No Night is Too Long Read online

  None of us lived in them. They were for undergraduates in their second and third years. To accommodate us, in the suburbs of P., or on the housing estates that lay beyond them, the university owned houses, all small but each thought big enough for four of us. 23 Dempster Road originally had three bedrooms, but flimsy dividing walls had made these into four. There was one bathroom, two lavatories, a very small kitchen in which we were each allotted a shelf of the fridge, and a common living room dominated by a large television set.

  Of my fellow post-graduates in Dempster Road, only one was also in the creative-writing course. This was Emily Hadfield, nearly two years younger than me and the only student at that time in the course to have had anything published. She’d won a short-story contest run by a women’s magazine, which had used her story in a later issue.

  Emily was a small dark girl with a pretty monkey face and a mass of Afro hair. She had a car, which she had to park in the street, and after the first day she began giving me lifts to the campus as a matter of course. We sat next to each other at Penny Marvell’s first lecture and found ourselves paired off to attend Martin Zeindler’s tutorials. Emily became my girlfriend.

  I write it easily, as if it were a natural step. The reality wasn’t like that. For one thing, I wasn’t specially attracted by her, although I liked her, and for another, ‘friend’ was more the operative in that conjunction of words. At least, for some weeks. Emily seemed content, as her grandmother might have been, first with good-night kisses and then with the kind of love-making that stops short – far short – of the thing itself. Or I thought she was content until one evening, in her small cluttered room, she extricated herself from my arms and said flatly,

  ‘I’m not a virgin, you know.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘And I shan’t get pregnant.’

  If there are people now who add to these qualifications a line to the effect that they aren’t HIV Positive either, it wasn’t happening four years ago. I’d been feeling a certain excitement up till then, an inkling that all might be well yet, but Emily’s words chilled me. I muttered something about her practical attitude being the ‘bane of romance’ and walked away across the room, a progress of all of eight feet.

  Emily said, ‘If you write the way you talk don’t be surprised if Penny sends you down.’

  Those words of hers had a strange effect on me. She’d meant to hurt, they would have hurt her, but they almost pleased me. They were a distraction, weren’t they, from what was really bothering me, my feeble sexuality? And they served to show me, in the space of a few seconds, that I was never going to commit myself to writing. I didn’t care enough. I cared far more about my sexual orientation. What was it? What was I?

  We’d quarrelled and I went away to bed. Emily did the only thing that could have worked. How she knew I don’t know, perhaps she didn’t, perhaps helping me in that particular way was far from her thoughts and she wanted nothing more than comfort and forgiveness. I’d been in bed half an hour and was lying in the dark on the verge of sleep. She came into the room very quietly and got into the narrow single bed beside me. Her hands were warm and she held my face in them.

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I came to say I was sorry. I didn’t mean it, I lashed out because I felt rejected.’

  For some reason, I couldn’t say anything. My voice seemed to have deserted me. It was pitch dark, the street lights went out at midnight, and my body was totally relaxed, ready to sink into sleep. I began to make love to her, to caress her, because this seemed to me what you did to someone in the same bed with you. She responded in a way I can only describe as passive but hopeful. And it was all right, I was all right. No doubt because I hadn’t been drinking, it was much better than with the sponsorship woman, Sinead or Siobhan, at the Latchpool. I had the satisfaction of feeling Emily grip me tight and utter a cry I’m sure wasn’t feigned. I’d heard that women do that when things have worked out, so I was proud of myself, but not so proud as to stay awake. By the morning she was gone. The bed was just too narrow, she said.

  After that we slept together a couple of times a week. It was pleasant and it was comforting. I’d read enough English literature to have known better, to have known that these thoughts of mine had a certain meaning which would make itself all too clear in an imminent future. I’d even read the same words as those in which I expressed my feelings to myself, and a chapter or so on had seen Nemesis come stalking.

  ‘I suppose I am just one of those people who aren’t very highly sexed.’

  That was what I had the nerve to tell myself. Look at my past, I thought, forgetting or deliberately ignoring my schooldays. Only a man indifferent to sex is content to have slept with just two women by the time he reaches twenty-two. And one of those no more than once. I disregarded my failed attempts with several girls while an undergraduate. Surely this low libido was something on which to congratulate myself. What pangs and agonies I should be saved, what troubles attendant upon promiscuity and, come to that, passion, I should be spared.

  I really told myself all those things while making love to Emily twice a week, like an unthinking, dutiful, steadfast husband, married for twenty years.

  During our first year, apart from a few essays, the principal piece of work required from us was either a novella or a screenplay. We could choose.

  Emily and I were both planning to produce novellas. Hers was to be a Gothic tale set in the 1870s, mine a ‘sensitive’ atmospheric piece about a boy growing up in a seaside town. Write about what you know, said Martin Zeindler, qualifying this with,

  ‘Of course at your age you don’t know much.’

  He insisted on watching over the progress of our work. In this he was like certain American publishers’ editors, or so I’ve heard, who work on a novel with a writer chapter by chapter, suggesting, discarding, sternly dictating and, sometimes, I suppose, approving. On Martin’s part, with us, there wasn’t much of this last. Sophie Dunbar came in for his scathing criticism as much as the rest of us. Of course it may be that it was only on her that his technique worked. It may have been Sophie alone who really absorbed his advice because she was a natural writer. On the other hand, perhaps, as a natural writer, she’d have succeeded without him, thus going a long way to prove the spuriousness of creative-writing courses.

  Martin concerned himself and us less with subject matter, character, liveliness, originality or imaginative flights than with a point of style. Naturally enough, we were expected to read a lot, particularly certain masters who were favourites both of himself and Penny Marvell: Meredith, Virginia Woolf, Golding and Malcolm Lowry are some I remember. We were expected to understand about post-modernism and structuralism and deconstruction and to have a firm grasp of why Elizabeth Bowen was ‘good’ and Maugham and Walpole were not. But all this was of small account compared with Martin’s hatred of colloquial contractions.

  Along with most of the class, when we first heard the term, I had no idea what these were. Martin, expressing an astonishment that approached disgust, set us right. It seemed that all his life, or since he had embarked on his own first degree, he’d been vexed by the problem of how to write elisions without making the prose sound either stilted or too colloquial to the interior ear. In other words, what do you do about ‘don’t’, ‘doesn’t’ and ‘didn’t’, contractions constantly used in English speech, and therefore in English prose? ‘Do not’ is impossibly stiff, ‘don’t’ sounds common, careless, over-demotic. Martin got round it by elaborate systems of avoidance and expected us to do the same. It was his obsession.

  When the first chapter of my novella was returned to me by Martin in Martin’s house on my first visit there, it astonished me by the rings and underlinings in red ballpoint which made a pervasive design all over the typescript. Emily, my companion then and on future visits, had fewer on hers, largely due to the 1870s being popularly supposed as a time when ‘do not’ and ‘does not’ were used as a matter of course.

  Just
the same she was obliged to listen while Martin took my chapter apart.

  ‘A serious writer can ill afford to be lazy,’ he began, demonstrating in this first sentence how to avoid another similar problem in English prose. ‘Laziness has made you write “don’t” here, Tim. But suppose you had determined not to be lazy, to concentrate instead all your intellectual powers, how might you have avoided the colloquial mess you have fallen into?’

  I didn’t know. Or, as Martin would have preferred, I had no notion. The sentence in question ran: ‘The boy on the beach, staring out to sea across the long wide expanse of shingle, then dune, then wet flat sand, didn’t believe he had a chance of seeing the ship, didn’t believe in the ship’s continued existence, or that it hadn’t long ago come to grief.’

  It seemed all right to me. It sounded all right when I repeated it inside my head. Emily’s opinion was asked and I could see that, if she had one, she didn’t want to give it. After a moment or two, during which Martin sat expectantly, slightly irritably, stroking the big black cat on his lap, she offered the suggestion that I might have said: ‘had no belief in a chance of seeing the ship’.

  That made Martin laugh rather angrily. By this time I had at any rate some sort of clue as to what he was getting at and proposed: ‘had no faith in seeing the ship’. But Martin lifted his hand from the cat’s back and waved it in a dismissive gesture.

  ‘What we are trying to avoid is not only vulgarity, Tim, but also stiltedness. This is something I’ve noticed you people forget. If a clumsy rigidity of style were our object, no inhibition would exist in your sentence on “do not” and “had not”. Suppose, instead, we try it this way: “The boy on the beach, staring out to sea across the long wide expanse of shingle, then dune, then wet flat sand, had lost all hope of seeing the ship, no longer believed in the ship’s continued existence, nor in the possibility that it had long ago come to grief.”’

  Whether or not this sounded better I really don’t know, or as Martin would have had it, I no longer know. But I don’t think I knew then. The result of it has been to make me write ‘don’t’ and ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘can’t’ in any prose I attempt. I only mention it now because of the strangeness of the coincidence, of the extreme oddness, that on that first visit to Martin Zeindler’s house, the passage he chose to analyse and re-cast in this way was about the sea and abandonment and a lost ship.

  It was almost as if he – or I – foresaw future events, I by my writing the sentence at all, he by his insistence on its reconstruction in the course of which it was repeated over and over. But it’s only now that I see it as predictive. Then it was merely a sentence at the beginning of a piece of writing in which I had very little confidence and which by the end of term I was to have abandoned for a better idea. No more than two chapters of it were ever written. That’s why it came as such a shock to me to find them still preserved intact among the work in the orange folder I brought away with me from P. two years later.

  The manuscript was in the chest of drawers in my old bedroom here. This is the room I use as the store place for mementoes of that time. Or, rather, not mementoes so much as artefacts I can’t bring myself to throw away: Isabel’s black and white scarf, the garnet I bought her from the children of Wrangell, Ivo’s letters. The folder also contained the short novel I wrote as a dissertation under Martin’s close guidance and which met with his much-qualified approval, and a short story about some people living in a Scottish castle. Those two chapters lay between them, with the sentence waiting to be found and re-read and to reveal its uncanny appropriateness.

  Those aspiring to a ‘good address’ in P. lived either in the old town or in one of the two suburbs that were really expanded villages. The old town was marginally better. Its streets were narrow and picturesque and its stone houses had long, tree-filled, almost wooded, gardens, invisible from the front doors which opened directly on to the pavement. Martin Zeindler owned just such a house as this, in St Mary’s Gardens.

  He had a system which unlocked the front door from upstairs when you announced yourself. Sometimes, when you pushed the front door open and came into the hall, other doors in the ground-floor passage and rooms at the rear had been left open, all the way through to a pair of french windows, and beyond these could be seen the varied greens of the garden.

  It was like looking at a window painting by Bonnard or Dufy. At the same time it was more mysterious than either, for the hallways and intervening open rooms were always shadowy and dim, the green prospect so clear and expectant and inviting; the sun always seemed to be shining out there. The second time I saw it, it was still sunny though by then December, and, walking towards the stairs, I felt a tremendous urge to keep straight on down that passage, go out into the garden and see for myself.

  Of course I didn’t do this. The first of the open doors was the entrance to someone’s flat, the tenant of the ground floor. Martin had to let part of his house in order to afford to live there himself. Who this tenant was I then had no idea, man or woman, young or old. There might have been more than one, for all I knew.

  As we reached the top of the stairs, Martin came out to meet us. He was wearing a fur hat and had wrapped himself in a plaid travelling rug. He said in an irritable, peevish way,

  ‘I do wish Dr Steadman would not leave all his doors open like this, it makes the whole house cold. I have never been able to understand this passion for fresh air, it’s so old-fashioned.’

  This, on the face of it startling, statement he began to elaborate with particular reference to Emily’s novella as we moved into the sitting room. The Victorians had a mania for fresh air, he said, except at night when it ceased to be therapeutic and became dangerous. He hoped she understood about these things, he hoped she hadn’t embarked on writing historical fiction, generally a mistake anyway, without previously immersing herself in the speech, social usage and behaviour patterns of her chosen period. Frankly, there wasn’t much evidence in the work he’d recently seen that she was doing this.

  Emily was defending herself when he got up again and went to open the door, jumping back from it as if met by an icy blast. It wasn’t a cold day and the upstairs felt very warm to me. But Martin, muttering about draughts coming from every direction, picked up the phone and was soon pleading for the french windows and the front door to the downstairs flat to be closed.

  ‘Yes, I know, Ivo, I know heat rises. I may not be a scientist but I do know that. Provided there is any heat to rise. What about that? Have you thought of that? Just close your front door, like a good chap, that’s all I ask.’

  That was the first time I heard Ivo’s name. It meant nothing. I just about made the connection that Ivo and Dr Steadman were one and the same. Martin put the receiver back, shaking his head. His face, which had grown rather pink while he was asserting himself on the question of heat rising, resumed its normal pallor. In the hat and rug he had looked Russian, some unjustly condemned moujik beginning the march to Siberia, but now as he took off the hat and laid the rug across his knees he was himself again, reminding me as he always had – partly because of his dark hair, moustache and geometrically trimmed beard – of pictures I’d seen of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. He even had the remains of a Harrogate accent, most apparent when he was irritable.

  ‘Dr Steadman is a palaeontologist,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘These people spend a lot of their time poking about with rocks, mostly in very cold places. They get used to it. Arctic temperatures mean nothing to them. They even prefer them. That’s no reason to try to reproduce them here.’

  Neither Emily nor I was particularly interested in the vagaries of palaeontologists. I had only a hazy idea what palaeontology was, something to do with old things, the science of old things. The only old things I cared much about were the furnishings of Martin’s room, indeed of Martin’s two floors, or as much as I’d seen of them. I’d never been anywhere like it before.

  It wasn’t that the decorations were smart or newly done or the
furniture obviously valuable antiques, though some of them may have been. Everything was nearly as shabby as at home. Two of the chairs had badly worn seats and string hung out of the arms of the sofa. But there was something entirely harmonious about the room from the yellow silk (fraying) curtains that hung to the floor to the large circular table that was polished to a shine so deep that you fancied you could see several yards into it. All the wood was like that, and Ivo told me later Martin polished it himself. Instead of ‘wall-to-wall’, the carpet was a big Persian or Indian square that lay in the middle of the polished oak floor. There was a very large mirror in a gilt frame, but quite plain and classical, not ornate, and pictures of Venice, canals and palazzos, a church on an island that I suppose was San Giorgio Maggiore. But the picture I liked best was monochrome, grey and white, the Parthenon by moonlight, shimmering in a thin, shiny mist.

  On our way back to the university I said something to Emily about that room, how I liked it, and how I thought that was the way a Venetian palazzo might look inside. When I got a home of my own I wanted it to be like Martin Zeindler’s. She immediately fired up.

  ‘I’ve never heard a man talk like that before. Well, not a straight man. I’ve never heard a man who wasn’t gay go on about furniture and carpets and that stuff.’

  That was ridiculous, I said. The majority of collectors of paintings and furniture were men and they weren’t necessarily, or even often, gay. What did she expect me to be interested in? Football and beer?

  ‘Don’t be silly. You’re not interested in furniture, you don’t know anything about it, it would be different if you did, if you were an expert, if it was your job, but it’s not, you just talk about it like gay men do. And clothes too; and hair and things. I mean, noticing Martin’s hat and that rug thing, noticing it was some Scottish tartan, that’s all part of the gay scene, you know it is.’

  I didn’t say anything. Defending myself suddenly seemed the most enormous bore. I sat in the car beside her, wondering at first if her idea of a ‘real man’ would have asserted himself and insisted on driving, although it was her car. I wondered that for a moment and then my thoughts went back to our departure from Martin’s house. The front door to the ground-floor flat had still been open. Crossing the hall, I’d looked back over my shoulder.