by Priya Parmar
Vanessa is the centre we hold to, although she does not know it. Virginia bucked and wriggled like a dying fish in order to evade this awful thing, but Vanessa stood up when grief knocked at the door. She turned to it squarely and put out her hand and took its hat and coat. There was no need for an introduction. They had met before.
Funeral on Friday. Golders Green Crematorium. Bell has just sent me a note to say that he cannot go and would I take special care of Nessa? He knows he cannot get through such a grisly moment whole and does not want to come apart before her. It is not pride, I think, but care. It would do her no good. And so he is going birdwatching, to look for Thoby.
Look up, dearest Leonard. You may see him.
Such love,
Lytton
YES
22 November 1906—46 Gordon Square (sunny)
Yes. He asked again, and I have said yes. Yes. Yes.
Later (late afternoon)
I have come back to bed to selfishly think about myself. Out there, the house is engulfed in a thick, choking grief. The friends have gone, and Thoby’s study is empty. We are left to get on with it. There is nothing to wait for.
I will marry Clive. I turn the decision over like a dish, checking for flaws. After each death, Mother, Father, Stella, came a wrenching sea change; a new fiery alchemy, a different physics. I know it will happen again. I cannot lose Thoby and stay the same.
But Clive knows me now. Knew me before. There is no other man I could marry who would know this Nessa. And now I will not have to go through the next terrible part alone.
Outside I heard a robin singing in the square.
BEZIQUE
Roger Fry
The City Club of New York
55–57 West 44th Street
New York
22 November 1906
To my beloved Wife,
It is decided, I will return to you for the Christmas holiday. There was some scuffle about dates and salary, but it is settled now, and I shall be with you on Christmas Day. I have warned Mr Morgan and the trustees that I cannot keep this up indefinitely and must be allowed to work out of England. To be near you. Will you be pleased? I hope so. Your letters have been vague, my dear. I worry for you constantly. Please tell me the first moment you feel the awful sickness coming, and I will book passage at once. I cannot bear being so far from you.
Your own,
Roger
PS: I am sailing on the R.M.S. Baltic in case you should wonder but I know you will expect me when you see me. How patient you are.
23 November 1906—46 Gordon Square
The funeral. Friends he loved and words he loved. Mother. Father. Stella. And now Thoby. I was calm, removed, all my denial caged by defeat. We lost him.
Lytton took charge of Virginia, and I sat with Adrian and the aunts. Virginia was contained, and I had stopped fretting over her until she asked if anyone could smell burning. Aunt Anny blenched when Virginia began to sniff the air.
And—Letters: from Mr Henry James, Mr George Meredith, the aunts, and others. Famous others. The writers, the painters, the social lions. Father’s literary friends; Mother’s artist friends. I resent their interjection. Not yet, I think. I cannot bear to read them yet.
Later (writing in bed)
There are whole moments when I am happy. How utterly absurdly inappropriate. I have even been happy thinking of Thoby. I am going to marry his Mr Bell. I feel as though I can slip out of bed, walk softly down the hallway, and tell him. But he is not there. Maud changed the linen on his bed today. The linen is changed on Fridays whether Thoby has died or not.
He was happy. All his life. All his life. There is an all now: beginning and end. But then I suppose no one gets out alive.
Lately, in the last years especially, he has been so happy. Surely that is a good life? That is enough? Dear God, I hope so.
27 November 1906—46 Gordon Square
George and Gerald were pleased when I told them.
“Good man, Bell,” George said bluffly. I was surprised, as Clive’s passion is modern French art—not something I would think would impress George. He distrusts the French.
“You approve?” I asked.
“Man sits a horse well and goes to a good tailor. Says a lot about character, if you ask me.”
I think he is just pleased that I accepted someone.
Virginia is hollowed by grief. First losing Thoby, and now losing me. “But I am right here,” I keep telling her.
29 November 1906—46 Gordon Square
It took me three hours to persuade Virginia to have a bath this morning. Her hair was hanging in matted clumps. Now Adrian is trying to talk her into breakfast. The day does not work, does not flow into itself without Thoby. The day stumbles and stutters and has forgotten its gait. Clive does not try to step in and replace him, and I am grateful. It would ruin everything for us if he tried to play the part of Thoby.
Later
Virginia is reading Catullus. She is reading the poem he wrote on the death of his brother. She copied out a single line over and over into her writing notebook. It soothes something in her.
Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale. I looked it up. And forever, brother, hail and farewell.
Had he lived, Thoby would have liked that. Had he lived.
Friday 30 November 1906—46 Gordon Square
Virginia left her postcard for Violet, who is still down with typhoid but is improving, on the hall table to be posted today. Adrian was to take it when he went out.
“No change in Thoby’s temperature, but he did manage some milk this morning.”
Oh, Virginia. No.
1 December 1906—46 Gordon Square (late)
We were all in my sitting room, where we collect in the evenings now. Thoby’s friends stop by more often now rather than less. The house has become a hub, a shrine. It is like a busy railway station. Friends arriving, hurrying, waiting, leaving. Packages, hats, umbrellas left. Plans and schedules and people crisscross our day. When Virginia and I returned from tea with George and Margaret, I found Desmond and Lytton playing chess in Thoby’s study, and Adrian and Clive were reading the evening papers.
Sophie is unimpressed with our irregular visitors. No one adheres to invitations any more, so we no longer offer them. Instead, we just negotiate the day as it comes and whoever comes with it. They all feel closer to him here. As do we. We are all clinging together. We are all pretending we know what happens next.
“And so you will leave on Sunday?” Clive leaned down to tuck the blanket a little closer around me. I caught the edge of Virginia’s impatience. She cannot bear his propriety, his ease with me, and considers it temerity. Her mouth pressed into an obstinate line.
Lytton stretched his long thin legs towards the fire. “Yes, Adrian, you’ll come to Cambridge, won’t you? Keynes and James will both be there, and Harry Norton and Hilton Young too, possibly.”
I looked quickly at Virginia. We have all known Hilton Young and his brothers since childhood, when their father and ours would go mountaineering together, but he has behaved differently towards Virginia recently. But Virginia betrayed no reaction upon hearing his name.
“Saxon is hoping to come up, but I can already tell he won’t make it,” Lytton said, resettling his spectacles. “James and Headlam want to go and see this wretched Greek play, full of keening women and heavy-handed prophecy no doubt, but that beautiful young Rupert Brooke is rumoured to get into a state of dishabille, and that is certainly worth the train fare.”
“Yes, I will come, if, if … that is all right, Ginia?” Adrian asked.
Virginia and Adrian are house hunting in Bloomsbury, as it has been decided that Clive and I will take over the lease of 46 Gordon Square on our own. Virginia is full of “us and them” talk and does not like Adrian to stray far from town as they have so much to do. Adrian stands six foot five in his socks, but he always looks a bit shrunken and diminished when Virginia is in this mood.
I am relieved not to
be moving anywhere. Awful to admit but true, and as I am still taking the rest cure, the doctor does not want me to exert myself. I am hiding behind that, but then I moved us all here from Kensington—surely Virginia can manage to move round the corner?
“Walter Headlam is translating something from the Greek, isn’t he?” Virginia asked, ducking Adrian’s question. She knows very well that Walter Headlam is working on a new edition of Aeschylus. Adrian squirmed in his chair, too uncomfortable to ask his sister for permission again.
“Has Maynard found a job yet, Strache?” Clive asked.
“No. He is impossible. No employment meets his requirements. But then his requirements are absurd; something glorious and useful and of national importance? Ridiculous. He came second in the country in the civil service examination, something I find hilarious and he finds irksome. I hope he doesn’t follow Woolf into the wilds of empire. That would not do.” Lytton pushed his small round spectacles farther up his nose in a gesture of disgust.
“But Strache, you are going to write for MacCarthy, aren’t you?” Clive asked, steering the conversation away from the grinding stones of cynicism.
“I suppose I shall have to. It looks as if his strange little paper might actually happen. Extraordinary of Desmond to be part of something that functions.”
And—Virginia has asked everyone to write something about Thoby. Lytton says that it is more than he can bear. All his bright talk is skimmed over a huge deep of sadness.
7 December 1906—46 Gordon Square (icy)
I saw another of Virginia’s postcards to Violet today. It was lying on the silver tray in the hall waiting for Virginia’s afternoon walk to the post box.
“Not much change, but Thoby is cheerful today and asked for marmalade rather than butter. A good sign, I feel.”
Dear God, Virginia.
Later
Clive and I play bezique now, a game for two. It drives her mad. There is a part of me that just wants her to shore herself up and get on with it. But that is not her way. Instead she is writing daily postcards to Violet, tracking Thoby’s fictitious recovery.
“Shouldn’t we do something about it?” Even as I said it, I could feel myself nestling into the word: we. Clive and I were playing cards in Thoby’s study. “And the worst thing is, I left it there on the tray. I did not know what else to do.”
“Shall I talk to her?” Clive asked, winning the trick.
I like that. His preference is always for action rather than discussion.
“And say what? She will deny it.”
“But we have seen the postcards—surely she can’t disregard that. Bezique, forty points,” Clive said. A queen and a jack. “Are you warm enough, darling? Another blanket?”
It is amazing how quickly the endearments have begun to litter our talk. “She can. She can disregard anything she likes. The natural boundaries you feel do not apply to her. Double bezique. Four kings,” I reached for the score sheet. “Five hundred points.”
Still later
Adrian and Virginia found a house. 29 Fitzroy Square. George Bernard Shaw’s old house. It is in an elegant square, designed by Adam. A circle in a square. A compelling, concentric shape. The neighbourhood is just over Tottenham Court Road and a bit shabbier than here. Theirs is the only house not yet broken into flats. Lytton says that Duncan Grant, who is planning to study at the Slade next year, has taken a studio a few doors down. A tiny dilapidated room in no. 22.
8 December 1906—46 Gordon Square
“I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all,” Clive said, humping my suitcase onto the bed. “She just spun the argument round and round, and I got a bit lost.” He looked so surprised, not expecting to be fuddled by Virginia.
“It is her maddening charm. She can take what you assume is important and make it unimportant. Do I need a woollen dressing gown, do you think?”
I was laying out clothes for Maud to pack. Clive and I are going away for a few days to meet his family. I am terrified to meet them all. Lytton makes them out to be great hearty farm people who have converted to the genteel country life with huge unappealing zeal. But all he says can’t be true, surely?
“Yes, I could see it was charm, but there was no logic there, no order. I don’t understand her,” Clive said, handing me my washing kit.
“Order irritates her hugely. Be careful about suggesting it.”
And—Violet read about Thoby’s death in the newspaper and was appalled at Virginia’s deception and heartbroken for us. Virginia is contrite.
9 December 1906—46 Gordon Square
Virginia and Adrian signed a five-year lease at £120 a year, which leaves some money in their budget for repairs and improvements. And they will need some improvements. I met the architects today. Virginia was supposed to come but decided to stay and write, so Adrian and I went alone. I am feeling much stronger, but we still took a cab over there as Virginia and Clive both insisted. Clive said not to bother going at all and to let Virginia and Adrian sort out the renovations, but I know they won’t. The new house has electricity but needs a bath installed, so it really cannot wait.
We walked through the house, and besides the plumbing, several rooms need painting and the banisters and the floor in the hall need to be refinished. Virginia will have the whole of the second floor. I have tried to speak to her about paints and furniture but with no luck. We could clearly hear the clatter and boom of the traffic and noise from the street. They should have double windows put in.
When we got home, Virginia did not ask about the house.
10 December 1906—46 Gordon Square (cold and Christmassy)
This afternoon, over luncheon with Clive at Rules:
“And she just …”
“Yes, she accepted the reasoning and promised to correct it—not that it needs so much correcting now that Violet knows, but she has promised to apologise. Once she explained it, it was all very understandable, really,” Clive said, motioning for the waiter. “The lamb as well, darling?”
I waited for him to finish ordering and said, “What is understandable? How can Virginia writing letters to Violet every day describing Thoby’s recovery”—I stumbled over the word—“be understandable? She actually told Violet that she, Adrian, and Thoby were off to the New Forest this week.”
“She simply wanted it to be true. She wanted to pretend. And she did not want to frighten Violet. Remember, Violet is battling typhoid too, although Virginia says she is on the mend. This wine is excellent.”
I looked at his sleek, unbothered calm and felt snaking irritation.
“I also would like it to be true. I would like my brother to be recovering in his room right now,” I finally said. “I just do not give myself the luxury of pretending that he is.”
“Virginia has such an imagination—it is easy to see how it could happen.”
“Imagination?” I asked through gritted teeth.
And—Rules. The last time I went there, I was with Thoby. Each first without him sweeps my breath from me. But I am terrified to run out of firsts. Once they are gone, they cannot come back. It feels like I am leaving fresh, crisp footprints in new snow and marking up the clean white sheet of our life before. Soon there will be nothing left of the old life.
Later
We have started on the books. Virginia is taking all of the books. All of the books from Mother and from Father. I went upstairs to her sitting room tonight, and there were towers of books stacked everywhere. We did not mention Thoby’s books. It is understood that they will never leave Thoby’s study.
Books require bookshelves, and Virginia’s sitting room will not have nearly enough. I added bookshelves to the list for the architects.
UNION POSTALE UNIVERSELLE
CEYLON (CYLAN)
10 December 1906
Jaffna, Ceylon
Lytton,
I have a confession. I burnt your last letter. I did not want it to exist. Inexcusable and I apologise. One must square up rather than run.
&nbs
p; All is the same here. Charlie-the-dog has forgotten wet English winters and lives only for chasing fat Indian mice. They are brave and quick and drive him wild. I wish I could say I was coming home immediately. I wish I felt pulled in a direction absolutely. Please congratulate Maynard for me. A fellowship at Trinity sounds excellent.
This letter has little point, I realise. I send it only to greet you, my friend. I think of our June days in Cambridge with the Goth reciting “Luriana Lurilee.”
Your,
Leonard
HRH KING EDWARD VII POSTAL STATIONERY
11 December 1906
Away, away away. Virginia, chastened and apologetic, has written Violet a truthful letter. But it no longer concerns us as we are going away.
Treasures have emerged from the packing rubble. The missing copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (inscribed to Father, although the ink is faded and blurred now) turned up amongst the Hardy novels, and letters from Tennyson and Disraeli to our great-grandmother Pattle slid out of Mother’s threadbare copy of Villette.
The work on the Fitzroy Square house is set to start the week after Christmas. I am leaving detailed lists with Adrian as Virginia is reluctant to visit the new house.
And—We chose a date. St. Pancras Registry Office, 7 February 1907, half past ten. I will wear blue. I have not yet decided on a hat. We will invite no one.
THE BELLS OF WILTSHIRE