All the Lives We Ever Lived

by Katharine Smyth

  Before going to sleep that night, he asked if I would help him make a to-do list. He wanted to (1) write a boat prospectus for the broker and (2) figure out how to say good-bye to his mother.

  “That’s not too much,” I said.

  “No,” he said. “But I want to leave quietly. I’m trying to leave behind a very small space.” He was silent for a moment. “I occupied a small space in this world, and I intend to leave only a small, empty void in my place.”

  When the waiter came for the bill, I said that the Agra had been one of my father’s favorite restaurants, and that we had held a service for him here last spring. The waiter looked puzzled, but then said, “Yes, of course—I know your uncle. He comes here a lot.”

  I nodded. “He likes it too,” I said, feeling foolish. Of course Andrew would be a bigger presence for this waiter than my father’s memory. But it was always shocking to be reminded of how quickly and completely my father’s effect had been diminished on his death—I expect most people leave behind a small space, whether they intend to or not. Then the waiter returned to the kitchen, and I was left only with the vague dissatisfaction that arises when I mention something that is meaningful to me to a stranger or even a friend to whom it is not meaningful at all. (The same thing happened when I visited the exhibition on little magazines in New York. “My father started Clip-Kit with Peter Murray,” I made myself say to the girl working behind the front desk. “Oh, yeah?” she said. “Cool.”)

  I was still glad to have come. I looked at the door and imagined my father walking in when he was a student at the Architectural Association, then imagined us both walking in during the winter when I was seventeen—we had sat at the table near the window. I thought of the middle-aged men and women who had filled the room during the party a few months earlier. I did not think of Virginia Woolf, who for years had lived just blocks away, who had haunted these same streets, who had almost certainly set foot upon the pavement right outside. The layers that accumulate, the memories we graft upon a place—these are a source of solace.

  * * *

  “TO FRESHEN MY memory of the war,” Virginia wrote in 1933, “I read some old diaries. How close the tears come, again & again; as I read of L. & me at the Green….The sense of all that floating away for ever down the stream, unknown for ever; queer sense of the past swallowing so much of oneself.” This idea—the power of the past to erase us, to steal from us every last moment of which our lives are composed—is omnipresent in To the Lighthouse. The sound of the waves on the beach seems to Mrs. Ramsay like a warning to “her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow,” and she will later seek to stop such slippage, pausing on the threshold of the dining room to take stock of an evening that is already beginning to vanish. I did the same upon tucking my father into bed that night, that night so long ago when we stayed up talking and crafting his to-do list; I stayed up even later in the living room, recording every word I could remember, pretending we were in that conversation still, knowing full well that it had fled forever.

  But what if there were some way of retrieving the moment, really retrieving it, so that we need never pause on the threshold, need never agonize over saying good-bye? Virginia was captive to the way in which the past “can still be more real than the present,” by how the Cornwall nursery held more reality for her than the present-day sight of the gardener outside. “At times I can go back to St Ives more completely than I can this morning,” she declares and then, taking this truth to its logical conclusion, envisions a futuristic contraption that we could plug into the wall to access all our missing moments (August 1890, say); a contraption by which we may “live our lives through from the start.”

  I can imagine Mrs. Ramsay’s girlish delight at the prospect of such an invention—Mrs. Ramsay who at dinner, reminded of a weekend when she stayed with old friends, cannot wait to escape the Hebridean table for that drawing room of decades past. She still remembers all the details—how cold she was as they went up the river, how Herbert pinned a wasp beneath a spoon—and stands in awe of how that day has continued to exist, of how she is even able to return to it, albeit only as a phantom: “And it was still going on, Mrs. Ramsay mused, gliding like a ghost among the chairs and tables…it fascinated her, as if, while she had changed, that particular day, now become very still and beautiful, had remained there, all these years.” Her recognition that such a weekend endures—that it is untouched—holds a strange, consoling logic: If a moment must pass, it must remain the same. What has happened, happens always. “However long they lived,” she supposes of her guests, they would “come back to this night; this moon; this wind; this house: and to her too.”

  On the morning after my Agra dinner, I took the train to my grandmother’s village. She and I passed a quiet afternoon and evening, until my uncle Robert surprised us by showing up unannounced after dinner and taking us to see the Guy Fawkes fireworks. It was a cold, clear night; my grandmother had forgotten her cane, and she clung to my arm as we walked along the promenade separating the millpond from the harbor. Before long there were fireworks in the distance, faint sparks showering on Hayling, and then the sky itself seemed to erupt—the sailing club had set off its own rockets. Drops of light rained down toward the water, and in so doing illuminated the nearby pontoon where six months before we had scattered my father’s remains. I thought of him, of course, of the water turning green beneath my shadow; and then I thought of another night long ago when I had left my uncle at the Blue Bell, his pub, walking home alone to the harsh, sweet smell of a bonfire.

  And then again the following day, when, after a visit to the Royal Oak, my father’s pub, I headed back along the promenade. It was a bright, hot afternoon—I was too warm in my turtleneck sweater—and the tide was out, the mud verdant and shining. I sat down beside a swan asleep, marveled at how clean and white she was; there were dozens more swans floating in the pond, and as I sat there a pair prepared to take off, their wingtips sounding like a spray of bullets as they struck the water. And with their ascent I had a sudden vision, steadily expanding, of all the millpond moments existing simultaneously (set one atop the other like transparencies); a vision of a hundred selves, layering, going about their business—not just the ash scattering and Blue Bell walk but also my young parents dragging the dinghy from the water, and my childhood trips to the Royal Oak, and the previous evening when my grandmother had taken my arm and faced the blazing, burning sky, and even the existing moment (the sleeping swan beside me), which I knew would never, could never, be divorced from all the rest. And why does it have to be now, I wondered, as opposed to then, or then? Why can’t I glide back and forth—so long as I am sitting here on the bank of the millpond?

  At lunch, Robert had said, “Your uncle Andrew, last time he was here, remarked that it would be a pity to give this place up.” He was referring to Seafield, my grandmother’s house, and later I pressed him: Was Andrew thinking of buying it? Robert looked pained and waved my question away. But I felt a quiver of hope—why not? When my grandmother died, Andrew could buy Seafield, Robert could live here, and then we would never have to give anything up. For wasn’t this house also a place that made it especially easy to dip into time? My grandmother was harder of hearing now, and Robert’s limp was worse. There were more photographs of my father. But there had always been photographs, and there was little else to mark the passing years, and so it might have been my father and not my uncle sitting in that chair, or so it might have been that I was twenty and reading To the Lighthouse well into the night, or that my father and I were about to set off on foot, through thawing fields, for late-morning drinks at the Royal Oak. What had happened once was happening still; all those moments, all those selves, existing at once, existing forever—what a cluttered world!—and all one had to do was pick one to today inhabit; pick another to tomorrow inhabit.

  In the same diary entry in which Virginia
recounted her 1905 visit to Talland House, she described the wild fantasies that accompanied returning to the place that was for her synonymous with happiness. The Great Western train that carried her and her siblings toward Cornwall was a “wizard who was to transport us into another world, almost into another age,” while Cornwall itself was a time capsule, hermetically sealed until now: “We would fain have believed that this little corner of England had slept under some enchanters spell since we last set eyes on it ten years ago, & that no breath of change had stirred its leaves.” Her greatest wish of all, though, was that contact with St Ives would actually return her to the past, actually provide a conduit by which to relive all those marvelous days of childhood, their yellow light and breaking waves, and by which to relive, too, presumably, the brief stretch of years when she and her mother overlapped. In Cornwall, she imagined, “we should find our past preserved, as though through all this time it had been guarded & treasured for us to come back to one day….Many were the summers we had spent in St Ives; was it not reasonable to believe that…here on the spot where we left them we should be able to recover something tangible of their substance?”

  But Virginia’s expedition to Talland House revealed the folly of this conceit—once there, it was impossible to escape the fact that the “lights were not our lights,” that “the voices were the voices of strangers.” And so too the folly of my own hope: Of course we would have to give up Seafield. As we had given up the boat, and the friends, and the living room with its marble fireplaces and silver mirrors, and even the hospital, so would we give up my grandmother’s house. It was just as well, for when she was gone there would be nothing to draw us back. The memories were not enough; even poor Robert was not enough. And from my post by the millpond I suddenly saw him, roaming the shore with a strange cocker spaniel. I laughed out loud—whose dog was that? The spaniel was pulling at the leash, excited by the swans, and my uncle shuffling to keep up. Then the birds moved on, the dog calmed down, and together they paused at the water, panting slightly and looking out over the harbor.

  Later, the sitting room quiet and the fire lit, the windows shuttered and the velvet curtains drawn, my grandmother asked me what I was writing about. I told her that more and more I was writing about my father. “I think about him all the time,” she said and then, almost indignant, “He seemed so well when we saw him at the hospital!” She asked if I remembered the night during their visit when he and Andrew had stayed up late; I said that I did. “Andrew said he wanted to talk about all kinds of funny things—about the past.”

  She set down her whiskey and stood. “There’s something I want you to have,” she said. I waited while she climbed the stairs; she returned holding a small box. Inside was a ring, a topaz that her husband, Charles, had smuggled back from the Middle East in the handle of a hairbrush. A champagne-colored stone held fast by four golden claws, it was glowing and golden and weightless throughout; looking down into it was like looking into a pale, light-slanted pool. “You take it with you when you go,” she said. “You’ll have it soon enough.” But there was something in the way she looked at the ring on my hand that made me say I would take it some other time. And I was glad that I did, for she seemed immediately grateful to hold on to it, this gift from her husband, for a little while longer.

  13

  “And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.”

  On my first night back in New York, sometime around dawn, I had another dream about my father. In it, the Rhode Island house had been sold and this was to be our final visit; the property, no longer wooden and worn, was an apartment on the ninth floor, and new kitchen cabinets and a washing machine blocked much of the view. The walls looked flimsy enough to blow away in the next strong wind. We wandered around, pausing at the one window to reveal the sea far below. “It’s such an insensitive renovation,” I said. “God, I’ll say,” my father said.

  “You’ll need to find somewhere else to go.”

  “Every time I needed to leave I went to Rhode Island.”

  “Couldn’t you find another house in Rhode Island?” I asked, but he demurred.

  Then we were walking along the beach, longer now, rockier, and strewn with green and purple seaweed. It seemed to stretch forever—the ocean was simply a suggestion—and seemed too to have all of life bound up in it, for there in the distance was a dovecote, now boarded up, that had once belonged to my uncle Andrew in France, and then the faraway figure of an old neighbor from Boston. But the farther we walked, the more desolate the beach became; water pooled and ran in rivulets between obsidian rocks, as if to say we might finally be reaching the shoreline, and then, suddenly, my father faltered and collapsed. I wasn’t expecting it but knew at once that it was time, and I kneeled down next to him and touched his face. His eyes were closed, but he was still breathing. The feeling of impotence was far greater than it had ever been in real life. “You were the best father,” I told him. And with that he opened his eyes—his head was flat and pale against the rounded stones—and somehow I understood that my use of the past tense, were, had succeeded in making his death real to him for the first time. And the expression on his face (he was looking not at me but past me) was one of terror; he saw something true and looming in this landscape, and whatever it was he saw caused him to wince and say, in a single, despairing breath: “Crikey.”

  He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  VIRGINIA WOOLF ONCE published a short story called “A Haunted House,” about a man and woman, long dead, who return to the home they shared in search of something—“buried treasure,” the narrator (and present occupant) calls the nameless thing they seek. The pair moves hand in hand between the rooms, drawing back curtains, opening drawers, as all the while the residence plays a soothing accompaniment: “ ‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat softly….‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly.” Eventually, reaching the bedroom where the living owners lie asleep, the ghosts reflect on their reunion: “Again you found me,” the man says. “Here,” the woman replies, “sleeping; in the garden reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. Here we left our treasure.” As they bend toward the slumbering couple, the narrator finally stirs, realizing the true nature of their riches, and that they lie within her: “Waking, I cry ‘Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.’ ”

  “A Haunted House” is a peculiar story, one whose mystery is probably better left preserved, but it makes me wonder about the blurred boundaries between a house and its inhabitants, about the role our houses play in protecting and sustaining us—it’s the couple’s home that enables their reunion, their home that is inseparable from the everyday doings (sleeping, reading, laughing) that is the fiber of their lives. And I love that “your” is italicized in the last line—“Oh, is this your buried treasure?”—as if to say that the light we carry in our hearts, and that our houses hold within their walls, exists independently of us; belongs to the men and women who precede us; spreads to the men and women who come after. We are our houses, the story seems to insist, as our forebears are our houses, and these shelters will preserve us and our buried treasure long after we are dead.

  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Woolf, a writer unusually well versed in the loss of place and people both, would forever return to these ideas. As Hermione Lee notes, each of the deaths she endured in youth “precipitated the loss of a home: Julia’s, Talland House; Leslie’s, Hyde Park Gate; Thoby’s, Gordon Square.” At times she affected a kind of nonchalance about rooting herself, expressing an urge to travel or set up shop in France or Italy; her niece Angelica recalled her contention “that one ought to have houses all about the country, and directly one has become imbued with the atmosphere of one’s house, and indifferent to it, one ought to move to another.” As Virginia and Leonard argued over the costs associated with their country home—including whether or not to
hire a full-time gardener—she worried that further investment in it would limit their horizons: “we shall be tying ourselves to come here; shall never travel; & it will be assumed that Monks House is the hub of the world.”

  And yet she was deeply, perhaps inextricably, bound to certain places—Cornwall, London, Sussex—and deeply cognizant, too, of the bonds that form between people and their palaces. (The name she chose for her first Sussex cottage? Little Talland House.) “Half the beauty of a country or a house comes from knowing it,” she wrote in 1928. “One remembers old lovelinesses: knows that it is now looking ugly; waits to see it light up; knows where to find its beauty; how to ignore the bad things. This one can’t do the first time of seeing.” The ghostly couple in “A Haunted House” has seen and seen and seen—they remember rising in the mornings and pottering in the garden; the advent of summer and snowfall in winter—and it’s impossible to think of the home they pervade without also thinking of Monk’s House, which, Virginia declared in 1919, would “be our address for ever and ever; Indeed I’ve already marked out our graves in the yard which joins our meadow.” Seen through this lens, Leonard and Virginia play both roles, not just that of the house’s living couple but also the phantom pair who haunts its halls.

  In To the Lighthouse, it’s Mrs. Ramsay who holds the light in the heart, Mrs. Ramsay who, like the house in Woolf’s story, promises her friends and family that she will keep them safe. And as she climbs toward the nursery, imagining herself forever wound in their hearts, and recalling her own parents as she sees their furniture on the landing, she glimpses an immortality like that of the ghosts—“that community of feeling with other people which emotion gives as if the walls of partition had become so thin that practically (the feeling was one of relief and happiness) it was all one stream, and chairs, tables, maps, were hers, were theirs, it did not matter whose, and Paul and Minta would carry it on when she was dead.” How curious, how compelling, this vision of the dissolution of the boundaries between people, so that it all—our houses, our belongings, our selves—becomes communal, becomes eternal; passes from us to our friends, to their friends, to their friends; a single, steady river that will forever flow.