No Night is Too Long Read online

  But I did read some of the other books in the set, not allowing myself to be put off as my father had been by Tolstoy’s gloom and Dostoyevsky’s preoccupation with suffering. My father was fond of animals. He used to say Dostoyevsky couldn’t write a book without having a horse flogged to death somewhere in it.

  So, having glanced at the dark blue and gold set of the Russians, with Sergius among them, I shall follow their example and refer to this place where I live as the town of N. ‘To the door of an inn,’ writes Gogol, ‘in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka, a light spring carriage of the sort affected by bachelors …’ And what’s good enough for Gogol is good enough for me.

  N. is situated on the Suffolk coast, that flat, eroded coast where the cliffs are not much more than sandbanks and hills of shingle and the river estuaries cut sluggishly through the low-lying meadows to the sea. There is no coast road. The towns and villages are linked to each other and to the north–south highway, as much as ten miles distant, by lanes either uncompromisingly straight or twisted corkscrew-like. The wetlands and the heaths are the habitat of birds and I’m awakened every morning by the cries of geese, being rounded up by their leader, before flying inland. There are more geese now than in my childhood, or else, most likely, I slept more soundly then.

  The town itself is not big; bigger, of course, than when I was seven and came to live here with my parents. Estates of small houses have gone up all round its periphery. A new, and very ugly, visitors’ centre has been built opposite the thirteenth-century church, and the Latchpool Hotel on the seafront has grown a huge, barrack-like extension reaching right back to the High Street. The mansion, once Thorpegate Hall, has been converted and extended and now houses the concert hall some journalist has called the finest in western Europe.

  But most people would call the heart of N. more attractive now than in former times. Conservationists and preservationists have been at work. Householders have been encouraged to restore their houses and paint them frequently. An annual ‘best front garden’ competition has resulted in whoever decides these things calling N. the floral capital of East Anglia. The retailers that used to be thought of as indispensable even ten years ago, the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, have closed – the citizens of N. do their shopping in the supermarkets of Ipswich – and been replaced by souvenir shops, antiques emporia and boutiques selling ‘designer’ clothes, or the work of local craftsmen and painters.

  Much of this has come about through the Festival. For N., if you haven’t already guessed, is the home of Europe’s most celebrated Festival of Song and Dance. Or perhaps I should say centre, for in the years since I left and before I returned, the ambitions of the N. Consortium have grown to dizzy heights and now the town is not only given over to song and dance for two weeks in July, but also sees the Sainsbury Marathon in October, the Nativity Revels at Christmas time and the Paschal Gala at Easter.

  No variant of vocal music lacks representation here: opera and operetta, concert arias, the ‘musical’, madrigals, Ambrosian chant, choir-singing, amorous ditties, ballads, lieder, folk songs, spirituals, the blues, jazz, rock and country. Everything known to what the N. Consortium’s director Julius Grindley facetiously and too often calls the terpsichorean art can be seen: ballet, country dancing, flamenco, the sailor’s hornpipe, the Gay Gordons, polonaises, mazurkas and czárdás, the military two-step, the farandole, the hesitation waltz and the can-can. We are not élitist, we are not snobs. Country and Western is regarded as sympathetically by us as is opera seria, and in our selections the bossa nova has as much chance of finding a place as Swan Lake.

  Notice my use of the first person plural. I say ‘we’ as of right, not only as a resident of N. but as the secretary to the Consortium. I was lucky, some would say, to get the job, though Julius persists in telling me, while apologizing for the minimal salary, that I’m too highly qualified for the post. Sexist that he is, he once said that a woman could do it, and a woman with no more than a couple of GCSEs at that.

  What, after all, have I to do but walk the two hundred yards to the Consortium’s headquarters, answer letters and the phone, send out brochures and tickets, and field all significant inquiries in the direction of Julius? Someone else is responsible for fund-raising. I have no fares to pay, no stressful travel, no parking place to compete for, and my lunch is sent in every day from the fast-food counter of the Thalassa restaurant next door. From my office window I have much the same view of the sea as from the living room at home, even if at Consortium House the gardens of the Latchpool and the Esplanade tennis court intervene. At five o’clock every afternoon I exit from the computer, switch on the phone answering-machine and go home.

  Looking back over what I’ve written, I feel disgusted by my cowardice and my escapism. For what have I been doing, after all, but postponing the true account of the thing I know I must give? I’ve even been writing in a cheerful, brisk way, as if I were happy or satisfied.

  I’ve been writing a travelogue. If that is what’s wanted the Consortium’s brochures or even the memoirs of Julius’s predecessor, Making a Song and Dance About It by Carlton Kingswear, give a superior portrait of the town and a better description of our kind of music. For me N. has been a place of refuge, the Consortium and its activities so far removed from those events in my life, passionate, violent and – perhaps, yes – evil, as to seem their absolute antithesis. Ironically, it’s at work that I’ve been able to find rest.

  I read a lot and the books I read aren’t usually light or even contemporary fiction. But I have almost no contact, social contact that is, with anyone. I sometimes discuss the weather and the day’s catch in the pub with the fishermen. Of course I have to go to Consortium parties, I make my small talk and drink my Rioja with the rest of them. Luckily, my status is too humble for me to be invited to the dinners which follow. When Julius or even Sir Brian push me into it, I show myself at, say, Palestrina’s madrigali spirituali or some ballet music by Sauguet or Hindemith, performances unlikely to draw even moderate-sized audiences, still less fill the theatre. Afterwards I hurry home.

  On first coming back to N., I found myself recognized wherever I went. My mother, before admission to hospital in Ipswich and then retirement to Sunnylands, had been a sociable woman and active on local committees, a hard worker for charities. I was stopped in the street with inquiries after her and, inevitably, to receive invitations. It isn’t hard to rebuff people if you’re indifferent to their reaction or the way they think about you. But I had to give a good many the brush-off before they understood – or believed they understood – and left me alone. I was set down as a recluse or a snob or emotionally disturbed. Only one or two persisted.

  No one else has made a comparable attempt. The drinkers in the Mainmast talk about the climate, about fish and sometimes about the extensions to the nuclear-power station up the coast, but never of personal things. My mother, in Sunnylands, often doesn’t recognize me. On my rare visits she takes me for one of the doctors or the nephew of the woman she sits next to in the circle of wheelchairs in front of the television. She can identify no one absolutely but her sister, my Aunt Clarissa, who lives in Ipswich and is a frequent visitor. I’ve more or less given up going because my only reason for a visit would be sentimental or to impress the staff and neither of those things interests me.

  Clarissa pulls no punches. She asked me straight out what was wrong with me and why I had become such a ‘misery’. Another time I heard her say to my mother she’d always said there was ‘something wrong with me’ and had suggested while I was small that this might be the result of having been the only child born to a woman nearly forty-seven years old. Since then I’ve always phoned before going to Sunnylands to make sure Clarissa won’t be there.

  But during our last encounter she did ask me how I was earning my living. Had I ‘written that book yet’? I said something brief about working for the N. Consortium.

  ‘I thought you went to a college to learn how t
o write books,’ she said.

  Enough sense of humour remains to me for me to find her description of the celebrated post-graduate creative-writing course at the University of P. very funny. I could imagine Penny Marvell’s face if she heard it, or Martin Zeindler’s, and, by association – as if I needed association – Ivo’s. His was a face I had no need to imagine, for it was constantly before my eyes. And even as I thought of him then I sensed his shadow fall across my mother’s wheelchair. Of course, when I turned he was gone.

  ‘Learning how to write books,’ I said, ‘is only the first step – if writing can be taught. Books have to find a publisher and a readership.’

  None of that meant anything to her. I might have known it wouldn’t. Narrowing her blackcurrant eyes, she said sharply that she supposed they had to be written first.

  ‘Six years of higher education,’ she said, making it sound as if I’d done an HND in agricultural engineering. ‘I wonder if you’d have gone in for it if you’d had to pay for yourself?’

  People like her would have every student in the country working for ten years after they’d graduated to pay back government loans, and with interest too, no doubt. But as I sit here, writing something at last, listening to the suck and withdrawal and rush of the sea, I understand that this will be as good a place to begin as anywhere, the point at which I ‘went to a college to learn to write books’.

  My childhood in N., my years at my public school on the other side of the county, my time as an undergraduate reading English literature, all this is unimportant. I shall gloss over it and if I need to revert at all to my school it will only be to say something about the nature of that place before girls began to go there the year after I left.

  I shall begin when I was twenty-one and came into this room with its big windows and its view of the sea one summer afternoon to find my father dead in his chair. I’ve mentioned Sergius because when I found him he was holding the ‘safe’ open in his hands, as he often did, and half-smiling at what it contained.

  He died of a heart attack. In the sunshine, at three o’clock, something stopped his heart. Though he died here, in this room, his chair drawn up into the bay window, I’ve never seen his ghost or heard his footstep. The difference is, I suppose, that I did nothing to contribute to his death. He’d been by the window so that when he was tired of contemplating the treasures inside Sergius and the Sergius phenomenon itself, he could raise his eyes and see the sea.

  There was plenty of money for my mother, but this didn’t stop people telling me they supposed I’d now feel it my duty to give up any ideas of further education and get a job. It was lucky, someone said, that I’d got my degree before my father’s death. Everyone expected me to live at home and ‘go in for’ teaching. A surprising number of people think that so long as you have a degree, no matter what in, education committees and school governors are going to welcome you to their staffs with open arms.

  I told no one about the one job I’d been offered. This came from a PR woman representing the sponsors of a flamenco programme in that year’s festival. She asked me if I’d ever thought of becoming a model and made me feel like the prey of a talent spotter in Hollywood’s heyday, in line for a screen test.

  ‘If you were a woman,’ she said, ‘you’d take it for granted that exploiting your looks while they last is as legitimate a way of earning your living as exploiting your brains.’

  ‘I’m not a woman. In any case a lot of women don’t feel like that.’

  ‘Only those with no looks to exploit.’

  I didn’t say I was going to try to be a writer before I considered anything else. I didn’t say I’d like to avoid all kinds of exploitation. Imagining myself in designer jeans, and perhaps nothing else but a gold neck chain, lounging negligently on the bonnet of a sports car against an alpine backdrop, made me laugh and, eventually, her too. We had too many drinks in the theatre bar and I went back with her to her room at the Latchpool.

  She was drunker than I, not surprisingly since she was six inches shorter and ten years older. Most likely it was this and not my performance, a mediocre business, that made her fall on her knees in front of me and, embracing my legs, give herself up to worship. Fellatio, at that stage, wasn’t acceptable, I’d made that plain. There was something repellent about her thick crimson lipstick. She praised everything about me, my appearance that is, in a paean of adoration. I was led to the mirror (on the bathroom door) and told to contemplate my image.

  I hardly saw myself. What I was contemplating, or rather congratulating myself on, was that I had done it at all, for she was my first, or at any rate my first successful, consummation. If she guessed she didn’t say. I put my clothes on and phoned room service for a bottle of champagne to be sent up. The Latchpool management had probably never before been asked for such a thing at midnight but the champagne came. The dour waiter who brought it asked grimly what we had to celebrate. Only I knew that.

  When my companion passed out I put her to bed with a glass and a bottle of mineral water from the fridge on the table beside her. I never saw her again. They say you always remember what your first was called but I can’t remember her name, only that it was one of those Irish names, Sinead or Siobhan.

  Two days later a letter came from the University of P., accepting me for enrolment in the two-year creative-writing course. I’d succeeded on the strength of my first degree and the sample of prose I’d sent them, a short story that had been shown to no one else. The signature to the letter was indecipherable but underneath it was typed: Dr Martin Zeindler, M.A., Ph.D., Course Tutor and Tutor in Post-graduate Studies.

  That was the first time I ever saw the name of the man who was to be my supervisor. You could call him the catalyst, I suppose, the unconscious director of events, who moved the pieces on the board as if in his sleep, unaffected himself by the changes in the game and unaware even that changes were taking place.

  Penny Marvell or Piers Churchill might easily have been allotted that role instead of him. They usually arranged these things alphabetically. Penny or Piers took everyone whose name began A to M, Martin the N to Z people. Only this time there were more with surnames starting with the early letters of the alphabet, two Browns, for instance, and no Smiths or Wilsons. Martin told me this himself, he told me one day after saying I’d disappointed him.

  ‘I picked you out,’ he said. ‘My choice was entirely governed by my having been on holiday in Cornwall. Cornish, I said to myself, why not? He’ll do. God knows why I didn’t pick Dunbar. I spent a delightful weekend there once.’

  Sophie Dunbar was the only one of us who has so far achieved any success. I sometimes see in the paper hype about her second novel, to be published this autumn. Why didn’t he pick her? I wish he had.

  3

  Martin Zeindler knows all about how fiction should be written but he can’t write it himself. His only novel was as abstruse and elusive as anything of the later Henry James and as tiresome as Finnegans Wake. After ten attempts it failed to find a publisher. So Martin is the living example of what Shaw said about those who can, doing, and those who can’t, teaching. I expect he still gives those intense tutorials at home, tête-à-tête with two or three students, while he sits there wearing his black cat round his neck like a stole. Probably his face still lights up and his eyes shine as he tries to awaken in the beginner a passion for perfect prose.

  We were twenty-four beginners, fifteen women and nine men. Everybody was either twenty-one or twenty-two except the single mature student who was somewhere in her thirties. All of us wanted to be a Best of Young British Novelist and some of us said so out loud. Of the twenty-four, two dropped out at the end of the first year and three were given what Penny called the old heave-ho; one died mysteriously, probably of AIDS, one got pregnant and went to live in Germany, and Sophie Dunbar wrote a novel that was reviewed in the Sunday Times and was short-listed for the Whitbread Prize. If the rest had any success I haven’t heard of it, beyond seeing Jeffrey Brown’s name
under a sonnet in the Spectator. Perhaps it’s early days.

  P. may have been a nice city once. If you have a lot of imagination you can get some idea of what it was like from the remains of the old town with its narrow lanes, stone buildings and twelfth-century cathedral. This memorial to the past is surrounded by office blocks, shopping malls and by mock-medieval multi-storey car parks with castellated ramparts. There’s more traffic in P. on a Saturday and at the evening rush than in central London.

  Built in the sixties of grey concrete and composition blocks the colour of tarpaulin, the university stands in its bright green partially wooded campus out on the exit road for Birmingham and the Welsh Marches. The creative-writing course had its being in a vast block called the Arts Centre, approached from the other buildings by overhead walkways. By the time I arrived, these walkways were in a dilapidated state, safe enough to use, but with panes of glass cracked or broken and the concrete between covered inside and out with graffiti. The architect had designed them so that each one enjoyed a view of the distant spoilt city, interrupted by the six halls of residence, charcoal-coloured towers with copper roofs, weathered to a dull green. Rumour had it that the inside of the towers was like an inner city slum, the lifts not working and the plumbing hazardous.