by William Boyd
“Hello?”
“Hello. Could I speak to Jennifer Tipton?”
“Sorry, you’ve got a wrong number. There’s nobody by that—” She remembered, suddenly. “One moment.” She cleared her throat. “Hello? Jennifer Tipton here.”
“Hi. It’s Huckleberry from the Book Nook. We’ve got your Virginia Woolf.”
“Virginia Woolf?”
“You ordered A Writer’s Diary. It arrived this morning.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Marvellous. I’ll be right down.”
She hung up. It was a sign. She suddenly felt joy-brimmed, joy-flushed, joy-sprung, as if she were in a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The shade of Virginia Woolf was encouraging her to travel to Rodmell and drive a stake through her heart. She scampered out to her taxi. Procrastination be damned.
She had the disgruntled taxi driver detour to Hove and the Book Nook where she paid Huckleberry for Woolf’s diaries. She flicked to the end as the final entries were what she was interested in, reading avidly as they journeyed on from Brighton to the Ouse Valley—not far away.
Elfrida told the taxi driver to park outside the village pub—the Abergavenny—thinking that she might look in for some refreshment later, after her researches. She wandered down a long narrow street towards the lower edge of the village and to Monk’s House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s country home, able to identify it easily thanks to Maitland Bole’s excellent map. She stood and contemplated the surprisingly small house, barely visible because of the mass of overgrown vegetation around it. She saw flaky white weatherboarding and a gate. Tall bushes and trees obscured most of the view.
She paused a moment, trying to summon up the spirit of Virginia Woolf—and failing. To the right she saw a high-walled pathway to the church—St. Peter’s. She walked up the path a few paces and, standing on tiptoe, peered over the wall to gain a view of the garden through the annoying foliage. It was a substantial garden, she saw, some few acres, she thought, and she could see an orchard beyond the flower beds. In front of her was a pond and a glassed-in sun porch. Some deckchairs and wooden seats were positioned on a patch of lawn and she spotted an ancient man in a beige linen jacket and panama hat deadheading dahlias. So, the place was occupied. She might presumptuously knock on the door later, she thought.
She headed for the church, skirting it and on to the graveyard’s perimeter wall with its view of the water meadows beyond. She could make out the course of the river, or at least its high embankments, about half a mile away, very bare, not a tree or a bush in sight, and running straight, almost like a canal. She glanced back at Monk’s House, though it was still largely obscured by trees and the orchard from this vantage point. Virginia would have walked across her garden and through the orchard to the garden gate in order to gain access to the fields leading down to the Ouse—no need to come via the church, of course. Elfrida sat on the wall, swung her legs over and dropped down the other side.
It took her less than ten minutes to make her way across the meadows to the river and she soon stood on the high embankment looking down on the slow-moving stream, wondering if this were perhaps the actual point where Virginia had filled her coat pocket with a heavy stone and then waded in. Where had she learned that fact about the stone? She searched her memory. That’s right: Enid Bagnold had told her at a party, years ago. Funny how things sprang into your mind like that. Then she thought: had Virginia jumped in? The Ouse was tidal, she had learned from Bole’s pamphlet, and at high tide was quite deep here, she estimated, maybe six feet. Easy to slip under, take some lung-filling breaths of water. She looked at Bole’s map again. The next village, not far off, was Southease, a third of a mile away—and there was a bridge crossing the river at Southease. Surely she wouldn’t have gone any further downstream towards Southease? People crossing the bridge might have spotted her. Where she was now standing on the west bank was as close to Monk’s House as possible. Upstream was Lewes. No, somewhere on this very turfy stretch of embankment—a yard or three in either direction—was the exact spot where Virginia Woolf decided to enter the water and end her life.
She shivered. It was a pleasantly warm though cloudy day in July 1968. It would have been freezing on 28 March 1941, she imagined. She unscrewed her little bottle of vodka and raised it to the river in salutation, then had a couple of bracing swigs. She slipped it back in her handbag and turned and strode through the meadow towards the church, a strange new respect building in her for her fellow writer, now she had seen the spot with her own eyes. Whatever else it took to commit suicide by drowning there would be a distinct need for personal bravery, for courage. And icy pragmatism—that heavy stone in her pocket was there precisely to combat second thoughts. And, maybe—the notion struck her—maybe she couldn’t even swim. Who knew these things?…Lord, Elfrida thought, finding it much harder to clamber back into the churchyard, surely there must be an easier way of ending your life and bringing the blessed release of oblivion?
She peered over the wall again, looking into the garden of Monk’s House. The old fellow was now sitting in a deckchair reading a newspaper.
“Coo-ee!” Elfrida called. “Excuse me! Here I am by the wall!” She waved, parting the branches of a laburnum so she could be better seen.
It seemed to take the old man about two minutes to fold his newspaper, struggle out of his deckchair and slowly wander over. He doffed his hat, peering at her concernedly.
“Hello,” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes. Oh yes, I’m perfectly well. I was just wondering,” she said, disingenuously, “if this was Virginia Woolf’s house. By any faint chance.”
“Yes, it was,” he said. He was very thin and narrow-shouldered with a sunken, gaunt face beneath a mop of dense white hair and ears that seemed to grow out of his head at right angles, like the handles of a pot.
“I’m very interested in Virginia Woolf,” Elfrida said.
“You’re not alone.”
“May I ask when you came to live here?”
“1919.”
“Ah.” Elfrida realised. “You must be Mr. Leonard Woolf.”
“I am indeed.”
Damn, Elfrida thought. I can hardly ask him what his wife did on her last day before she drowned herself. Frustrating. Play for time, that was the best tactic, at least she had his attention.
“I’m a novelist myself,” Elfrida volunteered, to explain her presumption. “Often compared to your wife, Mrs. Woolf. My name’s Elfrida Wing.”
“I’m not familiar with your work. Apologies.”
Well, why don’t you ask me in for a cup of tea, she thought, and find out more? How many strange novelists go to all this trouble to make their way to Rodmell in a given year? None, she’d have wagered. She decided to be bold.
“I’m very interested in the details of Virginia Woolf’s very last day—28 March 1941.”
Mr. Woolf blinked rapidly at her, as if seeing her for the very first time. The corners of his mouth turned down as he stared at her. He looked as if he were about to spit.
“Good morning to you, Mrs. Tring,” he said abruptly, throwing his newspaper down on a seat and stomping back into the house.
Fuck! Elfrida thought. Fool! I should have been more subtle, asked for a glass of water or something, she remonstrated with herself. She wandered angrily back up the lane towards the pub, the Abergavenny—odd Welsh name for a pub in East Sussex, she thought—noticing as she approached that her taxi was nowhere to be seen. Idle bastard.
She went in and ordered a large gin and tonic. The bar was wet with un-mopped rings of beer and the place seemed dirty and uncared for. Some long-haired local lads were playing a boisterous game of darts so she took herself off to the most distant corner, had a large gulp of her gin and opened A Writer’s Diary in the hope that Virginia might be more forthcoming than old Leonard Woolf had been.
She read
the very last entry again, dated 8 March, almost three weeks before she killed herself. The tone seemed quite sensible and balanced—no sign of mental disturbance. There was one sentence that held her attention. “I shall go down with my colours flying.” Intriguing. Was that some kind of premonition? Then the final observations: “Must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat.” What a disgusting mixture, Elfrida thought. Though it was interesting that she was going to cook it herself. No staff? Then she read on: “I think that it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.” Elfrida considered this gnomic remark for a few seconds. Perhaps it made sense only to another novelist. She felt a new spasm of inspiration. It was working. The visit to Rodmell and Monk’s House had been an amazing intuition. She would gain a “certain hold” on Virginia Woolf and her last day—and thereby kick-start her own career into life again—by writing it down. Yes.
18
It started to rain in the afternoon and, as a result, they couldn’t shoot outside and Rodrigo, mysteriously, called a halt to the day’s filming.
“Don’t you have ‘rain cover’?” Anny asked him.
“I don’t believe in rain cover,” Rodrigo said, bafflingly. “It destroys spontaneity.”
Anny went back to the hotel early but, even so, there was the usual small crowd of autograph hunters waiting at one side of the main door. Their numbers had been growing over the last week or so as if word had finally reached Brighton that a famous American film star was staying in their midst.
“Anny! Anny!” came the cries as she stepped out of the car. Anny, feeling benevolent, wandered over to her fans and started signing her name. There were about half a dozen hunters—all young women, curiously—and Anny, head down, signed away as the books were presented to her in sequence. But the last book was proffered by a man, she could tell from his big hands, and he opened his book on a fresh page.
I NEED YOUR HELP! was written there in big capital letters.
Anny looked up to see a bearded man in a woollen hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He wore spectacles and it was that unfamiliar detail that ever so slightly prolonged the split second that it took her to recognise her ex-husband. Cornell Weekes was indeed in England. And in Brighton. And standing in front of her.
Anny dropped her gaze back to the book.
“Jesus, Cornell, I don’t believe it,” she said, her voice heavy with disappointment. “They’re looking for you here,” she added quietly. “The FBI were here, talking to me about you.”
“You have to help me, Anny. You’re my only hope. I’m desperate.”
She wrote her room number down.
“Come tonight,” she said. “Call up. Try to look presentable.”
She walked off and into the hotel without a backward glance.
In her room she swallowed two Equanils and a Seconal. Then she showered, placed the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the outside of the door and clambered into bed. She slept, waking at eight o’clock that evening, feeling groggy and thick-headed and took an Obetral to wake her up. They were marketed as diet-pills but everyone knew they were amphetamines in flimsy disguise. She dressed and ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a pot of coffee from room service but, when it came, she realised she wasn’t hungry, because of the Obetral. She drank two cups of coffee with lots of sugar and began to think about what she would do when Cornell showed up.
The call came about an hour later.
“We have a Mr. Ingmar Bergman here who says he has an appointment with Miss Viklund.”
Ingmar Bergman was her favourite film director—Cornell knew that—she had often told him of her dream that one day she might be in a Bergman film—though it was a problem that she couldn’t speak Swedish, she realised.
“Show him up,” she said.
Cornell came awkwardly into the room, his usual mixture of chagrin and bravado emanating from him, as if he were angry that he had to come to her for help but recognising that he needed her, please, Anny. She saw he was wearing a tie and his hair was dyed black like hers. They did not shake hands or kiss. He took his spectacles off and slipped them in a pocket. His beard was trimmed and was greying, she saw, and thought that it suited him. With his gaunt face and his deep-set dark eyes he looked even more like the prophet-figure that he saw himself as—a seer in the wilderness of the twentieth century, the rest of the world ranged and railing against him.
He looked around the room and asked if he could eat her sandwich, seeing it sitting there untouched on its plate. Help yourself, she said, and he chomped it down in half a dozen bites—then poured himself a cup of cold coffee.
Suddenly he set the cup back on the tray and leant forward covering his face with his hands.
“I’m so tired, Anny,” he said, his voice muffled by his palms. Then he began to cry, quietly, almost inaudibly, just the shuddering of his shoulders giving his misery away.
She looked at him, trying to ignore the wrench of love for this maddening man that now tugged at her, feeling that she wanted to take him in her arms and stroke his hair and whisper words of comfort in his ear. This was what it was like with Cornell, she realised—life as a wildly swinging pendulum: from love to anger, from affection to irritation, from warmth to fierce antagonism. And back again.
She stepped forward and laid a hand gently on his back.
“Please, Cornell,” she said, feeling the tears warm in her own eyes. It was incredibly rare to see him so vulnerable. She had seen him cry only once or twice before, she remembered. He hated to cry, he had always told her, crying was a kind of defeat, the sign that you’d lost.
“You can’t go on like this,” she said.
He looked up, sniffed and rallied himself, wiping his eyes with the heels of his hands.
“I don’t have any choice,” he said. “I can’t go back to that place. I’m running for my life, Anny. For my life.” The emphasis he gave to the word seemed to bring back his usual vigour. He looked at her and she removed her hand from his shoulder. All the old love she had been feeling for him seeped quickly away.
“This is the only time we can meet,” she said, her voice brusque. “What do you want?”
“Money.”
“Turn yourself in, Cornell. I beg you.”
“How can you say that? I’m not going to fucking rot in prison for the rest of my life. I’d rather kill myself.”
“Then maybe you should kill yourself. If life isn’t worth living then it makes sense, you know, to kill yourself,” she said harshly, then a second later regretted her tone. “Give yourself up. It might be the right thing—in the long term,” she added, feebly.
“My life will be worth living—as soon as I get to Africa, to Mozambique.”
“Mozambique? Isn’t there some sort of war—an insurrection—going on there?”
“Exactly. A colonial power against a rebel army fighting to free their country. That’s why I’ll be safe. I have contacts in FRELIMO.”
“Jesus.” Anny saw the familiar mad zeal burn in his eyes. She sighed. “Why did you plant those bombs?”
“It’s called an armed struggle. I’m a freedom fighter engaged in a war against an oppressive state.”
“Just like FRELIMO. You should be right at home.”
“It’s not some kind of joke, Anny.”
“I know. Tell that to the soldier with no legs thanks to your bomb.”
“I know. I feel kind of bad for the guy…” Then he visibly stiffened himself. “You know what? He’s a fucking professional soldier. There are risks that come with the profession. Injuries, fatalities. He was in combat. In a combat zone.”
“Jesus, Cornell. He was in Nevada.”
“The war is everywhere. The country’s at war.”
“He just didn’t know it, right?”
“He knew it. There’s a war going on, an undeclared war.”
She felt weariness settle on her, like a shawl around her shoulders. There was never any arguing with Cornell.
“Why should I help you?” she said. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you could cause me?”
“We were man and wife.” He corrected himself. “Husband and wife. That must mean something. We shared our lives. We had good times, Anny, you know that. We swore an oath.”
“That was declared null and void after a few months.”
“An amazing few months. Admit it, Anny. It was…special, different. I changed you. You owe me.”
What could she say? She had no answer. She felt light-headed, now, recognising the effect Cornell had on her. It was a force, a mild but concentrated force of nature—like a cold-virus or an endless rainy day. He burned with an eternal flame of perceived injustice, everywhere, all the time. A parking meter was an injustice to him; putting your trash out was an affront to his liberty; having to stop at a red traffic light undermined his human rights. His relentless illogic triumphed over anything rational that aspired to be an alternative explanation, a brake, a contradiction. What she remembered of their married life was a near-constant sense of intellectual fatigue.
Symptoms that she was experiencing again, she noted, as she watched him talking—not listening to him—as he sat on the chair by the room-service trolley. She took in his new beard, his cheap suit, his unpolished shoes, his mismatched socks, one brown, one blue. How had she ever come to marry this man, this mild dipshit maniac? she asked herself for the thousandth time. And no answer came. Maybe it was that fatigue that made her decide to help him now, she thought. One last gesture. Anything to make him go away; anything to bring back calmness and tranquillity, to stop the eternal sense of agitation that being in the presence of Cornell Weekes provoked.
“How much do you need?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Fuck! Cornell—”
“OK. Two thousand. I need to go back to Lisbon, then catch a plane to Lourenço Marques from there. Then you’ll never hear from me again. Never see me again in your life. That’s got to be worth two thousand bucks, no?”