No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  ‘What exactly do you do?’ I said.

  ‘I go with the ship wherever it’s going, Kodiak Island or Anchorage or the Inside Passage, and I give – well, say five lectures on a twelve-day trip, and I take people ashore and show them things of geological interest, particularly glaciers. There are other scientists, bird people and botanists, all sorts of natural historians. That’s what passengers go for, to learn about wilderness ecology, these are serious cruises, they’re not luxury trips with drinking and dancing, you know. People book up partly for the lectures. They’d feel cheated if one of the lecturers wasn’t there.’

  I thought it sounded deadly but I didn’t say so. ‘I suppose I could come with you.’

  This, it turned out, would be impossible. Reservations were made, mostly by middle-aged or elderly Americans, business people and academics, nine months in advance. It would be useless putting my name down; they already had waiting lists of would-be passengers hoping for people with reservations to drop out.

  ‘Surely you could get me in on it as your – friend.’

  ‘Tim,’ he said, ‘don’t you think I would if I could? Don’t you think I’d jump at the chance?’

  Then he’d just have not to go, I said. He couldn’t leave me alone for a month. What was I supposed to do? I sounded petulant and I was pouting like an affronted bimbo, I know I was, but I didn’t know and don’t know now how a man in my situation avoids that kind of behaviour. The relationship between two such as we were, a young, not very strong-minded, penniless boy and a clever, comfortably off, dominant older man, seems naturally to make for it. I, who had never before been sulky, coquettish, a creature of moods and explosions of temper, was all these now. But perhaps, yes, I had been so once before, with James Gilman.

  It frightened me and I hated it and that only made me angrier with myself. I felt my maleness being sapped. I shouted at Ivo that of course he couldn’t go, he must give it up. I even asked him if he could bear being parted from me for four weeks. He said he was going and that was that and as for me, I couldn’t even stay in P. Martin liked the place to himself in June and July.

  I did it deliberately. Hating myself for it, I made my eyes big and round, I made my expression winsome, and said that if I really meant anything to him (note that the word ‘love’ had not at that time ever been used between us), if I meant anything to him he wouldn’t go away like this and leave me alone.

  He turned on me a look of the coldest contempt. ‘Oh, stop it,’ he said. ‘Look at you, making faces because Sugar Daddy won’t take you on holiday. Have you any idea how ridiculous you are?’

  I went over to him and hit him in the face. Of course he hit me back and we fought for a while, which led inevitably to love-making and making-up and champagne. He’d have to go, he said, but for the following year he’d book up well in advance so that I could go with him.

  The following year … It was a long way off but it didn’t seem like that then. It made me feel happy because Ivo had not only said we’d still be together the following year but had taken it for granted we would be.

  Term ended, I went to N. and he to Vancouver and thence to Juneau and the Panhandle of Alaska.

  This evening when I got home from Consortium House I made myself go into the bedroom that used to be mine. Behind that always-closed door were all the things I had brought home with me at the end of my last term at the University of P. I’d put them away in my bedroom and next day I’d gone with Ivo to Alaska. When I returned a month later I put the things I’d brought back with me in there too, Isabel’s scarf, the garnet, my binoculars, the map of Seattle I’d bought, Thierry Massin’s address, written down on the inside of an air-ticket envelope. But I couldn’t bring myself to sleep there among it all, so I moved into the room my parents had used.

  But I knew I had to go in there now. I was going to find the letters Ivo wrote to me from Juneau and the ship that first summer and re-read them. If I could. If I could bear it.

  It was very cold and very dusty. The suitcase and the canvas bag were still standing where I had put them, between the desk and the window, and a fine coating of white dust covered them like a sprinkling of snow. I’d taken my mother’s suitcase to Alaska and a big backpack.

  The letters were in the outer pocket of the larger case and at some point I had put the pages of the ultimately abandoned boy-by-the-sea novella in its orange folder in there too. I had total recall of exactly what was where, the disposing of the books and papers, the distribution of clothes. Or I thought I had. What I had forgotten was his photograph, for some reason stuck in the file with the novella pages.

  I couldn’t take my eyes from it. Sitting on the floor in that cold, dirty room, hearing the sea out there, the rush and pebbly withdrawal of the tide, I devoured his face, the features both grave and full of laughter, the deep eyes, the tired mouth, the lock of black hair falling.

  And I was nearer being in love with Ivo then than I’d ever been in life. I was even breathing the shallow breaths of the lover as I gazed. Whatever it had cost me, if I could have done it, I’d have brought him back.

  There’s a story the ancient Greeks tell of the man who found a frozen serpent. He took pity on it and put it in his bosom, but when it was revived by the warmth it stung him. Before he died the man reproached the serpent for its ingratitude, but all it said as it wriggled away was, ‘I was still a serpent.’

  Ivo didn’t save my life but he was good to me, he loved me, and when I woke up I stung him. His eyes gazed sadly at me. I looked at the hand that had killed him and laid it heavily across the photographed face.

  6

  Ivo wrote better letters than anyone in creative writing. I remember how this surprised me at the time. That was when I still believed in an absolute divide between scientists and those concerned with the arts, and expected scientists to be more or less illiterate.

  Ivo wrote to me that first summer when I was at home in N. and he wrote to me while I was with Isabel in Juneau, waiting for the cruise ship to come back. In those letters, especially the second set, he wrote about the beautiful places he visited and the ugly interesting ones, the gold rush towns and the disused mines. He wrote about the glaciers, about the animals and birds and unspoilt places. The people on board ship amused him and some excited his admiration, especially those academics whose learning was so enthusiastic. There were others that maddened him by their hugely comprehensive knowledge of their own subject and total ignorance of almost everything else. He wrote about them and the funny or clever or foolish things they said.

  He told me how it rained day after day. For some reason people think rain forests are confined to the tropics, but because it was so wet, when a sunny day came it was the more gloriously appreciated. The lecturers, along with the ship’s company and the staff, slept deep in the ship, well below the water-line, so when Ivo got up in the morning he had no way of knowing what the weather was till he came up on deck. He wrote to me about the glory of a fine day at sunrise when the sky was blue, the mist gone and the majestic mountains revealed in the clear air.

  Re-reading the letters gradually became more and more painful. And this wasn’t only because they were Ivo’s letters, but also because of their subject matter. They were, after all, about the rain forest on the north-west coast of America where he was to die and I was to kill him, and they brought back everything, including some things I’d succeeded in forgetting.

  I read three of them, constantly stopping to shut my eyes, to clench my hands, once to put my head in my hands. There was no one to see me but if anybody had they’d have thought me ill, with some sort of palsy or chorea. But what do I mean, no one to see me? As I sat there in the bay window – for I’d brought the letters down into the living room – I was aware more strongly than ever that he was watching me. He was standing behind my chair, looking over my left shoulder. I even felt him, I felt his hand touch my shoulder as I dropped my head into my hands, I heard him say softly: ‘Tim …’

  I jumped u
p with a cry. There were more lights in the room to put on and I put them on. I even fetched a lamp in from the bedroom next door, a lamp with a 150-watt bulb, and switched it on, trembling. The room was bright, dazzling and shadowless and it was quite empty. I tried to read on; I couldn’t. At the end of the third letter he’d written: ‘I wish you were with me. Because you aren’t I’m not enjoying this the way I usually do and I have a strong sense of my heart not being in it, no doubt because my heart is elsewhere. I miss you very much.’

  That was too much for me. I wanted the letters out of my sight and pushed them under the window seat, letting the flounce or whatever it’s called fall down and hide them. Then I seated myself at the typewriter and wrote this, an attempt at exorcism more needed today than ever. Of course it doesn’t work, but it helps. It’s as if I’m saying, when I’ve got it all down I can’t go through it all again, that isn’t the way it happens, something at least will be over. I even have a feeling that I’ll be cleaned, I’ll be washed white.

  When Ivo came back from Alaska we were longing for each other. In spite of what he’d said about missing me he’d nevertheless taken an extra month to visit friends and I was desperate for him. Martin might have wanted his house empty all summer, but Ivo was, after all, paying the full rent, not a retainer, and I hadn’t any compunction about moving back in the middle of August. I was there waiting when the taxi brought him home.

  At the end of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, James Tyrone’s wife says of him and her, when they first knew each other, it’s the last line of the play, ‘We were so happy for a little while.’ Well, that was Ivo and me. We were so happy for a little while.

  One thing I haven’t mentioned in this chronicle, narrative, account, whatever you like to call it, is the money I stole from Ivo. Of course I know I can’t right that wrong. I can’t give it back to him, the $700 I took from his cabin, all the booze and food I bought with the travellers’ cheques he gave me to sign and stood over me while I did it, the meals Isabel and I shared, my airfares and the cost of the hotels in Seattle, the coat I bought Thierry. Ivo’s dead, so I can’t give it back. So far as I know, he had no next-of-kin except that sister whose name and address I’ve no means of discovering. So I’ve calculated what I owe him and I’m going to give the money to something or someone, a worthy cause, a charity, I don’t know yet.

  It’s about $2,000. Call it £1,300. That’s about an eighth of my annual earnings before tax and a considerable sum to me, but I’ve raised half of it. If it’s in the bank it will just get lost in my account, so I keep it in Sergius. My mother’s pearls are still in there, but now they lie between two thin piles of notes.

  Re-reading what I just wrote, I can see it would look very self-righteous and sort of goody two-shoes to anyone else. Well, it’s a change for me to be like that. And I can’t help it. I’m setting it down for my own benefit, to remind me to keep at it, not to make excuses for finding another use for the money.

  In our second year of creative writing we were expected to write a novel. It was the equivalent, I suppose, of a dissertation. The writer-in-residence had written three novels, one of which had been something of a success and adapted for television, so was supposed to be an expert. With Martin it was more a matter of theory than practice. But he was as astute as ever at picking out colloquial contractions. My novel was going to be about a love affair between a young student and – guess what? – an older university teacher, only I thought it safer and wiser to make the teacher a woman.

  Whatever ours had started out as, Ivo’s and mine, by the autumn it had become a love affair. I think that happened a week or two before Ivo made his momentous statement, because it wasn’t much more than a couple of months after the statement that things began running downhill.

  We weren’t in bed or anything. We weren’t in any sort of romantic situation. I was very cagey about letting him take me out to meals, I didn’t want to be seen dining alone with him. It was one thing people from the university knowing I had a room here, everyone knew that, but quite another for them to see us out together. Sometimes, though, we’d go for a drink to a pub in the country outside P., and it was in one of these places that he said it. We were sitting at a table in the corner. The pub was quite crowded and we sat opposite each other, looking, I suppose, like just a couple of guys who knew each other and sometimes went out for a drink. I used to fantasize about this a bit, I used to think, this is how it is: he’s my brother-in-law, married to my sister, and I’ve dropped in and while she’s putting the kids to bed, I’ve said, How about coming for a drink? And he’s said, Why not? Better make it a quick one, though. That’s how people would see us, I thought, that’s how they’d place us, and I liked it, I felt it put me more securely into my gender. I was turning it over in my mind, looking at the angles, when he said, out of the blue:

  ‘I love you.’

  He spoke very softly, but casually too, and not in an intense way, not in a whisper. I didn’t say anything.

  ‘I’m very much in love with you,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear to be separated from you.’

  I’ve already written down what I thought in relation to Emily, about there being only two replies to ‘I love you:’ ‘I know’ and what I said to Ivo, ‘I love you too.’

  But even as I said it I had a feeling I was answering like this to be polite, to avoid hurting him, to be kind. Perhaps, too, to avoid trouble. Because even as I said it I was thinking, I don’t know what I mean by ‘I love you’, I don’t know what love is. And I was wishing, even then, that he hadn’t said it, that he’d controlled himself, kept it back. It frightened me, hearing him say it, as if it conferred on me a responsibility I didn’t want and couldn’t handle, a responsibility I wasn’t equal to.

  All this should have made me cautious and careful. It didn’t. Fool that I was, I compounded it. For some reason, I had to, I had to reinforce what I’d said even though I didn’t really feel it, to convince myself maybe or to strengthen what in my ears had sounded wretchedly feeble.

  ‘I really do love you,’ I said.

  I wanted to make him happy. The trouble with that is, as I now know, that it’s no use making a person happy for five minutes or five days, you have to keep it up, you have to sustain it. It’s got to be a life’s work.

  Is it something in me or are plenty of people like this? Am I alone or is it just part of the human condition? He diminished himself in my eyes by saying he loved me. Contempt is too strong a word, I didn’t despise him for it, but I pitied him a little, and that’s the next thing.

  That night, in bed, the sex had lost something. He loved me, therefore he was less desirable. He had confessed this weakness in himself, his need of me, his inability to bear separation from me, and I wanted him strong and cool and scornful. He loved me, therefore I loved him no longer.

  Of course it wasn’t the sudden happening I’ve described. I was even a little elated at the time by being told what I’d been told. I was proud of myself for my conquest. If the sex was somewhat below par I blamed the drink, of which I’d taken, not unusually for me, rather too much. That was when I started drinking in a big way, when I was with Ivo and Ivo paid.

  Even then, our relationship might have endured if we’d had something in common. It was easier for him because he was a reader and had read quite a lot of what for want of a better term I’ll call English literature. He didn’t stare blankly if I talked about this or that novelist or poet. About most things in physics, chemistry and biology, not to mention maths, I was totally ignorant. Ivo was in despair over me, he wanted to know what I’d been doing when the ‘rudiments of these disciplines’ (his phrase) were taught me in school. I could only say I’d forgotten, they’d gone from my mind, entirely evaporated. To save my life I couldn’t have done Pythagoras’ theorem or explained Boyle’s law.

  He said if some people were illiterate and others innumerate I was inscientious. Of course I took him up on that, asked what sort of Latin roots he thought those were, didn�
��t he know ‘scientia’ meant knowledge, not science? Did he realize he was actually calling me ignorant?

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you want to put it that way, you are. In the nineteenth century they’d have thought it ridiculous to go to a university to study English literature. That was something a man picked up in the course of the intellectual life. What was it after all but reading a few plays and pieces of poetry?’

  I was hurt and we quarrelled. He gave me Stephen Jay Gould to read and Lewis Thomas and John Bleibtreu and took out a subscription for me to New Scientist magazine. After puzzling over the first few numbers I stopped even opening them, and Ivo found a pile of them later, still in their plastic wrapping.

  Perhaps love, real love, would have triumphed over this. In Ivo’s case it did. He loved me even though I believed in – or had never thought of believing or not believing in – the inheritance of acquired characteristics in natural selection. Perhaps he loved me more, because my ignorance meant that he could instruct me in the theories of Lyell and Darwin and the errors of Lamarck. It probably wasn’t his fault that I didn’t listen, that I was bored. These lessons reminded me of childhood sessions with my father when he insisted on reading Kipling aloud to me. Ivo often said he wasn’t aiming to teach me as he taught his students, only a little to lighten the darkness in which I lived. I was as ignorant, he said, as those Elizabethans whose drama I’d spent so much time studying, and I didn’t even have their pseudo-sciences of astrology and divination and other mumbo-jumbo; I had nothing.

  But he loved me. In spite of everything he loved me, he couldn’t help himself. One day I made him happy by remembering that there was something called the Pleistocene period. Of course I couldn’t remember anything about it or when it was and I only remembered the name because it reminded me of Plasticine, a pliable clay for children’s use that came before Play-Doh and of which I was very fond when about eight.