Adeline (24 page)

At night, dear heart,

For you I pine.

But the tone is lost on Adeline, and cheerily she joins in.

In all my dreams,

Your fair face beams.

You’re the flower of my heart,

Sweet Adeline.

As Adeline leaps clumsily from the chorus to the verse, her voice careering from its first breeziness to a sudden heartsick vibrato, the song begins to swirl cacophonously in Virginia’s head.

There’s a picture that in fancy oft’ appearing,

Brings back the time, love, when you were near.

Adeline is holding her arms out stiffly in front of her, bent in the position for a waltz, but by the way she is squeezing them slightly inward toward her, she appears to be pantomiming an embrace.

It is then I wonder where you are, my darling,

And if your heart to me is still the same.

There is nothing remotely festive about this anymore. There is a tear rolling down Adeline’s face, and her tempo has slowed so painfully that she is virtually sobbing out the last lines.

For the sighing wind and nightingale a-singing

Are breathing only your own sweet name.

“Stop,” Virginia cries, and obediently Adeline does. For a long moment, the harsh ring of Virginia’s command hangs over them.

It’s my song
, Adeline bawls at last.
You taught it to me.

But Virginia is ruthless. “Well, you should unlearn it,” she rages, “along with all those other pious little aphorisms of nannies that you have been inane enough to repeat.
Ugly is as ugly does.
What
is
that? Thoby would have thrashed you for saying it.”

At this, Adeline dissolves into tears and fades.

Thoby, Virginia thinks, would have had hard words for me, too, over this.
Bullying a child. Honestly.
No, he would have been more strident than that.
Raving at yourself in the lavatory like some demented guttersnipe. Do you imagine such a thing can be overlooked? Tell me, how, precisely, are you different from this Vivien? Or from our very own Laura, I should like to know. You do remember our sister Laura, yes? In what way are you not her copy? And furthermore—ah, yes, we are at the crux of it now, I believe—why have you not suffered the same fate?
He cocks a hand to his ear.
What’s that? No shouting now? No slapping down? Right, then. I will tell you. The only thing that stands—the only thing that has ever stood—between you and the madhouse, beloved sister of mine, is not your talent, and certainly not your fabled divergence from the common follies of your sex, but us, my dear girl, us. The swains, the grooms, the
pères,
the
fils
and all the other common brutes presiding in your life. In short—dare we say it outright to the fearsome Mrs. Woolf?—the men.

This is the tone of her worst reviews, as if all the deceased men that she had so admired and fought with in life—Thoby, Father and now Julian (he is most painfully apt)—were towering over her, brandishing a copy of
Three Guineas
and bringing it down on her head.

Yes, though doing so feels somehow obscene, she must include her nephew in this company, for now Julian, too, is among the dead. She repeats this to herself many times these days, because it will not hold. It is an empty phrase. Julian is dead. What can it possibly mean? How can it possibly be? Sweet, cherubic Julian with his
Gioconda
smile, her very own borrowed child, perished in the corner of some hellish foreign field, and in Spain, for heaven’s sake, of all the baked and tattered hells to die in for a cause.

But what cause exactly? War? It simply does not signify. The waste. The contradiction. He had been raised in Nessa’s embrace, in their bohemia, suckling the daffodils and making love. So what the devil had happened to him? Why had he insisted on enlisting himself in someone else’s civil war, when doing so had only broken his mother’s heart? His great (and only) concession to Mama Nessa had been to drive an ambulance rather than fight, but driving through the battlefield foraging for wounded had proven to be every bit as dangerous as the battle itself. He’d lasted little more than a month.

She still cannot accept it, though it had happened a year ago nearly to the day—all these morbid anniversaries—but she knows well enough what it had been for. The necessity of using force against fascism. That had been Julian’s line, and the thing that had brought him into conflict with Virginia and others, in person, over many a vituperative dinner, lunch and tea, as well as in writing, the letters, the essays, the articles.

“Violence must be met with violence,” he’d railed, “when the perpetrators are beyond human decency.” He’d detested what he called the insular humanism and conciliatory nonpolicies of the residual Left, who he’d said still blindly clung to the threadbare pacifism of their youth, as a child does to his blanket when the monster is beneath the bed. “Well,” he’d scolded, “this monster is no longer bound by the conventions of fairy tales. He is not beneath the bed. He is tearing apart the room all around you, yet you remain holed up in your cribs, squeezing your eyes as tight as they will shut, and clutching the covers over your heads, in the infantile hope that the scary thing will simply be a good chap and go away.”

It was, of course, his generation’s view of theirs (i.e., Bloomsbury), though Julian had mostly excepted Leonard from this attack on account of what he’d called (and rightly so) Leonard’s longstanding penchant for seeing sense and for taking a well-informed and consequently more nuanced view of the lessons of history. Still, they had all been squabbling like relatives—cleaving the age-old rift between parent and child—for the better part of the decade. But now there was no more talk. Action had taken its place, and duly exacted its consequence.

The death of one’s child. There is no name for it. Children without parents are orphans. Spouses are widows and widowers. But a mother who loses her firstborn child, what is she? Her condition is unspeakable, yet she is the very essence of tragedy, and therein she is given many proper names: Medea, Clytemnestra, Niobe.

But Nessa is none of these. Hecuba bears the closest resemblance. Her Hector also died in war. But Julian was no Hector, even if he fancied himself as such. He did not die hot and quick on the sword of a demigod. He went slowly cold on a slab, riddled with anonymous shrapnel—it had been too far-flung to know whose, as if that would have somehow made a difference. Though maybe it would have. It might have seemed less futile if they’d at least known who the bastard was—the Hans or the Hermann or the Heinrich, for it had been a German plane, they knew that much—who’d dropped the bomb that had landed in Julian’s plot and thrown its scraps into his lungs.

Damn it all, it will not go away. War and peace. She can keep having this same argument, heedlessly, endlessly—she does, in fact, almost daily, traipsing over the downs, rowing openly with Julian’s ghost. And who cares who sees her. Who cares that she had bled it all out again publicly in
Three Guineas
—for Julian, to Julian—or that most of the cognoscenti, and even many of her friends, had deemed it a load of tripe. The book is her child, and for the child, and the child is her property. For her, there is no argument about that.

It is like Thoby dying all over again, and at nearly the same age—Julian was so like him—except that now she is nothing like the young Virginia who mourned her brother’s death as a contemporary. Now she is a fifty-six-year-old woman, a veteran mentor, disputant and aunt, who never felt right in any of those roles. Whereas Julian had been the young poet, threshing his own course, as young men must, defining himself against everything his elders stood for, yet also asking for their response, their advice, their—no, not their, her—her criticism, her match for his intellect, his ambitions and his art. He was the phantom limb that ached, and right in that telltale part of her where no limbs had ever grown.

Now she must go on comforting Nessa. She has been doing so all year, and in that time she has been tortured by the duty, which by rights should have been the most natural, most reciprocal of acts. Yet it has often felt like something out of Dante, a diabolical ordeal devised for the punishment of special sins.

To Virginia, as much as nursing Nessa has been tender, at times wrenchingly so, it has also been nothing short of perverse. Now, as never before, their bond has developed a caterwauling life of its own, and seems always to be flipping capriciously between extremes, so that one moment she feels almost subversive, like the mistress ministering to the wife, and the next she is just the sister again, shoring up the sibling who had done the same for her.

Julian had always been the focal point of all their love and conflict, the nexus of everything sweet and ugly that had ever been between them, the support, the competition, the camaraderie, the jealousy, the passion, the hurt. But now that he was dead, all of this had been magnified tenfold, had become more convoluted and—this was the most difficult part—instantaneous than she had ever thought possible. It is as if everything from the past, the present and even the future is capable of happening all at once, at any time, and exploding between them without warning. This newly old relationship with Nessa is more difficult, and more charged than any she has experienced, Vita included. Perhaps it always had been, but it has taken this atrocity to synergize the whole.

“Mrs. Woolf?”

The voice is startlingly close, and Virginia jumps at the sound of it. She might have thought it was one of her own, were it not for the formal address, but it is only Louie calling from somewhere on the stairs. “Mrs. Bell has arrived.”

In fact, Nessa had arrived a quarter of an hour before, but Virginia has been in the lavatory all that time, and Louie knows from experience not to disturb her there unless it is a matter of life and death. But Nessa’s presence in the house has made Louie anxious, partly because she does not wish to be perceived as a servant who, at this late date in her tenure, is incapable of performing the simplest of tasks, such as announcing a guest, especially this guest, whom she knows so well, and knows to be in no fit state to endure much of anything. But she is also nervous because she knows that Virginia has been in the lavatory for much longer than a quarter of an hour.

She knows, too, that Virginia has not been bathing in there or answering nature’s call. It had been she, Louie, after all, who had first answered the telephone this morning, and given the familiar caller’s famous name. It had also been she who, while upstairs making the gentleman’s bed, had heard Virginia stomp across the hall, slam the lavatory door and begin retching like a dog. The retching had gone on fitfully for some time. And yes, she had heard the lady talking to herself as well. She has heard her do so many times before, and not—begging your pardon—because she has been listening, but because it can sound as loud as the pub at last orders in there when ma’am is going strong.

“All right,” Virginia calls, trying to sound gathered, but she sounds throttled instead.

By now Nessa, too, knows that all is not well, and she does not expect Louie to intervene. She can deal with this herself. She has followed Louie onto the stairs, and hearing Virginia’s gurgled reply, she pushes past the servant and takes the rest of the stairs by twos. When she reaches the top, she flings open the lavatory door and glares across the threshold.

Again Virginia jumps at the sound of the door as it bangs against the far wall. Terrified, and still clinging to the toilet, she turns to see her sister standing with her legs sturdily apart and her arms stiffly crossed, looking like a murderous landlady.

“Nessa!” she gasps. “You frightened me.”

At nearly sixty, Nessa is still a very attractive woman. Her greying hair is gathered at the base of her neck in an elegant chignon. She is wearing little or no makeup, yet her pale skin and hair are so clear, and they complement each other so becomingly, that she glows with the lustrous monochrome of a photograph. Age has merely softened her beauty into the comeliness of a life well lived.

“Yes, well,” she says hotly, “I wasn’t going to wait down there any longer. Not with you up here doing your usual God knows what.”

Taking in the view of Virginia on the floor, hovering over the dregs of her vomit and gazing into the bowl as if she thinks she can read her fortune there, she adds, “Honestly, Virginia, must you always be so eccentric?”

This breaks the tension and makes them both erupt with laughter. Nessa rushes to her sister’s side to lay a nurturing hand on her shoulder. “Dearest, come away,” she says. “Shall we sit in your room?”

Virginia nods and allows Nessa to help her to her feet. As Nessa turns Virginia around and begins guiding her toward the door, she reaches behind and pulls the toilet chain.

When they are comfortably installed across the hall in Virginia’s room, Nessa in the writing chair, Virginia on the edge of the bed, Nessa says, “This isn’t over something to do with Ottoline, is it?”

“Ottoline!” Virginia scoffs. “God. She died in February and, would you believe it, I’m still quite over it.”

Nessa frowns.

“Oh, I know, I know. I’m wretched, and you know I don’t really mean it. But how could you think that I would be sick over Ottoline? Unless, of course, her journals have been unsealed.” She makes a scandalized face and covers her mouth coyly with her hand. “What then?”

Nessa smiles weakly, knowing, as everyone does, that Ottoline’s infamous journals are rumored to contain more incriminating information about the whole tangled web of Bloomsbury—at whose center Ottoline lurked like a black widow for more than thirty years—than the files of British Intelligence contained about the Nazis. And they had been sealed every bit as tightly, too, at her behest, by her husband Philip, who, without exception, did absolutely everything he was told.