Vanessa and Her Sister

by Priya Parmar

  Later

  A difficult conversation after supper tonight. Thoby spoke of how Mother was the quieter and the more reserved of our parents, yet how everyone still remembers her best. Virginia felt compelled to stand up for Father’s crashing, keen, razored intellect. Adrian looked stricken, as he does whenever we talk of Mother. He was her last baby, and her favourite.

  8 September 1905—Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

  “But she only sent two chapters! What am I supposed to do with two chapters—and not even the first two!” Virginia said, striding into the room, waving loose pages in her hand. Nelly had sent her unfinished novel to Virginia for criticism. I collected it from the post office this morning.

  “Mmm.” Not a satisfactory answer for Virginia. I was trying to flesh out a rambunctious bit of the sea by adding undertones of red and ochre. Whistler often used that technique to much better effect. My sea now looks like a shallow puddle flocking over river mud.

  “Nessa!”

  “And what do you think of the pages?” I asked, dipping my brush in turpentine.

  “I have not read them, of course. How can I? It is incomplete.” She thumped down onto the striped canvas deck chair.

  “Maybe you should try?”

  Later

  Now Virginia likes the chapters. Her brisk weather vane shifts leave me dizzy.

  “They are very good,” Virginia pronounced, crumbling her teacake rather than eating it.

  “Even though they are not the beginning?” I asked with a light hand of mischief.

  She sat very still. “You know they could be. Why not? Why must a novel begin at the beginning? Who declares such a rule? Who defends it?”

  I looked at her, concerned. “You sound medieval when you talk like that.”

  “I feel medieval. Like an armoured knight on a roan warhorse riding into the blood-soaked fray.”

  “The blood-soaked fray being Nelly’s novel? Not much of a warrior—she’s deaf,” I said.

  “No, the wider, oppressive fray.” Virginia’s voice was growing louder. “The can and can’t, do and don’t fray of convention in literature that I hate.”

  “And you are going to take it on?” I could not keep the scepticism from my voice.

  “Yes,” she said, and walked off towards Godrevy Lighthouse.

  I watched her pick up her lean, snapping gait. Virginia is always in motion. Her tempo is staccato and quick. Even when her body rests, her mind tumbles over and over like a lock. Her way is acquisitive. She is always interested in more—more affection, more attention, more contact, more safety, more warmth, more secrets. Her writing never catches its breath either. As soon as she has settled on a style, she grows bored with it. The freshness lost, she discards it and seeks something new. I worry she can never be still and happy at the same time. Her imagination feeds itself on motion.

  Very late—my blue room, chilly night

  I do not doubt Virginia’s talent. I know she is gifted. But mine is a deliberate, remembered knowing: as if it is a hat I must try not to lose. And then sometimes she is changed. Sometimes she arches away from me and wears a light halo of genius about her. Then she is not my Virginia at all. At those times I feel horribly earthbound and built of base metals.

  TENNIS WHITES

  Sunday 24 September 1905—Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

  Packing up for our return. I salt away the least noticeable items first. Virginia is unravelled by change and will start to fret. She has taken to walking out to Godrevy Lighthouse in the afternoons, and that is when I nip round the house lifting a beach towel here and an already-read book there.

  FIRST TO GO:

  Flower vases

  Bedroom slippers

  Dickens

  LAST TO GO:

  Striped bathing costumes

  Straw hats

  Austen

  26 September 1905—Cornwall (bright blue day)

  “Ant. Ant. Ant.”

  I looked over at Virginia. She was sitting on her lawn chair, loosely holding her pen but not writing. Her index finger was smudged with ink.

  “Ant. Ant. Ant. Ant.”

  “Dearest?” I asked gently. “Ant who?”

  “Ant ant,” Virginia said, as if stating the obvious.

  Thoby came round the white stone path and dropped into a chaise longue.

  “Ant. Ant. Ant,” Virginia directed at Thoby.

  “Yes. Good word, ‘a-n-t,’ ” he said, drawing out the small, sharp, pointy sounds. “Tricky word in crosswords. Always more of an ending: ‘defendant, accountant.’ ”

  “Ant,” said Virginia to no one.

  “Ant?” asked Adrian coming up the lawn, his hair still wet and smelling of the sea. “Ginia, have we got ants?”

  I looked at Virginia. She had grown bigger in the last few minutes. Rounded and settled, like a spider who is sure of her breakfast. She had caught everyone in her nonsense web. They were each wrapped and bundled and waiting for the spider feast. And she did it with a tiny word.

  Virginia has been invited to teach writing at Morley College this term. She will charm her students into sailor’s knots.

  28 September 1905

  Sat on a long summer lawn and watched Thoby and Adrian play tennis. The last few days of the holiday are always the sweetest. The unspent mornings are more precious, and the days more frugally divided. The rules break, and the habits bend out of shape. These were the days when Mother would allow us to have nursery tea with sandy feet and salty fingernails as we four wrung the last hours of tumbling sunshine from the summer.

  Now the cases lie half-open all over the house, and my canvases will never dry in time. Annoying, but I had to work on them today in the last of the loose blue-gold Cornish light. I will have to have them sent on next week. I will miss it here.

  FRIDAY EVENINGS IN AUTUMN

  5 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (summer dusk)

  We are back.

  Somewhere else, the tide rolls in. The tide rolls out. London’s elegant lines are printed in street dirt. I only want to paint the sea.

  7 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

  The colours in my head, the colours in my heart, and the colours in my hours do not match up. My head wants to play with the textured gloss of clear white: the bruised shadows of pink, and the silver of the sunlight riding on the wave. My heart wants to plunge into the open-water freshness of the richest, purest, bluest blue, and my hours are muddied with the wrangling, tangled, sparrow browns of my family.

  Thoby cannot get enough peace to work although what he is working on remains a mystery. He is meant to be reading for the bar but I am sure that on most days he is not. Adrian likewise professes his need to get “work” done, but instead he is nearly always playing the piano. Virginia rolls her eyes, lifts her brows, and talks of offices and deadlines and bylines—as if to proclaim her work to be authentic in the face of their play work. I suppose it is true, as she so often reviews for the TLS now.

  My work I keep to myself. Painting does not qualify as work in this family of literati. Work is not work where words are not involved. The unfixed mark of paint alters when it alteration finds. The distribution of colours is a curious sort of hobby to them. A lightweight experiment with insubstantial shade instead of the integrity-bound dimensional shape of letters on a page.

  “Writing is real expression, Nessa,” Virginia said, refusing the rosemary potatoes Sophie had made especially for her.

  “Virginia, those were made at your request,” I said steadily as Maud took the covered dish back down to the kitchen.

  I knew Sophie had used the last of her squirreled-away rosemary on them this afternoon. Sophie is always worried about “Miss Ginia” and her tendency not to eat. She shakes her head and makes noises about Lady Stephen disapproving of wasted food. It is true. Mother did hate to see food wasted. But even Mother could not get Virginia to eat. Only Thoby can do that.

  “No good, Ginia? They looked good to me,” Adrian said gamely
.

  Nothing.

  “Dearest, try. You know we all want you to eat,” I said, automatically cajoling her into nutrition.

  “Violet says she is heading towards the savage land of Oklahoma, where water buffalo run through the town and people dress in feathers and paint,” Virginia said loudly to no one.

  “Dearest, I think that was in the last century,” I said, trying to rope Virginia back into the realm of the everyday.

  “Violet wrote and told me that she was taken captive and held at arrowpoint for two days.”

  “And then got diphtheria, I suppose?” Adrian asked waspishly.

  “Do just eat, Ginia,” Thoby said, laying down his book.

  Maud, hearing Thoby’s intervention, sensed her cue and returned with the potatoes.

  11 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

  We have been home a week and I am still restless and unsettled. I have the loose-ended feeling of looking, looking. What am I looking for? Looking for substance, looking for a moment I do not understand. Is that just how this part of life is? Do we ever have the sensation of finding, of arriving? I worry that life is always in the future and I am always here, in the preamble, straightening up the cushions so that life will go smoothly once it does begin. How does it start?

  I have the outstretched feeling of wanting to seek Clive’s advice, on the Friday Club, on my paintings, on my hats. Perhaps because I know he would have a definite opinion. He does not waffle as I do. He speaks and then acts. I like those short, explosive verbs.

  No. Vanessa. Descend a storey. Round the stone steps of the curtain wall. Do I just seek an excuse to speak to him? I rummage for the truth and find handfuls of my own deceptiveness. Yes, no? Even I do not know the answer.

  Later (past midnight)

  He told me I am beautiful. Our family ostensibly values brilliance over beauty. Of course, underneath, Father expected beauty too. Tonight I closed the door and sat at my dressing table and looked in the glass, looked to see what Clive sees. I have never felt beautiful. I compare myself to the women in my family. I suppose all women do that. Mother was too hollowly drawn to be pretty, but she was arresting. Stella’s good nature made her far more alluring than the sum of her features. Then there is Virginia. Everyone turns to look at Virginia. Narrow and ethereal, Virginia’s beauty haunts.

  And me? I look critically, as I would at an artist’s model. My face is a pure oval. My eyes are heavily lidded, and my mouth turns down at the corners, giving my expression a gravity I did not earn. Overlarge for my face, my eyes are a widely set soft blue-grey, like washed slate. My skin is apple pink because I never remember my hat. My conker-brown hair escapes the loose knot at my neck and is never tidy. My hands are strong but long and white. I have paint under my nails. My figure is more womanly than Virginia’s ascetic frame. I try to like it but often feel lumpy rather than purposefully curved. I look unfamiliar.

  Friday 13 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (still warmish)

  Tea with Aunt Anny and Virginia this afternoon was huge fun. My God, she is an eccentric old thing. Today she spoke to Virginia and me at length about the great merits of wearing woollen underwear and comfortable shoes.

  Later, over dinner, I described the conversation to Thoby and Adrian. “That’ll be you someday, Nessa,” Adrian said as Sloper cleared away the soup bowls, “dropping round to make sure I clean my ears and change my socks.”

  Everyone laughed but me. I do not want to become that someday.

  And—At homes start up next week. Must order more cake. I feel nervous and restless and out of practise. It has been three months.

  Monday 16 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

  Friday nights—for artists. Shape. Colour. Light. Depth. The fractured, messy journey of image.

  I hope people come. I want so much. I want these nights to be brave. I want to elbow words out of the way and give art the floor. In Cornwall, I felt wrapped in such a sense of what was possible. Each canvas soaked up the paint hungrily. The brush thrummed with purpose. It was not the outcome that mattered but the doing. I want to bottle that feeling and serve it to my guests.

  But will the evening work? I hope Friday catches some of Thursday’s magic like a sniffle on an omnibus. Maybe Thoby is right and conviction is everything.

  My rules are simple and clear. We must dispense with insincere politeness—that vapid veneer of untruth that smothers London drawing rooms. Our well-mannered social deceit must not die a private death but a court-ordered hanging in the public square. The anarchic animal that is left will be a dangerous and hot-blooded thing. Unruly and impossible to predict. But alive.

  And—I have hung Great-aunt Julia’s best photographs in the upstairs hall. A long, slim row. The talented women of my family give me credibility. Why do I fret so? I tell myself it is only a party.

  Friday 20 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (unseasonably warm)

  It worked. The result was good. Not incandescent, but solidly good. The Thursday friends blended with the newly coalesced Friday friends, and the result was complete. The evening happened. Arts and letters: circles drawn and understood. Lytton hurled himself headlong into the spirit of the thing and interrogated Mr Derwent Lees—a young Australian painter who looks enough like Duncan to cause Lytton distress—about the nature of blue.

  Gripping the young man’s hand, Lytton wailed, “The melancholy, the drama, the pure forlorn character of blue undoes me. Ugh, Mother needs her hankie.” The astonished Mr Lees tried to retrieve his hand. Poor man. He was taking the brunt of Lytton’s unhappiness over Duncan’s increasing silence.

  Clive rolled his eyes and mutely appealed to Desmond, the good-natured diplomat, for help in rescuing the unsuspecting painter.

  “Yes, but another blue, a clear, French, new-day blue, can speak of promise and renewal,” Desmond called out, rising to join the discussion.

  “How Napoleonic,” Lytton said, shooting him a sulky look of spoiled fun.

  “Yes, how Napoleonic,” Desmond said, dropping into the other basket chair, taking the statement at value, and plunging into the question. “Red, white, and blue—the Americans and the French both chose their revolutionary flags from the same energetic palette. There must be some concealed engine in that tricolour combination.” Desmond can talk to anyone about anything and make it sound both vital and charming.

  Clive proved a masterful puppeteer. He is the truest bridge of arts and letters I know. He brought butter-yellow roses. I was so pleased to find him at the door and would not have preferred wildflowers at all.

  And—Clive spent a long time looking at the photographs in the hall. He had had no idea that Julia Margaret Cameron was our aunt. He recognised her work immediately.

  Later (late, curled in my dressing gown with a mug of milk)

  In a roomful of friends, artists, and colleagues, I look for Clive. When we speak, I do not look over his shoulder and worry about the sandwiches or the coffee or the comfort of the other guests. I am no longer the ringmaster, urging the circus horses forward. I am where I need to be and that is enough—the rest can take care of itself.

  Clive. I am on home ground when I am with him. Perhaps it is because Clive blends artistic sympathy and family friendship as no one else in the room does? No. Not even I believe that. Love, then? Is this what it feels like? Safety? Warmth? Comfort? Is that enough? Can I live without the thudding in the blood, the thrashing drama I always expected to feel? Maybe I have left it too long and am too old for that now? Perhaps. But I am not ready yet, I think. I am not done with this free, four-step, Stephen part of my life.

  69 LANCASTER GATE

  LONDON W.

  3 November 1905

  Dear Woolf,

  Our weeks have grown more exciting. Intrepid Vanessa has devised a Friday evening at home to round out our Thursday thorniness. But she is uninterested in any particular brand of artistry. It is conviction and risk that compel her. She is not a disciple of any school but carefully selects sacred tenets for her
three-dimensional faith from many temples. Likewise her salon does not endorse any one methodology, but rather it endorses effort. Effort and discipline are her twin gods.

  Her evening changed the pitch of my week—gave it more verve and substance. The hungry young artists were so animated. One young painter actually beat his chest to make his point—thrillingly primal.

  Virginia sat in the centre of the room, pinched and silent and affecting a bored expression. Her only comments (fired at close range into an unsuspecting crowd) centred on language. Her meaning was clear: image must lay flowers at the feet of text. She expected support from me and looked shrewish when, instead of taking her juicy bait, I threw myself headlong into a discussion of temperature: the loveless coldness of a world painted in blue. The loveless coldness of a world without the ripe, warming undertones of Duncan.

  Bell was Vanessa’s champion. Backing her utterly, he juggled the writers and artists, pairing unlikely people and ironing the night smooth. He made the party memorable. Guessing that Bell held Vanessa’s strength, Virginia went for broke and attempted to bring the circus tent crashing down. It is her way. Do not mistake me. Beautiful Virginia is full of malice, but she is not malicious. It is just how she is built. She is governed by different forces than we. This is important to understand as I do so want you to like her. In fact, I think you ought to marry her. Was that too unexpected? Should I have let you come to that conclusion on your own? Dommage.