculate angel’ and gone on to remark, ‘. . . when once you have secured your reward, and find yourself safe in heaven, and me howling in hell-fire, catch you lifting a finger to serve me then . . .’ she would have left him to rot, but Helen kept the door ajar, snatching an hour or so of sleep whenever she could, and never once snapped back. Jessica read on, growing more depressed, until Huntingdon had met his end, ‘. . . none can imagine the miseries, both bodily and mental, of the deathbed! How could I endure to think that that poor trembling soul was hurried away to everlasting torment? It would drive me mad!’

  ‘Harry,’ said Jessica, at the door of his room, ‘could I have a B and S?’ She made no apology.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ observed Harry.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Only I’ve just been reading about Hell again. I think nineteenth-century Hell is probably worse than the Hell of other ages – like nineteenth-century medicine – just beginning to be modern so they tried every which way to keep you alive and you couldn’t die as fast as you’d have liked. They were always experimenting with new methods to prolong the agony. How do I know that? Is it true, do you suppose? What’s it got to do with Hell anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Harry, ‘but I see what you mean.’

  ‘Diphtheria and whooping cough and scarlet fever and caustics and disinfectant, and all the curtains drawn, and the fear of Hell,’ said Jessica. ‘I know what today feels like. It feels like a Protestant’s Sunday. No joy. Worse – a reminder of Hell. I shan’t try and skip Christmas again, it isn’t worth it.’

  ‘Gordon was good on hell,’ said Harry. ‘Shall I tell you?’

  ‘Will it cheer me up?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘It might,’ said Harry.

  ‘I’m not sure if I’m frightened of death or Hell,’ said Jessica, ‘or both, or neither, or whether I’ve merely got indigestion, or maybe I was last incarnated in some Victorian villa with bad drains, and I can’t shake the memory off. Tell me about Gordon and Hell.’

  Harry turned to his notes. ‘“I may say . . .”’ he read, ‘ “. . . I have died suddenly over a hundred times; but in these deaths I have never felt the least doubt of our salvation. Nothing can be more abject and miserable than the usual conception of God. Accept what I say – namely, that He has put us in a painful position (I believe with our perfect consent, for if Christ came to do His will, so did we, His members) to learn what He is, and that He will extricate us. Imagine to yourself, what pleasure would it be to Him to burn us or to torture us? Can we believe any human being capable of creating us for such a purpose? Would it show his power? Why, He is omnipotent! Would it show His justice? He is righteous – no one will deny it. We credit God with attributes which are utterly hateful to the meanest of men. Looking at our darkness of vision, how can He be what we credit Him with? I quite wonder at the long time it has taken us to see that the general doctrine of the Church is so erroneous.” I suppose the climate of opinion at the time was still clouded by Calvinism.’

  ‘I wonder if he believed in the transmigration of souls?’ said Jessica, who had lived with a Buddhist convert for a while.

  ‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Harry.

  ‘I wonder if the churchmen were mad with him?’ said Jessica, entertaining an image of a crowd of the clergy wearing shovel-hats and clutching hymn books, pursuing a camel-mounted Gordon through a wilderness of dust.

  ‘If they were they probably couldn’t say much,’ said Harry, ‘because during and after Khartoum he was the darling of the public’

  ‘I wonder if I’ll ever be the darling of the public,’ said Jessica, selfishly, ‘or would that only mean that more people would want to murder me?’

  And Harry, much as he liked her, wished that she would go away and read her book, for he had his own thoughts to contend with.

  It was getting beyond a joke. Jon had stood for nearly an hour in his room with the door ajar, watching and waiting for Jessica to emerge from Harry’s room. He was conscious of no discomfort, but stood quite still behind the door, unblinking, and looking madder than usual, as people are wont to do when they stand too long without moving, their heads poked forward and their gaze glued to
some expected or imaginary happening.

  When at last Jessica appeared he still did not move but his eyes followed her as far as they could. She had passed beyond his vision when he heard her swear, and then she turned and came back. What she had done was to drift along the corridor with her hand on the banister rail and the key dangling from her finger, so not surprisingly she had dropped it into the hall. She walked back more swiftly, cursing. To Jon she bore the appearance of a person who has wrenched herself unwillingly from the beloved object, got to the end of the corridor, said to herself, ‘Stuff it – I won’t leave him,’ and is on her way back to the aforesaid beloved object. He suddenly shut the door and turned to face the window, shaking with what might have seemed to an impartial observer like the onset of a fit. An observer would undoubtedly have considered his demeanour most alarming. Jessica found her key on the mat in the hall and walked back to her room, unseen by anyone. Jon, also unseen, permitted himself overt expression of his malaise: he grimaced and thrust at the air with his head and hands, and growled quietly. After a while he washed his face in cold water in the peat-stained basin, looking in the glass as he dried it. Now that he had an observer, even though it was only himself, he composed his features and watched them until they seemed normal again. After a while he went to Harry’s room and stood with his ear to the door, listening for sounds of sinful rapture. There was no noise at all, so Jon found the silence even more suggestive than sound would have been, opened the door without knocking and went in. Harry was standing looking out of the window, but to Jon the room had an unfinished air since there was no sign of Jessica with her clothes off and her hair tumbled. He had been so certain that she would be there, had had such a clear vision of how she would be that he thought her absence a hallucination, and stepped forward with his hands outstretched, feeling for her invisible presence.