by Barbara Vine
‘Why shouldn’t I pay my own bar bill?’
‘Oh, did you intend to? We may as well do it now, then. Any drinks you have tonight you can pay for over the bar.’
There was no chance to say anything more because the Ruffles arrived and asked if they could share our table. Mrs Ruffle said, did we know they had eleven feet of rain a year in Prince Rupert. They had so much they didn’t measure it in inches. Someone had told her there was a storm warning out for later that day. Would we still be able to go ashore at Chechin and see the footprints of Dacnospondyl?
‘It won’t be much of a storm,’ Ivo said. ‘Rain and a bit of a squall. We won’t let rain stop us, will we?’
‘You betcha,’ said Mrs Ruffle.
He was genial with them, even hearty, all pals together, the intrepid adventurers, undeterred by a menacing climate.
‘What exactly does the name mean?’ she said. ‘Dacno-whateveritis. I meant to remember but I’ve forgotten.’
‘Roughly to be translated as “biting-back” or “backbite”, if you prefer.’
‘I like it,’ she said, but looked at Ivo as if it was he she liked. ‘I really like that old backbite. My kids are crazy about dinosaurs. They’ll be wild that it was Mom who saw that big guy’s footmarks and not them. When was it he was around?’
‘Between 250 and 300 million years ago.’
‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ said Dr Ruffle, who was a world-renowned cancer expert and ought to have known better than mouth remarks like that. He helped himself to a banana from the fruit bowl. The bananas that were left had all gone black by this time but he went on eating his one a day. They were good for the cardio-vascular system, he was in the habit of telling us all, being full of potassium.
Ivo was smoking again. When he was happy, when he and I were living together and happy together, he’d given it up. He lit a cigarette as if he were ashamed of his weakness, and perhaps he was. He and I went off in the direction of the purser’s office. To stall him, I said I hadn’t got the money on me.
‘What a liar you are,’ said Ivo. ‘Of course you’ve got it on you. You never move without it.’
My bar bill came to $260. I wasn’t altogether surprised. My head felt as if £170 had been spent on getting it into the state it was in. The $40 I had left would pay for whatever I drank that evening, Ivo said. Perhaps I should sleep off my hangover before Chechin Island was sighted. Or at any rate I should rest. There was a book in the ship’s library on the Cretaceous period and the culmination of the dinosaur revolution which I might find – he hesitated for a word – improving.
I sat on deck in the chair I’d slept in that morning. As far as the avifaunists were concerned, the cruise was over. There would be no more interesting birds. But the tailfins of humpback whales still broke the surface of the sea, someone saw a sea otter swimming on its back and from time to time seal faces appeared. I held the binoculars up to my closed eyes, trying to sleep behind them.
It was cold out there. For the first time since we left Juneau a real wind was blowing, chopping the sea into millions of wavelets, and the clouds were dark. They spat out bursts of rain that felt icy cold on the skin. The mist dropped and fell and rose again, the wind sweeping it aside. I asked Fergus, who came to stand at the rail by my chair, how deep the water was, but he didn’t know, only that it was many fathoms deep, perhaps unfathomable. It was grey and sparkling, yet dull, stretching for ever, seemingly endless.
Chechin Island appeared on the horizon at about ten, coffee time. I wasn’t sitting with Ivo but at a table I shared with Connie, Nathan and the ship’s doctor. Because I was seated by the window and facing the way the Favonia was going, because I wasn’t taking part in the conversation, I spotted the island probably before anyone else did. I say ‘the horizon’ but it isn’t really like that when anything more than, say, half a mile away, is hidden in mist. Chechin loomed out of the mist as if it, and not we, had moved. It grew upon me slowly, at first no more than a dark grey shape, but from the beginning it seemed to me one of the strangest, most sinister and ugly places I’d ever seen.
I said, ‘Look.’
Nathan got up and stood behind me, peered and said, ‘That’s Chechin.’
‘Is that where we’re going?’ Connie said.
‘If you don’t mind a rough sea and getting wet.’
By the time the coffee was finished we were quite close to the island, had come under its lee, perhaps, only I don’t know the right terms. I felt the anchor go down, that strange sound-sensation that is rather like feeling the descent of the wheels on an aircraft when it’s about to land. The island lay before us, some two or three hundred yards away, perhaps more.
It was a longish island, humpbacked like a whale, but out of the hump grew a tall pillar of rock, pointing a gnarled finger into the sky. There’s another island in these waters of a similar formation but looking even more like a lighthouse and named, by George Vancouver for all I know, the New Eddystone Rock. The rock column on Chechin looks more as if a temple had once stood there and all but a single pillar been eroded by the action of the sea. Trees grow there, spruce of course, and hemlock, and a greensward comes down to a white beach. Or, rather, you know the island is green when you land there. From the ship it looked grey, many tones of grey, like an etching on rough grey paper. A small cloud obscured the pinnacle of the column, wrapping it as a shred of cotton might wrap a distaff.
The sight of it brought back to me that picture which hung in Martin Zeindler’s living room, the one of the Parthenon by moonlight. It must have been the greyness, the absence of colour, and the sense of ancient things. But Chechin was the Parthenon in the dark, a troop of Goths having destroyed every column but one.
I nearly failed to go there. The rain had started again, dashing against the windows of the dining room, blown by the first of the squalls we had been warned of. I thought I knew what those lizard footprints would be like, indistinguishable from ice erosion or pits in the rock until Fergus or Ivo told us what they were. I imagined the trek through the woods, the dripping trees, the awful silence, the heady smell of a freshness, a pristine, unpolluted purity, almost too unfamiliar to bear. But if I stayed behind? Boredom and fear are a terrible combination. Could I stand another three hours’ solitary of boredom and fear?
I went down to my cabin and got into my waterproof gear, the pants, the jacket, the hood, the rubber boots. At the exit for the Zodiac embarkation I collected my life-jacket, turned disc 22 to red and followed the others on to the gangplank, into the rain.
14
Yesterday I was thinking about how to write down what happened on the island. Perhaps I should say it’s been at the back of my mind, though often pushing forward and emerging, for this is one of our busiest times at the Consortium. Apart from inquiries for seats, there have been the temperamental Harmonia-Balt Quartet from Vilnius and the loss of the cellist’s instrument to deal with, the inability of the Minister for the Arts to decide which performance of all twenty-one he can bear to sit through and the prima-donna-ish behaviour of the world’s greatest (so he says) flamenco dancer, who refuses to sleep anywhere in sight or sound of the sea. But I was thinking about the island and Ivo all the same, wondering how to set it down, whether everything should be described in precise detail or some events given emphasis and others glossed over.
I expected to begin last evening but at the last moment Julius more or less ordered me to go to the Pergolesi Mass at the Methodist Chapel. It conflicted with the obviously much more popular Britten Albert Herring in the Great Hall of the Concert Complex and for the former we had sold a mere twenty-three seats. However, two of them had gone to a couple called Margie and Eric Krupka, last seen by me on board the Favonia in south-east Alaska.
If I haven’t mentioned them before it’s because I saw very little of them on the cruise. They never went into the bar and they ate all their meals at one of the four tables for two. Still, they were among the passengers in the Zodiac in which I came bac
k from the island. That was the last time I remember seeing them. But here they were, looking just the same, sitting two rows behind me, but to the left-hand side.
Of course it wasn’t a particularly remarkable coincidence. It was hardly a coincidence at all. Sooner or later, all the world and its mistress (as Scott Fitzgerald puts it somewhere) come to Song and Dance at N. I’d seen James Gilman there and I’d seen Martin Zeindler. Probably it will only be a matter of time before I encounter the entire passenger list of the Favonia as well as Penny Marvell, Piers Churchill, Emily, Suzanne, Mansoor and Sharif Qasir.
Ivo I had seen there many times, but that was something else, that was another story. The Krupkas very likely had a visit to N. as part of their package deal, but on the other hand they might have been great church-music enthusiasts. And not much of their personal tastes or expertise emerged when as we met afterwards going down the aisle, they recognized me and spoke.
Sitting there, listening to Pergolesi, I’d wondered how to avoid them and resigned myself to the impossibility of doing so. In that small hall with its single door that was entrance and exit there could be no escape. I’d have to meet them. Pleasantries and reminiscences would be exchanged. I’d thought all that and been irritated at the prospect, bored by it, but I hadn’t felt fear. Now, as Margie Krupka’s eye lighted on me and immediately lit up, I was suddenly enormously afraid.
I was sure, of course, am sure, that there is much to know that has never reached me. When they found his body it must have been in the papers. At least in Alaska, at least on the west coast. Before that there must have been a hue and cry. None of it reached me because I was gone and after that I didn’t want to know. But the whole of the Panhandle area was alerted to it, probably it was the talking point of that summer, the disappearance of, the death of, Dr Ivo Steadman. So, when Margie Krupka called out, ‘Why, if it isn’t Tim!’ I would have liked to turn tail and run. As it was, I felt the blood go out of my face and goose-pimples start.
‘How’ve you been, Tim?’ said Krupka.
It amazed me – Americans always amaze me in this way – that he remembered my Christian name. I knew his but I had the Favonia’s list on the desk beside me when I wrote, I was constantly referring to it. He hadn’t seen me for a year and three-quarters, he’d known me for only seven days and that not well, hardly at all, yet he remembered my name. Could it be because …?
But, no. ‘You keep in touch with that other British guy, the palaeontologist – what was he called? What was the dark guy’s name, Margie?’
‘Dr Steadman,’ I said, and then I said, ‘Ivo,’ finding I could actually speak his name aloud without fainting or bursting into tears or having a stroke. I said it again to make sure. ‘Ivo.’
No comment on the lines of that-was-a-funny-thing-we-heard-happened lines, no exchanged glances, nothing. Politeness had been honoured and they began to talk about themselves, life in the west on campus, where they both taught at a state university, this music-in-Europe trip they were treating themselves to in celebration of a twentieth wedding anniversary, the English weather. If they lived in Arizona, as it seemed they did, news of Ivo’s fate would no more have reached them than it would me. Tomorrow they were off to Seville and Margie Krupka carolled some phrases from Carmen about her friend Lillas Pastia in a rich, tuneful soprano.
‘Say hallo to Dr Steadman when you see him,’ said her husband.
I hadn’t seen Ivo for a long time but it wasn’t a parting shot I much liked going home with. The High Street was crowded, or, rather, there were people round the Methodist Chapel, but the street that runs parallel to it, the alleys, the shore road, all were deserted. It was raining, it had been raining for hours, and the air was not misty but a clear dark blue, the coloured lights making reflections on the wet stones like smears of paint, red, green, orange. The glassy sea looked black, a great spill of ink. I turned sharply as I came into Shore Road, for I could have sworn I heard the slap of a footstep behind me, the sole of a shoe sucked by the wet for an instant before it left the pavement. I turned and there was no one there, but he was back.
Suppose I turn round one day, I thought, and look into his face? Say hallo to Dr Steadman when you see him. Rain fell on my face like the sweet, unpolluted rain of Chechin Island and I wanted to scream out, Save me, help me, don’t leave me to spend tonight alone! I actually stood still in the rain out there, holding my arms wrapped round my body, my shoulders hunched, thinking, I can’t go indoors, I can’t, because if he isn’t behind me he’s in there waiting for me. And then I thought, not for the first time, of going quietly down the beach and walking into the sea, just walking on and on in all my clothes, waterlogged shoes keeping the stones off my tender feet, raincoat and jacket and trousers ballooning with water, and water coming up over my head while I walked in and in, deeper and deeper.
I wonder if he did that or if he tried to swim? The waste of waters, on either side, on every side, stretching for ever, and nothing in sight anywhere to swim to. If he drank salt water like Quirini’s shipmates? Standing out there, looking at the sea, the tide far out, the silvery edge of it licking the sprawl of pebbles, I re-lived what had happened, I thought of what I must write down tonight. It brought me a kind of strength, of resolution, and it gave me the nerve to go into the house.
Liquid sunshine is what they call it in the towns up there, the faintly sunlit, half-mist half-drizzle that’s classified as a fine day. This was the state of things when the Zodiacs pulled away from the ship and headed through a roughening sea for Chechin Island.
Eleven people were in Ivo’s Zodiac and ten in Nathan’s. I wish I could remember exactly who was in each but I can’t and the ship’s passenger list doesn’t help. I do remember that Fergus was in our Zodiac along with Ivo, the Donizettis with Elianne, and the Krupkas, but there must have been two more and I don’t know who. As for Nathan’s, Betsy was with him and the Ruffles, and Connie Dorral may have been, but that’s all I can recall. I do remember Mrs Krupka wearing a black plastic rubbish bag over her clothes and her life-jacket, with a hole cut out for her head. The ship’s shop had weatherproof gear in stock but the Krupkas refused to spend money on that. That was what they said when Fergus commented on her strange garb, and they inquired rhetorically what they were to do with it afterwards. It never rained where they lived and in any case they went everywhere by car.
So I remember them, for that reason. And I remember the little girl Elianne with her sheet of rice paper in a plastic bag, hoping to get as good a rubbing of Dacnospondyl’s footmarks as she had of the petroglyph. Ivo wasn’t steering, Fergus was doing that. Ivo never looked back at the Favonia and he never looked at me, he kept his eyes on Chechin through his binoculars.
It took us about ten minutes to get there, and during those minutes the sunny part of the liquid sunshine receded and the mist seemed to rise a little. The thin curtain lifted and showed us the island clearly. Until then a shawl of white cloud had obscured the top of the pillar of rock but now it unwrapped itself and a jagged pinnacle appeared. The rock now looked a dark blackish-grey but the green lawns had gained colour. They sloped down to a fringe of beach, pale grey, not silvery, scattered with black moss-coated stones. (Fine writing, huh? Martin Zeindler would have made me cut it out. He’d have put his red ballpoint through ‘shawl’ all right.) We came ashore, pulled the Zodiacs up out of the water and stripped off our life-jackets. Everybody, for some reason, climbed the greensward and stood gazing up the length of the rock column.
I stood and gazed with them while Ivo told us why it was the way it was, what geological events had led to this island being here and retaining a single tall chimney, all that now remained of a once sizeable mountain. Elianne asked him if anyone had ever climbed it, but he said not that he knew of, people hardly ever came here. Some of the cruise ships that had Zodiacs like ours put boats ashore, but it was a notorious bad-weather spot, the centre of storms.
Did I take this in at the time? Did it influence me? I think it must
have. I know that while Ivo was talking and the others gazing, I turned round and contemplated the sea from which we had come, grey, undulating, flecked with foam, a huge, wide, empty sea on which the Favonia floating at anchor looked very small. But nothing concrete formed in my mind, it was all dreams then, vague hopes, absurd fantasy ways of escape.
Ivo came down from the green hill where he’d been standing. He smiled at Elianne.
‘We’ll all go and see Dacnospondyl now,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll see where he trod 250 million years ago. Unfortunately, we won’t see him.’
‘Or her,’ said a woman from the other Zodiac. ‘You always say “him”. They’re just as likely to be the female Dacnospondyl’s footmarks.’
‘You’re quite right. I’m sorry. We’ll go and see her footmarks and then you’ll all be free to explore Chechin if you want to. It’s eleven now, so I’ll say we’ll meet here by the Zodiacs at twelve-thirty. That should give you time enough.’
So we set off, a straggling procession. The feminist’s boyfriend asked Ivo if Dacnospondyl laid eggs and this started him on the definitions of a mammal, of a reptile. There were none of those on Chechin, so far as I could see, and no birds but for the eagles, one of which had flown from the top of a spruce to perch on the rock pinnacle. It was very quiet – no, more than that, utterly silent. The only sound was our voices. And when no one spoke, as happened after the little discussion on animal taxonomy – Ivo taught me that word – a deep breathless silence fell.
Everyone had shoes with rubber soles, or rubber boots. Underfoot it was moist, soft, almost virgin soil. No one ever walked here but visitors come to see where a lizard, extinct for an eternity, had once walked. The mist had risen and been absorbed in a gathering of clotted grey. You could taste the pure atmosphere now on your lips, salty, cold, and inhale a heady freshness. The temperature seemed to be falling. It was hard to believe this was midsummer, after midsummer, the year’s warmest time.