The sight of that, the experience of it, will waste me, she thinks, send me right over, and that is not something I can afford. She does not have the resources just now, perhaps never will, to comfort her great friend and companion’s surrogate wife, or persuade her not to go ahead with what she intends when Virginia herself has tried to end her life twice. Oddly, she reflects, though one might consider experience to be an indispensable qualification for a psychiatric nurse, she feels sure that hers will be of no help whatsoever to Carrington.
The despair of those days seems so far away now, unreachable, in fact, as despair always is when she is not in it. Despair, she thinks, tacitly thanking whatever quirk of consciousness has made this true, is blessedly unknowable in memory, except as an abstraction, or as a list of the physical symptoms that characterized it: weeping, torpor, headache, inability to eat, concentrate or sleep, the constant awareness of being cold, the hands and feet like ice, then sudden fevers and heats, a racing pulse and hallucinations. This—she can only say so in the past tense—is what it was like—“like” being the apposite word, because one could only ever say what it resembled, or how it appeared, not what it was.
“Oh, Lytton,” she cries suddenly, the empty name roving through her brain, seeking its subject, echoing both meaninglessly and momentously, like the byline of a famous writer uttered by someone who never knew him. But, of course, she had known him, perhaps not as Leonard had, but she had known a version of him. Was there aught else?
Leonard has always maintained that Lytton had been different with him, especially when they were at Cambridge with Thoby, and shortly thereafter, less vain, less small, less slavish to the tinseled pleasures of the world. And this may well have been true. Lytton had been Leonard’s friend first, but she had known him in her own right for years, too, and as someone not yet so wholly enamored of transgression or indulgence for its own sake.
She had known him in the early days at Gordon Square, when Bloomsbury was not yet Bloomsbury but a mere gathering of lively and like-minded students of life, learning, loving and sharing as they grew. She and Lytton had spent hours together in those days, walking in Kew Gardens, talking of the strangeness of reality and human experience as they knew it. And at times like those, when they were luxuriously alone, deep in the heady distraction of ideas, Lytton had been a wonderful private sparkling man and a companion like no other.
He had been, as she had always said, a female friend in spirit, and almost in body, but with the tutored, well-ordered mind of a man. He had been—she remembers him saying this very thing the last time they spoke—like her, a true androgyne, a harmless and half-fanciful yet highly civilized creature out of Milne or Barrie or Carroll that was somehow not indigenous to the stifling culture into which he had been born, and was therefore destined to lead the vanguard out.
She tries to visualize him now, to feel and even smell him as he was then, in all his untidy gentlemanliness, looking mostly the part, but always and endearingly a little off.
Smiling, she recollects her conception of him as Tinker Bell or the March Hare, but she decides that this is not quite right. Perhaps something out of Kenneth Grahame is more apt, the Water Rat or the Mole. Yes, better, she concludes, her smile broadening. She likes this immensely: Lytton the domesticated beast. For, in truth, he had always seemed to resemble most some sort of exotic pet who had become a member of the family, and who, despite being truly dirty deep down in the pores of his skin, overabundantly hairy, greasy and faintly malodorous, had been allowed into the house to play and sleep with the children.
Perhaps, she thinks with a great deal more pettiness than she knows she ought, perhaps that is what he and Carrington had had in common all along, animal magnetism of the uncopulating kind, the goat thrown in with the racehorse to keep him company in his stall. Except, of course, Lytton had never been a racehorse, certainly not so far as his writing was concerned. She had never thought his books at all technically impressive, or even very good. He had written them simply to be able to say that he had written them, and they were full of his cattiness.
Yes, if he was to be a horsy kind of domesticated beast, after all, then he should be more of a dray horse who could speak, she tells herself, smiling again at the naughty picture of it, the two of them a prize pair of livestock, Lytton pulling the wagon, mordantly quipping all the while, and Carrington riding in it, the mum ungulate going to market. I should put that into a story, she thinks, but then immediately she feels ashamed of having shown such disrespect to her dead friend, and to his “friend” who in turn is dying of her grief.
Virginia is swerving wildly now, she knows, between jealousy and remorse, cherry-picking images and memories, but she cannot stop herself. She thinks again of Lytton’s proposal—in the winter of ’09, was it?—while Leonard was in Ceylon, and to her was still only a peripheral figure, not yet even remotely conceived of as a potential mate. Or, not by her. Lytton had had other ideas, but of course she had not known this at the time, nor had she known how frequently and intimately he and Leonard had been writing to each other all during her travesty with Lytton.
But, she considers more pointedly, what really would it have been like to have been Mrs. Strachey? A marriage of convenience, to be sure, limber no doubt and lecherous on Lytton’s part, and perhaps somewhat more adventurous on hers as well. But, she recalls—then stops herself, because she is thinking, with a sudden shock of fear, of the upholding strength of her bond with Leonard, and how abject she would have been in her fits if it, if he, had not been there to catch her. Lytton’s hammock, by comparison, would have been a very loose-knit and tenuous support, she concludes soberly, that much is sure.
Would she have grown with him? Would she have gone on writing by his side? Or would she have been swallowed whole just as Carrington had been? Tossed, like a dollop of spun sugar, mindlessly down his gullet. She would never be sure of herself in this, of course, of what might have happened, but she knows at least that this is exactly the right way of putting it about Carrington, because Carrington had never been whole. She was hollow, and on Lytton’s palate she had deflated and dissolved on contact, like a confection.
Yet the question remains: Would she have done likewise? She, Virginia. It seems impossible, given the rigors of her mind, Lytton’s respect and their exchanges, yet she doubts nonetheless. She doubts because, for all her output and showmanship, and even now, with a modicum of fame buttressing her, she feels somehow that she is also hollow, as hollow as Carrington. Or fragile, at the least, as friable as meringue, and as deceptively insubstantial. Goat, she reminds herself, had been her own nickname as a child. “Hold yourself straight, my little goat,” her dying mother had said. They had been her last words.
Hold yourself straight. It is still every bit as applicable. Adeline is the proof. Leonard had found her this way, for all intents and purposes a child, for though she had been a near spinster of thirty when they married, she had come to him as a maid. Nessa, having already married and started her own family, and wearying no doubt of the continued burden of her sister’s keeping, had passed Virginia on—almost eagerly, and certainly with confidence—to the dependable Leonard.
And Nessa’s trust in him had not been misplaced. Leonard has kept her—no, much more than that—he has saved her from all that might have happened to her had she been let go, turned loose or—the most dreaded outcome of all—locked up, as poor Laura had been. There is no question. Lytton could not have faced it, and she feels certain that he knew as much the moment he proposed. Taking her would have been like taking a position. And being in Lytton’s care, she concedes, would have been like being the magician’s assistant, lying there passively, smiling sideways at the public, being cut to pieces for their amusement.
Yes, she thinks, newly horrified and clear, as if she has just woken from a mortifying trance: Thank God I did not marry Lytton. Thank God that is not what happened. Instead, I am here now, at fifty years of age, safe in the nest that Leonard and I have built
over the past twenty years. She says this word again to herself—safe—and sighs with new gratitude and relief.
Fifty is a landmark for certain, she thinks, but she has not been able to celebrate it as such. Her birthday had come this year a mere three days after Lytton’s death. She cannot help thinking that this is indicative, but she does not know—or care to consider—of what.
It is an insultingly bright and unseasonably gorgeous spring morning when they set out for Ham Spray in the Singer. Virginia is fresh and curious, as she always is at the start of a journey, though today her excitement is dampened somewhat by the task at hand. Leonard is silent and focused on the driving, still sifting, she intuits, through the jumble of his own feelings about Lytton.
How monstrously indifferent the weather is, she thinks, as she turns and looks out at the morning sun glowing orange on the new green of the trees, to shine so brazenly upon people’s suffering.
Their drive takes them due west into some of the most breathtaking country in all of southern England, meandering over the familiar downs of West Sussex, through the scrubby heaths and woodlands of Jane Austen’s Hampshire, with the slim jagged spires of Winchester Cathedral rising over it, and on into the lush plains of Wiltshire. Her eyes roam happily, gorging themselves on the scenery, which acts on her like a tincture of absinthe; floats her in the shallows of its emerald dream but never quite puts her to sleep.
They have been driving for at least an hour this way when Leonard breaks the silence.
“I think it was histrionic of her to have tried it,” he says.
Virginia knows whom he means, of course, but she reaffirms it nonetheless, as though the name is part of the spell that has been cast over them, and repeating it will help them to break free.
“Carrington?” she says.
“Yes, Carrington,” he repeats angrily. The name is a curse for him, too.
He has been brooding about Carrington’s suicide attempt for some time. Out of the corner of her eye, Virginia has been watching the conflict in his thoughts cramp across the peaks and hollows of his face. She knows exactly what is troubling him. He resents being thrown in like this to mop up after a family disaster. Carrington is not family, or even a particularly close friend, but her connection to Lytton, especially now that he is dead, has placed her firmly among the array of Leonard’s other self-imposed responsibilities to the people he loves, and his conscience is at him as usual to do right by his friend.
The specter of self-inflicted death is something he and Virginia have lived with all their married life. When Virginia took an overdose of veronal one month to the day after they celebrated their first wedding anniversary, it was Leonard’s quick thinking and decisive action that had saved her. Since then, nothing they have ever said or thought on the subject has been untainted by this past, and it cannot be now. It is always there, she knows, and it is best to declare it outright.
“Did you think it histrionic of me?” she asks.
“No,” he says defensively. “You were ill. It’s different.”
“Perhaps she is ill.”
“No, she’s upset.”
“Yes, well, that goes without saying under the circumstances.”
“Precisely,” he exclaims, thumping the steering wheel. “She is feeling what any person in her position would feel, what we are all feeling in our own ways.”
“You disapprove, then, of her way of feeling.”
“I simply think she has behaved badly. Inconsiderately.” He pauses here, seeming to consider other, ruder adverbs that he might use, but he loses his temper instead and shouts, “For pity’s sake, there is her husband to think of!”
“Oh, come now,” Virginia says. “You know as well as I do that Ralph has his own life with Frances, and has done so for a very long time. Carrington only married him at Lytton’s behest, to preserve their tawdry little ménage.”
“I don’t care,” Leonard crows. “A marriage is a marriage, and she owes him that consideration.”
“The consideration of what, exactly?” she asks, a touch combatively.
“Of not doing him harm. He was clearly devastated by the incident. He said as much to her repeatedly.”
“So he claims.”
“Well, I don’t doubt it. He may be living happily with another woman, but he still cares very deeply for Carrington. She had no right.”
“We all of us have that right, Leonard,” Virginia asserts, looking righteously away.
“Nonsense,” he says, turning toward her. “We have obligations to other people.”
She is still staring out the window, and everything about her says that, like it or not, the case is closed. She does not care to contest the obligations of marriage just now.
“Well, in any case,” she says at last, turning back to him with a glassy expression, “approaching Carrington with an attitude of disapproval will not be of the slightest use to anyone today, and may in fact make things worse. What’s more, since I know you to be incapable of disguising your thoughts, I’d suggest that you let me do the talking, or perhaps find some other employment while we are there.”
“May I remind you,” he says, matching her tone of cool reproof, “that your attitude toward Carrington is hardly unmixed.”
“You needn’t worry. I am, after all, expert at dissembling when required.”
There is a heavy pause.
“So you are,” he mutters, glaring at the road. “So you are.”
Neither of them says another word.
By the time they reach Ham Spray, emerging from the dappled nave of elms that shelters the long avenue of approach, the house is awash in midday sunshine. The glare off the white clapboards is nearly blinding, and both Virginia and Leonard are squinting like moles as they get out of the car. Carrington is not there to meet them, nor is there any sign of her when they knock as loudly as their knuckles will bear on the splintered oak door. But they find that it has been left open, as it swings ajar with the last of Leonard’s arduous raps.
Still no Carrington. Calling to her, they step into the hall, but there is no response, no sign even that anyone is at home. They look warily at each other for a moment, wondering if Carrington may have tried something again, but decide that panic is premature and continue making their cautious way through the house.
Stealing through it this way, tentatively, their light footsteps echoing faintly through the lofty Georgian rooms, is like sneaking into a museum after hours, or—the decor is so fantastical, yet so familiar—like walking around inside someone’s mind. The walls, the fireplaces, even the furniture are painted and tessellated with Carrington’s work, and hung with pictures by Duncan Grant, Henry Lamb and many more of their gifted mutual friends. The house is alive with boldness and the signature blur of color and line that made this place unmistakably their home.
Leonard and Virginia have seen this before, of course. Indeed, it resembles the interiors of their own homes, which have been decorated by many of the same artists. But now, in all its undiminished beauty, the work seems to jump out at them with a kind of garish irony, bearing unrepentant witness to the death it has overseen and the mourning it still contains.
They proceed to the sitting room where Carrington is crouched in the armchair nearest the hearth, though the fire has not been lit. With one glance, Leonard knows enough to retreat. He tries waving meekly and saying hello, but Carrington gives no indication that she has heard, and so making a sign to Virginia that he will wander and wait for her in the drive, Leonard bows out.
Moving slowly and haltingly—she is not sure whether Carrington quite knows that she is there, and she does not want to frighten her—Virginia eases herself into the armchair opposite. It is more sunken and worn than the one Carrington has chosen. It must have been Lytton’s perch, but Carrington will not presume to occupy it, or some such nonsense. Carrington will have to be the one to start this. The protocols of grief are obscure at the best of times, and the lady of the house is looking decidedly unhinged
.
Her famous bob of flyaway fair hair is now the color of dried mustard seed and thickly molded in a mass around her skull, like a boxer’s headgear. It looks as though she hasn’t washed it since Lytton died, perhaps since he fell ill, both of which are distinct possibilities. She is as pale and expressionless as lard, not a speck of color or emotion on her face, except in her eyes. They are startling as ever, though they look almost violet against the whites of her eyes, which have turned a semipermanent shade of coral pink from the crying. She is wearing a large, rumpled grey pullover and a grimy pair of old riding breeches. Her feet are bare.
There is nothing to say. Everything is painfully explicit. Everything, from Carrington’s urchin-like appearance, to the rows and rows of Lytton’s books, slotted like soldiers into the narrow shelves that line each wall, to the soot-blackened maw of the empty grate, it has all become so physically evident, so conspicuous an expression of loss, that Virginia is too daunted to speak.
Carrington is no help. She has no interest in overtures. Every grace has been consumed by the vortex of this place.
“I have been reading Lytton’s copy of Hume,” she says finally, abruptly and far too loudly, as if she is deaf, or has not spoken to another human in years and does not remember how to do it.
Virginia makes a strangled noise of assent—mm, or hmm—but it’s no good. Even that sounds vulgar to her now, like a gourmand tasting the soup.
“He is very good on the subject of suicide,” Carrington resumes. “He says that ‘a man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good.’”
She has clearly memorized the passage, Virginia observes. This must be the kind of thing she has been doing these past few weeks, holed up here in Lytton’s mausoleum for days at a stretch, veiled like an odalisque, with redolent old kerchiefs of Lytton’s tied around her face, trying to breathe him back to life.
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