Hume is not someone Carrington would have read while Lytton was alive, much less understood—or not without the help of Lytton’s constant tutelage. He was always one to prattle and instruct, whenever, wherever, garrulously holding forth as if the whole world and everything in it were his entourage by right of birth, and he was bound to share the gift of his erudition. In lieu of his seed, Virginia thinks, he no doubt sprinkled their pillow talk with such pearls—the learned sayings of great men—and Carrington surely swallowed them as eagerly as if they were pearls of those other ejaculations she so vainly desired him to emit.
Virginia is trying so very hard to be good, and outwardly she has been good, or passive, at least, but she cannot stop this cruel soliloquy from banging on inside her head. For every word she thinks to say, this voice has a dozen unsayable ones threatening to interrupt.
“Should we be talking of Hume?” she says finally. She knows it is inane, but it is the only neutral thing she can think of to say.
“Why not? We have no God,” says Carrington, as if she is in fact some self-styled student of Lytton’s who has crashed a legitimate tutorial and is damn well going to show the boys that she has read the material.
“No,” Virginia agrees. “We have no God.”
“So, then,” Carrington says, “there is no morality. Ethics is all we have left . . . Hume argues”—she is quoting again—“that ‘no man ever threw away a life while it was worth keeping.’”
It is becoming downright eerie listening to this, Virginia thinks, like talking to a haywire machine or a ventriloquist’s dummy that has animated itself. Carrington is gone.
“Worth keeping,” Virginia repeats, stalling. A mumbled yes is Carrington’s only response.
“That is the question,” Virginia continues solemnly, some part of her having decided that playing at pap philosophy is as good a way as any to placate an automaton.
“What makes a life worth keeping?” she ventures, a bit absently now, as if she is indeed talking to herself.
Carrington does not say anything to this, and so Virginia adds, more assertively, “The answer is different for everyone.”
“My answer was Lytton,” Carrington declares, and Virginia can feel her annoyance welling up.
“That is no answer, Carrington. No one person can give entire meaning to another person’s life. You are not Lytton, and he was not you, and he was certainly no answer to anything.”
“You did not know him as I did,” Carrington says, and Virginia nearly has to cover her mouth to stop herself from blurting: You did not know him at all, you gibbering sycophant. You couldn’t have. You do not have the capacity. But with a sudden strength of determination that she manages to drag up and out of her abiding love for Lytton, she is able to control herself, and instead she merely sighs and takes Carrington’s hand.
“No, of course,” she says quietly, “each of us knew him quite differently. Leonard could tell you things about Lytton that might surprise you. They have me.”
“I doubt it,” Carrington says petulantly, staring into the nonexistent fire.
Deluded fool, Virginia thinks. As she tries stroking Carrington’s hand, the putrid thoughts go on inside her head. Carrington, how pathetically little you knew of your master. What a mirage you made of your life. Virginia knows that she will have to seize on the superficial pity that these thoughts inspire if she is to avoid the stew of ill feeling that lies beneath.
“There is much more to you,” she lies, “more value in your life than whatever Lytton gave it. You must see that.”
“No. I do not see it. I see only death. That is my answer now.”
I cannot keep this up, Virginia thinks, exasperated. The horrid brat is determined to fight. Is she deliberately trying to provoke me because I am who I am, or would she do this with anyone? Well, Leonard was right to call her histrionic. She sounds like a penny dreadful. Oh, but damn Lytton. He really has taken everything out of her, and now there is nothing left.
This is the last clear thought Virginia has.
For some reason that she will never understand no matter how many times she goes over it in the days and weeks and years to come, this last thought shakes her violently as she thinks again of the personal vacuity that she had been pondering at Monk’s House just a few days before, the hollowness, both Carrington’s and her own. And then somehow, suddenly, very suddenly—and a little frighteningly, because this has never happened this way before—she feels this hollowness become itself and expand inside her like an obliterating gas. She knows then that she will not stand apart from this scene any longer.
There is the familiar collapse that happens in her chest, a complete dusting of the construct, all the jealousy and pettiness and disdain for the lesser creature—what lesser creature?—all the structure of a lifetime’s defense implodes in a moment, as it has done so many times before when she has been so desperately shortsighted and alone, as Carrington is now.
It is all over very quickly, the sham, the highhandedness, the handholding, the bleary-eyed attempt at objectivity, none of which she had pulled off in the slightest. And then, looking about at the fallen fabrication of herself, at the rubble of all this mental scenery, at the mote-strewn air and the light hazing through it, she sees only Adeline intact, standing there looking like the smirking aftermath of a very old practical joke. Really? her expression seems to say. We got you again?
“Then I will talk to you about death,” Virginia says, breaking out of her daze and sounding mechanical herself, or insane. But she does not feel insane. Not in the least. She feels relief, and the elation of at last being able to speak with brutal honesty to another living soul about this one thing. Can it be true? Finally, she sighs, someone I can really talk to about it, and not correctly, not consolingly, not to save or salvage—because that is just the folly of propping up a life that is sliding to its end—but truthfully, morbidly, because sickness is the only path we are on, any of us. Death the only possible outcome. So say it, she urges herself. Just say it. Out loud. To someone. For once.
Virginia’s icy use of the word “death” has roused Carrington for the first time, and convulsively so, as if she has been given a shock or an injection. She turns her whole body round in the chair and fixes Virginia with her pink and violet eyes, and the expression on her face is one of hunger, a ravenous hunger that has at last, after a long and dejected search, found its proper food.
This should startle Virginia. It would have done so a few minutes before, but now it does not. Not anymore. Because it is not Carrington she sees, but Adeline, hovering behind her like some wrongheaded guide to the underworld who is yet somehow just right.
And Carrington can see this recognition in Virginia’s eyes, or see at least that something vital has changed, the decisive switch thrown.
“Tell me,” Carrington says, so eagerly that anyone who was not caught up in this, anyone still in the real world—Leonard, say, who is walking the grounds or tinkering with the car like a normal person—would simply pick up the telephone and call for help.
But for them—how many of them are there now exactly, Virginia wonders, lurking behind and beside?—this is one of those rare psychic dislocations that can be shared.
“I see myself as a girl,” Virginia says, not knowing until the words are out that she is going to talk about Adeline. She has never done so with anyone. Not Leonard, not Nessa, not Vita. “She is thirteen, the age I was when my mother died.”
Carrington’s eyes are gaping like bloodied mouths, gruesome with fascination.
“She is stuck in the past,” Virginia continues, “with the first pain, the original pain that was my initiation into unbearable loss. She never recovered, and her only real wish, her only release, will be in death. She is waiting for me to die.”
Now who sounds like a penny dreadful? The thought flits across Virginia’s mind, but does not stick. These sentiments are Adeline’s, and they come without oversight; they have no valuation attached. She pauses her
e and looks blandly at Carrington as if to say, Does that satisfy you? But she knows that this is a long way from being finished.
“Does she ask you?” Carrington says, her mouth flopping open like an imbecile’s. The old Virginia wonders, Will she now begin to drool?
“Ask me what?” she says testily.
“Does she ask you to die?”
“She has no need to. That is why she is there.”
“And do you listen?”
Virginia sighs, more than half regretting that she has brought this into the open, and with someone—she sees this now, and should have seen it before—who is so poorly able to withstand it. She thought this would be like sliding into a warm bath with a doppelgänger, but it is like slashing a cutlass through butter. She feels like a criminal.
Carrington, meanwhile, knows that she has failed. She is looking down at her fingers, which are spread out on the tops of her thighs, displaying the variety of sores that are clustered around each cuticle. Some of them are infected, others are calloused and yellow-scabbed from having been picked and bitten so many times, still others are new and strawberry red, each with its own pale pink halo.
The body says everything, Virginia thinks, looking at the hands, recalling her first impressions of this place, and Carrington in it, and her own sense of the redundancy of saying anything when the objects had said it all already. She is feeling the same incompetence now, the writer who has nothing to say, because she has chosen the wrong medium.
As before, Virginia is torn from the temptation to distinguish herself from Carrington, and from what is so clearly happening to them both, the same inarticulacy, the same impotence in the grip of the same distress.
“You know where I am,” Carrington says gravely, still looking at her hands. “I knew that you would.”
“Because Lytton told you about my past,” Virginia says.
“No,” Carrington says with a strange assurance. “I would have known just by looking at you. I did know. It was I who told Lytton.”
This shocks Virginia. “Told Lytton what?”
“That you were a liar like me, and that your lying would . . . ”
But she will not finish, and Virginia cannot decide why. Carrington looks oddly afraid and cowed suddenly, as if her own version of Adeline, or someone else more domineering, is actually standing there with a hand on Carrington’s shoulder, warning her that she has said too much. But, Virginia wonders, too much of what? More than is proper? Or more than is allowed?
Does Carrington believe that the rest of what she had to say would have offended me too deeply? No. It cannot be that. She is beyond manners. So then it must be the other. She knows that she has said more than she ought. Virginia shudders a little at this notion, remembering Tom’s line from The Waste Land, the clairvoyant stymied by the blind spot—and this card, / Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, / Which I am forbidden to see.
She smiles slightly at her own fear. Silliness, she chides. Such infantile silliness. Let her die if she wants to die, but leave my horoscope out of it. I cannot save her, nor do I much want to. But this is not fair or altogether true, and she knows it. She is on her usual merry-go-round with herself. It has nothing to do with Carrington.
“Carrington,” she says, again surprising herself. She waits for Carrington to look up. When she does, Virginia adds haltingly, pausing between the words, because she does not know herself what she is going to say. “Think . . . Ask yourself what is true . . . Be sure . . . Then tell me . . . directly . . . Do you . . . want . . . to die?”
Carrington hesitates much longer than Virginia expected she would, and this, she thinks, could be either a very good or a very bad indication. Now she is the one who has said too much, and she feels again as if she has committed a crime. Either that or she has taken the calculated risk of going too far, because doing so is the only way of bringing the patient back.
Carrington is still sitting there so strangely massive in her silence, and once again Virginia thinks of something inanimate. She fixates on the idea, perhaps because she does not really believe in fixity. Yet here is Carrington seemingly just that, fixed, occupying space like a thing, insensate, obvious, sure, not indecisive in the least. Not a fool in temptation, succumbing, but an essence, pure and unwavering and simply, immitigably there. She is the stillest living thing I have ever seen, Virginia marvels enviously; what the will must look like before it moves the soul to act.
She wonders what Father’s philosophizing would have made of this, or the Apostles’: the will as a Platonic form, inert, still and solid as a bloody rock, but showing itself like this, as a woman, as a monument, like some bronze rendering of Justice herself, welded to her pedestal.
Almost smiling at the thought of Carrington plunked in Trafalgar Square beside Admiral Nelson, Virginia comes back to herself, unsure of how long she has been lost in thought. She is almost convinced that she is going to get away with what she has just said, or that her question has been somehow magically voided by its own impertinence, when Carrington finally speaks.
“Is there any reason not to,” she declares. It is not a question. She is not asking, nor is she looking to Virginia for an answer. If she is expecting anything, it is only one syllable, if there is one, that proves what she has said is patently false or mad. Yet it is not Virginia, but Adeline who answers.
“I can think of none,” she says dully, and as soon as she has said them, Virginia can feel herself scrabbling to take the words back, but the struggle is horribly inept and futile, like drowning in a dream. Carrington merely nods once, stiffly, in recognition, as if Virginia is in fact a physician delivering the fatal news.
Then, unexpectedly, either because she senses that Virginia is in turmoil or because she simply feels that their grim business together is done, Carrington stands and motions Virginia out.
Her motivation is opaque to Virginia now. She is unreadable once more, expressionless, shut off, but whether from resolution or reproach it is impossible to tell. An aftertaste of blame is clearly there, but whether it is coming from Carrington or herself she does not know. This is not a familiar misgiving. She always knows. She always knows too much, but now there is nothing but static, and as they walk swiftly and wordlessly down the passageway to the stairs, Virginia first and Carrington behind, the feeling worsens to the point that she must stop and turn so that she can look once more into Carrington’s blankened face. But by the time she manages to do so, they are at the bottom of the stairs and Carrington is pushing her, politely but firmly, backward out the front door, to where Leonard is loitering at the car. The conclusion has flown by, the moment gone.
Something unnamable is between them. Carrington knows it, too—that much Virginia has discerned—but is it the compact of co-conspirators, the imputation of a supplicant wronged or simply the cold dismissal of a cat’s paw used?
She hates it that she cannot decide, but, finding herself outdoors again, breathing the clarifying air and blinking in the sunshine, she begins to sense that the black enchantment of Ham Spray has lost its hold on her. She can feel her social self returning, gloves on, armor up, and as she looks one last time at the waxen changeling that Carrington has become, she resolves not to let confusion show. Never again. She is Virginia. Adeline is the lie, the liar that Carrington sniffed out.
“Goodbye,” Carrington says, throwing her arms loosely around Leonard and then more loosely still around Virginia. But Virginia will have none of it, and with a slight but definite shove, she frees herself from Carrington’s embrace and turns away.
“Come and see us next week,” she calls, her hand on the car. “Or not. Just as you wish?”
“Yes,” Carrington says, “I will come . . . or not.”
Early September 1932
IT IS THE same now every summer. Guests. An endless parade of unwanted guests at Rodmell. The idea of entertaining always appeals, but then, when the people come, and they stay, and they stay, and they draw on her greedily like leeches
, extracting all the best material that she has been saving for her work, well then, it is no fun at all. Then it is like enduring some quack treatment, ordered but clearly daft, and possibly harmful into the bargain. Then she can feel herself desiccating like clay, her face aching under another forced smile, and she finds herself sitting for the last half of the engagement like some melancholy recluse longing for the fullness of solitude.
Is this what it means to be famous, she wonders, or to preside over a famous group? Though infamous is more the judgment now, she hears. Among the up-and-coming set of standouts, the Bloomsberries are right out of fashion: a bunch of self-indulgent, pseudo-socialist, bed-hopping prudes—and yes, the last is a real epithet, apparently, the received contradiction in terms, used and endorsed by all who are anybody, intellectually and artistically on the rise.
And, oddly—this is a very new feeling—in the right mood, she finds that she cannot disagree. She hasn’t yet said this in company, but it has been on her mind. In fact, privately, when she doesn’t have her fists up for debate, she thinks it rather a deft summation of their disease. They really are a willfully ignorant contradiction in terms in almost every way, a pack of cross-dressing Quakers, a gaggle of loose-limbed pacifists dancing atop the cenotaphs. They had been virgins—most of them, well into their primes—who had thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that you could root out a century of squeamishness by playing at sexual excess.
The hubris of the young. It never fails to amaze, she thinks, even retrospectively, in oneself. They, every last one of them, from herself to Leonard to Lytton to Ottoline and on and on, are Victorians—period, full stop—no matter what they pretend. Yes, they have had the nerve to call themselves Georgians, but nerve is all it has been. And Lytton, who had so famously and pricklingly purported to dress down the great era of the Empire once and for all in ’19, had done nothing of the sort. He’d merely pulled off an elaborate stunt that the public had mistaken for a serious treatment. No. They had all been raised at the knee of the Dour One, buttoned up in black, and there they remained, in id if not in fact.
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