by Barbara Vine
There were no more than a dozen people in the Favonia lounge, having tea while Louise briefed them on what would be happening next day when we arrived in Prince Rupert. Megan was there and Nathan, but no Fergus and no Betsy. No one who had been in the Zodiacs to Chechin was there. I felt a constriction in my throat and my mouth dried. But I sat down. I sat down by myself at a table near the dais where Louise was standing.
It seemed to me that her tone was grave. She seemed subdued. And where was everyone? It struck me that I wouldn’t know if the ship had turned round and was going back the way it had come. I hadn’t looked out – and what could I have seen if I had?
The New Eddystone Rock, apparently. Mr Braden, at the window, announced its appearance on the starboard side. This time I did look, it would have seemed strange if I hadn’t. The sea had calmed, heaving a little with no more than a soft swell, and the rain had become a thin, gentle spray. I joined the rest of them, a pitifully small number, at the windows and watched us pass the rock that looks like a lighthouse, smaller than Chechin, with no trees, its chimney broader, a natural tower. Through the drizzle its outlines were blurred. It was a castle seen through a curtain.
My imagination constructed a scenario. The passengers, the crew, everyone, were having a meeting about Ivo, to decide what must be done about Ivo, whether to go back or send a wireless message to whoever one does send such messages to, a helicopter station, a rangers’ outpost. And they were also discussing me, what to do about me. I looked around me. I counted eight people where there were usually a hundred. Then Mrs Braden, on her two sticks, came up to me and asked me how I was feeling.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, and, ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Not seasick?’
‘No.’ Light dawned then. ‘Is that where they are? They’re all seasick?’
‘So it seems.’ She laughed her old woman’s broken laugh that you’d have called a cackle in anyone less nice. ‘George and I are just too old for that nonsense and you, well, I guess you’re too young.’
They were lying down in their cabins, that was all it was. That was why the ship’s doctor wasn’t there and probably why Dr Ruffle wasn’t there. We were out in the open sea now and in a storm and people were being seasick. They would think Ivo was being seasick. That’s where he was, so far as they knew, in his cabin being seasick. I didn’t have any tea but went into the observation lounge and stared out to sea through the bubble-shaped windows. The lighthouse rock had disappeared, everything had disappeared and it was just darkening, lowering grey sky out there and a calm grey sea meeting it at a horizon it took good eyesight to see.
On the way down I met Megan coming up.
‘How’s Ivo?’ she said.
I was afraid to lie and it was impossible to tell the truth. I said I didn’t know. How did she know I might know? What had he told her?
‘Fergus kept throwing up. They’ll all get better now the storm’s past. The last-night party’s due to start after dinner.’
But only ten sat down to dinner. Another storm blew up when dusk came. I sat at a table alone and knew I wasn’t going to be able to eat anything. Dr Ruffle came in, looking pale, without his wife, and finished up the last of the black bananas. Most of the soup and starters and roast chicken and apple pie a la mode went back to the kitchen. I asked for a glass of Chardonnay. Dr Ruffle caught my eye and came over.
‘How about we share a bottle?’ he said.
I said yes, but not with the greed and the enthusiasm I’d have shown the night before. He sat down and began talking about seasickness, why some people have it and others don’t, about migraine, about epilepsy and L-dopa. I don’t know what he said, I didn’t listen, but he talked away, apparently careless of my indifference. No doubt he thought that I was feeling queasy too. And I was, but it was a nausea of the mind, or maybe the soul. I was starting to be sick with horror.
The party never took place. The bar was empty. Dr Ruffle excused himself to go down and see how his wife was. I thought, suppose I dreamt it, it never happened, and Ivo really is down there, lying on his bunk, knowing his sickness won’t go till we come into calmer waters. It was so unlike me, to hit anyone. And why had I? Because he suggested I’d prostitute myself? So what? I probably would have if I’d thought of it and knew how to go about it. For money. For the sake of getting to Isabel.
I wouldn’t hit a man for accusing me of that. I’d had far worse insults from Ivo. Besides, I knew he insulted me when he was unhappy, and yes, when I’d made him unhappy. So perhaps I hadn’t hit him and he hadn’t struck his head on that tree, I hadn’t run away and left him. I’d dreamt it when I got back and lay down and slept. During that sleep I’d dreamt of hitting Ivo, knocking him unconscious, running away and leaving him. It wasn’t the kind of thing anyone would really do, so I’d dreamt it.
The lift was nearly always in use by old people who couldn’t go up and down stairs, but not that night, it was free that night. I went down in it, got off at the boat deck and walked along to where the life-jackets were hung up and where the discs were on their hooks. It was silent and empty and rather cold. It was as if there was no one on board but me. The life-jacket numbered 76 was hanging up there and disc 76 was turned to black. I must have been a little bit mad, or else it was the effect of less than half a bottle of Chardonnay, but I felt a tremendous relief when I saw that life-jacket and that disc, as though I hadn’t put the life-jacket there myself and turned the disc over myself. Ivo must be all right, he must be on board, because his life-jacket was there and his disc turned to black.
Others thought that way, of course, but why did I? I was a bit mad and that must be the only reason. In any case, it was a euphoria that didn’t last long. I went down to his cabin and before I got to the door I knew I’d been deceiving myself. Of course I hadn’t dreamt it, of course it had happened. I’d turned the disc myself. He was on that island, he’d regained consciousness and understood what had happened. It was cold and pouring with rain, the Favonia had gone without him, he had no adequate gear to withstand the coldness of the night, no means of crossing the water, fifty or sixty miles of sea, before land could be reached. He had nothing to eat and nothing to drink but rain, no shelter but the hemlocks and the thin tall spruces. Or else he was still unconscious, losing blood from a head wound, while his body grew colder, soaked by rain.
The passage down in the depths of the ship was deserted. A superstitious fear came to me, not that I’d find his cabin empty but that I’d find him in there. It was like that story, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’, about the dead son coming back because his old parents have wished for him to be alive. They have three wishes granted them. The first one, I can’t remember what they wish but it proves to them that it works. With the second they wish for their dead son to come back, but when he knocks at the door they know who it is and they can’t face him, for they know he is dead, so they use the third wish to wish him dead again. I knew Ivo was, if not dead, at any rate fifty miles behind us on an island in that waste of seas, but I thought, suppose he’s in there?
I opened the door and went in. The bunk was stored away in the wall. Everything was tidy. I looked in the small hanging cupboard which was all cabins of this size had for keeping clothes in. The jacket he wore for going into the dining room was there and a denim jacket, two or three pairs of jeans, a sweater, three shirts on hangers, a pair of shoes and a pair of trainers. My scarf, the Leythe scarf that had been Gilman’s, hung over the hanger the good jacket was on. I shut the door again and sat down on the single chair.
Half the point of doing what I’d done would be lost if I didn’t do this next thing. Having done what I’d done, this I was about to do was nothing. Macbeth knew about that when he said he’d stepped so far in blood that even if he went no further, going back was as tedious as going on. I don’t think tedious meant the same thing to them as it does to us. It wasn’t boredom that bothered me. What I’d done I’d done to get to Isabel, but if I didn’t do this one more thing I hadn’t a
hope of reaching her. Strange, wasn’t it, I was thinking of her then not so much as a woman but as a wonderful country, a sort of paradise that I had to surmount all sorts of obstacles to reach. Well, I’d surmounted one of them, or made a start on surmounting it. Now it was as if I had to go through a number of trials and tests, like Tamino, like Papageno. Only mine were the tests of vice, not virtue.
I wasn’t sitting there deciding what to do. I’d already decided. Wasn’t that why I went into the cabin? I was just putting off the evil day. I jumped up and flung that cupboard door open. It was then that I realized he must be wearing that leather jacket he’d left with me in Juneau and reclaimed when he came to fetch me. He wouldn’t have carried money with him to Chechin, or credit cards. I went through his pockets. In the inside pocket of the good jacket I found his wallet with thirty pounds in sterling in it and something over six hundred American dollars. My hands shook when I counted the notes.
He had only two credit cards. I took the Visa and left the American Express. I left the travellers’ cheques, they were in his name and no use to me. I took all the money. It’s no good being sentimental, being so-called scrupulous, in these circumstances. That was what I told myself. He wouldn’t need it where he was and I needed it very much. If left there it would only go to relatives, whoever they might be. I went through the pockets of the denim jacket and found a further $29 in five-dollar bills and ones. I took it all.
Then I packed his things. If they don’t know he’s missing, I thought, they may not find out if I pack for him. That way a steward will just come and carry his baggage up on to the dock at Prince Rupert. So I packed everything into his suitcase and backpack and left them in the cabin behind the unlockable door.
It had a bad effect on me, stealing that money. I have to call it stealing. It wasn’t mine. I closed the door of Ivo’s cabin and went up one deck to mine where I was sick. I threw up on and on, voiding all that wine. My neighbours probably heard but people were throwing up all over the ship that night. Afterwards I drank a lot of water and lay down with my clothes on. I lay down and closed my eyes and thought about him on that island. The sickness had left me with shooting pains running up through my legs and in my stomach, it doubled me up. But I fell asleep at last and I’d like to be able to say, it would be appropriate to say, that I dreamt of Ivo and his fate, but I didn’t. I dreamt of N. and being a little boy again. I was on the beach looking for enough sand among the shingle to make a sand castle. As is the way with dreams, the castle was made the moment I thought of it, and it looked like the New Eddystone Rock, but clear and sharp, with turrets and castellations, the sun shining on it and the sky clear and blue.
Louise’s voice, bidding us get up, woke me. I had a few seconds of not knowing, of thinking things were the same, and then it came back, all of it in precise detail. At first it seemed unbelievable, I could not have done that, not me, not to Ivo, not to anyone. But I had and that was inescapable. I did something I hadn’t done since I was the age to make sand castles. I began to weep, sobbing and crying, my whole body shaking with tears.
While I write, even at this moment, they are listening to Rosenkavalier. If Julius had told me to attend it I’d have had to play sick, I couldn’t have gone, I couldn’t have sat there in that auditorium listening to Ochs’ song and the Great Waltz. Without me, without me, every day is dreadful, but with me no night is too long. It sounds a whole lot better in German.
The Minister for the Arts arrived late. Of course he was offered a drink but he didn’t want that, he wanted a shower before the performance, so he had to be rushed down to the Latchpool and a bathroom put at his disposal. The curtain went up fifteen minutes late and by that time the soprano singing the Marschallin had had a tantrum in her dressing room over the conductor calling her an old Slovenian whore. Not surprising when you know she’s a happily married thirty-five-year-old from Cracow.
I saw the Minister and his wife into their box and stood for a moment in the darkness of the inner foyer, surveying the audience through the oval glass in the door. And there, in the sea of faces, I saw Ivo’s face. The strong light fell on it and showed me that worn look, those dark deeply shadowed eyes, the sunken cheeks, the black hair that falls across a lined forehead. He was watching the stage, the heavy velvet curtain, waiting for it to rise up into the proscenium arch and Rosenkavalier to begin. But I was not to be fooled, not any more. I knew my mind was creating this image. My mind had taken a photograph and was projecting it inside my head, on the back of my eyes, superimposing this face over whatever face was really there between the woman with the curly ginger hair and the old man with the white moustache. I even told myself I wouldn’t be frightened any more.
Finding I could make the face change, I shut my eyes, opened them again and turned him into a child with pigtails, then into a bald man with a big hairless forehead. I shut my eyes again. I opened them and Ivo was back, looking down at his programme now, lifting his head and looking straight at me, or into the dark corner that concealed me. My eyes met his unseeing, light-blinded eyes. The lights began to dim and even outside the door I could hear the rustle audiences make as they settle and prepare themselves for the first bars of the overture. I turned away as the curtain slowly rose.
Of course I knew that seeing him in there wouldn’t prevent my seeing him on the way home or inside my own front door. He could be in two places at once and often was. It’s misty tonight and you can’t see the sea at all. The sea wall is there and the beach but beyond that only a great white void. I had that frequent fantasy that I might see drowned Ivo coming up out of this mist, out of the fog-bound sea. After all, the sea is the sea is the sea – isn’t it? Every bit or drop of it communicates with all the rest, none is cut off, and a drowned man might drift ten thousand miles from the far west to these European waters.
But I’ve no reason to think he drowned. There are a good many other ways in which he may have made his end. As for me, I came home. He didn’t come out of the sea, he wasn’t waiting inside the door, and if I can sense him behind me now as I write, that’s normal, I’m used to that. It was only for a little while that he went away.
That morning, before I left the Favonia, several people asked me where Ivo was and how Ivo was. But none of them did so suspiciously. I’d no reason to believe anyone knew that Ivo and I had been lovers or suspected that he’d disappeared in strange circumstances. Some thought he was ill, others that they’d missed him because he was in another part of the ship. Once we’d docked at Prince Rupert, everyone assumed, or so I suppose, that he’d gone ashore. Our baggage, as I’d expected it would be, was stacked on the dock, waiting for us to claim it. His was there, I spotted it, I could have picked it out from a thousand bags, it had an iridescence for my eyes all its own.
Only Fergus, it seemed to me, had an idea that things weren’t as they should be. But I don’t know, it’s only a fancy I had. A brilliant sun was shining, the kind that’s too bright to last. The four lecturers stood on the dockside, waiting to say goodbye to us, with the captain, Louise, the chief steward and various other important people. There should have been five lecturers but no one remarked on this. No one mentioned Ivo. We passed in front of them, shaking hands. It was like the line-up at a reception or a wedding. I shook hands with Megan and Nathan and Betsy but when I came to Fergus he turned away at the precise moment and seemed to be saying something over his shoulder to Louise. My hand was stuck out in front of me. I withdrew it and felt the colour come into my face. But I don’t know, it was such a small thing, and perhaps he really did have something he needed to say to Louise at that moment.
I wonder if it could be Fergus who’s sending those letters? You think of all those lecturers as somehow being good people, pure people. But that’s nonsense. Education doesn’t teach integrity – as I should know – or reverence for the wilderness give you any sort of superiority of character. It’s as likely to be Fergus as anyone else. He was Canadian and his home was in Vancouver, I can remember his tel
ling us that at lunch one day.
But if he knew, wouldn’t he have given the alarm? Wouldn’t the Favonia have gone back for Ivo? Fergus can’t have known. His contempt for me must have been brought about by my drinking. He can’t have known, so the sender of the letters isn’t him.
I hadn’t gone home before looking in at Rosenkavalier. The post had come after I left in the morning, and there it was, on the mat, another of them. The handwriting is becoming as familiar to me as my own. This time the postmark was Seattle. One other thing I’ve noticed, it’s more often Seattle than anywhere else.
Like Selkirk’s adventure, the wreck of the Essex has become famous through being incorporated in a book. In this case, Moby-Dick. You are a literary kind of guy, maybe you’ve read it.
She was a whaling vessel. Dear, oh dear, not politically correct these days, not to be mentioned. Some would say her crew deserved all they got. But this was 1820, before ecology was invented. The interesting thing was that a whale wrecked the ship. In revenge, no doubt, for the murder some hours previously of its three companions.
Pollard, the captain, and the crew abandoned the wreck and set off in three whaleboats. They drank sea-water, they drank their own urine, they ate flying-fish raw. A month later they came ashore on Henderson Island, one of the Pitcairn Group. There they subsisted for a little longer on birds’ eggs and peppergrass until seventeen survivors set off once more in an attempt to find Easter Island, leaving three men on Henderson.
A shark attacked one of the boats. There were storms, rough seas. One man died, then another, then a third. The survivors ate his body. Two months after the whaler went down they were rescued by the brig Indian.
Of the men in the other two boats six died of want. Their bodies were cannibalized. Because this food was insufficient a lottery was held and the cabin boy, aged sixteen, was chosen to be sacrificed. Captain Pollard said to him, ‘My lad, if you don’t like your lot, I’ll shoot the first man who touches you.’ But the poor starved boy laid his head down on the gunnel of the boat, saying, ‘I like it as well as any other.’
