She pauses on the implication in this, to make Octavia hear it. She brings her hands to her lips, to warm and settle them and to prolong the effect of what she has just said, then drops the hands back into her lap with a dull thud, as if they are broken things with which she can do nothing. Shifting once more to her purpose, she continues. “As a doctor, did you never have occasion, at that time when you were at the war hospital, surely to . . . ”
Virginia is troubled by how to say this well. Her eyes stray anxiously about the room. Her hands have come alive again without her realizing. They are fidgeting in front of her, seemingly of their own accord, as if they are trying to knit but do not know how. These are dangerous signs. Octavia leans forward in her chair and takes hold of the bucking hands. Their iciness is shocking, but she betrays nothing as she lowers her face very close to Virginia’s and gazes firmly at her.
“To do what?” she says softly.
Virginia’s eyes suddenly stop pinging, and lock with startling ferocity on Octavia’s.
“To do nothing,” she says emphatically. There is a pulse of anxiety in her throat that half strangles the words.
Octavia is not keen on this line of inquiry, nor on the obvious effect it is having on her patient. She has the familiar sense, as she so often has with her old friend, of being led, but she will follow only so far.
“What do you mean, nothing?” she declares more than asks.
The word “nothing” has a jab in it that warns, but Virginia evades it, taking a warier tone.
“Those soldiers, like Septimus, psychologically destroyed yet being forced to resume ‘normally.’” She pauses, considering this, then changes her mind. “Actually, no, perhaps that’s wrong. This will be more immediate for you—not those like Septimus, but the ones whom no one could mistake, those who had been defaced and mangled beyond resemblance.”
Octavia pulls away.
“You know nothing of that reality,” she says testily. “You know only abstractions.”
“I was not there on the field or in triage, if that’s what you mean,” Virginia says, recoiling, too. “Though that is hardly a fault. Still, I believe I knew enough. I am thinking in particular of the drawings that were done in the surgeries, the places you were. At the time, my sister had access to some of Henry Tonks’s pastels through the Slade, and she showed them to me. The faces of those men—it was a parade of horrors.”
Octavia explodes.
“A parade? I have no need of your descriptions of the pastels you saw in a parade, or of the sanitized infirm you spied hunkering in Bloomsbury. I saw the beastliness raw, firsthand, unfiltered. And as for the renderings of artists on the subject, well, that was pure voyeurism and conceit. These were not subjects. These were not props for an argument against war. These were men. Maimed, denatured, sacrificed men.”
“You sound just like my nephew Julian,” Virginia says.
“Then I should think him a very sensible young man.”
“He’s dead. And he wasn’t sensible at all about war. He died nearly four years ago in Spain.”
That’ll take the spunk out of her, Virginia thinks. And it does, momentarily.
“He joined the Republicans?” Octavia asks.
“He drove an ambulance,” Virginia replies, making it clear that she will entertain no further questions about Julian or his views on war.
“Virginia,” Octavia says, after a mystified pause, “why, of all things, are you speaking of this now, when we are in the midst of another war, the threat of destruction literally hanging over us so low that we can see the swastikas on their tail fins?”
“Now it is you who do not need to tell me,” Virginia cries, her hands beginning to jump again. “Those planes have flown over our garden in broad daylight. They fly back and forth above us every night on their bombing runs to London. I am well acquainted, thank you, with the threat of these days. I am not linking wars frivolously, or their victims. I am not putting my abstractions in place of your carnage. You are missing—oh, you will make me too angry now.”
She waves a dismissive hand and turns half away. Now they are both sitting very stiffly at attention. The ticking of the brass-faced mahogany clock on the wall and the tightness of their breathing are the only sounds.
Octavia will wait. She knows that she has lost her temper, which is a sorer point in her practice than it would be if she had not had to fight so hard for it. She has emotional control, but in this unaccustomed role as adjunct psychiatrist to a friend, not enough. Not nearly enough. She knows that she must listen less reactively, and Virginia must go on of her own accord.
There is a softening now between them that comes of knowing what is at stake. It happens quickly when they are sharp with each other like this, because of the strain. It is ever-present, the friendship, the struggle, women, the profession, the finer balance required, yet so often lost. They forgive each other instantly for all the harshest things, even as the disagreements persist.
“Fine, then,” Virginia says. “We will speak in the present tense.” She is in full possession of her forces now. “These horrors you point to, they are not fresh to me. But I assure you, they are quite familiar. I knew them first as a young girl, and they have been with me all my life. I have lived in their shadow always, even as I have gone on with what was expected. All these years, as the ghost of me proceeded, or seemed to, at meals, at tasks, at gatherings, some piece of me remained apart, terrified, while the partygoers went on unawares. In this I have always been strange. But now, as the commonplace horrors of the war encroach, you, too, all of you, the average, are set apart from the habitual mundane. You, too, feel horror, the same commensurate, explicable horror that is being felt in common by everyone around you. Well, I say welcome to it, because, you see, I am not surprised. I felt this horror as a child, just standing before a puddle in a garden path. I have felt it many times since, sitting in the bath or standing in a shaft of sun slicing through apple blossoms. But now, at last, blithe being has caught up to me. The outer and the inner crises have met. Now, when the horrors are everywhere, when the world is a whirlwind of shared distress, I am snug in the storm’s eye. I am home.”
Octavia can say nothing at first. She is caught by the pity of this, as Virginia intended her to be, humbled as if by a slap to the face. There is no refuting it. Here is a hell she has never known. Her clinician’s hauteur shrivels under it, again, as Virginia knew it would. She is ashamed of having been angry, and perhaps unfair about the wounded men, but she is also irked by having fallen into the rhetorical trap that she sensed all along was being set for her. With Virginia, this always inheres. Octavia tries to weaken her resentment, and with it the underlying sense that they are in a battle of wills, but the stiffness is still there in her voice when she says, at last, “What is it, then, that you are asking me?”
“I was asking you about those men. Those particular men that you saw and knew and ministered to in the hospital.”
Again Octavia cannot help prickling. “And what of them?”
They are back where Virginia wants to be, and it is infuriating.
“Did you never think . . . did they themselves at times . . . not ask you to desist . . . to mitigate their suffering by . . . ”
But Octavia cannot let her go on. The point is too sore.
“You have not the first notion of their suffering,” she erupts. “I will not speak any more of this.”
Virginia is quicker this time. Having expected the outburst, she evades it in one turn, and presses on more surely.
“Then speak of me. Sufferings are not comparable, I do realize. I cannot know theirs, and they—you—cannot know mine. I am not asking you to. I am merely trying to find in your experience, your practice as a doctor, something to help you grasp—”
“I believe I can grasp,” Octavia snaps, “and without your help, whatever it is that you have to say.”
Virginia sighs and folds her arms firmly across her chest. She slides her hands into her armpit
s, trying again to warm them, and to ward off the worst of the misunderstanding.
“Then ‘grasp’ is not what I mean,” she says more plaintively. “I cannot say what I mean anymore. Still, I must say this. I need to say this to someone. To you. I know that you will not want to understand it, but I am asking you to try. Please, Octavia. There is no one else.”
The turnabout is sudden, and Octavia feels the pang of her own harshness, as well as the love that is between them.
“But how could I not want to understand? Have we not spoken together of many difficult things, Virginia? Have I not done so willingly? Usefully?”
“This is different.”
“How?”
“It will be much more difficult.”
“Tell me why.”
“It will be difficult for you more so than for me, and—you are right, I said this stupidly just now—not because it is difficult to grasp, but because it is difficult to concede. I do know you, Octavia, a little. You will not agree, and that is the least of it. You will loathe this instinctively. You will not hear of it, and so, I fear, you will not hear it, and that is why you will not understand.”
“So, you mean ‘understand,’ then, as in ‘agree.’ No, it was more than that. You said ‘concede.’ You need me to concede?”
“I need you not to act.”
Octavia pauses to adjust to this twist. She knows, of course, what Virginia means, but she had not expected her to say it quite this way.
“I see,” she says finally.
“Do you?”
“Well, it is only implied, as it ever is with you. You have not said the words. But yes, I believe I see where you are leading.”
“And will you follow?”
“I don’t know, Virginia. I really don’t know. I can listen. That much I can promise you. I can talk, if that will be of use to you. And I can do so as carefully as I am able, knowing you, and knowing the perils of too forceful an intervention in your case. But I cannot say that I will sit by and nod approvingly at everything you say, or indulge you in these flights to which you are prone. I would not do so in any argument with anyone. That is my way. You know it. You expect it, and I think you respect me for it. You could not have come here thinking that would change.”
“No. Indeed not. And that is why you are unique. The others are too close, too convinced of their clear-sightedness and my lack of it, to see clearly or discuss openly matters that frighten them, and which, in the end, are mine alone to decide. But you are just close enough, and just remote enough, to meet me where I am. Or you can be, if you are willing. I believe now that Leonard was right in this, after all. I did not come here thinking this, but I am beginning to see what it could mean. I know that what I will be asking you to do will not be easy for you, as my doctor and my friend. I know that you will fight it, because that is what you do, but I hope that you will do so in this room alone with me, without the threat of forceful intervention. I cannot have that. I have seen it done to other women, and I will not allow it to be done to me.”
“So you are to dictate terms.”
Octavia is turning pink around the eyes and nose. Her mouth is a tight line.
“If that is what you call it, then yes,” Virginia says. “I say only this: Do not force me to Septimus’s means.”
“Do I understand you?” Octavia cries. “You propose to throw yourself from the window if I do not consent?”
“It is not a proposition.”
“No. Indeed. It is a threat.”
“Don’t reduce it to the absurd, Octavia. You are not a simpleton.”
“How gracious of you to say so,” Octavia says, more acidly than she’d meant to. Hearing herself, she stops, and tries smoothing the taut front of her skirt. She takes several deep breaths to regain her composure, but she is too annoyed to calm herself fully.
“It is you who are behaving like a child,” she says. “An adolescent, actually, a hormonal, histrionic adolescent. Are we still in Brighton, or have we been transported suddenly to the West End? It is too absurd, Virginia. There is no one watching. It is just the two of us here in the surgery. You cannot elevate this to a performance. You cannot supplant life with art, nor death for that matter. Do not gloss it simply to disguise the fact that you are doing nothing more exalted than playing the part of the thwarted ingénue who would have her way at any cost.”
“No. Not my way,” Virginia asserts. “My choice. I would have my choice. But you would leave me without one. That is the difficult fact that you do not wish to acknowledge. The point is not that Septimus threw himself from the window, but why he did so. So, I ask you. Think of it. Why did he? Well, his answer is mine. To avoid being committed.”
“He committed the crime of self-murder.”
“In defiance of the greater crime of committing a person against his will.”
Exasperated, Octavia says, “Oh, Virginia, derangement deprives us all of choices. Doctors and patients alike. That, perhaps, is its greatest theft. I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“But that is just it,” Virginia says. “I am not deranged. Not now. I am on the verge of becoming so again. There is a great difference. These are not the arguments of madness. They are not crooked. They are not obscure. They are perfectly clear.”
“And what precisely is it that you think is so clear—aside, of course, from your unwillingness to properly address your condition?”
“What is clear—and with invasion looming, it is clear to every man and woman in the street, but it has been clear to me all along—what is clear, Octavia, is that death is certain.” Her eyes are immensely hard and shining, like polished river stones, and fixed on their target, boring into Octavia’s own as if they would burn through.
“But,” she continues, lifting her finger for emphasis—it is so wretchedly thin and pale that it has almost the opposite effect, but it is as steady as a spike—“if we are quick at the decisive moment, if we are not taken or struck down, and if we have not been forced by those who would care for us, then we may choose how we meet that certainty.”
In the fervor of the speech she has dropped the instructing pose, and now both her hands are placed in front of her, palms up, in a strangely contrary gesture of decisiveness and supplication. “I am asking for that choice,” she says.
Octavia is moved, but she will not yield or show it.
“And was it this same clarity,” she insists, “this same argument that informed your previous attempts? Were you making the informed, the unforced choice when you threw yourself from the window as a young woman, or later, when you took the overdose of veronal?”
Virginia hardly pauses on the answer, which has a sudden coldness and finality that she has not shown before—not today, and perhaps never before between them.
“I knew then what I know now. I told you. I knew it when I was very young.”
Octavia hears again the note of danger in these words, and knows, too, that it is new in their exchanges. But, she firmly reminds herself, she will remain as she is, whatever happens. She will not be drawn into panic, which is sitting there so oddly in Virginia, but as its more horrifying opposite, like a lizard, confident in the terror that it inflicts.
“And, for the simpleton, tell me again,” Octavia says stiffly. “What is it that you knew?”
“That death is an embrace.”
Virginia is abruptly softened by this pronouncement, which she has made dreamily, as if she were reading the last cozy line of a bedtime story to a child. She is looking off into her daydream, Octavia thinks, having scored the decisive touch, or so she believes. Octavia knows this line well, and will not rise to it, any more than she would to its saurian counterpart, which has just slithered artfully out of sight. If Octavia were not so alarmed, and if she were given to derision, she might be stifling a snort, but a kind of weary motherly displeasure is all that she can muster.
“My, how very dramatic,” she says, almost drolly. “We are back to the footlights. That is worthy of Juliet.�
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Virginia looks back sharply at her, surprised and angered at being mocked. Octavia, fueled by the unexpected thrill of an advantage, rushes on.
“But even a simpleton can see through you,” she says. “You have cleverly turned it all around, I’ll give you that, but the truth is far less flattering than the guise. You were not a savant, and you are not one now. You have simply failed to grow up. The truer way of saying it is not that you have always known, but that you know now nothing more than you knew then. This is a child’s romance, a child’s rash and flamboyant method carried through intact to the fancies of a fifty-nine-year-old woman who, I might add, is far too intelligent and wise not to know better.”
Virginia is strangely composed and, uncharacteristically, she ignores this insult.
“It’s true that my courses then were not as well chosen as they might have been. I left room for error and interference. But, as you say, I was young. I was eager.”
“Eager to escape,” Octavia says.
“No, precisely the opposite. It was always life that was the escape for me. Sanity was the diversion.”
Octavia is puzzled by this and almost intrigued, but she is also annoyed. To Virginia this has become a game.
“Escape? Diversion? From what?” she asks.
“Intimacy,” Virginia answers, again in the dream voice.
This has ruined any intrigue there might have been.
“Oh, nonsense,” Octavia says. “Romance . . . If you were so eager for this supposed intimacy, this embrace of death, then why did you not pursue it? Why did you not try again until you succeeded? Many years have passed since the last attempt.”
“We are all susceptible to diversion, are we not?” Virginia says, a look of guilty innocence stealing over her face. The mix is typical and perfected, one of the ways Virginia has of conniving with paradox.
“And my diversion,” she continues, now well in command, “has been perhaps more diverting than most. I was enraptured by it. I wanted to communicate what I had glimpsed, though I suspected from the start where this would lead. Expression, you see, carries the means of its own annihilation. Brought to its fullest consummation, its closest contact, it disintegrates. I have reached that point: the end of language. The rest is silence.”
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