No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  No one knew. All they had done was extract a half-hearted promise that some alternative would be found for me ‘in the next few weeks’. In fact, it happened two days later and came to me through Martin Zeindler. He sent for me to his room in the Arts Wing.

  ‘What on earth have you been doing, sending all these women mad?’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you. By a piece of exceptional good fortune, Dr Steadman wants a lodger and since I have no objection to his sub-letting, it’s yours. If,’ he added, ‘you can stand the cold.’

  I don’t think he suspected anything. It was all said in innocence. I must have been wreathed in smiles, as they say, for Martin put his eyebrows up and said something about icy temperatures and snow being forecast.

  ‘Of course he can’t wait. He has much the same attitude to the approach of polar conditions as a Malamute in a heatwave.’ I didn’t know what a Malamute was and had to look it up, though I can’t say this Eskimo dog much resembled Ivo. ‘I’m relying on you,’ said Martin, ‘to be my fifth column and make sure he keeps his doors shut.’

  I’ve sometimes wondered if this was his sole motive in persuading Ivo to take me in. But perhaps Ivo needed no persuading. I moved in a week after coming back to P. In accordance with Martin’s prediction it started snowing that night. Next morning I had nothing to do until Penny’s lecture at eleven-thirty, so I got up late and looked out of the window to see Ivo making a snowman on the lawn. The garden, that had always looked so inviting, was in fact quite different from the way I had seen it in my dream, being no more than a minimally tended half-acre of grass and trees. But there was a lawn, a big one, and in the middle of it Ivo had made a snowman as tall as himself.

  I put my clothes on quickly and on my way to the french windows met him coming in. Again I was aware of the disconcerting yet exciting way he had of speaking as if we had parted not twenty-four hours but two minutes before.

  ‘I’m looking for a hat for him. I wish I’d got a pipe – do you think Martin might have one from before he stopped smoking?’

  I could only lift my shoulders, stare at him.

  ‘Could you spare a scarf? You seem to have a different one every day.’

  The Leythe scarf – I felt I wouldn’t mind a legitimate reason for getting rid of it. James Gilman had given it to me, it had been his, of an infinitely superior Jermyn Street quality to the one I had from the school outfitters in Ipswich. With a doting look he had said, like Touchstone, ‘Wear this for me,’ and had exchanged it for mine. I carried Gilman’s expensive blue and yellow striped scarf outside rather ceremoniously and tied it round the snowman’s neck.

  Ivo produced a bowler hat he said he had once worn in a college rag. We stood admiring the snowman and he said he had made one every year except 1985, when there hadn’t been any snow.

  ‘Right, I must be off,’ he said. ‘I’m late. If I don’t see you tonight I’ll be around in the morning.’

  I was dismayed. What had happened? We’d made love in his bedroom when I first arrived, the champagne already waiting in an ice bucket, and then, to my surprise, he’d announced he had an engagement, he was going out to dinner, it was unbreakable, he must go. This was my room, he said, opening a door and heaving in two of my cases, he hoped it was OK, he’d leave me to settle in.

  I waited for him to come. I heard the front door and the inner door and his footsteps and I waited. The light in the passage went out and his bedroom door closed and I knew he wasn’t coming. We met, briefly, at breakfast. Or, rather, he’d finished breakfast, was off to the Institute, and had delayed five minutes only to explain to me where everything was and how, since there were two fridges, I could have the smaller one for my exclusive use. Without touching me, without even a finger on my shoulder, he had left in a hurry.

  The answer might be, I decided, that he hadn’t really wanted me here, that Martin had coerced him into it. He liked having sex with me, he was passionately attracted to me, fancied me if you like, but he didn’t want me living here, it was done as a favour to Martin.

  Nothing happened in the next few weeks to alter this feeling I had. The snow went, the snowman slowly melted, Ivo was in and out but we seldom had a meal together. The day after I put the scarf on the snowman, or rather the evening after, he knocked on my door and asked me very lightly and casually, but with a half-smile and leaving me in no doubt as to what he meant, if I fancied a drink. So it was champagne in the kitchen and then my room. He stayed half the night but was gone long before morning.

  We’re such creatures of habit, nearly all of us want patterns. I thought a pattern had been established, this was how it was going to be, every other night or maybe three nights a week there would come a knock at my door or else he would call out, ‘I’m opening a bottle of the widow,’ and we would drink and be together and make love. And then the week came when there was nothing, he was merely the landlord, a note was left telling me he’d be away for the night, his fridge was stocked with food but mine was empty. I saw him come home, it was a fine sunny day in February, and he was opening all the doors and letting the air blow through the house. The next thing Martin had come down to complain and I could hear Ivo’s teasing defence and Martin’s pedantic querulousness, I could hear it from behind my closed door.

  To provoke Ivo I waited till Martin had gone and came out dressed in spite of the fresh, cold air the way I thought someone in my position should dress to entice and beguile. You must remember that I didn’t know, I could only conjecture from what I’d read and seen in the cinema and half-remembered from Gilman days. So I came out in ragged-hem jeans, barefoot and bare-chested with a gold chain among my golden chest hair and a belt through the jeans of brown leather with medallions on it reminiscent of the Wild West. And Ivo looked at me and said, his mouth twitching,

  ‘Our Lady of the Flowers, I presume? All dressed up for the rent-boys’ ball.’

  He had such a tongue on him in those days. But I liked it, I liked his scorn. It didn’t hurt or humiliate me, or not much. It excited me. Providing his sarcasm would lead to love-making, I looked forward to it. I didn’t care if he brought the widow bottle into my bedroom, gave us each a glass and without a word pulled me down on to the bed for violent, silent usage. But I did very much mind when he had friends in for a drink and I wasn’t invited, when I became apparently no more than the student who rented the small bedroom. I began to think I must have it out with him, the whole thing. Why was it happening this way when the New Year honeymoon was so recent, when he had followed me to N., no doubt giving up whatever other holiday plans he had had? Why had he turned away from me?

  It’s true to say too that I felt sorry for myself. Life wasn’t easy in other respects. Penny Marvell hadn’t delivered to me her famous warning – notorious as the lead-up to the old heave-ho – that it wasn’t unusual for people embarking on the course to find after a few months that creative writing was perhaps not their métier, but Martin had made plain his disappointment with my boy-by-the-seaside story. And Sophie had relayed a rumour she had heard to the effect that eight out of the twenty-four of us were to be told at the year’s end that we wouldn’t be welcome back next October.

  Emily not only didn’t speak to me but avoided speaking to me as ostentatiously as she could. She gathered around her a band of allies who had a ritualistic way of conducting themselves whenever I appeared, gathering up their things, getting up and leaving, if it happened to be in the cafeteria, turning their heads all sharply away as if at a word of command when I came into the library or lecture theatre. Emily, whether entirely for the purpose of persecuting me or out of a fear of being alone, had taken to going about everywhere in this particular group of three other women. On the occasions I was unlucky enough to meet them outdoors on campus, they spread themselves out across my path, arms linked, apparently to bar my way, and broke up only when I walked relentlessly towards them. Their behaviour was more like that of schoolgirls from some rough comprehensive than graduate students. But I felt as Orp
heus must have when pursued by Maenads.

  So I was lonely and self-pitying. Ivo and I hardly ever talked and when we did we spoke on the most superficial level. I remembered my heart-searching confidences to him, the outpourings of my feelings, when we were together at the Kestrel, and I was sore and resentful. I was frightened, too, I couldn’t think what I had done, unless it was accepting a perhaps reluctantly made offer to live there. What terrified me was the feeling I had that his indifference was making me fall in love with him, I felt the threat of it, as if his cold demeanour combined with violent sexual onslaught was leading me fast towards that particular abyss. Already I was longing for him daily, nightly, and no less so immediately after one of our consummations, those aggressive near-rape struggles on my bed or his.

  It was late March and nearly the end of term when I asked him if we could have a talk. Easter was coming and when I saw ahead of me the weeks alone with my mother in N., the east wind blowing, the old people walking past with their tiny, skin-smooth terriers, when I imagined the brown sea and the Felixstowe ferry moving slowly across the horizon, I nearly panicked, I nearly threw myself on my knees in front of him.

  ‘What is it you want, Tim?’ he said to me.

  I mumbled something about our relationship, I’d thought we were having a relationship. Was I going to see him in the holidays? Everything was so indefinite. I had to go home the next day and as it was I’d be going without knowing anything of his plans or our future. This was not at all what I meant to say and I hadn’t meant to sound so miserable.

  ‘My sister is coming from America for a week. After she’s gone we could go somewhere. Would you like that?’

  ‘Where could we go?’

  Ivo said, smiling, ‘I don’t suppose you’d much fancy taking a look at some ancient sedimentary rocks in the Isle of Man, would you?’

  I couldn’t tell if he was serious or not.

  ‘A geologist called Herbert Bolton published a report on fossils he found in the Manx slates called grapholites. That was nearly a hundred years ago. No one thought much of it at the time but people are now beginning to think he was right and that the whole geological structure of the island should be reassessed. I thought I might take a look. But, no, I can see the whole idea fills you with dismay. Let’s go to Paris.’

  ‘Can we?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, I think we should. We will. Now tell me what you really want.’

  It wasn’t easy to put it into words, that I wanted us to be a couple but in secret, in the closet. Publicly, we could only be taken for inseparable friends. The way things were, I felt he was holding back from me, putting me at a distance. I quoted something I knew a scientist wouldn’t be able to place.

  ‘I feel I dwell in the suburbs of your pleasure.’

  He burst out laughing but didn’t ask where it came from, so I couldn’t show off and tell him about Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia. ‘You’re asking for a commitment. I make one and you make one. Is that it?’

  ‘I just want to be with you,’ I said, ‘and know what you’re doing and where you are. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Is that all? Not a very tall order.’

  The irony of that made me say what I shouldn’t have, what I was soon bitterly to regret saying, what I couldn’t have said if I hadn’t been pouring down champagne all the while we talked. ‘I only want us to be lovers.’

  It stopped his laughter. ‘Ah,’ he said, and then, quietly, as if he was afraid, ‘we shall have to see.’

  I went home to N. and wrote him letters every day. I wonder what became of those letters? He said he burnt them and he wasn’t a liar. I counted the days until it was time to go back, obliterating the dates on my mother’s Beautiful Anglia calendar with a felt-tip pen. She and Clarissa went off to Tenerife and I returned early to P.

  His sister had been. There were signs of her remaining, a nearly used-up bottle of nail varnish in the bathroom, the kind of Greek yoghurt we never ate in the big fridge. ‘She wouldn’t go to the Isle of Man either,’ Ivo said.

  He was happy, enthusiastic, inquisitive the way he had been that first day we met upstairs at Martin’s. The dry, sometimes scathing, manner was gone. He wanted to know what I’d been doing – had there been any opera in N.? He played the tape I thought he’d forgotten about or lost and we laughed at Ochs’ song:

  But with me – am I wrong?

  No night is too long!

  Next day we went to Paris.

  It is true of the Consortium’s music and dance functions, as it is said of St Mark’s Square in Venice, that if you spend enough time there you’ll eventually see the whole world pass by. Sooner or later everyone comes to one of the theatres or concert halls or walks past the Consortium’s door. Since taking this job I have seen here several members of the Royal Family, all the Cabinet, liable to change as it is, dozens of television actors, and one evening last autumn I saw Martin Zeindler. It was a lieder concert, Schubert and Wolf. Martin was with a woman. She was a little older than he, tall and elegant with elaborately done grey hair, and when I saw them he had his arm round her waist. He saw me and recognized me, I was aware of that, but I took care not to take it further and concealed myself behind one of the many doors marked Private until the interval was over.

  Lieder concerts aren’t very sought-after, which was why I was there. Julius likes me to go to the less popular events and, along with a couple of secretaries and his own wife and sons that he ropes in, swell the audience. He says it has a good effect. He once told me I ought to ‘get a partner’ so as to have an extra woman in the freebie contingent. I tried to wriggle out of last night’s event, not being fond of Indian ragas, but Julius was insistent, particularly as his own family was engaged elsewhere and the snow would deter even ticket-holders.

  I was sitting in the balcony, in the front row, and, looking down five minutes before the concert was due to begin, saw James Gilman come in with a party of eight. You can always tell with these parties, whether the people have come because they want to or for business reasons – that is, the tickets are part of a block booked by some company. Gilman – I never think of him as James – was obviously of the latter sort. For one thing, he was wearing a dinner jacket. He looked tremendously bored and at the same time suave and sleek. Even from where I was, a hundred feet away, I could see the grooves the comb had made passing through his butter-coloured hair.

  Any of the four women with him might have been his wife. They were all young, all in skirts up around their thighs, all covered in jewellery and make-up and all with the sort of hair that looks as if it has been pulled through a thorn bush. I watched Gilman take his seat and whisper something in the ear of the woman next to him. His lips were almost touching her ear. I thought of a sonnet he’d written me, the last couplet of which ran: ‘Though you may turn my dreams to dust and truth to lies/I’ll drown my pain in your unfathomed eyes.’

  That made me start laughing and fetched a ‘ssh’ from the only other person in the row. Instead of listening to the ragas, I thought of the day on which we’d exchanged scarves and how I told Ivo about it when I found Gilman’s in the garden shed bundled up with the snowman’s bowler hat. I think I told Ivo to make him jealous, though God knows I never had any more feeling for Gilman than a sort of coquettish need to provoke him and make him want me.

  In the interval, upstairs in the bar, Gilman looked at me and said, ‘Hallo, Tim,’ as if, instead of having last seen each other ten years before, we’d been meeting every day. I said, ‘Hallo, James,’ and then I remembered someone had told me he’d become a lawyer, a solicitor I think, with a practice in London. I felt no desire to approach him and he obviously didn’t want to say any more to me. But, strangely, because I rarely allow myself to think of her in this kind of way, it came into my head how entirely different everything would have been if Isabel had been with me, if she had been holding my arm as the pretty redheaded woman was holding Gilman’s, and how proudly I’d have introduced her, braving any poss
ible snubs. With a glass of wine in my hand, my eyes momentarily closed, I saw her for an instant on the darkness, her pale oval face, the full-lipped mouth like a red lily, the dark hair with the eyebrow-touching fringe.

  It was too painful to keep, that image. I opened my eyes and, turning in the opposite direction from where I’d last seen Gilman, looked into the face of Ivo. Or, rather, into the profile of Ivo, a hawk-nosed, bone-thin man who stood in a graceful slouch talking to an elderly couple. Except that, of course, as I soon saw, the nose was too long, the chin too small, the hair receded too far, and, when the face turned three-quarters towards me, Ivo’s ghost became what it always did, a shadow, a nothing, an illusion or, as in this case, a man of his age but with quite different looks.

  I’ve said somewhere, I think, that Ivo was absent from P. for three months each summer. I knew it, before I went to live with him, he must have told me, or Martin had, but it had slipped my mind. It must have been in late April, soon after the beginning of term, that he asked me what I meant to do while he was ‘away’.

  ‘What do you mean, away?’ I said. ‘Away where?’

  ‘You know I always go to America.’

  The fact is that I wasn’t much interested in what he did in America, so I hadn’t listened particularly attentively when he explained to me. The only thing that stuck in my mind was that part of the time he spent as a lecturer on the Alaskan cruise ships. Apart from that there had been something about visiting various geological sites in Montana I think it was, and in northern Canada, and ending up spending a week or two with someone or other who lived in Oregon.

  I’d simply concluded that, this year, he wouldn’t go.

  ‘I have to go, Tim. At least, I have to do the cruises, that’s four weeks on the ships. It’s good money, I need that money.