Adeline (11 page)

“She is not your equal,” Nessa had said, meaning not what most Englishwomen would have meant by such a remark, that Vita is of blue blood and Virginia is not, but rather what the snobs of Bloomsbury meant, that Vita is qualitatively not up to snuff. That is to say, in magnitude of mind, soul and sensibility, she is deficient; she lacks gravitas.

But Nessa is not one of Bloomsbury’s snobs. She is not normally so judgmental, or not at least when it comes to what are arguably extra-moral flaws in a person’s character. She requires people to be good, but she does not require them to excel. Virginia has never known Nessa to dash a person for being insufficient. And so, the fact that she had dashed Vita in precisely this way revealed everything about the threat that Vita represented to her, and to her umbilical bond with Virginia, which had never been encroached upon in the least, even by Leonard.

“Need she be?” Virginia had replied archly, leaving aside for the moment the import of what had been said.

“I will not have her trifling with you,” Nessa had carped, again, with an unusual flare of temper.

“And what if I am trifling with her?”

“You
are
trifling with her—that is obvious—and she with you, but you will be hurt in the end all the same. You always are, and it is not good for you.”

“Oh, you! Always the sentinel. So strict. Yet you know as well as I that every contact has its price. Would you have nothing touch me?”

“Yes, every contact does have its price, but you are more vulnerable than most, and some contacts carry much higher prices than others.” Nessa had paused here to groan irritably, then added, “Always, always, these are the ones you seek out. Really, must I remind you?”

“I do not need reminding.”

“You do.”

“Let it be, will you, dearest?” Virginia had pleaded. “This once.”

“Not when the threat to you is so great. Vita has the power to destroy you.”

“Come now, don’t be sensational. You have just said that she is not my equal.”

“Yes, which is what makes her all the more dangerous. She acts according to her whims and without a care for consequence. She is a great lady, after all. She was brought up to do as she likes, and to consign whatever results to the realm of common things that are not her business.”

Turning on Nessa, Virginia had asserted, “You are jealous of Vita.”

“Nonsense.”

“You are.”

After a pause, Nessa had meekly replied, “And what if I were? Would that discount what I have just said?”

“No,” Virginia had sighed in defeat.

“Well then,” Nessa had concluded, throwing her hands out in front of her and opening them wide, palms up, in the gesture of someone who has won her point. After a strained pause she had added, “You think that you love her, of course.”

“Oh, Nessa, love is not the word. The Greeks had so many words for love, and yet they could not exhaust its meaning. We have only one, and so much the poorer we. But in the language of love we are all poor. Even if we had as many words for love as the Inuit are reputed to have for snow, or indeed”—here, she had looked up at the overcast sky—“the Englishman has for rain, they would all still be inadequate.”

“We are not in England,” Nessa had teased.

“No,” Virginia had replied. “Alas, we are in Gomorrah.”

This had made them both giggle.

“Were the Cities of the Plain so full of flowers as this, do you suppose?” Nessa had said, looking around.

“Undoubtedly. The real paradise lost. Narcissi, narcissi everywhere, and the bee-besotting orchid spread a thousandfold.”

Here they had fallen down in another fit of the giggles on a plot of open grass beside a carp pond. Recovering themselves in little gasps of spent laughter, they had lapsed into a dream state and sat for some time without speaking, watching the cream-and-gold-colored creatures dart back and forth in the murky water, and surface occasionally to part their puffed and greedy lips in the hope of some reward.

At last, Virginia had broken the silence. “I cannot say it any better. I’m sorry. But I do
so
love you, Nessa.”

Nessa had fixed her then with her powerful grey eyes, which the grey day had made shine dully—like drops of pewter—and glow with unbearable solidity and warmth.

“I know, my love,” she’d said. “I know.”

IT IS SUMMER
again, and there is nowhere else to be but in the garden at Monk’s House, communing with the sun and the flowers and the air and a dear friend whom one must now begin to criticize. Lytton is sitting beside Virginia on the wooden bench at the edge of the bowling green. He could not be induced to play a game. He is too feeble, never much one for games, and they laugh about this as they sit, content, as they have always been, to talk instead.

Lytton is his usual gentle, drape-bearded, bespectacled self, with his long strands of thin hair parted far to the side, creamed flat across the top of his head and around his ears. He is wearing a beige lambswool cardigan vest under a brown tweed jacket, a perfectly knotted and dimpled cornflower-blue tie and white flannel trousers with a pair of white buckskin shoes. For him, he is dressed for summer, on the bottom half at least.

He has always had what they have in recent years come to refer to as a Proustian constitution: always susceptible to chills and maladies and even loud noises. He has lived much of his life reading in a supine position. It is not at all unusual for him to wear such heavy clothing in the warm months of the year, or to see him sitting outdoors when the weather is fine with a blanket thrown over his lap. But today, Virginia notes, he does seem a touch thinner and frailer than usual.

Virginia is draped for the weather in a long white cotton frock with a wide band of delicate sky-blue striping along the hem. She has a light linen shawl thrown loosely over her shoulders, and she is wearing a wide-brimmed black straw sun hat, topped on one side with a jaunty white spray of tulle.

They have been sitting this way in silence for several minutes, basking in the smell of fresh cut grass and fecund soil and the haven of the shade, when Lytton breaks in, as only he can, with the softest yet most sparing of assertions.

“So, I suppose we must have it out, then?” he says.

“Out?” Virginia coyly demurs. “About what, dearest?”

“
Elizabeth and Essex
, of course. You didn’t like it.”

“Nonsense,” she says. “I have criticisms. That’s all. I’d say my feelings are much the same as yours were about
Dalloway.
One can take issue with the particulars of a work, or the bringing off of it, but one can do so within the context of a broader recognition of the overall achievement, don’t you agree?”

Ignoring this, he says tartly, “Well, Ottoline thinks it’s brilliant.”

“Oh, well, if Lady Ottoline Morrell thinks it, then it must be so. Honestly, Lytton, she practically suckled you from infancy. Of course she’s going to fawn over it.” She pauses briefly and looks away, then adds tauntingly, “
To you.
”

“Oh, you’re horrible,” Lytton gasps, turning to her with a look of alarm. “Has she said something?”

“No, no.” Virginia laughs, cuffing his arm. “You needn’t worry. As far as I know, she has been an unswerving advertisement, as usual.”

Lytton sits back, appeased, and resumes gazing across the garden.

“That’s a relief, anyway,” he says, crossing his legs and bouncing the upper foot impatiently, as if he is waiting for a bus. “Still, I resent your putting that picture in my head. Ottoline suckling me. Witch’s tit indeed. Good Lord.”

“Oh, hardly,” Virginia scoffs. “Ottoline is perfectly exotic, I grant, and an acquired taste, I’m quite sure, but not repulsive. She’s simply a very brightly colored, somewhat screechy giantess who’s developed an unfortunate talent for repeating everything she’s overheard. I should think making love to her would be rather like making love to a macaw.”

Lytton makes a startled face. “Perhaps, when one is the size of a bunting.”

“She can’t help it.” Virginia sniggers. “She must be six feet tall if she’s an inch, and however one may try to robe and swathe and mitigate, a woman of that height is always disturbing.”

“And that orange hair to top it. Was she born with it, do you think?”

“Presumably.” Virginia sighs. “Oh, and those eyes, like the Sargasso Sea, violent green and churning like little whirlpools of intrigue. It does all seem almost preternaturally cruel.”

“No,” Lytton chirps disagreeably, briefly stilling his bouncing foot. “Witchy. As I said. Just imagine those sour, cold and wrinkled dugs.” He shudders theatrically and goes back to bouncing his foot.

“And you are the viper nursing in Rome’s bosom,” Virginia says archly. “Though when in Rome, is it not the she-wolf’s tit that is suckled?”

“Yes, well.” He casts her a knowing glance. “Speak of the she-devil in wolf’s clothing. But you were not yet a Woolf when I was of suckling age. In any case, you are mixing your myths. That was Romulus and Remus who were said to have suckled the she-wolf at the founding of Rome, whereas you have just made me Caligula—don’t think I missed that—and it was Tiberius who said it about him.”

Lytton pauses here to take full advantage of his cue. Dramatically clearing his throat in the practiced Strachey style, he resumes: “Repulsive old disease-ridden Tiberius, looking down and beholding for the first time the full hideousness of his psychopathic heir apparent—the terrible Gaius Caligula—snarled happily and muttered, ‘I am nursing a viper in Rome’s bosom.’ Or so it is written. And so therefore it is Tiberius’s tit I must suck—which, by the way, I consider to be a vast improvement over the proposed alternatives.” He pauses again, stroking his beard with satisfaction, and adds, “I rather like the sound of that, actually. Tiberius’s tit. Perhaps it should be the title of my next book. What do you think?”

“It might be just the thing for you,” Virginia teases. “Our very own Suetonius for Bloomsbury.”

“And what precisely do you mean by that?” Lytton says, pretending to be very engaged in flicking something off the front of his trousers.

“Only that it would suit your flair for the dramatic,” Virginia goads. “I think everyone can agree that
Twelve Caesars
was one of the great potboilers of its time, and a group biography, no less, blurring the line, shall we say, between fact and fiction.” She turns to him in mock surprise. “And here we all were thinking that you’d invented the genre. Or was it revolutionized?”

Smiling, he crosses his arms peevishly over his chest. “I detest you.”

“And how I love you for it,” she says, playfully pulling his ear. “You do it so awfully well.”

“Speaking of doing it, I can’t help wondering if by ‘flair for the dramatic’ you are taking what is, if I may say so, a rather shabby swipe at my vice.”

“Mmm. And which one could that be, I wonder?”

“Yes,” Lytton drawls wearily, “I wonder.”

“Oh, I see,” Virginia pipes. “You are perhaps referring to vices of
The Faerie Queene
variety? Elizabeth? Gloriana? What have you? Your topic of choice, yes?” She puts a finger to her lips and adds, “It is true that you may have been a trifle transparent in that respect. Or did you not intend to put yourself in the queen’s role?”

Lytton makes a cry of exasperated delight.

“How can you be so sure,” he says, “that I did not, at least in part, intend the more obvious parallel—
Virginia?
”

“What?” Virginia squeals, clapping a scandalized hand to her breast. “
Moi
, the Virgin Queen? And you, my Essex? Why Lytton, I had no idea you were so engrossed.”

“I was your Essex briefly, was I not?” he says, smiling devilishly. “Many moons ago.”

“Hardly,” she says, an unexpected sharpness getting the better of her good humor. “You were half in love with Thoby, if anyone, and I was merely the next best thing—your last stab at normalcy, I should say? But alas, your dirk wasn’t quite up to the job.” She stops herself here, embarrassed by the sudden sourness of her tone. “I’m sorry, Lytton,” she says. “That was cruel. You were wonderful to me after Thoby died, and I know you loved him nearly as much as I did.”

Chastened, Lytton says soberly, “Well, you know, you
have
always cast something of a shadow over me.”

She is genuinely surprised. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“I have always admired your talent, resented it even. And I suppose there is something of you—well, perhaps quite a lot of you—in my Elizabeth.”

She considers this for a moment, sifting through what she remembers of what she has read and what she can bear to admit that she recognized. She takes out and lights one of her cheroots.

“You mean her fickleness,” she says at last. “Ever dancing forward and back, never to be caught?” But she cannot bear to remain so exposed, and adds teasingly, “Or do you mean the sex? Were you making your own rather shabby swipe at
my
vice?”

“All of it, in a way,” Lytton says, still serious. “Though not a shabby swipe.” He pauses then, as she did, to adjust. He, too, will not give too much away. “Or not entirely that—except insofar as my nature, my bugger’s flair for the dramatic, as you call it, compels me to make some kind of swipe at . . . ”

“Frigidity?” Virginia finishes.

He hesitates, as if deciding again just how vulnerable or cutting he wants to be.

“If we are using all the crassest terms, yes,” he says. “But you must see that it is far more complicated than that. You said it yourself. The dance. Elizabeth’s entire life was a pavane. A long, elaborate pavane that she could never stop dancing, and in which she could never cede herself to anyone. Her power depended on it.”

Virginia is listening closely, holding the cheroot very close to her mouth and squinting through the smoke.

“A lifetime of unconsummated sex,” he continues, “enacted in every way but in the act itself, performed incessantly between a man and a woman who cannot have each other, or, in our case, who cannot want each other. And yet.”

“Yes,” she says. “And yet.”

Now Lytton is the one turning reflective. His hands are folded in his lap, and he is turning his head slowly left and right, scanning the garden.