No Night is Too Long Read online

  BARBARA VINE

  No Night Is Too Long

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  TIM

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  ISABEL

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  JAMES

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  NO NIGHT IS TOO LONG

  ‘With No Night is Too Long, she has written another masterpiece … a remarkable psychological thriller’ – Harriet Waugh in the Spectator

  ‘A dazzling structure of intrigue and suspense … she also stirs deeper questions: the nature of sexual attachments, the power of guilt and what it is that makes people act and change’ – Joan Bakewell in the Sunday Express

  ‘Beautifully written and enthralling’ – Sunday Telegraph

  ‘What a terrific treat to settle down with a new Barbara Vine novel…there is no question that with No Night is Too Long [she] is writing at the peak of her powers’ – Val Hennessy in the Daily Mail

  ‘A brilliant tale of dangerous liaisons, guilt and redemption’ – Scotland on Sunday

  ‘No Night is Too Long, written in the person of a young homosexual man and containing eerie scenes in Alaska, was her writing at her marvellous best’ – John Mortimer in the Sunday Times, Books of the Year 1994

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Barbara Vine is Ruth Rendell, the bestselling crime novelist. She has written many novels, including The Lake of Darkness, The Killing Doll, The Tree of Hands, Live Flesh, Heartstones and The Veiled One. As Barbara Vine she is the author of A Dark-Adapted Eye, which received huge critical acclaim and won the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Allan Poe Award; A Fatal Inversion, winner of the 1987 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award; The House of Stairs, winner of the Angel Award for Fiction; Gallowglass; King Solomon’s Carpet, winner of the 1991 Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award; Asta’s Book, shortlisted for the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award; and No Night is Too Long. All of these are published by Penguin. Gallowglass, A Dark-Adapted Eye and A Fatal Inversion have all been the basis of successful BBC television series.

  Ruth Rendell is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1991 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement in crime writing.

  To Phyllis Grosskurth

  TIM

  1

  Outside a high wind is blowing and making the sea rough. It’s a long time since I saw such big waves breaking on this grey pebbly shore. The sea is a pale brown, the colour of weak coffee with a little milk in it, a phenomenon caused by sand stirred up into the water. Even on fine summer days the sea is brownish here, seldom blue and clean.

  Soon it will be dark and I shall no longer be able to see these colours, such as they are. The dirty coffee brown and the grey. Out there, by night, the sea and the beach become invisible and only the road can be seen, lit by the lamps, the road and the sea wall. Beyond the wall might be a town or fields, but for the sound of the sea, its withdrawing roar and rattle of stones and the crash it makes as the wave returns and breaks. But for these sounds anything might be spread out beyond the wall, even a dark fiord with an island in its midst, a pair of eagles in the top of a tree, the forked tail of a humpback whale rising out of the waters. Who knows what may be anywhere when you can’t see?

  I’m writing these things down to get me into the way of writing. To make a start. But I see that what I’ve done is bring myself back to the stuff of my dreams, those dreams I’m attempting to escape from. All roads, it seems, lead to the island, and as time passes they do so more directly and insistently, not less. I’m writing this down in the hope of blocking those roads, of turning them into culs-de-sac and signposting them: No Through Way.

  To block, not to be cured. I’m not so innocent nor so optimistic as to believe that. I’m not innocent at all. It’s laughable to use that word about myself. And I don’t believe that any therapy, my own or that administered by someone else, can take away this burden, this fearful remorse. I don’t believe what someone said, that the writer is the only free man, because once he has set down his pain, his shame and the sorrow of his heart, he’ll be rid of it for ever.

  I believe only, or tell myself that I do, that once I see it before me on the page, in black and white as they say, then the dreams will go away. Isn’t it inconceivable that when the material of those dreams is laid out in precise lines of print it will still go on being rendered back to me pictorially by night?

  The dreams will go and I shall see the rest in what they call perspective. Why do I keep writing ‘as they say’, ‘what they call’? It must be because I’ve been daily farther and farther removed from the world of reality, so that I question these useful words and handy catchphrases. Because ‘they’ are people alien from myself, happy people who sleep without dreaming and use words without thinking, who have no need to analyse everything they and others do and say.

  Yet would I be writing at all but for the letters which have been coming now for a long time? Letters aren’t really what they are. Gratuitous pieces of information. Accounts of historical events. Stories, only they’re true. At least, I think so. Happenings, all with a common theme, and, though interesting enough to most people, peculiarly germane only to me. Relevant to me alone, and therefore sinister.

  Therefore menacing. Such communications don’t arrive in a vacuum. They don’t happen and then cease to happen without consequence, without sequel. They portend something more, something to follow and perhaps not just printed matter that comes through the post. So better write it down now while I have the chance.

  This seems to be the place to insert the first one, the first ‘castaway’ extract. Here it is:

  Alexander Selcraig, called Selkirk, a bad-tempered man, while on a voyage to America, quarrelled with his captain, on the grounds of the latter’s alleged incompetence. Selkirk believed that the ship on which they sailed was about to sink, due to inefficient maintenance. He asked to be put ashore on the nearest island, confident that others on board would choose to be exiled with him. However, none did and he was marooned alone.

  He had been right. The ship sank. But this was of little comfort to Selkirk in his predicament. Five years passed. He read the Bible, grew vegetables, cured goat meat and listened to the clamorous howling of sea-lions. Eventually he was rescued, only to be cast into prison by his Spanish captors. It was another five years before he was returned to his home in Scotland.

  As a man of your education must know, Daniel Defoe based his book Robinson Crusoe on the events of Selkirk’s life. Some have called it the first English novel.

  That was the first one. The envelope bore American stamps and, of course, an American postmark. For obvious reasons I always open such letters quickly. The name and address on the envelope were handwritten and, oddly for a letter from America, there was no sender’s address on the flap, so I opened this one very quickly.

  I’ve grown used to this paper, though at that time I don’t think I’d seen it more than once before. On that previous occasion, in the Goncharof Hotel in Juneau, Isabel had a pad of yellow lined paper. When I asked her about it she said, What do you mean, what is it? It’s a legal
pad. So, whoever is sending these things to me writes, or rather types, on yellow legal-pad paper.

  There is no central heating in this damp seaside house. I lay a coal fire before I go out in the morning and light it when I come home. I tossed the envelope into the fire without a thought. There was no address on the enclosure and no signature. I read it again and I thought about it and after a while I thought it couldn’t be a coincidence, it must be deliberate. Someone knows and has sent me this to show me he knows. Or she knows.

  That frightened me. It frightened me more than if the envelope had contained a direct threat. It made me understand that my guilt and my fear were two separate entities. Fear was an added burden. I found I was trembling a little as I sat there by the fire. Who had sent me that précis of Selkirk’s experience? Who could know? And how could anyone who knew that, also know that I lived here?

  The menace hung over me. It was another presence competing with his ghostly presence. My life is a dull one. I go to work and come home again, sometimes calling in at the Mainmast for a single half-pint of Adnams, the only drink I have these days. I read, I cook myself something. Now that I’ve begun this memoir, I write. He is there, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye or seen as a shadow falling across the floor. Sometimes, but not as often as I should, I go on the bus to see my mother. He is constantly with me and since the castaway story on legal-pad paper came, that was with me too.

  Of course I wasn’t in any doubt about the threat when I got the next one.

  Defoe suggested that tales of the island or the longboat are retold and passed on because they offer ‘light into the nature of man’. Do you feel that your experiences have illuminated man’s nature for you personally?

  Pedro de Serrano, a Spaniard, was sailing in the Pacific in 1540. His ship sank and, the only survivor of the wreck, he swam until he reached an island. There was no fresh water to be found there, no grass, only barren rock.

  Serrano lived on small sea creatures and, having cut the throats of turtles, drank their blood to slake his thirst. So he lived for three years until another mariner arrived on the island from another wreck. At first Serrano took this to be the devil, fled from him and could not be convinced that his pursuer was a man and a Christian until he heard him recite the Apostle’s Creed.

  The two men remained together on the island for a further four years before they were rescued. By that time, their skin burnt dark brown, their hair and beards long and shaggy, they looked so much alike that they were taken for twins by their rescuers, who ‘with admiration beheld their hairy shapes, not like men but beasts’.

  Legal-pad paper again. The name and address on the envelope handwritten, the postmark San Francisco, one stamp bearing the face of Harry S. Truman, the other of Wendell Willkie. It came two weeks after the first and, for some reason, I didn’t throw the envelope away. When a crime one has committed becomes known to someone else, when one is aware that it’s no longer a secret, it becomes concrete, it becomes real. It can’t have been imagined, it can’t be the product of a disturbed mind. There is no longer a chance that a mistake has been made.

  I knew what I’d done as soon as I’d done it. I needed no confirmation from others. But now that confirmation had come in this strange, oblique way, I didn’t so much confront my act as have my act confront me. Like his ghost it stood before me, but, unlike him, it was solid, not insubstantial, not shadowy and half-hidden. It was real, it had really taken place, I had done it, and I knew this as absolute truth because someone else also knew it.

  Writing this down won’t stop the letters – there have been three more since the one from San Francisco – but it may help to lay his ghost. The dreams, after all, come only by night, when I’m in bed asleep. His ghost appears to me everywhere and at any time. I saw it a few moments ago, for instance, when I was rereading the piece about Serrano. From the corner of my left eye I saw him, standing in the bay window, but as soon as I turned to look he slipped away. It’s always like that. He, it, whatever it is, a figment of my brain, the creature of my guilt, he never shows himself to me directly but always in the corner of my eye, on the edge of my vision, or very distantly as it might be along the beach by a breakwater or across the High Street, reflected obliquely in a shop window.

  This isn’t to say that I believe something supernatural is going on. I don’t believe in ghosts, I still don’t. He is the product of my troubled mind. Remorse has made him out of memories and old photographs and mind-imprints. Much of the time I see nothing, only sense him standing behind me or feel the chilly draught as he opens a door or hear his footstep in a creak of the stair. Strange, because he was never in this house. In my mother’s time I was hardly ever here myself and all it ever knew of him was his voice on the phone, his clear resonant voice that sometimes carried from the earpiece into farther reaches of the room. His ghost shows itself to me wherever I am and I know he would come to me wherever I was, his evanescent appearances have to do with me and not with a place in which he and I were together.

  He lives inside me and if I died would die with me. By writing about him, do I mean to kill him a second time?

  2

  This house on the seafront, facing the sea, is one of a Victorian row, each different in architecture and in height from the rest. Ours is narrow and tall, with a wide, triple-paned window on each floor, the top storey surmounted by a step gable. The outside was once painted the colour of creamy custard, but the sun and the winds have worn it to a pale, dirty sand. According to a council ruling, it should be re-painted every third year, but my parents ignored this and I’ve ignored it too. I can’t afford things like that. I’m saving up, not for a rainy day but because of one.

  Ever since the year the spring tide drove the sea over the shingle bank and the wall, over the road and in through our front door, we’ve lived on the first floor. I can remember a paddling pool where rooms had been and carpets floating on muddy water. Downstairs now is the unused dining room, its floor uncarpeted, and at the back the huddle of kitchen, scullery and pantry, nothing modernized or ‘converted’ in the twenty years of my family’s occupation, or come to that for a decade before, all kept in the mode of 1959. Up beneath the gable and on the floor below it are five bedrooms, all small and poky, only one by this time really habitable and that one inhabited by me. The best room in the house is this one where I am now, where I always am when I’m at home, a big room overlooking the sea, and though as shabby as the rest of the place, at least containing books, chairs and a sofa to sit on, and pictures covering the walls.

  Almost everything is worn out. The chair springs are broken and the upholstery is threadbare. The worn patches on the red carpet will soon be holes. Wallpaper is gradually detaching itself, bubbling in places, in others gracefully describing a backward curl as it begins its descent towards the floor. And this hasn’t happened during my sole occupancy. It was always like it, in my memory at any rate. The only occasion when anything in the house was painted or papered or made good was after the flood and then only in the most basic way. Nothing new was ever bought and nothing was repaired. My parents didn’t seem to notice and I didn’t notice until I came back here two years ago. Now I notice but I don’t care.

  The pictures are all rubbish and the framed photographs have turned yellow so that all of them, not just those dating from before 1920, look like sepia. These photographs are of family, school and college groups, and I’ve never been able to recognize a single face in any of them. Nor, for that matter, could my parents, though that was no reason as far as they were concerned for taking them down. They got a lot of pleasure from speculating if this or that face belonged to Uncle So-and-so and if another was Grandfather’s friend who went out to India before the First World War.

  I said that almost everything was worn out. This isn’t true of the books, though all of them are old, having belonged to grandparents and great-grandparents. They are in good shape through having been so little read. Probably the best among them is a set of Russian
novelists, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenev, all bound in dark blue leather, embossed in gold. They were presented to my great-grandfather, my father’s grandfather, on his retirement in 1910 from the bookshop and stationer where he was manager.

  Did he ask for them? Was he offered a gold watch and did he ask for these books instead? Did he read them? The answers to these questions are not known. What he did do, or someone did, is commit a violation against one of them, enough to horrify any book-lover. Using a sharp knife and a steady eye, he cut a square or, to put it more accurately, a cuboid, hole out of the middle pages, leaving the first fifty and the last fifty intact. When you open the book, as I did for the first time aged eleven, all seems well for a while, and then, suddenly, the rectangular wound in the text is before your eyes, the box-shaped void exposed.

  Not so much a great reader as an inquisitive one, I opened the book, turned over those first pages and there, to my great surprise, came upon my mother’s pearls, two five-pound notes and a half-hunter in rose-gold, snug in the hidden repository.

  My father had thought me too young to be let into the mystery. But now that I’d discovered it for myself I was initiated, as into some secret society. This was where you put your precious objects, I could put something of mine there too if I chose. My geode of amethyst quartz or my dried sea-horse. The book that had been so brutally operated on was a collection of Tolstoy’s stories and always known as ‘the safe’, or Sergius, after ‘Father Sergius’, the first story in the book and the only one to remain intact, for the last, ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’, was too long to have escaped and had lost its first ten pages.

  Such false ‘books’ for hiding treasures are commonplace now, are specially made that way and on sale in gift shops. I’ve seen them in the High Street here. It’s made me wonder if burglars make the bookcase their first call, on the look-out for a sumptuous leather spine, exquisitely gilded. But my parents knew nothing of that. They thought Sergius the result of the most thrilling and ingenious ruse ever to derive from the mind of an inventor. They even seemed pleased that I was old enough to be in the joke and exchanged meaning glances with me if any visitor remarked on the Russian books, or even if books of any kind were discussed. I think now that they lived in a world of their own where time stood still or, rather, had stopped on their wedding day in 1965, when they were both already middle-aged.