Years of training analysis had made him into as competent a therapist as any, but, as is so often the case, it had done nothing to ease his own way through the troubled paths of human intercourse: rather it had made of him a single-minded, foraging creature intent on a goal imperceptible to others. His wife had perched, as it were, on a branch watching him uncomprehendingly as he sought through the thickets for a means by which he could form a perfect union with her. In the end she had simply grown fed up – not of waiting for him to achieve this union, for she was not conscious of desiring any such thing – but of watching and listening to his seemingly meaningless ramblings. She had found it all unbearably boring, since she could never understand, not only what he was looking for, but what he was talking about.
Ronald’s penultimate patient was a wealthy young woman, part heiress to a fortune based on sugar. He had harboured lustful fantasies about her for some time, but had denied himself too overt expression of these. Now, weakened by physical hunger, he found himself staring down at her as she lay, all mounds and curves, warm and well-nourished; and he wondered not only what she would look like without her clothes on, but what she was going to have for dinner. When she left he found himself following her down the steps and had to pretend he had merely gone out there to pick up the rubbish which had gathered around them. He stood in the dusk clutching a sheet of torn newspaper and a polystyrene box that had once contained a hamburger. When his patient had driven off in her BMW he put them down again on the pavement. He was starving. He was lonely. He had few friends, for most people regarded the members of his profession with the same suspicion they felt towards the tax inspector, the chief of police and, possibly, the vicar; and none of his fellow professionals liked each other much because of the internecine rivalry common in those spheres where conflicting, and often opposing, theories strive for dominance.
He was still standing, in a most unprofessional fashion, on the doorstep when his last patient arrived, a few minutes early.
‘What’s up, Doc?’ inquired the patient, a brash and idle young man to whom Ronald had never warmed. Ronald declined to answer, but with stately tread led the way to the consulting room where for the umpteenth time he listened, bored stiff, as the young man, who actually appeared to enjoy these sessions, unreeled yet again a succession of memories, dreams and unseemly desires. When the fifty minutes were up, on the dot, Ronald cut him short, waited impatiently for the lad to write out his cheque for the meagre amount that was all he could afford until he found a job, and slammed the door behind him. If his wife persisted in staying away he would have to hire a receptionist which would be, considered Ronald, a ridiculous waste of money.
He went out for dinner, remembering just in time to carry a key so that he could get in again: his wife had always taken care of these details and he found he had to concentrate now on such trivia in order to save himself endless trouble. Somebody – probably one of the better class of homeless who were proliferating under the government’s economic strategy – had left a magazine between the bars of the railings, where doubtless he had leaned, reading, as he ate the remains of the hamburger which some richer person had abandoned in a litter bin.
Ronald took the magazine with him to the Indian restaurant round the corner where he ordered too many dishes because his wife wasn’t there to prevent him. He glanced through the magazine without noticing which one it was until his eyes began to water as he injudiciously bit a chilli in half. Cooling down over a bowl of tinned lychees he read the small ads on the back page, where the word ‘Christmas’ leapt to his eyes. He hadn’t thought about the coming festive season until now, and wondered whether the Indian restaurant would be open on Christmas day. Examining his feelings with clinical detachment he concluded that he was descending into an unacceptable degree of depression. This was confirmed when, on the way home, he first caught himself bending to look inside a closed car to see if it contained his wife, and then found he had walked down a side street after a woman who vaguely resembled her.
Sitting on the edge of his unmade bed, staring at the wallpaper, he noticed the magazine lying on top of his overcoat on the floor. Carefully this time he read the ad which had mentioned Christmas. If he had to live through Christmas alone he would do it in the small hotel at the edge of the world, for he was beginning to fear that if he continued in this frame of mind he would commit some impropriety towards a female and well-fed patient which would lead to his being struck off. So strongly did he feel that when the morning came he telephoned Eric to book his room.
‘Well, that’s seven,’ said Eric, concealing his satisfaction with a casual frown as he made a note of Ronald’s name.
‘Seven what?’ asked Mabel who, naturally, knew perfectly well. She was eating a sardine sandwich and reached out with a greasy grasp for her husband’s list. He looked away from her hand and began to note down what supplies he might need from the mainland. ‘They sound a dreary lot,’ observed Mabel.
‘How can you tell?’ asked Eric, who was feeling sufficiently relaxed to find this diverting rather than merely childishly annoying.
‘The Chinese have an idea that you can tell everything about a person by their name,’ said Mabel, beguiled by his mild tone into making explanations where she had originally intended only to wound. Then she wished she had thought of some other explanation as Eric smiled. A person called Mabel, she reflected bitterly, could not really afford to be superior about other people’s names. ‘I thought you were only taking six,’ she said.
‘I’ve taken seven,’ said Eric, ‘because somebody might drop out.’
Mabel thought it entirely likely that they would all drop out. She had never liked the island from the moment she set foot on it, and as the months went by she had begun to hate it with a wild and spiteful passion. She perceived it as nothing but a trap, and she felt like a creature going round and round in desperate circles, powerless and stupid. She could feel herself getting stupider and stupider as each day passed, and she could think only of her imprisonment, forgetting all that had gone before. She hardly bothered to try and remember what life had been like – the freedom, the gaiety, the long nights, the laughter, the men – and was only aware of the dark hill, the narrow shores and the endless moaning of the sea. It made her think of things she did not want to think about: of sorrow and loss. The whole island seemed to her implicit with loss, a symbol of deprivation and grief; but when she complained she spoke only of the cold, the boredom, the lack of modern facilities and the absence of companionship. As a result Eric found her increasingly shallow and trivial. Much of the time he could not remember the girl she had been. At first he had said, ‘I only bought this place for you. I thought you’d be happy here,’ which was not completely true, nor yet completely false. (At his first sight of her she had been rising from the water, the impossibly blue water of a municipal swimming pool, her grey eyes wide and bright as she blinked away the chlorine, her dark hair smoothed short and close to her skull.)
Eric had said as she moped and whined, ‘You can swim as much as you like. You’ve got all the sea to swim in now,’ and she would say in the apathetic voice of a beaten child, ‘I don’t want to swim in the sea.’ Eric had often wanted to strangle her for her perversity: he had seen joy in that girl in the water.
Sometimes Mabel dreamed of the sea, but when she woke she thought only of the channel between the island and the mainland.
She hummed to herself, a broken, drifting tune of things half-forgotten. ‘What if they all come?’ she asked, cutting short her melody.
‘I’ll clear out the far room at the end of the passage, just in case,’ said Eric. ‘I’ll take one of the single beds from one of the front rooms, and there’s that spare chest of drawers on the landing. No problem.’
‘How fascinating,’ said Mabel, idly pushing down a cuticle.
‘I’ll get Finlay’s sister-in-law to help me,’ said Eric.
‘You do that,’ said Mabel.
The room at the end of the passage made Eric think of an orphanage, or perhaps a lunatic asylum, full as it was of unwanted things, or things that had lost their purpose. Most of them had been abandoned by the previous owner and some of them seemed to have been con structed by someone whose mind was wandering at the time. What, for instance, was the conical object formed of pink, quilted plastic? Somebody must have found himself in possession of a piece of pink quilted plastic and made it into a cone. But why? Eric lifted it from the stained divan on which it reposed and trod on it, but its maker had given it a substructure of steel and he merely dented the plastic. Finlay’s sister-in-law silently forced it into a bin liner. ‘What the devil is it?’ asked Eric petulantly. She shrugged and pushed an old pillow in on top of it. Eric didn’t protest. The pillow, like nearly everything else in here, was too far gone to be salvage able. ‘I’ll make a bonfire in the yard,’ he said, breaking some strips of plywood over his knee.
They cleared out piles of old magazines, a broken umbrella, a seatless push-chair, a lidless tin trunk with a dead mouse in it and a chiffonier which Eric hacked to bits
in situ
. The dust occasioned by all this energy made him sneeze.
‘Ach,’ said Finlay’s sister-in-law, who was a woman of few words.
The room now contained only a wardrobe and an ottoman. Eric opened both. All that the wardrobe held was a hat-box which must have dated from the turn of the century and which Eric decided to keep, and in the ottoman was a moth-eaten coat of a thin, dark fur. For a moment he thought it was his wife’s and wondered how it had got there, but then he saw that it was far more dilapidated than hers and he put it in the bin liner. Finlay’s sister-in-law took it out again. Again Eric did not protest. If she wanted it she was welcome to it.
There were a few old off-white sweaters on a shelf in the top of the wardrobe. Eric took them down and considered them: he could feel Finlay’s sister-in-law watching him and wondered whether she wanted them too. He couldn’t be bothered to ask. They still seemed quite serviceable and not too full of holes, oily and harsh to the touch though they were. As he held them they felt unlike ordinary clothes; not soft and biddable, designed to keep the wearer warm, but as though they had a shape and purpose of their own, unconnected with ordinary human everyday needs. He put them back on the shelf. ‘Uncomfortable things,’ he observed, and closed the wardrobe door.
He took all that was combustible down to the yard and made it into a neat pile, while Finlay’s sister-in-law dampened down the dust by squirting it with water from a plastic bottle. Then she swept it up and washed down the door and the window-frames and the skirting-board until the room was perfectly clean.
Eric, coming back to collect his jacket, for it was cold in the darkening yard, commended its cleanliness while deploring the decorative condition revealed by its bareness.
‘I’ll paint the walls and ceiling,’ he said. ‘It won’t take me five minutes now we’ve got it clear.’
Finlay’s sister-in-law didn’t care what he did with it, although she didn’t say so. She had performed her task and now she was going home.
Eric took a can of rancid vegetable oil from the shelf where the previous owner had left it and poured it over his bonfire, appreciating the enforced economy of this move. He lit it from below with a match and the flames took hold. Smoke began to rise and, belatedly, he licked his finger and held it aloft to test the direction of the wind. Mabel would remark on it if the smoke flooded the inn. Happily, if somewhat incomprehensibly, since by the evidence of Eric’s finger the wind was coming inwards, it drifted out towards the sea.
It seemed another instance of his failure to under stand the natural rules that governed this inscrutable island, but he wasn’t going to brood about it now. He stood, using the yard broom as a goad when the flame faltered, watching the sparks sail up on the smoke.
There was a figure walking down the narrow road that held the shore back from the inn. ‘Damn,’ said Eric, for if this was a customer there was no one in the bar to serve him.
The figure as it came level revealed itself as a boy carrying a fishing rod. Then the smoke thickened in a sudden gust and he was obscured. Eric thought he saw him lift a hand in greeting, but when the smoke cleared he had gone.
Next day Eric painted the far room with a can of emulsion paint the previous owner had left in the shed. It was a fleshy shade which Eric would not have chosen himself, but beggars, he said, could not be choosers. Anyway in the end it made no odds because one guest rang to say she couldn’t make it after all, and another simply didn’t turn up. Eric vowed that in future he would demand a deposit, but he was rather relieved.
There were only five guests for Christmas.
Jessica and Harry sat opposite each other across a white-topped table in a first-class compartment on the London-to-Glasgow Express. Harry, having been an officer, had always travelled first class, and now that Jessica was quite rich and famous she too had grown accustomed to this habit. Anita was travelling second class, further down the train in a non-smoking area. Ronald was also travelling in second-class accommodation because his wife’s desertion had left him unconfident and fearful that he might, at any moment, find himself penniless. He rationalized his decision by telling himself that, these days, there was very little difference between first and second class. He was right, but he was, nevertheless, slipping unawares into an unfortunate trend towards self-deception.