by Barbara Vine
‘Everyone does,’ he said. ‘Is very chic, no?’
I said I hadn’t seen it quite like that and then I thought I sounded like my own father, or Clarissa. Thierry made me feel middle-aged. As my parents might have, I began to wonder what I was going to do with this unwanted guest. He said he was hungry so I took him into the kitchen, sliced up some sausage I had, cut a hunk of cheese and made him a sandwich. He smoked another joint while he ate it. The house, its size, its position, he admired extravagantly. After he’d eaten he wandered about, praising my parents’ shabby old furniture, eyeing the framed reproductions and the junk-shop oils as if they were the Armand Hammer collection.
It was then that it struck me why he’d come. In Seattle I’d told him everything. I’d told him what I’d done to Ivo. No doubt it was stupid but I had to tell someone, I was desperate and afraid and lonely and I had to talk about it. To a stranger, of course, which is what Thierry practically was. Someone I’d never see again. He hadn’t been sending me those letters, that wasn’t his way and his English wasn’t good enough. He had some quite other intent.
I’ve never actually known anyone who’s been blackmailed, I don’t think I’ve even read about blackmail in a newspaper, but I have in books. I’ve seen a lot of police serials on television with blackmail in them. Thierry, I thought, had come to blackmail me. This was how it always started (in books, on television), with the blackmailer strolling about, praising his victim’s possessions, then saying how rich he must be, surely he could spare some of it without even noticing – and so on.
What I’d do when he asked for money I didn’t know. Perhaps he’d ask to live here, be looked after, I couldn’t tell. He was too late anyway. The facts were known, they were in the paper. But I waited in suspense while he said a certain late Victorian chair with a rickety seat was Louis Quinze and the Turkey carpet Aubusson.
I waited and nothing happened. It was as if he’d forgotten all about the confidences I’d made him in that room of his. Or he’d never taken them in, he didn’t care. What was all that to him, murder, passion for a woman, some island at the end of the world? He was here for no more sinister reason than that he knew I had a roof over my head. And when it got to half-past midnight I said he could stay if he wanted. What else could I do? I couldn’t turn him out to sleep on the beach or find his way back to his Ipswich shop doorway. But I made it plain he wasn’t sleeping with me, even if he first had the bath he was threatening to take.
There are more than enough bedrooms in this house. I went from one to another while he was in the bath, locking doors where I didn’t want him to go. In the end I showed him to the only other room apart from mine where there were sheets on the bed. It was gloomy and cold and the mattress was very likely damp, but he seemed happy with it. I left him examining an ugly old art nouveau lamp with two bulbs in glass lily shades that had never actually been made to light up in my lifetime.
I didn’t sleep well. My door was locked. There was nothing in the place worth stealing except maybe my old violin and, of course, Sergius. There was £600 in Sergius’ belly and the ‘safe’ was there for the taking between Resurrection and, yes, The Golovlyov Family. But Thierry was the last person capable of finding it. In Seattle he’d boasted to me he hadn’t looked inside a book since he’d left school in Toulouse five years before.
During the night, or during the small hours, I heard him moving about. I heard him on the stairs. He padded past my room and the sweetish smell of marijuana drifted under the door. He was looking for something, but so long as it wasn’t me I wasn’t much concerned. Eventually I went to sleep, waking again at about seven-thirty. All was silent but for the inevitable whisper of the sea, calm and glassy this morning, and the eternal crying of gulls.
Thierry had gone. I went up to his room to check. The smell was very powerful but he’d gone. He’d come for a chat, a bed for the night, a meal and a bath, and now he was gone once more on his way. He’d only come to see his friend. I’d already misjudged him once, as I’d found when I had that test and came out of it HIV Negative. I told myself I must be less suspicious, I must stop imputing awful motives to people without any reason but that they do drugs (Thierry’s expression) and dress like the latest thing in grunge. I mustn’t grow up too much.
One more thing is worth setting down. I went into the room where all the Alaska memorabilia is and found those four pieces I’d cut Ivo’s credit card into. His name, printed on it in relief, was still quite legible, and the middle initial wasn’t F for Frederick but C for something else. So I went back to the library and asked the librarian if she’d check up on something for me: was there a newspaper called the Juneau Onlooker?
It didn’t take her long. There wasn’t. There isn’t and apparently never has been. I ought to have felt relief that my correspondent had made this last story up but I didn’t. I felt nothing but wonder that anyone could be so devious and so relentless. For what?
Today is Sunday and I’d meant to write all day, to finish this memoir. But I’ve already finished really and there isn’t much more to write. Have I achieved my aim? I’ll have to look back because I’ve forgotten what it was, something about stopping the dreams and laying his ghost, I think. It’s true that I don’t dream of him so much, I dream of Isabel instead, but that makes the times I do all the sharper, all the more piercing, and, as for his ghost, I see it just as often and I’m just as convinced and just as sceptical.
I don’t like these broad-daylight sightings. One of them occurred when I’d checked on Thierry’s room and first walked in here an hour ago. I went to the window to look at the sea. It was flat and still, the brownish-blue of a bird’s wing. The wind had dropped and a boat with white sails was becalmed about half a mile out. Fishermen were coming in with the morning’s catch.
Ivo was leaning against the sea wall, looking up at this house.
I closed my eyes and counted to twenty. Then I counted another fifty to make sure. When I opened my eyes he – it – was gone. So I sat down at the typewriter and wrote some of this, these last lines, getting up once to take another look, knowing he’d have returned, so certain that I’d have been surprised if he wasn’t there.
He was back where he’d been that first time. I felt like opening the window and shouting at him to go away, to leave me alone, to have pity on me. Wasn’t I giving up my whole life to being better? Hadn’t I suffered my share of remorse? Wasn’t it all changing me in the way I ought to change? How long did he mean to persecute me? I didn’t shout out because I knew how that would look, not just to the neighbours but to me, myself. It would look like madness. It would be madness.
But I think I may be mad. It was with fascination, it was almost with pleasure, that I watched him persevere. He saw me. He raised one hand in a kind of salute and then he began to cross the road towards this house.
I sat down again. That was thirty seconds ago. The doorbell is ringing. I shall go down and answer the door, but I shall make no more wishes. I used up all my wishes last night.
ISABEL
18
Writing to a dead man is a pointless exercise. But we were always great letter writers, you and I, we communicated more by letter than we ever did by phone, and when we had great things to tell each other we wrote them down and sent them by post. So this is my last letter to you, my memorial to you and my asking for forgiveness.
People often do write letters they don’t intend to post and that they know will never be read by any eyes but their own. Anyway, Tim may read this. If he is allowed to. If they let him read this sort of thing where he is. Perhaps I mean where he ought to be, for I wonder if even now he knows what he did, what he set in train rather, when he abandoned you on Chechin Island.
My dear, my darling. We were so close, though separated by mountains and seas. We had never quarrelled, even as children. We loved each other. Until I spoilt it all.
If I’d been in your shoes, I’d have treated my sister just as you treated me, I’d have been as angr
y and as hurt. The truth is I can hardly imagine the magnitude of your hurt. Of course I believed he wouldn’t tell you, and then one day, when you and he had broken up, as I could see you must do, I’d tell you myself. I’d tell you gently and cautiously, so as to hurt you as little as I could.
Let’s go back a bit.
You were so much in love and you thought it was for ever. I’m not going to reproach you for that, I’m not going to ask you how you could worship someone like Tim. After all, I once felt much the same about Kit and had the same kind of illusions. Almost every sentence Tim utters begins with ‘I’. Kit is cruel and deceitful but not as selfish as that. I suppose the point with Tim, the point of Tim, is his looks, he is so extraordinarily beautiful. One good thing is that he seems not to know it.
You sent me a photograph of him. Do you remember that? In this country there’s a tendency to compare good-looking people to movie stars and he looked like the young Robert Redford. For a while I thought you were having me on and the picture was of Redford, taken when Butch Cassidy was made. That was why I did what I did, because of the way Tim looks. I think so, anyway.
Yet I’d so much wanted the course of true love to run smooth for you. In those early days. I was having a bad time, I was always jealous, always suffering the pain of rejection, but it would have comforted me to know that you were happy in that part of life where I was made most unhappy. That one of us was all right would have supported me. It was only a week after Kit went off with that woman that your letter came in which you told me Tim had been unfaithful to you. It broke me up. I cried for hours. Then in the morning, when it was your evening in England, we talked on the phone and you said you were making a new start, the two of you, that things were fine, that the poor fool (my words, not yours) had thought you would hardly mind and that infidelity was all right for gay people.
The big shock was when you wrote to me that you were having him watched. It was so unlike you. It would be so unlike me. Or so I thought at first. Then I remembered that though I’d never employed a private detective, I was in no position to afford a private detective, I’d watched Kit myself, I’d set traps to catch him, I’d even asked my friends to tell me when they saw him somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be or with someone he wasn’t supposed to know. While Lynette was living here I asked her. At the time she had an apartment opposite the newspaper and she could see him come and go. I hated doing it and I hated myself for doing it but I asked her.
It did me no good. It would have been better for me not to know about the girl who was admitted to the building ten minutes after the last employee had left for home, much better not to hear about her and Kit leaving together two hours later when he’d told me he was having dinner with a contact. But you know all this. It’s because you know it that you felt able to tell me about your private detective and also to ask me to do what later on you did ask me.
I could only tell you that it would do you no good either. You went ahead with it. Of course you did. You never told me if Tim was guilty of any further unfaithfulness. I suppose you felt that in spite of having done a similar thing myself, I disapproved. Or perhaps there was nothing to tell. He was innocent or just never caught out.
In a way, if he’d shown an interest in anyone except himself, none of this could have happened and you’d be still alive. I wonder sometimes if you ever told him, if you ever said to him, look, you’re young enough to take yourself in hand, take a look at yourself and see how utterly self-absorbed you are. Perhaps you did and perhaps he gave the classic answer, that selfish people project and are always the ones to ascribe selfishness to others. But you weren’t selfish, though I expect he failed to notice.
The funny thing was that once we’d met, he and I, when we were together, he wasn’t selfish then, he started putting me first. But a year before, if he’d been the least bit interested in me as your sister, things would have been quite different. I remember how chastened I was when you told me on the phone that he’d never asked anything about me. He’d never even asked my name.
‘How do you refer to me, then?’ I said.
‘As “my sister”. When I thought of suggesting he stay with you, I may have said that my sister lived on the West Coast, I may have said Seattle. He’d probably have preferred me to put him up in some flash hotel.’
‘And he’s never asked my name, or how old I am, or what I do?’
‘Darling,’ you said, ‘he’s barely asked me those things about myself. He doesn’t know to this day what part of the country I come from, he doesn’t know where I took my first degree, he doesn’t know I’m a twin. I might be married and have half a dozen children for all he knows or cares.’
‘Yet you love him?’ I said.
‘Oh, yes, I love him. I often wish I didn’t.’
So, as far as he was concerned, I was just your sister, nameless, jobless, married or single, it hardly mattered – no, less than that, it had never been thought about. I was nothing. All that I was good for was in that I might have a bedroom for the young travelling man to stay in and pay no rent. A whole apartment perhaps if I was going to be in Alaska while he was in Seattle. And maybe I would have been, only you begged me to go to Juneau two weeks earlier than I meant to so that I could be in Seattle while Tim was there. To look after him, to keep an eye on him, to see he kept out of mischief.
The way you felt about him must have addled your brains. You never made mistakes like that, my dear, mixing up dates and making the wrong arrangements. You can say it’s because for the first time you went on a six-day cruise, but I believe you were driven distracted by him. I can just about imagine how you would have felt when you understood what you’d done and that he was going to be left alone in that hotel in Juneau for a whole fortnight. But I know none of that is true. It wasn’t like that at all. You didn’t make a mistake.
You were testing him. You were putting temptation in his way to see how much resistance he had. And there was more to it even than that. You wanted to know the worst about him. To be cured of him? Or to know if the kind of love you had would withstand any infidelity, any cruelty? It’s all part of the way it suits you to be in love with someone unworthy of your love, a talent you have for unhappiness. But it was sick too, you know, it was masochism. It wasn’t far from old Sacher-Masoch himself, going off with his wife and her lover on holiday as their servant. Only in your case it wasn’t you who were going to be there watching, but me, your sister, your twin, the other half of you.
A whole fortnight you sentenced him to in a strange place where he knew no one and no one knew him. Except me. Americans never say ‘fortnight’. Have you noticed? To them it’s a quaint old-fashioned British expression. I say ‘fortnight’ for ‘two weeks’ and ‘eighteen months’ for ‘a year and a half’ and ‘eight stone’ for ‘120 pounds’, ‘lift’ for ‘elevator’, ‘haven’t got’ for ‘don’t have’ and ‘bill’ for ‘check’, but he still took me for an American. He simply failed to think about it, I suppose, because I was myself and not him, I was someone else and whatever he may have said about loving me, I was still another person, somewhere out there.
You asked me to be your private detective. And quite half my motive in coming to Alaska at that time had been to see you. England was impossible for me that year and besides, Lynette was dying. Even she knew she was. She used to write to me about things that were going to happen after she was gone, about things going on the same but without her there to see them. She was brave. She’d been a good friend to me, the first friend I made when I came to the States ten years ago, and the only one that lasted to the end. The only one too, I sometimes think, that Kit failed to get to go to bed with him.
But half my reason for arranging to be in Juneau at that particular time, in June, a week after school stopped for the summer, was to have a few days with you. And then you phoned to say you’d be starting on the Favonia the day before I got there. You had made a balls-up, your word. But Tim would be staying at the Goncharof and if I was there too �
��
‘You’re kidding,’ I said like an American, and then like an English person, ‘You must be joking.’
You said, ‘Darling, you’re going to be there. What are you going to do in the evenings, anyway? You can’t be with Lynette all day and half the night. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a charming, good-looking young chap to go about with? He’s very well-educated, you know. He can talk the hind leg off a donkey. Music, painting, books, all the things you like, he knows it all. When it comes to biology he’s as ignorant as the babe unborn, but never mind that. And he likes women.’
‘What does that mean?’
You said your favourite thing then. ‘Oh, please.’ I miss that. I weep when I tell myself I shall never hear you say that again. If someone else were to say it it would make me love him. ‘Oh, please,’ you said, and, ‘He doesn’t like them in that way. He’s as queer as Dick’s hatband, whatever that means. I suppose the hatband was twisted.’
‘Am I to keep my identity a secret?’ I said.
‘Please,’ you said and you meant you wanted no deceit and no subterfuge.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘you never know with you, you’ve got so devious. You might want me to use a false name and wear a wig.’ It must have been then that you told me how uninterested in me he was, how I needed no alias when he’d never asked to know my name. ‘If he’s really so indifferent, what makes you think he’ll want to know me?’
‘He’ll be lonely. He’ll be glad of company. If he doesn’t get it he’ll go looking for the other kind to pick up in bars. You just have to be nice to him. Say who you are and why you’re there, show him the sights, take him out to dinner.’
‘If I’m going to do it,’ I said, ‘I’ll play it my own way, thank you very much.’ I became sarcastic, the way you do, but you always laughed at my sarcasm. ‘Of course he’s not going to suspect anything when your sister turns up by the merest chance for the identical fortnight he’s there.’