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 d
espised 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 . . . ”
“Tenderly what?”
“Anonymous.”
“How typical of you. You will destroy him with this. It is not an act of love. It is nothing but an indulgence of pure selfishness and thoughtless disregard.”
“Again you oversimplify. You forget that love is never one impulse, never one face, but many and varied and as conflicted as the truth always is. In my love for him, among many, many other contradictions, there is contained the cruelty of parting, and in his love for me, also many-faceted and at odds, there is the fulfillment of having me gone.”
Octavia flattens one side of her mouth and shakes her head in disapproval. She is not remotely convinced, but she does not wish to wade any further into the double meanings of Virginia’s marriage, if that is indeed what they are, or, and this is the more likely truth, into the rhetorical rings she runs round it to justify her will.
“And Vanessa?” she asks instead.
“She is my heart,” Virginia says. “She will know.”
What can she say to such a thing? Virginia has dismissed her sister’s grief in two short sentences. It is like slamming a door. Octavia feels as if she is being systematically shut out, and there is nothing she can do but give in.
“What of me, then?” she says meekly.
“Oh, my dearest Octavia,” Virginia says, her face melting into an almost unbearable kindness. “You are an oak. A sturdy, stalwart English oak. You will stand yet for a long time.”
This reply is even more pat than the last. There is no way in. The conversation is at an end. Now all she can do is stall for time. She looks at Virginia once more, pleadingly, searching her face for some response, but Virginia is in a cocoon, her expression as blank and inaccessible as if it were wrapped in gauze.
“All right,” Octavia says at last, sighing hugely and wiping the corners of her eyes. “I will agree to let you go and not to act. But on one condition.”
Virginia says nothing. She merely tilts her chin to one side to indicate that she has heard. This hurts Octavia, but there is nothing for it. She can only finish her part of what is already done.
“That you promise to let me come and see you tomorrow,” she says.
Virginia pretends to consider this for a moment. “The day after?”
“All right, then. The day after. It is a promise?”
“Yes,” Virginia says, and smiles.
Octavia stands. “Right, then, let me get you your milk.”
Friday
SHE IS SITTING at her desk in the writing lodge at the end of the garden, looking down at the blotter where a stripe of weak sunlight is lashing across it at the corner like the ribbon on a gift. She has placed a piece of sky-blue stationery squarely at its center, and the pen beside it, stiffly vertical, like a display. They—the paper, the pen and she in the chair—have been here like this since just before six, when the night guns at Newhaven had finally gone silent and the swarms of Luftwaffe had buzzed back across the Channel, having laid their iron eggs.
Often now, it is the silence that wakes her, the cessation that is somehow more horrifying than the cannonade. This is what woke her again this morning. She crept down to the lodge immediately to write the necessary notes, just as the horizon was beginning to glow, the trees and the shrubs and the rooftops standing black against the rose quartz of the sky like chessmen, arrayed round the clearing in the orchard.
She sat here for a long time, watching the sun assert itself in lancing shadows and shafts across the grass, and feeling the room brighten almost undetectably, as if from within, each molecule its own source, slowly dialing up the light. Now the sun is well up and the first rays have begun to penetrate the foliage that surrounds the low triptych of windows behind her. She looks at her watch to confirm the hour. Five to nine. She can delay no longer.
Grasping the watch, anxiously twisting its face toward her, she thinks again of the guns, the cannonade and the hour. When it begins, when it stops, and the undissuaded dawn it leaves to ripen, festooned by a cacophony of birdsong. This is when the voices are loudest in her mind, shouting over the larks and the thrushes and the wrens like a rowdy parliament.
They are a predictable group, tailored for the occasion by the blights and scorns of memory.
There is her Tom, now Poor Tom, or Tom o’ Bedlam, who comes ringing off the pages of Shakespeare with his penetrating nonsense, except that it is not really nonsense in the mouth of her stern, snake-eyed old friend, having, as it does, all the marks of his strict diction and the cold burn of his marmoreal skin. His is the dominant voice, her haunting competitor, here to the end, to beguile and torment her.
Then, for contrast, or because it makes a kind of twisted sense, there is her lovely gone Lytton, whose conversation she had craved so wretchedly every day of the last long nine years until he came alive again in this chorus this morning, shrill as ever, the quick dead Fool to Tom’s Tom.
And then—because who else could be her Lear?—there is the old magus himself, Yeats, no longer the wan, dusty keeper of the curio shop, nor the suspiciously rosy beneficiary of a vasectomy. He is resplendent in his greyness now, both powerfully dull and shining, striated and smooth-edged, like an unfinished statue of the great poet himself, striding out of the sculptor’s block, which is not marble or bronze, but one of those pure broadcasting minerals he had spoken of, titanium, perhaps, or zinc, hewn from the singing side of a mountain.
Finally, as always, there is Adeline, who is an angel of decorum, the Cordelia of this cast, speaking only when spoken to, or when the moment is perfectly right, the briefest, gentlest, most apposite words imaginable.
These are the personae—canonical, of course—that have come booming through her morning, just when the real cannons stop. From the canon for the canon’s hour, she has aptly chosen King Lear. She saw Lear once in the West End with Tom, she recalls, years and years ago when they were young, and they had laughed, as the young do, at its tragedy, which at the time had seemed absurdly lachrymose and contrived. But now it has appeared, the real thing, like the ghost of irony personified, precisely on its hour to have the last laugh.
Yes, the canonical hour, she thinks. There is also that. Terce, is it? Nine a.m.? Tom would know. He had told her once in the full flush of his conversion, but she had not paid much attention, having been at the time too preoccupied with forced discretion, swallowing the quips and carps that had kept rising to her lips like the bile in her gorge. She had detested his weakness in going over to the Church, like a traitor to the other side. But then, she had known everything he was running from—Vivien’s bane—and she had sympathized with him then, as she had sympathized all along. She had, she thinks now, always done her utmost to help him with the ill-starred accidents of his life, even as she had recoiled, and behaved every bit as badly as she had well.
Poor Tom, who had swallowed the catechism whole, and for what? To mark the hours in Latin? Or for comfort? To hide his furtive weeping boy’s head in the clergyman’s skirts? To pour all his festering confessions where they could never be retold?
Nine a.m. is Terce, says the pinching voice of Poor Tom. The third hour. The hours are marked in threes. Six a.m. is the first hour, Prime. Nine a.m. is the third hour, Terce. Noon is the sixth hour, Sext, and three p.m. is the ninth hour, None. Pity your Latin was always so poor. But then, what can one expect of a woman, and self-schooled?
She sighs at the old dig of this remark. It presses, as always, on the wound of insufficiency i
n her. It is the same thing again, the dread of being found out, or deemed an ignoramus by all those impeccable men who had come to her, armed to their gnashing teeth with all the academic rigors of their higher educations.
She unhands the watch and picks up the pen. Terce, then. She must be terse. Her eyes stray to the vase of the season’s first yellow primroses that she has placed at the corner of the desk, and grimacing at the pun, she thinks sourly, This is something he’d have done. Joyce, the gaudiest by far of that baccalaureate lot. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce—she had seen the full train of his name in his obituary only two months ago, on January 13, just two weeks shy of her fifty-ninth birthday. She nods to her galvanized Yeats, as if to say, He was not my Irishman of choice.
Strange. Yeats, too, like Lytton, and like Joyce, had died in January, within days of her birthday in ’39.
Bloody Joyce, that other creed-besotted sot and friend of Tom’s. He’d have punned on “Terce,” just as he had punned on a thousand other liturgical bug words, because, try as he might, he had never been able to get the Rome out of the boy. And Tom, the dolt, had put it (or its kissing cousin) willingly in, the mumbo jumbo of Canterbury.
It had been a bond in them, surely, the yoke of the Church, in the one case never quite thrown off, and in the other manfully taken on. It was all the same, a talking point between. She, too, had been a common subject for them to feast on, no doubt, as they were sharpening their knives on womankind. It was Tom who had told him, of course. Who else? “Virginia Woolf doesn’t care for Ulysses—thinks you’re a he-goat showing off.”
Well, she hadn’t cared for it, and he was a he-goat. So what?
She doesn’t want to think of how the rest of that conversation must have gone. But it had registered, her remark, enough to warrant a retort from the he-goat himself. He’d put it in, amidst the other gobbledygook, in his final tome, his last inscrutable testament, Finnegans Wake, published of course by Tom at Faber, and the whole civilized world had promptly fallen before it, panting like a parish of evangelicals. It was almost beyond belief. The precious Irish choirboy, speaking in tongues, had paused to stick out his tongue at her. Well, well, she couldn’t help but feel flattered. It was right there on page five, unmistakable (or was it?): “hegoak.”
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