Adeline (7 page)

He does not know it, but he gives himself away when he is like this, alone with her outdoors and thoroughly absorbed in something he enjoys. This is the person she first loved, and the one that no one else has ever known. Some of their set, the closest and of the longest standing, have sensed this part of him and loved it, too, but none has known it, not as she has, nor can they. This is not the man (she conceives this at first regretfully, then with a blush of satisfaction) that history will remember.

So be it, then, and good. It belongs to them alone. She approves, except that she would not have the hacks get hold of the wrong end of him after the fact—he in one claw, she in the other—and set him up against her as something he is not, a scourge, say, or a keeper. She sighs over this, chagrined and guilty. The conjectures of sex will be a war one day, and she will have played her part in starting it. The spoils will fall to the executors: interpreting all, knowing nothing.

For how would anyone see—how could they, through the masks of his political self, and even hers—what she sees kneeling before her in the garden on this fragile blue day in June? Here is this impossibly gentle, nurturing—and yes, she would go so far—this maternal man taking the tender sprigs of plants between his fingers as lovingly and wonderingly as if they were the tiny, perfectly formed toes of his own newborn child.

Down the years, they will be wasted, these treasures of his secret self: the warmth of kindness and trust that gathers about his shoulders and glows in him as he crouches on the grass in the shade, resting, unawares; the fierce protectiveness of life and of all living things that simmers in his eyes as he sits stroking the dog, staring into the middle distance, or as he watches, sometimes for an hour or more, a common sparrow make its way to and from its nest to feed its young.

It is incommunicable, she thinks. It is the very thing she has to say to him today, shown in another way. The same mystery lost because it cannot be adequately expressed.

“I have been thinking about Talland House,” she says suddenly.

He has stopped plucking to straighten a listing stake. With the palms of his hands he is tamping the loose soil at the base of one of the plants, firming the sod above the rootstock.

“At St. Ives, you mean?” he says, grunting as he leans more weight onto his arms.

“Yes,” she says, “the summers before Mother’s death . . . You know the anniversary has recently passed.”

He stops what he is doing, turns and squints up at her.

“Of course,” he says apologetically, “I hadn’t thought.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she continues absently. She is not going to tell him about Adeline. “It’s just that I was remembering something very specific that I did there.”

He is still stopped, looking up at her a little sheepishly for having forgotten the date of her mother’s death, but his hands have begun to move again beneath him.

“I haven’t thought of it for a long time,” she resumes, more dreamily. “It was a small thing, a very small thing, yet important. At first I was not at all sure why. I was quite puzzled by it, in fact. Of all the things that happened there, all the things that I might have held uppermost in my memory about those summers with the family in that house, but haven’t, this incident has stuck fast.”

“Have you told me about it before?”

“No. I have told no one. It didn’t seem significant enough to relate. I’ve hardly thought of it myself.”

He has righted the stake, and stands to face her, brushing his knees.

“Will you tell me now?” he says.

She is lighting a cigarette.

“If I can,” she says, drawing on it through pursed lips. Exhaling, she adds, “But there is a lot in it, and it has all just come pouring out together in a rush this morning.”

“Go slowly, then,” he says, still facing her, “and I will try to help if I can.”

He turns back, at full height now, and resumes his plucking.

“In the hall at Talland House,” she says, taking another slow drag on the cigarette, “there was a looking glass.” She pauses for a moment, picking a piece of loose tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “It was almost too high for me to look into—I must only have been six or seven at the time—but if I strained and stood tottering on my tiptoes, I could just see my face in it. It was a kind of game I played with myself, though it was serious, too, and secret. A strict and careful secret kept with myself. I did it only when I was alone, and only when I felt sure that no one could possibly come into the hall and see me doing it.”

His back is to her, but he nods as he shuffles another few steps down the row.

“I was ashamed of it,” she says, a little disbelievingly, as though it is something she thinks not even a child would be foolish enough to do. “Terribly ashamed of such a trifling, commonplace thing as looking at myself in the looking glass. Indeed, I remain so to this day. I dislike looking glasses. I dislike looking at myself. And, as you are only too well aware, I detest being looked at by others. Still, as you are also regrettably too aware, this happens everywhere I go.”

He smiles ruefully with half of his face, and without looking, reaches back and puts a consoling hand on her. She pats it briefly and he withdraws it.

“I feel people’s eyes on me,” she continues, more concertedly now, “and immediately there is that shame again, the same childhood shame, welling up and mortifying me. It’s worse than you know. Walking in the street or into a room full of staring people is a torture. Really, a torture, like being made to run the gauntlet of the
galerie des glaces
at Versailles. Exactly like, in fact, because to my mind, the eyes are not the windows of the soul but the mirrors of it. They do not reveal—certainly nothing of the observer. Instead, they reflect only the distorted image of what or whom is being observed.”

He has finished the row, and she has turned with him and begun ambling toward the orchard. He is holding a large piece of bark that he found lying at the end of the path, probably blown in by the last storm. As they walk, he is turning it over in his fingers, deciding what species he thinks it is, frowning at it as if it were the culprit she is speaking of.

“In any case,” she says, watching him, “that is how it has always seemed to me, and each time this kind of dreadful showcasing occurs, even now at middle age, I am transported back, and there I am again, this child, compulsively looking into the looking glass, yet cowering in shame.”

“I see,” he says, still examining the grains and whorls of the bark.

“And so, as I sat there this morning thinking of the past, going over this strange episode, I tried to make sense of it in all the predictable ways—the shame, I mean, and the curiosity. What conflict was expressing itself? What explained the discord?

“And you can imagine what I came to. It was all very well-trod ground. Was it my and Nessa’s tomboyishness, I wondered, asserting itself, instinctively reviling the practice of feminine display? We were well-bred Victorian young ladies, after all, training to be seen and then possessed by our husbands as ornaments. We hated this, of course, and resisted it as vehemently as we dared, even at so young an age. Yet we were drawn to it nonetheless, like Narcissus himself, compelled by the evidence of beauty in ourselves. This was Mother’s legacy, naturally, the primary trait for which she had always been—and we, her likenesses, would one day be—famous. Well, you said it often enough yourself. At that age, it was who we were, entirely. It eclipsed everything else.”

He is down again on his knees, yanking at a large, recalcitrant weed that has entrenched itself in one of the outlying beds.

“Yes,” he agrees, his voice straining with both the effort of uprooting the weed and the archness of intentionally repeating a cliché: “The lovely Stephen girls,” he says. “That day you came to Cambridge to visit Thoby. My, who could talk of anything else? I’ve said it a hundred times, everyone has, and still it jars me. The first time I set eyes on you and Vanessa, sitting there, the two of you side by side, all in white, with your wide-brimmed hats and your white parasols straight as rods in front of you. You were like two Graces, upright and poised and impossibly beautiful.”

He sighs again at the memory. “Incredible.” He lifts off his gardening hat and scratches his scalp with a slightly pained expression. “Ah, well,” he says at last, dropping his arms and swatting the hat lightly against his thigh to shake the grit from it. “Now, of course, I know that I was just one more awed face in the maddening crowd that beset you.”

“You couldn’t have known. I hardly did, except in the raw discomfort of it. It is only now, looking back, that I have begun to feel its full weight, and possibly its cause.”

“Indeed?” he says, placing the hat back on his head and adjusting the brim on his forehead.

“You see,” she says, drawing deeply again on her cigarette, “Mother’s femininity was not the only influence. There was also Father’s puritanism. It had been passed down to him for generations, and it was passed in some form to us. His harshness, his morbid self-absorption and bottomless need for reassurance, his overbearing seriousness and hatred of
shallow idle things
? That was all there, too, in us, roiling behind the mask of Mother’s face.”

“Yes,” Leonard agrees, “your father was a formidable man, and you were absolutely his daughters—not simply the pretty picture of young womanhood that you presented. I could tell that the moment I looked into your eyes.”

Virginia nods in recognition of the fact, but it is not at all the main thing, and she rushes past it, explaining, “But, still, none of this is sufficient. Knowing it all, putting it in place, these reasons, these influences, still I come back in my mind to those moments in the past, in front of the looking glass in the hall at Talland House, and I am not satisfied.”

“Is that really all?” Leonard asks.

“Well, no. There is that other deeply buried family secret that you have heard something about. George and his
mishandling
of me in that very hall, but—”

“Ah yes,” Leonard interrupts sarcastically, “dear brother George.”

“Half brother, please,” Virginia says. “It makes some difference. In any case, I needn’t elaborate. It was fundamental. The violation, the squeamishness and disgust, none of which I could feel properly at the time, but which have done their bitter business down the years.”

This is an ugly memory. Not something they talk about. Her misalliance with her half brother George Duckworth is at the root, Leonard believes, of their ongoing nonconsummation. All attempts at sex were abandoned long ago. The honeymoon had been a travesty in this regard, and had they not been the people they are, this would have sunk them.

It is no one’s fault. For whatever reasons (they are varied and mostly obscure, no doubt), she is amorously, but not at all carnally, inclined, and truth be told, Leonard is much the same. His apparatus, as they have at times fondly referred to it, is a friendly appendage, far less insistent than most. It has never plagued him as it does so many men, and so he has (mostly happily) gotten on with other things. Still, the subject is inherently delicate. It must be turned between them, as it so often has been in the past, on other ideas, and a bout of careful teasing.

“You sound as if you’ve been downstairs rummaging through the Freud,” he jokes, a little feebly, hoisting the convenient thing. They have acquired the English-language rights to publish Freud’s work under the Hogarth imprint, and the papers have just come in.

“Yes. Yes. I realize,” she says testily, partly because she has not been able to bring herself to read a word of the Freud. Still, she has heard enough of Sigmund bandied about by Tom and Lytton, and by all the other men with whom she is on intimate terms, to know that she doesn’t want to bother with him now. “But I could hardly fail to invoke him,” she moans. “His jargon is the lingua franca of our age, and all the more so to us now that we have him wholesale. We are nothing if not publishers of fashion, are we not? The doctor is decidedly in.”

She has not taken Leonard’s remark as he meant it. She has grown much shriller in the course of her little speech. “Freud, Freud, Freud and his brilliant insights into the female mind, ever dropping—or is it slipping?—into the great elucidating cesspool of male conversation.”

He scoffs. “Oh, that’s unworthy of you.”

“Yes, sacrilege, I know,” she says, undeterred, “since we are all so enamored of the great man.” She fans herself theatrically, doing her best imitation of posh feminine bewilderment. “All those clever drives and complexes.” She drops her hands abruptly and her cigarette brushes against the side of her skirt, leaving a smear of ash. “Yes, isn’t it a marvel,” she resumes in her own voice. “All those avenues of inquiry and their inexhaustible relevance to our endless fascination with ourselves.”

This is deliberately brash as well as contradictory.

“You, of course, see the egregious hypocrisy in this,” he grunts. “You’ve just finished—”

“I have not finished,” she shouts over him, chopping the words so harshly that the conversation all but slams shut.

There is a long moment of angry silence. She glares at him all through it, but then her expression softens. With a brief downward glance, and a flickering of his lips that he knows she will recognize, he apologizes for them both.

“I,” she resumes, tartly nodding to him, “who am, it would seem, as infected by the Freudian vogue as everyone else, went through the whole rigmarole myself this very morning.”

She considers this, seeming to allow his criticism to penetrate, and adds more defensively, “I am, I confess it, very interested in me, and my past in particular—it being mine.”

Leonard smiles graciously at her concession, but then turns up one side of his mouth at her need to make it sting.

“So, there I went,” she is saying, “taking up each of my tried, true possibilities, the obvious explanations—and, to be fair, I found them half useful to a point. They are valid enough, such as they are, as reasons, and they will do”—she bows here to acknowledge the quotation—“
to swell a progress.
That is, if one is content with small talk.”