No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  ‘I’m not sure I want the whole world to know of mine,’ she said and the smile she gave me was half-dismayed.

  The husband, I suppose. Kit, for Christopher, she’d told me his name, and that he’d left her. But he’d left her before and always come back. How could any man leave Isabel? How could he give up the scent of her and the feel and the sound? Relinquish the deep joy of just being in the same room with her? She held my hands and looked into my face.

  ‘Discretion never does any harm, Tim. I’d like these days we’ve had together to be a secret.’

  ‘Who can I tell?’ I said. ‘I’ve no one to tell.’ No one but Ivo, who couldn’t be mentioned between us. I’d tell him, I thought, or, rather, Isabel would be my trump card, brought out to clinch things when he tried to argue me out of leaving him.

  ‘You must do as you think best,’ she said quietly, and I knew she thought it beneath her dignity to plead with me for silence. I loved her even more for that, for the grace of it and the restraint. But I also knew she was thinking of Kit, that for some reason, though she didn’t love him, though she loved me, though he’d left her, she didn’t want him to find out.

  ‘I promise I won’t tell,’ I said.

  This was all in the morning, at breakfast time. We stayed together, mostly in each other’s arms, tumbling together as we moved about her room, even a brief apartness making us feel empty and naked. Wrapped in the Goncharof’s white towelling gowns, we tried to eat. I drank black coffee. She drank orange juice, glass after glass, and the acidity of it turned her face from pallor to whiteness.

  ‘I can’t let you go, I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘I’ll be skinned. I’ll be like a flayed person. I won’t be able to stand the cold and the rain without you. I’ll die. I’ll drown.’

  Why did I say that then? That I would drown? Because the rain continued to pour down, I suppose. Or because the island and its surrounding seas cast their shadow before them? From the window I could see people coming and going, in and out of the foyer of the Goncharof, wrapped from head to foot in waterproof coats and capes and hoods, like the ghosts of drowned fishermen. Everywhere felt damp, and upstairs, in the warm, it was steamy. Condensation dripped down the windows. I paced the room while she packed, and when she looked up to speak to me I caught her in my arms.

  ‘Tim, you must let me go. You must. This will be too much for me. Think of me.’

  ‘I’m coming to the airport,’ I said. ‘I’m coming as far as I can.’

  And then I remembered what I was supposed to do after that week’s trip with Ivo. I was to go to Portland and stay at someone’s house, then go on this Greyhound bus trip, then meet Ivo in Seattle. I wouldn’t go to Portland at all, somehow I’d fix it so that I flew straight to Seattle and Isabel. It had to be possible, if I played things right, if I managed to buy the air ticket myself instead of letting Ivo buy it.

  The midday precipice was still there and the pit was on the other side of it. I was still racing down headlong. But beyond the abyss it was as if I could see a green country lying spread out in the sun. I told her, ‘I can come to you in ten days,’ I said.

  She gave me a look of great tenderness. ‘Write to me. You know I like letters best.’

  ‘I’ll write every day,’ I said. The husband’s name stuck in my throat. ‘He won’t be there?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not any more. Not for a year now.’

  ‘Thank God for that.’

  ‘You may feel differently in ten days,’ she said, her head turned away.

  I said I’d never feel differently, not in ten days, not in ten years. And, of course, I don’t. It hasn’t been ten years, it hasn’t yet been two, but I love her now as much as I loved her then, more than I loved her then, and without anything for my love to feed on, without hope.

  We went to the airport in the rain. The sky was a uniform dark grey, not clouds but cloud itself. The taxi splashed its slow way through sparkling rivers and great flat pools drummed by rain.

  Careless of what the driver heard, I said to her, ‘Only ten days. That’s all it will be. I’ll be with you in ten days.’

  She held my hand, crushing it till the bones hurt.

  ‘Ten days,’ I said. ‘That’s nothing, is it? It’ll be gone before we know it.’

  We talked while we waited but I don’t remember what we said except that I told her I’d die if I couldn’t see her again. I went with her all the way to where they do the baggage scrutiny and I watched her go through and on and on until she was lost to sight. Ten days, I kept saying to myself, only ten days, but it didn’t help me, I couldn’t believe in it. I shut my eyes in the taxi going back and tried to conjure up her face on the darkness but Ivo’s came instead, his expression angry and vengeful.

  Just enough money remained for me to pay the taxi. I went up to my room, hunted through my clothes to see if I had any money at all and found a ten-pound note in a jacket pocket. One of the banks in Juneau would have changed it into dollars, twelve maybe, or fifteen if I was lucky. I put it back where it had come from and resigned myself to eating and drinking at the Goncharof until Ivo came in the morning.

  Drinking was what I did, mostly in my room. I slept and dreamt – horribly – of a woman with a woman’s body and Ivo’s face. The rain hadn’t stopped all day and it continued unabated through the long, pale grey evening. I tried the dark bar where I’d first seen her and where we’d drunk champagne, had gazed deep into each other’s eyes, exchanged long slow kisses when the barman was away and I’d clutched at her hand and pressed my mouth to the blue veins, blue as a Spanish Infanta’s, and the white skin and the long, shell-coloured nails. I sat there and thought about her, conjured her up, but she wasn’t there and it was too much for me, the loneliness.

  I suppose it was the drink that did it, but I had this fantasy that if I shut my eyes, when I opened them those twelve days wouldn’t have happened and she’d be sitting up there at the bar, reading The Golovlyov Family. Of course one part of my mind knew this wasn’t possible but another part thought it might be, that we know so little about time and even less about the human spirit. So I kept closing my eyes and wishing, trying to work a sort of spell I suppose, and opening them and looking at the empty stool, the parchment-shaded lamps and the bottles gleaming dully.

  In the end, when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went into the dining room and had dinner, but I was almost too drunk to eat. I remember taking that card I’d stolen from her out of my pocket and reading her name over and over. It had belonged to her and it seemed to me full of magic. I kissed her name and the waiter saw me. After that I went upstairs again and drank some more and fell into a sort of stupor, sitting at the window, watching the rain, watching the clouds split open to show a blood-red streak where the sun was going down. I must have lapsed into unconsciousness after that, for when I woke up I had my arms spread on the window sill and my head on my arms and it was dark.

  I drank all the water in the room and then some out of the tap. Ivo would come in the morning, I couldn’t remember when but before lunch. My face was wet and I knew that I was crying. Somehow I managed to get out of my clothes and I fell naked into bed.

  At some very early hour I heard the television in the next room come on, a harsh man’s voice and a strident woman’s voice talking. I said to myself that as soon as I could raise the energy I’d bang on the wall with my shoe like Sharif used to in Dempster Road, but I was asleep again after a few seconds. Next time I woke it was broad bright daylight and Ivo was in the room, standing over me, bending over me, his face six inches from mine.

  Here in N. we’re preparing for the Paschal Gala. Easter is late this year and the Festival always takes place during Passion Week and Easter Week. We’re working overtime now, sometimes late into the evening. Rosenkavalier is the high spot, to be performed by the Wessex National Opera on the night of Maundy Thursday, but I shan’t be there. Julius would much rather I wasn’t there, for there will be no
complimentary tickets and all seats will be sold out weeks in advance. A seat going to me would be a waste, he says, but to do him justice, he says the same for his own family.

  ‘It’s the price we pay, dear lad,’ he said to me this morning, ‘for our gorgeous jobs in this glorious setting, up to our necks in culture. If we have to forgo Richard Strauss at his most sublime for a Morales Mass or Ruuta’s religious school songs, who are we to complain?’

  I know I shall be roped in for a front-row seat at this latter performance, sung by four Finns accompanied by a string quartet from Vilnius. The dearth of bookings for it is becoming embarrassing. At this rate, Julius will have to change its venue from the smaller hall in the Concert Complex to the old Methodist Chapel in the town. I took him there at lunchtime and pointed out a few hard facts.

  ‘Not so hard as these benches,’ he said, sitting on one of them and rubbing his back. ‘It’s one thing to sit here for free and save your soul, but quite another to expect two hundred people to pay £13.50 each for the privilege.’

  I told him we’d be lucky to get twenty at the present rate, and then, to soften the blow, that the Methodist Chapel was very pretty, in an austere kind of way, and did date back to 1832.

  ‘We can’t put the Minister for the Arts on one of these,’ he said, banging the bench with his fist. ‘He won’t think it’s pretty, he’s a Roman Catholic.’

  I said we wouldn’t see the Minister for the Arts in there for dust. He would stick out for Rosenkavalier or nothing. Nothing was decided and I went back to ticket allocations and seating plans.

  Am I writing all this to postpone what I must write? Perhaps. It certainly isn’t relevant, unless the weather is, Alaskan weather, rain-forest weather, it’s been pouring since first thing this morning. The winds don’t come off the sea much here because the prevailing winds in this country come from the south-west. But today a north-easterly has been blowing, the waves noisy enough for me to hear them in my office. The wild sea was stripy, banded in blue and green and purple and brown.

  At seven-thirty the tide was high, making it impossible for me to walk home along the shore road. I tried it and was stopped by a tall wave breaking against the sea wall and flooding the road with spray.

  I made my way back into the High Street through one of the many alleys along there and came into the house by the back way. The bulb had failed in the hall light and I had to grope my way towards the front. Spray struck me as I came cautiously out of the front door to put the duckboards up at the gate and the sandbags behind them. But the tide was on the turn, the violent sea already being tugged back to roar powerlessly and thrash the shingle.

  Nature isn’t often wild in this country. It’s only occasionally that it does savage things. But on the American continent it wounds and kills people all the time, they’re burnt by it or swept away, engulfed in lava or frozen to death. Or drowned. Wild animals can kill you and even plants cause you injury. I thought of that this evening, protecting my house from a sea that only threatened but did nothing. The rain had slowed and thinned to not much more than a windblown mist. I came back into the house and felt for the hall light switch and then I remembered about the bulb.

  In the dark I felt Ivo very near me. I thought I could hear him breathing and I was frightened. Usually, I can stand his ghost. I don’t believe in ghosts and I know his is a creation of my imaginings, a projection of my guilt that takes on light and shadows and creaking wood to give it substance. But then, in the narrow passage downstairs, it was different. I hardly know how it was, for I could see nothing, only darkness and a little gleam of light too high up to be of use, a spot of light from the tiny window at the top of the stairs.

  There is no other light switch until you come to the kitchen or inside the dining-room door. That door was shut and I was afraid to put out my hand to open it. I thought that if I put my hand out it might be taken by another hand in the dark. I thought that if I moved along the passage my body would encounter his. My raised hand would find his cheek and my fingers run down his icy flesh. Even if I kept my hands as they were, wrapped round myself, I would touch him and he me. The breathing continued softly, with absolute regularity.

  I got down on my knees. I got down on all fours and started to crawl along the passage. All the time I thought my advancing hands would encounter a foot. It was better, a little better, when I understood that the breathing I could hear was my own breathing, and the thudding I took for the drumming of his fingers on the wall, the beating of my own heart. At the foot of the stairs I pulled myself up on the banisters and stumbled the last bit to the kitchen light. It came on and I knew I’d see him, his face, just for an instant before he vanished. But I saw nothing, of course I saw nothing.

  What is it I think is happening? I know he’s dead and I know the dead don’t come back. Ghosts don’t exist and there is no life beyond death. There’s rest and a long unbroken sleep if we’re lucky, but no other life and no other side. So what do I think I see and hear and why am I so cravenly, shudderingly, miserably afraid?

  Once I’d have had a stiff drink after an experience like that. Or three or four stiff drinks. Not that there ever were experiences like that before Ivo died. I don’t drink these days, beyond a beer in the Mainmast. For one thing, I can’t afford it. But it gave me up really, not I it. One day I realized I hadn’t had a drink for a week, I hadn’t thought of it, my head was too full of other things.

  The hangover I had that Friday when Ivo came back should have begun the giving-up process but it didn’t, not then. He walked about the room, saying it stank, he opened the windows and let in that cold, clean, wet air that is fresher than any air I’ve ever breathed. It hit my face like a dripping towel swung at me. A procession of bottles reared before my eyes like Macbeth’s line of kings. I said that, about Macbeth, groaning to Ivo, who didn’t know what I was talking about. He had lined the bottles up, champagne bottles and one that had held red wine, I don’t know how many Coors cans and liqueur miniatures, for the chambermaid to take away. There was a sticky brandy glass too, with a dead fly in it.

  ‘I didn’t expect you for hours,’ I said.

  ‘What a welcome!’

  I made myself sit up, though it was as if an army with bayonets was driving me down again, marching over the plains of my brain. My mouth was almost too dry for speech to be possible. Thinking – if I was capable of thought – that he might construe what I said as a sign of missing him, I managed to mutter that I’d drunk too much the night before.

  ‘So what’s new?’ he said.

  Why did I want to please him? Why did I need to placate him? If I had a reason then, if I tried to justify the way I apologized to him and excused myself to him, it must have been that I had to be on terms with him, brutal as it sounds, because he had money and I had none. Without him I was destitute and stranded. But that wasn’t the reason, it never was, I know that. I’d been brought up never to speak my mind, to prevaricate, not to ‘hurt others’ feelings’, not to be rude. All that asserted itself, especially at times of distress – and, God knows, I was distressed. I’d been taught it was my duty to please people and make them like me. Especially seniors and those in authority.

  I suppose the truth is that once Ivo started admonishing me, and that had been going on for six months or so by then, once that began, he ceased to be my lover in anything but a straight physical sense and became my father. Or, rather, the father, the archetypal parent in whom authority is vested and the power of exacting obedience. The power of inspiring subservience and creating hatred. Oedipus, Eyedipus, what does it matter so long as you hate your father? My father had come into his feckless son’s bedroom and found the evidences of dissipation, and disgust was all over his face.

  But why didn’t I just say then that it was over, that I was leaving, that I’d met a woman I loved? Why didn’t I? That Oedipal-father explanation isn’t adequate, it never is. The money excuse isn’t either. Fellow students had told me the British Consular people will always
get you home. They won’t like it, they’ll be unpleasant and you’ll have to repay the money, but they’ll do it. And they can’t kill you, can they? It always comes down to that in the end. Not that it really does much to change the way you behave.

  I know what I ought to have done. I ought to have got up and gone into the bathroom, killed or cured myself under a cold shower, drunk water, sent for black coffee and told Ivo I was leaving. I nearly did. As he began, in an icy way, to tell me how he had missed me, had longed for letters from me that never came, had nevertheless anticipated this moment – or the moment it might have been, coming off the ship, running up the steps of the Goncharof to find me waiting for him in the hall – as he began all that and pursued it relentlessly (he was an adept at contrasting the real with what might have been), I thought of chucking prudence and caution and walking out. But I thought also of Isabel. I needed to be on this side of the Atlantic, I needed to be here, so that I could find her again. And it was only eight days.

  I really thought then that in eight days I’d be able to tell him everything and it would be all right.

  In the Summit restaurant that evening, just as we were leaving, a waitress handed me something in a plastic bag and said the ‘young lady’ had left it behind a week ago. Ivo and I were having one of our truces. By that I mean that I’d apologized abjectly enough even for him, I’d fought my hangover and won the battle by lunchtime, we’d taken a packed lunch down to the State Office Building and listened to the Friday organ music and he’d at last asked me to forgive him for being jealous and demanding and exigent. But now, at the words ‘young lady’, that look I knew so well was back, disapproving, superior and – yes, incredulous.