Read Online The Inn at the Edge of the World by Alice Thomas Ellis - Free Book Online

knew what was wrong with her.
    ‘And you,’ said the professor, leaning forward on his bar stool to peer closely at Jessica. ‘What do you do?’
    Jon stepped forward and put his arm round Jessica’s shoulders. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘you know who
this
is.’ But Jessica was not wearing one of her acting faces, nor had she been talking in her commercial voice. There was a rather puzzled silence, not without embarrassment in some of those present.
    ‘Tea for three?’ mimicked Jon, quoting the tea-bag commercial in which Jessica was flanked by rival suitors while presiding over a Queen Anne teapot and shadowed by a jardiniere holding a ladder fern.
    That bloody fern, thought Jessica. It appeared in every commercial, every drama, every sit-com, every documentary, every chat show, every newsreel. It reared its head in living rooms, kitchens, offices, churches, police stations, filling stations, burial parlours, warehouses. It was ubiquitous. No director, no producer would embark on a project without first ensuring that the ladder fern was in place. Jessica had gone so far as to make a fuss, insisting that they must be kidding as they carted in the loathsome foliage; protesting that she couldn’t act with that plant, weeping that she was weary of the sight of it; that she and Mike had a game whereby they only watched television together in order to see which of them would first spot the ladder fern and gain a point. What, she had demanded, would happen to their relationship when Mike saw her actually seated beneath it? He’d laugh himself sick. All to no avail. The director had said he was surprised at her: she was well known and widely appreciated for her lack of artistic temperament, her avoidance of public tantrums. What, he had asked, had come over her? He had been rather cold. And the ladder fern had stayed in place.
    She emerged from her bitter musings to hear cries of recognition. One of her ways of coping with this sort of exposure was to remove herself in reverie, but she always had to come out again. It wasn’t as bad as it had been at first when off-stage acclaim had made her feel diminished and soiled. Now she had adopted two methods of dealing with it: either she put on an act, or she became exceedingly, exaggeratedly dull – which was also an act but too subtle to be perceived as such.
    ‘So you’ve come to get away from it all, have you?’ said the professor. ‘Get away from the bright lights and the roar of the greasepaint. I wondered what a beautiful woman like you was doing down here.’
    He’s off, thought Eric resignedly, beginning to polish glasses with neurotic speed.
    Why, wondered Jessica, couldn’t they have had roses, or love-in-a-mist, or chrysanthemums, or even a vase of gladioli, or a cheese plant, or a banana plant, or a potted palm . . .
    ‘Do you want another of those?’ asked Harry.
    ‘Yes please,’ said Jessica. The atmosphere had altered in some degree now that everyone knew who she was. Only Harry was the same because he never watched television and still didn’t know who she was, except that she was the nice woman he had met on the train. Ronald had seen her in
Hedda Gabler
because his wife had hauled him to the theatre: she was always doing that, and had even made him go to
The Phantom of the Opera
. Ronald shuddered at the memory. His wife, when he came to think of it, had actually been far from perfect. Anita knew all about Jessica from reading magazine and newspaper articles. She was thinking it would be sucks to the buyer when she told her who she’d spent her hols with. Eric, as the realization sank in, was beginning to, feel a sense of deep gratification. He had not associated the name on the letter which Jessica had sent him with the radiant star of the tea-bags who frequently interrupted his viewing when he found time to watch telly and conditions permitted transmission to the island. That name would add a great deal of lustre to the visitors’ book. Jon had