by Barbara Vine
17
It was what I’d dreamt of and hadn’t dared believe could happen. I didn’t kneel, I hadn’t quite lost my mind, but I stopped and stood on the corner of an intersection, watching her. She was no more than fifty yards away. If I’d called her name she would easily have heard. Or I could have run down the hill and been with her in a few seconds.
She hadn’t gone into the block. It was taking her a while to get the system to work for her. I could see her repeat the punching-out movements she had already made on the device beside the door. I saw her speak into the grille, and though I couldn’t see the door open I saw her vanish into the aperture that opening door created. She’d been dressed in a white and black shirt, but with blue jeans and her long black hair scooped up into a knot on the back of her head.
I went down there. To the doorway. I read the names under the series of bells and hers wasn’t there, but I’d known it wouldn’t be. This was an office block and the names were of companies and practitioners, a chiropractor, a child psychologist, a dentist, a law firm. She was in there and I’d only to wait long enough and she’d come out again. Eventually she’d come out, even if not till the next day.
But I wasn’t going to wait. In those moments I’d understood it was useless. That was why I hadn’t called out or run down the hillside. It was too late. What I’d done made it impossible and going with Thierry had somehow compounded that, though if this had happened the week before, if I’d seen her like this five days before, it would still have been too late. I’d killed Ivo to be with her and the act, paradoxically, made being with her ever again outside the things I could do and still bear to be alive.
So I turned my back on that apartment block where some friend of hers, or relation or lover, my successor perhaps, worked, and I found a bar and got drunk for the last time. I used up most of the cash I had left on a mix of unfamiliar drinks, no Coors and no champagne. Twelve hours later I was using Ivo’s Visa card to buy myself a ticket home that day. To have stayed there a night longer would have been unendurable.
The first time I saw him was at Heathrow. He was in the baggage-claim hall, waiting for his suitcases to come off the carousel. It was Ivo to the life, his peculiarly graceful stance, standing so straight and yet so relaxed, the angle at which he held his head, the looseness of his limbs, the black hair that slicked over his forehead. I should have been relieved. He was safe, somehow he’d been saved, he was coming home. I wasn’t relieved, I was terrified.
I couldn’t look and I couldn’t stop myself looking. I walked in his direction, looking away. A quick glance showed me he was even wearing that jacket, the one with Isabel’s address in the pocket. I looked away, I looked again and he’d turned someone else’s face to me, a face strangely not unlike Ivo’s in that the eyes were dark, the mouth sensual, the cheeks hollow, yet because of a subtle rearrangement of features, a centimetre more here and a centimetre less there, so entirely different as to make confusion impossible. My mind had made Ivo out of a tall thin man, a bit of denim, a hank of hair.
I saw him a lot more times on the way home to N. He was to manifest himself to me in two versions: as the stranger who looked like him, who belonged to the same physical type, and as the almost unseeable presence, the shade that stands at my shoulder and vanishes when I turn my head, that disappears no matter how fast I turn in my attempts to catch him. I saw him in the tube and in the train, and he was waiting for the bus that goes to N. from Ipswich.
He came into the house with me. On the doorstep I had the superstitious fear that I mustn’t let him in, that once I let him in he would be in for ever. But I felt him slip past me before I could close the door. There was no one else there. My mother wasn’t there. I called out to her in a way I’d never done in my life before, I called for help to my mother the way dying men are said to do, but there was no answer.
She’d had a stroke while I was away and had been taken to hospital. It was all there in a series of letters from Clarissa that lay in a heap on the carpet inside the door. To make assurance doubly sure, she phoned an hour after I got home.
The other letters were just bills. I thought there might have been a letter from Isabel. There wasn’t. But what, after all, would I have done about it if there had been? I’d had her, herself, within my sights, within call, within running distance, and I’d let her go. Would I have answered a letter?
I unpacked. I put everything but my clothes in that room that had been my bedroom: Ivo’s letters, the garnet I’d bought for Isabel, her black and white scarf, the Alaska guidebook, the street plan of Seattle. Of the nearly $700 I’d had, under $20 remained. Ivo’s Visa card I cut in quarters the way I’d seen him destroy an outdated card, but I didn’t throw them away. I think I was afraid to put them out with the rubbish.
My mother would never come home again. When she was able to walk with a walking frame the hospital discharged her and she moved into Sunnylands. Fortunately, my father left enough money to pay the £450 a week it costs to keep her there. Or let me say that he left enough to pay it for three or four years, after which I suppose this house will have to be sold.
Where will I go then? Most people who used to know me would think it odd that I’m living here at all. I always swore I’d never go back to N. after I got my creative-writing M.A. It was to be London for me or Paris or, if I could fix it, New York. I’d always despised those people who had grown up here alongside me and whom I’d still see when I came home during the vacations, girls walking up the High Street with children in push-chairs, men driving to the station car park in Ipswich. That was before I understood that people don’t live where they want to but where they have to, where they can afford to, where there’s a job or a parent to baby-mind or a cheap house. Or where they know people and feel safe, or safer, because things are familiar, where the great threatening world is pushed outside. Living here and thinking, writing, remembering, I’ve learnt and understood a lot that just used to pass me by.
Little people, I once called them. I’m a little person myself now. A recluse, a celibate, an old bachelor inside a young body, a quiet, keeping-himself-to-himself friendless man who sometimes goes into the pub and chats with the locals but mostly stays at home. A man with a poorly paid job that’s walking distance away and a hobby to ensure a cheap and innocent way of passing the evenings. His mother is in a retirement home and he takes care to visit her two or three times a week, and to drop in afterwards on his elderly aunt.
They all notice he has no girlfriends. (Well, he has no friends.) His neighbours, who are old, are rather pleased about this. The more daring among them, male and of military provenance, suggest he might be a ‘poofter’, but since he’s not a ‘practising one’, it doesn’t matter, does it?
I was lucky to get this job, very lucky that ‘Auntie Noreen’ happened to sit next to Sir Brian at a committee meeting and suggest my name when the question of who should be secretary to the Consortium came up. Luck didn’t seem to come into it at the time and nor did permanence. I’d hold it for six months at the most, I thought. But I’m still here and unless I do walk into the sea one day and keep on walking towards Holland till the waters close over me, unless I do that I’ll be here till I retire.
And Ivo with me, I suppose. It’s strange to think that he’ll stay young while I grow old, for that’s what will happen. In dreams, when we encounter people we know, they aren’t as they are now but as they once were. When I dream about my parents, my bent old father is tall and upright and my poor chair-bound mother is dark-haired and vigorous, the once hyperactive woman who boasted that she never sat down. So Ivo will stay young. Once he was seven years older than me but I’ve aged a bit since then. I shall be his age in six years’ time and then I shall pass him, leaving him behind in his eternal youth.
I know that because when I saw him in the auditorium at Rosenkavalier he looked just the same. He was unchanged or, perhaps, he even looked rather younger. Before I wrote about what happened in Seattle I said that he didn’t
follow me home that night, he wasn’t a few steps behind me, he didn’t slip inside when I unlocked the front door. Nor did I see him rising out of the sea. I couldn’t have done, for the sea was invisible, whited-out by a mist that hung from the sky to the shingle bank. But the next morning, the day before yesterday, I saw him. He was walking on the beach, on the hard sand down by the water-line. The tide was as far out as it ever goes and the sea was striped green and grey and bluish-brown. It was no longer misty, and pale yellow cloud streaked the sky.
Am I going to see him in the mornings now? That was what I thought. Isn’t it enough that he stands behind me as I write and follows me back from the pub and stands in the hall in the dark waiting for the lightbulb to fail? Sits in the concert hall at night, his face the only face I see in a sea of faces?
He stood at the water’s edge and looked out to sea. There was a tanker on the horizon, a grey, angular shape of an oblong joined to a trapezium. It looked big enough from a distance but it would be unbelievably vast seen through a telescope. The ghostly Ivo watched it, or watched something, through binoculars. How refined my mind was at turning the screw, how subtle my imagination. It had given him binoculars now. What next, I wondered. A whale to replace the tanker? Bald eagles instead of cormorants?
I watched him and he watched the sea. Had he watched it like that from Chechin, searching the empty sea for a sail, as marooned sailors always do, as the castaways in all those anonymous tales sent to me had done? In a moment he’d turn and come up the beach, climb the shingle bank and come to the sea wall. Only by that time he’d have turned into someone else. To put it more correctly, he’d have shed the aspect of Ivo my imagination had given him and become himself, whoever that might be. Some festival visitor, a guest of the Latchpool or the Dunes.
Sometimes great clouds appear on the horizon, dark masses and snowy peaks, so that if you half-close your eyes you see mountains beyond the sea. A wilderness of waters, grey waves, white-capped, pricked by rain and, bounding it all, the ranges of Alaska. It wasn’t like that yesterday morning. A pale plain sky touched the brownish bluish sea in a blurred line. There could be no fantasies and no illusions – except one, the one that’s always left.
For when the man with the binoculars turned and began to walk up the beach he was still Ivo. My imagination wasn’t quite yet to be conquered by my reason. His eyes were fixed on this house and I moved away from the window, knowing that when I looked again he’d have turned into the music-lover on holiday he’d always been. His wife would have come down the steps to meet him or his dog answered his whistle.
It was time to leave for work. The wind was blowing off the land, due west, so I put on a windcheater for my short walk. This is what old bachelors always do. They take no risks with their health. I came out of the front door and he hadn’t changed into someone else, he had gone. I felt like saying, See you later, except that I don’t make jokes with Ivo, not even grim ones.
That was two days ago. In the evening I went to see my mother, passing the Concert Complex on my way to get the bus. More Strauss, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and they were going in, hundreds of them. It would be another full house. I hadn’t seen Ivo since the morning but there he was, going up the steps.
My mother fell asleep after I’d been there half an hour, so I took Clarissa to a café for a cup of tea. I’m only writing this part because of what she said. She looked at me across the table and said, ‘You’ve changed.’
‘Have I?’ I said, waiting for her to tell me I needed to come out of myself, I ought to be less selfish, I ought to put my mother first and so on.
What she said gave me quite a shock. ‘You’ve turned into a sad man, but you’re a lot more considerate. You’re more caring about people.’
‘I expect that’s because I don’t see very many,’ I said, but I wondered if there’s been some profit in all this guilt and all these recriminations. If it’s true that my character has improved, that I don’t lie so much, and through Sergius I’m a prospective philanthropist, I suppose there must have been profit, there must have been good. Some people would see it as a matter for congratulation that for nearly two years now I’ve been celibate. But that’s fashionable in these days of AIDS.
Something time hasn’t altered is my feeling for Isabel. I shall never see her again, yet I can’t imagine wanting anyone else. She is starting to take Ivo’s place in my dreams and like a good succubus comes into my bed at night and creeps into my arms.
Ivo followed me home from the bus stop. I’m awfully tired of this pursuit, this shadowing. It’s not as if I need to be reminded, it’s not as if I don’t already feel bitter remorse.
I turned round once and shouted, ‘Get away from me, Ivo! Leave me alone!’
An old man putting milk bottles out on his step gave me a long frightened stare. Mad, he was thinking, and perhaps he was right. The opera was over and the Great Hall in darkness. I walked along the seafront with Ivo’s footsteps behind me but disregarding them, knowing there was no one there, and thinking about the castaway letter that had come in the morning.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t open the next one. Of course I did and it was the one I’ve unconsciously been waiting for. If they are all true, and they are, this is the truest, the ultimate. This is what they have been leading up to. This is what underneath I knew all the time must be. This is the threat.
The extract which follows is from the Juneau Onlooker of 30 March 1993.
The body of a man, discovered three days ago by naturalists conducting a survey of the island of Chechin, has been identified as Dr Ivo Frederick Steadman, 31, a British paleontologist.
Dr Steadman had been missing for nearly two years. He was last seen by passengers on the cruise ship Favonia on which he was a lecturer. Dr Steadman, who was unmarried and appears to have had no relatives, was an academic on the faculty of the Institute of Ontogeny in Warwickshire, England.
Although in an advanced state of decomposition, the body revealed at autopsy a head wound and cranial fracture. Juneau Police are treating the circumstances of the death as suspicious.
It shocked me when I first read it. Then I thought, how funny, his second name was Frederick and I never knew. What did they mean, no relatives? He had a sister. And why no mention of the University of P.? But newspapers do make mistakes like that. March 30th was two weeks ago, about the right length of time for the police to run me to earth.
Five minutes after I was inside the house, the doorbell rang. I was in the kitchen, spooning instant coffee into a cup and waiting for the kettle to boil. No one ever comes to the door except meter readers, and they don’t come at eleven at night.
The Monkey’s Paw. Wish for Ivo to be alive, I thought, then wish for it to be him, and on the way to the door use the last wish to wish it isn’t. Don’t answer it at all. It can’t be Ivo because ghosts don’t exist, the supernatural can’t be, only the rational is true, so don’t answer the door. The kettle started whistling. I turned it off. The bell rang again, the kind of ring that goes on and on.
I remembered the footsteps following me. I remembered the Krupkas, met two nights before. Perhaps I’d left something behind on the bus and this was some stranger calling to return it to me. Or Eric and Margie had had second thoughts and, having been to Die Frau ohne Schatten and thence into the pub, decided to call on me. But they’d been going to Spain…Still, why was I shaking, the spoon knocking against the side of the mug when I lifted it up to pour the water in?
No longer frightened of anything? I set the mug down and went to the door. I took a deep breath and flung the door open. It wasn’t the Krupkas or the only other person on the bus when it got to N., and of course it wasn’t Ivo’s ghost. Nor was it the police, come to question me about the discovery on Chechin Island. It was Thierry Massin.
I’d last seen him – I’d only ever seen him – in Seattle. He seemed smaller than I remembered, and slighter. The jacket he was wearing was the denim one with the sheepskin lining I’d bought hi
m on Ivo’s Visa card. It was filthy by now. It looked as if he’d been sleeping in it on a tarred surface. Probably he had.
‘So,’ he said. ‘So, I find you.’
His English hadn’t improved. Nor had his appearance. There had been something sharply attractive about him the summer before last, a Latin darkness, knowing, astute, with a gutter sophistication. Now his face was skeletal and when he smiled, as he now did, a skull’s grin, the gold tooth was obscene.
‘I come in?’
It crossed my mind to say he couldn’t, my mother was living here, but a lot of the point seems to have gone out of lying. I realize what a lot of lies I used to tell and how little they did for me, how small an improvement they ever made. When the police came to ask me about Ivo I wouldn’t lie. That was a decision I came to before I gave Thierry his answer.
‘Sure,’ I said, and, ‘Tell me what you’ve been doing. How’ve you been?’
He didn’t look too pleased when I said there was no drink in the house. He used a French construction to ask for it: ‘Is there to drink?’ and seemed amazed, seemed suspicious, when I said, only Nescafé. In fact, though I made him a cup, he didn’t drink it, but did his French culinary superiority bit. No Frenchman would ever touch that stuff, he’d rather perish of thirst. While he talked he chewed cloves, so that I wondered if privation had forced him to give up his marijuana habit, but after a time a squashed brownish joint and a pin were produced from the sheepskin pocket.
Since Seattle he had been in Canada, in southern Greenland and had worked on a whaling vessel in Icelandic waters. This last one I didn’t believe, but it did remind me of the last castaway letter but one. He gave no details and shifted off the subject with a sidelong smile when I questioned him. In Ireland he’d washed dishes in a hotel in Galway and in England he’d been sleeping on the street.