by Barbara Vine
But nothing disconcerted him, not rain or cold or apathy among people inadequately dressed for these hazards. As he brought the boat about and we turned in close under the overhang of green and sparkling gold, as the branches shook over us their gathered rain, he turned to me a face I’d never seen before, so enraptured was it, so caught up in the glories that he alone of us could truly see.
Coming aboard the Favonia, I turned tag 22 to black and asked Ivo if I should turn 76 over for him.
‘You don’t listen to what you’re told, do you?’ he said like a teacher.
‘I’m sorry.’ I was meek, placatory.
‘Remember next time.’
But he came to my cabin later with a bottle of champagne and his own tooth glass. We sat on my bunk drinking champagne and he said he was sorry, he shouldn’t have spoken to me like that, especially in the presence of others. No reply had come from Oliver Davies but tomorrow we’d be in Sitka and he’d phone Davies at the time he had appointed.
I’d begun to feel as if swept along by uncontrollable events, a river of them, tumbled with ice, and for a while could only give myself to it. I yielded to Ivo in everything, I let him make love to me, hard and quick, all over in five minutes, I let him lead me to dinner, I preceded him upstairs, zombie-like, to where Fergus gave the lecture on the Russians and the sea-otter fur trade. That night I lay in his arms, thinking that I must tell him, I must tell him before he reached Oliver Davies and arranged to leave the ship.
I had to tell him before we came to Sitka.
12
Writing this, I’ve made a discovery. I’d thought that putting down my experiences on paper would be intolerably painful, I thought the pain of it might inhibit and finally stop me. But while the events themselves were deeply painful when experienced, and thinking about them equally excoriating, writing of them hasn’t been like that. Writing hasn’t been a relief or an exorcism but something quite other. It’s been as if I described things that happened, not so much to someone else as to a part of me that has remained inviolate from them. I’ve found detachment without looking for it. I’ve found that living is one dimension, thinking another and writing a third.
Why did no one ever point this out during the creative-writing course at P.? Perhaps they didn’t know. Perhaps nothing had ever happened to them to give them a reason for discovering it or they were too much occupied by colloquial contractions and deconstruction. What does it matter? We learn these things better if we discover them for ourselves. I’m learning now as I begin to write down what happened when I confessed to Ivo and asked for my release. And this time, so effective has the detachment process been that I’m not going to need any digressions to postpone the evil day.
Ashore in Sitka, while the avifaunists paid a visit to an eagle hospital, and the rest went to watch the Archangel Dancers, I wandered the town, looking for evidences of the Russians. There weren’t many. Even the Orthodox cathedral had burnt down and been rebuilt thirty years before. Ivo, keeping to his time to the minute, was in the Westmark Shee Atika Hotel, phoning San Francisco.
The nerve I needed to tell him had been paralysed by a bad night, by dreams, by simple fear. If Oliver Davies agreed to take over from him, I’d have to arrange some kind of escape for myself in Prince Rupert or Vancouver. And I’d have to do it without money. I considered stealing money. From Ivo, of course, for I knew he’d never expose me. That was the state I’d reached. I had even made myself aware of how much money he had, far more in actual cash than I’d expected. He’d always disapproved of the over-use of credit cards and a cheque-book was no use to him here.
It was base. I know that. Fear and anticipated panic will make one do almost anything. No, not ‘almost’, anything. I tried to think of Isabel but although her face and her voice, her whole appearance and her ways, are crystal clear to me now, they’d faded then. It was as if she’d stepped away from me into the mist. She was veiled and Ivo was starkly visible.
He came into the bar where we had arranged to meet and told me he’d spoken to Oliver Davies’ wife. Davies was away until tomorrow. She’d no idea if he would consent to take over from Ivo. Sounding unhappy about the idea, she said she’d ask her husband and he would contact the ship. No, I’ll phone him from Wrangell, Ivo said.
We each had a beer. Ivo wanted to show me the museum but I hadn’t the heart for it. He asked me why I was depressed but I couldn’t answer. We walked down to the waterfront where eagles perched on hulls of boats and fishing tackle. It was raining a bit but the clouds were high, smooth and white as snow. A little way out, on the calm silvery-white water, one of the big cruise ships lay at anchor, the Northern Princess, eight decks high. We stood on the wet stones and looked out to sea, real sea here, nothing on the other side until you got to Japan. The rain on my face was like fine, cold needles.
‘I am going to leave you,’ I said. I spoke remotely. It was as if I was reciting something I’d learnt. ‘When we get off the ship on Friday I’m leaving you. It’s over. I’ve had enough. It’s all over.’
He turned his head. ‘What?’
‘I’m leaving you. I don’t want to be with you any more. This is the end of it.’
It was such an effort to say that it exhausted me. I felt physically enormously tired. Those few terrible sentences had used up a disproportionate amount of energy. He took hold of my arm, just above the elbow, in a hard, painful grip.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
I did so, unwillingly. His face had grown dark – with rage, with pain, with simple disbelief? I couldn’t tell.
‘I’m not hearing this,’ he said. ‘You didn’t say what I think you said.’
His fingers dug into the muscle. I tried to shake him off. All I could think of saying was what Clarissa used to say to me when I was a child, ‘Don’t. Not here. People can see us.’
‘Do you think I give a fuck what people see?’
He was holding both my arms. I struggled and he held on. We were on the quayside and in danger of falling over. I’d have liked to break free and hit him, strike him in the face and see him lose his balance and fall in the water. Of course I didn’t. I said, ‘Let’s go somewhere and talk.’
What had I expected? That he’d accept it and let me go? Easily? Like that? I hadn’t expected anything. I’d never climbed the great rampart of telling him, never imagined what was on the other side. We went back on board and up into the empty observation lounge. A crew member who had been going through it with a vacuum cleaner said good morning and then left us alone. The ship rocked gently, sitting at rest on the flat sea.
‘Why did you say what you said out there?’ said Ivo.
As if it had been just something to say, to provoke, to tease or to test, not a statement of intent. I tried to keep calm but I realized I was afraid of him. A flood of terror of Ivo seemed to flow through the vessels of my body, a petrifying fluid. I was afraid it would paralyse my voice, making it hoarse or squeaky. I think it did a bit. Ivo was looking at me with scorn.
‘I am going to leave you. I meant it.’
‘What’s brought this on?’
‘I wasn’t going to tell you until we were home again,’ I said, ‘but I’m doing it now because I can’t stand any more. I can’t be with you any more.’
‘I asked you why.’
Because I no longer got anything out of the relationship, I said, because it was all irritation and annoyance and pain.
‘You no longer love me.’
It was spoken levelly, in an almost conversational tone. I’d moved far enough away from our connection to be touched with shock because a man had said this to me, a man. He saw it in my face, or he saw something, and gave a harsh laugh.
‘You never loved me?’
I had that feeling one sometimes gets that the room is bugged or that invisible listeners, agog, are hearing what one says. ‘Do we have to dissect everything?’ I said.
‘No, we aren’t dissecting. I asked you if you had ceased to love me and you’
ve answered me whether you know it or not. Now I’d like to ask you why you ever made that approach to me in Martin’s room that day. It was you made it, if you remember. You came up to me and touched my face. Was it all nothing? Was it just for fun?’
The old couple coming into the lounge saved me from answering. On sticks, they proceeded slowly in our direction, stopped and spoke to us in their courteous way in their cultivated Boston voices. Had we enjoyed our visit to Sitka? Mr Braden had been ashore but his wife had not quite been up to it. In better weather she might have managed, but when it was wet and slippery underfoot … However, remaining aboard, she had seen no fewer than three sea otters swimming in the neighbourhood of the ship.
Ivo and I stared, nodded, achieved rictus smiles. We must have seemed ill to them. Out here, in the open sea, one or two passengers had been mildly seasick and Mrs Braden evidently thought that was what was wrong with me, for she advised me to have a rest before dinner and be sure to try to eat something. Ivo and I went to my cabin. I sat on the bunk, he sat on the single metal-framed chair.
‘I have to give the lecture tonight.’ He spoke in a dull monotone.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Would it have been better if I hadn’t told you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘It could only have been a postponement.’
‘You still haven’t told me why,’ he said.
And so it went on, I determined on not bringing Isabel into it, he wanting an explanation, as if there is ever a single clear-cut reason for breaking up the sort of thing we had. But he didn’t ask if there was anyone else. At last he left me, he had to, for Louise’s voice came over the system, calling us all on deck for a sighting of whales or otters or something, and I didn’t see him again until I went up to his lecture. Maybe he had no dinner, I don’t know. He talked about the formation of fiords and this wasn’t a case of the professional rising above emotional pressures, doing a good job in spite of inner turmoil. He looked and sounded ill, and several times his voice faltered.
I couldn’t face prolonging our conversation and after the lecture I went off to do something I swore I wouldn’t do once I was with Isabel and we were happy. I went to drown my sorrows. There were plenty of others anxious to do the same. There always are. I remember sitting with the ship’s doctor, talking about loneliness and the means by which we’d found what it was. We drank brandy and he smoked all the time.
It was stupor rather than sleep that took hold of me around midnight. I made it to my cabin, but only just, the ship’s doctor supporting me, the drunk leading the drunk, down the staircases and along the passages, as the Favonia made her way round the northern tip of Baranof Island and into Chatham Strait. A death-like sleep had hold of me when Ivo came to the door very early in the morning. I said something, ‘Who is it?’ probably, and fell back into unconsciousness, to be wakened from it I don’t know how much later by Louise’s bright voice relayed. Ivo was sitting in the chair, watching me.
He looked as ill as I felt. His worn face had become cadaverous. I staggered into the shower room and drank from the tap, then I drank from a bottle of Perrier I didn’t remember was in the cabin, up-ending it, draining the whole litre or whatever it was. He didn’t say a word. Louise’s voice was replaced by terrible music, hot metal and a woman’s shrieking soprano. I grunted to Ivo something about why was he there. What was he doing in my room at this hour?
‘It’s a full day for me,’ he said. ‘I won’t have another chance.’
Thank God. I didn’t say it. ‘I want to have a shower,’ I said.
‘Have it.’
‘There isn’t much room in here.’
‘Why did you drink so much last night?’ he said. ‘Are you unhappy?’
In the shower, I started off with the water hot and let it run icy-cold. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me unless it was because I was twenty-four and you can play about a lot with your health at my age. Even if you’d never been particularly used to luxury, as I hadn’t, it was horrible in that shower cabinet, everything wet, the wooden slats underfoot wet, all the surfaces you touched sprinkled with a kind of dew, the towels perpetually damp. I’d been shocked when I found out what Ivo was paying for it.
I came out with a damp towel tied round my waist. Ivo gave his harsh unpleasant laugh. ‘If it was all right for me to see you naked the day before yesterday, why isn’t it now?’
Because, when a love affair is over, you begin behaving in the former lover’s presence as you behave in the presence of those with whom you’ve never had a sexual relationship. A normal degree of modesty returns. If, for instance, I’d found myself for a night under the same roof as Emily, I’d have wrapped a towel round my waist when I came out of the bathroom. Well, with Emily I’d probably have put a dressing-gown on, and the more voluminous the better. Only with Isabel now would I have let myself be naked.
I didn’t explain to Ivo. He knew why. I began putting on my clothes. He said, ‘Will you have lunch with me in Wrangell today? We could have an hour together. To talk.’
‘There isn’t any more to say.’
‘There’s plenty more for me to say. Besides – ’ He was proud and this cost him an effort. I didn’t want him to make it. ‘I have to know that you didn’t mean what you said yesterday. If you were so unhappy last night that you had to drink that much, I have to think it was because you regretted what you said, because you found you needed me.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘no.’
‘Tim, I want us to be together permanently. I don’t think you’ve understood that. I know I criticize you, I find fault and to some extent I admonish you, but that’s only because I want you to be perfect. You’re so young and you’ve a chance still of being someone remarkable. Isn’t that permitted in someone older than you who loves you, to try to set you right? You could say I’m trying to make a perfect partner for myself.’
I said something about not wanting to be made into anything. But, in fact, I can’t sort out any more what we said to each other in my cabin and what we said in the ‘diner’ where we had lunch in Wrangell. The enormous hangover I had has left my memories confused. I only know that nothing was said in the cabin about a third party. At that point he still hadn’t asked if there was anyone else.
He must have gone quite soon after that. We left together to go up to breakfast. I had my hand on the door handle to open it when he stopped me. He took hold of my wrist.
‘Have pity on me, Tim.’
I said nothing. We went upstairs. Waves crashed inside my head but the sea was calm and the morning clear and blue. I drank black coffee, ate a piece of toast, watched over by Ivo who seemed to me once more censorious, condemnatory, paternalistic. I thought about how he’d been when we first met, how laid-back, with that tantalizing coolness, his wit, the faintly sexy innuendo. Megan came to the table to ask him something and he got up and left with her, giving me no backward glance and saying nothing to me.
A rather larger cruise ship than the Favonia waited outside Wrangell harbour but we went in and made fast at the city dock. Ivo and the other lecturers with a party of Tlingit enthusiasts had gone ahead and I saw that disc 76 was turned to red. I turned 22 over as I went ashore on my own. The children in Wrangell have some sort of franchise to be the sole purveyors of the garnets that are found there by the Sitkine River, and it seemed a good idea to buy a garnet for Isabel. They are only semi-precious stones but I thought that Isabel had just the colouring that dark, congealed blood-red would suit. Perhaps I could have one set for her as a pendant or a ring. That brought me up against the problem of money once again. Ivo had given me $300 as spending money on the previous Monday, the day he’d first phoned Oliver Davies and I’d been in that short-lived stage of yielding to the inevitable. There had been nothing to spend the money on.
I wandered the streets of Wrangell, searching for a fine garnet. A little Tlingit boy sold me the best one I saw for a dollar and refused to take more. Thinking of how I could have it
set, in gold certainly, brought Isabel back to me and I felt her presence more than I had for days. I hadn’t written to her. Once or twice I’d sat down to write but I hadn’t known what to say because I couldn’t write what I wanted to, that I’d see her soon and see her alone. Now I saw her again and her disappointment as she waited for the letter that never came. I imagined her sad eyes, the light shrug of her shoulders. Then I pictured her long white hand and my ring sitting there on the wedding finger, the plighted love finger. The garnet had been so cheap. I calculated that if I spent nothing more I’d have enough to get me from Vancouver to Seattle and perhaps enough for a night in an hotel.
It’s a dismal feeling, that one of absolutely not wanting to see someone that not such a long time before I had wanted to see very much. My whole body seemed to grow heavy at the prospect of the meeting ahead. My footsteps dragged and my head ached. I got to the diner first and had a drink, a hair of the dog. It was almost alarming the way it didn’t work, it made me feel no better. He came in just as I was wondering whether to have another.
As if he were talking to Mr and Mrs Braden or Connie, he said, ‘The tide will be out this afternoon, so we can all make the trek to Petroglyph Beach. I hope you’ll come, you’ll find it very interesting.’
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘There are large stones on the beach, scattered among the other rocks, each bearing a device or logo that’s been chiselled into the surface. No one knows why and it isn’t known who the craftsmen were. The stones are very ancient.’
