Adeline (23 page)

What a monumental kindness Leonard had done by taking her there, to that place, to that very day and to its elaborated twin, that other day in the garden at Monk’s House in 1925 when it had all come rolling out into art. It had been the perfect reminder. She could heal herself once more, as she had always done, by looking into the past, planting her feet again where she had once been whole, when she and Adeline had not yet diverged, and where they had been so very, very happy as one.

Leonard had known all of this without knowing explicitly of Adeline, and he had also known that by recalling what she had achieved both symbolically and actually in her work in the recollection of this place, she could find again the encouragement to live a little longer. All at once, and while himself saying nothing at all, this simple act had communicated the profoundest, most rectifying message that anyone could: Here you have been happy, and so you will be again; about this you have written beautifully, and so you will again; here is life; these are the things that belong to you, and they cannot be taken away.

Afterward, she and Leonard had stood together for a long while, hand in hand, on the gouged and pitted limestone promontory of Godrevy Point. With the waves pounding beneath them, the spindrift dashing up into their faces, they had looked out across the raucous waters of the bay at the proud gleaming tusk of the lighthouse, with its moody cumulus above and its walled lawn below. There it had stood, even still—and also still, it stood so remarkably still—the defiant finger and the stamping foot, so white, so green, lofty and grounded both, always flying, always holding fast amid the graft and torment of the sea.

“Shall we?” Leonard had said at last, loosing her hand and turning to go.

She had looked at him then with all the gratitude of a lifetime, which had owed its extension, each bleak and obstreperous time, to moments, to gestures such as these. But with his usual grace and exquisite kindness, he had merely narrowed his eyes at her and blinked: There is no need, my love, no need.

And so they had come home, and she had spent her summer
in camera
with Adeline, waiting for the medicine to work. But, of course, the real medicine had been there all along. She thinks she sees it now in Leonard’s suffering, though, like Adeline, she has not understood it.

But no matter. He has succeeded in this ruse without using one. His anguish has been interpreted as love, which, in fact, it mostly is, the intolerable awareness of his growing weakness against the recurrence of her disease. He is crying because this grief, happily misleading though it may be, is only one more temporary hold against the enemy, a mere postponement of defeat. He cannot foresee how or when, but he knows that failure is assured. Someday, it
will
come.

Yet, sitting across from him, now beaming, Virginia—and this is really so unlike her—is seeing nothing but praise. Can she not see the pain? Well, he is thankful, then, if she cannot.

But this is not the whole reason she is beaming. He, too, is off in what he sees in her, for over the past few hours she has at times actually been reading, or, to be more accurate, thinking quite hard about something she has read. She has had Tom Eliot’s latest collection of poems open in her lap, and there is a piece—“Burnt Norton”—a single line from it, that has held her in its grip for some time in the profoundest state of awe and disbelief.

The trilling wire in the blood.

It is breathtakingly beautiful, as so much of what Tom writes is. In whatever time or place she might have read it, the line, the words themselves put together in this way, would have made her stop. But, again like so much of what Tom writes, if she had read it only two years ago, it would have made no sense. She would have admired it the way a savage might a foreign god, for the phenomenological fact of its beauty and power, but she would have knelt apart in ignorance and never dared approach. In the end, she would have done what she had so often done before with Tom’s work. She would have shut the book and, with the sourness of envy in her heart, dismissed as fancy whatever she had felt.

But now. Now it is too clear. Hauntingly, thrillingly clear. It is Yeats’s prophecy come true, the very thing he had said to her two years before at Ottoline’s. “Tom—he too has heard the mermaids singing.” And again, “All the metals are in your blood . . . and so a human being becomes a wireless.”

So, now there it is, at last writ down as the old man had said.

The trilling wire in the blood.

But that is not all, for, as she had asked herself just moments ago, moving her finger along the page, What is the very next word? What is the noble function of this blooded wire?
It sings.
It bloody well sings, just as Yeats’s whales and seas and mountains are singing, and thereby it resonates the world.

At this she had gasped rather loudly, just as Leonard had been gasping out the first of his tears, and she had looked across at him with such surprised relief, yet also with the trill of Tom’s blood and the wail of Yeats’s Mysticeti in her ears. But of course Leonard, dear man, had not known this cause. And now he, too, is looking at her—a little oddly, she must allow—with his own—is it relief?—because he thinks she is gasping only at him.

“It is as good as anything you’ve ever written,” he says at last. “Extraordinary.”

“Oh,” she sighs, leaping up and crossing to kiss him on the forehead. “I am so, so, so, so very pleased you think so.”

He takes gentle hold of her wrist, looks up at her and smiles weakly. “You see,” he says, “it is all all right.”

“Yes, so it is. After all this blasted suffering, it is.”

“I told you it would be,” he murmurs, but he cannot quite look her in the eye as he says so. His gaze slides a little sideways from her face, seeming, he hopes, to muse in the middle distance. But he needn’t worry. She is no longer looking at him either. Or, not at his face.

She is looking down at his hand, which is still holding her wrist loosely and distractedly, tossing it gently between his thumb and forefinger, as if it were the worn willow handle of a cricket bat idling between his knees.

She remembers that she had seen him do this once over tea that day so very long ago when they had first met, when she and Nessa had come up to see Thoby at Cambridge. All through the visit, Leonard had been fidgeting with a cricket bat between his knees, and because of this—he had done it expressly to disguise his defect—she had not noticed his tremor. But she would not have been likely to notice it in any case, for she had been trembling herself that day.

She had been as nervous as he. And so, there they had sat, awkward among the others, two fiddlers, he with his bat, she with her parasol, ticking at their props for comfort. And once—she remembers this bit only now for the very first time—just for a moment, their eyes had met. Immediately and synchronically, like the pendula on a pair of magnetized clocks, their fussing hands had stopped, and shyly, tenderly, they had smiled together at being caught.

TOM HAD RUNG
up this morning to tell her the news himself. Vivien had been committed to the Northumberland House asylum.

“I didn’t want you to hear it from someone else,” he’d said, with what, even for him, had seemed a new and chillingly clinical reserve, as if he were not still the husband—astoundingly, they were not yet divorced—but some bureaucratic adjunct assigned to the case, making the obligatory calls to forestall any fuss.

By way of justification, she supposed, or to gild his little household catastrophe with the precedent of genius, he’d told her that Joyce had been forced to do the same with his own daughter Lucia, not three years before.

Ah, well, in that case . . .

She had said all the right things and given nothing away—so sorry, how awful, perhaps it’s for the best—but all the while she’d felt a fearful nausea creeping through her. Before long, as she’d sat listening to Tom drone, all at once she had been horrified to find herself clammy and shuddering and foul-smelling beneath her arms. In the end, she had had to ring off quickly and rush to the lavatory to be sick.

So Tom, she thinks, her arm still slung around the toilet bowl, there you are. The reptile is out of his hole, having shed his unsightly skin. Now, all slick and freshly shining with treachery, he suns himself in the full light of day.

Her hatred for Vivien, she realizes, has mostly slipped away with the years, lost its hold on her, in spite of the horror show of their last day together. Perhaps that had been the actual breaking point for Tom and Vivien. She had wondered ever since if it might have been. Certainly it was one of their last outings together. Tom had left for Harvard later that month, as planned, and that had been the end of the marriage. He’d simply left, and a year later, in absentia (as she’d predicted), he had had the separation papers drawn up and delivered to a bewildered and bereft Vivien, who had been, by all accounts, still reeling from the abandonment, as well as the thorough shunning that Bloomsbury had given her on Tom’s behalf. Virginia shudders now to think of her own part in this. The cruelty, the hypocrisy, the pettiness.

As she had watched Vivien from afar, growing more and more frantic in the shadow of Tom’s rejection, and finally seeming to self-destruct in embarrassing public displays of recrimination, Virginia had sensed her distaste for the woman obscurely giving way to the feeling of kinship that had always underlain it.

Perhaps, she thinks now, it was finishing
Three Guineas
that had finally done it. Its shrill denunciation of patriarchy, or so the harshest critics have opined, had had a jarring effect, even on her. The first reactions have been absolutely scorching on this point: This is a screed, not an argument, and one that has only served to reinforce the very stereotypes about women’s minds that the author intended to refute, etc., etc.

She had been painfully aware of this stylistic vehemence all along—for it was indisputably there, that much was true—yet she had found herself unable to dampen it in later drafts, despite repeated advice from Leonard and others that she do so. On the contrary, she had grown angrier and angrier on behalf of her fellow women as the writing had progressed. Now, in its first month of publication, this tirade, as the book has been tarred, has drawn more fire than anything she has written, and she has grown angrier still.

Tom’s news could not have been timelier or, indeed, more predictable, yet it has hit her like a train. There had been signs, and she had noted them, albeit with a subdued alarm. Yet she had behaved terribly nonetheless.

In perfect inversion to Vivien’s decline, Tom had flourished in recent years, at times it seemed almost malignantly drawing vigor from his wife’s demise. It had been horrid to observe, all the more so because Virginia had felt complicit—no, she had been complicit—yet she had been unable to stop herself from licking her lips and presiding, every bit as shrewishly as Ottoline, over Vivien’s exile from their club. In her usual convoluted way—all cryptically subconscious, of course—just as Virginia had begun softening toward Vivien, and even vaguely descrying in this mistreated woman the fragile likeness of her own mad self, she had also begun to experience an equal and opposite surge in her affection for Tom.

It was indefensible, and she sees how expertly she had hidden it from herself, all of it, buried and denied, very deeply and heatedly, in the sharp, expository prose of this new polemic. There in plain view, in the pages on her desk, she had held the whole disgraceful mess of her personal feelings conveniently at arm’s length.

Until the call. This awful call from Tom. Now, swilling up in her all at once, the broth is too shameful to stomach, hence the sickness, coming on so hard and suddenly. Listening to Tom had been like having some poisonous serum of truth poured into her ear, and it had done its worst, making its nauseous way through her guts. All the rot had come up.

She looks at it now, the viscous brown stripe of bile lying along the curve of the toilet pipe, having slithered down from the bowl. Bile is thicker than water, she thinks, but there is no cleverness in the thought, only rue, and the vile reflection of this unflattering Narcissus staring back at her, having morphed into an eel.

Ugly is as ugly does
, warbles Adeline. She is sitting on the edge of the tub, her hands hanging limply between her legs in the folds of her skirt. She looks both removed and pitying, like someone who has come upon an accident in the road and can do nothing but stand and pray. Except that Adeline will not be praying. She has declared herself a rationalist, because Thoby had once done the same. She worships her older brother still, and in the usual way, as a god.

She is full of his memory. They had traipsed up and down the stairs together, playing games and talking about Greek and Roman literature, which he had been studying at school. Once, while arched heroically on the stair head, preparing to vault the rail and drop like proud Achilles into the foyer, he’d proclaimed himself an atheist. “God is a myth like any other,” he’d announced. “The Bible is simply our Homer, Hesiod, Virgil, Ovid and so on, all folded into one.”

But Adeline’s taunting now is nothing like Thoby’s then. Virginia presumes this is deliberate. She is being as irrational as it is possible to be. But Adeline is not one for making a point. She is the point, the reminder, which is why Virginia’s first answer is contrite.

“Yes,” she whispers, still hanging over the bowl to be sure that the spasms have ceased. “I have done wrong.”

She detests this idiotic adage about ugliness, but it has emerged of its own accord, like the lyric of a popular tune that has lodged itself in her mind.

She remembers the barbershop standard that Tom had once sung to her, to tease her about her discarded first name. Sarcastically, she begins to sing, putting her head right down into the bowl, so that she can add an extra touch of scornful twang to the insult.

Sweet Adeline,

My Adeline,