by Barbara Vine
‘I’d like to go back to the hotel first and have a shower and change my clothes. I’ll take a cab up to Lynette’s.’
So there was no help for it. But I’d miscalculated. Four letters seemed excessive, as if my eyes or my sense of touch when they came into my hands, must be deceiving me. I must have looked extremely taken aback but I also knew that if I was not to lose Isabel, if I was ever to get anywhere with her, I now had to give some kind of explanation. And she was looking at me inquiringly, plainly waiting to be told.
I said, ‘Please come into the bar and have a drink before you go upstairs.’
She hesitated, but after a moment she went ahead of me in among the marble columns and the aspidistras. The barman came over, his face greenish in its cold misty light. Isabel lit one of her rare cigarettes. Just as I began on my explanation it occurred to me that I could have avoided all this. I could have asked the hotel management to place all letters that came for me in my room. I suppose I’m just not used to staying in hotels.
It was too late now. I said, ‘You must have wondered why I’m getting all these letters.’
‘It’s not my business, Tim.’
This was very off-putting. Or it would have been if the hand that held her cigarette hadn’t trembled. Our drinks came and I thought that if I wasn’t an alcoholic already I could easily become one. The first mouthful of brandy does so much.
‘I want to tell you that someone I know has gone down to Prince Rupert on a cruise ship. Well, they’re on their way back now.’ It sounded silly, that terminology. ‘She,’ I said, ‘she’s on her way back. She’s a lecturer, she gives lectures to the passengers. She’s a botanist. We were lovers but that’s over now.’
Isabel actually disliked asking personal questions. It wasn’t a self-imposed restraint on her part but alien to her nature. She said diffidently, for my sake I suppose, to help me through, ‘But she keeps writing to you?’
‘Every day. I wish I could stop it. I wish I could make her understand that our relationship is over.’
‘She must be very much in love with you.’
‘That’s not my fault, is it?’
Isabel made no reply to that. She had gone rather red, very unusual for her. ‘Will she be on the cruise you’re going on?’
I nodded.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘You came here with her and you’re here to wait for her to come back.’
That was so, I said miserably. I’d nearly gone home, I said, that same day as she had arrived, but I’d discovered I had an Apex ticket and I hadn’t enough money to buy another. It all came out then, the entire truth, except that I’d changed the sex of my lover.
‘I could have left,’ I said. ‘I could have gone to Vancouver.’
‘That wouldn’t have helped you much,’ said Isabel, not looking at me, looking at the ice floating in her glass of sparkling water.
‘I stayed because you came,’ I said.
She was very still. I waited. I couldn’t imagine what she would say. She got up, said, ‘I’ll stay and have something to eat with Lynette this evening. It may be the last time.’
I pulled the letter I’d written her out of my pocket. It was bent and a bit creased and rather damp. I’d been carrying it about all day. I held it out to her and said, ‘Read it. Please don’t throw it away. I insist that you read it.’
She took the letter without a word and walked out of the bar. The long empty evening stretched before me, an evening that I knew would mean an inner turmoil for me of speculations, fears, arguments with myself, shame at what I’d done and awful apprehension. On top of all that I still had four letters from Ivo to read. I called the barman and asked for another brandy.
Sometimes, in the evenings, I go down to the beach and walk along the shingle or the stretch of sand the tide has left hard and firm. I walk a little way up beyond the edge of the town, in the opposite direction from the Dolphin and the overhang of the low brown cliffs, and when I come back I go into the Mainmast for a pint of Adnam’s. I did that this evening. There was no wind and it was mild for the time of year. I wondered what someone like Isabel, an American used to that spectacular west coast, would think of our East Anglian shore where there are no soaring mountains, scarcely even cliffs, where the coastline is not scooped by tides into little bays and where a river estuary looks simply as if the sea has decided at this point to put out an arm and reach inland.
As well as an absence of mountains is an absence of islands. An island couldn’t survive in this sea. It has eroded the coast, eating up whole towns, so that here in N. our Corn Exchange, which was once in the centre of the town, now stands the same distance from the sea wall as this house. The churches of St Barnabas and St Matthew disappeared during a series of eighteenth-century gales. Excavations on the beach still throw up bones from the engulfed churchyards. So what chance would an island have? The sea would wash its soft sandiness, pummel and stretch it, finally wring it out like a sodden cloth and set rags of it floating off in the streaming currents. That brownness we always see is what the sea does, scooping up sand from the bottom and churning it through the waves.
Tonight the moon was out, making a shining white road from beach to horizon across the calm flat sea. The sky was a pale bowl, no colour, or rather, a colour not in the spectrum, something no one has described, clear and deep and glowing. One or two night skies in the Inside Passage were that unnamed colour, and it was like going back to a long, long time ago, when the world was young.
In one of those letters, one of the four that prompted my confession to Isabel, Ivo wrote about Chechin Island and taking a boatload of cruise passengers ashore there. It wasn’t the only place where fossilized trees could be seen, he wrote, but nowhere so far north in the world were such marvels left as the fossil webbed and clawed footprints of some dinosaur-like yet amphibious creature. They had gone to Chechin in two boats, he leading one group and the zoologist who was with them on the cruise the other. But the passengers’ response had been disappointing. They had been much more excited the day before at the sight of a grizzly bear that padded out of the forest and stared at them before beginning its hunt for shellfish along the shore.
Like you, wrote Ivo to me. You would have been like that. He was sickened by the oohs and ahs of the tourists, their comparative indifference to these unique geological records, their picture-postcard cuddly-toy attitude to an animal that would certainly have killed any one of them who went close to it. But I’d have been the same, he suggested. And, in spite of what he’d written three letters previously about asking my forgiveness, he launched into another attack on me, my frivolity, my laziness, what he called my medieval attitude to ‘serious subjects’. It was better, I suppose, I thought so at the time, than outpourings of love.
The second half of the letter was mostly devoted to inquiring why I hadn’t written to him. I could have written poste restante to Petersburg or Sitka. What else had I to do all day? I was supposed to be a writer, wasn’t I? Then he withdrew that. He mustn’t jump to conclusions, he said. I probably had written and my letter was awaiting his arrival in Sitka on his way back. That made me curse. Of course I hadn’t written and I’d never even heard of Sitka.
The next letter was all love. The one after that contained a bitter reproach at the lack of a letter from me. He’d gone to the US Mail Office in Sitka and the one letter addressed to him was from someone else. The last of the four letters was rapturous again. He longed to see me, he could hardly get through till Friday.
Letters, letters … Always at the back of my mind I ask myself who is sending me these desert-island letters on lined yellow paper. For instance, is it a mad person? Almost by definition, anyone who sends anonymous letters, or even just anonymous information of this kind, must be mad. But what do I mean by mad? A lot of people would call me mad.
I’ll confess something. Once or twice I’ve thought it might be Isabel. She knows this address, she knows me, writing letters is something she does, and on legal pads.
And they all come from where she lives, or near where she lives. Of course hundreds of miles separate these cities on the postmarks but to the people who live in the north-west they’re near each other. She probably has friends in Banff and Vancouver who would post them for her.
Against that is the fact that she doesn’t know what I did and I can’t see how she could know. Even if by some extraordinary chance she did know, she’d found out, she wouldn’t do this. It wouldn’t be in her nature. I’ve talked about my correspondent being mad and Isabel is one of the sanest people I’ve ever known. Not hysterical, not neurotic, not even specially emotional, a cool, sensible, considerate woman.
So she has to be dismissed from the list of suspects, with the resultant guilt on my part that I ever thought of her in this connection. I should have trusted her, I should have had more faith in her. For one thing, I need to believe she still loves me. It’s all I have.
That Tuesday morning was the first time Isabel didn’t appear at breakfast. My letter had offended her, I thought. She must be having breakfast in her room. Worse than that, it might have driven her away, first to stay at Lynette’s house, then to go back to Seattle. I drank a cup of coffee, I couldn’t eat anything. Her room key was gone from the hook under her pigeonhole. I went back to my room and phoned her, but, too frightened to speak to her, put the receiver down when she answered.
It had been raining all night and it was still raining. I came the closest I’d ever done to feeling imprisoned, if it’s possible to be shut up in nowhere. For that was what had happened to me. I couldn’t be in my room because the chambermaid was there; I couldn’t sit downstairs because if I did so it would be impossible to avoid a direct confrontation with Isabel when she emerged. To go out would be more like plunging into a river over which a waterfall is pouring than walking in the rain. But in the end I did go out. There was no other choice. I put on the waterproof gear, pants to cover my jeans and the hooded jacket, and struggled down to a bar I rather liked on Fourth Street.
That was an awful day. Or the first half of it was. It began with brandy and Coors chasers and by midday I was almost on my knees. I made myself walk and I must have walked miles as the rain eased off and became a sad grey drizzle. In the middle of the afternoon I had something to eat in the Goncharof, knowing that at that time Isabel would almost certainly be at Lynette’s. I wasn’t drunk any more, it had worn off and left me dehydrated. To the barman’s surprise, I had a pint or so of fizzy water in the bar and then I thought I’d go to my room and have a bottle of something sent up – a bottle of wine to give me courage or send me to sleep, by that time I didn’t much care which. It was almost five.
The lift came. She got out of it. Or, rather, she stepped out and stepped back into it, taking hold of both my hands and drawing me in. She said nothing but immediately she was in my arms. If it was she who embraced me first or I her I have no idea. We clung together, kissing each other, mouth over mouth, devouring each other, past the first floor, on up to the second and the third and fourth before we noticed. She whispered, ‘I’ve forgotten my key,’ so it was to my room we went.
She took my key from me. She was remarkable, the cool way she unlocked that door, her hands quite steady. Inside the room, it was darkish, the light swallowed up in rain. The roaring sound was the rain drumming on the windows. She put her mouth on mine and her hands behind my head, and like that, in the dim rushing warm noise, we kissed. We touched each other’s bodies with anxious hands, we whispered each other’s names and I said, ‘At last, at last.’ Her back arched and her body reached for me and she wasn’t silent any more, her gasps – or mine, they were indistinguishable – were as eloquent as the rushing water.
There was no battle, no savage rough-house of struggle and violence and wounding. After that first time, necessarily quickly accomplished, it was a warm, slow measure, a gentle, long-drawn beat and an exalted flight.
10
Isabel stayed there all night with me. We went downstairs for dinner and then came back again. It was ridiculous, that dinner. I held her hands under the table, we pressed our knees together, I pushed my knee between hers, and then, because we could no longer bear that table between us, I moved to sit beside her. Our bodies touched along their length. I’d just made love to her twice but the warm feel of her, ribs in silken flesh, the indentation of waist, the rounded curve of hip, the long muscular flank, knee, shapely calf and cluster of fine bones that was her ankle, all this that was the physical Isabel was almost too much for me. I trembled as I held her hands.
It was new. I was twenty-four but I felt that before her I’d never made love, to woman or man, I was a virgin. Such beauty I’d never possessed before, nor known the depth of feeling her murmuring brought me and her cry of delight. That these things could be I hadn’t known. Such a degree of sweetness I’d never imagined or that passion could go hand in hand with licentiousness, or desire be satisfied yet remain quite unsatisfied. I shouldn’t have looked back to the others and made comparisons but I did, I couldn’t help myself. To think of Emily and Suzanne not only made me shudder but wonder why I’d bothered, why I’d gone on and on, what had there been in it for me but an itch relieved. Now, more reflectively, I ask myself what can have been in it for them. As for Ivo, I thought of him and a great swell of nausea swung up through my body. Isabel put her cool hands on my face and said,
‘You’re hot, you’re blushing. You’ve gone as red as fire.’
‘At my thoughts,’ I said.
She misunderstood me. ‘You needn’t blush for your thoughts now, Tim. It’s too late for that.’
My love letter was never mentioned between us. There was no reason to mention it perhaps, for everything I had written in it I said to her again. And now I said it with a fiercer meaning, a greater reality, there was no longer need for fantasy. ‘I love you,’ ‘I want you,’ this was a litany I couldn’t keep from speaking, punctuating all the things we said with these two expressions of longing. I had written to her, as all lovers write, that I couldn’t live without her, and now I said it with my arms locked round her, skin to skin pressed close, and my lips against her hair.
‘I love you. I can’t live without you.’
I said it because she’d told me she was leaving next day. Not the Friday but the Thursday. They’d taken Lynette away to hospital in Anchorage and now there was no reason for her to stay longer.
‘Aren’t I the reason?’ I said.
It was Wednesday night and we’d been in bed all that rainy afternoon, had slept a little and then gone out to a restaurant, walking with our arms round each other’s waists. There was a new ring on her finger, a ruby or some red stone with diamonds, and seeing it across the table I felt the sharpest pang I’d ever known of jealousy and fear.
‘Who put that on your finger?’ I said. It was the way Ivo talked.
‘Lynette,’ she said. ‘It was her mother’s. A parting gift.’
Her tone was so serious, her eyes so grave, that I had to believe her. I woke up in the night, in the small hours when the early dawn had already come, and looked inside that ring for a love message, initials, a date. There was nothing. Her bag, that she called a purse, was on the desk. I checked that she was asleep and felt inside the bag for an address book. Instead I found a card with ‘Isabel Winwood’ printed on it, an address in Seattle and a phone number.
She whimpered in her sleep and put out her arms to me. We slept with our arms round each other till morning. I kissed her white breasts. I took her long skeins of hair and wound them round my own neck to draw us together.
I told her I’d stolen the card. She laughed and asked me why.
‘I was afraid you wouldn’t give me your address.’
‘I would have. But wise people in our situation wouldn’t meet again. I think we ought to be wise, don’t you?’
‘I think we ought never to be parted,’ I said, and then, ‘We’re too young to be wise.’
She turned her face away. ‘I’m going home today.�
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No, I said, no, no, you can’t. I held her tight. No, you can’t go, you mustn’t, no, no.
‘Tim, I can’t afford to stay a day longer than I absolutely must.’
Money – everything comes back to it. It’s what makes the world go round. I’m not sure what I think now but I used to think money was the primary requisite of life. You had it and all else could follow. After ten days at the Goncharof I had hardly any of Ivo’s left, I’d spent it all on Isabel. To be honest, I’d spent it on myself and Isabel. She too had to be careful with money. She was only a high-school teacher with a husband somewhere, a husband who had been mentioned but never discussed.
‘I’ll go with you,’ I said, ‘I’ll follow you. I won’t let you go.’
She moved a little way from me. She unwound the stream of hair and shook it back over her shoulders. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘Remember? You’d have gone last week but you couldn’t afford to.’ She spoke very softly, very tenderly. Her white, ringless hand stroked my cheek, my hair.
‘After what you’ve been spending, have you any money left?’
‘Not much,’ I said. I’d told her a lot of lies but still I didn’t want to tell her more than I could help. ‘Very little. About fifty dollars.’
There wasn’t any more to be said, not then. We hadn’t much time left together. We had none to waste.
Her plane would leave at lunchtime. I kept saying over and over to myself that I couldn’t go on without her. It was actually impossible for me to imagine anything at all happening after midday. It was if midday was a physical barrier, a great precipice that I’d either stop dead at or fall over. The morning was the path leading up to it, a downhill path that got me to the cliff edge more and more quickly as I advanced along it. Beyond was a bottomless chasm.
All that morning we weren’t apart for an instant. We got up together and took our shower together, mouth to mouth, hip to hip as the water streamed down our bodies. Once or twice she suggested I go back to my own room for just five minutes, she suggested we went downstairs separately, but I refused. We’d got beyond the forms. As far as I was concerned, the whole world might know of my love.
