No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  You remember that evening we saw Tim at the raga concert. I didn’t introduce you but I told you afterwards who it was, without further explanation. The truth is that I was very shaken by that encounter. I was cool with him, merely saying hallo and nodding when he said hallo back, but that was only a cover for an intensity of feeling. I had seen him several minutes before he saw me, I had had time to compose myself and prepare myself for a confrontation that turned out no more than a casual encounter.

  I wrote just then of intensity of feeling. Intensity of memory would be to put it better. The mistake we make is in believing that when we are deeply emotionally affected by a chance meeting with an old lover, this means that love endures. Of course this isn’t so. What remains is only nostalgia, the memory of our own profound emotion at the time. I expect you noticed how silent I was for the rest of the evening. My thoughts were a muddle of remembered things he once said to me, injuries he did me, his callousness and kindness, his opportunism and his gratitude. But the love was long gone.

  Why then did I agree to go to Nunthorpe and represent him when he phoned me three days ago? Not for the nostalgia and certainly not for the love. I told you, while you were driving me to the station, that it was from interest and from curiosity. Both perfectly true. It’s also true that what I was embarking on was to make a change from the daily routine of company law. And it was a first time. Before that, no one had ever phoned me from a police station and made me the object of the request: ‘I want a lawyer.’

  But it was more than that. It was also because I believe, and I know you do too, that we do ourselves and those we spend our lives with no good by forgetting, still less by falsifying, events long gone by. We diminish ourselves by denying the past.

  I didn’t know then why Tim picked me. There are at least two good law firms in Nunthorpe. Almost as soon as I saw him he told me that when they gave him the Code of Practice for the Detention, Treatment and Questioning of Persons by Police Officers, my name came into his head. My name simply became synonymous with the word ‘lawyer’. He asked for a London phone directory and, miraculously, they fetched him one. I say ‘miraculously’ because the Suffolk police I’ve encountered here are about as thoroughgoing and efficient, as unimaginative and obstructive, as the police anywhere else.

  I’d been reading up the law in the train. They had cautioned him but they hadn’t charged him with anything, so I told them what they knew already, the length of time they could keep him there without charging him, and then I talked to Tim again and at last got myself to this hotel, the Latchpool, where my room overlooks the North Sea with Dunwich to the north and Aldeburgh to the south.

  In the morning I saw Tim again and sat in on the questioning. I gave them two hours and then I told them my client was entitled to a break. They brought us a cup each of brown stuff, coffee or tea, I’m not sure which. Tim said there was something back at his house he wanted me to read. If it was still there. If the police hadn’t removed it. I asked him if they had had a warrant but he didn’t know. I told him they couldn’t remove anything without giving him a receipt. He asked me if he’d be allowed to give me the key and I said, yes, why not, he was under arrest but he hadn’t been charged with anything.

  He has changed out of all knowledge. I suppose he would in twelve years, especially when those twelve years are between thirteen and twenty-five, but I have a feeling all the same that he has changed since that day I saw him at the raga concert and that’s only a few months ago. I wonder if I can explain what I mean. Once the first thing you noticed about Tim was the way he looked, and that was the second thing and the third. There wasn’t much else there, except charm and a certain gracefulness. I suppose egotism must be attractive in itself, there must have been something else, or why was I so wildly in love?

  It’s different now. The looks are what you first notice, of course. It’s something of a liability, isn’t it? The looks are always going to be what you notice first. Until he grows old and loses them. But a kind of melancholy is the next thing, a gravity that is the last thing one would have associated with Tim, and a certain self-effacement. I think it would once have been called humility.

  I reminded the officers that they had another four hours. After that they would have to go before a magistrate to get an extension and a magistrate would only listen to them if they had some evidence. Alone with me for a moment, Tim said to go to his house and read what he had written, especially the last part. So I left them, the investigating officer beginning all over again on what Tim’s relationship with Ivo Steadman had once been.

  A lot of policemen still think that if a murdered man is homosexual, his sexuality must be the motive for murder. That’s not really so different from asserting that if a murdered man is heterosexual the logical conclusion is that he was killed because at some time or other he loved some woman. Tim had told him repeatedly that he and Steadman had ended their relationship nearly two years before. The visit was solely to look up an old friend. He insisted that they had parted on good terms. Indeed, on parting he had given Steadman a sum of money, or part of a sum, that he owed him. The Chief Inspector took it for granted that because this money wasn’t found on Steadman’s body Tim must be lying.

  The piece Tim had written was where he said it would be, on the desk in the first-floor living room that faces the sea. I was taken aback when I saw the extent of it. There must have been 300 sheets of manuscript. Then I remembered he had said it was only essential for me to read the last part, that which was most recently written. The final page was still in the typewriter, half-finished.

  I took the whole manuscript back to the Latchpool. There I read not just the last part but the two chapters or sections which preceded it as well, and then of course I began to see what had happened after Steadman left the house and began his walk back here. That last part I would like you to see too but it’s confidential and my conscience would trouble me if I let you read it. One’s own secrets for one’s wife, but not other people’s. That makes sense, doesn’t it?

  Tim denies most strenuously that he had anything to do with this murder. Even if he had wanted to kill Steadman – though he didn’t, he had come to love him again – he knows about remorse now, and the price he would pay for an act of violence. I’m not bound to believe him, only to act as if I do, but I do believe.

  Whatever the outcome may be, I’ll write again tomorrow. Now I’m going to read Tim’s memoir.

  When I opened the door to Ivo I never had any doubt. I didn’t have to touch him or pinch myself. I certainly didn’t feel like running screaming down the street. He was real, he wasn’t dead, and that was all.

  For a moment I did wonder about all the hundreds of previous sightings but I knew really when the phantoms and figments stopped and the real Ivo began. At Rosenkavalier on Saturday night. The men who followed me home and stood in the dark hall waiting for me and those who hovered on the corner of my glance, they weren’t real. They were what I always told myself they must be, what I argued that they were even when I was most afraid. The man on the beach was really Ivo and so was the man who leant against the sea wall, looking up at this house.

  For all that, it was a strange feeling inviting him in, watching him go up the stairs in front of me, then sitting opposite him, just looking, adjusting to it. We didn’t say much at first. We just looked at each other, not embarrassed, not even a bit awkward. I never felt he might have come here to be revenged and afterwards he told me he never felt that because he hadn’t died that first time I might try to kill him.

  Something odd had happened. The whole thing was more than odd but I don’t mean that. I mean that it was as if the normal restraints and inhibitions that are present even when two friends or lovers are together just weren’t there. We could be silent, we could speak, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter what we said either. We’d got beyond that. So I looked at him a bit longer and then I spoke. I asked him how he got off the island.

  No retorts, no recriminatio
ns, no sarcasm, none of that how-you-can-ask-that-after-what-you-did stuff. He just told me. He told me in a cool, practical way, as if he were giving an account of events to some board of inquiry. I shan’t go into it here, it’s enough to say another cruise ship called at Chechin between the storms. Ironically, it was the one I saw at the dock when the Favonia reached Prince Rupert.

  ‘I never thought of that,’ I said. ‘Or, rather, I thought the big boats couldn’t get up those narrow channels.’

  ‘Not that narrow there,’ he said and for the first time he smiled. ‘That’s the open sea, Tim.’

  He’d spoken my name for the first time. I asked him where he’d been since, for it seemed to me that he must have concealed himself somewhere out of the world, or spent two years wandering those northern wastes.

  He seemed surprised. ‘At home,’ he said. ‘Back at the Institute, living in the flat at Martin’s.’

  It was so simple. It had never occurred to me.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ he said.

  We went into the Mainmast. It was early but you have to get there early on a Sunday if you want a seat. All the time I was saying to myself, this is me and Ivo, I’m walking in here with Ivo, this is Ivo who isn’t dead. I’d even asked myself once if it was I that was dead and we’d met again in that afterlife I don’t believe in.

  The atmosphere of a seaside pub dispels heaven and hell fantasies. I was alive all right and so was he. He put his eyebrows up when I had a pint of Adnams and wouldn’t let him order a bottle of champagne. There’d have been some astonishment in there if he had, even supposing they had any.

  I told him what I did in N. and he said he’d booked up months before to come and hear Rosenkavalier. The reason for that was obvious, but he’d thought he might try Die Frau ohne Schatten as well, he thought he rather liked Richard Strauss, so he’d settled for one of our bargain festival four-day weekends. Of course there was the possibility I might be here but he hadn’t thought there was much chance of it. You could generally count on people like me putting themselves as far as possible from the family home as soon as they could. But he couldn’t resist a certain amount of nostalgic revisiting, going down what Clarissa calls ‘memory lane’. He couldn’t stop himself coming to look at the house, he came several times, it exerted an irresistible fascination. And then he saw me standing at the window…

  ‘Did you think I was real?’ I said.

  ‘Of course I did. What else?’

  ‘I was always seeing your ghost. How d’you account for that?’

  ‘Pure guilt.’

  ‘Or you projected part of yourself,’ I said. ‘Like a werewolf.’ He laughed. I didn’t. ‘I tried to kill you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I stole all your money and your credit card.’

  ‘That, I admit, was a nuisance.’

  ‘Don’t you mind any more?’ I said. ‘Did you ever mind?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I minded. Rather a lot, as a matter of fact.’ He smiled. ‘Have you still got my sister’s scarf?’ he said.

  She looked like him. I’d noticed it. I’ve even remarked on it somewhere in what I’ve written. The enormity of what I’d done silenced me.

  He said gently, ‘I stopped blaming you long ago.’

  ‘What about her?’ Her name stuck on my tongue. I couldn’t speak it. ‘How d’you feel about her?’

  ‘I’ll go and see her in the summer,’ he said. ‘She’s my twin. We used to be very close and I miss her a lot. We can’t go on like this.’

  We parted for the afternoon, Ivo and I. I felt I couldn’t take any more for the time being. I wanted to be alone to think about Isabel. The thing was, I ought to have been cast down, realizing the extent of what I’d done, understanding who she was and recalling the lies I’d told her, but I wasn’t. I was happy. I was full of hope. After all, I hadn’t killed Ivo, I hadn’t killed anyone, and if I’d stolen a lot of money I could make that right, I was seeing exactly how I could make that right.

  I could write to Isabel now. I could even phone her. Ivo wouldn’t care. I could tell after the first five minutes with him that he no longer wanted me, he no longer loved me, all that was over. If tolerance and forgiveness had survived the ordeals of my attempt to murder him and my theft of his property, love hadn’t, passion hadn’t. What did I expect? But, in fact, I was glad. I could imagine being friends with him and how good that would be, will be.

  It’s wonderful to be forgiven, it’s fizzy, heady, like champagne.

  Soon after Ivo came back it started to rain. He’d left his car in P. and come here by train. That made me put him off his idea of making a sentimental journey to the Kestrel for dinner. It would be as wet walking the beach or the dune path as it ever was on Chechin, and Ivo had nothing more waterproof with him than that famous leather jacket he’d been wearing on the island. We decided to go up to the Dunes instead, and even for that short journey I had to lend him the hooded rainproof jacket he’d bought me for Alaska. As he put it on I thought of that morning when it had been hanging over the cheval glass in my bedroom and in the shape of it I’d seen his ghost.

  Over dinner I said I wanted to give him the money I’d stolen from him. So far I’d only managed to save up a bit more than half of it, but I wanted him to have that. Of course he put up a massive resistance, I’d known he would, he had more money than I had, he’d forgotten that credit-card bill by now, it was all past and no longer painful. I believe he was thinking of me as the same person who once would have been relieved to have an offer like that refused. That man would have seized on the first murmur of refusal and said no more about it. And I didn’t say any more about it – not then.

  It was a dark night, starless, the moon like the reflection of a distant light in muddy water. The High Street was dressed with strings of flags as it always is at festival time. The little triangles, red, green, yellow, hung down dripping in the rain.

  ‘I’m going home tomorrow,’ he said.

  ‘Come in for a bit and I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  He burst out laughing. I loved him again then, the way I did when we walked here once before and he’d come up from the sea and told me the beach was tame, a pussy-cat of a beach. In the house, upstairs in the living room, I told him what it had been for me these past two years, the remorse, the hauntings, the sense of being a pariah, isolated from other people. I told him about seeing Martin Zeindler at a concert and then James Gilman and the Krupkas, but how there seemed always to be a glass wall between me and others.

  The one subject I didn’t touch on was the most important to me: Isabel. And this wasn’t only because it seemed a tactless thing to do. I didn’t know what to ask him, I didn’t know what to say. The first question would have had to be, ‘Does she hate me?’ and I was afraid to ask that.

  He said a bit more about how it had been, lecturing on the Favonia as if nothing had happened, finding explanations for people who kept looking at the plaster on his head and asking him what he’d done to himself. After that, I went down to fetch the tea. It would be the first time I’d ever made tea for Ivo.

  While I was away he’d been wandering round the room, looking at things, the way he does, the way he did that first time at Martin’s. If he’d looked at the manuscript lying on the desk there was no sign of it but he’d picked up the stack of envelopes the castaway letters had come in and was holding one of them in his hand.

  ‘What’s my brother-in-law been writing to you about?’ he said.

  So that also was explained. Kit Winwood had been both the jealous husband and avenging friend. He was, it appeared, inclined to these revenges. I didn’t mind, it gave me more hope. If he knew who I was and where I lived, if she had told him, I could hope.

  ‘None of the marooned people in his stories died on their islands,’ I said.

  Ivo laughed. ‘No, well, I didn’t. I expect that was part of what Kit was trying to say.’

  ‘How could she marry a man like that?’ I said.

  ‘Y
ou know better than to ask that sort of question about anyone.’

  I led him to the bookcase where the Russians were and showed him Sergius. He smiled when he saw the cavity inside with the money in it.

  ‘There’s something childlike about you still. I hope you’ll never lose it.’

  ‘Take the money,’ I said. ‘Take the whole thing. I want you to.’

  He still said no, so I took out my mother’s pearls and put Sergius in the pocket of the waterproof jacket when he wasn’t looking. Things tucked into pockets have been quite important for us in our strange history. And jackets lent to be worn for specific reasons or on certain occasions. (‘Wear this for me…’)

  The rain had stopped. That made me afraid he wouldn’t wear the jacket and I’d have to think of another means of giving him the money, but he said he’d walk back to the Latchpool along the beach. The sea was quite rough and there was a lot of spray. If the tide had been in, instead of about as far out as it goes, the waves would have come up over the shingle bank.

  I’d been wondering how we’d part. With a handshake and a promise to keep in touch? At the foot of the stairs he took me in his arms and held me for a moment or two. Then he was gone.

  I watched him go up the steps to the top of the sea wall. He didn’t turn round to wave, he thought I’d gone in. His body, then his head, disappeared over the other side and I heard the crunch and rattle of his feet on the pebbles. The night was too dark and the sea too far away to see any more, but I stood upstairs at the window for a while, looking into the blackness until my eyes grew accustomed to it and I could make out distant lights at Thorpeness and a light on a fisherman’s boat. Then I did something I hardly ever do. I drew the curtains.

  Knowing I wouldn’t sleep, I sat down and wrote this. It was my last chapter. Ivo wasn’t there any longer, standing at my elbow, letting me catch sight of him out of the corner of my eye. Once I looked between the gap in the curtains but it was deep dark, the sea invisible, silent but for the crash and receding roar of the tide. Some time around midnight I thought I heard a key tried in the front door lock. My imagination has to find something to act out, I expect, now it has lost the drama that was its mainstay.