by Barbara Vine
I should stop opening these letters, I know that, but I can’t.
One good result of them has been that these last two have stimulated me to start writing again. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because we only know about these people’s experiences because someone, the victims or an observer, wrote accounts of them. Does this mean that I want my own account to be read, like a confession? That I want the punishment this would lead to? It’s too confusing for me to sort out and all I can do now is go on writing.
I was re-reading the piece about Quirini and his companions when Clarissa rang to say my mother was very ‘poorly’ (her word) and that I ought to ‘pull myself together’ and go and see her. So I did.
What’s the use of it? She doesn’t know me. Clarissa was there, being extremely censorious, and saying I couldn’t tell whether she knew me or not and sitting beside her, holding her hand, was the least I could do. My mother seems a very long way away from me and has done for years. She stopped understanding anything about me and the way I respond to things when I was about six. You might say, I suppose, that I stopped understanding her too, but it’s not supposed to be that way, is it? It’s supposed to be parents doing the understanding. My mother has become an empty, mindless shell, in a perpetual trance.
‘You don’t know what she dreams,’ Clarissa said.
I asked her what she thought I could do about that.
‘You ought to be here every day to see her. You stop work at five, you could easily come every evening.’
It’s useless to argue with her and I no longer wanted to. Perhaps she’s right. Those extracts I keep getting in the post are having a strange effect on me, quite different I’m sure from what my correspondent intends. I read about these miserable shipwrecked people, whose one wish seemed to have been to be restored to their families, and I wonder why I don’t feel that way. I wonder if those dreams of my mother’s Clarissa spoke of feature me and a need for me. So, feeling this way, I’ve been taking the bus into Ipswich to visit her, and the journey hasn’t been as bad as I expected. I sit there, holding her hand and thinking about Isabel.
In spite of what I’ve said about the detachment that’s present when I’m writing of dreadful personal things, I am avoiding, I have shied away from continuing. I haven’t kept to what I promised myself I’d do, allow no digressions or by-paths to hinder me. I’ve wandered and prevaricated, but through it all I’ve known one thing for certain: having come so far, I can’t stop now. I can’t just give up, I have to go on. My hope now is that I can recover that detachment, that it will come back, as the ability to write has come back, when I approach an account of what happened on the island. And not only when I approach it, but as I attempt to write it, to travel, struggling, through that Thursday night, through Friday, and come out into the clear terrible sunlight of Saturday morning.
I don’t want to begin. That, at any rate, is plain. I’m doodling with words now, as others doodle round the margins of a sheet of paper, making configurations like the carvings on the petroglyph stones. Like the rubbing Elianne Donizetti made of some ancient, unidentifiable monster. It’s that, remembering that, which must get me back into this history and on to the worst part.
That evening at dinner, Elianne showed us the sheet of rice paper with the smudgy shape on it like a grinning beast’s mouth, full of teeth. Maybe it was one of Philip Ashton’s serpents. Ugly and disturbing as it was, Mrs Donizetti was going to have it mounted and framed. No one commented on the bruises on my neck, though once or twice I saw Dr Ruffle staring at them.
Those few years I had over Ivo must have been enough to make me slightly the stronger. As we know from sportsmen’s decline, that kind of real physical strength starts to fail by thirty. I fought him and I won. I tore his hands off my throat, I kicked him, I sent him flying across that tiny cabin, and he crashed into the door with a slamming sound that seemed to rock the ship. My windpipe felt as if it had been in a vice. I choked and grunted, trying to clear my throat. It must hurt a lot being strangled.
He got up and stood there, hanging his head, hanging his arms down and flexing his fingers. Then he threw back his head and tossed his black hair back. His face had a purplish flush. I’d never seen him look like that before.
‘You might have killed me,’ I said.
‘Yes. I wonder what they do to murderers in this state? Put them in the penitentiary or the gas chamber? In Utah it’s still a firing squad. Did you know that?’
‘I think you’re mad,’ I said.
‘No, you don’t. You don’t think I’m mad. That’s just a manner of speaking. What did you think I’d do when I found you’d been unfaithful to me? Kiss you? Offer you a hundred bucks not to do it again?’
He went into the shower room and I heard him sluicing water over his face. When he came back his hair was dripping and his face was back to its normal colour.
‘Tell me,’ he said very calmly, ‘it isn’t true. Tell me you never had her.’
I braced myself. I got ready for him. ‘It is true. I did.’
He didn’t touch me again. He slammed out of the cabin. After he’d gone I drank a lot of water. It hurt going down. My throat felt like my bronchial tubes were sore inside. But I knew it wasn’t over, I knew there was more to come. I went upstairs to where they were all, as usual, in the Favonia lounge, listening to the briefing for the following day, the last day. Ivo wasn’t there. I asked the pretty Korean steward with the smiling brown eyes for a double brandy, no ice, and said, would it be big, would it be a sizeable drink? You have a triple brandy, sir, why not, no problem. It came and it was big, burning my sore oesophagus as it trickled through.
I went to the lecture because I knew Ivo couldn’t do anything to me there. He wouldn’t even talk about it there. Nathan was to show a video, then give a talk. As soon as I came in I saw Ivo sitting in the front row. Of course he was interested – it was much more his subject than Nathan’s. I sat at the back, next to the Bradens. The video, apparently made for children and in bright colour, was of dinosaurs and kindred creatures roaming the earth. Nothing more about it remains in my memory. I was thinking about getting through the night and the day and the night, whether it was all over and he would just give up, whether there was more to come, if $300 was enough to get me from Vancouver to Seattle.
Nathan talked about the creature called Dacnospondyl and its footmarks, which we were to see next day on Chechin Island. I may not remember the video but I remember that. I remember every detail of that reptile and suppose I know as much about it as is known, just as I remember everything about the island, its precise latitudinal and longitudinal location, its appearance, its plant life, the great chimney of rock that spires out of its centre, its loneliness. Yet I don’t believe I listened very attentively to what Nathan said and I’m sure I didn’t attend to what Ivo had to say about it next day. All the same I could write a minutely detailed essay on Dacnospondyl and its habitat. This information must have filtered through to me subliminally, as things do perhaps in the vicinity of terrible events that can’t be effaced from the memory.
Mrs Braden asked me how I had come to hurt my neck and I said I fell over in my cabin. Her husband looked at me over the top of his half-glasses but she believed me, innocent, sweet woman that she was, incapable of presupposing drunkenness but quite able to imagine me at my age stumbling and falling as she might stumble and fall herself. She had some arnica in her cabin which she wanted me to have for the bruises. I’d intended to make for the bar but I could hardly refuse. The Bradens had one of the two suites, much nicer than my damp, dark cabin. Set up on the Favonia’s battered furniture were photographs of children and grandchildren in silver frames. Mrs Braden’s pink dressing-gown was laid out on one of the beds and her pink slippers under it. I mention this because it all seemed so far from my life, from what was being done to me and what I was doing, though I suppose I’m just being sentimental.
I did go to the bar and found Betsy there with Fergus, drinking Coke, s
o I had a Coke too, with two measures of vodka in it, a strange, over-sweet mixture. The guarded way they spoke to me, a certain awkward, unwelcoming manner they had, made me think they knew, that Ivo had told them all about it or they guessed. I got the barman to open a second can of Coke for me, pour away half and fill the can up with vodka. This I meant to carry with me back to my cabin, indifferent to Betsy’s stares and Fergus’ remarks on the way alcohol speeded up brain-cell destruction.
Outside the door Ivo was waiting for me. I nearly dropped the can. He was standing in the passage, leaning against the wall, his arms folded. When he saw me he lit one of his rare cigarettes.
‘Come out on deck,’ he said.
‘I want to go to bed,’ I said. ‘I’m tired.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re not tired. You’re halfway to being pissed and you’ll be all the way when you’ve downed that. What have you put in it? Rum?’
‘Vodka.’
He laughed. There is something horrible about laughter when it isn’t the natural consequence of amusement. Ivo had a way of laughing for all sorts of reasons. Because he was shocked or disgusted, or appalled, nauseated, enraged, and from a godlike eminence too, at the beastliness of human behaviour.
We weren’t just standing there while we talked and he laughed. He was propelling me up the staircases towards the observation deck. It was after eleven, and that was late on the Favonia.
The night was clear and starry, the moon as thin as a curve of wire. We weren’t yet in the open sea but coming to the southernmost end of the Inside Passage, and the islands we passed between were opaque humps of darkness against the shimmering bright darkness of the sky and the starlit calm darkness of the sea. I had never before seen starlight reflected in water, and when I’d read about it I’d thought it some writer’s romantic fantasy.
Ivo began pointing out the constellations and naming them, Orion, Cassiopeia, Charles’s Wain and the Pleiades that are the seven daughters of Atlas, one of them so pale and faint that you can never be sure you see her. Isabel and I had done the same thing on the dock at Juneau, only we hadn’t known the names. Ivo knew them all. It was strange, wasn’t it, the two of us standing there, alone on board ship at night, I half-drunk, sipping from a can of drink, he giving his astronomy lecture? The end of his cigarette glowed in the dark. He was consumed with jealousy and I with fear. He was sick to hear me say I hadn’t meant it, I was his and no one else mattered, yet he went on talking about the Milky Way and the Heavenly Twins and why Mars shines with a red light. And I listened and said Yes, and Really, and What’s that one, then?
His cigarette end was as red as Mars, glowing in the bit of sky between us. There were lights on the shore in the distance on the port side. Ketchikan, he said, or it might be Metlakatla. And then he turned his back on the stars and the lights and said,
‘She knows about me, of course?’
‘Isabel?’
‘Yes, of course Isabel.’ He spoke the sibilant with a hiss and drew out the middle vowel. ‘Is-aa-bel!’
I’d told him so much there seemed no harm, no indiscretion, no danger, in telling him the rest. ‘She knows I had a relationship with a lecturer on one of the cruise ships.’
‘And she thinks it was a woman.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Oh, please. You’re so transparent. It’s just what you would tell her, it’s just what you would do. Did she believe you?’
‘Of course she believed me.’
‘By that you mean that your mutual trust is so perfect that she takes everything you say for gospel? How very unfortunate for her. In some cases that would be – well, nice, touching, but with a consummate liar like you, she’s simply in for disillusionment, isn’t she?’
I said he must abuse me if he wanted to. I couldn’t stop him, but I could go away, I could go to my cabin.
‘No locks on the doors, though, are there? That’s one of those disadvantages that have their happier side.’
‘I’m stronger than you, Ivo,’ I said.
‘Only physically.’
I don’t know why that made me shiver. The implicit threat, I suppose. Of course I wasn’t very clear-headed by that time, I’d drunk more than half the can, but I put my hand on the rail and looked over and thought how at this hour you could pitch someone over and who would know? Everything was so quiet and still, the sea so calm, nearly all the people on board asleep. But for the faint starlight, it was dark. Did he know what I was thinking? He often did, that was the frightening part.
Then he said something terrible. He stepped back and put one elbow on the rail. The shadows on his face were quite black.
‘I shall come with you on Saturday. To Seattle. I shall come with you and meet her.’
‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘How can you? You’ve another two weeks to do.’
‘Please. Do you think a mere job means anything to me compared with you? Do you?’
‘Compared with revenge, you mean.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I don’t know.’ He pinched out his cigarette and put the end in his pocket. ‘Could I be wonderful, do you think, and give you up to her if I was convinced she loved you and you loved her? It makes me puke to talk like that, to use those words. But since I can’t find other words, could I do that? No, no, it’s all nonsense, I know that. You’ve known her ten days. She doesn’t know you at all. She’ll have forgotten you by now or you’ll be a dirty little memory to put among a lot of other dirty little memories. Juneau, where I screwed that British guy. That’s what’ll go through her mind when anyone says Alaska to her. If you turn up on her doorstep she’ll be so embarrassed she won’t know what to say.’
‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ I said.
‘It may be a bit easier for her if I’m with you. I can imagine it, as a matter of fact. I can imagine us all having a drink and a good laugh.’
‘I’m going to bed,’ I said.
He didn’t try to stop me. In some ways, with no cause, he had always treated me like a potential vandal or non-green, and as I went he said, ‘Don’t throw the empty over the side, will you?’
I think I had no sleep that night. It’s said that this is never quite true, that we doze without knowing it. But it seemed to me that I had no sleep. Most of the time I wasn’t even lying down but sitting on the bunk with my head in my hands.
Of course, I knew Ivo couldn’t come with me to Isabel unless I took him there. I had her address and he didn’t. But this was no escape. I wanted her, I wanted to be with her, I wanted to go to her alone. It was almost certainly true that I could phone her in private. I could escape from Ivo for a few minutes at the airport in Vancouver and phone her, but to say what? That I couldn’t see her yet because I had a friend with me? The ludicrousness of it made me wince. And what would ‘yet’ mean? I would have to explain but explaining Ivo meant revealing who and what Ivo was.
At about six I went up on deck, my mouth dry and my head feeling the way it usually did in the morning. I had a pain too, not low down in my body, but in my side around where I thought my liver might be. Perhaps I was getting cirrhosis. It didn’t worry me if I was. Death had begun to seem the only way out. It would be preferable to life with Ivo or life without Isabel.
Feeling too weak to stand for long, I sat down in a deck-chair. It was then that I noticed for the first time that we were in the open sea, that there was no land anywhere, for the first time since we left Juneau. The level grey shining sea stretched away on both sides. Up above my head that wiry moon still floated, a silver hook in the one piece of blue that wasn’t obscured by dull masses of cloud.
Isabel had become clear and present to me again, for some reason, and imagining being with her was curiously consoling. It was a dream, of course, almost a fantasy, because I wasn’t going to be with her, if Ivo had his way I was never going to see her again, but while I thought of her and saw her, I was deluded into a kind of happiness. It sent me to sleep out there in the cold, fresh morning, and what woke me was
Louise’s voice brightly announcing that breakfast was now being served in the Favonia’s dining room.
Ivo was already there, sitting at an otherwise empty table. He saw me, he was waiting for me, and he patted the chair beside him in a peremptory way. Like a hypnotic subject, I made my way towards him. I heard myself say a formal ‘Good morning’, and I saw his half-smile, his shrug. When the coffee had come and the stewardess had gone away again, he said,
‘We shall be in Prince Rupert by this time tomorrow. I shall have a lot to do today and we may not get another chance to talk.’
‘I’ve nothing to say,’ I said, ‘so that won’t matter a lot.’
‘It will certainly make things simpler. I’ve taken no steps yet to alter our arrangements. That will have to wait till we get to Prince Rupert. Then I’ll try to cancel your flight to Portland and get a flight for both of us to Seattle. I hope it’ll be for the same day, that is, tomorrow, but of course I don’t know if that’s possible.’
‘You’re wasting your time. I won’t let you meet her.’
He didn’t argue. He started to eat a piece of toast but I could see he had no appetite. Then he dropped his bomb. I wonder who first used that phrase about signing one’s own death warrant? It’s become too much of a cliché ever to be used again but it was a good metaphor, wasn’t it? Imagine hearing it for the first time, the effect it would have.
He looked at me. ‘That money I gave you last Saturday,’ he said. ‘You haven’t been spending it, have you? I’ll have it back to pay your bar bill. I’d rather use cash than a credit card.’