No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  So I reasoned. If I also say that so I hoped, I may be justified by the certainty that you could never never be happy with someone like Tim. I’d no expectations that you’d phone me or write to me during those days, but it would have been a comfort if you had. I was alone and wondering and worrying and reassuring myself but still waking sometimes in the night in dread, remembering how you felt about Tim and what Tim and I had done. It served its purpose. Once I’d parted from him at Juneau Airport I thought I didn’t want him any more, I thought that was gone, desire as well as friendship. I was even afraid to think about him.

  But he must have been at the back of my mind. When the ten days were up, when it got to that Saturday, I had to think about him. I remembered how ardent he’d been, how he’d said nothing would stop him coming to Seattle. Yet he hadn’t written and I couldn’t really see how being with you might effectively have stopped him writing or phoning. You wouldn’t have been together every minute. He’d promised. Still, he might just turn up. He’d promised to phone first, but what were his promises worth?

  The phone didn’t ring once that weekend. My life is a fairly solitary one, especially in the school vacations, and days often pass without the phone ringing. No letters came, from you or him. No letters of any kind came. Then on the Monday Rob called to say Lynette was dead. The next day I went into town for a dental check-up but apart from that I didn’t leave the house and no calls came. This time I had no feelings of pique, nothing but relief that Tim had changed his mind and was no doubt having a fine time touring the West Coast.

  Two days after Rob had phoned they brought Lynette’s body back to Seattle so that she might be buried beside her mother and father. When I went home after the funeral, the house wasn’t empty any longer. As you know, Kit had come back.

  New starts grow very stale when you’ve had as many as we have. This one, which he proposed, must have been our fourth. After I’d got over the shock of finding him in the house I said I was a fool not to have had the lock changed.

  ‘If you had,’ he said, ‘I’d just have sat on the porch and waited for you. You’d have let me in.’

  ‘I expect I would,’ I said. ‘Anyway, you’re a lot bigger than I am.’

  ‘Come on, Izzy, when did I ever lay a violent hand on you?’

  It’s true. He never did. What used to be called mental cruelty is his specialty. He’s very good at that. At least it was the spare room where he’d put his things. He had nowhere else to go, he said, his girlfriend having thrown him out, the one called Cathy. It’s always been hard keeping up with them and their names. We went out to dinner together, to a pizza place, nothing at all grand, and he proposed the fourth new start. I said I’d see, he could stay in the spare room like any other friend.

  ‘At least you said “friend”,’ he said.

  I’d stopped worrying that Tim would come. Paradoxically, once Kit was in the house I began to be anxious about it again, I was even convinced that he’d suddenly turn up. Why did I care? If Kit were to be made jealous for a change, why not? All the brunt of that had so far been borne by me. It was his turn. Is there some rule that says a woman has to stay faithful after her man has left her? But I suppose that what I’d once felt for Kit, traces of it, still survived. After all, he was still my husband, and in the past I’d done a lot to try and preserve the marriage. Neither of us had filed for divorce. We were as much married as ever.

  Each time the phone rang and Kit answered I thought it might be Tim, and hoped he’d have the presence of mind to put the receiver down. But it never was Tim. I’d hoped there would be no letters and I was relieved when there weren’t, though I minded too. Anyway, there was no sign of Tim, and Kit, who used to be jealous of any man I spoke to while thinking me unreasonable to be jealous of his girlfriends, had no reason for suspicion.

  Talking to me about him, other people used to forget Kit was still in Seattle. Because he’d left me, they used to take it for granted he’d left the city, perhaps even gone back to Canada, but of course he never had. He’d been here all the time, apart from his travels as investigative reporter for his magazine, still with an office on University Street, simply living in a different house in a different part of town. It was a Friday when I found him in the house and let him stay and on the Monday morning he went off to work, as in the old days.

  I remember you used rather to like him and he to like you. Until in one of his crazed moments he accused you and me of incest. The fact that you were and always had been committed to a gay way of life made no difference to Kit. Nothing made any difference when he was in one of his states. You laughed when I told you and said you wouldn’t hold it against him. More to the point was that he never held his suspicions against you. You were never the object of one of his revenges. As his ex-girlfriend was. I’ll come to that in a moment.

  So Kit went to work and I did the things I do in the school vacation, the marketing and the laundry, my dance class and a class I’ve signed up for in adolescent psychology. I caught up with my reading and painted the kitchen walls and cooked meals for Kit and me in the evenings. All that was normal, the sort of thing we’d always done. But what began to happen afterwards wasn’t. We talked.

  I don’t mean that to talk was a conscious decision on his part or mine. Neither of us said, ‘We have to talk,’ or ‘Let’s discuss this.’ It was rather a spontaneous outpouring of words that began when supper was nearly finished and which came at first from Kit – later, when I realized he would listen, from me too. Talker and listener, we gravitated from the table to armchairs, one of us fetching coffee or drinks after an hour or so of it, returning to talk some more. Nothing like it had ever happened before. He’d never wanted to hear my views on anything and he’d accused me of being uncaring if I protested at his confessions.

  But something had happened to change him. Or so I thought. When I began to talk to him about what Lynette’s departure for Alaska and then her illness and death had meant to me, he listened. He wasn’t bored, he didn’t close his eyes or mutter perfunctory nos and yesses, he actually asked questions and made comments. I talked to him about my loneliness in the past year and he seemed to listen sympathetically to that too. It was all very strange, as if we were two other people.

  I talked to him but he talked to me far more and his talk was both a triumphant list of his conquests and a stream of confessions. While telling me what he had always told me, that those women ‘meant nothing’, he was still able to say of one of them that he’d never felt such a powerful sexual attraction and of another that he’d been obsessed with her face, which he was always seeing in his mind’s eye or, almost mystically, grafted on to the shoulders of other girls. I found I could listen to all this very nearly dispassionately, and this may partly have been because he was still sleeping in the spare room, there’d been no contact at all between us, we hadn’t so much as touched hands. After we’d talked for two or three hours, once for nearly four, we went our separate ways to bed.

  Kit’s is a vengeful nature and a lot of what he said was concentrated on the revenge he meant to take, and was taking, on Cathy. She had a fax in her office and another in her home and part of his punishing of her was to send her literature that used up all the paper on her fax roll. Apparently, Cathy had a tender heart where animals were concerned. She used to turn off the television if anything came on about hunters or endangered species. She hated the idea of the fur trade but was too sensitive to animals’ suffering to be able to bear actually joining the anti-fur lobby, being aware of the kind of photographs she’d have to see and the descriptions she’d have to read.

  It was this sort of thing, and far far worse, that Kit was sending the poor woman by fax. Extracts from anti-cruelty societies’ pamphlets about how bears were trained to dance and pit bulls to fight, about foxes in traps and deer wounded by crossbows. All these articles had big banner headlines that she couldn’t fail to see even if she managed to avoid reading the text, and all of them incorporated dreadful photograph
s. They were far worse than anything that found its way into an ordinary newspaper. I was outraged when he told me, but by this time I was trying to act like a real therapist and not to show shock and horror.

  ‘You must stop this,’ I said to him, as coolly as I could.

  ‘I’ll have to stop,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘I’ve run out of material and I won’t get any more unless I send a massive donation to the homeless dogs or the starving donkeys.’

  Why did he hate her so much? ‘Oh, please,’ he said, and he must have caught that off you. ‘She broke up my marriage and tried to destroy me. Isn’t that reason enough?’

  ‘How did she try to destroy you, Kit?’

  ‘I got her to put something of mine on the word processor and she altered – corrected, she said – the grammar.’

  You don’t have to do much to incur Kit’s wrath. But he did stop sending the catalogue of cruelty to poor Cathy and one evening, in an outburst of self-abasement, confessed that he’d broken up his marriage himself. Was it too late to mend it?

  I told him I didn’t like the things he did. I’d overlooked them too many times. I thought these revenges of his were very nearly psychotic. His rages frightened me and his infidelities had been the cause of the worst pain of my life. He shouldn’t be talking to me every evening but to a real therapist. He should be having counselling. That silenced him for a while. Then he said, if he did, would I have it too? I made the mistake then of saying I didn’t need it.

  ‘The people who say they don’t need it are the ones that do, a therapist told me,’ he said.

  ‘A therapist would,’ I said. ‘They have to live.’

  But perhaps he was right. If I was as adjusted as I thought I was, when he told me in detail of his life with Cathy and of his infidelity to her with someone whose name he claimed to have forgotten, wouldn’t I then have told him about Tim? After all, during the course of our marriage Kit had been unfaithful to me with at least twenty women while I to him only with Tim. He’s hardly a man who subscribes to the sauce-for-the-gander-is-sauce-for-the-goose philosophy but he isn’t a monster either, he’d surely have had some understanding. So I reasoned when I wasn’t with him. When I was and we were talking, though sometimes tempted, I always resisted telling him about Tim.

  And, seeing what happened later, I was right, wasn’t I? For he is a monster, he is very nearly psychopathic, he doesn’t know the meaning of rational behaviour. It’s only when things are going well for him that he pretends to know. He put up a good pretence as the time went on. I suppose things were going well for him, very well. He’d had his revenge on his ex-lover, he’d given her material for her mind to dwell on in misery and horror for years to come. He’d returned to his old home and found ‘the wife’ apparently prepared to take him back. There was to be no expensive, messy divorce – and the world was full of women. No wonder he began to be so nice to me, even to the point of showing a very alien emotion, remorse.

  When he’d been back in the house for three weeks, when we had talked to each other about every aspect of our lives more than we’d ever done in all the years of the past, he moved his things and himself into my bedroom.

  By this time I thought that Tim must be back in England. That I could accept. It troubled me more that I’d heard nothing from you, but I told myself that in the past when you’d been on these cruises as much as two months had gone by without a letter or a phone call. Tim, after all, had promised me to tell no one of what had been between us. I hoped he was well on the way to forgetting. I wasn’t, but it was early days.

  Then one day Kit said, ‘Who’s Tim Cornish?’

  He had my address book in his hand. I wasn’t particularly concerned. And, of course, I could give a truthful answer. ‘He’s Ivo’s partner.’

  ‘What a crazy term. Sounds like a couple of bank presidents. Don’t you mean “lover”? Why does he have a separate address?’

  ‘It’s his family home, I believe, his mother’s house.’

  Kit said no more. He’d needed the phone number of an acquaintance of ours whose name began with C, so you couldn’t say he had exactly been prying. I felt I’d got away with that rather well. And I kept on persevering in my efforts to forget Tim and what had happened. But try as I would I couldn’t help wondering about him. I couldn’t forget his – ardour, I suppose is the word.

  I asked myself if anyone over the age of seventeen would protest passionate love with such sincerity, not once but a dozen times, would declare undying love, make such unasked-for fervent promises, and ten days later have forgotten all about them. Can a man be as shallow as that? As quixotic as that? Along comes a new person, or, as in this case, an old love, and all is forgotten, lost, dismissed?

  It wasn’t that I wanted him. No, no, far from it. But people are strange and when we want to forget a love affair we don’t want the other person to forget. We want them to remember and regret the loss for ever. No one had ever confessed such love for me as Tim had. I even wondered if he’d never meant it, if it was just a studied technique of his, including the writing of that letter he gave me in the bar at the Goncharof, which in the past had proved a good way of securing sexual partners.

  I didn’t want to think about you. It was better for me to keep you out of my mind and wait. Wait and see. One day the phone would ring and it would be you and from the first word I’d know that all was well, that you hadn’t been told and you hadn’t guessed. The paradox was that Kit often talked about you.

  He’d like to see you, he said. It must have been two years. Why had there been no letters from you since what he called his ‘homecoming’? Did I think you’d ever work at an American university? Were you coming to stay when the cruises ended?

  To most of this I had to say I didn’t know. He said he hoped I wasn’t ‘growing apart’ from my brother and this led to one of his diatribes on the narrowness of my circle of friends, my disinclination to ‘go out and meet people’, of whom there had been few since he came back.

  The evening talks went on, necessarily rather repetitious by this time. But I suppose they were therapy for us, even though I wasn’t as open as I might have been and he was back at presenting himself in the most attractive light possible.

  Another thing I’m going to tell you, or tell this piece of paper I’m writing to you on. Sex with Kit had always been good, that must have been what made me keep taking him back, but it wasn’t good any more, and every time it happened I thought afterwards, that has to be the last time and I have to tell him. Tim got in the way, you see. In Kit’s arms, I saw Tim’s face.

  You know what time it was that the doorbell rang and what day it was. A Sunday evening at about seven-thirty. We’d eaten but all the supper things were still on the table. No one ever came to the house without warning. There was no one with whom we were on those sort of dropping-in terms. The doorbell rang and we looked at each other.

  ‘Cathy,’ Kit said.

  But that was his vanity. I knew better. I knew she’d never come near him again. Not after the starving donkeys with the crippled feet.

  ‘That sort of ring at the door on a Sunday evening is probably the police,’ I said.

  I thought of you. Something had happened to you and the police were coming to tell me because I was your next-of-kin. The bell rang a second time.

  Kit said, ‘Why? What have you done?’ And then he said, ‘I’ll go.’

  That’s a matter of course. Even in our neighbourhood a woman wouldn’t answer the door after dark if she didn’t know who it was. Kit went out of the room and I thought, it’s not the police, it’s Tim. Or perhaps it’s the police and Ivo is dead. Ivo has drowned among the ice-floes. Or it’s not the police but Tim and Kit will kill him.

  So I remember I got up from my chair and I put my hands up to my head. I got hold of my hair in two handfuls and stood there like a madwoman.

  And I was standing like that when you came into the room with Kit behind you. For the first time since we were children you didn’t
come to me and take me in your arms and kiss me when we met. Your face was dark and sad and full of anger.

  21

  I’m in no position to resent punishment. You’re the injured one and I injured you. If I thought at the time and afterwards that you might have done it differently, that you might have tempered the blows, that you might at least have inflicted them on me in Kit’s absence, that’s only because we can always see some justification for our own actions. We always have self-pity. You were right in what you did. Only I loved you and I did mind dreadfully. You wanted to give me pain and you succeeded.

  It’s odd the things we notice. I noticed you had no baggage and you’d never come to me before without baggage. I even asked where it was. I asked Kit, my voice tangled up somewhere in my throat, and Kit said he’d asked the same thing himself, What have you done with your bags, he’d asked. Kit still wasn’t aware of anything in the atmosphere. Your face hadn’t seemed abnormal to him. It was nothing to him that you hadn’t embraced me.

  I had no more words. You said with a terrible grimness that you wouldn’t be here for long. It was just that you had something to tell me, and, since Kit was at home, to tell him too.

  I wasn’t prepared. I was prepared for something else. That came later. You sat down, saying it was hot, it was stuffy in the room and why didn’t I have air-conditioning, or better still, open the windows. I was mesmerized by your eyes, your eyes were very bright and glittering, and I was like a creature on the highway, paralysed in headlights.

  Kit asked you if you wanted a drink.

  You laughed. It was a harsh bitter laugh that didn’t even stretch your lips. ‘Only if you’ve got champagne,’ you said.

  I knew what you meant and I trembled, but Kit didn’t know. ‘There’s Chardonnay.’