No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  You did laugh. ‘OK,’ you said. ‘Play it your way, play it by ear. Be someone else, say your name’s Rosa Luxembourg. No, he’ll have heard of her. Say you’re Marie Curie.’

  I said no, it was no use, it was one thing to laugh about it, another thing to do it. And I wasn’t going to do it. You phoned again a week later and you sounded so deeply wretched, you had had such a time with him, he was coming, he was not coming, at last he had agreed to come, that I softened and said I’d do it, I’d do anything. After you’d rung off I stood there and looked up at the ceiling and I just prayed that it would soon be over, that you’d get over him and leave him and be yourself again. But by then I’d committed myself to being Sacher-Masoch by proxy.

  I’ve been playing the CD you sent me of that music. It’s the most romantic music I’ve ever heard. That’s very strange when you consider that the words of the song Ochs sings are a piece of absolute self-deception on the part of an ugly, boring man who is unable to believe himself less than God’s gift to all women. Another self-absorbed egotist. There’s no sincerity in Rosenkavalier, is there? You know that the Marschallin will grow older and older and more desperate to find young lovers until she’s a ridiculous laughing-stock. You know that Octavian and Sophie will be out of love as quickly as they were in it and Sophie will soon be a second Marschallin. But still the music is the most romantic that can be and so much the stuff of ‘our tune’ that honeymoon hotels ought to play the Great Waltz every night in their cocktail lounges.

  It was your tune, wasn’t it, yours and Tim’s? I guessed when he and I were together in Juneau. And now comes the hardest part as I try to explain to you why I became his lover and he became mine.

  But we’ll go back a little once again, if you’ll let me.

  Two weeks before I was due to fly to Alaska Lynette became terribly ill. She could scarcely move, you know, she was scared to move because her bones had become so brittle. One day she had reached out rather quickly to pick up the phone and snapped her collar bone. She was worse than very old women get when they have osteoporosis, and she was only thirty-two. They flew her up to hospital in Anchorage and gave her treatment that was intended to make her ‘more comfortable’. Another shot of poisons, I suppose. Everyone knew there was nothing to be done, that it was only a matter of waiting for the end. The great thing was to get her to the end with as little pain as possible.

  In other years I’d stayed with her and Rob. Rob pressed me to stay this time but somehow I could tell he’d find it easier with no one else in the house. Lynette had written that she wanted to die at home and Rob was going to do his best to see it happened that way. I’ve never had a chance to tell you this and now I never shall, but as it turned out she died in Anchorage, in hospital, though he was with her to the end and at the end. Anyway, I was very firm with Rob about not staying with them and, as you know, I made a reservation for two weeks at the Goncharof.

  As soon as I got there I called Rob and asked him when I could see Lynette. He said she was asleep, she’d been asleep all afternoon, and this was a piece of luck because it meant that she’d be fresher and would want to stay awake in the evening, perhaps even until a normal bedtime. He’d call me back in a couple of hours and then drive down to the hotel and pick me up. I said not to bother, I could walk, it wasn’t far, but Americans don’t like you doing that, not even in a safe sort of city like Juneau, so I thanked him and said all right and I’d await his call.

  The next bit sounds as if I did it on purpose. It sounds part of a deep-laid plot. But in fact I’d forgotten, for the moment, all about keeping an eye on Tim Cornish, I’d forgotten his existence. My thoughts were full of Lynette. I began waiting for Rob’s call in my room but the people next door had their television on very loud and it was starting to irritate me. So I took this Russian novel I’d picked up in a secondhand bookstore and went downstairs. You can’t really call it a lounge, the area that goes by that name at the Goncharof, can you? It’s more like the waiting room in one of those vast American railroad stations, huge, high-ceilinged and with doors swinging open to blow in draughts. And not at all private. So I did something very unlike me. I told the reception clerk where I’d be and then I went into the bar and sat up at the counter with my book and a big glass of orange juice I got the barman to bring me.

  I meant to read The Golovlyov Family but it was impossible. I’d suddenly realized I was afraid to see Lynette, not so much because I couldn’t bear it myself, of course I could, but because of what my face and my eyes might show her of my feelings. She would be terribly changed. Rob had warned me of that. Was I going to be able to behave naturally when I walked into that room where she was? And by ‘naturally’ did I mean the way I’d behaved last time we met when she was still fighting the cancer and with a fair hope of success, running up to put my arms round her and kiss her? Or would it be better, would that be more natural, to be honest and direct and to say as well as show how affected I was by what I saw?

  I’d got to the point of regretting I’d come. Did they really want me there, either of them? Perhaps coming was just self-indulgence on my part, a selfish wish to see Lynette once more before she died. I felt very torn and indecisive and also, briefly, almost totally unaware of my surroundings. I’d gone into my own interior. But there was stress too and because of this I did something I hardly ever do these days, I lit a cigarette. Maybe, if I’d really stopped smoking for good, I wouldn’t carry a pack with me and a book of matches.

  Tim may have been in the bar a long time before I was aware of him. As I’ve said, I was aware of no one and nothing. My paperback was open in front of me but I’d scarcely read a line of it. When the reception clerk whispered very close to my ear I actually jumped. I had to ask him to repeat what he had said, guilt made me think he was asking me to put my cigarette out, but it was Rob’s call he had come to tell me about. I got down off my stool and followed him to the phone and it was then, as I was leaving that strange dark bar with the yellow marble pillars, that I first set eyes on Tim.

  I recognized him at once. Even so, his looks staggered me. The camera may not lie but it sometimes underestimates. It was only for a second that I glanced at him but still I took in quite a lot, his roving eye, his ready-for-anything expression, and for an instant I forgot Lynette and thought, oh, my poor brother. Yes, I did, darling, and that may be the height of short-sighted folly but I swear it’s not hypocrisy.

  There was no plotting or planning about it and my leaving The Golovlyov Family in the bar wasn’t intentional. I was preoccupied and I simply forgot it. It was a wonder I remembered my purse.

  When he gave the book back to me in the morning I was in a dilemma. I’ve sometimes wondered since what he thought of me in those moments, my utter silence, the way I stared at him like a madwoman. He just stood there, holding out the book to me and smiling, looking like a film star or an angel. And I was in a turmoil. Should I declare myself, say who I was, say I was your sister? How angry with you he’d be! I wanted not to have to think of this, be bothered with this, I was still hopelessly, bitterly, distressed over Lynette, more than anything by the sight of these two people who loved each other knowing death would soon part them. I’d hardly slept. And now here was this Tim Cornish, this gloriously handsome vision, confronting me, forcing me to decide, to act.

  For a ridiculously long while I said absolutely nothing. When I did speak I knew I’d lost my chance of telling him you were my brother. If I was going to tell him it would have had to be at once, the very first thing. I took the book from him. It was in a curious state, mangled and dog-eared, the cover bent in half. Secondhand it might have been, but it had never looked like this.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, and, ‘I thought I’d left it in the place where I had dinner.’

  The waitress brought his breakfast to my table. I asked him if he was alone. It sounds like a come-on but that wasn’t the way I intended it. He still hadn’t told me his name and a hope sprang up inside me that I was wrong, that in
spite of the photograph this wasn’t your man but another, even more beautiful, that coincidence had brought to this far corner of the earth. But he was alone, he was Tim Cornish. We started talking about Primo Levi, God knows why, I don’t remember why.

  I told him my name and as I did so I thought, now he’ll know, now the bewilderment starts, then the questioning, then the rage. But you’d been right. He didn’t know me because he had never listened or asked. He heard me say Isabel Winwood as innocently as if I had said Mary Smith.

  And now the time has come for the real explanation to be given, the real excuses, for it’s one thing to share a table for breakfast with a man, another to spend the morning sightseeing with him, to lunch with him and dine. When he asked me I could simply have said no. And now I honestly don’t know why I didn’t.

  Except that I was lonely and unhappy and this was the only vacation I was going to have. And he was so extraordinarily good to look at and so charming and so easy to talk to. I don’t know why I said that about him starting every sentence with ‘I’. He may have done once but he didn’t after the first few minutes. He was so nice. You’d said he would be. And I’d nothing else to do. Lynette stayed in bed till nearly lunchtime and I wasn’t to go to her until the afternoon. For some reason, when I’d planned the trip I’d thought I’d be spending all day from morning till night with Lynette, but that was because I hadn’t understood. I’d thought I wouldn’t have time to do your surveillance. Now I’d seen her and talked to Rob I realized three hours would be the maximum stretch I could possibly spend with her at a time. For the rest I’d be quite alone – unless I was with Tim.

  So I didn’t say no to him. It was a glorious day, as hot as California. I showed him the sights, we lunched together and I went off to see Lynette. But I’d over-estimated when I thought three hours. Perhaps the long evening spent with a friend from the past had stimulated her, perhaps life itself was simply becoming too much, whatever it was she was exhausted and fell asleep while we talked. I crept away, went up to my room and wrote you a letter. It was the first one I wrote, the one that was waiting for you poste restante at Sitka, where you’d much rather have found a letter from Tim.

  That was the letter in which I told you I’d met him, I’d taken him on a sightseeing tour and to the cemetery, I’d had lunch with him, and I’d managed all that without revealing my relationship to you. But when I’d finished the letter I began to think very seriously about the consequences of this deception. If you and he were going to stay together, and it looked as if you were, no matter what pain it caused you, one day he was going to meet me and everything would come out. Any anger he might feel for you now would be nothing to the bitterness and resentment he’d feel if he discovered we’d banded together to deceive him in this way. I began thinking that the whole thing was a mess and I should never have agreed to this surveillance game in the first place. I wondered why I had. But I had, and now all I could do was somehow or other clear things up before I got further embroiled.

  I decided to ask him out to dinner and over dinner to tell him who I was. It would be awkward but the awkwardness not insurmountable. I might even put it to him that I’d said nothing earlier because I realized how it would look: that I was spying on him for your sake. Nothing, I’d say, could be further from the truth. I was here to visit my friend who was ill and our presence at the same hotel the merest coincidence. I even toyed with the idea of an outright lie, of telling him you thought I was staying in the Case home.

  The truth was that I wasn’t at all clear what I would say to him. I’d trust to the inspiration of the moment, to the effect of being relaxed and drinking a glass or two of wine. The main thing, I thought, was to make him understand that you knew nothing of it, that you’d be as surprised as he to know I was also at the Goncharof.

  None of this sounds much like me, does it? This isn’t the sister you knew. Nevertheless, it is. He’d begun to have his effect on me. I wrote him a note and had the bellboy take it to him. I suppose I just didn’t want to speak to him on the phone. It had to be a direct confrontation or nothing.

  We met in the bar and went out to a restaurant. I had that glass of wine, psyching myself up to the approach to telling him, and I began by asking him if he was going on the cruise alone. Oh, darling, he has such a way of looking at you that is all transparency, all limpid honesty, those true blue eyes, that steady earnestness of expression. He looked me right in the eye and told his lie.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Do you think I’m crazy?’

  I know what I should have said. I should have said, I don’t think you’re crazy, I think you’re a liar. You’re going with my twin brother who loves you to distraction, who has in all likelihood paid your hotel bill, bought you the very clothes on your back and financed you to entertain women like me behind his back. But I didn’t say that. I was deflected from my purpose. Coward-like, I talked about Alaskan cruises and about anthropology.

  The point is that I didn’t tell him, not that evening or ever, and the reason was that sitting opposite him like that, and, later, walking down to the waterfront in the dusk, I found myself so violently attracted that it was faintness and pain at the same time. It made me breathless, I almost gasped. In that marvellous air, the freshest there is anywhere, I felt deprived of oxygen, asthmatic, hyperventilating for him.

  It was a hunger that took away my appetite for food and a thirst that made me afraid to drink any more. It was a need to touch that froze me into remoteness and a desire to kiss that made my mouth ache, but it wasn’t love. I don’t want there to be any confusion about that. I’m sure it wasn’t love.

  19

  Pathetic though it sounds, I don’t want you to think I gave in to it. Not then. I did fight against it. I really struggled. I nearly won.

  Darling, you were an understanding man. Paradoxically, you, who didn’t need to, really understood women. But still I believe you were a little bit like the man a friend of mine, a very old woman, told me about. They were very young at the time, engaged to each other, though they never married. He said to her, ‘I can feel like that, but oh, my sweetheart, you mustn’t. Or if you feel it you must never never let on, you must never show it.’ A sexual revolution has happened since then and feminism has happened but men still doubt that women can ‘feel like that’ to the extent they themselves do. They hang on to the belief that we have to have ‘love’ as well.

  I didn’t love Tim. I wanted him the way you wouldn’t have found it at all degrading to confess you wanted someone. It had been two whole years for me, darling. Kit hadn’t touched me for months before he left. The one or two times he wanted to I wouldn’t let him, not after those women who came to his office after five-thirty, a troop of them, a succession, like call-girls. And I’m not, you’d say and so would I, the sort of woman who has casual affairs. I’ve never, for instance, had a one-night stand. That won’t cause surprise. What did surprise you – no, not that lukewarm word, but shock and horrify you – was that I went to bed with Tim at all.

  I held out for a week and in that week I spent hours of every day with him. I spent most of the time I wasn’t with Lynette with him. Just to make matters worse, I suppose, for it was a sort of torture, a torment mixed up with exquisite pleasure. At first I told myself nothing would ever come of it. You see, in spite of all the evidence, I couldn’t believe he was really attracted to me. He was gay. If I say gay men can be very flirtatious with women, does that sound impossibly shallow? Perhaps it would be better to say gay men are often very easy with women, and very intimate, because they know it can lead to nothing, it’s absolutely safe. I thought his attentiveness was due to that. I even thought, he loves Ivo, and I look like Ivo, I talk like Ivo, we have the same gestures, the same facial expressions. It’s Ivo he sees in me and Ivo that attracts him.

  I’ve been very stupid and very blind, to my own feelings and to yours and his.

  The letters he received all came from you. He opened none of them in my presence and I thought the
y were too precious to him for that, too private and perhaps too sacred, to be read anywhere but in the seclusion of his own room. That their arrival obviously embarrassed him I attributed to the diffidence of the lover. We’re ashamed of the weakness of love, of our vulnerability.

  I spent all day Sunday with Lynette, watching what I guessed would be her final decline. There’s nothing more killing to sexual desire than the prospect of death. While I was with her I forgot Tim and the state of excitement I was in all the time I was with him, that sensation of being suspended from a high wire. I sat with Lynette, subdued by that special gravity that belongs in the neighbourhood of those who die young.

  She said to me, ‘I’ll never see you again after this week. That’s why I have to be especially nice to you.’

  I said didn’t she mean I had to be especially nice to her, but she only gave her thin, wide smile. There was no pretence between us by that time that she was going to live. We talked about death that day and about reflecting on the things in our past life we felt we’d done wrong. Lynette was Rob’s second wife. His first was not her friend but only someone she knew slightly, yet she felt she’d behaved badly to her and stolen her husband, even though the first wife and Rob hadn’t been getting on for years and were on the point of parting. Knowing she was about to die, and having no religious faith, she’d given a lot of thought to these events and sorted out in her mind exactly how wrong she’d been and how much her behaviour had been justified. I was taken aback by her courage and greatly admiring of the way she felt it necessary to come to terms with what she called her ‘serious misdemeanour’, how much of her conduct she could justify and how much simply admit had been wrong.

  Lynette was very weak, and her voice had grown low and rather harsh. But the cancer never touched her brain. Her mind was clear and she was always lucid. Out of simple curiosity, she still had that, she asked me if there was any really bad thing I felt I’d ever done.