Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  Virginia had written as much in Dalloway: What can one know even of the people one lives with every day?

  And the answer is: very little. Only what one knows by rote, and the rest is wisps and guessing, a mist of fogs and foreign atmospheres that may, when you’re lucky, burn as bright and enchantingly as the boreal lights, but may as likely stir up a tempest, or cast a gloom, grim and suffocating as a mine.

  This is one thing that Lytton will never understand, even knowing Virginia and him as he does. Lytton had chosen not to marry, as so many of his fellow unfortunates had done—using a wife for cover and then keeping on as before, having assignations on the sly in alleyways and cheap hotels, avoiding arrest. Lytton had been honest enough in that. He is living with Carrington, but it is a knowing arrangement. Both of them are having their affairs with other men. They are maintaining their own illusion, perhaps, but it is not the same.

  When it had come to magnetizing Virginia and Leonard, way back in the dark days of the Edwardian lacuna, as they had dubbed it—1901 to 1910—the marriage question had turned into a very strange ball of wax with Lytton. It had been an odd, odd business all the way round. Leonard does not like to recall it in detail—he finds the melodramatic highs and lows of his youthful confessions, almost all of which were made to Lytton, embarrassing—yet, when he is being honest with himself, he is unsparing.

  It had happened while he had been abroad in Ceylon. He had left in 1904 and not returned until 1911, and all that time he had been out of pocket, so to speak, with what was then only the proto-Bloomsbury crowd. He and Lytton had written to each other almost daily throughout. It had been, in many ways, the flowering of their friendship, for they had relied on each other like family, when in truth family was rarely this reliable or close. They had held and bucked each other up through the inevitable comedowns and disappointments of postgraduate life. They were not in Arcadia anymore.

  They had poured out their broken hearts to each other on every subject, from the minutiae of Leonard’s administrative duties in the jungle, trying to hack a semblance of order out of the underbrush, to Lytton’s unrequited passion for his cousin, Bloomsbury’s resident Lothario, Duncan Grant. Their correspondence, lengthy, deep and lasting, had got them both through seven long years of alienation and unhappiness.

  But then, in February of ’09, Lytton had written with the strange news that he had proposed to Virginia Stephen, and what was more, she had accepted him. But in the very next sentence he had gone on to say that it had all dissolved quite quickly, as both of them had realized the folly of such a course.

  In Leonard’s estimation, the proposal itself had not been altogether out of place. In his letters, Lytton had confessed to feeling lonely, as Leonard had himself, and to being full of anxiety about where his life was going. Marriage had seemed a logical next step and certainly one that would afford him the much-needed warmth and approbation of, as he’d put it, “the phalanx of the norm.”

  But then, within days—and this, looking back on it now, Leonard sees is the part that had been truly out of place—Lytton had proceeded to extol the virtues of Virginia, and essentially to play the part of the pimp in inducing Leonard to come home and pay his own court to her.

  Why not you, if not I? he’d said. If you ask her, she’ll be sure to accept. It’s a natural fit, practically incestuous, what? And on and on. He’d been a relentless winking eye on the page for months afterward. And, while Leonard had been much more attracted to Vanessa when he had met the Stephen sisters for the first time, on a visit they’d paid to Thoby at Cambridge—she was the more beautiful, everyone agreed—Vanessa had already married Clive Bell. And marrying Thoby’s sister was practically like marrying his own sister. The same had been true of Clive’s marriage to Vanessa. They were all as close as kittens, first the men, and then the women, too.

  He sits up suddenly at this, remembering the day’s mail. He looks impatiently around his desk and begins riffling through masses of strewn paper. There is an unanswered letter here somewhere from Tom Eliot. His own form of epistolary coaching, but this time from the midst of the marital experience, one husband to another. He has been advising Tom for several years now, both in writing and in person. It was only natural. Leonard’s and Tom’s marriages are quite similar in certain respects, and Tom and his wife Vivien have become more or less sucked into Leonard and Virginia’s extended brood. Close as kittens.

  Tom and Vivien had been married in ’15, just three years after he and Virginia had been, and, like them, without fanfare, in a peeling London registry office. They moved in the same circles. They practiced the same trade. Leonard had assumed his current literary editorship of The Nation, for example, only after Eliot had been offered it and turned it down. Two years ago, he and Virginia had been the first to publish Tom’s abstruse and groundbreaking work The Waste Land in book form under their very own Hogarth imprint. It was the poem that had really set Tom on his way to becoming the towering literary figure he had long dreamt of being. Virginia herself had set the type.

  Now Tom is joining the Faber & Gwyer publishing firm, a competitor to Hogarth, and that, after Virginia had worked tirelessly, raising funds to free him from the drudgery of his former position at Lloyd’s bank. It is a touchy business at times, their various entanglements—that is Bloomsbury now, every bit as much as it was back when—yet the man-to-man correspondence Leonard is sharing with Tom is quite different from the one he had with Lytton. It is more mature, for one. Thus far, it has managed to survive the stranglehold of the pile.

  There are other parallels between their marriages, though he does not like to dwell on them. Vivien suffers from a nervous disease whose origin is at best poorly understood. According to Tom, it manifests physically most often during menstruation, and, much like Virginia’s disorder, in headaches, which precipitate violent upheavals in her mood. Both couples are childless, and for the same reason. Fearing exacerbation in the mother, as well as the likelihood of passing the defect to the child, the doctors have advised against conception.

  But this, as far as Leonard is concerned, is where the likeness ends. Vivien is no Virginia. Not a practiced or established artist, not an intellectual and decidedly not a genius, however Tom might sometimes boast about her brains and her indispensability to his work.

  Yet Tom has come to think of Leonard as something of a source, someone who knows all about managing troubled and troublesome wives, and who can advise discreetly on how best to bring about the kind of lasting connubial truce Tom seems convinced that he and Virginia enjoy. Mostly this is true, and Leonard won’t shatter the illusion. He’s worked too hard for it. Besides, as it happens, he does know quite a lot about balancing in a squall. He has gotten his sea legs by painstaking trial and error over the last thirteen years. Why shouldn’t he share what he knows? And why shouldn’t he receive the occasional comradely boost from a husband who finds himself at times in similar straits?

  He has found Tom’s letter at last, and he will answer it now, before lunch, when his thoughts on the subject are focused, if not quite fresh. He has wasted much of the morning in thought. This at least is something to do and to finish. The press of manuscripts and his own research can wait.

  4:16 P.M.

  THE AFTERNOON SUN is bright and keen on the bricks of the cobble path, and gently warms Leonard’s calves and thighs as he kneels, deadheading the sweet peas that he has trained so carefully all season. Lean cane stakes, five feet tall, are posted a foot apart in neat rows up and down the length of the path on both sides. Between them he has threaded four-by-four-inch knotted cross-hatchings of string, an active system of support, both supple and strong, that took him many hours to fashion. By means of it, the plants have thrived through the usual whips and bastings of an inclement English spring, coiling their tendrils up and through the subtle trelliswork and hanging tightly, even through the worst of it. Now he is having his reward. The flowers are a boisterous profusion of pink and lavender and magenta, which—he repeat
s this pedantically every year—this pruning will enhance and prolong well through the summer.

  Though the sun is out at last, the air is still cool, as it so often is in early June when it has rained this much. The water meadows are swamped and the river Ouse is a milky torrent overflowing its banks. She is standing above him on the path, alert and attentive, her arms wrapped about her in place of a shawl, watching him pinch and discard the errant growths.

  He never says so outright, he wouldn’t, but he wants this ritual to be observed, daily, she suspects it would be, if he had his way, but weekly will do. He needs her to appreciate his competence in this, to note and acknowledge the details of his craft, and so she does, outwardly, though it is really he, not his gardening, that she is observing so closely.

  He does not know it, but he gives himself away when he is like this, alone with her outdoors and thoroughly absorbed in something he enjoys. This is the person she first loved, and the one that no one else has ever known. Some of their set, the closest and of the longest standing, have sensed this part of him and loved it, too, but none has known it, not as she has, nor can they. This is not the man (she conceives this at first regretfully, then with a blush of satisfaction) that history will remember.

  So be it, then, and good. It belongs to them alone. She approves, except that she would not have the hacks get hold of the wrong end of him after the fact—he in one claw, she in the other—and set him up against her as something he is not, a scourge, say, or a keeper. She sighs over this, chagrined and guilty. The conjectures of sex will be a war one day, and she will have played her part in starting it. The spoils will fall to the executors: interpreting all, knowing nothing.

  For how would anyone see—how could they, through the masks of his political self, and even hers—what she sees kneeling before her in the garden on this fragile blue day in June? Here is this impossibly gentle, nurturing—and yes, she would go so far—this maternal man taking the tender sprigs of plants between his fingers as lovingly and wonderingly as if they were the tiny, perfectly formed toes of his own newborn child.

  Down the years, they will be wasted, these treasures of his secret self: the warmth of kindness and trust that gathers about his shoulders and glows in him as he crouches on the grass in the shade, resting, unawares; the fierce protectiveness of life and of all living things that simmers in his eyes as he sits stroking the dog, staring into the middle distance, or as he watches, sometimes for an hour or more, a common sparrow make its way to and from its nest to feed its young.

  It is incommunicable, she thinks. It is the very thing she has to say to him today, shown in another way. The same mystery lost because it cannot be adequately expressed.

  “I have been thinking about Talland House,” she says suddenly.

  He has stopped plucking to straighten a listing stake. With the palms of his hands he is tamping the loose soil at the base of one of the plants, firming the sod above the rootstock.

  “At St. Ives, you mean?” he says, grunting as he leans more weight onto his arms.

  “Yes,” she says, “the summers before Mother’s death . . . You know the anniversary has recently passed.”

  He stops what he is doing, turns and squints up at her.

  “Of course,” he says apologetically, “I hadn’t thought.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she continues absently. She is not going to tell him about Adeline. “It’s just that I was remembering something very specific that I did there.”

  He is still stopped, looking up at her a little sheepishly for having forgotten the date of her mother’s death, but his hands have begun to move again beneath him.

  “I haven’t thought of it for a long time,” she resumes, more dreamily. “It was a small thing, a very small thing, yet important. At first I was not at all sure why. I was quite puzzled by it, in fact. Of all the things that happened there, all the things that I might have held uppermost in my memory about those summers with the family in that house, but haven’t, this incident has stuck fast.”

  “Have you told me about it before?”

  “No. I have told no one. It didn’t seem significant enough to relate. I’ve hardly thought of it myself.”

  He has righted the stake, and stands to face her, brushing his knees.

  “Will you tell me now?” he says.

  She is lighting a cigarette.

  “If I can,” she says, drawing on it through pursed lips. Exhaling, she adds, “But there is a lot in it, and it has all just come pouring out together in a rush this morning.”

  “Go slowly, then,” he says, still facing her, “and I will try to help if I can.”

  He turns back, at full height now, and resumes his plucking.

  “In the hall at Talland House,” she says, taking another slow drag on the cigarette, “there was a looking glass.” She pauses for a moment, picking a piece of loose tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “It was almost too high for me to look into—I must only have been six or seven at the time—but if I strained and stood tottering on my tiptoes, I could just see my face in it. It was a kind of game I played with myself, though it was serious, too, and secret. A strict and careful secret kept with myself. I did it only when I was alone, and only when I felt sure that no one could possibly come into the hall and see me doing it.”

  His back is to her, but he nods as he shuffles another few steps down the row.

  “I was ashamed of it,” she says, a little disbelievingly, as though it is something she thinks not even a child would be foolish enough to do. “Terribly ashamed of such a trifling, commonplace thing as looking at myself in the looking glass. Indeed, I remain so to this day. I dislike looking glasses. I dislike looking at myself. And, as you are only too well aware, I detest being looked at by others. Still, as you are also regrettably too aware, this happens everywhere I go.”

  He smiles ruefully with half of his face, and without looking, reaches back and puts a consoling hand on her. She pats it briefly and he withdraws it.

  “I feel people’s eyes on me,” she continues, more concertedly now, “and immediately there is that shame again, the same childhood shame, welling up and mortifying me. It’s worse than you know. Walking in the street or into a room full of staring people is a torture. Really, a torture, like being made to run the gauntlet of the galerie des glaces at Versailles. Exactly like, in fact, because to my mind, the eyes are not the windows of the soul but the mirrors of it. They do not reveal—certainly nothing of the observer. Instead, they reflect only the distorted image of what or whom is being observed.”

  He has finished the row, and she has turned with him and begun ambling toward the orchard. He is holding a large piece of bark that he found lying at the end of the path, probably blown in by the last storm. As they walk, he is turning it over in his fingers, deciding what species he thinks it is, frowning at it as if it were the culprit she is speaking of.

  “In any case,” she says, watching him, “that is how it has always seemed to me, and each time this kind of dreadful showcasing occurs, even now at middle age, I am transported back, and there I am again, this child, compulsively looking into the looking glass, yet cowering in shame.”

  “I see,” he says, still examining the grains and whorls of the bark.

  “And so, as I sat there this morning thinking of the past, going over this strange episode, I tried to make sense of it in all the predictable ways—the shame, I mean, and the curiosity. What conflict was expressing itself? What explained the discord?

  “And you can imagine what I came to. It was all very well-trod ground. Was it my and Nessa’s tomboyishness, I wondered, asserting itself, instinctively reviling the practice of feminine display? We were well-bred Victorian young ladies, after all, training to be seen and then possessed by our husbands as ornaments. We hated this, of course, and resisted it as vehemently as we dared, even at so young an age. Yet we were drawn to it nonetheless, like Narcissus himself, compelled by the evidence of beauty in ourselves. This was
Mother’s legacy, naturally, the primary trait for which she had always been—and we, her likenesses, would one day be—famous. Well, you said it often enough yourself. At that age, it was who we were, entirely. It eclipsed everything else.”

  He is down again on his knees, yanking at a large, recalcitrant weed that has entrenched itself in one of the outlying beds.

  “Yes,” he agrees, his voice straining with both the effort of uprooting the weed and the archness of intentionally repeating a cliché: “The lovely Stephen girls,” he says. “That day you came to Cambridge to visit Thoby. My, who could talk of anything else? I’ve said it a hundred times, everyone has, and still it jars me. The first time I set eyes on you and Vanessa, sitting there, the two of you side by side, all in white, with your wide-brimmed hats and your white parasols straight as rods in front of you. You were like two Graces, upright and poised and impossibly beautiful.”

  He sighs again at the memory. “Incredible.” He lifts off his gardening hat and scratches his scalp with a slightly pained expression. “Ah, well,” he says at last, dropping his arms and swatting the hat lightly against his thigh to shake the grit from it. “Now, of course, I know that I was just one more awed face in the maddening crowd that beset you.”

  “You couldn’t have known. I hardly did, except in the raw discomfort of it. It is only now, looking back, that I have begun to feel its full weight, and possibly its cause.”

  “Indeed?” he says, placing the hat back on his head and adjusting the brim on his forehead.

  “You see,” she says, drawing deeply again on her cigarette, “Mother’s femininity was not the only influence. There was also Father’s puritanism. It had been passed down to him for generations, and it was passed in some form to us. His harshness, his morbid self-absorption and bottomless need for reassurance, his overbearing seriousness and hatred of shallow idle things? That was all there, too, in us, roiling behind the mask of Mother’s face.”