Adeline (17 page)

Virginia’s icy use of the word “death” has roused Carrington for the first time, and convulsively so, as if she has been given a shock or an injection. She turns her whole body round in the chair and fixes Virginia with her pink and violet eyes, and the expression on her face is one of hunger, a ravenous hunger that has at last, after a long and dejected search, found its proper food.

This should startle Virginia. It would have done so a few minutes before, but now it does not. Not anymore. Because it is not Carrington she sees, but Adeline, hovering behind her like some wrongheaded guide to the underworld who is yet somehow just right.

And Carrington can see this recognition in Virginia’s eyes, or see at least that something vital has changed, the decisive switch thrown.

“Tell me,” Carrington says, so eagerly that anyone who was not caught up in this, anyone still in the real world—Leonard, say, who is walking the grounds or tinkering with the car like a normal person—would simply pick up the telephone and call for help.

But for them—how many of them are there now exactly, Virginia wonders, lurking behind and beside?—this is one of those rare psychic dislocations that can be shared.

“I see myself as a girl,” Virginia says, not knowing until the words are out that she is going to talk about Adeline. She has never done so with anyone. Not Leonard, not Nessa, not Vita. “She is thirteen, the age I was when my mother died.”

Carrington’s eyes are gaping like bloodied mouths, gruesome with fascination.

“She is stuck in the past,” Virginia continues, “with the first pain, the original pain that was my initiation into unbearable loss. She never recovered, and her only real wish, her only release, will be in death. She is waiting for me to die.”

Now who sounds like a penny dreadful? The thought flits across Virginia’s mind, but does not stick. These sentiments are Adeline’s, and they come without oversight; they have no valuation attached. She pauses here and looks blandly at Carrington as if to say, Does that satisfy you? But she knows that this is a long way from being finished.

“Does she ask you?” Carrington says, her mouth flopping open like an imbecile’s. The old Virginia wonders, Will she now begin to drool?

“Ask me what?” she says testily.

“Does she ask you to die?”

“She has no need to. That is why she is there.”

“And do you listen?”

Virginia sighs, more than half regretting that she has brought this into the open, and with someone—she sees this now, and should have seen it before—who is so poorly able to withstand it. She thought this would be like sliding into a warm bath with a doppelgänger, but it is like slashing a cutlass through butter. She feels like a criminal.

Carrington, meanwhile, knows that she has failed. She is looking down at her fingers, which are spread out on the tops of her thighs, displaying the variety of sores that are clustered around each cuticle. Some of them are infected, others are calloused and yellow-scabbed from having been picked and bitten so many times, still others are new and strawberry red, each with its own pale pink halo.

The body says everything, Virginia thinks, looking at the hands, recalling her first impressions of this place, and Carrington in it, and her own sense of the redundancy of saying anything when the objects had said it all already. She is feeling the same incompetence now, the writer who has nothing to say, because she has chosen the wrong medium.

As before, Virginia is torn from the temptation to distinguish herself from Carrington, and from what is so clearly happening to them both, the same inarticulacy, the same impotence in the grip of the same distress.

“You know where I am,” Carrington says gravely, still looking at her hands. “I knew that you would.”

“Because Lytton told you about my past,” Virginia says.

“No,” Carrington says with a strange assurance. “I would have known just by looking at you. I did know. It was I who told Lytton.”

This shocks Virginia. “Told Lytton what?”

“That you were a liar like me, and that your lying would . . . ”

But she will not finish, and Virginia cannot decide why. Carrington looks oddly afraid and cowed suddenly, as if her own version of Adeline, or someone else more domineering, is actually standing there with a hand on Carrington’s shoulder, warning her that she has said too much. But, Virginia wonders, too much of what? More than is proper? Or more than is
allowed?

Does Carrington believe that the rest of what she had to say would have offended me too deeply? No. It cannot be that. She is beyond manners. So then it must be the other. She knows that she has said more than she ought. Virginia shudders a little at this notion, remembering Tom’s line from
The Waste Land
, the clairvoyant stymied by the blind spot—
and this card, / Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, / Which I am forbidden to see.

She smiles slightly at her own fear. Silliness, she chides. Such infantile silliness. Let her die if she wants to die, but leave my horoscope out of it. I cannot save her, nor do I much want to. But this is not fair or altogether true, and she knows it. She is on her usual merry-go-round with herself. It has nothing to do with Carrington.

“Carrington,” she says, again surprising herself. She waits for Carrington to look up. When she does, Virginia adds haltingly, pausing between the words, because she does not know herself what she is going to say. “Think . . . Ask yourself what is true . . . Be sure . . . Then tell me . . . directly . . . Do you . . . want . . . to die?”

Carrington hesitates much longer than Virginia expected she would, and this, she thinks, could be either a very good or a very bad indication. Now she is the one who has said too much, and she feels again as if she has committed a crime. Either that or she has taken the calculated risk of going too far, because doing so is the only way of bringing the patient back.

Carrington is still sitting there so strangely massive in her silence, and once again Virginia thinks of something inanimate. She fixates on the idea, perhaps because she does not really believe in fixity. Yet here is Carrington seemingly just that, fixed, occupying space like a thing, insensate, obvious, sure, not indecisive in the least. Not a fool in temptation, succumbing, but an essence, pure and unwavering and simply, immitigably there. She is the stillest living thing I have ever seen, Virginia marvels enviously; what the will must look like before it moves the soul to act.

She wonders what Father’s philosophizing would have made of this, or the Apostles’: the will as a Platonic form, inert, still and solid as a bloody rock, but showing itself like this, as a woman, as a monument, like some bronze rendering of Justice herself, welded to her pedestal.

Almost smiling at the thought of Carrington plunked in Trafalgar Square beside Admiral Nelson, Virginia comes back to herself, unsure of how long she has been lost in thought. She is almost convinced that she is going to get away with what she has just said, or that her question has been somehow magically voided by its own impertinence, when Carrington finally speaks.

“Is there any reason not to,” she declares. It is not a question. She is not asking, nor is she looking to Virginia for an answer. If she is expecting anything, it is only one syllable, if there is one, that proves what she has said is patently false or mad. Yet it is not Virginia, but Adeline who answers.

“I can think of none,” she says dully, and as soon as she has said them, Virginia can feel herself scrabbling to take the words back, but the struggle is horribly inept and futile, like drowning in a dream. Carrington merely nods once, stiffly, in recognition, as if Virginia is in fact a physician delivering the fatal news.

Then, unexpectedly, either because she senses that Virginia is in turmoil or because she simply feels that their grim business together is done, Carrington stands and motions Virginia out.

Her motivation is opaque to Virginia now. She is unreadable once more, expressionless, shut off, but whether from resolution or reproach it is impossible to tell. An aftertaste of blame is clearly there, but whether it is coming from Carrington or herself she does not know. This is not a familiar misgiving. She always knows. She always knows too much, but now there is nothing but static, and as they walk swiftly and wordlessly down the passageway to the stairs, Virginia first and Carrington behind, the feeling worsens to the point that she must stop and turn so that she can look once more into Carrington’s blankened face. But by the time she manages to do so, they are at the bottom of the stairs and Carrington is pushing her, politely but firmly, backward out the front door, to where Leonard is loitering at the car. The conclusion has flown by, the moment gone.

Something unnamable is between them. Carrington knows it, too—that much Virginia has discerned—but is it the compact of co-conspirators, the imputation of a supplicant wronged or simply the cold dismissal of a cat’s paw used?

She hates it that she cannot decide, but, finding herself outdoors again, breathing the clarifying air and blinking in the sunshine, she begins to sense that the black enchantment of Ham Spray has lost its hold on her. She can feel her social self returning, gloves on, armor up, and as she looks one last time at the waxen changeling that Carrington has become, she resolves not to let confusion show. Never again. She is Virginia. Adeline is the lie, the liar that Carrington sniffed out.

“Goodbye,” Carrington says, throwing her arms loosely around Leonard and then more loosely still around Virginia. But Virginia will have none of it, and with a slight but definite shove, she frees herself from Carrington’s embrace and turns away.

“Come and see us next week,” she calls, her hand on the car. “Or not. Just as you wish?”

“Yes,” Carrington says, “I will come . . . or not.”

IT IS THE
same now every summer. Guests. An endless parade of unwanted guests at Rodmell. The idea of entertaining always appeals, but then, when the people come, and they stay, and they stay, and they draw on her greedily like leeches, extracting all the best material that she has been saving for her work, well then, it is no fun at all. Then it is like enduring some quack treatment, ordered but clearly daft, and possibly harmful into the bargain. Then she can feel herself desiccating like clay, her face aching under another forced smile, and she finds herself sitting for the last half of the engagement like some melancholy recluse longing for the fullness of solitude.

Is this what it means to be famous, she wonders, or to preside over a famous group? Though infamous is more the judgment now, she hears. Among the up-and-coming set of standouts, the Bloomsberries are right out of fashion: a bunch of self-indulgent, pseudo-socialist, bed-hopping prudes—and yes, the last is a real epithet, apparently,
the
received contradiction in terms, used and endorsed by all who are anybody, intellectually and artistically on the rise.

And, oddly—this is a very new feeling—in the right mood, she finds that she cannot disagree. She hasn’t yet said this in company, but it has been on her mind. In fact, privately, when she doesn’t have her fists up for debate, she thinks it rather a deft summation of their disease. They really are a willfully ignorant contradiction in terms in almost every way, a pack of cross-dressing Quakers, a gaggle of loose-limbed pacifists dancing atop the cenotaphs. They had been virgins—most of them, well into their primes—who had thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that you could root out a century of squeamishness by playing at sexual excess.

The hubris of the young. It never fails to amaze, she thinks, even retrospectively, in oneself. They, every last one of them, from herself to Leonard to Lytton to Ottoline and on and on, are Victorians—period, full stop—no matter what they pretend. Yes, they have had the nerve to call themselves Georgians, but nerve is all it has been. And Lytton, who had so famously and pricklingly purported to dress down the great era of the Empire once and for all in ’19, had done nothing of the sort. He’d merely pulled off an elaborate stunt that the public had mistaken for a serious treatment. No. They had all been raised at the knee of the Dour One, buttoned up in black, and there they remained, in id if not in fact.

Tom Eliot is the exemplar of their type. He embodies what he isn’t. Or—to put it more accurately, and for the sake of the enemy’s argument, more irrefutably—he emblazons what he isn’t all over his skin in every detail, like some savage’s tattoo, because he can’t, in fact, embody it. That is Tom. That is all of them. All over.

Tom is coming to tea this afternoon, as it happens, and with his awful raving wife Vivien, too, of course. Virginia has made this mistake before—allowing that unruly woman through the door—and, after the last time, she’d sworn never to repeat it. Tom could come to tea alone, she’d said. He could come to breakfast, lunch and dinner, or to stay as long as he liked, so long as he left this creature at home. She is not housebroken. Sorry to all and sundry, but there it is. Vivien has become a nuisance beyond enduring, and she is ruining Tom to boot.

Well, at least he is going to Harvard in a few weeks. That will be a year out of Vivien’s clutches, at least. She wonders if Vivien knows of this yet, or if Tom is planning to cable her from America with the fait accompli. Tom is hopeless at confrontations. It will not be a surprising move on his part if he keeps his nervy polecat in the dark until he’s put an ocean between them.

Virginia only hopes, for the sake of their afternoon, that this has been his chosen tack. Otherwise, they are liable to end up fishing wifey out of the pond, or—and this is all too likely—having to wrestle the bowls from her as she heaves them one by one onto the dining table, gleefully shattering all the china and glass. That kind of outrage would be just up her street. Her type always seems to find catharsis in the sound of fragile objects breaking, the outward expression, no doubt, of her internal state.

Ah, well, Virginia’s own state is fragile enough these days, having come through the tempest of
The Waves
, intellectually, artistically, bodily, emotionally spent. Now she is writing a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, of all things, to cleanse her palate and rest in levity for a change.