The Inn at the Edge of the World

by Alice Thomas Ellis

  ‘What gets me,’ said Eric, who had been brooding, ‘is that I could have sworn there was someone else on the causeway. You couldn’t see properly but for a minute I thought a fishing boat must have come up. I could have sworn I saw that boy who goes past here most days, but I can’t have done because even if they’d tried to help and failed they wouldn’t have gone away without saying something, would they? I didn’t see a boat go out either, did you?’ he appealed to the others.

  ‘It was probably the seals you saw,’ said the professor. ‘There’re dozens of them about.’

  ‘I guess it must have been,’ said Eric. ‘But it looked like people.’

  ‘In those conditions,’ said the professor, ‘you couldn’t have seen an ocean liner properly. I could hardly see a damn thing.’ He was already beginning to feel guilty and make excuses for himself, noted Ronald with impartial satisfaction.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ said Jessica. She had made up her mind to take Harry’s book about General Gordon home with her. She knew nothing about publishing but her agent would doubtless know somebody who did. If he hadn’t quite finished it, she’d finish it herself.

  His door was unlocked, the room scrupulously tidy: a hypocritically gentle breeze lifted the curtain by the window and Jessica shivered. She opened the wardrobe and looked steadfastly at his clothes. It was absurd that a person’s clothes should remain when he had gone. What did they think they were doing, just hanging there? The MS lay on the small table where Harry had worked. She picked it up and put a rubber-band round it, then she opened the table drawer and looked inside. It held a framed photograph of a woman and a boy, standing with their backs to the sea: she recognized them immediately, for had she not seen them only that morning? She took it and put it in the bottom of her suitcase and she never showed it to another living soul.

  Downstairs, Eric looked round at his reduced clientele: they seemed to be settling in for the night, hunched over brimming glasses, telling tales of disaster in low voices.

  ‘I had a friend whose aunt was drowned,’ said Anita. ‘In the Serpentine.’

  ‘I didn’t think you could drown in the Serpentine,’ said Mrs H.

  ‘You can drown in the bath,’ said the professor. ‘You could drown in a puddle if you kept your face down.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to?’ asked Anita. ‘My friend’s aunt fell out of a boat and she was dead when they got to her.’

  ‘Perhaps she had a heart attack,’ said the professor.

  ‘She drowned,’ said Anita. ‘They did an autopsy and she’d drowned.’

  ‘How did she fall in?’ asked Mrs H.

  ‘I don’t know the details,’ said Anita. ‘My friend was too upset to tell me.’

  Eric wanted to go to bed for he felt exhausted by the events of the day. It was all right for them: they didn’t have to do anything but sit around gossiping about the deaths of strangers. He’d asked Finlay’s sister-in-law to stay late but it seemed she had better things to do. Knowing that a whisky would not help to wake him up he nevertheless gave himself a double: after several of those he might get his second wind, for it didn’t look as though he was going to get an early night. Anita was sitting beside Ronald in the manner of a wife, knees together, unsmiling though not disapproving and prepared to be silent should Ronald show signs of wishing to speak. Eric could have kicked her. Looking back he realized he had found it soothing to have the inn full of single people with no loving couples to rouse his envy and exacerbate his unhappiness. If Mabel had been different he could have looked kindly on breeding pairs, but as it was they made him sick. He wished he could stop thinking about his wife. Wife, he thought. Some wife to leave a man on his own to run a hotel with no help but a drunken boatman and a weird woman who danced off into the night whenever he needed her. As he glowered at Anita he thought that Mabel had never sat beside him like that, had never waited for him to speak, nor kept her knees together. She had lounged around with her limbs carelessly disposed for anyone to see, and she had laughed at whatever pleased her without ever referring to him for approval or permission. She had never even pretended to belong to him and when he had – no matter how covertly – assumed ownership of her she had flown into one of her rages, white with fury and leaping out of his reach with the slippery strength of a great fish. He was undoubtedly better off without her and he missed her until he thought his heart would break. Coldly he told himself that this misery was reaction to the dreadful events of the day: he had not – as Ronald would put it – assimilated the full meaning and made the appropriate adjustment. In a day or two he would be himself again and able to make rational decisions. At the back of his mind there lurked the awareness that he would not find it easy to sell the inn, and the only decision open to him was to knuckle down and make the best of it – without his wife. He was appalled to find himself weeping and hastened out of the bar to the inn yard where he stood in the cold taking deep breaths. From down the coast in the direction of the professor’s cottage came the sound of music: the locals were up to their tricks again. He listened for a while, half outraged that they could make merry when two people had drowned and half meanly gratified that they were probably making a shocking mess of the professor’s lawn: he wondered vaguely who they were; then suddenly curiosity got the better of him. To his own mild astonishment he took off his shoes, crossed the narrow road and walked along the shore to spy on the illicit dancers, the tears drying on his chilled cheeks, the moon lighting his way.

  To the end of his days Eric couldn’t make up his mind whether or not he wished he hadn’t done that. To the end of his days he couldn’t make up his mind whether he had seen what he thought he saw or whether he had gone momentarily insane. The dead do not return to dance at the scene of their demise: that could not have been Harry with a woman and the boy with the fishing rod who had so often passed the inn on the way to the sea. Nor could that have been Jon sitting in the ruins of the professor’s fence and laughing.

  Eric had stood barefoot on the ice-cold sand, rubbing his eyes and trying to shout to Finlay, who was capering about with his flute, but he seemed to have lost his voice as you lose your voice in dreams. The music was so sweet: it crept over his consciousness as the soft summer tide creeps over the shore, and Eric thought he was fainting. He threw back his head for the wind to clear it, but the wind had dropped and the music grew louder, the dance wilder. There were others there whom he recognized and many who were strange to him: he had not known the island contained so many people . . . the moon went behind a cloud, something brushed past him and he staggered, somebody laughed again and he could smell seaweed, intensely strong. ‘Watch out,’ thought Eric, but no words came. Nervous breakdown, he thought. I’m having a nervous breakdown and I’m not surprised.

  ‘It’s getting beyond a joke,’ said a voice and Eric blinked as the lights in the cottage came on, illuminating the flattened lawn. ‘I’ll have the law on the bastards,’ continued the professor, ‘or I’ll get a shotgun and sit up all night until I catch them at it. I’ll . . .’

  ‘Oh, let’s get inside and close the doors,’ cried his girls. ‘What does it matter?’

  ‘What do you mean – what does it matter?’ inquired the irate householder. ‘It’s taking liberties. It’s illegal. It’s trespassing and criminal damage . . .’

  ‘It’s cold,’ wailed the girls.

  Eric couldn’t move: he stood on the sand like a rock.

  ‘Who’s there?’ yelled the professor, catching sight of him. ‘Come here you . . .’

  ‘It’s me,’ said Eric, finding his voice at last. There was no one in the garden now. No one, that is, but the maddened professor, for the girls had gone inside.

  ‘What the hell are you doing there?’ asked this person, leaping to conclusions.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said Eric, alerted to the professor’s suspicions by his tone. ‘I mean I didn’t push over your fence.’

  ‘Then what are you doing there?’ asked the professor, not unreasonab
ly.

  ‘I thought I heard noises,’ said Eric.

  ‘Then why didn’t you tell me?’ said the professor. ‘We might have caught them.’

  ‘I wasn’t sure,’ lied Eric, whose principal concern was that the professor shouldn’t notice that he had no shoes on. It seemed somehow vitally important.

  ‘Well, did you see anyone?’ demanded the professor, and there was a long pause.

  ‘No,’ said Eric eventually, and the professor stamped his foot on the sea-soaked earth.

  ‘They’re animals,’ he said. ‘Quite apart from the damage they do, how can they carry on like that after what happened this morning?’

  But Eric didn’t agree with him. He had a strong sense that it was not the dancers but the professor who was the interloper here. His perceptions had altered during the dance. He wondered how he would discuss the day-to-day running of the inn with Finlay’s sister-in-law when last he had seen her she was dancing with the dead.

  Jessica upset the ladder fern in the morning. She didn’t mean to, not consciously. She was standing looking out of the dining-room window for she knew not what, and when she saw nothing, either expected or unexpected, she turned away and over went the fern with a crash of brass bowl.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Anita, when she’d recovered from the fright.

  ‘I’m not,’ said Jessica, breathing deeply, her shoes full of spilled earth. Now Harry had gone she had no one to talk to, and she couldn’t remember when she had felt more cruelly deprived.

  ‘It’s the reaction,’ said Anita, passing her a tissue from her handbag.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Eric, plying dust-pan and brush and wondering what was likely to happen next. ‘I’ll just repot it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m hopelessly clumsy sometimes.’ She took off a shoe and emptied the earth into the dust-pan, still snivelling a little.

  ‘I might not even bother,’ said Eric, picking up the fern by what would have been its scruff if it had been an animal. Jessica thought it was ironic that Jon had imagined her to be such a plant lover when the principal feeling a growing thing had inspired in her was acute dislike. She shook out the other shoe.

  ‘What’s the time?’ she asked. Now she couldn’t wait to leave the island.

  ‘You may have to come back for the inquest, you know,’ said Eric, dropping the fern carelessly into the pot.

  This had not previously occurred to Jessica. ‘All of us?’ she demanded.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Eric. ‘I don’t know the form.’

  ‘I may not be able to,’ she said. ‘Not if I’m in rehearsal.’

  ‘I think you may have to,’ said Eric.

  ‘Like an enchantment,’ said Jessica, thinking of those places – usually islands – which laid a spell on people so that they could never stay away.

  ‘The law,’ said Eric. ‘You can’t mess about with the law.’

  ‘No,’ said Jessica, accepting this prosaic proposal. ‘I suppose you can’t.’ She went upstairs and threw things into her suitcase. The sweater she left on the bed.

  ‘I’ve left the sweater on the bed,’ she said to Eric as he came to help her carry the case down.

  ‘You can keep it if you like,’ said Eric indifferently, but Jessica didn’t think she’d need it again. She had too many clothes already. Finlay’s sister-in-law passed on her way to strip the beds and tidy everything away and Jessica thanked her for looking after them so nicely. The woman smiled and spoke the first words Jessica had heard her utter.

  ‘Ye’ll be back,’ she said.

  Jessica gave Ronald and Anita the slip on Glasgow station. She didn’t want to see them any more. All the way home she read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – indeed she reread much of it since her attention kept wandering. She enjoyed the bit where Helen tells Lady Lowborough to get lost, although she wouldn’t have liked to have to say the lines on stage: ‘. . . because it is painful to be always disguising my true sentiments respecting you, and straining to keep up an appearance of civility and respect towards one for whom I have not the most distant shadow of esteem . . .’ Difficult, that, thought Jessica, muttering the words under her breath and thinking that if Harry hadn’t drowned she could have tried out the passage on him. As it was the lady across the aisle obviously found her eccentric. Jessica realized she was wearing an inappropriate expression for a solitary passenger: she had adopted a high and haughty look and was peering down her nose in the effort to resemble Helen Huntingdon. For the time being she found it easier to play Helen than to be herself. Then she took up Harry’s MS. She thought the beginning particularly good. She flicked through the rest and when she turned to the last page she saw that he had written ‘The End’. She was glad to be relieved of the necessity of finishing it herself for she would not have been able to. Harry and General Gordon began to seem to her to be one and the same person. Somehow this also made everything easier.

  Anita guided Ronald to an empty section of the train: she would have looked to an imaginative observer like a small animal bossing a larger in the manner of a corgi with a cow, which inevitably made Ronald look slightly stupid. She had determined to bring matters between them to a head and to this end had washed her hair in the small hours of the morning, which meant that she was now feeling unusually weary. ‘I’m dreadfully tired,’ she said plaintively, but Ronald did not respond: he seemed not to be noticing her shining hair.

  Anita changed tack and surreptitiously ingested one of her vitamin pills. ‘I feel better now,’ she said, after a mile or two. ‘I think I’m getting over the shock. Things like that have much more effect on one than one realizes.’

  ‘Mmph,’ said Ronald, who was thinking about his cold, empty house and the patients who would be neurotically annoyed with him for going on holiday: he considered them selfish and thoughtless and was growing increasingly uninterested in their boring problems. Where should he have his supper this evening? What would he do tomorrow?

  ‘What did you feel when you saw them go down?’ asked Anita, thinking that an intimate question such as this must lead to a discussion which would bring them closer, but Ronald was now thinking about Krafft-Ebing and sadomasochism and asking himself whether anything made sense. ‘Ronald,’ insisted Anita.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘When they went down,’ said Anita, who on reflection was finding her question rather foolish. ‘What did you feel?’

  ‘Who?’ said Ronald, trying to wrench himself back to the present. Anita regarded him with disbelief: he seemed to have forgotten already that two people had drowned in his vicinity. She couldn’t be expected to understand that he was accustomed to horror by listening daily to tales – imaginary or not – of dark events and undigested tragedy.

  ‘Harry and Jon,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I thought someone should get them out,’ said Ronald, indifferently.

  ‘They tried,’ said Anita. ‘We all went as near to the edge as we could, but it was too late.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ronald, ‘so there was nothing to be done.’

  This was undeniable but Anita still found his attitude perplexing. It was inhuman – not so much because he seemed not to care as because he seemed incurious. Perhaps, she told herself, it was his profession which had distanced him from the human race and that he was, in fact, a superior type of person in his very impartiality.

  ‘What time do you suppose they serve lunch?’ he asked.

  Anita longed to rebuke him for worrying about food at a time like this, but she dared not. He seemed a different man from the one she had walked and talked with on the island and she feared he was slipping away from her as Harry and Jon . . . She thought she might cry in a minute and she had a despairing sense that Ronald wouldn’t notice. Everything was going wrong. It was like a shipboard romance, she thought miserably, and she didn’t know what to do to retrieve the situation. It looked as though she’d be going back to the department after all. Nothing had really changed. ‘I have
n’t given you my telephone number,’ she said, and she wrote it down on the back of an envelope and passed it to him.

  He looked at it with apparent incomprehension and put it in his breast pocket. It would go to the drycleaner’s, reflected Anita, and never be seen again.

  Jessica avoided Ronald and Anita when they got to Euston and sneaked into a taxi. Anita stood alone as Ronald said, ‘Excuse me a moment,’ and disappeared in the direction of Platform 2. He had seen a woman who resembled his wife.

  Finlay was heading towards the island, back to Turncoat Inn, under a heavy rain. Mabel sat in the cabin wearing a new fur and looking quite cheerful. If her husband asked where she’d got it from she’d say she’d got it dirt-cheap from a place where the animal-rights protesters had moved in.

  ‘Got a light?’ she called, sticking her head out in time to observe Finlay waving to three seals who were passing in the opposite direction. ‘You’re nuts,’ she said, ‘you’re all nuts.’ She cupped her hands about the match to shield it from the wind and the rain, and the light glowed through the transparency of her webbed fingers. ‘Ugh,’ she said, ‘bloody weather . . . I must be nuts too, coming back.’

  ‘Och,’ said Finlay, ‘ye all come back in the end.’