Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  Warily approaching them, Vivien looks over the low table where the drinks tray is set. Gesturing nonsensically at it, she cries, “Why have you taken these? Are you trying to confuse me?”

  “No one has taken anything,” Tom says. “Now sit down.”

  Leonard is more consoling. “Yes, Vivien. Please do sit down. We should so like your company.”

  “Oh, you should,” Vivien mutters. “You should, if it weren’t for . . . ” But she trails off without finishing and decides instead to smile at Leonard. She does so almost pleadingly, as if she is asking for his forgiveness, or thanking him in a backhand way for his persistent gentleness in what even she knows is quickly becoming a debacle.

  “Now,” Virginia says, to break the spell of Vivien’s appeal. Turning to her husband, she announces, “Leonard and I have just celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

  In the awful pause that follows, this jab does its dirty work, and Virginia smiles, adding, “So, a toast, then. To marriage, and death do us part.”

  Tom gamely raises his glass, but with a noticeable sneer, and says the obligatory “Here, here.” He cannot bring himself to say the words “marriage” or “death,” however, and he sets down his glass without taking a drink.

  Leonard is balancing his glass on his knees, with both hands wrapped protectively around the stem as if he intends to plant it. “To marriage,” he says dolefully, casting a reproachful glance in Virginia’s direction, but he does not move.

  Vivien has lit up at the challenge. Seizing the Martini shaker and popping the top off, she salutes Virginia with it, nodding to acknowledge her opponent. She then downs the contents like a Viking, so violently that half of it streams out the sides, down her cheeks and onto the front of her dress. Her thick coating of face powder has washed away in stripes from the corners of her mouth like a tragedian’s frown. The sight of her is so distressing that Virginia has to look away.

  Vivien swipes at her chin with the short sleeves of her frock, sighing contentedly at her achievement; another conflict successfully provoked. She is very clever—at her best really—in the heat of a good row, and so she is now. She loses no time in cutting to the quick.

  “What you get married for,” she squawks in a perfect cockney, modifying her husband’s famous line just slightly for the occasion, “if you didn’t want children?”

  This is almost unanswerable, and it hangs there over the four of them, dangerously pregnant and inadvisable, like some depraved piñata that has been filled with nails and nitroglycerin.

  We should have expected this, Virginia thinks, determined, at least for the moment, to deflect the palpable bull’s-eye of this taunt. Vivien has always claimed this line as her own, her indelible contribution to the greatest poem of the twentieth century, a mere five hundred lines, give or take—she remembers the drudgery of setting the type—that had arguably grown more iconic in its first decade of existence than even Tom himself.

  But it had been they—Tom, Leonard and Virginia and their forward-thinking press, not Vivien Haigh-Wood cum Eliot—who had brought this monumental work of art into the world. Who was this harridan to think she could turn it on them like this? It is unconscionable cheek.

  But she knows she should not allow herself to be drawn into a brawl. It is, of course, what Vivien has intended all along, and that is among the best reasons to avoid it. Deny her her scene.

  And yet, children. Children, damn her. It is the incontestable absence that has always bound the two couples together. How terribly and precisely it has touched all the maladies of sex and creation that Leonard and Virginia have stubbornly refused to acknowledge they have in common with Tom and Vivien, but which, just as stubbornly, some part of them has always known they have in common all the same.

  And the poem. It was devilish quoting the poem to this end, for it was the poem, and the very autobiographical pain of it that Vivien was pointing to in that line, that had once brought them so close to Tom, and in some ways to Vivien, too. It was the poetry, the life and life-giving force of letters that they had all seen living on as their legacy in place of children. Subliminally, but no less passionately for being so, this was what had inspired them to collaborate in the first place. But since then it has only torn them fretfully, fitfully, yet never quite fully apart.

  The moods, the troubles, the sicknesses. They are at the root of it all, writing, not writing, surviving, not surviving, marrying—how? And staying that way or not. And, most of all, or worst of all, not having children. The chafe of it never goes away. No matter how they write it—question it, dismiss it, defer to it, going over and over it with their pens, as if scratching it obsessively on the page can desensitize the nerve—nothing has changed.

  It is why they are here having “tea” at this late date, and with so much festering displeasure between them. Tom and Vivien are on the verge of what is likely to be a permanent separation. Virginia and Leonard are more together than ever. And yet. Yes, and yet, here they are, at each other like badgers in a sack. All except Leonard, who is trying, as always in his quiet way, to make peace.

  They are as combustible as the times, these four, and lining up on opposite sides. She has heard rumblings about Tom’s growing fascist sympathies as well as his anti-Semitism. The Jew-baiting has always been there, often in muted form, but now, from what she’s heard, it is beginning to leak out. Meanwhile, Vivien reputedly worships Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts and skulks about London with a knife. Not that her behavior at present can count for much, yet even so, Virginia wonders, how much of this viciousness—and it is coming from both of them, she feels sure of that—is bound up in a politics that, of late, has become all too personal to everyone?

  Here, after all, is Leonard, the socialist, pacifist Jew who has just come out with his own book on the prevention of war—Tom has made no mention of that either—arguing that the roots of armed conflict lie in the very jingoism that the lovely couple before them would seem to endorse and embody.

  No one says any of this, of course. No one will. But it is there, suppurating.

  They are opposites who have been stranded, by fate or biology or sheer bad luck, in the same shameful fix: Barren and squirming on the razor’s edge of matrimony and madness, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, they are too alike to bear it and too disparate to come to terms.

  Children, as everyone is so fond of reminding them, are the future. So, they have always consoled themselves, are ideas and works of art. But, as Vivien has so cruelly conveyed with that single, vilely chosen snippet of verse, they have none of the former, precious few of the latter, and nothing in the end that has any real power to avert teatime spats, much less world wars.

  If anyone has bothered to dispute Vivien’s last words, Virginia has been off spiraling too ponderously to have heard, but she doubts it. They are all as listless and dejected as prisoners. By the look of him, Leonard is too drained or despondent to try to shepherd them back to neutral. He is looking longingly at one of the apple trees as if he is thinking of hanging himself from it. Tom has lit a cigarette, and is smoking it like it is his last. He is holding it so still in front of his mouth, merely opening and closing his lips to drag and exhale, that the ash on it is nearly an inch long. Even Vivien seems mollified by her joust and its deadening effect. She knows that it has hit home and doesn’t seem to require a retort. Virginia’s torpor has told her as much, though she would have known anyway. She knew the instant she opened her mouth that there would be no going back.

  Despite her better judgment of only a few moments before, Virginia cannot bring herself to leave this comment or its mouthpiece unquashed. But before she can summon the killing words, Vivien erupts again, responding as she has been doing all along, not to Virginia herself or this situation, but to the years of unaccepted likeness and dislike that are between them.

  “You are a wicked, wicked woman, Mrs. Woolf,” she cries. “The White Devil indeed.”

  “I beg your pardon?�
� Virginia scoffs.

  “Or didn’t you know? Since we are talking of the poem,” replies Vivien. “We emended those lines for your sake.”

  “We?” cries Virginia. “Hah! I doubt that very much. But remind me, since you clearly fancy yourself the coauthor, which lines were those?”

  Not to be outsparred, Vivien focuses her eyes fiercely for the first time all afternoon and raises her voice to a volume that even the servants must be able to hear inside the house. “Remind you,” she shouts, “must I?” She shoots Virginia a withering look. “Well, of course, having never been formally schooled, you could be forgiven for not knowing your Webster.”

  This is too absurd to acknowledge, one of Vivien’s characteristic flights of delusion, for as everyone has always lamented on Tom’s behalf, one of Vivien’s chief faults has always been her scholastic deficiency.

  “My dear Vivien, you forget. We knew you back when. We know you now.” Virginia casts her eyes across Leonard and Tom, to reinforce the suggestion that they are sharing a private barb. “And you are nothing more than what you have always been: a dull-witted and failed arriviste clinging to the coattails of your betters.”

  But Vivien will not relinquish so easily what she knows she has gained. Pretending not to hear, she picks up her glass, which still has some liquor left, sweeps it instructively over the company and, ignoring the splash that falls across the front of her frock, goes on with her lesson.

  “The original lines, as they appear in Webster’s play, are as follows,” she slurs pompously: “But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, for with his nails he’ll dig them up again.”

  She pauses dramatically here, the remainder of her face powder seeming to puff off of its own accord, as if from a barrister’s wig in the heat of a summation.

  “In The Waste Land,” she continues, as if anyone needed reminding of the poem’s title, “we rendered them thus: Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.”

  She pauses again to suppress a burp, and draws herself up, as if she is addressing a group of feckless students rather than the author and publishers of the work in question. “An interesting change, don’t you think?” she says, adding triumphantly, “Especially in light of the latest discovery at Ham Spray.”

  At first no one can take this in. The unexpected affront to Lytton’s and Carrington’s deaths is so much more of an outrage than anyone had expected even Vivien to commit, that for a solid thirty seconds no one reacts. Vivien sits patiently upright, beaming with the success of this strike, sipping demurely at the dregs of her drink. The other three are slumped more lifelessly than they were before, like novelty toys that have been unceremoniously unplugged.

  Virginia turns wordlessly to Tom, not for confirmation of the truth of what has just been said, for she does not for one instant believe that there is any truth in it, but for some acknowledgment of the sheer magnitude of the treachery that his wife has managed to unleash, and he to tolerate. But Tom is frozen with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, terrified, mortified or both. She sees immediately that he will be of no use.

  She looks at Leonard. He, too, is a wreck of disbelief, the Englishman still clinging to his raft of good manners, stunned into mute passivity. Seeing that she is the only one willing to or capable of defending herself, Virginia turns at last to address Vivien, who, this time, has been attentively awaiting her reply. The look of venomous anticipation in her eyes provokes a frenzy.

  “You witch!” Virginia shrieks, lurching forward as if she means to strike Vivien, but drawing back at the last moment. “How dare you mention that accursed place? You can have no idea what it was like in that house. What we went through. We were there the day before Carrington shot herself.”

  She stands, white with rage, overturning her chair behind her onto the grass and swiveling on her heel to march into the house, but Vivien is too quick for her.

  “Oh yes,” she says exultantly, “I know you were there, and that you spoke with Carrington alone.” She takes a short mocking breath and turns her head on its side. “One can only wonder what you said to her.”

  She keeps her head on its side. Her smeared face is now gashed by a vile, gummy grin, and her eyes are so maliciously bright that she looks possessed.

  “Among Carrington’s papers,” she continues with taunting surety, “was found a note with those very same lines from Webster—can you imagine? The very same lines, written out in Carrington’s hand, and the word ‘wolf’ underlined.”

  Vivien jerkily rights her head, crosses her legs and settles back in her chair. “That cannot be a coincidence, do you think?” she says.

  Yet another astonished silence engulfs the other three, who are once again utterly at a loss, like characters from a different genre, thrown in with this harpy. Virginia had been almost halfway to the house by the time the words “‘wolf’ underlined,” had registered. She stops cold at the sound of them. She is standing with her back to the others, shaking, as before, with rage, but also tottering with the jolt of this new insult.

  Leonard stands and goes to her. He puts his arms around her and she collapses against him. But then, flushed with a fresh resolve not to be beaten by this bromided nobody, she rights herself again, takes her husband by the shoulders and swings him aside. She turns and makes her way toward Tom. She stumbles slightly when she reaches him, and leans over to grip the arms of his chair for support. “Is this true, Tom?” she gasps, glaring into his eyes. She is close enough to kiss him. “You must tell me if it is.”

  Very slowly and reluctantly, he nods, but he cannot bring himself to say anything.

  “Of course it’s true,” shouts Vivien triumphantly. “We heard it directly from our mutual friend Ottoline, and, well, you know how close they were.”

  Vivien is like a crocodile clamped on its prey. She will not let go. She will roll right to the bottom of the bog with her victim and thrash it until it is dead. There is no graceful way out, and Virginia is too sideswiped to try. Leonard will have to euthanize this fiasco.

  Without looking at Tom again, Virginia pushes herself back from his chair and, without another word, makes her way across the lawn toward the house. Leonard is still standing where she left him, and she meets him on her way in.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispers as she passes. She will not look at him either, though he sees that this is because her eyes are no longer functioning as they should. They will guide her to her room, where she is likely to spend the next several days incommunicado, but that is all. She is locking down into her most isolated self. Once there, she will be gone for as long as it takes, all the doors and windows shut tight. He can only wait for her to come back.

  Leonard’s eyes are on her all the way to the house. When he sees her reach it, open, then shut the door behind her with a brisk and terrible click, he shifts his gaze to Tom, who is already up and handling Vivien. Grasping her by the shoulders, he hauls her to her feet, which she is clearly unable to keep beneath her on her own, roughly grapples her to him by the waist and marches her toward the front gate. Vivien is one of those petite women who look immediately ridiculous when they attempt a show of force. And so it is now. Her feet are no longer touching the ground, and she is repeatedly attempting to kick Tom in the shins. Meanwhile, she is pummeling his chest quite uselessly with weak and uncoordinated fists, and spitting unintelligible insults into his face. He, however, looks only faintly annoyed and oddly focused on his task, as if she is not a human being, but an unwieldy object that he has been hired to transport. It will be no great tragedy if he drops her; just more time on the job.

  Over the top of Vivien’s head, Tom is slurring his apologies to Leonard, and Leonard is waving him off, saying some insincere variation on “It’s all right” or “It’s all over now,” but Vivien is screaming too loudly for him to hear. The gist of a formulaic sendoff is all he can get, which is undoubtedly for the best. He can’t apologize enough, and Leonard can’t pretend en
ough to make this parting anything but a farcical dumb show. Tom will have to make this up to Leonard over time, if he can. Virginia will require more finesse. And Vivien? Well, before today, she was on her way out. Now she has stamped her ticket.

  ACT IV

  THE YEARS

  1934–1938

  October 1934

  WHY DOES THIS not get easier? Honestly, why? It makes no sense. Other labors improve with repetition; streamline, accrue, accelerate. Not this one. The novel, it seems, is definitively always just that, new. Damned thing. And she is damned along with it, again and again and again. Bloody hell.

  Except that hell is not the outer darkness. Hell is writing novels.

  What else can she think? She has done this seven times already, and the last was her best. But it is coming on five years since she touched The Waves, five long, terrible years since she wrote those final resounding words: Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! Had it been a malediction? A valediction? In retrospect it sounds as if it was both. Seal your lips with a curse. She is working harder than a dung beetle, yet she has nothing to show for it but dung.

  The startling skirl of the telephone ringing fills her with a sense of childish liberation; class dismissed. And indeed there is a reprieve on the other end, for it is Ottoline calling to absolutely beg her to come over to Gower Street at once and salvage one of her teas, which she swears is falling so mortifyingly flat that she will be shining bald the next time they meet if Virginia does not fly to her rescue immediately.

  Virginia laughs. “But what can possibly have gone so wrong?”

  “I’ve deliberately kept it scarce,” Ottoline huffs in a scratching whisper—she has clearly got her hand cupped round the mouthpiece—“because blessed Yeats has graced us again. But Stephen Spender is in there with him now, and I would swear to you it is not a happy meeting of two poets. It’s like some forced détente between diplomats, neither of whom speaks a word of the other’s language. It’s simply ghastly. You must come. You are the only person I know who can possibly resuscitate this conversation.”