by Barbara Vine
I could think of nothing to say.
‘Elianne Donizetti has been buying rice paper and crayons so that she can make a petroglyph rubbing as a souvenir. Perhaps you’d like to do the same.’
‘Are you serious?’
He smiled unpleasantly, the way he did when something he said got under my skin. Then his face altered and his voice.
‘Though you think your feelings have changed, you could still stay with me for companionship. You’ll be alone, otherwise, and I’ll be alone, and is there anything profitable in that? Sex can be suspended for a while, if that suits you. I’ll find it hard, but some things are hard and that’s all there is to it.’
‘Ivo,’ I said, ‘I just don’t want to be with you.’
It caused him pain, he couldn’t hide that. A kind of spasm crossed his face. The truth is that we only care about someone’s pain when we like him or when we don’t know him personally and have no reason for liking or disliking. I observed Ivo’s pain but I didn’t care about it.
He made a strenuous effort, both to be calm and to be reasonable. ‘We shall inevitably be apart for the next two weeks, anyway. It’s too difficult now for me to change with Oliver. While I go back to Juneau and come back again to Prince Rupert you’ll be on your West Coast travels. We won’t write. We won’t do that this time.’ He flashed me a dark look. ‘Or, rather, I won’t. You don’t have any problems in that area. We’ll have no contact until we meet in Seattle sixteen days from now.’
He was giving me a way out. Or, handing me an opportunity if I’d had the sense to see it. I’d only to be a little nice to him, a little acquiescent, make a few promises and I’d not only have been free but have had enough to be free on. For I’ve no doubt that if I’d said, Yes, we’ll have this separation, we’ll be apart with no contact for two weeks, we’ll meet in Seattle and see how we (I) feel, if I’d done that he would have ceased to nag me, begun to be pleasant to me, and, more important, given me more money.
It’s hard now to say why I didn’t agree. I’d like to think it was because I wasn’t as bad as that, but that’s something which, if I’m honest, I’d be dubious about. Perhaps I reasoned that if I agreed it would all have to begin again in two weeks’ time and Isabel would be there or would be near-by, would almost certainly have to be lied to, fobbed off, deceived, while I prevaricated and alibied myself. And would Ivo just go? Would he give me up more easily in a fortnight’s time than he would now?
‘I’d like to make a clean break now,’ I said.
He hated clichés. I was never allowed to get away with even such a semi-quasi-cliché as that one. ‘Any break you make is unlikely to be clean,’ he said. ‘Dirty dealing is part of your charm – or would appear so to those who find amorality appealing.’
I said I didn’t see how abusing me would help. Why did he always insult me when things weren’t going his way? What was the point of insulting me, anyway? He’d been looking down at the table. He lifted his head and looked at me. There were dark shadows under his eyes and his eyelids looked heavy and swollen. Ivo’s eyes were tragic, I sometimes thought, even when he was enjoying himself. They were very expressive eyes, not opaque like many people’s are, but true mirrors of the soul.
The question was bound to come, though I’d genuinely hoped and believed it might be avoided. He was looking at me and I knew then that he was going to ask. But I was looking over his shoulder at the door and by the time he spoke I’d seen Betsy and Nathan come in with Dr Ruffle. Our cruise was the enemy of intimacy. You could hardly ever be alone, a tête-à-tête was always interrupted.
Ivo would never use an expression like ‘someone else’ or ‘another man’. He said, ‘Have you found a new lover?’
What had he in mind? One of the jet-haired, ivory-skinned crew? The barman with the smiling brown eyes? I didn’t answer because the others were already coming up to us. They’d had lunch, they said, they’d seen us through the window. They must have wondered why the welcome they got from me was so enthusiastic. But Ivo had gone very pale, he’d gone grey and he looked ill. Betsy had begun to talk about eagles, the bounty that the United States Government once had on eagles and their consequent endangerment, and Dr Ruffle knew someone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had a pet eagle, imprinted when young, so that it fancied itself human. Ivo looked as if he was recovering from being struck in the face. Under the table he took hold of my knee and held on to it. He had never done that before, anywhere, ever. It was as if he held on for dear life, his nails digging into the skin under the kneecap. Just as I was thinking I’d cry out if it didn’t stop, he took his hand away, got up and said, Let’s go, let’s find the others and go and see the petroglyphs.
It was a desolate place, that beach. We walked to it, up a long hill, where little houses in little suburban gardens looked out on to the sea. The sun had gone and we were hardly to see it again until the cruise was over and Alaska left behind. Of course I didn’t know that then and as I trudged up the hill I kept hoping, the way a child does, for the clouds to part and recede. The greyness made it half-dark, though only two o’clock on a midsummer afternoon, and by the time we’d crossed a cliff-top field and started the descent to the beach, the Tongass drizzle had begun.
The sea was a paler, shinier grey than the sky, the beach itself a welter of grey stones, all of it flat, gloomy and cold, the mountains hidden in a mist like cold, wet smoke. It would have been rather like the beach here at N., very early on a wet morning, but for the great boulders that lay tumbled about. They may have been granite or limestone or something else, Ivo did tell me, but I’ve forgotten. Some of them were bare, sea-washed, natural, but others had carvings on them, some kind of hieroglyphs, a fish, a face, a hand, an abstract figure. I’ve never understood why people get so excited about this kind of thing but they do. Even Ivo was lifted temporarily out of his misery by the enthusiasm of the Donizettis and the touching simplicity of an avifaunist from Fort Worth who made a stone rubbing and then took a photograph of the only bird he found represented among the petroglyphs.
There was no atmosphere about the place, no sense of a distant past or of a mysterious lost culture. It had grown rather cold as the clouds sank and the white wetness became tangible. We were there a long time. I sat on a stone with something like the letter B carved on it and stared at the luminous sea. I tried to think about Isabel but I couldn’t. When I tried to conjure her up and see her, which is one of the things we do when we ‘think about’ someone, I could only summon an image of her walking away, her back towards me. I realized I was very frightened. I was frightened of Ivo. Ivo blocked out everything else and he came near to extinguishing Isabel.
On the return journey he ignored me. I was left alone. I walked alone while everyone else was part of a group. Behind me I could hear Ivo talking about the petroglyphs to some people called Blatt from Cincinnati, a keen couple who kept putting forward ideas as to who did the carving on the stones. Ivo was saying that the stones were there when the Tlingit first came, they were there before any known settlers, and Mrs Blatt, who was a Chariots of the Gods fan and believer in flying saucers, suggested extra-terrestrial agency. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to catch Ivo’s eye, and I caught it, I held it, while he stared at me as if I were some worm crawled out from under a petroglyph. But no, he’d have given the worm a kinder look. He turned away and smiled at Mrs Blatt, that gullible admirer of supernatural pyramid builders.
I was afraid of being alone with him. I was afraid of that question being asked again and of not knowing how to answer. But it’s interesting how things are hardly ever as bad as you think they will be but often very bad when you anticipate nothing much. Neither was true in this case. I was terrified of Ivo and I was right to be, for he was far worse than I’d expected.
He went on board ahead of me. I noticed that 76 was turned to the black side. I’d like to have gone to my cabin and slept but I was afraid he’d follow me there, so I went up to the observation deck with my binoculars and ming
led with the twitchers who were watching a flock of tiny ducks. The Favonia weighed anchor and started on the southward journey for Ketchikan. Rain fell in straight shining rods, making a million punctures in the flat, calm sea, ‘calm as a millpond’, some woman said, as if she hadn’t said it the day before only to have Ivo ask her, in a deceptively courteous way, if she’d ever seen a millpond. The rain made it very cold, only the little brown ducks, beloved of the American Avifaunists, seemed to enjoy it, bouncing and diving and plunging in the glassy grey water.
I went furtively into the dining room when the time for dinner came and, seeing a vacant place at the Donizettis’ table, asked if I might join them. I could avoid sitting with Ivo that way. There’s a lot to be said for Americans. They reacted as if I were their president, or at least an Oscar winner, and couldn’t have been more welcoming, gracious and apparently delighted. I didn’t see Ivo at all. He may have eaten earlier. I made up my mind not to go to the lecture. The Donizettis were going, of course, they hadn’t missed a single lecture, they hadn’t missed anything. As far as I could gather, they had barely slept.
After two brandies in the bar, I went downstairs to my cabin. The ship felt empty, almost everyone being up in the lecture hall. I lay down in my bunk and thought, only one more day, one last day, and on Saturday I shall see Isabel. Again I considered writing to her but it seemed too late for that. Instead, I thought about money.
It’s interesting that I hardly ever think about it these days, I’ve just enough and that’s all right, I’ve enough to stow away a bit in Sergius, and that’s all I want, but then it occupied half the capacity of my waking thoughts. Money, money – you’re not supposed to work in the United States without a green card or whatever, I knew that, but I also knew that people do work, in restaurants for instance, and get away with it for months, for years. I could do that, I thought, and get some money together and persuade Isabel to come to England with me.
I really thought all that, lying there in the belly of the Favonia, as she moved through the narrow channels towards the open sea. It says something for my imagination that I could have those visions and see them as feasible, that I could see it as a cool, practical concept, working as a waiter or barman, living with Isabel, planning a joint future for us. I left out Ivo. I tried to leave him out, though I didn’t entirely, for all the time I was dreaming this way, I could feel my fear of him tensing up my shoulder muscles, moving nauseously inside me, drying my mouth.
And five minutes after the lecture began he walked into the cabin. He didn’t knock this time but walked straight in and kicked the door shut behind him. I must have made a sound, some kind of exclamation of more than surprise, of actual fear, for he looked at me with scorn.
‘Oh, please,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What do you want?’
‘Are you afraid of me?’
I didn’t answer him but repeated what I’d said.
‘I want to know who it is, of course. I want to know all about him.’
I couldn’t say I didn’t know what he meant. I suppose people do say that, I’ve read that they do, ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ though I’ve never heard it. We always know what the other one means in these situations, not that there had ever been a situation quite like this for me before. But Emily walked into my consciousness at that moment and stood there, looking at me accusingly.
A product of the creative-writing course at P., I ought to have been able to invent a man, a male lover complete with name and appearance and occupation, I ought to have been able to describe some fictitious meeting and even have given a sample of our dialogue. The reason I didn’t was that I wanted to leave all that behind, I wanted my homosexuality to have been a phase, prolonged in my case longer than such phases usually are, but over now. I didn’t want to confirm it even if such confirmation was a lie. Superstition came into it somewhere, a feeling that if I boldly stated I was in a sex relationship with a new man I’d be holding out temptation to the fates and the result would be the loss of Isabel.
I was terrified but I said it. ‘It’s a woman,’ I said.
He wasn’t immediately upset. I suppose shock takes a while to strike home. ‘Another Suzanne? Another Emily?’ It was like a blow in the guts the way he remembered their names. ‘Oh, please,’ he said again. ‘A little bit of pastime. Not the real thing, you know that.’
‘That’s just what it is, Ivo,’ I said, ‘it is the real thing. I’m in love. I’ve never been in love before. You know I was never in love with you, I never said I was, I can’t help it, I didn’t know I was going to meet her and fall in love. It was a shock to me.’
Cold as ice, he said, ‘Who is she?’
‘I met her in Juneau, in the hotel.’
He was silent.
‘We were together all the time, for nearly two weeks. I saw her first in the bar.’ The sneer that curled his mouth I ignored. ‘She left her book behind and I kept it for her till we met next day. I was in love by then, it was love at first sight.’
‘You fell in love with a woman you met in Juneau?’ He sounded as incredulous as if I’d said I was going to take over control of the ship from the captain. ‘A woman staying in the hotel? What happened – she picked you up?’
‘I don’t want her talked about like that, Ivo,’ I said. ‘I love her.’ I looked him in the eye. ‘And she loves me.’
‘I don’t believe you. You’re inventing this. I don’t know what your motive is, I don’t know what you hope to gain by it, but I know it isn’t true.’
‘Ivo,’ I said, ‘you have to believe it. We’re lovers, Isabel and I, we made love I don’t know how many times, and we’re going to go on, I’m going to her on Saturday and I’ll be her lover again.’
I hadn’t finished, I was still talking, pressing all this home, making him believe, when he was up and attacking me, his knee on my chest and his hands round my throat.
13
It’s growing light in the evenings now and there has been no repetition of my experience in the dark hall of my house. I haven’t seen Ivo again, his ghost, his shade, I haven’t even seen anyone in the town who resembles him. He no longer waits at my elbow while I’m at my desk and he no longer follows me home. It can’t be that my writing has exorcized him, for I haven’t been writing for weeks now. I got stuck. I got writer’s block, though hardly for the usual reasons. When I reached the point where Ivo attacked me it brought on something like illness, I felt sick, I felt pressure on my head like the ceiling coming down on me, even felt for that night and the next day that I wouldn’t be able to write any more.
And as if he or she sensed the predicament I was in, my North American correspondent sent me two more castaway accounts, one at the end of February, the second in the second week of March. Both were on yellow legal-pad paper and both were in envelopes with the address handwritten.
A Venetian merchant, Pietro Quirini, based at Heraklion in Crete, left port bound for Flanders in April 1431. It was an ill-fated voyage. Due to problems with his rudder he did not reach Lisbon until the end of August. The ship continued northward and in December another storm struck. It began to go down. Sixty-eight people were on board.
Forty-seven took to a longboat, twenty-one to a gig. The gig sank amid the wild waves. For the men in the longboat hell began. Their provisions and all their barrels of water were swept overboard in the heavy seas. The cold was typical of North Sea latitudes in the depths of winter. Deprived of fresh water they drank sea-water, became dehydrated like victims of cholera, and thereby lost their strength to steer the boat. More than half of them were dead before they at last reached a snow-covered island in January 1432.
The starving, frozen men kept themselves alive by drinking snow and eating shellfish for three weeks until a fisherman landed on the island and told them they were in the Lofoten Archipelago off the north-west coast of Norway. Their rescue was arranged without delay.
Not everyone has been so lucky.
The seco
nd one outlined a less harrowing experience.
In the early 1700s, Philip Ashton, a seafaring man, was among a large number of sailors captured by pirates off Cape Sable in Central America. It was while the pirates were collecting drinking water in casks on Roatan Island, which lies in the Bay of Honduras, that he escaped from them and hid in the forest. Unable to find him when they were due to leave, one of them called out, ‘If you do not come away presently I shall go off and leave you alone.’
Ashton chose to remain but wrote: ‘I was on an island which I had no means of leaving; I knew of no human being within many miles; my clothing was scanty, and it was impossible to procure a supply. I was altogether destitute of provision, nor could tell how my life was to be supported. This melancholy prospect drew a copious flood of tears from my eyes …’
He was nine months on Roatan before encountering any human being. Snakes inhabited the island. One of them ‘opened its mouth wide enough to have received a hat, and breathed on me’. Before companions, then rescuers, came, he almost drowned while swimming to a nearby, smaller, island, one that was free of vermin. Another time a shovel-nosed shark struck him in the thigh. From going barefoot, his feet were severely wounded. Once he was attacked by a wild boar.
Ashton was lucky. He was rescued. Two years, ten months and fifteen days after he was first taken by pirates, he returned to his father’s house in Salem, Massachusetts and was received ‘as one risen from the dead’.
What am I to make of these letters? There seems to be no pattern to them. For instance, if they had begun by recounting mild cases and progressed to the worst kind, the sort that ended in the death of the castaway, I could see some point to them. I’d expect a last one, of particular horror, and this followed by a threat of retribution or a demand for something. But Ashton’s case is one of the least horrifying in the catalogue of those sent to me and Quirini’s one of the most dreadful.
One had a Seattle postmark, the other came from Banff in Canada. It’s possible others may know what I did, but the only person I ever told was Thierry Massin. I can’t imagine Thierry having the intellect and the resources to write these things. Besides, he could barely speak English, let alone write it. Whoever is sending me this stuff must have access to a reference library. Of course Thierry may have told someone else and it is this man who has taken it upon himself to torment me like this. A man – if Thierry has a hand in it, it won’t be a woman.
