Adeline

by Norah Vincent

  The threat to her is a threat to the idea of everything he stands for and to the only thing he believes in. It reawakens him to the terror of meaninglessness. It shakes him all through, like a dull iron bell tolling a reminder of the defining contradiction of his life: He has indulged himself in the delusion of progress, to inching ever upward on a journey that he has always known was going downhill. It has never changed. He has never changed. It is like a puzzle turned upside down and backward, wrapped inside a lie. He has never been able to stop caring about something that he knows will come to nothing, and he has never been able to stop trying to forget what he knows.

  That is Virginia. That is love, a justification, a corrective walking around in the flesh, which is simply, always there, and for no good reason, but is beautiful enough, redeeming enough, purely in its essence, and just because it happens to exist, to ameliorate the futility and the savagery of being alive.

  But she is not the only source. He has made sure of that. She is an example, one incarnation picked out of chaos that he has chosen to live with every day so that he might point to her and tell himself: This is why I do it. This is how.

  But there are other people, other creatures, other ways. There are the Apostles (who survive), his animal companions, his garden, music, art, books. They serve the same purpose, and he has placed them carefully around himself as touchstones. They are always within reach, and that is why the thought of Virginia’s death shakes him as profoundly as it does, but it does not shatter him. He has never, he would never, give so much power to one hope.

  And yet Virginia is singular. She is in fact not of a kind, but her own kind, and there will never be another. He does not want to see her go so soon. And she needn’t.

  Not long ago she was happy, perfectly happy. She had said so. So had he. They had been walking together on the downs one afternoon, talking about her work, and the work of all writers, speculating about what a writer is and what he might be for, and there had been—they had both noted it—that low pleasant hum of contentment between them, the deep sense of satisfaction that always swelled in both of them when they were flying together in thought. It was another of their jokes. They called it being in a state of classical grace. When they were walking out there across the fields, side by side, heads turned in the same direction, eyes and minds on the horizon, they said they were like the Greek ideal of friendship carved in an Athenian frieze, or painted on an ancient urn such as the one Keats immortalized.

  He had been free enough that day finally to tell her the truth about The Years, that he had not thought it her best work. She had even agreed, and allowed him to elaborate. It was, he’d said, the very thing that it had been to her in the making: too labored. It was too fussy on structure and fact—which in fiction had never been her strength or her mission—and too short on atmosphere—which was both her mission and her strength. Again she had agreed, and this had led to their discussion of writing and writers more generally.

  He remembers clearly what she’d said next, and he knows that he will always remember it, because he’d found it so unexpectedly piercing and beautiful, and because it had reminded him of a similar discussion they had once had about her work many years before, when she was riding the crest of her genius into her prime in To the Lighthouse and The Waves.

  She’d said that perhaps every writer is meant to express only one idea, one mood, one version of what this strange human experience is about, and that he spends his life and work repeating it over and over. If he is fortunate, once or twice he gets it absolutely right. He delivers his single given message more purely, more uniquely than any other writer has or will. But the once or twice is usually all he gets. Either he builds to it slowly, gathering strength and particularity as he goes, and it happens toward the end of his career, as it did to Joyce, the last expressions being the best—this is the most blessed outcome, she’d said—or it comes all at once in a bolt and then never again, as it did to Conrad, or it comes, a hump somewhere in the middle, as it had—she’d paused only briefly here—to her, and the rest is just an echo, the congenital compulsion wearing itself out.

  He wonders if he should have heard the warning then. Yet he had been so taken, as he is now, by the truth of what she had said, and the impressive presence of mind that she had shown in being able to say it. He had never heard her speak this way of Joyce, but he had also never heard her speak this way of herself. She had spoken of her own work dispassionately, yet at the same time with an undertone of resigned wistfulness, as one might remark on the ouster of a sick fledgling from the nest, or some other calamity of nature which was indubitably sad but couldn’t be helped.

  But then her tone had abruptly changed, and she had begun to talk of her most recent novel, Between the Acts, which she had just finished. The interregna between books had always been emotionally treacherous for her, he knew only too well, but this transition had been worse than the others, worse even than the terrifying time around The Years. In this case, her customary downward slide from the creative highs of composition to the postpartum lows of final edits had been more precipitous than usual. The contrast of moods, before and after, had been especially stark. She had enjoyed writing this novel more than most; every page, she’d said. But now that it was done, she’d set herself stridently against it, calling it trivial and unworthy. She’d gone so far as to say she wanted to withdraw it from the press.

  Julian’s old Cambridge friend, and their onetime employee, John Lehmann had come back to them after six years and was now part owner and managing editor at Hogarth. In ’38 Virginia and Leonard had reconfigured the press in order to relieve themselves of some of the day-to-day burdens of running it. To that end, they had sold half of the concern to Lehmann and taken him on full-time to co-manage it with Leonard. They had established an advisory board over which Virginia, as well as the old hot Oxbridge set from ’32—Stephen Spender (who had become a friend), Christopher Isherwood (whose second novel, The Memorial, Hogarth had published in ’32) and Auden (who was not a friend)—ostensibly presided. But the board never met. Still, the changes had brought the press more fully into the hands of the younger generation, a move Leonard and Virginia had hoped would ensure both its continued relevance and its longevity.

  Leonard and Virginia had gone to London a week or so before to have lunch with Lehmann, and it was then that Leonard had given Lehmann the good news that Virginia had finished Between the Acts. Lehmann had been enthusiastic, asking to see the manuscript, and he had congratulated Virginia on her accomplishment, or he had attempted to do so, but she had cut him short in a flurry of the same disparaging remarks that she had made to Leonard on the downs.

  Leonard had listened to all of it again, but he had offered no critical view. True, he had not considered this latest novel to be her best work, but he by no means shared her distaste for it. He’d fought her off on this point as tactfully as he’d been able, assuring her, quite honestly, that this was, in fact, a worthy book, and not trivial in the least. But he had done little if any good, and he had been relieved when she’d let the subject drop.

  After this, they had walked in silence for some time, taking in the lovely roll and sweep of the downs and the dramatic span of what she liked to call a Constable sky, its bright blue back gleaming through great swaths of changeable cloud. They listened to the river chattering nearby, and spotted a grey heron in flight, its long, balletic legs stretching languorously behind.

  Then they had begun to speak about death. This in itself was not strange. They had done so often since the fall of France the previous June, a debacle that had made Nazi occupation of the British Isles seem inescapable and imminent. They, as well as many of the couples they knew, including Vita and Harold, had spent the intervening months renewing their pledges to die together on their own terms rather than allow themselves to be interned in a concentration camp. As a Jew, he could expect no alternative, and as the nonconformist wife of one, she’d said she would not accept one.

 
; This was all routine. War talk. But then—and this, he realizes now, had not been the strange thing, but the strangest thing—Virginia veered again.

  “When a fetus comes alive in the womb,” she’d asked, “what tells its heart to start beating?” As she’d said it, she’d stopped walking and turned to look at him quizzically, as if she were a girl pondering the mysteries of life and he was her father, the man of sensible remove, with all the answers. But she hadn’t waited for him to speak. Instead, she’d begun walking again, leaving him standing there at a loss.

  “And when it does begin,” she’d added airily over her shoulder from a few paces on, “why then? Why exactly then and not a moment before or after?”

  He’d begun to follow her, still a pace or so behind, still trying to work out what she was about, when she’d stopped once more, turned and said, “And why cannot death be as painless as that? Or as timely? The music simply ending, as it began, without struggle, without knowledge, without thought. Why must the life be shaken out of us when it has been so softly, so smoothly put in?”

  He had had no answer for this, of course, and they had merely stood on the hillside facing each other with the wind gusting over the long grasses, whipping their hair and clothing and spooling the temperamental white-grey skeins of cloud across the valley. They could see the river clearly from there, weaving through the sodden water meadows, the chalk escarpments and the whole of the wide majestic weald, mottled with grazing sheep.

  At last he had moved to go, taking up her hand, which she had not offered him, but which she had merely let fall into his grasp and lie there, impassive and cold. He’d led her more than accompanied her home, and they had spoken only intermittently, of incidental things: the way, the smattering of rain they’d encountered a mile or so from the house, dinner.

  He could remember nothing else important. Had he overlooked it? Possibly. What had brought about the change? They had been talking as they often did, more breezily even, more objectively, than usual. Then one of her anomalies had descended, a sudden barometric plunge, and that had been that. These are patterns he knows well—the only pattern, of course, being the lack of pattern. He does not really expect to find the tipping point, nor does it really matter if he does. The tip is the thing, the fact of it, the turbulence coming on and his response to it. “Right the ship! Right the ship!” blares the klaxon. “All hands on deck.” But his hands are like her hands in this, undone.

  The proximate cause had been the book, of course. It always was. And its connection to, its standing in for, bearing a child—that, too, was well worn. But it had been the leap from the likening of life’s beginning to its end that had chilled as much as it had moved him, and as he thinks about it now, he is beginning for the first time to see why. It had not been the talk of death. That was usual. It had not been the transitive link she’d made between her creative output, the lack of children in their lives, and death. Given the atmosphere, her patterns of thought, it had made a Virginian kind of sense.

  But something about this last thought throws him over, and the realization that he’s been looking for overtakes him with painful conviction. No, of course, he scolds, those were simply the words, the ideas floating on the surface of her conversation. How could he have been so easily fooled when it was almost an adage with her? It was how she separated men from boys, how her method was achieved: Shiny pretty things conceal meaning. The dolt falls for them every time.

  The obviousness of this strikes him with such a convulsion of conscience and shame that he wants to break something or rush out into the garden and tear apart all his handiwork. How can he have been so stupid? Now, when discernment is what is most required. Now, after all these years, and when he has just proclaimed himself the expert.

  His brain is screaming. She was not saying anything philosophical or poetic in the least, you idiot. It was calculatingly practical. She was trying to work out how to kill herself, as quickly, as smoothly (that had been her word) and as painlessly as possible.

  At this, he leaps up from the chair. He must find her. Where the devil is she? He calls to Louie and she comes, but she can tell him only that she thinks—she cannot be sure—that Mrs. Woolf has gone out for a walk.

  Thursday

  LEONARD AND VIRGINIA had arrived on time at Dr. Wilberforce’s surgery, 24 Montpelier Crescent, Brighton, shortly after three. Leonard had agreed to wait for Virginia in another part of the house. He knows it well, for this is also where Octavia has made her home with Elizabeth. Since the start of the war, Elizabeth has been in the United States, but prior to this, Leonard and Virginia had called on the couple socially many times. Today Octavia will give them another ration of her milk and cream. It is too soon for fruit, so they have brought her a bouquet of the season’s first crocuses and jonquils.

  Though Virginia had insisted to both Octavia and Leonard that an examination of whatever kind was entirely unnecessary, to soothe Leonard’s agitation she had complied with the arrangement. Immediately upon arriving, she had followed Octavia into the surgery, undressed, had her temperature taken—it was low—and allowed herself to be duly palpated and auscultated by the madam physician, none of which had resulted in anything more than a statement of the obvious. Virginia is not measurably ill, but clearly she is not well. One look at her will tell even a stranger on the street that something is very wrong. Everyone who has seen her recently has noticed. She is emaciated. Her eyes and cheeks are so sunken, her bones so prominent and the skin stretched so tightly across them at her clavicles and wrists that she looks like a marionette.

  They have come directly from the surgery into the sitting room adjacent to have what they are calling their visit, but which Virginia knows to be some foolhardy attempt at psychotherapy. Let her try, then, she thinks coldly. See how far she gets.

  Octavia Wilberforce is a stout, mannish woman of that particularly hearty old English country stock that was built to breed and to endure. Had she been born a man, she might have ridden the fields imposingly on horseback, overseeing the season’s crop, or perhaps governed a far-flung colony, had her portrait painted and then hung it in the hall beside all the other somber, long-nosed forebears of her clan. Her forehead is very high and prominent and ends in a receding hairline from which her unremarkable but unruly brown hair sweeps back and outward in a crowning coif. She has a slight double chin and no lips to speak of. Her eyes are stretched lengthwise and rather far apart, which gives her the vaguely disapproving look of someone who is not easily played for a fool.

  This is not the blessed face you would choose to behold on your deathbed, but it can be confessed to nonetheless. It has about it just the right bovine imperturbability, but with none of the stupidity attached. This might work in some measure after all, Virginia concedes, almost hopefully.

  “Do you know why I called him Septimus?” she says abruptly.

  Octavia is thrown. “Septimus?”

  “Yes. Septimus Warren Smith. You remember, the mad young man in Dalloway who throws himself from the window to his death.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, of course,” Octavia replies. “I’m sorry. Why did you call him Septimus?”

  “Because I was the seventh child. There were eight of us in all, by both of my parents’ two marriages.”

  “Yes, so there were,” Octavia says. “So there were. I had not realized that you were the seventh. And, of course, Septimus is you.”

  “Well, in part, yes,” Virginia says. “As are many of the other characters—Clarissa, Sally, even Peter. All pieces of me. You and I did not know each other then—it was almost twenty years ago now when I was composing it—but you have been kind enough in recent months to let me probe you about your own history, and I have only just put this naming bit together. You also came from a brood of eight, did you not?”

  “Yes. I was the eighth of eight, and so named.”

  “Ah, then. So, you see, here we are, Septimus and Octavia, seventh and eighth. Siblings, almost. How strange these correspondences
are. They seem to be multiplying just now. I am seeing them more and more.”

  Octavia does not like the sound of this. “Because you are looking,” she says.

  “And”—Virginia smiles to soften the correction—“because they are there.”

  They have always disagreed about such things. Octavia is, by nature and training, firmly on Leonard’s side of the divide, brashly sensible and dismissive of any mystic tendency or shade of the occult. Those are not really the right terms for what Virginia is getting at, but even “metaphysics” is a word Octavia would utter only with extreme prejudice, or as a rebuttal, exclaiming it above the fray, in the style of the logical positivists. She’d have done well at Cambridge.

  True to form, Octavia pauses, unwilling to press the point of what may or may not be, so to speak, there. Instead, she goes back to the name, and asks, a touch reproachfully, “About Septimus, you were thinking of the past, were you not? The time when you, too, threw yourself from a window, and to the same purpose?”

  “Not successfully, alas.”

  Octavia chooses to ignore this. She does not indulge self-pity in illness. And when it is mixed, as it is so potently in Virginia, with the grandiosity of social class—or perhaps it is simply bohemian pretense, she does not care to differentiate—it is a luxury she will not countenance.

  “It was during the breakdown that followed your father’s death, was it not?” she says, with an unavoidable clutch of the schoolmarm in her voice.

  For a long moment Virginia does not answer. She is staring at the floor. Her hands are cold and shaking in her lap.

  “I am not referring to my father,” she says at last.

  “All right. Then what?”

  “I was thinking of Septimus’s condition and particularly of the last war. The treatment and,” she hesitates on the damning word, “the harm.”