by Barbara Vine
Only two men on the boats survived. The three men who had chosen to remain on Henderson Island were rescued.
Ivo, at any rate, can’t have resorted to cannibalism. There were no people there to eat, any more than there were animals or fish. I asked myself if it were possible that Mrs Braden had guessed the truth. Or if she’d guessed when she saw in the newspaper of the discovery of Ivo’s body, and if she’d told someone. I’d never have suspected Lillian Braden of sending anyone anonymous letters designed to threaten, I knew she was incapable of it, but she might have passed on what she knew and it’s he or she that is doing it.
And then, suddenly, I thought of something. Of all those people in the accounts who’d been marooned on islands, either by chance or intent, not one had died there. They had endured terrible privations, but all had been saved. Yet in the nature of things there must have been far more castaways who hadn’t survived. Was it that the dead had no literature commemorating them? Or was there some other purpose behind my correspondent’s choice of stories?
I’ve kept the envelopes. While the typeface in which these accounts have been put on paper looks as if made by a word processor, the name and address on each envelope is always handwritten. I wonder if this is because the sender has a laser printer linked to the PC which won’t print on envelopes. Ours won’t at the Consortium and we have to use a typewriter for the envelopes.
The writing is forward-sloping and big with bold loops, rather old-fashioned by our standards but a typical American hand. A man, I think, I have that feeling, but how can I really tell? Someone who was on the cruise and who later read of Ivo’s death in a newspaper.
The letters have ceased to frighten me. I’ve stopped being frightened of them. I’ve almost ceased to be curious. The next one that comes I shan’t open. If anything frightens me now it is the speed with which I seem to be growing older.
The plane to Vancouver wasn’t due to leave till the afternoon. A guided tour of Prince Rupert by bus had been arranged for the Favonia passengers, this to be followed by lunch in an hotel and a walk round the shops for those who wanted it, finally the bus would take us to the airport.
A lot of ships were in Prince Rupert harbour, including two huge cruise ships, one of them the Northern Princess that we’d last seen at Sitka. At some point her more powerful engines must have helped her overtake the little Favonia. Everyone who had come off her seemed to be touring Prince Rupert. I went with the bus as far as the hotel where I said goodbye to the Donizettis and the Ruffles, receiving from them pressing invitations to visit with them whenever I happened to be passing through Moscow, Idaho, or Athens, Georgia. But Mrs Braden only wished me a good journey, her sad smile telling me – unaccountably and without any sort of foundation – that she knew everything, had read between the lines of my curriculum vitae and, weighing me in her balance, had forgiven me.
The bus took them all away. By then the sun had gone and the sky had turned a familiar dark grey. I asked reception to call me a taxi. I phoned the airport and was told that a flight left for Seattle in the late morning. The taxi driver told me about Prince Rupert’s annual rainfall. An inch of it was falling all around us as we drove through the town, a modest, pretty, deeply suburban sort of place, where bald eagles were as common as starlings. The driver said he liked rain. When he went away, as he sometimes did, he missed the rain and felt happy when he got back. I need not think I was going to avoid rain by going to Seattle. Everyone knew the rainfall in Seattle was among the highest in the United States. I said I hadn’t given the rainfall a thought. He showed me the memorial to some poor fisherman from Japan who had been swept off course and whose body had been found in his boat when it was washed up on this coast. That was something I could have done without.
I bought myself a seat on the Seattle flight with Ivo’s Visa card. There’s no point in dressing up what I did or using gentler terms. That morning, after I’d cried, I got myself together and practised his signature. It didn’t take much practice, for he signed his name as a sort of scrawl, and scrawls are much easier to copy than a legibly written name. While I was doing the scrawl on the slip at the airport I felt a momentary terror but the woman looked at it indifferently and made out my ticket.
I was on the plane before I started planning what to do when I got to Seattle. The first thing would be to find an hotel. I’d already got the idea that the United States is more efficient about these things than we are at home, things run more smoothly, people are more ready to help. Not that I’d ever tried this sort of thing at home. There would be something at Seattle airport geared to helping people find hotels, I was sure of it. I’d find an hotel and get into my room and phone Isabel.
All this planning kept me from thinking about Ivo. I was concentrating on it, purposely to keep Ivo away. But he came back, as he always has done since. I started wondering how long he would survive, if he was already dead, and then by what means he had met his end. It was, I calculated, by then twenty-one hours since we’d left him there, since I’d left him there.
I’ve never made many excuses for myself. I’m not as bad as that. But in those early hours I did make some. I did tell myself that he struck me first, that he’d provoked my attack by saying a monstrous thing to me. Recalling how his head had struck the tree, I even decided he might have been already dead before I left him. I told myself over and over that it was done, it was past, it was too late to do anything about it, I’d known what I was doing and I’d done it, that was all. I slept a bit on that plane, I was very tired.
It has a beautiful bay, Seattle, a deep, complex islanded inlet, just as pretty as Alaska only without the high mountains. In the airport lounges, the luggage-reclaim area, I kept seeing telephones. I’m sure there weren’t more phones than anywhere else but there seemed to be more. I collected my suitcase and my backpack and decided to phone Isabel as soon as I was through customs. As I was getting off the aircraft the idea had come to me that once I saw her again, once I was with her, Ivo and what I’d done would begin to fade away. When we’d been together in Juneau I’d have forgotten all about Ivo’s existence if it hadn’t been for those letters that kept coming. There would be no letters this time.
I’d phone her before I found an hotel. After all, maybe I wouldn’t have to find an hotel. Perhaps I could stay with her. And I ought to phone her as soon as I could. She expected me today, she would know what time the plane arrived from Prince Rupert.
I felt in the outer pocket of the suitcase for her address and phone number. There was nothing in it but Ivo’s letters. I shivered a bit at the sight of his handwriting. Then I remembered that I’d put the card with her address on it in my jacket pocket. I went through my pockets. I opened the suitcase, there in the baggage-reclaim hall, and started going through my clothes. There weren’t very many and only one other jacket among the jeans and sweaters. The card wasn’t in any pocket of that one. I tried the rainproof jacket and trousers. They felt damp and rather sticky under my hands. The card wasn’t there.
It’s an odd thing in these circumstances, what you do, how you react. I knew I’d put the card into the left-hand inside pocket of my jacket and I knew I’d never taken it out. I knew where I’d put it but I still searched through everything, through my jeans pockets, inside sweater sleeves, in all the other pockets of the case and the backpack, among the pages of the two paperbacks I had with me, even between the pages of Ivo’s letters. It wasn’t anywhere.
The panic you feel when this happens is one of life’s awful things. Well, it hadn’t happened to me before. But I recognized it for one of those things. My heart had begun to beat hard and painfully. It hurts when your heart thuds away like that, as if it’s an engine trying to drive itself out of your chest. I put the stuff back into the case and fastened the case up and sat there with my head in my hands. When my heart returned to normal I kept saying over and over, try and remember, try and remember. I couldn’t remember because I’d never done a thing to commit that address and that number
to memory, I hadn’t even been curious about it, it was just a house number where the houses were numbered in thousands in a street that was also just a number, and a meaningless zip code. If there’d been a 76 or a 22 in the numbers I’d no doubt have recalled them, but there wasn’t, I did know that.
Then I remembered where that card was. It was in the left-hand inside pocket of Ivo’s leather jacket. I’d been wearing it when I said goodbye to Isabel and Ivo had taken it back next day.
Ivo had been wearing that jacket the day before. When we started for Chechin he had been wearing it under his waterproof gear and his life-jacket. It was on him now, or on his body.
16
I knew then what he’d meant when he said I couldn’t stop him meeting Isabel. He had her name. He had her address, he had had them even then. I imagined him finding the card in the pocket of that jacket, his anger, his misery and his need to be revenged.
It was a beautiful day, clear blue sky, hot sunshine. They say it’s always raining in Seattle but the people who say that haven’t been to the Tongass. A taxi took me to the hotel I’d found south of Yesler Way. It was one of the cheapest, I sat on the bed in my orange-coloured bedroom (orange carpet, poker-worked with cigarette burns, orange curtains, Peruvian crafts orange bedspread) and tried to think how I could find her.
I searched my memory. Finding the card in her bag I could remember, and the way she’d looked at me and the words she’d spoken when I’d told her I’d taken it. I remembered being drunk in the Goncharof dining room and kissing the card in front of the waiter. But of what was on the card, apart from her name, I had no memory. Just one of those American addresses that may mean a lot to Americans but don’t mean much to Europeans, all numbers, numbers that make us ask until we realize how the system works and how logical it is: how can a short suburban street contain three thousand houses?
There was a phone book in the room. I looked up Winwood and found just one: Michael Winwood, in a suburb or district called Kirkland. Isabel’s husband was called Kit and I’d taken it that this was short for Christopher, but perhaps not, perhaps he was Michael, called for some reason Kit. I called the number and held my breath but the woman who answered at last said she’d never heard of Isabel Winwood, but she didn’t say that the way an Engishwoman would, repressively and in an affronted way, determined to keep the conversation as short as possible. She was expansive, she wished she could help me. When her husband came home she would ask him, he had a big family, many cousins, and it was possible one of them had married an Isabel. But no, they didn’t live round here, her husband had come from the East Coast. Still, I was to be sure to call her again if I was in need of more information.
How do you begin? I went out and walked about the city. I could see that it was a nice place, I could see why some poll had shown it to be the most desirable place in the United States in which to live. While I was out, that first day, I bought a map and saw how spread-out Seattle was, and I read, I can’t remember where, that at some point in its short history it had taken in twelve townships to be part of greater Seattle. She might live in Kenton or Bellevue, Menroe or Snohomish.
I thought about her all the time. I have to make that plain, that I never stopped thinking about her those first few days. Re-living everything we’d done together and re-visiting all the places we’d visited, I remembered waiting for her in that street near the Governor’s mansion and that made me remember Lynette Case. Lynette would know Isabel’s address.
That brought me a huge excitement. It was so simple. I was there, I had done it. In my room I got hold of whatever they call directory inquiries and they were very efficient, they gave me the number in an instant: D. M. Case, Calhoun Avenue, Juneau, Alaska. I don’t remember the number any more, except that the four digit bit started 22 – I would remember that. It would be a long-distance call but I wasn’t worried about money.
There was no reply. I tried every hour till it was too late to try any more. Then it came to me. Of course. Lynette would still be in hospital, the hospital in Anchorage. I couldn’t remember the name of it but it was in Fodor’s Guide to Alaska.
The people there were just as obstructive and difficult as people in English hospitals are. At last I got someone, not a nurse, some administrator, who told me Mrs Case wasn’t available to speak to me and wouldn’t be tomorrow or the next day. The voice sounded diffident, almost embarrassed, and its owner obviously didn’t want me to press her. But I had to know. It was the most important thing in my life.
‘Is she still in the hospital?’ I said. ‘You can surely tell me that.’
‘She is not in the hospital.’
‘Is she at home?’ I didn’t know if they had hospices in Alaska for the terminally ill, I knew nothing of what arrangements they made.
The voice said repressively, ‘She’s no longer with us.’
‘You said.’ I was getting annoyed, it was so important. ‘If she’s not with you, where is she?’
‘Mrs Case passed away on Friday.’
So that was that. I felt furious because she had taken so long to tell me. I reflected that the husband was still alive. I would get him at home on the following day.
But he wasn’t. I’d tried his number five more times before I remembered he worked for the government, possibly even in that Public Office Ivo and I had visited and listened to organ music. They were nearly as difficult as the hospital. I was passed on from one bureaucrat to another and at last told Mr Case had gone off on ‘vacation’. He had taken his annual leave immediately after his wife’s death.
At the hotel I’d given them an imprint of Ivo’s Visa card. I used the card again to buy myself lunch. Once I’d started it was easy and there seemed no limit to it. A shop in the old part of Seattle in Pioneer Place sold craft jewellery and the sort of ethnic clothes Isabel wouldn’t have worn. But she’d have worn the gold and pearl earrings, the silver pendant. I’d chosen a pair of earrings and got the Visa card out – but what was the use when I couldn’t find her?
In the United States you need a car. Public transport isn’t very good, except for air transport and that’s wonderful. Everyone drives. I could see it wouldn’t be hard driving round Seattle and I could imagine how much easier things might be if I had a car. My chances of finding Isabel would be greater, I thought, though I couldn’t exactly say how.
I could have used Ivo’s Visa card but I hadn’t got Ivo’s driving licence. I hadn’t got a driving licence with me. Anyway, I think I’d have been afraid to fill in a form and make insurance declarations in someone else’s name. On the second day I bought newspapers and I found out something else I’d never previously thought of, that the United States doesn’t really have national papers, each city has its own paper or papers. What had happened up in Alaska might not be recorded down here. Unless it was a big story. Something like the Jeffrey Dahmer case might be in every newspaper across the country, but a man’s body washed up on, say, Vancouver Island, wouldn’t be.
There was nothing about Alaska or islands in the paper I bought. But what had I expected? His body might not be found for years, might never be found. I thought often of his being drowned, of his attempting to swim to the mainland from Chechin, but I’d no reason to think he would, I didn’t even know if he was a good swimmer.
Isabel had expected me on the Saturday. I wondered what she would do. Perhaps only decide that I’d changed my mind, that our time together had meant less to me than I’d thought at first. After all, she’d made a half-hearted effort to say we shouldn’t see each other again. She’d think I’d come to agree with her. I groaned aloud when I thought of that. I hadn’t written, though I’d promised to write. All the time I’d thought that wouldn’t matter because I’d be with her, in nine, eight, seven, six days I’d be with her.
I walked along the waterfront and sat in a little park looking at the harbour. There was a farmers’ market down there in Pike Place and I thought, suppose she comes here to shop, I would if I lived in Seattle, I could s
it here day after day and wait for her to come.
She didn’t come but the Bradens did.
At the foot of the series of hills that rise in steps from the waterfront to the streets where the art museum is and the public buildings, a hire car disgorged them. The driver helped Mrs Braden. Her husband, who needed only one stick, brought her own two and gently supported her while she grasped them. I’d liked them but for all that I’d have avoided them if I could. Mrs Braden stood and looked about her, her expression lively, curious, enthusiastic. She saw me and she waved. In order to wave she had to give her sticks back to her husband and hang on to his arm, but she waved. She showed indications of coming over to me, so I went to her.
‘Mr Cornish,’ she said. ‘How very good to see you.’
‘Tim,’ I said. ‘Please call me Tim.’
‘How do you like Seattle? Will you walk round this very charming market with us? Maybe we shall have the good luck to see the young men juggle with the fish. I should like to see the fish throwers, wouldn’t you?’
What was it about her? One day Isabel would be like this woman. She might have been Isabel’s grandmother. They had the same graciousness, the same good manners and sweetness and dignity. A non-malicious sharpness of tongue, they had that in common too. The thought came to me that when the twenty-first century was middle-aged Isabel and I might be like these two, I handing her the two sticks she used, the ivory-headed and the ebony, if such materials were ever in use then, if they weren’t utterly outlawed.
We did see the two men playing catch with great slippery codfish. We saw the embroidery done by the people from some Far Eastern country, Vietnam or Laos maybe. Mrs Braden bought a shawl, very fine pink and grey weave, for her daughter. She said to me,
