by Barbara Vine
Then I maddened him by questioning Darwin’s theory of evolution. Ivo was a totally committed neo-Darwinist, and he refused to allow any alternative belief. When I said that it was just as likely God had made Adam and Eve and put them in a garden as that everything had reached where it was by chance, he got really angry.
‘There is no room for opinion here. Darwin is TRUE.’
‘It’s not true like two and two make four is true, though, is it? You needn’t shout.’
‘The comparison you make is stupid and ignorant, but, yes, it is an irrefutable truth about man and the physical world. You’ll be saying next that Archbishop Ussher was right and something called God put the fossils in the rocks in 4004 BC.’
‘You can’t prove he didn’t,’ I said, ‘any more than you can prove your origin of species and that we all came from chimps.’
Ivo shouted that this was the blinkered layman’s view, Darwin had never said we came from chimpanzees. What had he said then, I asked, and we went through the whole business again. Ivo had a framed cartoon of Darwin in his bedroom, the naturalist’s bushy-bearded face attached to the hairy body of an ape. I always found it repulsive, not to say off-putting, and one night I turned its face to the wall. It was several days before Ivo noticed.
All this sounds like a small thing but it wasn’t. I may have argued with Ivo but I was beginning to feel that his intellect towered over mine, that he was proud of this, and in spite of the instruction he was always trying to give me, wanted to keep it that way. When I was unfaithful to him it was partly to assert myself, to feel that I was a separate person with a separate life, and perhaps that there was a society out there that didn’t give a shit about neutrons, Gray’s yearly genesis parameter, sea gel solids and DNA.
Ivo had to go to a conference in Glasgow. He wanted me to go with him and I wouldn’t. I knew what it would be like, all those scientists talking incomprehensibly and when they found out – as they would in two minutes – that I wasn’t Ivo’s assistant, either ignoring me or treating me like some catamite he’d picked up on the M74. I said I needed three days to myself to get on with my novel.
Since moving in with him I’d lost what friends I’d made in creative writing. They’d never been much more than acquaintances. Emily and her coterie had given up their persecution of me; now they ignored me and, for some reason, the men on the course followed suit. What reason I didn’t know, for I doubt if anyone ever guessed about Ivo and me, and if they had, surely my own contemporaries in the 1980s would have been more open-minded than to ostracize me for being gay? I didn’t know then but I think I know now and it doesn’t make for comfortable self-appraisal.
I wasn’t lonely when Ivo was there, but once he was gone the loneliness increased with every passing hour. On the second evening I did a daring thing. Ivo wasn’t the sort of man who goes to places like that, but he’d once in passing pointed out from the car P.’s only gay club. I repeated to myself the old courage-boosting formula: ‘They can’t kill you,’ and went down there on the bus, Ivo having taken the car to Glasgow.
Strange, really, isn’t it, that I should quote that formula now? After all, I know if anyone does that it’s not fool-proof. Most people say it some time or other but if Ivo said it before we embarked on that flimsy little boat for Chechin Island, if he’d said to himself, ‘They can’t kill you,’ how wrong he’d have been. They could. Or, rather, I could. I did. It was such a grey day, the fog hanging in curtains over the mountains, even the shore line, the place made ugly by the stultifying, heavy, obscuring mists. The sea was grey with little dancing waves, no fin piercing its surface, no phocine creature showing itself. Only the small, darker grey shape of the island, a shallow triangle, and its rock chimney wrapped in cloud – but the time hasn’t come for this. Not yet. It will come, it must, but not yet. Now I’m on the bus going across town to William Street and the Fedora Club, to meet there and pick up, really to be picked up by, the pretty Indian boy called Mansoor.
There’s no point in describing the place or him. I took him back to Ivo’s. Martin saw us come in but I don’t think he suspected anything. He was on the stairs, having come in late himself, his cat stalking up ahead of him, and when he’d said good evening, he asked me please to keep the doors shut on the next day, the draughts had been terrible lately. He probably took Mansoor for a fellow-student.
Back in N. for Christmas, separated from Ivo for two weeks while he visited some old Cambridge professor who’d once taught him, I made friends with a girl I met at the ballet. Suzanne wasn’t a dancer but something like an assistant deputy stage manager. We went to bed three times and when she had to leave and go up north with the company I didn’t make arrangements to meet her again. I said goodbye and it had been nice but there was someone else.
It sounds strange, perhaps it sounds crazy, but I confessed both these infidelities to Ivo for what seemed to me at the time perfectly cogent reasons. The gay philosophy or lifestyle or mystique, whatever you like to call it, I’d never really got the hang of. What I had were a lot of ideas about it that were somehow off-balance. For instance, I believed that gay men were always much more promiscuous and inconstant than heterosexual people. I thought it was something to be taken for granted even in couples who were couples, who were living together in what on the face of it were one-to-one relationships. I thought Ivo might have had someone else while he was in Glasgow and someone else in Cambridge, and when I didn’t much like that idea I put this down to my not being entirely gay, being at least bisexual and perhaps not gay at all really. I was very confused.
As to Suzanne, believe it or not I thought it wouldn’t matter to Ivo about her because she was a woman and therefore this infidelity wouldn’t be ‘real’ to him. He couldn’t be in competition with her. While my being with Mansoor he would see as just a diversion when he wasn’t there, something gay men did, part of a cottaging philosophy. There were even couples who did it together, Mansoor had told me, picking up two or perhaps just one boy to take home, in perfect mutual approval and harmony.
I felt injured and shocked because Ivo didn’t take it that way. Why had I told him at all, he wanted to know. He’d rather have not known, he’d rather have remained in ignorance. His jealousy and his hurt were so great they even altered his appearance. They made his face go soft and lined with pain. I muttered something about his having once said we must be honest with each other.
‘I didn’t mean about things like that,’ he said and he sounded young and confused. He sounded like me.
Of course he ‘forgave’ me. If you love someone and want to be with them you haven’t much choice but to do this. It was early spring, our second spring together, and he began talking about going to Alaska. I’d forgotten he’d booked up for me, I’d also forgotten he must have paid for me, but I calculated that it wouldn’t be expensive – there I was wrong – as Ivo had said these cruises weren’t luxurious.
By this time I didn’t want to go. I’d started thinking about my future. By the time we were due to go away I’d have my M.A. What was I going to do? Not write fiction, of that I was becoming increasingly sure, and not stay in P. London beckoned. I needed a job, I should need money. Going away, perhaps even abroad somewhere, would ensure a natural break with Ivo, for his job was here at the Institute of Ontogeny, and there was no prospect of his following me to wherever I went. The end for me and Ivo was in sight and it was a kind of relief to think about it in these terms. I could tell myself that come August we should have parted.
He’d changed in more ways than just appearance. That soft look had gone and in that respect he was back to normal. But he’d begun to watch me. Not begun, no. He watched me all the time, and although I could never prove this I know he set someone else to watch me too. Not a real private detective, nothing so professional and unscrupulous, but just someone he paid a small amount to hang about outside and see what I did, where I went.
When I wasn’t at the university, at a lecture or a tutorial, and mostly at
this stage I wasn’t, I was at home writing my novel. It was strange, neurotic really, writing about a particular kind of disturbed, fraught love affair while I was in much the same kind of love affair myself. From the window, when I looked up from the typewriter, I could see this boy watching the house. The odd thing was that I’d seen him somewhere before, though I couldn’t think where. Usually he was in a parked car but sometimes on foot, strolling along the opposite pavement. It took me two or three days to realize I was being spied on. Once I did, I started going out the back way. This meant climbing over the fence and dropping down into the lane behind, but it was worth it to fool the watcher.
Then I decided to do better and give the watcher something to report back. By this time I’d remembered where I’d seen him before. It was at the Fedora, the one and only time I’d been there. Having escaped by the back fence, I had the good luck to run into Roberta of Dempster Road days. She seemed to bear me no malice, so I asked her back for a cup of tea. The watcher was there in his car, taking photographs for all I know. I’d kept Mansoor’s phone number and though I didn’t want him for sex ever again, I rang him up, asked him over and said we could go out for a drink. When he came I took care to keep him there for an hour before we left for the pub. Without his car that day, the watcher dived into the phone box when he saw us emerge, but he saw us all right.
Ivo never said a word about any of this. He never reproached me, he never asked, and I think this made me worse. I, who’d been almost reclusive, invited home everyone I encountered: Sharif one afternoon, Jeffrey another. And then, after he’d kept up his surveillance for a month, the boy disappeared, never to be seen again. Ivo had decided he could no longer afford his services or that my promiscuity was so excessive that it was pointless to record separate instances of it. Perhaps too he thought there was safety in numbers.
One day he said to me, out of the blue, ‘That first time, at Martin’s, why did you come up to me and touch me?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’d never done it to anyone before.’
‘Were you lonely? Did you see me as a father figure?’
‘I suppose I found you attractive,’ I said.
He looked thoughtful. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. You would put it like that. “Attractive” is nearly as debased a word as “nice”, it means nothing more than provoking a sexual itch, if that. Do you know what I thought when you touched me that day?’
I didn’t want to know. I found a courage I hadn’t yet been able to summon up. ‘Don’t start, Ivo, please, do you mind?’
‘No,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t mind. It’s better if I don’t tell you. Better for me, and I can’t say I care how you feel.’
‘Thanks very much.’
‘I should have gone on as I meant to when I began,’ he said. ‘I know that now. Stayed cool, kept you guessing, kept my feelings to myself. But I didn’t because I loved you. Too bad, isn’t it? I love you too much for your own good and far too much for mine.’
He was right there. At the time I’m afraid I just felt embarrassed. If he’d been sentimental with me that evening I truly think that would have been the end. I told myself I could have taken it from a woman, not from a man. The term and the course had only a couple more weeks to run and I think I’d have got out if he’d tried to talk about love to me then, I’d have found someone whose floor I could have slept on for those twelve or fourteen nights. But he was soon cold and practical, phoning his sister, marking essays, making a list of what I’d need for Alaska. We’d had no sex for a week and at ten sharp he went into his bedroom and shut the door behind him.
The devil in me that makes me conduct myself like this became active again. Ivo didn’t want me, or appeared not to want me, so once more I wanted him. I forgot about not really being gay, not being bisexual, about really being a woman’s man. For me Ivo became again simply the most attractive person I’d ever known. Was gender all that important, after all? Surely the civilized man desired the nature, the essence, the personality, not something dependent on physical shape, an extraneous bit here, a channel there. So I argued with myself, growing hungry for Ivo, dry-mouthed, his shut door an affront to me. His voice began once more to tease me and his tired dark eyes (‘your unfathomed eyes’, in the immortal verse of Gilman) began as of old to draw me to him.
It’s useless to say it now but I can’t help it. If I’d kept myself aloof till the end of term, if I’d said what I’d made up my mind I felt, that it wasn’t going to work, that it would soon be over, and, above all, that I was sorry but I couldn’t come to Alaska, he could say what he liked, storm at me as much as he liked, but I couldn’t go with him, if I’d done that I would never have met Isabel or seen those sinister little towns or Chechin Island and he’d be alive now.
I fell asleep over the typewriter this evening. It was because I’d decided the upright chair I usually sit in was too hard, so I’m in an armchair, one of my parents’ aged Parker-Knolls that look so ugly but are very comfortable. Weariness overcame me as I laid back my head for a moment and with sleep came Ivo in a dream.
Of course I’ve been aware of him in the room with me all evening, looking over my shoulder. And in the dream, anyway, he didn’t come to me; I went to him. I went to him as I did in life, five nights before term ended, knocking on a closed door and, when admitted, going to him as I had done that first time at Martin’s, to lay my fingers on his face and draw them gently down his cheek. In reality we’d made love, a rapturous resumption of a sex relation lost for too long; in the dream he changed into Isabel as I touched him, and I saw something I had never seen before, that they were alike, that they looked alike. I awoke, crying out.
Next day, close to me again, he gave me a batch of travellers’ cheques and $100. He checked up on my clothes, to see that I had the right waterproof gear, sound boots. Whatever I might think now, I should need binoculars. I should want if not need a camera.
The arrangement was that after the trip was over I’d fly to Portland, Oregon and stay with someone Ivo knew there. He’d be fulfilling his obligations as a cruise lecturer and would join me later. A Greyhound bus tour of north California had been fixed up for me before I flew back to meet him in Seattle. San Francisco was an obvious place for any newcomer to the western United States to visit, a ‘must’, but Ivo had noticeably left it out of my itinerary and of course I knew why. I was not to be exposed to the temptations of the world’s gayest city.
Thus appeared the first new cloud in our sky. Who wouldn’t resent being treated like a tempted child? I should have said no at this point. I didn’t. I kept telling myself that if I didn’t take this opportunity it might be years before another chance came. In any case, if I was careful with my money I might manage to save enough to take me over the Golden Gate on my own initiative.
But suddenly, the day before we left, Ivo said to me that he supposed I’d like to see San Francisco, he couldn’t think how he’d come to miss it out. Of course I wondered what had occasioned this change of heart and concluded it was intended as a sop to me for having to suffer something quite unexpected and unwelcome. For the first part of our trip I was to be left alone in Juneau.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I got the dates wrong. I thought I was starting my first lecture cruise on the 17th but I find it’s the 10th and you’re booked in for the 24th.’
Ivo wasn’t a liar but I didn’t see how this could be true. He had been talking about this for nine months, he’d gone on at least six of these cruises in previous years. Was it probable, was it even possible, that he had made all these arrangements for me, had carefully planned such tight itineraries, yet made such a glaring mistake in the starting date? He must have some other motive, I thought. There must be someone going on that first cruise he didn’t want me to meet, he must have changed the dates for me to keep me out of mischief. When challenged he only said he’d got it wrong, even he sometimes got things wrong, and he smiled his tired, worn smile.
I remained convinced, howeve
r, and I’m still convinced. There can be no other explanation. Some member of the ship’s crew, some other lecturer, even some passenger, expected to be on board during that fortnight beginning the 10th, would have constituted a threat to him and a chance for me. He wangled things, he pulled strings to avoid it, and as a result I was to be left to twiddle my thumbs (as Clarissa puts it) for thirteen days in what was surely Hicksville at the ends of the earth.
Juneau.
Ivo wasn’t to know that I’d meet Isabel there, at the Goncharof Hotel in Juneau. What temptation on board ship could have matched her? Who could have threatened him one half so much as she threatened him?
7
When people visit new countries they read up about them beforehand. Or so I’ve heard. I never have. But until then I hadn’t been to many countries, only the usual holiday places in Spain and Italy and, of course, to Paris with Ivo.
We had Fodor’s Guide to Alaska lying around and a couple of books by John Muir. I meant to look at them but I couldn’t get down to it. I just wasn’t interested. I didn’t even know what part of Alaska we were actually going to because I hadn’t looked at the atlas. On the other hand, I knew what it would be like from Ivo’s letters of the summer before, temperate rain forest that feels cold and wet, a natural-history excursion that wouldn’t be so very different from camping out in the rain.
My feelings must have shown because it was then that Ivo began really reprimanding me and taking me up on everything I said. He’d always had his sarcastic spells, but now he was everlastingly telling me off. I didn’t protest much, I put up with it, anything for a quiet life. But every day that brought our departure nearer reinforced my feeling that I simply didn’t want to go. At the same time I knew I was going, I couldn’t get out of it at that stage, I’d resigned myself to the inevitable. Besides that, I had the idea that if I went on this trip I’d somehow be set free to tell Ivo as soon as it was over that we’d come to the parting of the ways. It was quite irrational, I knew that, but it was what I felt and it was a kind of pact I made with myself. Go with him, I was saying, not to enjoy yourself, not to expect that, not for anything but because he wants you to, go on sufferance, grit your teeth and endure, and then somehow you can leave him, put it all behind you and everything will be all right.
