To the River

by Olivia Laing

  Now I felt more like I’d fallen to the bottom of a glass dome. The Downs rose all around me and beyond them was the sky, chalky too, screened with fine cloud like the scrim that drops before a play. Behind me great white cumuli were building. A storm? It was hot enough. The air felt tense and fidgety against my fingertips and as I glanced again over my shoulder I saw the clouds above Falmer had tarnished to a spoiled grey. Something stank to high heaven too. I nosed around and turned up the corpse of a rabbit, its fur tugged into damp little tufts as if it had been suckled.

  A man passed me then, moving quickly, binoculars slung about his neck. We smiled silently at one another and it struck me for the first time how safe I felt. Five days of walking, speaking hardly at all, and I seemed to have become immersed in the world, neck-deep, the panic that had shadowed me for months dissolved away. My phone had bleeped periodically but I hadn’t answered it. I didn’t want to rupture the buoyancy that had come so unexpectedly. At home, solitude had begun to terrify me, the threat of it, stretching endless and paper-white, though in the past I’d always loved to be alone. But here, in the fields, moving at my own pace, I did not feel islanded or isolated. There was too much occurring. Like – now! – those two oystercatchers on the far bank, still as bookends, monochrome save their tangerine beaks, crying in pitched, plaintive voices peeppeeep peeeppeep peeppeep.

  The path stretched on before me, almost flush with the ruffled water. A train went by, calling its way to Southease, and down in the Brooks I could see a pair of tractors clearing the field, the men concealed within their cabs. There was something very strange about walking aside such brimful water, as if I could step down onto it and continue along that shifting track. The river was completely opaque now, aglint with borrowed light, its surface coloured the bluish-green of spilled petrol, teased by the wind and current into tufts and crests and little waves. Behind it I could see the bald chalkpit at Asham, where Virginia once leased a house. It was where she went to recuperate after her third breakdown, and she kept a funny sort of nature journal there, full of spare, painful accounts of moths sighted and mushrooms gathered. Her wedding night was spent at Asham, and she finished her first novel, The Voyage Out, whilst staying there too, in the west-facing rooms that rose out from the hill like the prow of a ship.

  The house is long gone now. It was engulfed by a cement works in the 1930s and slowly wrecked by the clouds of chalk, which covered everything in a fine, wheezy dust, screening the windows and spoiling the garden and the bordering elms. It grew derelict and was pulled down entirely in 1994, when the works – now turned into a landfill site – were expanded in size. In his autobiography Leonard Woolf remembers finding the house for the first time, hidden in a hollow of the Downs amid a great field of sheep. ‘The grass of the garden and field seemed almost to come to the sitting rooms and into the windows facing west,’ he wrote. ‘One often had a feeling as if one were living under water in the depths of the sea behind the thick rough glass of the room’s long windows – a sea of green trees, green grass, green air.’

  It wasn’t green any more. The chalk had been quarried away, and the holes that remained gummed up with disposable nappies, household waste and the corpses of cattle infected with BSE. The pits had been cut down to below the water table and not all of them were originally lined, so that for a time the waste leached chlorine and ammonia into the long ditches that snaked down to the river. The site had reached capacity a month ago, on 16 May, the pits chock-full with rotting rubbish. And soon, or so the waste company promises, Leonard’s green grass will be restored, the cap of downland smoothed back across the foxed, bedevilled earth.

  Virginia thought that Asham was haunted, and wrote a short story based on her experience there. The doors, she wrote, used to open and close all night, and a couple would whisper and sigh as they tiptoed between the rooms. Had the cement works flighted them, I wondered, or had they persisted in the dust until the abandoned house was pulled apart? I liked to think that if you found the right spot amid the bin bags you would hear them, voices hushed, still patrolling a house that had long since fallen away.

  I’d been reading Woolf’s diaries and letters all spring, buying cheap paperbacks with ugly covers that had to be shipped from America. I coveted the beautiful Hogarth Press editions, which sold in Lewes for horrendous, heart-stopping prices. We used to have a couple of them at home, shifting bookshelves as we moved from place to place, and the last time I visited my mother I brought one back: The Flight of the Mind, the first volume of letters. The spine was a pale flinty grey like the breast of a pigeon, tattered at its ends and bleached a little by the sun. On the frontispiece my father had written in his tight, distinctive hand To Denise, from Peter, with much love, 3 December 1976. The date was her birthday, the last before I was born. I couldn’t imagine my parents as a couple, though I’d seen photographs of them smiling in cut-off shorts, leaning against a bottle-green TR6 or messing about on a friend’s speedboat. I wondered if she’d asked for the book. For Christmas, Matthew had given me a Hoover.

  Little stories kept coming back to me now, and phrases I found so pleasurable I rolled them around within my mouth. Woolf wrote often of the river, and I remembered a story late in the diaries of a flood that had occurred just south of here. In the early years of the Second World War, a bomb was dropped near Rodmell that ruptured the banks of the Ouse, those same banks that William Jessop had contrived to fix the river to its course. The water swelled out blue across the fields and the marsh was returned to the inland sea of medieval times, the bridge cut off, the road impassable. On Guy Fawkes Night, Woolf wrote of the beauty of this unfathomable sea, adding: ‘Oh may the flood last for ever – a virgin lip; no bungalows; as it was in the beginning.’

  The pleasure of isolation quickly palled, as it always did. To read Woolf’s diaries is to be tugged to and fro between the irreconcilable desires for solitude and company, the twin fears of being islanded and swamped. The experience of being marooned at Rodmell, which war and flood made literal at last, was both delicious and deadly; the waters which had risen up about Monks House were at once generative and barren.

  Water, in Woolf’s personal lexicon, represented a way of slipping the superficial self – the self who played bowls, or minded when a hat was criticised – and ducking down into a deeper, nameless realm. When Virginia writes about writing, which is often, the images she employs are liquid. She is flooded or floated; she breaks the current. When the books are going well she plunges off, happy as a swimmer, into the marine element of private thought. When the work is going poorly, however, when headaches prevail or sleeplessness sets in, her descriptions begin to acquire a nightmarish dryness.

  It’s hardly surprising, then, that the novels she wrote should be so flush with waterways. The Voyage Out begins aboard a liner bound for South America, and To the Lighthouse is set so close to the edge of the Atlantic that the sound of the sea is heard on almost every page. The movement of water intersperses the action of The Waves, and in Orlando two lovers are divided when the frozen Thames melts into teeming life again. As for her last book, Between the Acts, written as bombs undid the architecture of London and the Woolfs were once more marooned in Sussex, it revolves around a deep pond filled with lilies, in which the silvery flashes of fish – carp, were they? – are sometimes briefly glimpsed.

  What is one to make of this great weight of waters? Though they are beautiful, they carry with them the risk of annihilation too. Take that fishpond with its red and white lilies, the size of dinner plates, that bloom by day and close when it grows dark. The servants won’t walk near it at night because a lovesick woman drowned there once, though when men came to dredge it all they managed to salvage was the thighbone of a sheep. Or there’s that strange puddle in The Waves which Rhonda finds herself unable to cross, a scene repeated in Woolf’s own fragmentary memoir, A Sketch of the Past: the grey, cadaverous puddle that threatens identity itself.

  Water is dangerous then, even – that cada
verous – deadly. But. I didn’t want to be tugged by hindsight, to weight every word with what would take place, years later, in the Ouse. Thanatos, the death impulse, the urge towards non-being, is said to be the opposite of eros, and yet it is shot through with its own sort of sensuality. I thought of a letter Virginia had written to Nelly Cecil while she stayed in a house near Rye, amid the cornfields and sheep-pastures that had once, not so long ago, been sunk beneath the sea. ‘I feel like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood,’ she wrote, ‘smoothed, obliterated, how should my pockets still be full of words?’ Does this prefigure what was to come? Vaticinium ex eventu. The prophecy comes after the event. And is it not necessary to dissolve the self if one hopes to see the world unguarded?

  The day was growing hotter. Big river-coloured dragonflies were lifting into the warm air and up above the pylons one or two seagulls were drifting south amid an unruly sky, the clouds torn into scraps and orts. They were bringing the hay in on Rise Farm. I could see five tractors by the hedge, though only one was mowing, the cut grass drifting behind it like smoke. The next field had already been baled in blue plastic, the exact colour of surgical scrubs. An oystercatcher cried a warning then, and as I turned a speedboat came bouncing down from Lewes. A topless man was steering and a woman and black dog sat huddled in the prow. They were flying the Jolly Roger and as they passed the wake slung out, thick and creamy, and sloshed itself against the shore.

  The path had broadened and now the long grass also came to an end, giving way to pink cranesbill and clover, the little tipped yellow heads of black medick and a few of those giant dog daisies that are also known as marguerites. A wind had got up from somewhere, whipping the river into actual waves. Those clouds – I looked more closely – did not bode well. Oh hell. I was caught equidistant between Rodmell and Lewes, right where I’d been in the last downpour. There was nowhere to shelter out here: no trees, no bridges, not even a wall. I shoved my notebook in my pocket and glowered furiously at the sky.

  Thunderheads were building above Lewes. I could see them massing behind Mount Harry, banking by the prison and the old racecourse. A haze had fallen ahead of me, dimming the fields and turning the air almost to gauze. The light fell through the altocumulus of a mackerel sky, each scale thickly whorled and pale as spun sugar. Mackerel skies and mare’s tails make tall ships carry low sails, I muttered to myself. The sun burned through like magnesium, a distant, impeded thing. My right eye had begun to run with tears, though whether from the light or pollen I couldn’t tell. White, negating white, the colour of the refiner’s fire. Christ is said to have come back from the dead dressed in white, his raiment exceeding fallen snow, white as no fuller on earth could make it with their baths of chalk and urine. This sky might also have been run through a fulling mill, scoured, ground and pinned on tenterhooks to dry. I cupped a hand about my weeping eye and carried on, trying not to look at the veiled sun.

  It was a strange landscape at the best of times, the Brooks, the land so flat and intermarried with water. I’d read in a history of Lewes that when the river ran high and threatened to breach the banks farmers would stake nets cattycorners between the hedges to catch the fish as they washed across the grass, and furthermore that it is from this practice that the phrase a pretty kettle of fish takes its origins, for the nets were known as kettles. I don’t know if this is true, though. Such origin tales always strike me as dubious, like the claim that the Ouse comes as a contraction of the Waters of Lewes, which over time got rubbed down by use to the Wose and thence the Ouse.

  Thinking of the marshes and their periodic immersions reminded me that there was another element to Woolf’s story of the bombed river. In a letter to her friend, the irrepressible composer Ethel Smyth, she sketched the landscape again, this time inserting herself in the frame.

  Then, to my infinite delight, they bombed our river. Cascades of water roared over the marsh – All the gulls came and rode the waves at the end of the field. It was, and still is, an inland sea, of such indescribable beauty, always changing, day and night, sun and rain, that I cant take my eyes off it. Yesterday, thinking to explore, I fell headlong into a six foot hole, and came home dripping like a spaniel, or water rugg (thats Shakespeare). How odd to be swimming in a field! Mercifully I was wearing Leonard’s old brown trousers. Tomorrow I buy a pair of cords for myself. Its raining, raining . . . and I’ve been walking, walking. The road to the Bridge was 3 foot in water, and this meant a 2 mile round; but oh dear, how I love this savage medieval water moved, all floating tree trunks and flocks of birds and a man in an old punt, and myself so eliminated of human features that you might take me for a stake walking.

  Critics have tended to regard this incident in a sinister light, as a portent of what would take place on the same ground a few months on. As Hermione Lee, the most acute of Woolf’s biographers, explains, ‘it is an alarming conjunction of wanting to be immersed in the savage water, and wanting to become anonymous and featureless’. I’m not sure, though, that I agree. If we have any hopes at all of seeing the world, it is in those moments when the ‘I’ winks out, when the self empties or eddies away.

  On the subject of stalking, the naturalist Annie Dillard wrote: ‘For . . . forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat.’ This sort of dislocation with the human, identifying instead with dead or lifeless matter, seems both a natural and a necessary part of becoming absorbed in the wider realm. There’s a note of ecstatic surrender in Woolf’s description of the savage medieval water, of the fluxing world in which she has become so thoroughly dissolved, and though it is close to the desire for self-annihilation, it doesn’t seem to belong entirely to someone who has lost faith with life.

  But there’s a larger problem here. The tendency to wring prophecy from the tide of material that Woolf left behind seems to sit uneasily with what she herself thought of the past. As she experimented with memoir, biography, and novels that contained elements of each, she noticed that the process by which events are converted into history is inevitably distorting, for the past acquires in the telling a shape and coherence that is absent from the present. It’s an observation that she expressed sharply when she came to write of her brother’s death, describing it, as I have already noted, as ‘one of the falsifications – that knell I always find myself hearing and transmitting – that one cannot guard against, save by noting it’.

  Some patterns can only be observed at great distance, it’s true, but in order to view life in this way something else must be sacrificed, for when we look with hindsight, from the final outcome back, we see events inflected with a meaning that the one who lived them never grasped. I don’t believe there is a single person who’s not troubled sometimes in the course of their days by a sense of occlusion or tenuousness, a sense that their actions occur within such a great expanse of darkness on either side that they might prove at the last incoherent and devoid of sense. ‘Yes, I was thinking,’Woolf wrote in her diary at around the same time that the Ouse was bombed; ‘we live without a future. That’s what’s queer, with our noses pressed to a closed door.’ She was speaking of the war, but I think that what she said is true of every day, whether bombs rain down or not, for the future is by its nature contingent and to read every event in terms of what is yet to occur disjoints the moment in which life is lived, divesting it of that uncertain, glancing quality that is the hallmark of the present.

  Still, one can’t ignore the great weight of stories about immersion and submersion, about going under and being washed away. There were two in particular that had stayed with me, one written when Woolf was very young and one in the final winter of her life. I’d read them both on a snowy day in the archive at the University of Sussex, where an assortment of Leonard and Virginia’s papers and letters reside in a series of mushroom-coloured cardboa
rd boxes that smell faintly, as indeed does much of the library, of meat stew.

  The first, ‘A Terrible Tragedy in a Duck Pond’, was written when Woolf was seventeen, in the miserable wake of Stella’s death, as a gift for her friend Emma Vaughan. It concerns a real incident in which Emma, Virginia and her younger brother Adrian capsized and sank a punt while playing aboard it late one night and with what was evidently hysterical good cheer. As the title suggests, the account is a self-conscious parody of a newspaper report, the sort of exercise one might be set at school, though Woolf of course never went, learning Greek from Janet Case and delving the rest from her father’s shelves.

  Woolf’s gift as a mimic lends liveliness to her novels – that magpie ear for found dialogue – and her ventriloquism is an essential component of her satire. Here, the narrator employs the portentous, inadvertently bathetic tones of the provincial journalist, sloppy with facts and imaginatively unequal to the tragedy he has himself fabricated: the terrible drowning of three young people.

  The waters rose & rose, irresistible, calm. One moment dry & vigorous, then thrown from the warmth & animation of life to the cold jaws of a sudden & unthought of death – what change could be more absolute or more dreadful? Alone, untended, unwept, with no hand to soothe their last agonies, they were whelmed in the waters of the duck pond, shrouded in the green weed (we believe it to be a species of Anseria Slimatica) which we have mentioned above.