No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  ‘Let me see,’ he said when we were out in the street.

  I handed it to him without a word. The package smelt of Isabel’s scent, which made me feel dizzy. Ivo put his hand into the bag and pulled out Isabel’s black and white scarf. The pattern was very distinctive, an abstract design, and the material something diaphanous. I thought, he’ll ask and I’ll tell him, I’ll tell him the truth, and then, I thought, I won’t have to sleep with him tonight.

  Base, wasn’t it? Anyway, it didn’t work out that way. Ivo put the scarf back in the bag and handed it to me. ‘Someone you picked up?’

  I said nothing.

  ‘Her trade must be profitable if she can afford Laroche scarves. Or did you buy it for her with my money?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t, Ivo,’ I said. ‘I’m not as bad as that.’

  He began to laugh. People walking along Main Street turned and stared at him. ‘He’s not as bad as that! How old are you? Ten? Eleven? What does that make me? A closet pederast?’

  ‘I meant,’ I said, ‘I’m not so immoral I’d spend your money on presents for another lover.’

  ‘Oh, she was another lover?’ You could never win with him until he broke down, and then you could. ‘Now he tells me. But you didn’t spend my money on her. What happened, she bought her own dinner? You went Dutch?’

  And so it went on. I refused to go in the bar of the Goncharof, so he said he’d have room service bring up champagne. That was during a mini-truce. In a mild, casual way he asked me if I’d spent all the travellers’ cheques and, when I said I had, merely put up his eyebrows. The champagne came. Ivo found his leather jacket in the clothes cupboard, put it on and felt in the pocket where the hundred dollars had been. He actually pulled the lining out of the pocket and held it taut to show its emptiness.

  ‘I’ll have this in my own keeping now,’ he said, and added very unfairly, ‘There are some who would have the very clothes off one’s back.’

  But he wanted me, I knew that. The champagne wasn’t enough to make me want him. I was suddenly extremely afraid of having my body penetrated and equally of penetrating a man’s myself. But I remembered that once before, after Suzanne I think it was, I’d asked him if instead of what we usually did we could have intracrural sex. The word made him laugh, that cold bitter laughter of his. He wanted to know where I’d got it from, where I’d heard it, I hadn’t been reading scientific books, had I? For quite a while after that he would suddenly come out with it: ‘Intractural,’ and begin to laugh. ‘Intracrural!’

  So I just said, ‘No.’ I said I’d sleep in the armchair if he liked.

  ‘Don’t be more of a fool than you can help,’ said Ivo.

  I got into bed with him and he turned his back and was asleep before I was. Next morning we checked out of the Goncharof. They gave him the bill with all the lunches and dinners on it that I’d had with Isabel, all the drink I’d had and the miniatures out of the fridge. He sat down to it, with me sitting beside him, and he went through the bill item by item, very slowly, but not saying a word till he got to the sum total, which was much higher than I’d expected.

  Then he looked at me quite dispassionately, almost as if he were amused. ‘How does it feel to be kept?’ he said. ‘Fine, I suppose, once you’ve said goodbye to self-esteem. Know what that is, do you? They used to call it conscience.’

  I write this because I’m ashamed of it now. I wasn’t at the time. It seemed to me quite justifiable. After all, he’d invited me, I hadn’t wanted to come, I hadn’t wanted to stay. The last thing I’d wanted was to be dumped at the ends of the earth to stay on my own for a fortnight. Once there, I had to live. I said to him, like that ten-year-old, I suppose, ‘Oh, leave me alone.’

  That afternoon, still barely on speaking terms, we went aboard the Favonia.

  11

  Isabel’s scent still lingers in the folds of her scarf. Some kinds of perfume seem to last for decades, changing only a little, sharpening or sweetening, as year gives way to year. The black and white pattern is of swirls that are like the sign for the bass clef. Ivo’s knowing it came from Laroche had surprised me at the time. There was no label on the scarf, or it had been cut off. Until then I’d always believed he wasn’t ‘that sort’ of gay man, he wasn’t the kind Emily suggested I might be taken for, the sort that knows about designers and who makes what perfume. And realizing that he was that kind, that there was a side of him that was, helped along the repulsion I was starting to feel.

  It brought me a big sense of relief to find that I’d got a cabin to myself on the Favonia. It didn’t worry me that it was tiny and well below the water-line and the adjoining shower room almost too small to turn round in. Ivo was on the deck below, where all five lecturers were and the ship’s officers, the crew being down in the bowels of the ship.

  He shut the door and said he was sorry, he was sorry he’d been harsh to me, in future he would keep some control over his jealousy, he wouldn’t carp. What did he care about money? I was welcome to everything he had. Then he took me in his arms and kissed me and said, laughing, that I wouldn’t have much chance to be unfaithful to him on this ship. The average age of the passengers was around seventy. Once I’d probably have made some sort of joke about the crew, the handsome Korean crew whose average age was around twenty-two, but since Isabel I no longer said things like that.

  The first thing we were supposed to do on board was all meet in the Favonia lounge for drinks and snacks at six o’clock, meet the cruise organizers and the lecturers and be told about the plans for next day. That gave me my first sight of my fellow-passengers. Some of them were very old indeed, but most were in late middle-age and the youngest in their mid-forties. Or so I suppose. I’m not very good on ages when people are over thirty-five. One old couple looked as if they ought to have been in wheelchairs and were only on their feet assisted by sticks because no one was allowed to go on the cruise unless mobile.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t introduce me to anyone,’ I’d said to Ivo on the way up there. I didn’t mean these old people, I meant the other lecturers, two men and two women, who were all about his age.

  ‘Why not? They know I’m gay.’

  ‘All the more reason,’ I said.

  I anticipated an explosion, at least an argument. We’d been through that many times, but I’d never felt so determined before. I had no closet any more, I had nothing to come out of. There’s no point in standing up and being counted when the cause is one you won’t profit by. Or so I thought.

  Ivo said, ‘Are you saying we are to seem not to know each other? We are to pretend we’ve just met on board?’

  ‘I don’t see why it has to be gone into like this. We can just behave naturally.’

  ‘If I’m going to behave naturally,’ said Ivo, ‘I’d chuck you down on that bench and fuck your brains out.’ And then he said quickly, overcome by remorse, ‘I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. We’ll do whatever you want.’

  Of course we didn’t. No one ever does do what the other wants. At any rate, he stuck to what he’d said and didn’t introduce me to Megan the anthropologist, Fergus the historian, Betsy the ornithologist or Nathan the wilderness expert. But we sat at the same table as these last two for dinner and seemed perhaps all to get to know each other at the same time. Apart from a grandchild a couple had brought with them, we were the youngest people on board and it was natural for us to sit together. I still think that, though I couldn’t have said it to Ivo without getting another stinging rejoinder.

  The Favonia left Juneau harbour as we sat down to dinner. It was raining again, the sea grey beyond the window and rain and spray lashing the glass. Fergus was giving a talk on the history of Haines and Fort Seward with a video, and when I said I thought I’d give that a miss, Ivo put up his eyebrows, said, ‘Nonsense,’ and hauled me up several flights of stairs to the lecture hall that was behind the bridge. He’d been to the ship’s shop and bought me a pair of binoculars, having previously scolded me for not bringing any. Enjoy
ment of the Alaskan Panhandle was impossible without binoculars. I hadn’t a camera either but I didn’t tell him that.

  Several of the old people fell asleep. I thought I’d attended my last lecture in the previous April when I’d listened to Piers Churchill on Ford Madox Ford’s prose, and I rather resented having to sit through this one. The grandfather sitting next to me took notes all the time in a neat, highly legible hand. When it was over he introduced himself as Frederick Donizetti. His is the only name I’d remember if I didn’t have the passenger list and the ship’s log on the table here in front of me. His wife said gently, ‘Professor Donizetti.’

  Was I a student? Not any more, I said. Mrs Donizetti said I looked so extremely young, not much older that Elianne, which reminded her that she must go and check on Elianne before they had a last drink in the bar. Would I join them for a nightcap? said the Professor. Ivo’s murmured rejoinder, that there was nothing I’d like better and he’d picked a right one here, went unheard by anyone but me.

  Apart from Isabel, who was quite different, these were the first Americans I’d ever met socially, and it amazed me the unselfconscious way they introduced themselves, and the ease with which they talked to a stranger. At first I thought they must be particularly extroverted, but when we were in the bar everyone behaved like that, coming up to me and shaking hands, saying their names as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do, asking me where I came from and what did I think of Alaska.

  I spoke my thoughts aloud, perhaps because that was what they all seemed to do. ‘I shouldn’t think anyone could ever be lonely in the United States.’

  There was a good deal of dry laughter and a blonde woman who looked a bit like the ageing Marlene Dietrich said I was kidding. According to the passenger list, she must have been a Ms Connie Dorral. Most of the rest were academics or retired academics, there were two doctors of medicine apart from the ship’s doctor – who was mostly absent, chain-smoking on deck – and a dozen or so members of a society called the American Avifauna Association.

  ‘At home we’d call you twitchers,’ I said.

  That raised a lot of interest. People wanted to know why and what twitchers did and how did I come to know what the word ‘avifauna’ meant. I thought how you could never have a conversation like this in N. or P., or anywhere in England, and I said so. Again they wanted to know why. I drank three dry martinis and started to enjoy myself. At any rate I felt happier and easier than I had done at any time since Isabel went away.

  Ivo wasn’t there and this had something to do with it. Our relationship had reached a stage where I could only be relaxed when I was away from him. After I’d met the Donizettis he’d abandoned me, and I hadn’t seen him since. It was difficult to escape the conclusion that he was taking what I’d said seriously and behaving as if we’d only met when I came aboard. This didn’t stop me being anxious that I might find him waiting for me in my cabin when the party broke up and I went down there just before midnight.

  He wasn’t but the discovery I made that there was no lock on the door rather disturbed me. Everything was very quiet but for the blowing noise the air-conditioning made. If you were inclined to claustrophobia it might have been very bad for you down there at night. Luckily, I wasn’t. But I lay awake a long while, listening for footsteps coming towards my door.

  The voice of the tour director wishing us good morning woke me. It came out of a public-address system you could no more turn off than you could lock the door. The greeting was followed by announcements of various kinds, details of the temperature and precipitation level and a preview of what would be happening that day. It might have been the small hours or midday, there was no way of telling down there. I found my watch and saw that it was seven.

  Instead of five lecturers already at our table, there was only Ivo. The others, Ivo said, had had theirs an hour before. The dining-room windows gave on to a calm grey sea and a sky of smooth grey unbroken cloud. I looked through my binoculars at it and saw the same thing, grey sea and grey cloud. Mrs Donizetti waved to me from across the room and Connie Dorral called out ‘Hi’ and ‘Good morning’.

  ‘I see you’ve been making friends,’ said Ivo.

  An enormous breakfast was on offer, cereal and eggs and bacon and toast and fruit, so I asked for the lot. I fancied that one of the people I’d met the night before, a doctor from Georgia called Thomas Ruffle, was staring at Ivo and me with more curiosity than our sitting at the same table warranted. It made me a bit uneasy about being there, but I told myself not to judge by my former standards. The doctor was an American and Americans, I was learning, are interested in people, as against the English, who are interested in things.

  Ivo, who when he read my thoughts always read the ones I didn’t want him to know about, said, ‘If we have breakfast together now, run into each other by chance in Haines and accidentally have lunch in the same restaurant, happen to sit next to each other at the evening briefing and have a pre-dinner drink together, do you think we’ll have done enough to make our fellow-passengers accept our innocent friendship?’

  ‘I hate your sarcasm,’ I said.

  ‘It used to turn you on,’ he said. ‘It used to make you think I was cruel and violent and dangerous to know. I wonder why these unpleasant qualities are always so – what you would call – attractive?’

  I ate my eggs and bacon. I waited a while and then I said, ‘Is it going to rain? Shall I need my waterproof gear?’

  He looked at me and said very quietly, ‘Why do I love you so much? What would make me get over you?’

  I didn’t answer. Connie Dorral passed our table as she was leaving the dining room and said Dr Someone had seen two seals bob out of the water on the starboard side. I made some sort of appropriate reply.

  ‘So, how shall we contrive to meet by accident in Haines?’ said Ivo in a lighter and more pleasant voice. ‘Let’s say the Sheldon Museum at the foot of Main Street. I’ll be coming out and you’ll be coming in at eleven? How’s that?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ I said. ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, what I want is for us to leave this ship together and explore Haines together, eat our meals together and sleep together. It’s not want I want but what I may have.’

  And so it went on. We did meet on the steps of the museum and we did have lunch together. The rain came down in torrents in the afternoon, so we stayed in the restaurant, talking to various members of the party who came in. Ivo, who never lied but was prepared this time to keep silent while I lied, listened while I told the Donizettis and Connie and a geophysicist from Milwaukee that he and I had no prior knowledge of each other. No cocks crew, it was raining too hard.

  ‘It’s nice for you to find a fellow countryman,’ said Mrs Donizetti.

  Megan gave the lecture that evening. It was about the Chilkat Indians and of no interest to me whatever. I sat between Ivo and Betsy and thought about how I was going to manage things, how I was going to tell Ivo about Isabel, or if it would be possible for me to avoid that and simply make it clear to him our affair was over and we had to part for good. The awful, sordid truth was that I absolutely depended on him for money.

  Writing about this now, nearly two years later and after all that happened, I’d like to leave out the money part. But I can’t. If I’d been financially independent of Ivo I wouldn’t have gone on the cruise at all, I’d have gone to Seattle with Isabel. Still, I suppose you could say that if I’d had money of my own I’d have left the Hotel Goncharof before Isabel arrived there. It’s no use calculating things that way, assessing conditionals and might-have-beens. The lesson to be learnt is never to put yourself in someone’s else’s financial power, and I’ve learnt it, but much too late.

  If I hadn’t spent so prodigally while Isabel and I were together that past week I’d have had enough to live on, albeit frugally, for my travels to Portland and San Francisco and my return trip to Vancouver. But now I didn’t intend to go to those places at all, only to Seattle. That woul
d mean buying an air ticket to Seattle and staying somewhere while there. Could I stay with Isabel? And what of when the time came to use the Apex ticket home? How could I bear to leave her? But if I stayed how would I live?

  It looks as if I am just making a list of excuses for what I did. Of course I know there are no excuses. There is barely an explanation.

  Ivo came to my cabin that night. He knocked and, without waiting, came in. I couldn’t think of a reason for saying no, making only a feeble protest that the cabin was so small, the bed so small.

  ‘I’m not planning on spending the night,’ he said.

  When he’d gone I did some more thinking. Not about money this time but about the most appalling thing that could happen, that Isabel might somehow learn of my relationship with Ivo.

  We went up the mountain in the train to White Pass, gold rush country. A woman in the carriage with me took no notice of the scenery, the jagged peaks swathed in snow, the deep blue valleys, the sun that was hot and bright as the clouds sank below us, and looked only at the wild flowers growing on the right-hand embankment where there was no view. She was a botanist from Florida, made ecstatic by her discoveries, enthusiastically recording her own voice commenting on dogwood and hemlock and curious grasses.

  A railway buff from Albuquerque told me this trip was ranked as world-class among enthusiasts. He’d waited to make it until he retired from the academic post he’d held, and then, that same year of 1982, the line ceased operations. Imagine his disappointment! Six years later, to his joy, the White Pass and Yukon Route railway began to run once more, and here he was, making the trip as soon as he could.

  These are the things that matter to you when you are old, I thought, wild flowers and mountain railways. The life of the emotions is all dead and gone, used up. But that life was all I could think of as a longing for Isabel took hold of me and at the same time the prospect of being with her again seemed to recede. Sex with Ivo the night before had done its damage. It was an experience I looked back on with horror, with a shrinking of my body into myself, my arms crossed on my chest, my legs pressed together. And yet I’d pretended enjoyment. Why? To avoid another confrontation? To hasten the end of it and his departure? It made her fade a little, our encounters become a falsely recalled memory, our future unreal.