Adeline (29 page)

“No. Not my way,” Virginia asserts. “My choice. I would have my choice. But you would leave me without one. That is the difficult fact that you do not wish to acknowledge. The point is not
that
Septimus threw himself from the window, but
why
he did so. So, I ask you. Think of it. Why did he? Well, his answer is mine. To avoid being committed.”

“He
committed
the crime of self-murder.”

“In defiance of the greater crime of committing a person against his will.”

Exasperated, Octavia says, “Oh, Virginia, derangement deprives us all of choices. Doctors and patients alike. That, perhaps, is its greatest theft. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

“But that is just it,” Virginia says. “I am not deranged. Not now. I am on the verge of becoming so again. There is a great difference. These are not the arguments of madness. They are not crooked. They are not obscure. They are perfectly clear.”

“And what precisely is it that you think is so clear—aside, of course, from your unwillingness to properly address your condition?”

“What is clear—and with invasion looming, it is clear to every man and woman in the street, but it has been clear to me all along—what is clear, Octavia, is that death is certain.” Her eyes are immensely hard and shining, like polished river stones, and fixed on their target, boring into Octavia’s own as if they would burn through.

“But,” she continues, lifting her finger for emphasis—it is so wretchedly thin and pale that it has almost the opposite effect, but it is as steady as a spike—“if we are quick at the decisive moment, if we are not taken or struck down, and
if we have not been forced by those who would care for us
, then we may choose how we meet that certainty.”

In the fervor of the speech she has dropped the instructing pose, and now both her hands are placed in front of her, palms up, in a strangely contrary gesture of decisiveness and supplication. “I am asking for that choice,” she says.

Octavia is moved, but she will not yield or show it.

“And was it this same clarity,” she insists, “this same argument that informed your previous attempts? Were you making the informed, the unforced choice when you threw yourself from the window as a young woman, or later, when you took the overdose of veronal?”

Virginia hardly pauses on the answer, which has a sudden coldness and finality that she has not shown before—not today, and perhaps never before between them.

“I knew then what I know now. I told you. I knew it when I was very young.”

Octavia hears again the note of danger in these words, and knows, too, that it is new in their exchanges. But, she firmly reminds herself, she will remain as she is, whatever happens. She will not be drawn into panic, which is sitting there so oddly in Virginia, but as its more horrifying opposite, like a lizard, confident in the terror that it inflicts.

“And, for the simpleton, tell me again,” Octavia says stiffly. “What is it that you knew?”

“That death is an embrace.”

Virginia is abruptly softened by this pronouncement, which she has made dreamily, as if she were reading the last cozy line of a bedtime story to a child. She is looking off into her daydream, Octavia thinks, having scored the decisive touch, or so she believes. Octavia knows this line well, and will not rise to it, any more than she would to its saurian counterpart, which has just slithered artfully out of sight. If Octavia were not so alarmed, and if she were given to derision, she might be stifling a snort, but a kind of weary motherly displeasure is all that she can muster.

“My, how very dramatic,” she says, almost drolly. “We are back to the footlights. That is worthy of Juliet.”

Virginia looks back sharply at her, surprised and angered at being mocked. Octavia, fueled by the unexpected thrill of an advantage, rushes on.

“But even a simpleton can see through you,” she says. “You have cleverly turned it all around, I’ll give you that, but the truth is far less flattering than the guise. You were not a savant, and you are not one now. You have simply failed to grow up. The truer way of saying it is not that you have always known, but that you know now nothing more than you knew then. This is a child’s romance, a child’s rash and flamboyant method carried through intact to the fancies of a fifty-nine-year-old woman who, I might add, is far too intelligent and wise not to know better.”

Virginia is strangely composed and, uncharacteristically, she ignores this insult.

“It’s true that my courses then were not as well chosen as they might have been. I left room for error and interference. But, as you say, I was young. I was eager.”

“Eager to escape,” Octavia says.

“No, precisely the opposite. It was always life that was the escape for me. Sanity was the diversion.”

Octavia is puzzled by this and almost intrigued, but she is also annoyed. To Virginia this has become a game.

“Escape? Diversion? From what?” she asks.

“Intimacy,” Virginia answers, again in the dream voice.

This has ruined any intrigue there might have been.

“Oh, nonsense,” Octavia says. “Romance . . . If you were so eager for this supposed intimacy, this embrace of death, then why did you not pursue it? Why did you not try again until you succeeded? Many years have passed since the last attempt.”

“We are all susceptible to diversion, are we not?” Virginia says, a look of guilty innocence stealing over her face. The mix is typical and perfected, one of the ways Virginia has of conniving with paradox.

“And my diversion,” she continues, now well in command, “has been perhaps more diverting than most. I was enraptured by it. I wanted to communicate what I had glimpsed, though I suspected from the start where this would lead. Expression, you see, carries the means of its own annihilation. Brought to its fullest consummation, its closest contact, it disintegrates. I have reached that point: the end of language.
The rest is silence.
”

Octavia has heard this before. It is a favorite when Virginia is depressed, intoned woefully at tea, the two of them consulting through the years, though not appearing to, just chatting as friends do, but with a purpose.

Octavia sighs. “You have said as much before, Virginia. Often, in fact, and for as long as I have known you. Each time you finish a book, you declare yourself mute and inert, and you fall into the torpor of this . . . this perceived ineptitude. It has always been the same.”

“Yes, it has always been the same,” Virginia agrees. “Because it has always been true, and I have always known it. That is what I want you to understand. The recurrence, and the when and the why of it, the coming back always to this single truth: The wholeness, the oneness, this way of being that I have intimated cannot be fully divulged. And all this writing, this fever to put it down, has only ever been a knowingly futile diversion from that inescapable, that scientific fact. It cannot be achieved. Not by our means. Not in the confines of our minds, our language, our winnowing perception . . . And all these times, you are right, always at the end of an attempt, because that was when I was faced yet again with the same evidence, I fell into this same silence. Always then, I knew again what I had known repeatedly before but had not yet been willing to accept. And so the cycle continued. I turned away. I scarpered back into distraction and forgot. I lived, striving to communicate this radiating significance that I had momentarily descried. I wrote and rewrote and revised until the last line, the last full stop. And then, feeling crushed, as before, I was back where I had started, newly failed.”

She ceases abruptly, her breath coming full and almost chokingly fast. But she will not wait for Octavia to answer until she has said the remaining words, the whole in fact of what she came to say. She steadies herself with the dull determination of a furrower righting his plow, and finishes.

“But that is all over now. I have made the last cycle. I am done. I am ready. I accept. Hereafter, there will be no more leaving.”

Octavia jerks forward and nearly stands, lurching up to the edge of her chair and slapping her hands violently against her thighs.

“Honestly, Virginia, you try me so. You prevaricate. Leaving is exactly what you would do.”

The desperation in this, and the secret it reveals so unwillingly, that Octavia’s grasp is slipping, rings between them like the distant wail of a child in distress.

“No,” Virginia murmurs. “Not leaving. Going.”

“Going? What do you mean, going?” Octavia is shouting now. “Into the waiting arms of the hereafter? Is that it?” Then, regaining at least a note of her adversarial pretense, if not her composure, she adds, “Hereafter. It is a telling word, don’t you think? You said it a moment ago, you realize.”

Virginia reaches for a cheroot and lights it, her hands as strangely steady as they were when they began this part of the conversation. She takes a luxurious drag, raising her chin imperiously to blow the smoke up and behind her. This is not meant to annoy, but it does, and Octavia again regrets that she is not better able to conceal her chagrin. Virginia looks at her kindly, or means to, though to Octavia it does not feel kind. Virginia crosses her legs and leans her elbows on her knees. This is the didactic mode again, as with the raised finger, one of her tricks, perfected at parties over the years. It holds her apart and safe from the messiness of contact.

“Now, my dear friend,” Virginia says, “I think it is you who are being perhaps just a little romantic.”

Octavia scowls dismissively, but says nothing.

“That is a Christian heaven you are thinking of,” Virginia continues. “But you have it quite backward. The ancients had it closer, I think. In the East, I mean. Nirvana is not our hereafter. It is not everlasting life, or even life reincarnate. Extension is not the desire of going. Quite the opposite. It may surprise you to know that the literal meaning of the Sanskrit word
nibbana
is ‘extinguished.’”

Octavia can contain herself no longer.

“Don’t lecture me. The swastika comes from Sanskrit as well, and do you know what it means? ‘It is good.’ How do you like that? Oh, for God’s sake, Virginia. This is madness.”

“No. No, Octavia. Listen,” Virginia says, patting the air with her hands in a calming gesture. “Not madness, but the relief of it, the completion of it. Don’t you see? Madness is”—she raps her knuckles on her head—“this instrument overwhelmed. I am mad when the visions and the knowledge are most intense. I am
made
mad because I cannot accommodate the onslaught, because it is too much for my brain to take in or to put out. That is why the silence.

“Go back to what you know,” she continues, determined to make this clear. “To Paul. The Bible. Acts, is it? His vision of heaven, you remember? He could not describe it. He was a man of many words, always instructing, always warning. Yet this he had no words for. And why? Because, as he himself acknowledged, it was indescribable. It could not be spoken . . . So it is with me. And no, Octavia, I am not delusional. I do not imagine that I am that pedantic lunatic Paul, or that I have seen heaven. There is no such
place
, no extra life. There is only the relinquishment, the happy, final throwing off of all these weights and frames that make me mad with incapacity: this body, these words, this hopeless bloody rock we are standing on. It cannot move fast enough. None of it. The light is shooting through and past us. We cannot catch up to it. And that . . . exactly that, this entrenchment while beholding the unspeakable . . . is why this consciousness is and has always been excruciating to me. I cannot do it anymore.”

Octavia is staring at Virginia’s face, which is flushed for the first time in months, possibly years. It is so incongruous, so unlike her normal state, Octavia marvels, that she looks like an old photograph that has been retouched, or a wooden doll whimsically painted to seem cheered. Pools of actual pink, deep pink, are dotted in the strangest places: on her left cheekbone but not her right, swiped across the forehead but not the chin. And the nose, the long, arrogant Stephen nose, is whiter than any of her has ever been, even at her sickest, and unreal, like putty, the flat colorless color of an object that defies the light.

Octavia is stunned by what she has heard. Won over, she might have said, except—she sees this at last—there is no contest. There will be no more sparring—there never was any—no vain flourishes of wit and frankness. Those were her projections. She has had this wrong from the start, not superficially, of course—that is all there, part of the veneer, and Virginia’s ploy—but profoundly. She has had it all profoundly wrong at the core of what, for Virginia, the whole purpose of this interview has turned out to be. It has not, after all, been a debate staged between loving adversaries, nor a tussle with an old friend. It has not been a consultation or a medical call. It is simply a goodbye.

She cannot dodge the pain of this or stop the tears it brings. She will not even try.

“And what of Leonard?” she moans. “Have you given him a moment’s thought in all this?”

“Of course I have. Always. We have been discussing this for a long time.”

“So you have talked of it?”

“We have talked of the ideas in it. Yes. But that was only creative flushing. The matter of it, the vision, has always been understood. He knows better than anyone ever could how the sickness and the work have gone for me.”

“Then why not tell him now?”

“Because knowing and hearing are two very different things. I said so at the beginning of all this.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“There are a great many things we feel and wish for that we can never say aloud, often never admit to ourselves. Leonard is far too moral and good a man to entertain a malignant thought, much less have it set before him as a gift.”

“Damn you. You are speaking in riddles again. How can you?”

“I’m sorry. Truly. I don’t mean to. I am merely saying that without me Leonard will be free. Free to work, to live and love. And this is a freedom that some relentlessly quashed and despised but deeply human and righteous part of him desires. Anyone would. And I want this for him. For years and years he has seen to me, watched over and cared for me, as well as talked with me, and been my dearest, most inspiring creative and intellectual companion. But I have been a burden to him. I have kept him back. He knows this, but his devotion will not let him see it, and his overbearing conscience will never let him admit it. To say it aloud to him, to drag it out glaringly into the light and name it, would be to insult him. To have it done, however, will be tenderly . . . ”