She hadn’t read the thing, but Tom had shown her, pointing to it so fiercely on the page with his talon-nailed middle finger that he’d left a mark. He’d stood there with the book open, lavishing his oiliest scholar’s smile on her, as if he’d just told her that he’d found a reference to her in the Holy Gospel itself, only this, of course, was the gospel according to James.
Oh, curse it, she rails: Why now? Joyce had had the indignity to die, and far from feeling the prick of schadenfreude she’d expected, she’d nearly broken down. She’d read the news in the paper and shuddered violently, almost epileptically, as if at a forewarning, then collapsed in a heap for the rest of the morning. Writhing in agonies of self-disgust, she’d lain on the floor for hours, filled with all the biting admiration she had not allowed herself to feel while he’d lived. In the envious throes of her imagination, his presence had always been too much, standing monstrous and grinning on the near side of the Continent, like a Cheshire colossus.
He, too—no, in truth, only he, not she, she could admit this now—had come to the end of language. He had flown. He had had the courage, the negation, to do what she had not: to fail flamboyantly.
That was the nut of it, and it was a truism worth proclaiming again, if only to these walls and these demons. She had said as much to Octavia yesterday, though in different words, and anyway, the stubborn, track-minded woman had not understood.
But here it was, she would repeat her summation, for herself and for Tom, Yeats, Lytton and Adeline, who were listening: All the greatest works of art were failures by definition. By design. This was the whole purpose and nature of art, to fail, for art was and could only ever be futile and moribund. That was what made it shine in the darkness.
Naturally. Of course. And why not? She would go on for a bit here, indulge herself as she used to, as if they were all still sitting around smoking and shouting and laughing: alive.
“Here,” she pronounces, her mouth moving but no sound emerging, her eyes roaming the imagined group, “here, thrown up to a God who does not exist, are the brash and squandered valedictions of creatures who can make no sense of their predicament. And so they despair. Yet they choose to sing anyway, sing loudly and elaborately and gorgeously, unheard and unanswered, the dying anthem of the tragic human inability to communicate.”
She sits up in her chair as if for applause at one of her lectures, and thinks, How about that for the scoffers? But then, just as quickly, she remembers her position—where she is, what she is and whom she is addressing—and she sinks back, defeated and ashamed, into the slouch she has been assuming all morning.
But Joyce—she cannot let go of this—however she’d grumbled over him, had done it. He had. He had sent up his beautiful, doomed, man-made flying machine, traced the arc of its brief flight and, with equal parts pride and insouciance, watched its inevitable crash. Yes. She could allow as much now. Daedalus, the master craftsman, was exactly the name; the creator and sire of Icarus, who flew on wings of his father’s making and, flying too high, too human, fell to sea.
She has a moment of satisfaction over this, her, for once, resentless salute to the Artist, so called. But then, quick as instinct, the voice of Poor Tom is on it like a fly, blundering in from the farthest boroughs of her brain:
But you haven’t done it. You didn’t do it, did you? So, what of that?
And then, just as quickly, there is Yeats, fending off the assault, reciting the poem he once wrote for her:
We that have done and thought . . . That have thought and done . . .
Ignoring the old man, Lytton, ever naughty and loyal, elects his own way, and chides instead in her defense:
Here’s a riddle for you, Tom. You’ll like it. It’s phil-o-soph-ic-al and topical, too. If an opus crashes in the desert and no one’s there to hear it, or see it, or care one way or the other, does it make a sound? Not a bang, perhaps, but a whimper, eh? Just like our good old RAF in Africa, flying, rat-tat-tat, then down and—poof!—just a wee little handful of dust.
She smiles at this and barks a laugh, as if Tom is really in the room and she is just clearing her throat. Even now, she dares not appear too amused to hear his verses so maliciously lampooned.
But it is true. Poor Tom is right. She had not done it. She had not flown. She had reached her pinnacle in The Waves, the heights of translucence. But then she had lost her nerve and retreated, rushed back—like a woman?—to the sanctuary of the known world, to the writer’s tidy workshop, call it, full of sawdust and lumber and glue, where she, along with all the other weary yeomen, had built solid, weight-bearing sentences with well-sanded corners and straight lines. Not a craftsman anymore, but a tradesman, she had churned out the riskless product in her later years, varnished, hidebound and safe as bloody houses. Even Leonard, in his own soft way, had agreed.
But—she catches herself—she had had her reasons, hadn’t she? She had done it, written The (admittedly deadpan) Years and the overstretched Between the Acts, just to show that she could, and to answer her critics. Or that, at least, had been what she had told herself and everyone else when she could bring herself to say anything at all. Yet here, alone and not alone—damn these voices—the truth will out.
Those had not been her real reasons.
“I did it because I was afraid,” she says aloud, furiously dropping the pen on the blotter, where she sees that the paper is still blank. How appropriate, she thinks. Not a word.
She looks at her watch once more and sees that it is almost nine-thirty. No matter. She will put down something for Leonard yet—she will—but the time will mean much more than the note. The note will be for the inquest, a document for him to show and be exonerated by, though by the authorities only. He will not exonerate himself. Never that. He is too hard, too exacting.
She knows that Leonard will go over this morning in his mind again and again, looking for his fault, and he will find it primarily in time, in vigilance. He will berate himself ceaselessly for falling asleep, or worse, losing focus on the watch, and he will rack himself for every minute gone.
This is where her wristwatch will do its work, a kindness she can show him, knowing him so well. She will be quick out the door and into the river. This she has promised herself for him. When they find her, he will have the evidence of the wristwatch, strapped to her, stopped at the wicked moment, and he will know then—he will have the needed proof irrefutably in hand—that it had not been long, not long at all, the time between her leaving and her going.
It would be noon at the latest.
Sext, says Poor Tom. By Sext, thy will be done.
Sexed at last, shrills Lytton, not to be outdone. Our frigid bluenose virgin-ia climaxes at last. And comme les françaises, no less, comme les françaises. Come one, come all, come comme les françaises and have your little death, or so they call it, la petite mort.
Sext, Poor Tom says again, as if to obliterate this blasphemy. By Sext it will be done, and by None they will know.
Yes, she thinks, by three o’clock Leonard will know that what’s done has been done, and he will know that he could have done nothing. That is all that matters.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned, says Yeats, reciting again. But this time, with the flintiest of smiles, he adds, Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
Soixante-neuf, squeals Lytton, delighted by his own invention and the chance to extend the ribaldry at Tom’s and old Yeats’s expense. Between the soixante and the neuf falls the shadow of the slouching beast with two backs. What ho! He’s coming again, and to Bethlehem.
This is too wonderful to resist, and she explodes in sobs of laughter. These are the final outrush of all her rage and anxiety pent up. The surprise of this does not escape her as she seizes with mirth, her belly collapsing and distending painfully, the tears streaming down her face, her mouth a sloppy rictus, wailing of its own accord like an inconsolable child’s.
Why is she laughing? How? But she knows why and how. She has done it before.
Suddenly and vividly she remembers her father’s wake all those many years ago. Everyone had gathered in that awful, lugubrious sitting room, waiting to go in, the siblings and semi-siblings (except, of course, Laura, who had been sent to the asylum, and lovely Stella, who had died). There they had been, thrown together, the Duckworths, George and Gerald, and the Stephens, Thoby, Vanessa, herself and Adrian, all milling about and fidgeting in that dark closed space, desperate to escape the terrible knowledge that they felt freed, not aggrieved by their father’s death, and now were strung up by obsequies that they could not properly bring off.
George, drunk of course, had broken the spell. Donning an absurd party wig he’d found in a trunk, he’d begun dancing on the furniture, singing sea chanteys in the style of a fishwife, his voice pitched like a corncrake’s. At the sight and the sound of him, they had all broken down in fits of obscene merriment which had gone on and on, each of them feeding off the other, long after George had put his leg into an umbrella stand on an inadvisable leap from the chaise, and had clattered into the potted aspidistras in the corner. He had lain there for quite some time, moaning and giggling like a satyr in a pile of shards and scattered soil, and they had all gone on moaning and giggling with him until the doctor, or someone presiding, she couldn’t remember who, had come in to shush them with a sour and scandalized face.
Laughter was not something one expected so close to the end, yet there it was, as akin to death as to madness—Poor Tom o’ Bedlam, and the bedraggled Fool, poorer still, wailing and joshing on the heath beside their Lear, and all of them, like that other false man, Viola, smiling at grief. At last, the absolute, the perfect genius of that line rings true to her, like so much else that the Bard had just tossed off, the throwaway lines of his comedy, light fare, and the muttered asides that were there in every one of his tragedies, like darts. They had stuck in her and were twitching now like tune forks.
Absent thee from felicity awhile, quotes a wearying Poor Tom.
You are no Prince Hamlet, counters Lytton viciously, nor were meant to be.
And that, too, she thinks, is true, and Tom knew it. Poor straight Tom, forging his fraught poems on the anvil of his intellect, beating them till they shone and cut. He, too, had chosen the safe haven of the tradesman, yet not, she believes, as she had done, out of fear, but in rectitude. Emotions, though lodged in him viscerally to the point of impaction, had always been anathema to Tom, like a disease or a bad smell, and all the more so for being endemic. And, of course, the harder thing: They were so un-English. Yes, of course. English to the bone was something he had always so desperately wanted to be. And, through God knew what private scourgings and refurbishments, English he had damn well become—three-piece suit, wife, church, royal subject and all.
There had been a time, she recalls, when the most hurtful thing you could call Tom was a bumpkin, which Lytton or someone else had done repeatedly to rib him. Or you could break off humming the tune of “St. Louis Blues,” another well-worn chaff resorted to when Tom got too high-stepping and forgot himself. He could talk, dress and wed his way to the core of proper English life, but there was just no sidestepping the old fact: He was a Middle American, born and raised.
But in the end it is immaterial, because Tom will be remembered. Yes, he will be remembered as well as—and this is the crucial difference—understood, because he is exactly what he’d always said he was, the prophet, not the god, the small man with a gift for sight and a talent for usefulness. Nothing more.
He will stand back forever in the minds of literary men, as he had always done, pointing at the spectacle, and doing so with such shrewd precision, with such cleverly veiled, yet niggling tenderness, that his works would shake men to their soles for as long as there were words and souls to hear them.
He will be that berated thing, a success, and so, not an artist, but an artisan, a virtuoso of the message that gets through, because it will have been sent from the sideline by a spectator who would not play in the endgame.
He will die standing, she thinks, the stony sage who has had the good sense not to alight, and I will die having dallied too long after my best, a coward. All of his predictions will come true. Fearing death by water, hearing human voices, I will drown.
She looks down at the paper and sees that, without knowing it, she has written most of the lines she intended for Leonard. Reading them, she sees that they are like something written in sleep—or in a lunatic trance of laughter and recrimination, more like—but they will do. She scribbles the rest perfunctorily, because she can do nothing else, hastily, obsequiously explaining it away in Adeline’s voice, as if it were a piece of homework past due. But Adeline is good for this, diligent, repetitive, sincere. She soothes the injury by being daft. She cannot be held responsible for her crimes.
Yet the true crime is not lack of life, but of love. Nessa had been right. It is lack of love, the right kind of love, which Virginia has never shown to anyone. And in this Adeline has been as complicit as she. Indeed, Adeline is the author of it. Octavia had also been right. She, Virginia, has never grown up. Adeline is not her invention; she is Adeline’s, just another persona in the array, and none of them capable of love outside the circle of themselves.
That much of what she has just written to Leonard is true. She has never been as good as he. She has never loved as he has, through acts and things done not from desire but out of care and at great cost.
Oh yes, of course, she has loved in her way, grandly, passionately, erotically, companionately, fraternally, sororially, filially, even spousally, to a point, but in all these ways she has only ever loved as a child loves, epiphenomenally, and without the dutiful giving back that truly adult partnership requires.
All those things she’d said and hardly meant, and all the people she’d said them to, just more words. But Leonard had not spoken. He had been. He had behaved as love does, and he had gone about it quietly, seeking no credit or reward, whereas she had blathered and bruited it to all comers, needing approbation, praise, adulation from each, and acting, if she acted at all, only in the thespian sense, or like a baby.
Certainly now she knows it. She has always known it, but here, at last, is the final sentence. This is the wrongdoing by which she is rightly shamed. She would embrace death, she had told Octavia, choosing it, the fullest silence, as she should have chosen it long ago, and that is the truth. But she cannot disown this last vanity: She is also going to it guilty as charged, head bowed, up the steps of the scaffold, like a queen condemned. That, too, is her truth.
Except that there would be no last words, only these execrable notes. No more descriptions, no faithful report of those perishing moments. These are all the things that she will never write. Yet they are all that she has ever wanted to communicate.
Absent thee from felicity awhile, echoes Poor Tom, and draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.
Where is my Horatio now? Lytton chimes, sounding far away and despondent for the first time. But it pains him—no, her—to be so sentimental—the dreaded thing—and so Lytton proffers a last emending jest, even though it tastes a trifle sour in his mouth as he says it. My kingdom for a Horatio, he burbles, but does not laugh, and neither does she.
My story, she thinks. What wash it has all been, and pompous, like Father keening over his wounds, solemnly gaping his waistcoat with both hands to reveal his sacred heart, throbbing in his desiccated breast. We perished, each alone.
Bosh! It is just Tom all over, the banker with the molten heart of fool’s gold, locked in its safe, behind his façade. And it is Tom, no doubt, who will have the last word. Posthumously, speaking in the only language posterity can comprehend, and saying all the things that she has meant. Well, let him, then; she can write no more. In his beginning is her end.
In the disturbances of spring, moans Poor Tom in his own verse, menaced by monsters.
She looks down at the blotter and sees that she has dashed out the note to Nessa, again unknowingly, while she has been
elsewhere, confabulating with fiends. This, at least, is in her own voice, not Adeline’s, but it has rambled over the same ground: Leonard, his goodness, her state, and at the end, the frantic wave of recognition, like the flail of a drowning man.
Ah, well, the words she will leave her are of even less importance than those she will leave for Leonard. Between them, the closest of sisters, communication is not really verbal, after all. Never has been. Vanessa, congenitally wise, had chosen pictures, and she had chosen them very young, though she had not done so intellectually, but out of instinct and her natural self-confidence. She had done so knowing what she, Virginia, the younger sibling who chose words, had not known or been secure enough to accept until it was too late. The adage about pictures and words is too true. A single stroke of the brush comes closer to conveying the real thing than reams of written words can ever do.
Her best work has only ever been an emulation of her sister’s art—indeed, the art of all the painters she admires—with its supple blurs and diffusions of the vulgar world, whose assortment of egos and objects is, to those who see through them, as idiotic and explicit as smut. They, the painters, have known from the outset that the almighty intellect is simply in the way. Direct apprehension is all. Adeline has known this always, too, but it has taken shriveled, striving Virginia a lifetime to let go of the pretense.
And now, to be reduced in the end, like this, to plaintive scribbling. Well, it is fitting. Back to the babblings of an infant, disenchanted with her own voice. And yet—again, she had told Octavia the same—Vanessa will know. She will know without being told, or in spite of being told post delicto. It is a meager insult that she will soon forgive.
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