The Inn at the Edge of the World

The Innat at the
Edge of the World

ALICE THOMAS ELLIS

Constable & Robinson

55-56 Russell Square

London WC1B 4HP

This edition published by Corsair,

an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2012

Copyright © Alice Thomas Ellis 1990

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library

ISBN-13: 978-1-78033-661-9
eISBN: 978-1-78033-888-0

Printed and bound in the European Union

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cover illustration: Diane Law

Cover design:
www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

For Stephanie

‘It is not given to the Seal People to be ever content . . . for their land-longings shall be sea-longings and their sea-longings shall be land-longings.’

‘The island mentality,’ said Eric. He gazed out at the inn yard from where he sat in his tiny office, wondering what he had meant by this remark and why he had spoken aloud. Perhaps he was going mad.

‘You’ve got a hangover,’ said his wife. ‘You always talk to yourself when you’ve got a hangover.’

Eric jumped. His wife walked about as silently as a house fly. She stood in the doorway, and to prove how cold she was feeling she clutched her cardigan across her chest with both hands. ‘It’s so sodding
cold
,’ she said.

‘I’ve lit the fire in the bar,’ said Eric.

‘Waste of money,’ said his wife. ‘There’ll be nobody in.’

Not for the first time Eric tried to imagine how he’d feel if he murdered her. Not how he’d feel while he was doing it – the act, no doubt, would give him a momentary satisfaction – but how he would react afterwards. His principal emotion, he thought, would be embarrassment. Murder was neither respectable nor sophisticated; for the rest of his life he would feel miserable and shy if anyone so much as glanced at him. The whispers – ‘
He murdered his wife, you know
.’ He had no real fear of the immediate consequences since he thought he would only spend a few years in jail with remission for good conduct. He could give a course on engineering to the other inmates. A number of wife-killers had got off very lightly recently. He had once asked a customer, a solicitor from Edinburgh, about the complexities of divorce. The man had advised against it these days. It was a lengthy, expensive and disruptive business, fraught with recrimination and ill-feeling. It was quicker and neater, he said, to murder your spouse, plead intolerable provocation or insanity, or what you would, pay your debt to society and emerge from open prison to resume life with your property intact and no maintenance payments to worry about. Eric had been shocked, but as the solicitor had spent the day fishing and was presently warming himself up with a number of whiskies he had made allowances for him. The man could not be serious, for if he meant what he said he would endanger his own livelihood. It was popular wisdom that lawyers grew fat on the legal fruits of marital disharmony. Sometimes he reflected that an innkeeper convicted of murder might prove a draw to the morbid, but he had never cared for the limelight and did not relish the idea of himself as a sideshow. Besides, every now and then his wife still made him catch his breath. She had a way of looking up with a sudden smile that changed her face, changed the whole of her. At the moment she looked as sullen as a bull, bored and rather dangerous.

‘So wear your fur coat, Mabel,’ he said, spitefully. She loathed being called Mabel, and she had wanted a new fur coat for a long while. Once upon a time he had called her Ma Belle. Then, as he got more used to her, he had called her Maybe and sometimes Maybe Baby, until the time came when she had felt she knew him well enough to ask him not to do that; she preferred being called Poppet. Now, as a compromise, he usually called her Mab, but when she was being too awful he called her Mabel.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked. He tried to hide the paper he’d been typing on but she walked up behind him and took it from his hand. ‘Dreading Christmas?’ she read in an unnatural tone. ‘Then get away from it all in a small hotel at the edge of the world . . .’ Eric reached for the paper but she held it above her head. ‘Oh,
honestly
. . .’ she said.

‘Why do you use that silly voice?’ asked Eric.

‘Because it’s a silly advertisement,’ said Mabel.

Eric lost his temper in a minor way. He pushed back his chair without considering the consequences, fetching her a shrewd blow in the stomach as the arm-rest revolved. It was what is known as a captain’s chair.

‘Ouch,’ said Mabel with an unjustifiable degree of outrage considering the circumstances. ‘Can’t you watch what you’re doing, you ape?’

‘I can’t see out of the back of my head,’ explained Eric, regaining self-control.

‘If you ask me you can’t see out of the front of your head,’ said Mabel, fondling her diaphragm.

His control slipped again. ‘Give that to me,’ cried Eric, lunging forward to seize the paper.

Alarmed, Mabel shrank back. ‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me,’ she said. ‘I told you that last time – you ever lay a finger on me again and . . .’

‘That was an accident,’ said Eric, weary now. ‘You know perfectly well it was an accident.’ A small barrel of beer had once rolled out of his hands in the inn yard and Mabel had put her foot under it. That was the way Eric saw it.

‘Accident my foot,’ said Mabel, unaware of the subtle resonance of this remark. ‘You knew damn well I was there. I told you then – you ever lay another finger on me . . .’

It was guilt, thought Eric, that made her so determined to blame him for the occurrence. She had been particularly bad that day, taunting him as he had struggled all by himself to perform the multifarious tasks of a small innkeeper; asking him whether he was satisfied now that he had dragged her away from the comfort of their modern luxury home in Telford and dumped her here in the teeth of the Atlantic gales with no one to talk to and nowhere to go.

It was partly because of the people she had talked to and the places she went that Eric had resolved to realize a vague ambition and buy himself an inn at the edge of the world. It wasn’t as though she had contented herself with talking to the sleek-suited sales executives who had thronged the lounge and patio of what the estate agent had described as their detached luxury house, winter and summer; and it wasn’t as though she had habitually gone to museums, theatres and picture galleries, back in what she referred to as ‘civilization’. No, she had frequented dubious night spots, endangering her health, while claiming that she organized her social life only to further his career by mingling with influential people. The absurdity of this was such that he had never found words to refute it, and it was now quite possible that Mabel herself believed it to be so. He had left it too late to tell her she was talking crap, and had put himself in the wrong by bringing her away without due explanation. She thought him eccentric, unfeeling and irresponsible – completely lacking in sex appeal, in fact – and there was nothing whatever he could do about it.

‘Well, I’ve warned you,’ said his wife. ‘You just touch me once more . . .’ She dropped the paper on the desk, bored with it, and went off, moodily caressing her midriff.

Eric now hated his advertisement. He felt as exposed and shamed as if he had written a delicately secret poem about his soul and his wife had mocked it in the market place. He crumpled it up in his hand, walked across the narrow road to the sea’s brink and threw it on the waves.

There was a grey seal out there. He watched it and thought it watched him back, head raised for a while from the waters that must surely, surely stretch to the world’s edge.

As usual Eric felt less melancholy with the evening. If he was put to the torture he would never admit that he sometimes felt oppressed by the grey wastes of the ocean, the vastness of the sky with its set, cold stars. It was for these that he had left the smallness of the Midlands, the horrid comfort of modern houses where the bathrooms had no windows and begonias grew in boxes. He had come to find peace in the timeless spaces, but he wasn’t making enough money and sometimes felt that he had been conned – as indeed he had been. He had been deceived by the previous owner, who had given him an inaccurate estimate of the benefits accruing from the tourist trade and a wholly untrue assessment of the year’s average profits. In a corner of his mind he knew this; had known it at the time, but declined to take it into account. He had wanted the pub too much to be put off by its disadvantages, and he didn’t even resent the previous owner’s dishonesty; it was only to be expected. What he did mind was the indifference of the land and sea about him, and if he had had the resolution to examine his feelings he would have found that he resented the way they ignored him. They just sat there. He might have been anyone. He had come prepared for a love affair with the sea and land, but his love was unrequited and now it was dying. Sometimes he felt afraid, for he was a rational man and rational men do not shrink from the loneliness of everything. Rational men do not acknowledge it, having more important matters to think about.

He closed the inner door of the bar against the wind from the sea, and went to kick the sparking log in the grate; the red-shaded lamps gave an illusion of warmth and his first two whiskies supplied the reality. Mabel was in her customary place at the bar. Not behind it, as he had naively expected she would be when they left Telford, but slumped on a stool, still clutching her cardigan about her with one hand and grasping a glass in the other. Since only her husband and the boatman were present she kept her skirt pulled well down over her knees to protect them from the draught.