by Barbara Vine
I was sitting on the settee and the blow threw me sprawling against the back of it. I gave a sort of cry and covered my face with my hands, all classic stuff, all things that women do. And he did what men like him do. He got hold of my hands and pulled them down from my face and pulled me up by them. For a moment he let me go to stand there unsteadily and then he began the onslaught.
Have you ever had a tooth knocked out? It’s something you read about or see on TV (see someone acting it on TV) and it’s quite funny, it’s one of those joke happenings like falling off a ladder or slipping on a banana skin. Incredible, really, that the idea of a man beating up a woman used to be thought funny too, in certain contexts, in certain circles. And caning children. Well, I won’t go on. I was crouched on the floor and Kit was kicking me, he’d knocked me to the floor with a punch in the mouth, and I felt something floating in my mouth which I spat out into the palm of my hand. It was an incisor with half the root still attached.
I screamed when I saw it and spewed blood all over my hands and the floor. That’s what made him stop. He can’t stand the sight of blood. I heard him go out of the room and when he came back I expected it to start again, I thought, he’ll kill me, he could easily beat me to death, and I heard myself say, ‘Please, Kit, no, please don’t, please stop,’ in a sort of mumbling lisp because losing a front tooth changes the way you talk. But he’d only come back to bring me a towel. He threw it at me, a wet towel that you’d put over a boxer’s head in the ring.
‘That’s you seen to,’ he said. ‘Now it’s his turn.’
I heard him go upstairs but I’d nowhere to go. You know what a little house it is, nothing downstairs but the living room and the kitchen. By that time it was ten at night, after ten. My watch had got broken when he kicked me but I could see the clock on the wall and the face of it seemed to have got very big and shining, like a great round moon. I didn’t know the people next door very well. It’s not a neighbourhood where you know the neighbours. I should have called 911, I don’t know why I didn’t. Not because I wanted to protect Kit, that was the last thing, perhaps because – and it sounds absurd – I’ve still got some old-fashioned ideas left over from our upbringing. It was only a man beating up his wife, that was what I thought, I can’t trouble them with that. Would you credit it?
But I was terribly frightened, I was too frightened to be in the same house with him. The moonfaced clock said ten-twenty. I wrapped that wet towel round my head and round my mouth and I went next door. Luckily, it was a very warm night.
They said they’d heard it through the wall. They’d heard me screaming. I hadn’t even been aware of screaming that much but they’d heard it and Nicole wanted to intervene but Scott had stopped her, saying it wasn’t their business. You see how familiarly I write about them. That’s because we’ve become quite friendly since that night, since they put me in their car and drove me to the emergency room at the hospital. Is there anyone we can contact, they kept saying. Haven’t you any family we can contact? No one, I said. There was only you. Only you, not very far away, downtown at the Westin, but I didn’t say it. I was afraid you wouldn’t come.
Two ribs were broken. My tooth – well, it could be capped. Lucky it wasn’t worse, someone said. Someone always says that. I didn’t want a hospital bed, I doubted if my medical insurance would cover it, so I went home with Nicole and Scott and I was going to bed in their guest room when Scott said he’d take a look next door. If Kit’s car had still been there, parked on the street, I wouldn’t have let him do that.
But Kit had gone too. The house was empty. Though I didn’t have the nerve to go back there that night I did in the morning. I was all over bruises, especially on my sides and my thighs, and I had a great purple bruise on the left breast which would have worried me until a year ago when I read that those horror stories are old wives’ tales and a blow to the breasts doesn’t cause cancer. My left eye was black and closed up but when I struggled to raise the eyelid I could see out of it, which was all that mattered. The injury to my mouth wasn’t at all serious but it was the one that caused me most distress. The gaping hole was right in the front. Dentists probably have a name for the tooth that was gone, a primary or principal incisor or something, but to me it was just the one in the front on the left. I looked in the mirror and wondered, with considerable bitterness, what Tim would think of me now.
Then I went into my own house. That is, I hobbled in. Somehow, in the fracas, I’d sprained my ankle and it was bandaged up. Still, I managed the stairs, though it took me a long time. Kit had certainly gone. The clothes he’d brought with him were gone and so were a number of things he’d bought since his return, a raincoat, a sweater, a laptop computer, a clock-radio and tape-player and a few other electrical items including a battery-operated toothbrush. And his gun, his Colt automatic. He’d taken my two new suitcases too to put it all in, the ones I bought to take to Alaska. That alerted me to what else he might have appropriated.
It was my fault for keeping money in the house. I don’t usually, only this was in my purse, and I wasn’t thinking about taking my purse with me when I sought refuge with Scott and Nicole. A bit over $200, I’d used the bank machine that day, not a very large sum but more than I could afford to lose. So what was done to you, darling, was also done to me.
Why do they do it? You could say for Tim, I suppose, that he needed the money, though for what it’s hard to say, since he seems only to have gone back to England with it. But Kit didn’t need it, Kit earns far more than I do, Kit didn’t need to steal my suitcases and the cash I needed for two weeks’ living. Revenge, I guess. Rob once told me that his first wife did much the same to him. They punish you, not because you’ve injured them, but because you are their victims. And what is a victim for but to take more and more punishment?
Once the dentist had put a temporary cap on my front tooth I filed for divorce. The strange thing was that on the same day I heard from Kit’s lawyer that he’d already done so. The next morning I got hold of my courage very firmly, I gripped it like you hold weights for a workout, and made myself dial your number.
The ringing stopped after three double rings and you said hallo. I said what I’ve always said when I’ve called you since the day, the same day, we left our home and went out into the world, ‘Darling, it’s me.’
You put the phone down.
22
This long letter to you is nearly over. I wish now that I’d begun it sooner and sent it to you. But that’s impossible. It was your death which made me write it.
You lived for nearly two years after you came to my house and told me what Tim had done. You went home and back to your job. ‘As if nothing had happened’, as the phrase goes. But we have to live as if nothing had happened, we have to earn our livings, show a brave face to the world, continue our daily routines, behave to our friends and neighbours as we’ve always behaved. Acting as if something had happened, which is the alternative, is only another term for madness. If you’d done that, wouldn’t you have torn that ship apart, told the world, pursued Tim, killed him, and wouldn’t that be madness? If I’d behaved, not as if nothing but as if what had happened had happened, I’d have shot myself.
But Kit is perhaps a little mad. Not for him the rapid return to normal life, the resumption of an equilibrium. Think of Cathy and the faxes. It came back to me how Kit had once told me he’d got the sack from some job on a newspaper and in revenge he’d stolen the editor’s children’s beloved dog. He didn’t do anything to the dog, just kept it in his apartment for a week, and then, at night, left it tied up in these people’s yard with a Coke can tied to its tail. I didn’t believe that story, I thought he was inventing it, he was a bit drunk at the time. I believe it now.
So what will he do or has he been doing to Tim? I’ve been asking myself that for months but I’ve done nothing. What can I do? I could phone Tim or I could write to him, but I’m afraid to do either. There was so much you didn’t tell me that night. What, for instance, did
you tell Tim about me when he confessed our affair, our very brief affair? And how did he come to confess to you? Did you suspect and tax him with it? I can’t believe that. What I would half-like to believe is that he told you he was in love with me and intended therefore to end his relationship with you.
Half-like? I don’t know why I said that. But, yes, I’d like to think Tim at any rate fancied he loved me. I’d like to believe he meant the things he said when he said them. Or he thought he did. At the time, and perhaps for a week or two afterwards. I’d like it, darling, because no one else ever says those things, because I’m alone and really quite friendless. It’s my own fault. I never meet anyone. I don’t go to places where I might meet people. I go to school and I come home and sometimes I have a drink with Scott and Nicole and sometimes I spend the evening with Lynette’s stepmother. Rob took me out to dinner when he came here on vacation in the spring. I go to my dance class, which is full of women, and to my psychology course, which is full of women and married men, so you see it is all my own fault.
The trouble is that I’ve been thinking of Tim quite a lot. I don’t mean I’m in love with him or that I long for him or anything like that. I ought to hate him for what he did to you but I don’t hate him. Perhaps I would if he’d succeeded. It goes round and round in my mind, the question why. I’d like to know why. I’d like to ask him.
‘Why did you say you were in love with me?’ I’d like to ask him. ‘Why did you write me the love letter you gave me in the hotel? You didn’t have to, you must know that. Surely you could tell I was mad for you. You only had to touch me. Look what happened when you did. So why write and tell me you were in love with me? Why did you have to keep on saying you loved me, you couldn’t live without me, you couldn’t wait till we met again?’
I can formulate the questions but I can’t devise replies, not the kind that come anywhere near satisfying me. For instance, perhaps I was to be his cure for gayness. Do gay men still try to be ‘cured’ by making love to a woman? Do they want to change? I don’t know and the only person I can ask won’t talk to me. Anyway, if that’s what he wanted he didn’t have to keep saying he loved me. He didn’t have to keep saying he’d join me in ten days’ time and nothing would prevent him. He didn’t have to promise to write to me every day. If it wasn’t because he loved me and wanted to be rid of the obstacle to his joining me, why did he try to murder you by leaving you on that island?
When he got off the boat in Prince Rupert he must have thought you were dead. Why didn’t he come straight to Seattle? He had the money, he’d stolen it from your cabin. That, after all, was why he’d ‘killed’ you. I’ve often wondered, and I’ve been cold and sick at the thought, if you told him unbearable things about me. You might even have told him that you and I set him up, you’d asked me to tempt him, to try and seduce him. That would be grounds for hating me and trying to kill you, wouldn’t it?
But I don’t really believe you’d do that. Tim isn’t truthful but you are. You and I both make poor liars. Tim is a poor liar too but he hasn’t realized it yet. Perhaps he’ll stop lying when he comes to see how bad he is at it. You see how I harp on him, so much do I want to know. And I haven’t had a great deal else to think about these past months, this past year and a half. There must be answers and you must have known them. Tim must know them. Sometimes I’ve thought a dreadful thing, that you and Tim met again and came together again and that you forgave him, though you could never forgive me.
This last part I’m writing in a plane above the Atlantic. When I started my letter I thought I’d never go to England again, I’d never go home. And I wouldn’t have till I got your forgiveness or your death. Well, your death came first.
It was Martin Zeindler who called and told me. The police would do so, he said, but he thought it best for him to do it first. Poor Martin. I never knew him very well but we’d talked a few times, we’d met socially in St Mary’s Gardens, and do you know, I’d never known him be serious. Mock-serious, yes, pedantic, mock-severe, mock-everything, but not grave and real the way he was on the phone.
‘I have some very bad news for you, Isabel.’
‘Ivo,’ I said.
‘I want to tell you before the police do.’ The voice was the same man’s voice but not the tone, not the words. ‘Ivo’s dead, Isabel.’
Without thinking, I said, ‘He drowned, did he? No, he died of exposure, they call it hypothermia.’
I was living in the past, you see. I was altering the past to make it so that you really had died on Chechin or trying to swim to the mainland from Chechin. It was as if it was inconceivable for you to die from any other cause. You were a castaway and thus you died, as if it was all preordained and nothing else was possible. Martin thought I was distraught, the balance of my mind was disturbed.
‘I hate having to break this to you on the phone, Isabel. I couldn’t come eight thousand miles. It’s better than a policeman coming to the door.’
Wasn’t that odd? That was exactly what I’d thought when you came to the door that night: a policeman come to tell me of your death in the water or among the ice-floes. I said I was sorry, I was a fool. How did you die? When Martin said it would be a shock, I must brace myself, he was bitterly sorry, I thought he was going to say AIDS. That fear has been with me for years that one day you’d get and die of AIDS.
‘He was – ’ Martin hesitated. It must have been hard to say because it was hard for him to grasp. The concept of killing someone as a part of life wasn’t new to me. I was almost prepared for it. Martin tried again and succeeded. ‘He was killed, Isabel. He was murdered. On the beach at that seaside place where they have the Song and Dance Festival.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘Isabel, are you still there?’
‘Oh, yes, I’m still here.’
‘I’m so sorry to have to tell you like this.’
‘Martin,’ I said, ‘there isn’t any other way.’
‘He’d gone there for the Easter festival. They call it by some pretentious name. There was a particular opera he wanted to hear.’
I could feel dreadful, hysterical laughter mounting. Only Martin Zeindler would talk about ‘hearing’ opera at a time like this.
‘He was staying at an hotel in Nunthorpe. Apparently, he’d gone for a walk on the beach before going to bed. He’d been along the seafront and he was walking back to his hotel along the beach. Or so I gather.’
And then I realized. Martin didn’t know Tim lived at Nunthorpe. Perhaps he’d never known, or else he’d forgotten or thought he’d moved away.
‘There’s to be an inquest,’ he said. ‘They haven’t fixed a date yet. I’ll let you know. And then the funeral, Isabel…’
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I’ll come at once.’
In the event I didn’t do that. I waited till Martin called three days later to tell me the inquest would be on the following Thursday. And in the meantime I started writing this letter to you, from a full heart, to set it all down.
I think I know what happened. It wasn’t opera you went to Nunthorpe to hear. When had you ever cared for opera? The only one you’d ever heard of was Rosenkavalier because the tune was in it, your tune. You were practically tone-deaf and wouldn’t have known Tosca from West Side Story. You went to Nunthorpe to see Tim. Why I don’t know. Perhaps you’d never been in touch with him since you went home, perhaps you thought the time had come to confront him and talk the whole thing through. I’m sure you thought he presented no danger to you.
But he did.
Martin called just as I got to the part where Kit took my money and walked out. He told me the inquest date and said that someone had been arrested for your murder. I knew then. I didn’t have to ask the name.
Martin told me without being asked. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He was one of my students. The extraordinary thing is that he used to live here, in this house.’
It didn’t seem extraordinary to me. Terrible, but not strange, not a cause for wonder
. The word that came into my mind was – disappointment, bitter disappointment. I realized I’d been hoping for something, all this time I’d been hoping. For what? That Tim wasn’t as bad as he seemed to be? That it was all somehow a mistake? Or that by a kind of miracle I could find him again, that he’d be changed into the person I wanted, that he’d be right for me and I for him?
All that is impossible now. It’s really over.
The captain has just told us we’re over the west coast of Ireland. It won’t be long now. Goodbye, Ivo, my darling. I’m going to tell myself you forgave me before you died.
JAMES
23
I’m a conventional man. I lead a conventional life of order and routine and I don’t do quixotic things. You know that. I suppose the only respect in which I differ from the received portrait of the city solicitor is in that I tell you everything. I can’t imagine having a secret that I would keep from my wife or that my wife would keep a secret from me.
Having said that, I realize that I have kept my feeling for Tim Cornish a secret from you. You and I have been married for seven years and I’ve never told you. This is what men always say, that it wasn’t important, and that was why. True, it isn’t important now, but it was once. I don’t think adolescent love is a trivial thing, that we look back on it with shame or as trivial, I think it’s real and the memory of it may be everlasting.
When I was eighteen and Tim was thirteen I was in love with him. I was deeply in love and it consumed my whole existence. He wasn’t in love with me, that goes without saying, but he was nice to me and compliant, he did what I wanted. You understand me, I’m sure, I don’t want to use the words. He was nice to me for the favours I could do him and at Leythe fourteen years ago, believe me, a first-year needed all the favours he could get. I believe it’s different now, things have changed. For one thing, girls are among the intake and I expect that makes all the difference. The fagging system went at the same time. It had grown pretty benign in my day but still it amounted to little slaves scared to disobey their masters.