He is finally done, yet he does not have the look of a man who has just delivered a psychotic’s sermon, or, by chance, encapsulated the mysterious workings of the world within an hour. He does not seem enervated in the least. He is glowing, as he was when she came in, and now she is beginning to see just how he may have sucked the spleen out of Stephen. Yet in her chagrin, she is nearly his disciple, too. She is truly mesmerized, and now, it appears, unwisely encouraging him as well, for what she says next seems to come from someone other than herself and without her consent.
“You said the Mysticeti whales.”
“Ah, yes,” he gushes, “well, of course, the root of the word ‘mystic’ is the Latin mysticus. The root of the word ‘Mysticeti’ is unclear, though it appears to be mysticetus, meaning ‘mouse,’ a corruption of a translation from the Greek in Aristotle’s Historia Animalium. But much more interesting is this: Melville named his ship the Pequod after the Pequot, one of the indigenous peoples of what would later become the Massachusetts Bay Colony. New Bedford is the primary seaport of whaling in North America from which Melville’s ship departs in its search for Moby-Dick. As you may know, there is a river in that area called the Mystic, as well as a town of the same name. The name comes from the languages of those same indigenous peoples, either Muhs-Uhtug or Missi-Tuk, both of which mean ‘big river,’ though the latter term is more literally translated as ‘great river whose waters are driven by waves.’”
“Like the Ouse,” she says.
Yeats looks at her curiously.
“The Ouse River in Sussex, near where we live in the country. It is tidal.”
She looks at him for help, as if she has said something terrible that cannot be taken back, but he is only hearing again what he has already heard.
“And so,” he says, “here is yet another coincidence, as the skeptics would say. But you and I know from Baudelaire to call it a correspondence.”
She nods, but she is utterly spent and, mesmerized or not, she can say nothing more. She does not quite know how she disengages herself from his clutches, or if he lets her go, but when she is aware of herself again, she is standing in Ottoline’s foyer, going through the motions of departure with the grande dame herself. Yeats is there, too, but only to see her off. He is staying—to enthrall some other unsuspecting mark, no doubt, and invigorate himself still more.
As they are saying their goodbyes, Yeats leans in and whispers to her, “The poem that I wrote for you is called ‘Spilt Milk.’”
She nods stiffly and a little guiltily, but he seems unperturbed by her failure to have read his latest work. As always, he simply knows.
The moment she reaches home, she bounds up the stairs to her room and rifles through her books. She has it here somewhere. She is pulling out all the newer ones that she has either shoved in sideways on the bookshelves atop the rest or crammed in nooks by the bed and elsewhere in the room, but it is not there. She stumbles, twirling anxiously around the room, more determined than ever to find it. She goes flat on her belly beside the bed, and retrieves it at last from the depths of a pile of toppled quartos, newspapers and journals that she has let accumulate there.
The Winding Stair, a pale turquoise and black-checkered volume on which is depicted the winding staircase of the title, a coiled serpent, confrontationally open-mouthed, and a woman riding a dolphin. She flips to the table of contents and runs her finger down the page until she sees it. “Spilt milk.” She opens to the place and sees that the poem is only four lines long. She reads it over many times. She reads and reads, and her eyes begin to water and swell. She closes and reopens the book. She sits staring blearily at the text, the cover, the walls. Then, finally, she allows herself to cry.
There is no escaping these links. She will not use Baudelaire’s word for it yet, but the sense is clear. These are the words of Mr. Wolstenholme coming back to her out of the past in another form, steeped, exactly as before, in her unutterable sadness. They are a prophecy. They are a recollection. They are an epitaph. They belong on a stone.
November 1936
LEONARD IS SITTING by the fire, listening to the wet, green logs hiss and crackle, not caring that he has been soaking in their smoke, almost to the point of asphyxiation, for hours. His smarting eyes are doggedly fixed on the page in front of him, which he is holding up vertically and very close to his face, trying to obscure his expression from Virginia. She has been sitting across from him all this time pretending to read, but she has been watching him like prey.
The rest of the proofs for this, her latest novel, The Years, are balancing on his lap. He is almost through. She has not let him see the work before now because she has been in such an almighty swivet over it. True to its new title—it had formerly been called The Pargiters—she has been wrangling with this tome (it is six hundred pages long) for years, and in the past six months she has been as unwell as she has been since those last worst days of 1913.
He is staring at this page, has been for some time, not reading it, because it is the second to last and he does not want to finish. She is waiting for this, as she always does, for his verdict, but this time, because of her state, there is far more at stake, and they both know it. His judgment carries all the fatal thrust—sadly, this is not an exaggeration—of a Roman emperor’s up- or downturned thumb in the gladiatorial ring, which is why he cannot give it truly, and why her hunkered waiting has become so immense and terrible.
It is the worst feeling he has ever known with her, even after all they have been through together in the almost quarter century of their marriage. This feeling, this brainwave of hers, call it, has a menacing life of its own. It brings to mind recent broadcasts from the Continent made by that foaming maniac Herr Hitler, who had positively desecrated that summer’s Olympic Games in Berlin, and by technological extension the rest of the world, with his plosive spattered outbursts into the Reichrophone, which had come lashing over the wireless into every home and mind like a fist full of rusty knives.
The comparison is unfair, of course, and yet, he thinks, how her thought pattern beams so acutely between them as if it would indeed cut. It hangs, it hovers, it protracts and somehow seems to ping overhead, ever so softly and metallically—he cannot escape this association with sharps—like a guillotine in the wind in those last interminable moments before it falls on the unfortunate’s neck. She has not meant to put him in this position, nor would she were it up to her, but it is not up to her, and so she has.
No wonder, then. He is in a mighty paroxysm of angst, desperate to summon his powers again. Quietly, wretchedly, his senile tremor making the page before him shake violently in his hand, as if it is indeed in the throes of some supernal force, he has spent the last however many minutes—seconds, quarter of an hour, he does not know—petitioning a God in whom he does not believe to descend in his rickety machine and relieve this denouement. Solve this, he begs. Give me strength. Give me conviction. Give me the mendacity to deceive, to assume again this unwieldy burden of her doubt and embellish what I do not feel. Let me not say what I think—though what I really think is not at all bad—but rather what she is waiting, what she is so wanting and needing, to hear. Somehow, he wagers recklessly at last, at the cost of my own perdition if it must be so, please, this once, this once more, let me save her life.
At this, as mechanically as his convenient God, with his free hand, he takes up the last page, and, holding both it and the other before him at chest level—he no longer has the wherewithal to hide his face—he runs his eyes across the final words. He pauses this way, held fast for a moment by whatever potency he has managed to conjure in himself, and then, quite suddenly and utterly, in a way that he has never, ever allowed himself to do in her presence before, he breaks.
He breaks the way he had once broken as a child of five or six, when, upon returning from a blissful summer holiday in the country, he had rushed out to the family plot behind the house in Lexham Gardens to inspect the garden. Much to his dismay, though not entirely
to his surprise, for they had been left untended all season, the beds lay sprawled there pitiably in all the decrepitude of their neglect, far uglier and more upsetting to behold than he had anticipated. The few remaining plants, drooping and bereft, had been overlaid with a thick and dreadful coating of soot, the remnants of the famous clinging smog—not fog—of the coal-fired London of those days.
Standing there looking at this scene, such a young boy in his Eton collar and worsted suit, in the year 1885 or ’86 it would have been, he had shivered top to bottom for the very first time with what he would one day come to understand had been the great abiding sorrows of the world. Weltschmerz, as the Apostles would invoke it.
But at the time, it had only seemed as bizarre and separating as all the rest of his experience. That time—which had been the zenith of Victoria’s reign, of industry and of the Empire, yet also the nadir of social inequality, poverty and filth—had always been to him so thoroughly other, so inherently unreal, even then, as he was living it, that looking at the people and things materializing before him had been like looking through a rent in time itself, or through a stereoscope, into a picture that he did not believe he could touch. It had never quite seemed to exist.
And the sight of it, many such sights, in fact, and their accompanying sadnesses, had broken him, just as they were breaking him now, way down inside, and without his consent, in all the hidden nodes and ducts and apertures where his reason has no say, and where the somatic betrayals of grief come furiously, and of their own accord.
As the first convulsive sob seizes him, he snaps forward from the waist and then immediately back, caroming against the wooden upright of the chair with a resounding thwack. The proofs whoosh and flurry to the floor around his feet, as if he has thrown them down in disgust. His mouth cracks open obscenely, red and mute, as in a Goya still life, with its lurid centerpiece of rotten fruit. And finally, spasmodically, with the same intemperance, the tears come all at once, drenching his cheeks in sheets and darkening the collar of his shirt as if he has plunged his head into the washbasin.
Good God, Virginia thinks, the sought relief of all these stranded months flooding her parched and isolated brain. I had not hoped for such a reception; he is moved to tears.
She had spent much of the summer in bed with Adeline, reading aloud—when she had been able to read—passages from the manuscript of Vita’s new biography of Joan of Arc. Adeline had become convinced, though of course Vita knew nothing of Adeline, that this was Vita’s long-awaited answer to Orlando, a book written specifically for, about and in honor of not Virginia, but her.
Yet the truth was that Vita had mostly waned from view. At some point in the previous year it had crossed Virginia’s mind that their demoted friendship, which had slid a long way from its erotic heights over the years, had reached its end.
But that had not happened. Though diminished, it had gone on, and at a considerable remove, for Vita could not—she had never been able to—handle Virginia’s spells. She had always been afraid of the turmoil that lay behind Virginia’s brilliance, and she had never doubted that something truly alien and frightening was there, and waiting to pounce. However intimate they had become, Vita had always maintained a safe distance from Virginia’s “other side,” and she had, as she had done in all of her affairs since the disastrous tryst she’d had so young with Violet Trefusis, kept her hand safely on the door handle at all times. In her own way, Virginia had done the same, knowing that the donkey could not fathom the asp.
Yet Adeline would have no truck with this view. She had seen herself in the Maid of Orleans, as well as a tribute in Vita’s love, and that had been that.
The visions, she had cried, as if the concordance were unmistakable. The headaches had come upon her at thirteen.
And, of course, as she had gone on to point out, the Maid had also shorn her hair and donned the clothing of a boy. Was this not proof enough?
Orlando! She had wailed decisively.
There had been no dissuading her or curbing the effect that this perceived flattery had had on her. This, as well as Virginia’s seriously deteriorated condition, had given Adeline a degree of confidence and strength that she had not enjoyed for many years.
In their exchanges, Adeline had often had the upper hand, and she had, at times, been remarkably strident, as inversely hale as Virginia was ill, and full of the pride she had always drawn from Virginia’s falls.
The martyr dies, she had insisted one morning while yanking Virginia’s breakfast tray away from her. She always dies.
Then, quite without precedent—presumably it had been the boldest thing she could think of, and an attempt to show who she’d thought was now thoroughly in command of their partnership—she’d taken up the boiled egg and, with a disturbing and ghoulish relish, popped it into her mouth, shell and all, and summarily crunched and swallowed it as if it were a soul and she one of Satan’s subalterns reclining on the burning lakebed of hell. She had, alas, been introduced to Milton.
How awful, Virginia had thought with a shiver, watching the long, flexing muscles of Adeline’s throat pass the object like a snake. Still, she had thought staunchly, I will not show her my fear.
“That may be,” she had heard herself saying, “but we are simply not going to self-immolate.” After an angry pause, she’d added, “Nohow,” a strangely slangish turn of phrase that she had not even known she’d known, and one that she certainly never would have used with anyone else. “Never mind,” she’d said finally, pulling the breakfast tray back and replacing it on her lap. “That is not how we are going to die.”
But is it not a purification of the soul? Adeline had said, as if she had not heard the reprimand.
“Don’t be a fool. They burned that poor peasant girl at the stake. It was a barbaric method of execution imposed by religious fanatics on a pawn.”
But what of holokaustos?
“Don’t be clever. That was an inane and useless pagan ritual which—”
And so, to wit, Adeline had cut in—something else she’d never done before—we have the ceremonial cigar instead. It was, word for word, what Virginia had said to Lytton in the garden years before when they had been talking of the pagan ritual of sex. Hearing it again, Virginia had marveled at how precise, yet how blank, Adeline could be. Her recall in some things was like a child’s, perfect yet ignorant. She could say the words in order by rote, as if they were a line in a play, but she did not know what they meant.
Still, in those long, hot, cloistered summer days that Virginia had spent alone with Adeline in the bedroom, there had been something else fueling the girl’s insolence—something more than the usual smell of the sickroom and the near persuasion of death, or even Vita’s perceived hommage. She had been overjoyed, quite literally. She had spent a great deal of time dancing about the room with her skirt raised above her knees, singing nonsensical ditties and bouncing on the bed.
The occasion? This had been the year of Virginia’s menopause, or still was. She did not know how long it could be expected to last. She did not know if this latest trouble was the aftermath or if it was still the phenomenon itself, her hormones having their last gush and making it damn well count. Exit, pursued by a bear.
In any case, Adeline had been elated by the demise of her old nemesis. In fact, if Virginia hadn’t stopped her—she’d actually gotten as far as assembling the necessary items—she’d have fashioned one of the hated menstrual rags into a doll, tied it to a stick, set it alight and marched about the room hoisting it aloft, belting out the “Marseillaise” like a Communard, burning her bloodied bandage in effigy.
Virginia had, of course, been as pleased as Adeline to see the hated womb-leakage go, but if its going presaged, as it was threatening to do, some ineluctable drive to do herself in, and in some hideously torturous and symbolic way devised by Adeline, the piping part of her was not for it. And there was still a piping part, the part of her that was still propagating ideas and intent on breeding art, the same part
of her that had been of late both gravely provoked and disgusted by the creeping lamia Adeline had become. How dare she feast on my weakness? she had thought. How dare she amble and jig, and yet smile and be a villain? I am the progenitor, not she.
Well, they had had their wars together, she and Adeline, and for nigh on a hundred days, stamping and flailing, sweating and groveling, fretting as they fell, indeed like the petty demons in Milton, grappling well out past the stratosphere of sense and down again into chaos. But now, sitting by the fire watching Leonard weep into her book, that is all quite over. A bad dream.
For Leonard has made the miracle happen again. He had done so months before, actually, though only now does it truly resonate.
Was it not wonderful to see Godrevy again, and Talland House? Adeline had said excitedly at one point during their trial, the innocent girl emerging for a moment once more from behind the provocateur.
In May, when Virginia had begun her decline, and everyone, including the servants as well as anyone connected with Hogarth, had become sufficiently alarmed to stop the presses, Leonard had insisted on a complete break, a two-week holiday from all work.
He had driven them to Cornwall, thinking that a visit to this idyll of childhood memory would heal her. And so it had, briefly. How could it not? She had walked in the garden at Talland House and peered through the high, thickly moted windows into the molting yellowed rooms, just as she had done in her mind’s eye when writing Lighthouse, with the caressing, slow and heavy-lidded gaze of passing time. Yes, it had been a return to that time, both to the time of Mr. Wolstenholme and of Adeline sitting on the grass having her vision (he being a shattered witness to it), and to the time, many years later, of her fullest creative outpouring in Lighthouse.
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