The Inn at the Edge of the World Read Online Free PDF Page B

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