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Chapter 7: Jamaica Inn

            With the windows rolled down to let in a breeze–rental cars in England don’t have air conditioning–Teresa carefully drives between hedgerows until she comes to a signpost.  She loves these posts.  Each signboard points out its singular direction with such assurance: Bideford–Witheridge–Lynmouth.  Teresa checks her map and follows the arrow south toward Bideford.  At Trefarnon in Cornwall, the road to Bodmin Moor rises up from the low coastline.  The car tops a hill and there is the moor.  It is so perfectly bleak, like a brooding brown and green nubby carpet stretching out under the late afternoon sky.  Cirrus clouds make thin shapes that reform like amoebae casting indigo shadows below. 

         Only one road, the one Teresa is following, crosses the moor.  There are no more houses, no more stone walls dividing pastures, no more sheep.  Teresa drives on, trying to remember the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s novel.  She read Jamaica Inn so long ago that all she can recall is the presence of smugglers and the main character suffering a terrifying isolation.  And then she goes over another hill and the Inn is there.  Although the gray stone building is surrounded by a large car park with a scattering of cars and two tour buses, the essence of the place is sinister, more brooding than the moor.  It is stark.  The garden patio is less garden than brick, offering only a few frightened, wind-twisted bushes. 

         Teresa soon has her fill of the place.  The smugglers’ museum is the most interesting part with its maritime paraphernalia and accounts of the most notorious smugglers and wreckers.  Jamaica Inn was the only coaching house between Bodmin and Trefarnon on the coast.  Smugglers brought their barrels of brandy and boxes of tea here to be distributed all across England.  The constabulary, it seems, were often on the take, and punishment for possessing stolen goods was infrequent.  The Inn has its own ghost story as well, about a man who was murdered in the bar.  Photos of ghostly apparitions taken by guests at the Inn are displayed.

         Teresa skims through Daphne du Maurier’s exhibit.  She buys a paperback copy of Jamaica Inn.  It is a relief to get back in the car and drive away.  The place felt thick and heavy to her, as if the air were full of the angular remains of harsh, drunken, bellicose voices.  Once she is out on the moor again, she pulls off the road and stops in a lay-by.  Standing beside the car, she notices a ragged path that leads over the moor.  She follows it.  The heather, in small clumps, has a few purple-pink bells still blooming.  She picks a sprig, sniffs it, and pockets it.  She’ll press it between the pages of Jamaica Inn.  The sun comes down in shafts of light; the air is sweet.

         “Whew!”  She takes in deep breaths all the way to her navel, stretches her arms and feels the weight of the Inn leave her chest.

         As there is not a soul in sight, Teresa starts to run as fast as her sixty-three -year-old legs will move.  She sprints out across the moor until she has to stop because of a stitch in her side.  Then she flops down on her back in the scratchy, fading heather.  When was the last time she lay like this, and looked straight up at the sky?  She can’t remember. 

         Soon the rocks poking into her back force Teresa on to her feet.  She walks back to the car, thinking about how she used to race her brother, Junior, when their father took them to Central Park.  She was older, taller, and therefore faster until Junior passed her up at age fourteen.  No matter how many times Teresa beat her brother in a race, her father would say, “Good, good, Junior!  You run like Man o’ War, like a champion!”

         And Teresa would stand panting, and feel hot tears burn, and swallow the words that pushed from her mouth. “But I won, Father!  I won!”