The Inn at the Edge of the World

Alice Thomas Ellis, The Inn at the Edge of the World, 1990

    'What's he a professor of?' asked Jessica who had, intermittently, wondered about this for some time. He didn't strike her as being cast in the donnish mould.

    'Teeth,' said Eric contemptuously. 'He's a dentist.'

    'Ah,' said Jessica. 'How revolting.'

    'He makes a fortune in one way and another,' said Eric, 'and he gets months of holidays.'

    There followed one of those satisfying discussions, in which all parties are in agreement, about the iniquities of the medical and dental professions and the shortcomings of the NHS, leavened by individual accounts of appalling experiences, both surgical and financial, which each participant had undergone at the hands of one or more practitioners of these humane skills.

It is a joy to read (and reread) Alice Thomas Ellis's books, and as I've only read two so far, I speak with the assuredness of opinion as you have only come to expect, Dear Reader – and I can thank side-bar resident dear Ur-Spo over at Spo-Reflections for the introduction. It would seem, however, that her books are not everyone's cup of tea, but I particularly enjoy her shrewd, dry wit and sharp observations of people's frailties. Her characters might be flawed or peculiar but are drawn with an amusing and subtle touch, and her black humour belies what is her strongly conservative Catholic eye when probing the human condition and what she sees as the failings of the modern world.

An observant reader may have noticed I've already had a rave over The 27th Kingdom and today's is another of her books needing some airspace hereabout. As it seems an age since I first read this amusing book (and had plucked out my favourite passages for these pages to then languish forlornly in the Draft Department) I've had to recently read it again to remind me what is going on in her take on the vacuousness of the modern Western Christmas. Not a chore, may I say! She's such fun. And there's always a little sprinkling of the otherwordly, shall we say.

The professor entered with a girl in the duffel coat. He seemed annoyed and Jessica wondered what he had to be cross about when, so far as she knew, nobody was trying to kill him. At present she felt she was the only person in the world with something to be really cross about.

    'They've been at it again,' he said. 'I nearly caught them this time. There's just enough snow to show up footprints on the lawn.'

    'They were playing music,' said the girl in the duffel coat unexpectedly.

    'Bollocks,' said the professor. 'They weren't. It was the wind in the wires.' This was clearly the continuation of an argument which had begun earlier and was leading nowhere.

    'They were,' said the girl, and Mrs H. brightened at the prospect of discord.

    'It was probably the ghosts again,' she said. 'You're haunted.'

    'I'm not haunted,' said the professor, as though he'd been accused of having lice. The distinction of having a ghost was obviously outweighed for him by the nuisance of trespass. If the dancers on the lawn came from another element he still resented them pushing his fence down. 'It's bloody-minded locals,' he said and stroked his crotch fretfully, which made Jessica think of Mike again. Perhaps it was the fault of feminists, she thought, which caused so many men to have to keep publicly checking on their masculinity.

But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here with these abrupt introductions to some of the local flavour at the Edge of the World and need to put a bit of flesh on these bones. The Inn in question is a hard luck sort of business in the remote and Outer Hebrides, and its desperate Outsider owner, Eric, decides to clutch at some out-of-season business by advertising it widely as a Christmas destination for those who don't want any festive cheer. Despite his wife's scorn, five people actually respond, so the lascivious Mabel decamps to Glasgow at the moment of their arrival, leaving Eric to valiantly manage his guests with the aid of a couple of distinctly odd locals. 

The usual motley assortment thus land upon the island's distant shores, loners, mostly, each with some baggage in tow or some social graces left behind, and they hunker down on this moody, wintry, and slightly eerie place and proceed to get to know one another and some peculiar locals, as there's simply nothing else to do. And A.T.E. works her magic on them.

Among the unlikely alliances formed amongst the five guests, are Jessica, a jaded and fairly famous actress who is a household voice and face of soap and tea-bag advertisements and the like, and widower Harry, the "disciplined and tidy" ex-military man who "had been sad for almost as long as he could remember". But then, they should be naturally drawn to one another as Jessica is to find herself a potential murder victim on the island, and Harry is constantly ruminating on and longing for his own death. It is his admiration of General Gordon and his envying him his early death that, finding himself in a purposeless existence, Harry starts writing his biography. 

General Charles Gordon in Khartoum

Luckily, I had read Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians immediately before I first read The Inn and was well and truly boned up on General Gordon, so it was with delight that I greeted his appearances in the book as an old friend:

    'Don't cry,' said Harry.

    'I'm so sorry,' said Jessica. 'Men hate tears.'

    'I don't mind,' said Harry. 'I don't like to see you upset.' He would have told her that he himself sometimes wept, but he knew that women cannot bear to see men weep. 'How about a brandy?'

    'And soda?' said Jessica, attempting to substitute a smile for a snivel. 'Drink to General Gordon?'

    'Why not?' said Harry. 'He was an amazing fellow for looking on the bright side.'

    'I suppose he'd need to be,' said Jessica. 'Stuck in Khartoum like that. I've nearly gone mad stuck on Crewe platform for an hour – and nobody was proposing to massacre me.'

    'I know something to cheer you up,' said Harry. 'I'll read you some last words.'

    'Thanks a lot,' said Jessica, drying her tears.

And later on, after a goodly dose of her holiday reading, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, a depressed Jessica turns to Harry for a restorative tonic:

    '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 – ... 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 ...

The other dubious pairing is between Ronald and Anita. Ronald is a self-centred psychoanalyst, "a single-minded, foraging creature intent on a goal imperceptible to others" whose long-suffering wife and cleaning lady both have finally left him and whose utter flailing about domestically has forced him to take lodgings over Christmas at the edge of the world in order that he might get fed and watered. 

Anita the lonely and insecure spinster in charge of stationery in a big store, who yearns for elegance and taste (and love), was foisted with nauseating festive offerings by her impossible buyer this year. In silent protest and a surprising act of defiance, she chooses an anti-Christmas escape, imagining the remote hotel to provide a chic retreat from all the wrong notes being hit by the tasteless, peopled with the like-minded. While her ideals are merely that, and, despite his ungracious demeanour, the slightly desperate Anita finds herself automatically responding to Ronald's apparent need for female guidance.

    'Are you more or less ready, Ronald?' asked Anita.

    'What for?' asked Ronald.

    'You are coming with me,' explained Anita patiently, 'to talk to a lady I met, who knits special sweaters with a special pattern so that when her husband and sons get drowned she can identify the bodies.'

    'Oh yes, of course,' said Ronald. 'I remember now. I said I'd come with you, didn't I?'

    'Yes,' said Anita. 'You did.'

    'I'll go and get my coat,' said Ronald after a short silence, illustrative of some reluctance.

    'You can't spend the morning pigging crisps and nuts in the bar,' said Anita on a sudden surge of gaiety.

    So that's the way the wind's blowing, thought Eric. For she had sounded quite like a wife in a not unreasonable humour.

The fifth wheel in the non-Christmas assemblage is Jon. A minor actor, young, vain and handsome, and clearly mad. He is obsessed with Jessica, with whom he shares an agent and who cannot quite remember him or understand his giving attention to her, and stalks her to the edge of the world with goodness know's what intention. Well ... ultimately, murder. Sorry! Spoilers abound around these pages.

    'Schmuck,' said Ronald as Jon left the room, and Jessica was briefly diverted by this evidence of a different aspect to a character she thought she had summed up. He's human, she thought. Anita, however, found his remark lacking in dignity and professional finesse.

    'He's unbalanced,' she reminded the psychoanalyst. 'He needs treatment.'

    'He's a schmuck,' repeated Ronald stubbornly. Jon had reminded him of his least favourite patient, and by association, of the wifeless, cold and foodless house to which he must soon return. There was, he thought self-pityingly, nothing more depressed than a depressed psychoanalyst, for no one else was so familiar, by way of observation and practice, with the subtle gradations and bleak possibilities of this melancholy state. He took the remains of a once-hot roll from Anita's plate and piled jam on it – an act which could be construed as displaying a heart-warming familiarity and ease of manner, or a lack of any knowledge of social decorum whatsoever. Anita couldn't make up her mind.

Which reminds me, there was a bit of plainspeaking over at Samuel Pepys's diary yesterday, too. "But my Lord Mayor I find to be a talking, bragging Bufflehead ... when in discourse I observe him to be as very a coxcomb as I could have thought had been in the City." &c. &c. and concluding, "I am confident there is no man almost in the city cares a turd for him, nor hath he brains to outwit any ordinary tradesman." But I digress ...

Like any good formula for a book, throw together an odd assembly in a remote location and just see what happens. Add some Celtic lore, in the form of Selkies, and perhaps some ghosts and you have the perfect preternatural Christmas getaway for our not-quite Famous Five. And because I cannot resist spoilers, five go out but only three will return! Make this a Christmas read, or get in early as a just any old time of the year read and I will be disappointed if you don't find it entertaining.

Image credits: 1, 3: Flying With Hands; 2: Wikimedia Commons: 4: via Pinterest

General Bewilderment Lane

 

In which lane do you swim, Dear Reader, in the Pool of Life? If you find yourself in the General Bewilderment Lane, I bid you hearty greetings, for that is where Your Correspondent is to be found these days. What is going on? Why even is it? How did we get into this handcart hurtling toward the proverbial? Etc., etc. Although, truth be told, in the pool in which I have been swimming lately, it is much more optimistically called the Free Play lane. Safely out of the way of those more determined, and where a bit of aquatic physio can be done between the laps, for the recovering hip is still a work in progress. Rather like the Soul, too, for it is the season of Lent for thems who swing that way. Which I also have been, lately. Swinging, that is.

Behold some of this morning's scenery:

Laps under the watchful eye of the Navy

View back into Woolloomooloo Bay

Walking home past these tidy runabouts

Training tall ship the Young Endeavour

Missed the bus so had to tackle the 112 stairs

This Piscean may be a new hatched 60 but it's still a piece of cake!

Image credits: 1: Judy Horacek; Rest: Flying With Hands

The Daughter Of Time

Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time, 1951

Would you call Truth, Dear Reader, a trickster or a friend? 

"Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority", so sayeth Francis Bacon in 1620. Or more, "History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it", as pronounced by Winston Churchill in 1948?

It would appear that it is as slippery as an eel, indeed, when a little bit of amateur sleuthing reveals that both these well-known quotations might, after all, be misattributed and misquoted, respectively. History as laid out by Historians, for consumption by minds young & pliable or seasoned & cynical, must surely be littered with both facts and fancies, despite the best intentions (or worst). And the Truth, well, objective Truth, about History as it is made can be very subjective, even slipping into Legend or Propaganda, depending on who gets to write it. 

Anyways, it's not all po-faced seriousness around here, it's just Your Correspondent's introduction to a long-overdue book spoiler. From the Golden Age of Crime Writing, no less. Ah, who doesn't love them? So breezy, such scintillating dialogue, a little hint of glamour, nearly always a brace of young lovers and a (usually) well-deserved victim whom everyone has motive to bump off, red herrings galore and a tidy & happy ending. So many of my favourite things. 

And wherein you might find exchanges about royalty, vintage fashion and brazen opinion all elbowing for space on the one page: 

    'Oh, not Mary Queen of Scots!'

    'Why not?' asked Marta, who like all actresses saw Mary Stuart through a haze of white veils.

    'I could be interested in a bad woman but never in a silly one.'

    'Silly?' said Marta in her best lower-register Electra voice.

    'Very silly.'

    'Oh, Alan, how can you!'

    'If she had worn another kind of headdress no one would ever have bothered about her. It's that cap that seduces people.'

    'You think she would have loved less greatly in a sun-bonnet?'

    'She never loved greatly at all, in any kind of bonnet.'

    Marta looked as scandalised as a lifetime in the theatre and an hour of careful make-up allowed her to.

    'Why do you think that?'

    'Mary Stuart was six feet tall. Nearly all out-sized women are cold. Ask any doctor.'

Bliss.

Is this Mary's seductive cap, so quoth?

Or is it this velvet bonnet?

This book, though, is slightly different from the, oh, couple of dozen I've knocked off in the past while. No locked room in a country manor, or quaint village with the attendant eccentrics, or even Mayfair ballroom in interwar London here. No cyanide, sparkling or otherwise, or Morris Dancer's decapitation, or shooting stick as grisly murder weapon. Rather, our dapper and charismatic detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in hospital, bored and recovering from a Workplace Incident and whiles the time casting a fresh policeman's eye over a four hundred-year old whodunit, wherein the victims are not even sure to have been dispatched, let alone how.

Using only his Little Grey Cells, to borrow from another favourite meticulous detective, and the legwork of a keen young researcher to ferret out the necessary facts for him from real and invented sources, "Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time", he investigates not the plight of the imprisoned Mary Stuart, as she's plain silly, but the mystery of the fabled missing Princes in the Tower*, alleged to have been murdered by, or for, the wicked King Richard III. The challenge to Historians is on!

The Princes in the Tower, 1878
John Everett Millais

I was very moved as a child by John Everett Millais' sepia reproduction of the tragic princes and its accompanying lurid description, an essay by one Ehrma G. Filer in the vintage University Society's encyclodædic children's series on our shelves. She told the tragic tale of their lives and their wicked uncle, and finished with the flourish, "These unfortunate little Princes stand there proudly, though their hearts are beating fast. They remind us far too well of the old unhappy days of long ago, before the spirit of democracy ruled the world." Sob!

The villain of the piece?
The seductive velvet cap suggests not!

History, as taught in the sad and scratchy curriculum of the 1970's in Australia, no longer plumped out the tales of the Kings & Queens of Britain, so what I knew of Richard III was from the said Bookshelf for Boys & Girls, Shakespeare and general knowledge. Of course, the 2012 discovery of his skeleton under a carpark in Leicester brought me somewhat up-to-date and illuminated the scale of the rehabilitation of his reputation by some. And it turns out that Ms. Tey's popular 1951 book was one where many of the arguments of his innocence in the murders were laid out. 

In no time all, for I swing like the wind, I do, the Ricardian side won me over completely upon the discovery that the "contemporary" account of the whole matter, the oft-referenced one by the celebrated Sir Thomas More who was a mere child during Richard's reign, was likely written by one Cardinal John Morton, who was an actual enemy of the king. Morton and More were likely propogandists for the Tudors, and before dear Richard, the last of the Plantagenets, was even cold in his shallow and hasty grave, their lurid tale had become the Truth, and was dished up to children centuries later as History. Lo! we have a textbook example of the fallibility of Great Minds and the undeserved influence they wield. 

Inspector Grant swiftly tosses out the Morton/More evidence and sets to his Case as a detective–looking for motive, means & opportunity among the other players of the time. Looking, in other words, for Facts.

The fact that Sir Thomas was a martyr and a Great Mind did not cut any ice at all with him, Alan Grant. He, Alan Grant, had known Great Minds so uncritical that they would believe a story that would make a con. man blush for shame. He had known a great scientist who was convinced that a piece of butter muslin was his great-aunt Sophia because an illiterate medium from the back streets of Plymouth had told him so ... As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned there was nothing so uncritical or so damn-silly as your Great Mind. As far as he, Alan Grant, was concerned Thomas More was washed out, cancelled, deleted ...

And is this the first use of the word cancelled to apply to a public persona? In 1951? How modish!

Not to mention the long term consquence of Cromwell's insistence on a warts & all portrait:

    'If you ask me,' the surgeon said, absent-mindedly considering the splint on Grant's leg, 'Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. "I'm a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me." And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.' He pinched Grant's toe with detached interest. 'It's a raging disease. A horrible perversion. In some parts of the States, I understand, it's as much as a man's political life is worth to go to some constituencies with his tie tied and his coat on. That's being stuffed-shirt. The beau ideal is to be one of the boys...'

I'm with you Ms. Tey. Whatever happened to one's Sunday Best for being seen out and about town? How times haven't changed.

If you have not met Inspector Grant before, do not think he is just a cynical curmudgeon, intent on taking a wrecking ball to tradition and scholarship. He is a charming and insightful man. Viz. his contemplated Christmas surprise for his frugal and modest housekeeper Mrs Tinker, whose care he will submit to after leaving his hospital bed. He had been lavishing elegant handbags upon her each year, which never again see the light of day, suspected to be squirrelled away in a drawer as treasures:

Next Christmas he was going to open this shabby sack of hers, this perennial satchel à tout faire, and put something in the money compartment. She would fritter it away, of course, in small unimportances; so that in the end she would not know what she had done with it; but perhaps a series of small satisfactions scattered like sequins over the texture of everyday life was of greater worth than the academic satisfaction of owning a collection of fine objects at the back of a drawer.

Was it Colonel Mustard
with the candlestick in the library?

No, The Daughter of Time, is not your typical Cluedo trope. There is no tidy ending to the mystery, save ol' Pipistrello being pretty darned convinced that Richard III has come off badly in the court of public opinion. And while Ms. Tey has quite possibly massaged and stretched what is really known about Richard and his nephews, it is a witty and pleasurable read, even if you are not drawn to the escapist pleasures of the Golden Age of Crime fiction.

* ERII had allegedly been approached three times for permission to have DNA testing done on the two skeletons found interred in 1674 under stairs in the Tower of London but refused. Or maybe it was the Church of England, the custodians of the remains, that refused. Either way, the mystery continues!

Image credits: 1,6: via Google; 2,3,5: Wikimedia Commons; 4: Flying With Hands