Adeline (25 page)

But Nessa has never been attracted or susceptible to the martial art of gossip the way her sister has. Virginia might pretend otherwise when it suited her, but Nessa knows that a good chin-wag has always been a favorite pastime of hers. It was the virtual linchpin of her friendship with Lytton—perhaps “friendship” is the wrong word—and the coven she assembled with Ottoline. Virginia had wasted a great deal of time and idle talk with Her Ladyship over the years, and in the blood sport of society she had given every bit as good as she’d got. She did not like to be reminded of this fact.

Nessa, meanwhile, had always thought of herself as actually living the life—and happily—that so many others had lived only vicariously—or in Ottoline’s case, relived convalescently—by yapping about it. The postmortems of love affairs have never interested Nessa much, but when it comes to Virginia (
vide
Vita), she knows that there is often a great deal more than hurt feelings at stake, even just in what she overhears.

“So, what’s happened?” Nessa asks.

Fiddling with the lamp cord on the night table, Virginia says nonchalantly, “Well, I suppose it does have to do in some manner with Ottoline. But then”—she laughs—“what doesn’t?”

They both smirk at this, Nessa less so than Virginia, and Virginia goes on, trying to distract herself from the mild constriction that is still there in her throat.

“You know she filled Vivien Eliot’s head full of nonsense about Carrington after she and Lytton died.”

“Well, she would, wouldn’t she?” Nessa says. “You said they’d been lovers once.”

“Who?” Virginia cries. “Vivien and Ottoline?”

“No. Of course not. Don’t be a fool. Ottoline and Carrington.”

“Oh, yes. That. Well, as I said, Ottoline had her hand, so to speak, in every pie. But I mean something else.”

She pauses here, still fiddling with the cord. After a moment, she adds sheepishly, “I mean how badly Ottoline and I treated Vivien after all that. After Tom left her.”

“But that’s ancient history,” Nessa says, not wanting to discuss Ottoline any more than necessary. She is pressing for the real cause of this morning’s events. “Why are you thinking of that now?”

“Not that ancient,” Virginia balks. “Anyway, I feel awful. It’s all a muddle. Everything is bound up with everything else, and I’m thrown over. I just—”

“Virginia,” Nessa interrupts sternly, “what have you heard?”

Throwing up her hands, Virginia says, “I received a phone call this morning from Tom.” She looks candidly at Nessa, as if this should say everything, but it is obvious that she has stopped short of the main thing.

“And?” Nessa prompts. “What did he say?”

This is more difficult than she thought it would be to repeat. She is beginning to feel sick again at the thought of it. She swallows hard several times to clear the saliva that is filling her mouth, and takes several deep breaths.

“Virginia?”

“Yes, all right,” Virginia snaps, cracking the cord against the nightstand and nearly toppling the lamp. Nessa leaps up to steady it. Virginia takes full advantage of the delay, and the fact that Nessa’s attention is, for the moment, focused elsewhere. She breathes deeply several more times, and clutches at her throat and belly in a way that she is relieved Nessa doesn’t see.

When Nessa has retaken her seat, Virginia swallows again and says, “Tom said that Vivien has been committed to an asylum.”

The words “Oh, dear” slip out before Nessa can stop them, and Virginia’s eyes pop up at her. “You see?” she says accusingly.

But Nessa immediately recovers. “I see that it is a very sad thing for Vivien and for Tom,” she says, pausing to emphasize her verdict. “And that is all.”

“That is not all,” Virginia cries.

Nessa starts slightly at this and tries to soften her tone. “I know it isn’t. I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t want you spinning this out, making more of it than there need be. You know that at times like this you blame yourself for everything. You must stop this now.”

She had meant to express her sympathy and the profound understanding that she has gained by helping Virginia through these bouts since they were adolescents, but by the time she finishes, she is surprised to find herself nearly shouting.

Julian’s death has both sharpened and dulled her. She feels less, she rages more. She can seldom suppress the tantrums that seem to lurk most threateningly when she is with Virginia. The persuasion of her grief is too strong: This is not your burden anymore, it tells her, this constant shoring up of your sister.
You
are the one who is destroyed.
You
have known the blankness of actual pain.

In this mindset she has very little of her famous patience left. She can no longer tolerate these petty exacerbations.

“Oh, Nessa,” Virginia moans, fearing Nessa’s thoughts. “It is I who am sorry. I didn’t intend to tell you. Not like this. I didn’t mean for you to find me as you did. I know that all of this is nothing beside Julian.”

Nessa feels the momentary urge to contradict, but there is no real feeling behind the impulse, and so she merely stares at the floor beneath Virginia’s feet.

“It was you, you know,” Virginia says softly.

“Me what?” Nessa says without raising her eyes.

“Who saved me from ending like Vivien.”

At this, Nessa looks up with a puzzled expression. “Saved you?”

But Virginia only returns Nessa’s gaze, her own eyes filling with the sudden tears of gratitude that have overcome her.

Nessa can feel a shudder of discomfort go through her, and then a hot surge of resentment overtaking it, thickening in her throat and filling her ears with blood. It is too typical. She is being ambushed yet again by a show of unaccountable emotion whose true cause Virginia refuses to expose. But she will not let herself be thrown. With a stilted matter-of-factness that for the moment conceals her displeasure, Nessa says, “But of course it was Leonard who saved you.”

Virginia smiles. “Yes,” she says. “But it is more complicated than that. Our family. Oh, Nessa, it frightens me so even now just to think of it.”

This sends another rush, this time of near fury, up Nessa’s spine. Her brain is beginning to simmer. There will be no avoiding this scene, but she will not be the one to provoke it.

Looking at Virginia now, Nessa sees her sister’s strangely pained expression, as though she is trying to sweep aside her first feelings as quickly and ruthlessly as possible to make way for a more dispassionate pronouncement. This has a slightly cooling effect. Nessa settles in the chair and lets the cushions plump soothingly against her stiffened back.

“It is always the men who appear to be in control of these decisions,” Virginia resumes at last. Her tone is now pedantic, but forced. “And, ultimately, they
are
in control, of course. The doctors, the fathers, the husbands, the brothers are all holding the keys, but—and this is part of what I have been sick about this morning—perhaps it is in fact the women, the mothers and sisters”—she pauses briefly to say the next words with special emphasis—“or the
step
mothers and
half
sisters, who are turning those keys in the locks. Might it not, in the last analysis, be the acquiescence of one or more female relatives that permits, or overlooks, or obscures, another female relative’s confinement? Vivien’s mother, Lucia’s mother and, not least, let us say it aloud for once, our own mother, poor Laura’s stepmother—where were they?”

“Lucia?” Nessa says, because she does not want even to begin to entertain what Virginia has just suggested about their half sister Laura and their mother. They have not spoken of Laura in many, many years. The mere mention of the name is evidence enough to Nessa that Virginia is much farther afield this morning than she realized.

“Lucia Joyce,” Virginia says perfunctorily. “Never mind her. It’s just . . . I wanted you to know that I know that it was you.”

Still Nessa says nothing, though she is looking searchingly and skeptically into Virginia’s eyes. Why is she on about Laura?

“Don’t you see?” Virginia says. “Laura lived with us. She was there with us in St. Ives. And then, magically, she was not there. She was put away, and long before Mother died, when we were too young to know what it meant. Then Mother died, and sister Stella died not long after, and it was only us, you and me, with the boys and Father. Then Father died and Thoby died, too, and we were left at last only with Adrian, who, you’ll agree, was always a nonentity, and with George and Gerald Duckworth, who, well, we know what they were.”

Nessa looks down again at the mention of their half brothers’ names, for she, too, has very sore and shaded memories of both of them. This is something else of which they have not spoken for many years.

“I’m sorry,” Virginia says, seeing Nessa’s eyes fall. “I know what it means to say these names. All of them. But I must tell you what I mean. It was then, after everyone had died, that I began to decompensate. It was when they alone were our proprietors, our three so-called brothers, two pigs and a midge, that I was most lost.”

“And Leonard!” Nessa angrily interjects.

“Yes,” Virginia concedes, “and then Leonard came along to civilize everything, the only noble male in our vicinity.”

“Yes, and the one who kept you from ending like poor, maligned, forgotten Laura. Isn’t that your point?”

“Has she ended?” Virginia says remorsefully. “Has Laura ended? I do not even know.”

This snaps the fragile equanimity that Nessa has held so carefully intact. She puts her head into her hands with a cry of utter frustration and begins to weep.

“That is my point,” Virginia says quietly, watching Nessa react. “People might have said the same of me, in passing perhaps, or because something reminded them of that strange, mad girl they once knew: Whatever happened to Virginia?”

She pauses here to raise herself from the edge of the bed, cross to Nessa’s chair and kneel at her feet. Taking Nessa’s wet hands away from her face and holding them in her own, she says, “They would have said so were it not . . . yes, for Leonard, his credit is assured, but”—she beats the air assertively with their held hands—“but for you, dearest. Were it not for you.”

Nessa drops her head against the rear of the chair, exhausted, and sighs heavily, the sobs still hiccupping her breath.

“And this is how I repay you,” Virginia says bitterly, as she drops Nessa’s hands and lets herself fall backward onto the floor. She lands with a whimper of dismay and looks away.

“No, Virginia,” Nessa says, raising her head from the chair to glare down at her sister, “this is how you
are.
”

Nessa’s voice is still thick with tears, but the sudden fierceness of the words has jerked Virginia back, and she is staring into Nessa’s angry eyes.

“You do this whenever you are distressed,” Nessa says. “You mix and equate things that are not the same. You confuse and you contradict, just as you have always done, because it is your most effective means of condemning yourself . . . Well, I’m sorry, but this time I will not let you do it. I will not let you have it both ways. Not about this. Not in the state I’m in. I will not sit by and listen to you revise and indict our entire family because on this particular day it happens to suit your spiteful habit of mind.”

Nessa is now sitting on the edge of the chair, her hands flying.

“You pretend to credit me with saving you, yet in the same breath you condemn me for not saving Laura. Don’t you see that? Oh, of course you do. It’s all just another part of this sick dance we’ve been doing since—” She stubbornly shakes this away. She will not to be put off by the mention of Julian’s name. “What you are really saying is that because I saved you, why did I not save Laura? Why in all these years have I, like you, never sought my half sister out? How is it that I do not even know if she is dead or alive? Perhaps I—we—could save her still.”

Virginia cannot contradict this, because she knows it is all perfectly and miserably correct and, as Nessa said, just more of the same perversion that has been pulling them together and apart since Julian’s death. She does not really want to think about the fate of Laura any more than Nessa does, or about Vivien for that matter, or, God’s sake, Lucia Joyce. She wants her Nessa. She wants her Nessa to tell her that it has all been, and that it will all be, all right.

“Do I always?” she asks plaintively.

“Yeeeeessss!” Nessa wails. “Yes. Always. There isn’t a single consistent thought in your head or feeling in your heart except, occasionally, the ones you manage to put down in your books. You’ve just published the most scathing attack on men, accusing them of disempowering women for centuries, but now you want to tell me that it’s the women, after all, who have been putting women into the madhouse, or, occasionally, when they are the mildly good ones like me, saving them from it.”

“One is entitled to adjust one’s opinions after the fact,” Virginia says weakly.

“And then there’s Tom,” Nessa says, ignoring this remark. “The source of today’s avalanche, apparently. It’s truly incredible. You told me once that you thought you might have loved him. I have the proof. You put it in a letter to me not two years ago. As for Vivien, well, you virtually threw her down the well after Tom left her. But now that she’s been put away—though again, apparently not by Tom alone, but somehow by the machinations of her mother as well—Tom is the devil, Vivien is a saint, and you’re a wreck who only narrowly escaped being carted off like Vivien, like Laura, and like this Lucia, whoever she is, to the darkest hole in all of Britain, had it not been, heaven be praised,
for me
!”

Nessa is purple with rage. She has been screaming all of this, hardly pausing to breathe, and subsiding only when she has run out of air, as she has done now. But she is not finished. She gasps as if she has just fought her way to the surface from fathoms deep. Her voice has roughened with the strain of the attack, and what she says now growls out of her so harshly that Virginia is truly frightened by the sound.

“All the extremes,” she snarls contemptuously. “Love—ha, now there’s a specimen—you thought you loved Lytton once, too, remember? And, dear God, let us not even tread on Vita. But then there are all the other emotions as well—hatred, fear, like, dislike, envy, faith, pride, jealousy, lust, adoration, accusation, and on and on and on. They’re all one and the same to you. They make no sense, and they mean nothing. You apply them all. Julian is, of course, their nearest target—the great love, the great enemy, the measure of all things that you haven’t
conceived
—but who, really, has escaped your onslaught? Who haven’t you tried to possess, and then just as quickly discard with all your downpouring of nonsense? . . . But in the end there is only you. You, who put it all into your one and only true obsession—yourself—and spin it round and round in that hopeless roulette you call a brain, and then, when you’re finally through with it, when it serves no further purpose in that lethal little game you love to play with yourself, well then, you simply spit it out. You spew it as far and wide as it will go. And they call it your wit, your charm, your brilliance, but all it really is, or ever was, is waste.”