No Night is Too Long

by Barbara Vine

  Who do we think is listening when we make these bargains? Who or what is going to make things right because we’ve honoured our part of the contract?

  My M.A. was assured and I didn’t much mind missing the degree congregation at the beginning of July. The day after the University of P. came down for the summer I borrowed Ivo’s car, filled it with all my stuff, including the novel about the young man and the older woman, and drove it to N. The day after that we flew to Vancouver and thence to Juneau.

  The way Goncharof was spelt and the fact that ‘hotel’ was put after the name and not before it did more than anything in those first hours to show me I was in the United States. That was something else I’d forgotten or not thought about. But everything was astonishing. Everything was a surprise from the moment we landed.

  The weather, for a start. It was eighty degrees and the sun blazing hot. The sky was bright blue and the air the cleanest and clearest I’ve ever known. The only snow was on top of the mountains. The sea was blue and the grass was green, but these were like platonic ideals of green and blue, the truest, the brightest, the most perfect. And you could stand, surrounded by all this, as we did at the airport, looking at the bright clear pristine beauty and yet feel the sun hot on your skin. I started to feel happy. Contemptible, really, to think that this is what good weather can do.

  The airport is about eight miles out of Juneau. We went there in a taxi and on the way we saw a little black bear fishing on the wetlands. Ivo smiled and pointed. He was as proud as if it belonged to him, he’d trained it and put it there himself. Except that when I said this to him, hoping he’d be pleased, all he said was:

  ‘I wouldn’t own, still less train, any animal.’

  He’d been morose ever since we’d left Vancouver. But nothing could have lowered my spirits except perhaps if he’d said the arrangements had been changed and I’d be going with him next day. There’s something oppressive about being with a person that you know disapproves of you and loves you at the same time. I was suddenly very much looking forward to being left alone, even if it was going to be for nearly two weeks. And if I was a bit taken aback at first to find that he’d booked a double room for us at the Goncharof, I soon told myself I’d be sharing it for only one night.

  On the way, remarking on the Russian names we saw up on hoardings and signposts, I’d been treated to an acidulous lecture on the occupation of Alaska by the Russians. Apparently the United States bought the place from them in the 1860s. Looking out of the car window, I thought I could see why anyone would want to buy it and that it had come cheap at the price. Later on I was to revise this opinion. But on that glorious afternoon I was in love with everything I saw, the long blue fiord, the neat houses with waterfront gardens, the flowers everywhere that were the flowers of spring, over at home two months since. I don’t know the names of flowers – well, tulips and daffodils I know and they were out in June, as well as trees with pink blossom on them and yellow buttercups in the grass.

  They call it a city, Juneau. They call every village a city in America. But Juneau looked more like a country town to me, not a bit English, Canadian perhaps, I wouldn’t know, with little crooked streets and little touristy shops. The mountains covered in pine trees soared up behind and among the trees were the scars of gold mining.

  The taxi driver wanted to take us on a ‘city tour’ that was to include the Governor’s mansion and the State Capitol. I wouldn’t have minded but Ivo was adamant. Straight to the hotel. I’ve said I was in love with everything I saw but it would have taken someone absolutely obsessed to love the Goncharof, or at least to love its appearance.

  It occupied the whole area between the high street or main street, whatever they called it, and the roads that turned out at right angles towards the harbour. ‘The entire block’, the driver said. It was made of dark purplish-greyish red brick. If you had to name the worst colour in the world I think most people would choose that one, a kind of dried-blood-mixed-with-ashes colour or red rose petals ground into the mud or the scab on a dark-skinned person’s wound.

  (That was my creative writing getting the better of me. I must watch it.) The main entrance was on one corner, no doubt to give the architect the chance to put in a curved flight of steps up to the door that filled a whole half-circle. These were of concrete with a bit of Astroturf up the middle. A sort of onion dome, a very Russian dome, painted a dull grey and red soared above the steps and was held up by eight pillars in granite, or if not granite some ostentatiously veined grey marble.

  ‘Hideous,’ I said. ‘Did the Russians build it?’

  ‘The Russians had gone thirty years before it was built,’ said Ivo. ‘Don’t you ever listen?’

  ‘Then I can’t see why they didn’t make it more attractive.’

  ‘Ah, your favourite word. We haven’t heard it much lately. I was beginning to miss it. This is the most expensive hotel in Juneau I’ve brought you to, so you must make the best of it.’

  He was doing his making-me-feel-like-a-bimbo bit again. The driver picked it up and smirked to himself. I said no more. We checked in and were treated to a long apology from the reception clerk for the lack of air-conditioning. They never had this weather, this was freak weather, nothing like it had been seen for years, et cetera. While Ivo was filling in forms and we waited for someone to carry our bags up, I had a look round. It was comfortable but gloomy, excessively, unexpectedly, sombre and drab. Large sofas stood about, upholstered in dark brown leather or rust-red velvet. The rest of the furniture was either of marble or polished wood with metal decoration. Is that called buhl, or is it ormolu? I’d swear the houseplants were aspidistra. Oil paintings of snowy landscapes or hunting scenes covered great sections of wall. The sun didn’t penetrate here and lamps were on, their bulbs glimmering under parchment shades.

  Never having been in the United States before, I didn’t know then that all American bars are either fairly dark or very dark. No doubt the drinkers like it that way. The bar at the Goncharof was a vast elongated chamber, in which free use had been made of pillars, this time in dull yellow marble. They gleamed faintly through the dimness like so many trunks of trees in a petrified forest. You could just make out the deep, curlicued ornate carvings on the ceiling, the unlit electroliers of steel-grey metal, as many-armed as some Indian goddess, the heavy folds of velvet curtains tightly drawn across the windows, velvet of a colour undiscernible, slate grey or chocolate or that dreadful blood-ash, it was impossible to tell.

  If there hadn’t been people sitting at tables, a very few at four in the afternoon, but still people just visible in the gloom, I might have supposed it was closed until evening when perhaps all would become a place of light and liveliness. But there was no doubt the bar was operating. A barman in a monkey jacket moved desultorily between the tables. Behind the bar, where ranks of bottles glittered, a single lamp was lit. Under an ochreish parchment shade painted with some ancient oceanic map, its light shed a yellowness like the sodium vapour that gives such an unearthly look to motorways at home.

  I remarked on it to Ivo in the lift. He said coldly that things were different abroad; if they weren’t there would be no point in going away. The boy who was carrying our bags grinned to himself. I pictured myself sitting in that bar with Ivo in the dark for half the evening, neither of us speaking, I drinking too much, and I resolved that nothing would get me in there, tonight or ever. I’d no way then of knowing how much I’d come to love the bar of the Goncharof, what sanctuary it would provide and its darkness what cover for an increasing passion.

  The radio was on in our bedroom when the bellboy led us in. It was one of the best bedrooms and perhaps that was why, out of deference to whatever the Alaskans call a better class of guest, it was switched to that programme that plays classical music all day long – and all night, for all I know.

  What exactly it was playing when we arrived I don’t know, Mozart perhaps, I was walking about examining the bathroom, the way the windows opened and what was
in the fridge. The grim Victorian décor extended only to the ground floor and our bedroom was bright and light with a normal carpet, light-coloured armchairs and a television.

  Then the music changed and they started playing the Great Waltz from Rosenkavalier. Ivo smiled. He quoted my translation of Ochs’ song, ‘But with me – am I wrong? No night is too long’, and then he said he was sorry, he was bitterly sorry for the way he’d spoken to me, he would never speak like that to me again, and he came up to me and took me in his arms.

  I wrote all that yesterday, quite late at night. I expected to dream as a result and I did, but not about the Goncharof Hotel or Isabel, not about the dark bar or the bright weather, not about the champagne we drank that evening or the dinner we ate in the restaurant on Front Street.

  I dreamt about drowned Ivo coming up out of the sea.

  I was leaning over the sea wall. It was night but moonlight and there was no one about except that I could see a fishing boat a long way out. The sea was flat calm, a thin skin of it crawling over the stones and slipping back with a sigh as the tide slowly came in. Everything was grey and silvery and as quiet as death.

  The waters parted and Ivo reared up out of them like a dog surfacing, and like a dog he shook himself. He shook his wet hair, which was long, which came down to his waist. And then he began to pull it off and I saw that it wasn’t hair, it was seaweed. His clothes were pale and greenish from long immersion. They clung to his skeletal thinness. He left the sea and stood for a moment at the point the encroaching tide had reached. Then he came on, up across the stone-filled sand, over the ridge where there is nothing but stones, and towards me, towards me, between where the lifeboat stands and the hut where the fishermen sell their catch.

  I would have liked to turn and run. Is there any feeling of paralysis comparable to being weighted to the ground in dreams? I couldn’t move. My feet were planted in the stones. Ivo came to me and I saw that he was blind. Sea creatures had eaten his eyes. He took me in his arms, in his wet, stinking embrace, and held me tighter as I struggled with such terrible revulsion, such sick horror.

  And all the way through I never knew it was a dream. I wasn’t granted even that consolation. When I woke out of what seemed hours of wrestling with a corpse I was wet, soaked in sweat, streaming with it.

  It took me a while to get over the dream. I had to get up, open the window and put my head out into the cold. I’d only experienced that floundering in a sweat-bath once before and that was our first night in Juneau. But there it was from the heat. The windows in our bedroom wouldn’t open very far, I suppose there were seldom occasions when guests wanted to open them at all, and the thick air smelt of sex and Ivo’s cigarettes and the champagne he’d had sent up after dinner. He hadn’t drunk much but I had, I’d got through a bottle and a half, it was the only way for me to make love-making possible. I could only do it when I was stupefied and sledge-hammered with drink. The sweat streamed off me in the night and the sheet under me grew cold and clammy.

  Ivo was awake but he didn’t speak to me. I could see a gleam of light on his open eyes. He was on his back, staring at the ceiling. It shows what a state I’d reached when I say I was so guilty already by that time and so apprehensive of the future that, though the bed was a king-size, I made myself lie on the cold damp patch to cover it up. I didn’t want him to reach out and touch it. I felt as I had long ago, when I was six or seven, and for the last time in my life I wet the bed, guilty and horrified and wanting to do anything to keep it hidden.

  My head was bad in the morning but I knew better than to mention that to Ivo. He wanted to take me up in a helicopter to the Mendenhall Glacier and I’d said I’d go, so I went. All the way in the taxi taking us to the helicopter station he talked about glaciers, what they were and how they had formed, using expressions like resistant strata and bedrock jointing. I suppose I must have learnt something about glaciers when I was at school but if I did I can’t remember. It was new to me and something I didn’t particularly want to learn about. I knew the glacier would be beautiful and perhaps awe-inspiring in the brilliant sunshine and that was enough for me.

  It wasn’t enough for Ivo. The thing was I had the impression he was getting a sort of grim pleasure out of boring me. He was tormenting himself, of course, because it actually pained him that I was so uninterested in what amounted to a passion for him. But he couldn’t help going on with it. He wanted to see how far he could go, how long before my eyes closed with the boredom of it or I screamed out at him to stop. His lips twitched once in an effort to stop an outbreak of bitter laughter. Perhaps too he saw it as a test of my love, that I’d endure this tedium for his sake.

  All the people at the helicopter station knew him. They seemed overjoyed to see him again. The youngest, a girl of about twenty, called him ‘Dr Steadman’ in a very respectful way. I’d never been up in a helicopter before but I didn’t let on. We walked on the ice and looked down into the bottomless pools of blue water (‘your unfathomed eyes’) and Ivo gave me another lecture on how cold the water was and how deep, so that anyone falling in wouldn’t survive for more than a few moments.

  The ship he’d be embarking on that afternoon was in dock. We walked down to have a look at it. Its name was the Favonia, one of a line in which all the vessels were named after Roman women, Fimbria, Flaminia, Fulvia and so on. It looked smallish and shabby to me but I said nothing. The registration was Liberian, out of Monrovia, but the officers were German, Ivo said, and the crew, as I could see for myself, Korean. Food was going on board, crates of cauliflowers and bananas. Someone behind a porthole waved to Ivo and he waved back.

  We were back there by four for him to go aboard. He hadn’t much baggage, just a backpack and a case. A man and a woman can embrace when one of them goes away, they can hug each other in public, they can kiss, and onlookers don’t mind, they think it’s nice, it’s touching. I didn’t specially want to kiss Ivo then but I resented the fact that I couldn’t, that we’d had to have our goodbye kiss in a hotel bedroom. I even said something about it to him.

  ‘I wonder if it’ll take twenty years or fifty years before it’s possible for someone like me to kiss someone like you in public.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be dead before it comes to that,’ he said.

  He did something unexpected. He took off his jacket, a leather one that had been very good once and whose shabbiness I liked, and handed it to me.

  ‘Wear that while I’m gone. If it doesn’t remind you at least you’ll know you look better in it than I do.’ (‘Wear this for me,’ Gilman had said, giving me a scarf for a snowman.)

  Ivo patted my shoulder and went off up the gangway. I watched him for a while, walking along the deck towards what I now know was the staircase down. Once he turned and waved to me. Then, quite suddenly, a door opened and someone he knew came out, a man in uniform who shook hands with him and slapped him on the back. They were immediately talking animatedly.

  I’d been feeling guilty and miserable up to that point but seeing Ivo meet someone he knew had a strange effect on me. I felt like a parent must when he takes his son back to school at the beginning of term. He’s guilty about leaving the boy but when he sees his son is all right, he’s found a friend, in minutes he’ll have forgotten his family and his home, when he sees that he knows the boy’s fine and he can leave him, certain he’ll be happy. That’s how it was for me. My father had become my son, just as he’d be my father again one day. I was learning how endlessly interchangeable such relationships are.

  My relief, or the euphoria it brought, didn’t last long. I’d decided to go for a walk round the town once Ivo had gone and I set off up Main Street towards the Capitol. Ever since we arrived in Juneau I’d been looking forward to this freedom, this being alone, and now I told myself to begin enjoying it.

  Without a guide book, I’d no idea what the buildings were apart from the Capitol – more marble pillars – and the little Russian Orthodox church. But I pressed on, walking the grid-plan street
s and those that weren’t in the grid, up to the Governor’s mansion and Gold Creek. There weren’t many people about and hardly any cars. The sky was still without a cloud and the sun still hot and bright.

  Back to the waterfront at last and all the way along Egon Drive once more. The Favonia was gone. She must have left while I was exploring the town, gone out on the tide, or whatever the expression is. I hadn’t told Ivo I’d watch her go out but somehow I knew he’d have expected me to do that, come back at five-thirty for that purpose. Now I remembered he’d told me they expected to leave Juneau at five-thirty, and I felt a pang of guilt. Or not guilt perhaps, but something else. I realized I felt Ivo would be cross with me for not being there to see him off. I wasn’t even acting like a bimbo but like a child. Father was back. I was afraid Daddy would be cross with me for not obeying him.

  This told me more than anything could have that being with Ivo was bad for me. Continuing with him would just make things worse and worse. He would grow more hectoring and didactic and superior, I more petulant and coy and sulky. It would sap my will and ultimately destroy me. The whole of this trip was misconceived, I should have known better than to have come on it and now I wished I hadn’t. I realized something else as well as I began walking back to the Goncharof, something on a far more mundane level. What on earth was I going to do with myself for twelve days till Ivo came back?

  It panicked me. I suppose I hadn’t thought of it before, only of being free. But free to do what? Walk round the cemetery? Visit the museum? And then what? Knowing myself as I thought I did, I imagined picking up someone, boy or girl, in the Red Dog Saloon. Finding some bad company and getting drunk evening after evening. If I avoided that, maybe I could have a lot of big meals and spin out the time spent eating them – but on my own?