by Barbara Vine
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ she said. ‘You can just say you’d rather not say.’
But I couldn’t think of anything. Of course there were plenty of small things, sins of omission, like not going to see Mother and Daddy as much as I should have after I left home, and forgetting to write to people and not remembering anniversaries and birthdays. There was plenty of that. And things which older people, our parents certainly, found morally wrong, like living for a while with Kit before we were married, and, before him, living with Michael. And unkind thoughts and social lies and once, years ago, riding the train from San Francisco to Los Angeles without a ticket. That was worth mentioning because it made Lynette laugh.
It was strange though, wasn’t it, that I who was about to commit a real crime, could think of nothing I’d done seriously wrong in all my thirty years? I was on the brink of committing a grave offence against the person who was the dearest in the world to me. Still, when I told Lynette, and meant it, that apart from all the petty things I’d never done anything I could assess as truly wrong, I believed most sincerely that I’d never make love with Tim, for, whatever I might feel or yearn for, he’d never want me.
Full of thoughts of Lynette and death and the parting of friends, I met Tim in the morning and we went together to Tracy Arm. Did I tell I’d already kissed him? On the Saturday night when we parted outside the door of my room, I had such an irrepressible longing for the touch of his skin, just to feel it against my lips, that I kissed his cheek. He drew back as if my mouth stung him.
‘Good-night,’ he said, the coldest I ever heard him.
I hadn’t seen him since but I knew better than to repeat that kiss in the Goncharof foyer as we prepared to leave on our six-hour cruise. I thought I knew when my touch was unwelcome. I even thought how pleased you’d be with me for extending my friendship to him and at the same time keeping him under this strict surveillance.
It was raining, of course. It was pouring with rain and the sheets of rain and those huge clouds like icebergs in the sky hid everything. I understood that my arm was no longer to be tucked into his. Touching was at an end. I had ended it with my seemingly innocent but in fact calculating kiss. As the little ship went in among the ice-floes I talked to him, as you might have done, of glaciers and how they formed, recalling everything that you had told me but not, I fear, making as good a job of it as you would have done.
When we got off the ship in the dock at Juneau he wanted to come straight to Lynette’s with me but I stopped him. I couldn’t have taken a stranger with me there, though when I uttered the word I could see I’d hurt him. Four letters from you were waiting for him at the Goncharof. He saw me looking at the handwriting on the envelopes. I was thinking, I must tell him, I shall tell him tonight, I shall tell him I’m your sister, and when he asked me to come into the bar and have a drink I said yes because I thought that that would be the time, then I could do it.
I had to have a cigarette. He took the book of matches from me and lit it for me.
‘You must have wondered why I’m getting all these letters,’ he said.
I said it was no business of mine. It was my opportunity, wasn’t it, to say, no, I haven’t actually wondered, I’ve known why, they’re from my brother. But I didn’t. I said it was no business of mine and just stared at him. I waited. My hand that held the cigarette was shaking, though, and he looked at it, he could see. He was drinking brandy.
Then he said something that gave me an awful shock. It was a bomb he dropped. (Why do people say a bombshell? They never do in any other context.) If you were alive, darling, I’d never tell you this. It’s only because you’re dead and can’t read it that I’m writing it to you. Whatever he did to you afterwards and however you may have come to feel about him, I still would never have told you this to your face or for you to read.
He was awkward about it. He stumbled over some of the words and very nearly stammered. For such a frequent liar, he isn’t a good one. Or not when the lie is very important to him. The letters, he said, were from a woman, a lecturer on a cruise ship.
‘She’s on her way back,’ he said. ‘She’s a lecturer, she a lectures to the passengers. She’s a botanist. We were lovers but that’s over now.’
For a moment I found it hard to speak. Then I managed ask him why ‘she’ kept on writing, if their affair was at an end.
‘I wish I could make her understand that our relationship is over.’
I said she must be very much in love with him, but as I said the word it sounded to me as if I was talking that awful language you used to call queers’ cant in which men refer to each other as ‘she’ and give each other feminine identities. I suppose I couldn’t immediately grasp what he was really saying and why he was saying it. All I was sure of in those moments was how dreadfully this lying confession, these revelations, had turned me off him. I felt utterly repelled and much of it came from disillusionment.
Even when he said that he’d stayed because I came, he hadn’t left and gone home, even when he said that, it hardly affected me. I was frozen into silence by the enormity of it, by his denial of you.
After a little while I got up and said I’d be having dinner at Lynette’s that evening. I would have done anyway, for I knew it might be the last time. She was going back into the Anchorage hospital on the next day or the day following that. He pulled a letter out of his pocket. At first I thought it was one of yours and I had a premonition he was going to show it to me and pretend that this fictitious woman had written it, that Ivo was a woman’s name. But the envelope, though crumpled up and a bit damp, was blank.
‘Read it,’ he said in a strange, breathless voice. ‘Please don’t throw it away. I insist that you read it.’
What did I think would be in it? Further confessions about his love affair, I suppose. I thought I should read an account of your relationship over the couple of years you’d been together, but with the locations changed and some of the circumstances and, of course, your sex. I even wondered what name he’d give you. But, can you believe it, I didn’t wonder then what his motive might be in transposing his affair into heterosexual terms, or if I did I thought it must be because he was still inside the closet and wanted to keep his sexual orientation a secret from me. And I wasn’t sufficiently curious to open it before I left for Lynette’s. The envelope looked as if he’d been carrying it about with him for days.
The two or three hours I spent with Lynette that evening were very painful. They were taking her back to Anchorage on Wednesday and by this time I think she hardly believed she’d be granted her wish to die at home. We were to meet again next day but she was having so much morphine that she could never be sure when she’d be conscious and when in a deep, drug-induced sleep, so she gave me what she wanted to give me that night. It was a ring I had always admired, a ruby set in small diamonds, that had been her mother’s.
Tim’s letter was there waiting for me when I got back. I didn’t open it then, I went to bed, but I dreamt of the letter, in a curious dream in which I was reading it in a hotel room I was mysteriously sharing with you and Kit. You were both there, watching me, while I read it. Tim had become an oncologist in the dream, Lynette was his patient and he was writing to me that it had all been a matter of mis-diagnosis. Lynette didn’t have cancer, it was the drugs she had been given which were poisoning her. I believed the dream, I really thought it was true, and I was trying to reach Calhoun Avenue to tell her but, as is the way in these dreams, I couldn’t find my way, I kept coming back to the sea, and so I woke up, battling against a wind off the fiord.
It was only one in the morning. I put on the light, got up and read the letter. I’ve told you what I expected. The sort of thing it actually contained hadn’t crossed my mind. It was a shock. I did rather an odd thing. There was still time to fill in the breakfast order card and hang it outside on the door. They gave you up until two a.m. I filled in the card in a numb sort of way. Whatever I decided to do I knew I wouldn’t be able to fa
ce him at breakfast.
Again, darling, if there was ever any prospect of your reading this I wouldn’t set it down. But you won’t. Addressing you this way is just a conceit of mine, a format for confession. I read the letter again. It was an outpouring of passionate love. He loved me, he’d never loved anyone else, he couldn’t live without me. If he had to do without me he’d die. No one else has ever written anything like that to me. It was the way I now believe you sometimes wrote to him.
And it has an effect, that sort of thing. It shakes you, in spite of yourself. While I was saying to myself, how could he, how dare he, he’s Ivo’s lover, how dare he write these things to me, while I was saying that, I was also thinking, can he really love me like that? Am I adored like that?
I was shivering. The Goncharof provides refrigerators in its rooms but empty ones, and mine was still empty but for a bottle of water. I don’t drink much, as you know, but if there had been one of those miniatures of brandy in there I’d have drunk it at a gulp. All I could do was go back to bed and sit there with the light on, thinking about Tim’s letter. I told myself it didn’t matter, it was just an adolescent outpouring from someone who should have left adolescence far behind, it was unimportant compared with Lynette. If I had to lie awake half the night, having a sort of crisis of nerves, I should have had it over her.
Eventually I did sleep and the arrival of my breakfast woke me. Immediately I remembered the letter. But that’s the way we are, I suppose that’s the difference between a saint and the rest of us. Altruism is fast forgotten when something momentous happens in one’s personal life.
The phone began to ring while I was taking a shower. It’s no good saying I knew it would be Tim, I didn’t know, there was a chance it might have been Rob. So I lifted the receiver and said hallo, heard Tim’s indrawn breath for a second – oh, yes, by then I could distinguish his breath and his sighs from another’s – before he put the phone down. The last thing I wanted was to meet him in the foyer, so instead of using the lift I went down the stairs and out the back way.
Of course it was raining but I walked to Calhoun Avenue. This was my last time, positively the last time, but instead of thinking of the ordeal before Lynette that could only end in death, instead of thinking of Rob left behind to mourn, my thoughts were all on Tim’s letter. Much of it I’d involuntarily committed to memory and I kept repeating phrases from it over and over. I was flattered, you see, darling. I was flattered to be called beautiful, to be worshipped, to be told that if he was never once allowed to make love to me it would be a bitterness for the whole rest of his life.
Nonsense? Well, perhaps. It would be very wrong to indulge in self-pity now. I’ll only say that with Kit I’d had a hard time, I’d lost nearly all my sexual confidence. Did I ever tell you that he used to refer to me to his friends as ‘the wife’. It’s not an expression Canadians use, it’s English working class, but he adopted it after he heard it in a TV sitcom. To him I’d been ‘the wife’ and to Tim, apparently, I was a goddess.
Rob had taken the day off work. We sat and talked for a couple of hours while Lynette slept. The nurse told me it wasn’t strictly a coma she was in, but that’s how it looked to me. Rob said he’d keep in touch and let me know of her progress, though progress was hardly the word. Overnight, while I had been fretting over whether or not to start a love affair, she’d aged another ten years. I kissed an old woman’s yellow sunken cheek, I touched her hair with the hand that now wore the ruby ring, and I put my arms round Rob and kissed him goodbye.
The rain was coming down so hard I had to take a taxi back. It went along Fourth Street and about halfway along I saw Tim, smothered in waterproofs, going into a bar. My heart missed a beat and with it I felt that curious plucking sensation low down in the body that’s the first sign in women of real physical desire – perhaps in men too, I don’t know. You have to remember that I did want him, that I’d wanted him long before I read the letter. But there’s no doubt the letter changed things. A good many men have used a woman’s love for them to get her into bed and I was thinking by then along those lines, his love to gratify my lust.
And what of you? I wasn’t thinking much about you by that time, darling. And after an hour or two in my room I could say I wasn’t actually thinking at all. Wanting him was starting to consume me, I was fantasizing about it, telling myself that if I didn’t take the chance now, like him the bitterness of regret would be with me for the rest of my life. I told myself a lot of other things, the way one does in these circumstances. Not that I’ve been in many of these circumstances, but it’s a situation in which you learn a lot about yourself and about human behaviour. I told myself that my best friend was dying, I’d miss her for ever, I deserved a bit of enjoyment, that Tim was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, that it would be a swift affair, lasting at most two days, here today and gone tomorrow.
The next step was mine. I was the prime mover. By then he must have thought his letter had annoyed me and I’m sure he’d have accepted rejection. He’d have had no choice. But I wasn’t going to reject him. I asked myself, where would he be now? I called his room and when there was no answer I guessed he’d be in the bar, so I went down in the lift.
I dressed up first. I brushed my hair and left it hanging loose. Humiliating, when you come to think of it, not to say degrading. The lift doors opened at the ground floor and he was standing there, waiting for it. I couldn’t speak, I just stood there and held out both my hands. He took my hands and came into the lift and in a moment we were in each other’s arms. I whispered that I’d left my key behind, so it was to his room that we went.
I can’t write what happened there, even though you’ll never read it. He was so sweet, he wasn’t selfish then …
20
‘You needn’t blush for your thoughts, Tim,’ I said to him. ‘It’s too late for that.’
No doubt, he had plenty to blush for, as did I. For a moment his face on the pillow had gone fiery red. Neither of us ever mentioned his letter. He spoke aloud all the compliments and avowals of love he’d written down.
I won’t say I didn’t lie to him. My conduct was in itself a lie. But I never falsified my feelings and said I loved him. I spoke the truth whenever I could, excepting of course that one great truth.
He never said another word about the woman he was expecting to join him when the Favonia docked on Friday. How he’d have handled that I don’t know but he had no need to worry about it as I intended to leave on Thursday morning, and leave I did.
Tim said he’d follow me, he’d come with me, but, you know, the absurd part was that neither of us had any money to speak of. He had about $50 left and I had maybe $100 and my return air ticket.
The friendship we’d had disappeared, all the comradeship and companionship, things in common weren’t important any more. Maybe they’d have come back if we’d had more time. But as it was, sex took over. We hardly talked. That last night we did go out for dinner and I suppose it was there, in the restaurant, that I lost my Laroche scarf. Unless he took it and kept it for a memento. He wanted to know where the ruby ring came from – ‘Who put that on your finger?’ – and I don’t think he believed Lynette had given it me. We were about an hour and a half in the restaurant and then it was back to bed. For sex and for the oblivion sex brings. While I was making love with Tim I stopped thinking and I believe he did too.
I tried to stop him coming to the airport with me but I might as well have tried to stop the rain. It was a bit of a shock when he told me he had one of my cards with our address and telephone number on it. He told me quite frankly that he’d taken it out of my purse while I was asleep because he was afraid that if he asked for it I might say no.
‘I do say no, Tim,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried to tell you there won’t be any more meetings.’
He just laughed. ‘I’m coming to Seattle. I’m coming in ten days’ time. Ten days is nothing, it’ll be gone in a flash.’
‘Call me first. Write to me first.�
� I did have the presence of mind to say that.
‘Oh, I’ll write,’ he said. ‘I know you like letters better than the phone. I’ll write tomorrow and keep on writing.’
So I kissed him goodbye and he told me he loved me. He’d been telling me he loved me over and over from the time we got up. We parted and I was very near to falling in love with him then – only we’d parted and he wasn’t there any more. I got on the plane and went back to reading that book I’d never finished, The Golovlyov Family. It wasn’t until I was home, in my own house alone, that I started thinking about you.
After three days when no letter had come from him I began to breathe again, I began to think it might be all right, it might actually be all right and no harm done. But human beings are perverse and I was also a little bit piqued. Such is man’s love, men were deceivers ever, so much for undying passion, I thought. But I didn’t mind. I was relieved. You’d be back in Juneau by now, I thought, he’d have had second thoughts, second, third and fourth thoughts. He’d be looking back on a mad interlude, a holiday adventure, a nice bit of pastime, rather pleased to discover himself to be bisexual.
And he’d never tell you. You’d never tell him. You knew from my own letter that he hadn’t known me for your sister, so you’d keep quiet about that. He might say that he’d been befriended by a nice woman here to visit her sick friend, but he’d give no more away than that. And though you’d know who the woman was, you wouldn’t suspect anything.
The distant future presented problems. What would happen if you and he stayed together and the occasion arose when meeting me or even hearing my name was inevitable? That, I thought, was a long way off. Besides, I didn’t believe you’d stay together. What he’d told me about his relations with the woman lecturer was true in every respect except that he’d bent your gender and made you a botanist. The chances were that by the end of the summer, at whatever cost to yourself in misery and recriminations, your relationship with Tim would be over.