Ignoring this, he says tartly, “Well, Ottoline thinks it’s brilliant.”
“Oh, well, if Lady Ottoline Morrell thinks it, then it must be so. Honestly, Lytton, she practically suckled you from infancy. Of course she’s going to fawn over it.” She pauses briefly and looks away, then adds tauntingly, “To you.”
“Oh, you’re horrible,” Lytton gasps, turning to her with a look of alarm. “Has she said something?”
“No, no.” Virginia laughs, cuffing his arm. “You needn’t worry. As far as I know, she has been an unswerving advertisement, as usual.”
Lytton sits back, appeased, and resumes gazing across the garden.
“That’s a relief, anyway,” he says, crossing his legs and bouncing the upper foot impatiently, as if he is waiting for a bus. “Still, I resent your putting that picture in my head. Ottoline suckling me. Witch’s tit indeed. Good Lord.”
“Oh, hardly,” Virginia scoffs. “Ottoline is perfectly exotic, I grant, and an acquired taste, I’m quite sure, but not repulsive. She’s simply a very brightly colored, somewhat screechy giantess who’s developed an unfortunate talent for repeating everything she’s overheard. I should think making love to her would be rather like making love to a macaw.”
Lytton makes a startled face. “Perhaps, when one is the size of a bunting.”
“She can’t help it.” Virginia sniggers. “She must be six feet tall if she’s an inch, and however one may try to robe and swathe and mitigate, a woman of that height is always disturbing.”
“And that orange hair to top it. Was she born with it, do you think?”
“Presumably.” Virginia sighs. “Oh, and those eyes, like the Sargasso Sea, violent green and churning like little whirlpools of intrigue. It does all seem almost preternaturally cruel.”
“No,” Lytton chirps disagreeably, briefly stilling his bouncing foot. “Witchy. As I said. Just imagine those sour, cold and wrinkled dugs.” He shudders theatrically and goes back to bouncing his foot.
“And you are the viper nursing in Rome’s bosom,” Virginia says archly. “Though when in Rome, is it not the she-wolf’s tit that is suckled?”
“Yes, well.” He casts her a knowing glance. “Speak of the she-devil in wolf’s clothing. But you were not yet a Woolf when I was of suckling age. In any case, you are mixing your myths. That was Romulus and Remus who were said to have suckled the she-wolf at the founding of Rome, whereas you have just made me Caligula—don’t think I missed that—and it was Tiberius who said it about him.”
Lytton pauses here to take full advantage of his cue. Dramatically clearing his throat in the practiced Strachey style, he resumes: “Repulsive old disease-ridden Tiberius, looking down and beholding for the first time the full hideousness of his psychopathic heir apparent—the terrible Gaius Caligula—snarled happily and muttered, ‘I am nursing a viper in Rome’s bosom.’ Or so it is written. And so therefore it is Tiberius’s tit I must suck—which, by the way, I consider to be a vast improvement over the proposed alternatives.” He pauses again, stroking his beard with satisfaction, and adds, “I rather like the sound of that, actually. Tiberius’s tit. Perhaps it should be the title of my next book. What do you think?”
“It might be just the thing for you,” Virginia teases. “Our very own Suetonius for Bloomsbury.”
“And what precisely do you mean by that?” Lytton says, pretending to be very engaged in flicking something off the front of his trousers.
“Only that it would suit your flair for the dramatic,” Virginia goads. “I think everyone can agree that Twelve Caesars was one of the great potboilers of its time, and a group biography, no less, blurring the line, shall we say, between fact and fiction.” She turns to him in mock surprise. “And here we all were thinking that you’d invented the genre. Or was it revolutionized?”
Smiling, he crosses his arms peevishly over his chest. “I detest you.”
“And how I love you for it,” she says, playfully pulling his ear. “You do it so awfully well.”
“Speaking of doing it, I can’t help wondering if by ‘flair for the dramatic’ you are taking what is, if I may say so, a rather shabby swipe at my vice.”
“Mmm. And which one could that be, I wonder?”
“Yes,” Lytton drawls wearily, “I wonder.”
“Oh, I see,” Virginia pipes. “You are perhaps referring to vices of The Faerie Queene variety? Elizabeth? Gloriana? What have you? Your topic of choice, yes?” She puts a finger to her lips and adds, “It is true that you may have been a trifle transparent in that respect. Or did you not intend to put yourself in the queen’s role?”
Lytton makes a cry of exasperated delight.
“How can you be so sure,” he says, “that I did not, at least in part, intend the more obvious parallel—Virginia?”
“What?” Virginia squeals, clapping a scandalized hand to her breast. “Moi, the Virgin Queen? And you, my Essex? Why Lytton, I had no idea you were so engrossed.”
“I was your Essex briefly, was I not?” he says, smiling devilishly. “Many moons ago.”
“Hardly,” she says, an unexpected sharpness getting the better of her good humor. “You were half in love with Thoby, if anyone, and I was merely the next best thing—your last stab at normalcy, I should say? But alas, your dirk wasn’t quite up to the job.” She stops herself here, embarrassed by the sudden sourness of her tone. “I’m sorry, Lytton,” she says. “That was cruel. You were wonderful to me after Thoby died, and I know you loved him nearly as much as I did.”
Chastened, Lytton says soberly, “Well, you know, you have always cast something of a shadow over me.”
She is genuinely surprised. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“I have always admired your talent, resented it even. And I suppose there is something of you—well, perhaps quite a lot of you—in my Elizabeth.”
She considers this for a moment, sifting through what she remembers of what she has read and what she can bear to admit that she recognized. She takes out and lights one of her cheroots.
“You mean her fickleness,” she says at last. “Ever dancing forward and back, never to be caught?” But she cannot bear to remain so exposed, and adds teasingly, “Or do you mean the sex? Were you making your own rather shabby swipe at my vice?”
“All of it, in a way,” Lytton says, still serious. “Though not a shabby swipe.” He pauses then, as she did, to adjust. He, too, will not give too much away. “Or not entirely that—except insofar as my nature, my bugger’s flair for the dramatic, as you call it, compels me to make some kind of swipe at . . . ”
“Frigidity?” Virginia finishes.
He hesitates, as if deciding again just how vulnerable or cutting he wants to be.
“If we are using all the crassest terms, yes,” he says. “But you must see that it is far more complicated than that. You said it yourself. The dance. Elizabeth’s entire life was a pavane. A long, elaborate pavane that she could never stop dancing, and in which she could never cede herself to anyone. Her power depended on it.”
Virginia is listening closely, holding the cheroot very close to her mouth and squinting through the smoke.
“A lifetime of unconsummated sex,” he continues, “enacted in every way but in the act itself, performed incessantly between a man and a woman who cannot have each other, or, in our case, who cannot want each other. And yet.”
“Yes,” she says. “And yet.”
Now Lytton is the one turning reflective. His hands are folded in his lap, and he is turning his head slowly left and right, scanning the garden.
“But, you see,” Virginia says, filling the space, “I have always insisted that sex is in the mind. These bodies of ours are donkeys, and merely doing it is . . . well . . . merely doing what donkeys do. It’s utterly ridiculous when you think of it. Aristophanes showed as much—and we laugh right along with him. But we don’t really get the joke, because we are the joke.”
She pauses, narrowing her eyes still mor
e behind the smoke from the cheroot.
“What a pagan act of worship copulation is. Two animals praying their hearts out to the graven images of each other. We’re only one burnt offering short of the good old days.”
Lytton laughs. “I suppose self-immolation after coitus would have defeated the purpose—decidedly not adaptive for the survival of the species.”
“And so, to wit,” Virginia says, taking a long drag on the cheroot and blowing the smoke into a wide fan in front of them, “we have the ceremonial cigar instead.”
They are playful again.
“Or,” Lytton says, reverting to his pedantry, “we join at the spine, as Plato had us. The beasts with no backs. We are the third sex, you and I,” he chirps invitingly, turning and bending his knees to his chest so that he can put his feet on the bench and lean back against Virginia. “Half male, half female, fused but facing away. Children of the moon, he called us, Mrs. Woolf.” He howls and smiles back at her.
She laughs heartily, and following his lead, turns aside, puts her knees to her chest and leans against him, so that they are sitting back to back like bookends.
“I do think, in any case,” she resumes, “that you were a bit heavy-handed in the book.”
“Dramatically, you mean?”
“Well, yes, that. It’s all a little breathless, you must admit.”
“Potboilerish?”
“Not quite,” she says, nudging him. “But one does have the feeling at times that one is being played to, or that the words are being worked into a lather for one’s . . . how can I put this delicately . . . titillation.”
“Then we are back to Tiberius, are we?”
“No, no. And that isn’t primarily what I meant to say. I meant that you are heavy-handed not just in tone, and in the way you set your scenes, but in your use of sexual symbolism.”
“Too many pricks?”
“Or their stand-ins, yes, if you must.”
“Of course I must. We buggers are compulsive about such things, don’t you know?”
“Oh, stop. You know perfectly well what I mean.”
“Well, it may horrify you to know this, but I received a very thoughtful and complimentary letter from Dr. Freud on the subject.”
“I’m not in the least surprised or horrified, actually. The master loves to be stroked, and you have shown yourself to be an apt pupil.”
“Now that is a horrifying thought. Stroked? First Ottoline, now Sigmund. You would have me assuming the position with every last troll of our acquaintance.”
“Hardly. But it does prove my point. It’s simply your tendency to overinterpret when it comes to matters of sex.”
“Yes, well, who are we to talk, I suppose, you and I? We are hardly Rhine maidens.”
“Ha! Speak for yourself, Nibelung.” Slapping her thighs in delight, Virginia adds, “God, but you know that brings me right back to the old days in Gordon Square when Leonard was just back from Ceylon and we used to go to the opera or the ballet or the theater every night. I’ll never forget introducing Leonard to the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden. Poor thing. What he did for art in the name of love. We’d start in the afternoon and we wouldn’t finish until after eleven. By the end of it, he was as miserable as a wet cat. I can still hear him saying, in his wonderfully correct but cantankerous way, ‘Well, now that’s done, I’m glad I’ve seen it, but I have neither the desire nor the courage ever to do it again.’”
Lytton laughs. “Oh yes, yes, you’re right, I do remember that, conscientious Leonard sternly doing his duty and grimacing all through it. I had such fun watching him squirm. Well, I suppose to the unenamored, Wagner is rather the cough syrup of high culture.”
“Leonard says we were members of the Wagner cult.”
Lytton laughs again. “Didn’t you and your brother Adrian go almost ritually to Bayreuth for the festival every year?”
“Yes, yes. It’s true. It was all very en vogue in those days, and you were playing the procurer, so I suppose lonely Leonard, coming as he was, all parched and primed out of the jungle, was left with very little choice.”
“Procurer indeed!” Lytton cries. “And primed? What can you mean?”
“You know precisely what I mean, you awful little man. You’d been working him up to me for months, courtesy of the Royal Mail.”
“Well, it hasn’t turned out so badly, has it?”
“On the contrary, I owe you a great debt of gratitude for giving me away.” She casts a reproachful look in his direction. “At the altar, I mean, of course. You were the best possible substitute for Father.”
Lytton is pleased with this formulation, but, charged as it still is, he knows not to let it lie there undiverted for long.
“Which, incidentally, brings us nicely round again to Dr. Freud. You may find this interesting,” he says, pulling a letter from his breast pocket and lovingly unfolding it.
“No,” she cries, wheeling around out of her bookend, seeing that he has produced the actual letter. “You haven’t!”
Lytton nearly falls over backward without her support, but grasps the bench’s arm just in time. Recovering himself and putting his feet back on the ground, he says, “I have, as it happens.”
“Unbelievable,” Virginia says, dropping her arms to her sides and letting her legs fall wide out in front of her under the folds of her long skirt, as if she cannot be bothered with posture at a time like this.
“I’m quite proud of this artifact,” Lytton says, not looking at her. He holds the letter out in front of him as if he is a clerk in a courtroom verifying evidence. “And so I quote,” he continues. “‘You’”—he turns to Virginia—“and by ‘you,’ he means, of course, me, Lytton Strachey, the author.” Peering over the top of his spectacles, he lets his eyes rest on her for a moment, then turns back to the letter.
“‘You are aware of what other historians so easily overlook’”—he raises his finger and slows his reading for emphasis—“‘that it is impossible to understand the past with certainty, because we cannot divine men’s motives and the essence of their minds and so cannot interpret their actions. Our psychological analysis does not suffice even with those who are near us in space and time.’”
He pauses, poking the upraised finger at the air. “‘So that with regard to the people of past times we are in the same position as with dreams . . . As a historian, then, you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis . . . you have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country’s history, you have known how to trace back her character to the impressions of childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion . . . and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred.’”
He puts the finger down, and beginning slowly once again to fold the letter along its creases, he adds crisply, “End quote.”
“Oh, God,” Virginia sighs. “Not again. Do you know I had this same argument with Leonard years ago when we first acquired the rights to publish Freud’s papers?”
Lytton does not indicate that he has heard. He is still putting the letter back in his breast pocket, and with absurd care, as if it is a papyrus.
“You are right in one respect, however,” Virginia continues. “I do find it interesting that he admits to the impossibility of knowing the motives of other minds, even those that are nearest to us. But then he proceeds nonetheless, and by means of his own clumsy methods, to presume to analyze those very motives, or at least to praise you for doing so in his stead. The man’s arrogance is quite breathtaking.”
“Clumsy methods—thank you. That’s very kind,” Lytton says absently, looking out again over the garden.
“Well, I’m sorry, Lytton, but you have rather co-opted him whole hog,” Virginia says harshly. “And that business about Essex’s execution being an expression of Elizabeth’s hatred for her father. The Electra Complex, is it? . . . Let me see if I have this right. Her father, that most viri
le man of men, Henry VIII, who executed her mother, Anne Boleyn, thereby committing a crime, which, though she secretly wished for it, naturally gave rise in our little fiery redheaded queen-to-be a seething hatred not just for papa, but for all men. Kill mommy, marry daddy, and cover your guilt in hatred. That’s just about it, yes? And that’s already too much, but you don’t stop there. Yet another Complex—capital C—must come into it. And so the beheading of Essex is also the great standing metaphor for castration. The woman’s abiding desire to do it, and the man’s abiding fear of having it done. Bravo and presto. There you have it. Your first-class degree in Viennese twaddle.”
Lytton is looking at her in genuine disbelief, as if he has just been deliberately scratched across the cheeks by a passing squirrel.
“My, my. Quelle harangue, ma chérie,” he says, falling back against the bench with his legs still firmly crossed. “But hark!” he shouts in his stage voice, thrusting his arm out in front of him. “Our Vestal Virgin speaks the truth. And woe betide those who hear it, for her tongue is mightier than the sword.”
Virginia makes a sour face and righteously stubs out her cheroot on the arm of the bench.
“Forgive me for saying so, my dear,” Lytton adds sarcastically, “but I believe it may be you who has just won the award for dramatic performance.”
“Oh, damn it,” she says, throwing the butt of her cheroot into the grass. “Freud makes me mad. Always has done. It’s not you.”
“Maybe a little bit me,” Lytton gently suggests. She does not reply to this, and so he goes a bit further. “Perhaps my Essex has feared de-pronging at his virgin’s hands.” He looks at her submissively, adding, “Do you think?”
She smiles. “Perhaps.” Looking out at the afternoon light, she puts her hand on his and adds, “Perhaps the complex, if not the prong, has been on both sides.”
He smiles down at her hand as she withdraws it, and murmurs, “Yes.”
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