by Barbara Vine
He had brought a lot of champagne. I’d never been much of a drinker but with Ivo I took to drinking, it became inseparable from making love with him. It was quite a long time before I realized I was drinking much more than he was. Harder to face was the fact that I seemed to need a drink first. But not then, not on New Year’s Eve and the early days of the New Year, the honeymoon on the cliff edge with the rain endlessly pouring outside and the sea swelling and exploding on the shingle.
We went up to Orford to the Oysterage for dinner and to the Swan at Southwold. The Consortium’s Nativity Revels didn’t end till Twelfth Night and they were putting on two operas in January. We went to hear Rosenkavalier. It was a change for me to be able to offer Ivo a new experience. Ochs’ aria he said was the best song he’d ever heard, so I bought him a tape in the foyer. It was highlights from Rosenkavalier with the Great Waltz on it and ‘Ohne mich, ohne mich’. Although it was raining, we walked back to the Kestrel along the dune path, singing ‘Ohne mich’, or as much of it as I could remember. I made my own translation, into bad verse. The words made Ivo laugh, he said it would have to be our tune.
Without me, without me,
Every day’s misery,
But with me – am I wrong?
No night is too long!
Ivo stayed until the last day before term started and he drove me back to P. with him. I’ve never been back to the Kestrel. When I go for a walk I go the other way. But this past week I haven’t been able to write. A depression settled on me, no doubt the result of writing and re-reading those last few pages, and I expect I made it worse by walking up the coast, partly on the beach, partly on the cliff path, to the place where Ivo and I passed those heady days and nights.
The Kestrel Hotel. Bed and Breakfast. All rooms with bath. Bar Food. Three-course dinner: £12.50. Vacancies. Well, there would be vacancies in October.
I stood on the shingle and looked up at the slate-roofed, white-painted building, put up perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago, and I marvelled that it still stood, that the sea which took everything along that coast had left it still beetling over its little fragile bit of cliff. Not a tree in sight; green turf, a huddle of cottages, a fish-and-chip place, a church spire and the power station. It looked enormous from where I was, bigger than it used to be. They’re always building extensions to it. If you half-close your eyes it might be a castle that you’re looking at, or even a modern city of towers. You’d think it was beautiful if you didn’t know what it was.
Ivo’s bedroom had been the one at the top in the left-hand corner. I’d been writing about us in the past days and, in order to do so, summoned up some remains of that physical madness that gripped me then, feeling actual lust in my body for the first time for over a year. Writing about it used it up, leaving me drained and dry and sexless, like an old man. Now I could barely believe I’d done those things, felt those things, been so swept up, spellbound, crazy. I could barely believe I’d been Ivo’s ardent lover.
These feelings were soon swamped by guilt, as they always are. A woman with a hard, suspicious face was watching me from the window that had been Ivo’s. I turned away and began to walk back inland, along the muddy paths between the rushes, under the heavy cables that carry electricity away from the power station. Rain in the air sang in the wires, making a dull sorrowful musical note. I thought of how we do things that a few years later we can’t believe we’d have dreamt of doing. And Ivo, or his shade, his imagined ghost, the shadow I’ve conjured, who has been absent while I was writing, came silently back into the corner of my eye. I turned my head just in time to catch the toss of his black hair, the dark bloom on his skin, and to see a thin hand raised as if to ward me off.
It was like one of M. R. James’s stories. He knew this coast, this sea, these flat fields. The pursuer that recedes and dwindles as you quickly turn to catch him is his kind of thing, the figure that’s half-seen, the companion that’s always with you. James himself was probably homosexual, but firmly locked in the most respectable and scholarly of closets. Whatever his pursuers and pursued had in their pasts it wasn’t love-battles on a sweaty bed, the room sweet-smelling of semen and champagne.
When I got home I was so cold I lit a fire up here and sat in the armchair in front of it reading Dante, the Inferno, in the Dorothy Sayers translation. There was a purpose behind this. I wanted to see in which circle of hell he puts murderers. The worst part, I expected, Circle Nine, and to reach it I had to read the whole poem. It took me hours but what else when not at work, do I have to do? And do you know, Dante has no murderers in hell at all!
There are plenty of people there for something else, people who happen to have committed murder in the course of their crimes. But no one is in hell specifically for killing someone. Heretics and traitors, panders and seducers, hypocrites and spendthrifts, blasphemers and suicides, but no murderers. It opens up all kinds of strangeness. For murder surely is the worst crime we can think of, the ultimate sin. Seducing, not to mention blasphemy and a spot of wrath, is nothing to it. Not then, though, not in the thirteenth century, if Dante is to be believed, and he must be. These things are hard to grasp, for we can’t migrate back six centuries. But can it be that if I’d lived in Florence in 1292, I’d have considered myself far less of a sinner than Julius’s brother, who killed himself with Ecstasy and gin last year?
In front of the dying embers of that fire, before I went at last to bed, I also re-read the latest efforts of my transatlantic correspondent on his legal-pad paper. The writer gives me no chance to forget what I did. By now he has sent me five. One of the two most recent came last Monday, the other yesterday. Both envelopes were handwritten, one postmarked Seattle, the other Sacramento, California.
The first letter was as follows:
The islands called St Paul and Amsterdam lie in the Indian Ocean roughly halfway between South Africa and Australia. In 1790 a Frenchman, Captain Peron, was marooned there from the American vessel Emily. The four sailors abandoned with him quarrelled amongst themselves and all died as a result of their brawls, leaving the poor Frenchman to a hermit’s existence.
There he remained for three years, living on a diet of fish, the eggs of seabirds and seal meat, the only vegetation consisting of no more than mosses and ferns. Chance alone brought an end to his misfortunes. Vessels en route to China did not generally put in at St Paul, but one did in July 1793, by mere chance. This was HMS Lion, a British warship, carrying the diplomat Lord Macartney. This distinguished passenger was curious to take a closer look at St Paul, a boat was lowered and as a result Captain Peron was rescued.
Yesterday’s contribution to the canon varied somewhat from the old-fashioned, gloomy and vaguely moralistic tone of the previous ones. It was a lot more bloodthirsty and the protagonist was stranded on a boat, not an island.
This is a story of the herring fleet that operated out of Southwest Harbor, Maine. The date was 1904. When the boat Cannon foundered in a storm the only survivors of a crew of ten were three men who managed to reach a lifeboat. They were Jeb Cannon of Southwest Harbor, James Thomas of Damariscotta and Clem Mallory of Ellsworth. A widespread search failed to find any trace of them.
Cannon was picked up a month later. The other men had disappeared but there were large pieces of meat in the boat. Cannon admitted this was human flesh. Thomas and Mallory had died, he said, and he had eaten their bodies to stay alive.
Fourteen years later, dying of a fever, he confessed the truth to neighbours on his deathbed. Two weeks after the storm he had shot Mallory with a pistol he had salvaged from the wreck. Then he had cut him up and eaten pieces of the body. When Mallory’s remains went bad and had to be discarded overboard, he had shot Thomas.
The confession over, Cannon’s neighbours crept away and left him to die alone. Refusing him burial in their village, they took his body out to sea and dropped it over the side.
Is this sequence of letters intended to lead somewhere? If there is any progression or development I can’t see
what it is. Each seems to be the isolated story of a man saving himself by escaping from a shipwreck or being abandoned, alone or with companions, on an island. And now, cannibalism.
Does my correspondent make up these stories or are they true? The experience of Alexander Selcraig/Selkirk is of course fact, it’s the most famous of all desert-island adventures, but are the others? If they are true, where does he or she get them from? Is he a collector of castaway experiences and if so for what purpose?
It looks as if, by asking these questions, it’s merely my curiosity which has been aroused by these letters. But that’s not so. Their purpose must be to frighten me and they do frighten me.
That in itself is strange, for a month ago if anyone had asked me, I’d have said that I wasn’t afraid any longer of anything much, certainly not of being found out and punished. Only of my own mind and the tricks it plays.
5
The room I sleep in that was my parents’ bedroom is too narrow for its high ceiling and the Victorian bay window is ill-proportioned. But it looks on Sole Bay, as the windows of the living room below it do. A dark green roller blind keeps out the glare when the sun rises out there beyond the edge of the sea.
An unaccustomed whiteness of light awoke me this morning before the geese started and without looking I knew it had snowed in the night. I didn’t want to look, I had no wish to confront it, for snow reminds me – as if I needed reminding – of the Inside Passage, and when it is fresh and untouched, of the glaciers that Ivo loved and took me to walk on in the blue air and the bitter cold.
Lying there in bed in the still, dark room, where all the light was round the edges of the blind and shimmering a little through it, I saw his figure in the deep shadows of the alcove the chest of drawers only half fills. I put it in these words, though of course I knew within seconds it was not he, it was not even a dream of him, but that what I saw was the cheval glass I had pushed to a strange angle and over which, for some reason, I’d hung my hooded waterproof coat when I came in the night before. It had been raining and the rain had turned to snow. For a moment only it had been he, tall and thin, his hand holding the mirror and reflected in it, his head turned to the window as if his eyes could penetrate the blind.
It was that waterproof jacket which started it, not only because of its shape, I’m sure, but because it was the one I got specially to wear in Alaska.
The snow had come early, and for a freak November fall it was deep. For us, on this coast, it was deep. It always seems to me to lie uneasily at the seaside, appropriate for towns and cities, for the inland countryside, most suitable for mountains, but wrong here on the coast, almost ludicrous. What could be sillier than snow on the beach?
The gulls have turned yellow-grey against its whiteness and covered the blanket of it from this house to the sea with the cuneiform patterns their twiglike feet make. It began snowing again as I walked to Consortium House and the snow flew in fast-melting feathers against the windows of my room as I sat down to work. We are making arrangements for the Nativity Revels, the biggest and best, Julius claims, of all carol services held in England. It goes on for four days and between them the choirs and soloists sing every Christmas carol ever written. It has been my task, among a good many others, to see to the arrangements for televising the big Christmas Eve service. It’s to be transmitted live and nothing must go wrong.
I suppose it is because I have been writing about Ivo – not because I have been thinking about him, I always do that – that I kept seeing him throughout the day. He was at my elbow to be quickly dispelled by a sharp turn of my head. When the snow ceased and the sun came out his shadow fell long and black across my desk and streaked along the floor. At lunchtime I went outside, only next door, to Thalassa, but I saw him. He was in the bookshop, his face clouded but not hidden by the bookseller’s absurd mock-sixteenth-century glass, hunting down a paperback in the science section. I was half-way across the high road, unable to believe this was not Ivo, when he turned his head and instead of that dark weariness, those heavy-lidded eyes, the lick of black hair, I saw a pink face, moustached, determinedly cheerful, making the best of a dreary life.
After work I went to the public library and asked if they had anything on castaways, marooned sailors, that sort of thing, and was offered, from the juvenile section a very old copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. Eventually I came away with quite a scholarly looking book, an examination of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century seafarers’ tales, and a journal kept by the wife of the captain of the Maid of Athens between 1869 and 1870.
It seemed to stay light longer this afternoon because of the snow. As I walked home I could see quite clearly where the white beach meets the grey sea and the creamy hulk of the lifeboat rears up behind the sea wall. Darkness is as strange as its opposite when there is snow on the ground. It becomes black light instead of an absence of light, translucent, shimmering, ghostly. The irony of the lifeboat station’s having been moved to within fifty yards of my own house is not lost on me. It is as if some power-that-is has said: You shall see the life-savers every day, you shall see the boat, you who made death by sea and did nothing to save him.
Until I get the electric fan and the oil stove and maybe a coal fire going, the damp chill of the house is all around me as I step into the hall. Usually it feels colder than outside, such a still, oppressive moist cold that even the air indoors is not quite clear. The snow hushes everything. The noisy world grows silent, for people stay at home and car engines are muted, slowly and softly driven.
I moved in with Ivo. It sounds simple, put like that, but in fact my move was the result of an enormous row which broke out in the house in Dempster Road. The evening I got back to P., Ivo dropped me outside the front door. In the holidays, I’d half-forgotten the people I’d been sharing a house with. They were just people I’d been thrown in among and as for Emily, she’d become my girlfriend more through propinquity and convenience that any great attraction on either side. Certainly not on mine. She had faded from my consciousness and retained a significance there about on a level with Gilman’s or, say, my mother’s friend that I called Auntie Noreen. Roberta Clifford and Sharif Qasir I had never liked. I thought her an opinionated bore while he took offence at the least things and was absurdly belligerent besides.
I walked into the squalid little living room, only at that moment thinking I might be called on to give some sort of explanation to Emily for not having been in touch. The three of them were sitting in there. They weren’t reading or studying anything or watching television. They were waiting for me and three pairs of eyes turned on me as I came in.
I suppose Emily had asked Roberta and Sharif to stay there and give her support. Emily’s face was blazing with anger and the other two wore those grim, self-righteous expressions which indicate enormous enjoyment is being derived from taking a moral stand.
Emily began by asking me if I’d been ill. Her voice was held under considerable control – then. Only illness, severe illness, she said, would excuse my neither phoning nor writing to her since she went home nearly a month before.
We were practically engaged to be married, she said. ‘Informally engaged’ was the term she used.
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ I said.
‘In Scotland,’ said Roberta, ‘Emily would be your wife by now in the law. Living together like you’ve been and everyone knowing it, that’s enough to make her your wife.’
‘What a load of crap,’ I said. I didn’t believe it, it was rubbish, and I was going upstairs. Sharif jumped up and stood barring the door.
‘Oh, please,’ I said. It was one of Ivo’s expressions, uttered in exasperation. ‘Oh, please.’
‘In another era,’ said Roberta, who’d read nineteenth-century social history, ‘Emily would have sued you for breach of promise. Her Dad would have put a notice in the paper, warning other girls to have nothing to do with you. If they did that now I expect it would go out on TV.’
‘It’s no fuckin
g business of yours,’ I said. ‘You keep out of it.’
‘How dare you speak like that in front of a lady!’ said Sharif.
I couldn’t resist it. ‘That was no lady,’ I said, ‘that was my Scottish common-law wife.’
He punched me. I leapt aside and kicked out at him. We would have been fighting in a minute if Roberta hadn’t grabbed Sharif’s arm and Emily jumped up and flung her arms round me. I threw her off and she fell on the floor. I made for the stairs. Luckily, my door had a lock on it, so once inside I slammed it and turned the key. But that was far from the end. Emily came banging on the door in the middle of the night and shouted abuse at me when I wouldn’t open it. I could deal with that. It was much harder coping with her tears when she caught me as I came creeping out to the bathroom first thing in the morning, again flung her arms round me and began crying and sobbing.
There must be another woman, she sobbed. She wanted to know who she was and how long it had been going on, and also wanted to assure me that no one would love me as she did, no one would ever do as much for me as she would do. I said I didn’t want anything done for me and she cried the louder. She began screaming and stamping her feet. It was six in the morning and the students in the house next door started thumping on the wall with what sounded like a broom handle. In the end I slapped her because that’s what is always recommended in cases of hysteria.
That day I spent in the library to discover when I returned home rather cautiously in the late afternoon, that the three of them with some kindred spirits had got up a deputation to the woman who deals with accommodation placements at P. and said they couldn’t live under the same roof with me. No doubt, they told her some long tale of their own invention.
‘You’ve got a strange way of getting a man to marry you,’ I said to Emily. ‘What do you do when you want to put him off?’
That inflamed Sharif. He picked up a hideous green glass vase off the nasty wood-chip table and was going to hit me over the head with it, but once again Roberta intervened and reminded him we were expected to pay for breakages. I asked her where I was supposed to go.
