by Barbara Vine
And what, come to that, had Ivo thought I’d do? Or hadn’t he cared? He knew I was about as uninterested in plants and trees and climate, rocks and terrain and birds, as anyone could be. Like most people I get a kick out of seeing a bear or a wolf in the wild, but that’s about it. I couldn’t help feeling he was punishing me, this was all punishment and reproof, and for some reason it brought to mind an old saw or jingle my Aunt Clarissa used to repeat to me when I was small. When I said I didn’t care about something, she used to wag her finger at me and say: Don’t care was made to care/Don’t care was hung./Don’t care was put in the pot/And boiled till he was done. I said I didn’t care a good many times to Ivo. Goaded, I’d told him I didn’t care about Darwin and his theory, whether he was right or wrong, I didn’t care whether igneous rocks came before plutonic rocks or the other way about, and I didn’t care about fossils, the whole idea of fossils made me want to curl up and die. So he was punishing me. Don’t care was to be made to care.
I went into the great foyer of the Goncharof. Stacks of suitcases stood about. There’d been a new influx of tourists off the aircraft from Vancouver we’d come on and which got to Juneau in the late afternoon. I went up to our room, my room. I’d suddenly had a rather wonderful idea. Why shouldn’t I just go home? Ivo had left me money and travellers’ cheques. I had plenty for a car to the airport, meals in Vancouver, even a sightseeing tour of Vancouver or a day or two in that city. There seemed no reason why I shouldn’t get on tomorrow’s flight out.
He’d asked for it, there was no doubt about that. And I was going to leave him anyway. I told myself it would be kinder to leave him now than raise his hopes and give him a false security by going on this cruise with him. He’d come back and find me gone and that would be the best thing for both of us. I wouldn’t see the American west coast, of course, the Golden Gate Bridge and the bay, Seattle, that’s supposed to be the most desirable place in the US in which to live, Oregon and Washington State and California, which has such a glamorous ring to it. But I was young, I’d plenty of time to come back.
I’ve often thought, since then, how different things would have been if I’d gone then as I meant to. Whatever had happened to me, my life must have been happier. Ivo would be still alive. I would never have met Isabel, and that means, like someone says in Shakespeare, that I’d have left unseen a very wonderful piece of work. But I’d have averted a lot of misery, for her as well as for me, I expect.
But I can’t have any real regrets, still less reproach myself, over not leaving next day. My failure to go wasn’t due to anything I did but to what you’d call a technical matter. I was so ignorant of travel arrangements, I’d only been in an aircraft twice before, and it never occurred to me a return ticket wouldn’t necessarily take me back when I wanted to go. I even thought myself quite clever and grown-up, picking up the phone and asking reception to get me the number of Juneau airport so that I could make – and I even got the correct American term – a reservation.
I got through to them and they soon put me right. Mine was an Apex ticket, didn’t I realize that? I didn’t even know what they meant. Experience is the best teacher, as Martin Zeindler once said, quoting probably, but she takes very high wages. I felt I was paying some of those wages when the twangy voice, barely concealing its scorn, told me that on this ticket I could only return on August 4th and not before or after. Unless I paid a return fare, of course. I didn’t have to add up the sums on those travellers’ cheques to know I hadn’t even half what the flight would cost.
So I was doomed to stay, I was trapped, I couldn’t escape. Something Ivo had said earlier in the day came back to me. You can get to places in south-east Alaska by ship or plane but forget the roads. What roads exist run a few dozen miles out from the towns and then come to a dead end. The famous Alaska Highway was a long way inland.
All this time I hadn’t put Ivo’s jacket on. I’d been carrying it around, holding it slung over my shoulder, and then I’d laid it on the bed. I put it on to go downstairs and, naturally I suppose, put my hand into the pocket. The notes crackled in my fingers. I pulled them out and saw they amounted to nearly $100. He had given me his purse, that was what it amounted to, only purses these days have become jackets. It wasn’t enough to get away, though.
After a while I went down in the lift. The front window of the Goncharof faced due west but the sun wasn’t setting yet, it was hours off sunset. The summer nights are long in Alaska. A funny thought came to me then, that I liked night better than day, dim places or artificially lit places better than natural light and sunshine. Ivo liked daylight and fresh air, cool winds and the draughts that so annoyed Martin Zeindler, and that was another of our incompatibilities.
I went into the bar. Where else?
Isn’t it in one of the Just So Stories that Kipling says some creature in the darkness of the jungle was like a mustard plaster on a sack of coals? Yet she wasn’t a bit like that, the simile is all wrong. She was a bright thing in the darkness but as a star is bright in the night sky, as the Parthenon radiant by moonlight.
She was waiting for me at the end of the world.
8
I can see Isabel now. The impression I have is so vivid that I have only to shut my eyes to get a picture of her on that dark screen, under my closed eyelids. And I don’t mean some vague image, half created in words and half from memory, I mean a real picture, like a coloured photograph. There she sits on her high stool, her very slim, very lithe body turned sideways so that I can see how small her waist is. Her head has turned right round and she is looking at me appraisingly. Her hair is very dark brown, shiny and long, with a fringe just touching eyebrows that look as if drawn with a soft brush. She lifts a lock of that fringe back and combs it into her hair with two fingers. Then she stops looking at me and returns rather suddenly to her book.
So Isabel was … what? It’s an odd thing to write but I don’t know if she was good-looking or not. I know she wasn’t pretty and I know she couldn’t have been described by that word Ivo said I, was so fond of: attractive. She had a beautiful body and beautiful hands and feet. Her mouth was large, the lips with a swollen look and of equal size. In fact, strangely, her upper lip and her lower lip were exactly the same. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before or since in anyone. Her mouth was red but naturally that way. She never wore make-up.
Her skin was eggshell white with a faint sheen on its utter smoothness. But the most remarkable things about her were her eyes, a clear, depthless hazel, large and tremendously shadowed, the eyelids dome-like, a smooth grape colour. I think it was the only time I’ve ever noticed the colour of someone’s eyes on first seeing them. The dark hair, the feathery fringe, framed her strange, rather long, hollow-cheeked face. In the moment her eyes met mine I thought how sleepy she looked, yet she sat on, uncomfortably perched, reading a book she had to hold up with both hands.
Her eyes were on me only for a second. I couldn’t take mine from her. I found myself studying her, everything about her, the simple clothes she wore, a short black skirt, a white shirt, a jacket of tweed I suppose, a fine black and white tweed. A thin gold chain bracelet was around one wrist. Her shoes were black, with heels but not high heels. I watched her take a cigarette, light it, put the packet and book of matches back in the pocket of her jacket.
A distance of no more than ten feet separated us and we two were apart from the other people in the bar. In fact, we were isolated here because this was the non-smoking area. I hoped the barman would come up to her and ask her to stop smoking because then I would hear her voice. But the barman seemed to have disappeared. It was hard to see in that dimly lit place. For all I could make out of what went on in the smoky depths beyond the mottled yellow pillars, we might have been quite alone, she and I.
This was one reason why it seemed almost wrong not to speak to her. I knew Americans were very sociable people. I might never have been in the United States before but I’d encountered enough American tourists. You could never s
it in a train with one of them without being asked where you came from, what you did and where you’d been to ‘school’. Probably she expected me to speak to her, it wouldn’t be an attempt at a pick-up in her eyes, it would just be a normal friendly gesture. At this moment, because I hadn’t spoken, she was no doubt setting me down as a typical cold, reserved Brit.
I was longing to talk to her. I was curious to hear her voice, her laugh, to find out what kind of an accent she had, to see her beautiful, well-tended American teeth. But of course I was a reserved Brit, I’d been brought up that way, as all middle-class English people are. Oh, I could pick someone up, if we were in that sort of place, if that was what you went there for. But a woman in a foreign country absorbed in a book? She might be waiting for someone, possibly one of those Americans who are the size and height of a centre forward in a Norwegian football team. Besides, picking up wasn’t what I wanted. I was lonely, I wanted a companion, and for that companion, without knowing anything about her except what I could see, I wanted her.
Then something happened. One of the hotel staff came into the bar, looked around, spotted her and said something to her, almost into her ear, in a very low voice. I heard the word ‘call’. She got down from her stool without a word and followed the man out, taking her cigarette with her. But not her book. The book she left lying open on the bar.
At least that meant she was coming back. The barman appeared from somewhere and I asked for another Coors. I started wondering who had phoned her. The six-foot four-inch football player to say he couldn’t keep their date? As she left the bar I looked at my watch and saw it was twenty past six. The barman picked up the ashtray she’d acquired from somewhere, made a face at the ash and the dead match, and took it away. I looked at my watch again at six twenty-five and again at six thirty-two. It was a long phone call.
When it got to six forty-five I knew she wasn’t coming back. She’d forgotten about the book. All he’d phoned for was to change their venue, and she’d gone off to the new place wherever that was. There was no one about. The barman had disappeared again. I’d already told him my room number, I had no bill to pay. I got up, crossed to the bar and picked up the book. It was Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlyov Family. Not exactly the big blockbuster of the year, but surely an intellectual challenge. The kind of book no one would read for pleasure, I thought, but only as part of some course. I’d never read it myself, though it was among the blue leather-bound ‘Russians’ of which Sergius was another.
Instead of handing The Golovlyov Family in at reception, I took it upstairs with me. She might have written her name inside it, some people do that, but she hadn’t. A label stuck on the back showed it had been bought from a bookshop in Los Angeles. Did that mean she lived in Los Angeles?
It came to me after about an hour that I’d have to eat somewhere. I’d have to have dinner and I’d have to have it alone. It wasn’t much of a prospect. As soon as she saw me coming, the woman sitting at a desk at the entrance to the dining room asked me if I had a reservation and when I said I hadn’t, it hadn’t occurred to me, I was staying in the hotel, she shut her book triumphantly and said every table was taken. Driven outdoors, I found a small uninspired restaurant where they told me they would close at nine-thirty even before I’d asked for a table.
All through the meal I thought about her. Suppose she wasn’t even staying at the Goncharof? Suppose she’d come into the bar only to await this escort of hers? It seemed likely. I didn’t know her name, I couldn’t ask at reception. All I could do was tote her book round all the hotels in Juneau. Inquiring for her? Inquiring for whom?
By then I was obsessed with her. Not sexually, if that isn’t too hard to believe. At that time what I wanted was to talk to her and be talked to by her, to sit somewhere with her and have a drink. I imagined the two of us having coffee together in the morning, sitting on a terrace overlooking the water. Drinking champagne on a balcony in the long light evening. I’d got so used to champagne with Ivo that it was almost the only alcohol I ever thought of.
I thought of champagne but I finished the evening drinking brandy in the Red Dog Saloon. It looked authentic and frontierish but it was new and touristy, not really interesting, a fit place to find oblivion. Walking back to the Goncharof, I was seeing double, two sets of steps up to the entrance, two sets of six pillars, and in my room two copies of The Golovlyov Family. I lay on the bed with my clothes on and fell immediately asleep. Waking up three hours later with a raging thirst, I found myself still clutching the book, its cover dog-eared by now from where I’d bent it over and lain on it.
Strangely enough, I didn’t feel too bad in the morning. Perhaps the brandy had been of very good quality. Of course I hadn’t got around to filling in the card you hang on your door saying what you want for breakfast in your room, so I had to go down.
She was there, in the dining room, reading another book. I didn’t wait to be seated, which is what you were supposed to do, but went straight back upstairs, got The Golovlyov Family and put it in my pocket. Coming down in the lift, I had a momentary panic that she might have disappeared again, I hadn’t noticed what stage she’d reached in her breakfast, but she was still there, concentrating on her book, pouring herself another cup of coffee with scarcely a glance at the pot in her hand.
I said boldly to the waitress that I wanted that table in the window. It was the one next to hers but still a good six feet away. She didn’t so much as glance at me. The waitress took my order, came with coffee in the endearing way they do over there, without your having to ask for it. This time I’d decided to take no thought, not to be bogged down in thinking and putting the pros and cons to myself. I just got up, walked over to her and spoke.
‘Excuse me. You left this in the bar last evening.’
It seems strange to me now, sad perhaps, somehow regrettable, that those were the first words I ever spoke to her: ‘Excuse me, you left this in the bar last evening.’ I remember the last words too, uttered at Juneau airport. ‘I’ll die if I never see you again, I’ll die.’ Death isn’t so easily come by, of course. I know that now. You have to be braver than I am, and more resolute.
I wasn’t thinking of death then, I wasn’t thinking of Ivo or of being bored and lonely. I held out The Golovlyov Family with its dog-eared cover.
‘Excuse me. You left this in the bar last evening.’
She was looking up at me. I couldn’t conceal from myself the fact that she was looking at me apprehensively.
‘I’m sorry about the cover,’ I said. ‘I must have done it, it wasn’t like that.’
She smiled, a slowly dawning smile. I had been right about her teeth. They were perfect. Not that I particularly noticed that then. I only noticed that she was smiling.
‘I would have handed it in at the desk,’ I said, ‘only I don’t know your name.’
If ever there was a come-on, that was it. She didn’t rise to it. She didn’t tell me her name and ask mine. I began to think she would never speak, even that she couldn’t speak. Was ever woman so consistently silent? She put out her hand for the book, looked at it, looked up at me again. Her voice was almost a shock because I’d waited so long for it. It was very low and very English; American, yes, but lightly so, the way we snobbish Brits want Americans to sound all the time.
‘I thought I’d left it in the place where I had my dinner,’ she said, and then she said, ‘Thank you,’ in a very heartfelt way, as if it was her diamond bracelet I’d found and returned to her. ‘Thank you very much.’
‘You had another book with you, I see. That was lucky.’ This must count among the silliest and most banal remarks I’ve ever made but I had to say something, I had to hold her attention which I fancied was straying back to that other, luckily acquired book. ‘There’s not much to do here but read,’ I said. ‘Not if you’re on your own.’
She closed her book, and put the two books, The Golovlyov Family and the other one, which I saw was Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table, neatly lined up
edge to edge, one on top of the other, between the basketful of jam jars and the coffee pot.
‘Are you on your own?’
I fancied she’d asked as if she thought someone like me couldn’t be, those brushstroke eyebrows raised and that snapdragon mouth turned up a little bit at the corners. I was saying yes, I was alone for two weeks, when the waitress appeared with some of my breakfast on a tray, and saved me. She saved me in a way I might have thought embarrassing but didn’t. When she asked if I’d like her to serve me my breakfast there instead of at my own table, I could have kissed her. But I said nothing, I waited for the table’s occupant to say I could stay and I held my breath.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Do sit down.’
I told her my name before she told me hers. I had the impression she didn’t want to tell her name, that she hesitated very briefly, but when I’d given her mine she had to.
‘Isabel Winwood.’
It was then, I think, that I saw the wedding ring. But I told myself perhaps it wasn’t a wedding ring, just a ring she happened to wear on the third finger of her left hand. The way her eyes were deeply set was what gave her a slightly tired look, I decided, for there was not a line on her face. Those soft, swollen lips fascinated me, but I couldn’t afford to waste time gazing raptly, I had to speak, I had to make conversation. My arrival two days before, the coming cruise – I wasn’t going to mention Ivo – Juneau, the weather, all were possibilities. She listened, sometimes smiling. I wasn’t to know then that she hardly ever spoke unless she had something to say.
I was allowed to go on like this, desperately seeking new topics, somehow allied to Alaska, I was running short, wondering why she didn’t ask me where I was from, what I did and where I’d gone to school, when she picked up The Golovlyov Family, opened it and seemed to be reading from where she left off the night before. Of course that silenced me.
