The tyranny of illness, he thinks before he can stop himself. He takes it all. He props her up, he steps away, he ministers, he allows. He maneuvers, always within the confines of this hysteria.
He falters on the shame of the last word, stopping on the stairs and sitting on the warp of a worn step. Tracing the whorls of the wood with his fingertip remorsefully, he cannot believe that this, of all words, has come into his mind. He will not claim it as his own. It is too grotesque. These are the villains speaking in him, saying the worst conceivable thing.
It is their malevolent pull that he feels when he is sitting quietly in Fabian meetings or at some other solemn event. It is their call to mischief he hears goading him to shatter the decorum of his politic life. At such times, he sits, his weak hands wedged beneath his scrawny thighs, his caved torso rigid against the seizure that he fears will make him leap from his chair and begin shouting irrevocable curses that will banish him from the company of all right-thinking men and women.
Yes, women, he thinks. Right-thinking women.
Who, after all, is hysterical? It is your hands that are always shaking, he reminds himself bitterly, looking down at them as they lie on the step quivering.
He winces and turns on himself sardonically now, as if in the voice of some hectoring Greek chorus. Shake, you fool, and see to your wife, because she is your superior in every way, or have you forgotten? He feels the usual sting of this assessment, which is both his own and everyone else’s, though it is never said aloud. He will always grind himself on the wheel of her genius, grappling for purchase against it, and the inadequacy it feeds in him.
Those who can’t write, print—is that it?—says the same goading voice in him. He is digging into the step and pulling up a large sliver, which catches on the soft flesh beneath his fingernail and makes him pull back sharply. Was that the truer reason for acquiring the printing press? Not for her but for you? Bury your squelched attempts in a pile of worthier submissions, hers prime among them? But squelched by whom? Not by her, certainly, or not actively by her. By the image of her? Or the shadow it has cast over your—ah, there is that obstetrician’s word again—hysterical imagination?
Envy is an opportunist, he knows, and in moments like these, when he has been tossed to the point of senselessness for weeks on the welter of her moods, he is susceptible to petty resentments; the jargon of those Neanderthal practitioners he has consulted over the years.
He can see them now, the innumerable boors of the medical profession, hunkered behind their monstrous clawfooted mahogany desks. God, had he not heard enough of their smarmy club talk about “women’s troubles”? How little they understood and how pompously they pronounced, as if it was all simply a matter of bringing her to bear.
Yet clearly he is no better, carping their carps, and more shamefully still, doing so in the confines of his head where no one can hear or hold him to account.
He stands again and hops angrily down the remainder of the steps, punching at the sides of his thighs. Within three long, swift strides he is in his study, with its anodyne fug of pipe smoke, damp wool and old books. He breathes it, standing there, gazing fondly round the room, the few prized possessions of his life in letters, and his mind begins to clear.
He seats himself purposefully at his desk, and with his thumb begins to strum one of the many reams of manuscript that lie before him in stacks, neatly spaced like city blocks seen from above. The floorboards above him creak, and he casts his eyes up at the ceiling, following the swift, light progress of her footsteps and then the muffled yet firm closing of her door. He waits, but hears nothing more.
He will not see her till the afternoon, if then, when they will both abandon their labors for the outdoors, he in the garden, where the plum trees need pruning and the vegetable plots weeding, she on the downs, where she will stride out her demons and shout their execrations to the air. He shifts in his chair, pencil in hand, takes up the nearest pile and begins to read.
From its accustomed place in a wad on the floor, Virginia retrieves the threadbare floral print dress that she so often wears when she is working. Gathering it hastily between her thumbs and forefingers, she places it like a wreath around her neck and shoulders, pulls her arms roughly through the sleeves and lets it fall loosely over her narrow hips.
The fabric, seldom washed, is grubby with use, oiled and inked and sweated in, so that it is as flanneled and funked as a beloved toy bear. When they are at each other, Leonard complains about this garment, its shabbiness, its ubiquity, its smell. He has dubbed it the Lambeth laydeez ’ousecoat, but she thinks of it more as an artist’s smock, like the one Nessa sometimes wears.
The dress. Distress. The lighthouse lays its caress.
Absently, drifting in the rhythm of the phrase, she scans the breakfast tray. Standing over it, she stiffens, eyeing the delinquent bun as if it were a calling card left by one of those unctuous second-tier society women whom she somehow both needs and loathes.
It must be dealt with. But how?
She stares at it for a moment longer, hating it irrationally, for itself and for all that it represents, the blameless bread placed before her each morning like a reproach. Doctor’s orders. The indignity of it, the intrusion. She feels her scalp prickle with indignation. Then, gripped by a sudden fury that some overseeing part of her knows is absurdly disproportionate, she seizes the bun and rips it to bits. Before she can stop herself and think—the lavatory would have been wise—she strides to the open window and hurls the pieces out.
She doesn’t bother to see where they have landed, but she will have to check when she goes out this afternoon. It is the kind of thing Leonard will notice and say nothing about, though he will no doubt scratch it into his diary as diligently as he records every other assertion of her ill health.
Ah, well, she allows mockingly, one must do what one feels. There are many reasons. Not just one, infallible, but varieties of sane response and a host of sensible premises behind them, whatever the logicians might say. But there is only one intimate to receive them, two if she counts Nessa, but lately she does not.
So, then, I count on misinterpretation instead. How, really, could it be otherwise? My food lies decimated in the azaleas, truly one-tenth dispensed, if that, and the remainder is for the birds. She smiles at the pun, hearing some fusty Victorian shrew exclaiming, “This breakfast is for the birds,” or one of the servants, clearing away yet another unkempt meal, declaring, “Good lord, ma’am, but you do eat like a bird.”
But then her mind snags more hurtfully on the birds, because it is in fact they who speak to her in the voices that no one else can hear. If only the bread would placate them, she yearns, or make their learned shrieking intelligible to someone, anyone, else. There is so much pain in this lack of understanding, so much terrified struggle in these fits that Leonard and the others see as mutinies. But it is concord she wants most, strives for so desperately in everything she writes. There must be a way, she urges herself each time, some way to inscribe the storm of her experience so that she will not have to be alone with it.
She thinks of John Clare’s plaintive lines, and feels their same regret:
. . . Even those I loved the best
Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.
She falls with a hollow thump into the worn armchair, which enfolds her like a mouth, the molded cushions tonguing the length of her like an indulgent mother cow. She places the lap desk across her knees, slides the pen into the yellow calloused groove between the first and second fingers, first and second knuckles of her right hand, steadies the paper with her left hand and poises the nib.
She looks up at the facing wall where a lozenge of nacreous light displays the shadow of a breeze-blown branch trembling. She gazes at it for a long moment, entranced, then drops her eyes to where her knobbled fist has already begun to make its slow, mesmeric way across the page. She follows it lovingly, indulgently, tilting her head to the side like a small child drawing her fir
st sun. The trick, the quickness, is in the fingers, hinging tirelessly above the stylus like some huge and bloodless insect spinning out worlds. She loses herself in the motion, the pleasant scratch and whisper of the act, and, relinquishing herself wholly now to the illusion, she disappears.
10:47 A.M.
THEY ARE LYING on the narrow bed side by side, woman and girl, facing each other like mirror images, each propping the side of her head with the heel of one hand against the temple. The supporting arms are bent at the elbows. The opposing arms are stretched the length of each body, the wrists languid on the curve of the hips, the fingers loosely spanning the upper thighs. They are looking intently into each other’s eyes, not besottedly, as lovers do, but studiously, as if examining rare stamps under a loupe.
You first, says Adeline, squirming to adjust her pose.
“Patience, little goat,” Virginia chides, leaning in to place her lips playfully against the tip of the adolescent’s nose. Adeline wriggles delightedly, then goes quite still again, softening her gaze so as not to blink.
“Now then, shall I begin?” says Virginia, bringing her own eyes very close to and even with Adeline’s so that she can see all the shapes and shades in the hazel pinwheels of her eyes.
Adeline nods once, gravely.
“Very well. There is the black dot in the bottom half of the iris, exactly in the center.”
My second pupil, Adeline says.
“Yes,” answers Virginia, “through which you see the first world.”
And what is the first world? Adeline asks, knowing the words that Virginia will say but needing to hear them again.
“The one that lies behind this one,” Virginia obliges, dreamily.
Adeline sighs at the confirmation, relieved. Yes.
These answers, said and heard many times before, are the game between them, the reestablishment of sameness.
Adeline prompts again: Is it very like?
“Not at all like,” Virginia says. “Quite different.” She pauses tenderly to stroke Adeline’s cheek. “But you must tell me. What do you see?”
Adeline drops her propping right arm and rests her head on the pillow, hugging it for comfort. She lets her eyes unfocus and glaze.
I see the man sitting at the end of Mother’s bed, she begins, very slowly and precisely. I see the darkened room, the heavy drapes, the bedclothes carefully arranged, the shape of Mother, laid out. I have never seen her lying down. Not ever before. But now she is perfectly still and straight. The composure of her face is . . . Adeline falters here. She darts her eyes away and back. Her face is like . . . She breaks off, unable to go on, and so the other dredges up the description.
“An ecstasy of absence,” Virginia says, smoothing the familiar phrase.
Adeline nods, and her cheek makes a soft breathy sound on the pillow. They lie there quietly for a moment, breathing. Virginia reaches over and brushes a loose strand of hair behind Adeline’s ear.
“And what do you feel?” she asks.
The answer comes quickly this time, sharply, with the usual stab of self-reproach: Nothing.
She waits again, still stroking Adeline’s hair, patiently, coaxingly, letting the somnolence of ritual take its effect. “What then?” she says at last.
I stand beside the head of the bed, bend and kiss her cheek.
Another pause for the seeing of it, fractured in their minds’ eyes. Then Virginia asks,
“Which is like . . . ?”
Which is like cold iron, says Adeline, frowning. Like kissing cold iron. She closes her eyes wearily.
“Yes,” Virginia confirms. “Yes.”
The recitation is complete, the moment shrined. It casts its pale shadow on them like the watermark of an event too imprinted to erase.
This is where I remain, Adeline says, and where I come to you.
“Broken off,” the other continues absently to herself, as if this were all written down somewhere word for word. “The seed of me that was then, and grew no further.”
Adeline says nothing to this. She has no line. But after a long pause, she lifts her head, newly inspired, and asks brightly,
Do you remember Mr. Wolstenholme? The mathematician who used to come and stay with us every summer at St. Ives?
Virginia thinks for a moment. The name, the image of the man are fixed in her memory, yet the man himself, if there was such a thing, is obscure. He is only as she remembers him, sketched and kept, the placeholder for an idea.
“Of course,” she says at last, fondly and only a little dishonestly. “The Woolly One. He sat in his chair and smoked and read and never spoke.”
Yes.
Adeline lets herself down again on the pillow. Rolling on her back, she searches the canvas of the ceiling as if descrying there the image of what she is about to say.
But, she resumes, with the lurch of disclosure in her voice, he did speak once. She waits for the surprise of this to penetrate, then adds solemnly, I have never told you this before.
This falls between them awkwardly, but with the promise of something meaningfully withheld, the recovery of an event that Adeline has clipped out of time and stored in the hollows of her expurgated self.
She begins again dreamily, without prompting.
It was one of those washed late afternoons of late summer when the blue of the sky is so pale it feels as if it is fading away, but the sun is still fierce and small, glaring from its corner.
This is like something she would have written for practice in her diary, though if she did, it is lost, and Virginia has never found it among her things.
I was sitting on the lawn, squinting out at the waves in the bay, watching the whitish blue blossoms of foam spread and dissolve on the swells. I remember I was thinking that it was like watching lichens growing and dying on rocks, but in sped-up time.
“Good,” Virginia whispers. “That’s very good.” She waits for more, but Adeline is snagged on the memory. “Go on,” Virginia tells her soothingly. “You can.”
Adeline blinks rapidly and sighs. She brings her hand to her throat for comfort, resting it on the birdbeat of the pulse.
It was strange to think this, she resumes hesitantly. I remember being a bit startled by it, because I had never really had a thought like that before, and never one with such strange feelings attached to it. The world seemed to be speeding up and slowing down, going liquid and solid at the same time, and me with it.
Virginia considers this. Yes, she thinks, that’s right. That’s right. I remember it now.
“Yes,” she says aloud. “I remember.”
And Adeline continues more confidently, the words coming now without hesitation, the memory tumbling through.
I felt as though I had stepped—like Alice—into another world, or a slice of one that was showing through a gap in this one. It was so odd and hypnotizing, and the longer I looked, the odder and more hypnotizing it became, until I began to worry that I might be having some sort of fit or break or collapse. I didn’t know what, and it frightened me.
It frightened me only a little at first, but then the fear began to grow, getting larger with every breath, spreading like a cramp inside me and then breaking into a rush all through me. I could feel myself becoming physically weaker and weaker, less and less able to rouse myself or squirm or even go rigid against it. And then, finally, I lost the fight. I was paralyzed. I could not move.
Virginia lies back on the bed, seeming to stare into the same imaginary place and time that are locked in the girl’s memory.
I wanted to get up and go inside, she hears Adeline saying. Go anywhere to get away from this thing, whatever it was, and I tried several times, but I couldn’t. I could not even get my little finger or my lips to move so that I could make a sign or cry out for help to whoever might be near.
I was helpless, cut off by this kind of horrid waking seizure. I was panicking and trapped, as if I was being held down by some huge invisible weight. I began to think that I must be dying, and that thi
s must be what dying was like, the mind going wild, and the body a sack. The horror of it went on in my head for what seemed like a very long time, with all my worst, most frantic thoughts and feelings swirling and swarming inside this corpse that my body had become.
This is all very familiar now, Virginia thinks, her body beginning to display the agony that Adeline describes. She is stiffening on the bed, as if the event is passing through her. Adeline is going on quickly now, without pause.
I could not put these opposites together. I did not want to. I fought with all the strength I had left, even though I knew it was diminishing all the time. Knowing this only made me fight harder with less, and with no relief.
But then, after a terrible struggle that seemed to last forever, though I suppose it must have lasted only a few minutes or even seconds, this awful whirlwind inside me sucked up the last of my resistance, and I was suddenly . . .
She pauses to get this right.
. . . well, I suppose I was suddenly released. I gave up. I went slack under the fear. I stopped trying to push it away or avoid whatever it was bringing me to.
She stops again, not quite believing her own words, her eyes seeking out Virginia’s for the necessary contact, but Virginia is too deep now in her mind and in the past to act her part. Adeline must find her there, and by talking.
And so, suppressing the doubt, she goes on.
Then the whole nightmare . . . it somehow turned perfectly tame in an instant. I went numb all over and weightless and the terror became a kind of nothingness that drew me into it and calmed me. All the parts of myself that had fought loosened their hold on me. Questions, worries, beliefs, doubts—all my thoughts—fell away one by one until I was left there floating, limp and colorless and empty.
“But aware,” says Virginia, rushing in to finish the thought. “Absolutely aware. Without sense. Without thought. Without will. And happier—more at peace—than you had ever been.”
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