The Inn at the Edge of the World (26 page)

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 haven’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.’