Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  Well, this—The Waves—would be much the same, but hers. Her elevation of the same, and more honestly put forth as fiction. Or The Moths, as she sometimes still thinks of it, those who gather and dance about the flame, never alighting. That is her family now, the people about her, the giants—this is not too grandiose to apply—of her age: Bloomsbury.

  This will be, in part, her group biography of Bloomsbury, but, as such, it will be primarily of Bloomsbury as a group, as a collective, not as a collection of its members, individually sketched. There will be some of that, as always, pieces of the people she has known, but they will also, in Yeats’s sense, all be one, all her, all the pieces of her split self shattered in the looking glass.

  There will be, of course, some of Lytton. She will call him Neville, she thinks, perhaps after Lady Anne Neville, another queen and consort to a misshapen king, Richard III. As with Elizabeth and Essex, he fits nicely both ways, as queen and man, the freak of nature, self-despising, who, because he was not made—or so says the Bard—to court an amorous looking glass, he descant[s] on [his] own deformity instead. This captures something of the treachery in Lytton, she thinks, and certainly the crookedness of soul, racked on the body. And then again, even there, in those six searing words given to King Richard in act five, thrown into the uproar of the last lost battle at Bosworth Field—There is no creature loves me—there is Lytton, entire.

  And then there must be some of Tom as well. Goodman Tom Eliot, like some upright rogue out of Hawthorne, black-eyed and guilty as he is chaste. She will call him Louis, because that is the name of a saint who was also a king, and it is the name of that city in the bland American hinterlands where he is inescapably from. He will be the outsider looking in, longing to belong, and stirring in his loins, like all the other boys, for boys, but clinging to his God as a Spartan to his shield, which he will either carry or be carried on to sanctuary. She will make him not American but Australian, and she will make him the son of a banker, who in turn, when he is grown, works stiff and stately in an office, kept tight by his appointments and his desk of drawers. It will be obvious enough, and not.

  The third man will be Bernard, who is the suggestion of her male self. But, as the third man, he is also the embodiment of her theme, as it was suggested by Plato and Aristotle: How can man be both a man, unique and singular, and at the same time also be mankind—that is, partake of the form of Manhood, the universal? These are two, not one, and according to the great men of thought, it required a third entity, or hypothetical third man, who could somehow explain the other two. She thinks this same difficulty was transposed into religion as the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The third was needed to explain or link the other two; God the Father and Jesus, God the man, must have an intercessor, and so the Paraclete, subsisting in both and in itself, triune.

  So her book will have six narrators, two pairs of three. Three men, three women, but in three dimensions, so that they will be, not triangles, but pyramids, symbolizing another of those wonders of the ancient world that still stand along the banks of the Nile in the shadow of the great Pharos of Alexandria.

  She knows that her Greek philosophy is muddled—infernal Greeks!—but it is what she can do. She does not understand it. It is one of the problems of philosophy that show up the shortcomings of her intellect, and this has always pained her. It had pained her father, too. She had had him, as Mr. Ramsay, say as much in Lighthouse, railing at his own limitations. If the alphabet from A to Z represents the entirety of what can be known, he had gotten only so far down the way—to Q, as he says. In her case, she thinks perhaps she has only really gotten to H.

  No matter. She does not deal in strictures. But the others did. This was exactly the kind of abstruseness that Lytton and Leonard and Morgan Forster and the other Apostles still debated, just as they had done so ardently at Cambridge. In one sense, Bernard will be all of them, these young men, who are not so young anymore, and this aspect of what became Bloomsbury, growing out of the society of intellectuals that had formed half of the group’s core—the other half being, of course, the artists, such as Nessa and Clive and Duncan.

  She smiles. The oneness of her is many, and the many one.

  Thoby must be the centerpiece, the point where the apexes of the two pyramids meet, like the knot in Yeats’s bow tie. Thoby must be there, because Thoby is never gone, and because no matter how many times she writes him, he is never written out. He will be called Percival, the knight, the hero, the god who dies young, and Neville-Lytton will be in love with him, because that was true. The others will all meet in him adoringly, too, because the others are also all her, all the points of the geometry pointing to, uniting in, one point.

  As for the three women, first there must be Nessa, who will be called Susan because it is nearly an anagram of her name, and because it is the ancient name for the lily or the lotus flower. The still life, the painted object that paints the world. The artist, the mother, the sister whose soul she wishes she could fuse with, and almost has.

  The second woman, Jinny, will be a straight shot. Vain Virginia herself, unhidden as her public face, gossiping and flirting and demanding to be admired.

  And finally there will be Rhoda, who is the rose, the rhododendron in the garden and that island of the same name, Rhodes—the third of the seven wonders—with its colossus bestriding its shores, hailing across the breaking waves of the rounded Mediterranean Sea to its fellows, the Pharos and the pyramids, grounded by the great river in Egypt. This will be her weak, quavering, despondent self, the one who can be terrified by puddles. Adeline, of course.

  Nessa is the only one who will know all of this when she reads it. Only she will see Thoby in his accustomed place, elegized perpetually. Only she will see the shades of herself in Susan, living in the countryside and bearing children and seeing the world in colors and shapes; or the traces of Lytton and Tom in Neville and Louis; or the traces of all their learned men in Bernard; and the two faces of herself in Jinny and Rhoda, by turns cowering and coruscating in the crowd. Only Nessa will see all of this. She may even in part descry this mystic union and dispersal of the self, these triumphs of consciousness that are dreamt of in Yeats’s philosophies.

  And that will be enough. Any portion of this will be enough when it is lying, held in the comforts of Nessa’s understanding, just as she knows that it will rest in the shelter of Leonard’s intellect, because Nessa and Leonard are the only ones. They are the only true receptacles for whatever rended thing in her can be called by the name of love.

  She has been working some, and making all of these notes, but she has been doing so, much to her frustration and annoyance, between—there is no other word for it—waves of the old afflictions. The same barrage: headaches, racing heart, copious and brutal menstruation, nausea and, in a new twist, a holocaust of the flux. In a sardonic tip of her hat to this last unpleasantness, she is now referring to her diary by the Latin variation of its name, because it is where she is reduced to doing most of her scrawling when she is most afflicted by these runs.

  This word “holocaust” reminds her again of talking with Lytton in the garden about Plato and Freud and sex as an act of pagan worship, the burnt offerings of the ancient Greeks—holokaustos—reenacted, but only symbolically now, by Darwinian restriction, in the postcoital smoke. She has taken to smoking on the toilet, too, because there is nothing else to do while she waits for the tide to recede.

  Well, at least she can laugh about it sometimes. Laugh or die, Lytton used to say. So for now she will laugh at her outputs, upper and nether, which she has always said are not unconnected. If it was good enough for the omnipotent Joyce to have his hero greet the morning asquat on the cuckstool, then it was good enough for her. And, if it was good enough for the Bard, whose scatology was far more encyclopedic than Freud’s—well then, she would say it again—it was bloody well good enough for her. On the commode she sits, like patience on a monument smiling at grief, and over the page she is Rodin’s Thinker, po
sed just the same.

  Adeline is made queasy by the mention of stools, but that is because, for her, the sensation has so often presaged the act, and mingled disagreeably with all her other cramps and complications below the waist. Still, their talks of late have been different. They have not followed the pattern of her mother’s deathbed scene, with its iron-cold kiss of death. They have changed. She would even say they have progressed.

  I hated his hands on me in the dark, she had said recently, and of course Virginia had known immediately whom she’d meant. George. Her half brother George Duckworth sneaking into her room late at night and fumbling over her like a bucketful of crabs.

  But this had happened later, when she and Nessa had been coming out, thrust out the door and into the limelight of fin-de-siècle London society by George, who had wanted to use them as bait for his own social ambitions. They had gone along, but with extreme reluctance and mortification, because George had insisted—he had done so nearly every night—and because there had been no escape. They had all been living under the same roof with Father at 22 Hyde Park Gate.

  And so they had allowed themselves to be dragged, all primped and powdered—to George’s taste, of course—into the ballrooms and great rooms of countless millionaires. They had sat there sullen as limpets for as long as George had required, and then, finally, limped home to bed, too exhausted to undress. Not to worry: George had seen to that.

  She would have been eighteen or nineteen at the time, and it surprises her that Adeline can remember this far past their mother’s death. It is as if she has chipped off another piece, or sundered herself, so that part of her is still stopped at thirteen, but part of her is older, too, and caught again in the dark bedroom with George, the incubus, where she—Virginia or Adeline or both—had come unpunningly of age.

  Adeline will say very little else about what happened with George, which suggests both that her memory of it is poor—this is not her time—and that it is poor for a reason—neither of them wishes to remember the details. The shadowed forms of it, the scattered scuttling sensations, the nausea left behind; they are enough.

  Adeline would much rather talk about Rhoda, her costarring role, and so they do, though at present Rhoda is an outline. She has no substance to speak of, but then, by design, like the other six, she never will have solid form. She will be, as she once described it to Leonard, a creature written in light, a photographic negative if such a thing could be painted, for in that Leonard was also correct. Virginia is, like Nessa, a painter, not a photographer, and her method is, like the divine Caravaggio’s, perhaps, chiaroscuro—chiar, light, and oscuro, dark. The words on the page, so-called black and white, will paint her scene in the world of light and shadow through which her disembodied souls will flicker and flit. She had also said this last bit to Leonard that day in the garden, and so it would come true. She had written Lighthouse—she tells this to herself again—and now her vision would reach its fullest, most abstract expression in Moths, in Waves. She is still uncertain which title is best. But she will know. When it is time, she will know.

  ACT III

  BETWEEN THE ACTS

  1932

  Early March 1932

  THE NEWS, WHEN it had finally come, had been too crushing to accept: Lytton was dead. Mercifully, after such a long and terrible decline—it had been months of suffering—he had succumbed. An autopsy had revealed the cause of death to be a large tumor in the stomach, which had blocked the whole of the lower intestine, but no one had known this at the time, and he had had no treatment.

  It had been a blessing to hear that he suffered no more, yet she had been unable to feel anything but—she did not quite know what. Even these, the natural effects when the news was fresh six weeks ago, had been beyond her power or willingness to describe on paper, probably because she had not wished to contemplate them too closely. They are plural and unnatural in the extreme, that much she knows by now, a nightmarish commingling, like a slimy, bloody knot of jeweled necklaces and snakes in some wretched painting by Blake: the unsightly image of her Gordian heart.

  She had actually loved him once, hadn’t she? So, so long ago. Or had she merely convinced herself of this at the time because it had seemed the thing to do, to love the man who proposed to you? Again, it was how they had all been raised, the men as well as the women. And anyway, hadn’t he been the closest a man could come to being a woman? An Elizabeth after all? Had that been in her mind as well—the lure of Sapphism even then—unacknowledged quite as such, but incipient and feared? How better, after all, to ward off error and convention with one blow than to marry an unrepentant bugger? Or, as she had once suggested to him so rudely, had proposing to her been his moment of greatest repentance, his dodge in the other direction, regretted and withdrawn immediately?

  They had laughed about it afterward, as if it had all just been more persiflage between chums. She had not let it show, but she, or her vanity—which amounted to the same thing—had been wounded by it, and had remained so for years. Perhaps—she can consider this more clearly now—the hurt and the subsequent jealousy over his companionship with Carrington is still there. No, not perhaps. It is—laced into the knot with the rest—one of the snakes.

  In absolute quiescence let me rest.

  It was a line from his deathbed poems that Carrington had shared with her in one of her recent letters. They had been corresponding since Lytton’s death. She had cried when she’d read it, yet now that his death has been accomplished, she cannot grant this last request. She cannot let him rest. He belongs to me, she thinks stubbornly, though in truth he had belonged to no one, not even to Carrington. But Carrington, like her, like everyone he had seduced with the seven veils of his affections, believed that Lytton had been hers.

  It is an infuriating position to be in, Virginia thinks, competing for the lion’s share of his memory, and after all those years of knowing him, knowing the slipperiness of his appeal and the shabby contents of his character. She knows better than to enshrine him, even if Carrington does not. She perfected her defenses long ago. She had secreted away sweet awkward Adeline behind a dazzle of skill. Yet Adeline remained, whereas—she marvels that this has not occurred to her before—perhaps Carrington has no such avatar inside her, and never did.

  She, Virginia, like almost everyone else, had always taken Carrington for a sort of fuddled doll who, with her absurdly wide round blue-ribbon-blue eyes, her bouncing crop of yellow hair and her odd flouncing moodiness, had seemed rather unreal, like the spitting image in miniature of a real girl who had once owned her, grown tired of her and cast her off to make her hapless way in the cruel world. The cruel world she had landed in had been theirs, of course, and she had done so, or so it had seemed then, spectacularly unprepared, her head stuffed with rags, her wooden heart ripe for the plucking.

  But perhaps they had all been wrong—all, that is, but the grand impresario herself, Ottoline, who, the gossip was, had had one of her bizarre short-lived affairs with Carrington once upon a time. But the rest of them at least—had they all been fooled by a façade, and the truth was far more sinister?

  Perhaps the Carrington of those years had been no innocent abroad, no inert plaything waiting to be picked up, but rather a person of spectacular emptiness and cunning who had hid the horrifying vacuum of herself within a carapace of lies. Then along had come Lytton, with more than enough personality for two, and filled her with his overflow. It—their eunuch union, she calls it now, chortling cruelly—had been an act of true asexual reproduction after all. Lytton had simply replicated, made Carrington into more of himself.

  Well, there is consolation in that, at least.

  But Carrington. What is to become of her now that her substance is dead? Virginia has tried dutifully to console her in her letters, but her words have rung false even to herself, like the doggerel of a bought condolence. She supposes that Carrington cannot possibly know the depth and entanglement of Virginia’s feelings for Lytton and, by extension, her specu
lations about Carrington herself. Yet surely she is shrewd enough to sense the halfheartedness, if not the clouded hostility, of Virginia’s prose.

  Carrington had already tried to kill herself once, apparently, a day or so before Lytton’s death, when it had become clear to everyone that there was no longer any hope and that the end was very near. Her husband, Ralph Partridge (he had been dragged into her arrangement with Lytton years before, poor lug, and was her husband only in name), had told Virginia and Leonard that he’d found Carrington unconscious in the garage with the motor running and had saved her just in time. Later, when she had come to consciousness, Ralph said that she had raged at him viciously for bringing her back, and he had cried miserably, asking her over and over, “How could you do it?”

  He’d said he felt sure that she would try to kill herself again. It was only a question of when. She was being watched closely and cajoled out of her intentions (or so it was hoped) by everyone intimate who could be induced to come and stay at Ham Spray.

  Virginia and Leonard are due to make their trip for the day on Thursday, and she is dreading it, more because she will have to invade the place that Lytton has left, the actual place where he departed, and she will have to stand there with his ghost. But his ghost will not be the Lytton she knew, nor will it be some beautified version of him glimmering in the corners of the rooms. It will be Carrington herself, his widow in all but name. It is too macabre.

  Carrington has always been Virginia’s rival in some unchallenged way, unchallenged because Virginia has never thought Carrington worthy enough to combat; not an equal, as Nessa had once said of Vita. It would have been like playing chess with a goat, she thinks, and immediately regrets the unkindness, for the thought of an animal in pain has always been as intolerable to her as it has been to Leonard, and that is what Carrington is like now, a senseless, keening animal in pain.