by Priya Parmar
“Do you know, we spent a month living on the same staircase at Cambridge, and nothing—he had no interest in speaking to me. I call that lazy.”
“But James?”
“James is in the death throes of the thing, and one can only hope it passes soon. Although it might carry James away with it.” He looked up at me. “Not all of us have the willpower to survive these things, Nessa.”
UNION POSTALE UNIVERSELLE
CEYLON (CYLAN)
21 January 1909
Kandy, Ceylon
Lytton,
I am sorry to have neglected you for so long. We are having a disaster here. Rinderpest disease has broken out in several herds in the neighbouring province of Uva, and it will be catastrophic if it spreads to our cattle herds. It is highly contagious and can wipe out thousands at a time. Cattle are people’s most precious possession here, and to lose them is heartbreaking as well as ruinous.
I realise, writing this, how far I have strayed from who I was when I left England and wonder how, if ever, I could make my way back? I find myself wondering if your mythic Virginia is the answer, the magical civilising force that could make me happy. Is that madness? Is that desperation? It is illogical, but often these days, my thoughts find their way to her door. Perhaps it will pass.
I think of you often and hope all is well with you.
Yrs,
Woolf
HRH KING EDWARD VII POSTAL STATIONERY
25 January 1909—46 Gordon Square (frosty)
Virginia’s birthday supper tonight. She asked for family only. Family includes Adrian, Clive, Lytton, Saxon, Desmond, Molly, Duncan, Morgan, Hilton, and Maynard. (Violet is at Welwyn or we would have invited her, and Virginia decided against Ottoline and Philip and their menagerie of lovers.) She says she wants to be with the people she loves best. Virginia is circling. She is seeking my forgiveness. I am civil. I am kind. She cannot fault my behaviour. Nor can she find me.
At one point, as it inevitably does, our talk alighted on the question of who Virginia might marry. Hilton volunteered (I still think he may propose one day), and Lytton looked anxious and suggested Leonard Woolf again. Clive missed it, as he was seeing Morgan into a cab. By the time he got back, we were discussing Maynard’s new position as a fellow at King’s.
1 February 1909—46 Gordon Square (early morning)
“Is everything all right with you and Virginia?” Clive asked, coming into the dining room for breakfast.
“Of course.” I folded my napkin and put it next to my place setting. I did not want my eggs after all.
“Really? Virginia seems to think that you are angry with her.” Clive stood at the sideboard ladling out sausages from the warming dish.
“Virginia is mistaken.” I kissed his cheek and went upstairs to check on Julian.
4 February 1909—46 Gordon Square
I am painting well, given all that has happened. I am pleased with my quiet still life and have decided to call it Iceland Poppies. Each time I come back to it, I am surprised at how well I like it: the wintry palette, the antique medicine jar and pale matching bowl, the green glass poison bottle, and the contrasting poppy. Yes, they are right together. Of course, I could fall out of love with it in an afternoon. Rightness can be a transitive thing.
Clive wanted to know if the painting is about Virginia’s suicide attempts. How very obvious of him. He did not see the triplicate nature of the canvas. The three stripes on the wall. The three vessels: two white, one green. The three flowers lying in the foreground: the two white, turned to the wall, and the one shorter-stemmed, poppy facing outward and painted in a fresh bolt of red. I alternate. Sometimes I am the white flower and sometimes I am the red.
Wednesday 17 February 1909—46 Gordon Square (six pm)
Lytton proposed to Virginia this afternoon. And Virginia accepted. Disaster.
LYTTON HAS JUST LEFT. What a mess. He arrived wild-eyed and desperate to undo this fumbled proposal. It seems he went to Fitzroy Square this afternoon to escape his depressing bedsit in the crowded family house in Belsize Park. He was late with his article (for The Spectator), could not get any quiet to work, was disheartened at the prospect of Maynard having won a fellowship at King’s, and was still suffering from his ongoing Christmas cold. He went seeking good company, luncheon, and a decent fire, and he ended up impulsively proposing marriage to Virginia in the drawing room.
“Did you kneel?” I asked.
“No,” he said, looking shocked.
“Did you speak to Adrian about it?”
“No.” Lytton slumped farther into his chair; his body curved like a question mark. “If I had had the forethought to ask Adrian, I would have also had the forethought not to do it. Tea and toast and French novels by a warm fire—it was just such a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, and then I thought, all afternoons could be spent that way if we were married, and then before I knew it I said …”
“Did you kiss her?”
“Ugh!” Lytton dropped his head into his hands, horrified by the thought. Apparently he was stunned and appalled that Virginia had accepted. He never expected her to accept. In all honesty, neither did I.
“As soon as I said it, I realised I am a bugger through and through. I could never marry a woman,” he wailed. “And certainly not a woman such as Virginia.”
“Yes, I can see that.”
I CANNOT IMAGINE THAT Virginia really wants to go through with it. I hurried him out and sent a note round for Virginia to call.
Later (eight pm)
I asked her to come when I knew that Clive would be out. He has yet to learn of the proposal, and it will be no good for Lytton when he does find out. Lytton and Virginia are not good at secrets. She sat in the armchair but soon crept to the sofa and laid her head on my lap. She shook and burrowed until I put my hand on her head. It rested there, calming her.
“Why did you agree?” I asked, smoothing her hair from her face.
Each time I stopped, she nestled her head until I brushed my fingers through her hair again.
“I shouldn’t have,” she said, clutching at my painting smock.
I waited, knowing there was more.
“How will I ever do this, Nessa? Am I to live with Adrian for the rest of my life? Don’t I get to have someone of my own? Somewhere of my own?”
I was taken aback. I had expected her to plead our recent rift. But this rang of truth. With the exception of my own husband, Virginia had never expressed a wish to have a man of her own or a place of her own. She was always violently against the family breaking up at all. “Ginia,” I said carefully, “plenty of men would love to marry you. Walter, had he lived. Hilton most likely. You must find the one you would like to marry. You must find a life for yourself. And then, of course, you will set up house on your own together.”
“I have never met a man I wanted to marry. I am not sure there is one,” Virginia said darkly.
“So, not Lytton?” I asked, gently steering her round to the current problem.
“Of course not Lytton. I would prefer his sister Marjorie over Lytton,” she said bluntly.
I looked down at her, surprised. Virginia’s Sapphism has long been conjectured, but I was surprised to hear her state it so frankly. “I said yes because I was happy to be asked.” She hunched her legs up under her long skirts and tucked her hands under her chin. A posture from childhood. “I was so happy with just us—just our family,” she said softly. “I wanted us to be all together.”
I know she was thinking of Thoby.
Ten pm
I bundled Virginia into a cab. She is meeting Lytton in a quarter of an hour at Fitzroy Square.
I was moved by Virginia’s great distress tonight. Surprising that sincere affection can survive where there is no trust.
18 February 1909—46 Gordon Square
They managed what Lytton called an honourable retreat.
They dissolved the preposterous engagement, and when he got home Lytton wrote Virginia a very sweet
note insisting that what mattered most was that they liked each other as friends. Lytton says that he has been urging Leonard Woolf to marry her. He says he will explain his inadvertent proposal, and Leonard will understand. Leonard Woolf must be an extraordinary man to understand such a thing.
I know she accepted Lytton to make amends for Clive. In her reasoning, if she marries someone else, she can erase all the harm she has caused. Since that day at Fitzroy Square, I have refused to discuss the affair. She treads carefully around me, waiting for signs of forgiveness. It is difficult to forgive when she is not finished transgressing. The flirtation is not over with Clive, hardly abated. I understand Virginia’s logic. If she finishes with Clive now, she will lose us both. She will not end the affair until I agree to forgive her. She cannot be left with no one.
And—It seems that Clive believed me when I told him that all was well between Virginia and me. How unobservant of him.
Monday 1 March 1909—46 Gordon Square
They have just left for Cambridge. I decided not to go. Julian has caught another cold, and the weather has not yet turned, and I wanted a moment alone to paint. Virginia, Rupert Brooke, and Harry Norton have gone for the day to visit James Strachey in his rooms at Cambridge. James is in need of cheering up; he is still not over Rupert Brooke, who is still not in love with him. Lytton says a mountaineering Adonis called Mr George Mallory is in love with James, but James is too besotted by Rupert to notice. I suspect Lytton is a bit in love with Mr George Mallory himself. Mr Mallory has something of Duncan’s slim, rumpled beauty, and he climbs mountains to boot. Lytton will find that hard to resist.
Clive wanted to go but is meeting a curator friend from Paris and had to stay in town. I am hoping they will all stay away until after supper and Clive and I can have an evening alone. I must tell him of Lytton’s proposal. It will be a disaster for Lytton if Clive hears it from someone else.
And—Adrian told me that Duncan has ended his affair with Maynard. Lytton will be happy. Adrian seemed pleased about it as well.
Later (four am)
Clive is still not home.
3 March 1909—46 Gordon Square
Everyone was here tonight except Clive. I am suspicious.
5 March 1909—46 Gordon Square
It is Mrs Raven Hill. They resumed their affair over our Christmas visit to Seend. Lytton told me this afternoon. He has been trying to tell me for months. I am exhausted by the deceit.
At least it is not Virginia.
Later (2.30am)
Clive is still out. He told me that he was going to be with Maynard and Duncan, who still spend all their time together, but they stopped in after supper and knew nothing about it. They looked uncomfortable when I asked bluntly if Clive was with Mrs Raven Hill.
6 March 1909—46 Gordon Square (late afternoon—lightly raining)
Clive came home this morning, unrepentant. Apparently, I have misunderstood our marriage. He never thought we would be constricted by provincial fidelity. He never thought I would be so narrow-minded, so Victorian, so unimaginative, as to confuse a marriage and a love affair. He never thought I would interrupt his personal freedom in this way. He never expected to love just me for all of our lives. I had that wrong. But he knows I am not the kind of woman to love many men. I am built to love just one, passionately. Does he expect me to direct that singular love to someone else?
10 April 1909—46 Gordon Square (blooming)
A disastrous morning. Why did I do it? Ridiculous question—of course I was going to do it.
This morning Clive left early to meet Lytton at the Savile Club in Piccadilly. Maud and Sophie were both out food shopping, it is Sloper’s half day off, and Elsie had taken Julian into the square to play on a blanket in the grass. I was alone in the house, and I am never alone in the house.
I did not hesitate. When I heard the front door shut behind Elsie, I ran quickly up the stairs to Clive’s study. Taking care to notice the order of things and replace each letter exactly where it lay, I read them. I read them all. The new love letters from Mrs Raven Hill are stacked together with the older love letters from before we were married. Her passion is uncomplicated and straightforward—of the body rather than the mind. Her letters speak of arrangements and train times and seedy hotels in Paddington. He has bought her two new hats, a silk nightgown, and a small watercolour. Fine.
In the smallest drawer in the desk, tucked all the way at the back, are a stack of much-thumbed letters, tied in a pale blue ribbon. Virginia. They were as bad as I feared. No. They were worse. And they were all about me. I retied the ribbon exactly as I found it. A double bow with the ends looped around.
24 April 1909—46 Gordon Square (late afternoon—still light)
It has been a fortnight. I have not told him I have read the letters. What would be the point? I have asked all my questions about Mrs Raven Hill. He has answered in half-truths, and I can guess the rest. Clive finds her a comforting and familiar convenience. She is Virginia’s counterpoint. I feel superior because I know more than his lover does. It is a petty victory. I am sure Clive turns to her because Virginia refuses. My refusal or not is irrelevant. I am no longer a competitor in the match. I am conquered territory and have no currency. Annexed and occupied and without much value.
And rarely, delicately, Clive asks about Virginia. It takes great nerve and huge arrogance to ask me, but he does it anyway. He cannot help himself. Will she marry? Who will marry her? Who wants to marry her? His shoulders draw into tense defensive lines as he collapses his voice into an even pitch.
10 May 1909—46 Gordon Square
The New English Art Club accepted my Iceland Poppies! It will be on exhibition this summer alongside Augustus John and John Singer Sargent. So something good has tumbled out of this appalling year.
And—How lovely, Duncan will be exhibiting as well. I know his portrait of James is to be included, but I am not sure of the other piece. His work has gained such authority and beauty lately. I think he will become quite famous. He is often among us at Fitzroy Square and comes here with Virginia and Adrian. The better I know him, the better I like him.
Tuesday 18 May 1909—46 Gordon Square
Virginia just returned from Cambridge. Hilton Young finally proposed. And she refused. So she is willing to wait for the right love after all. Clive is smug and relieved and has been whistling all day. He hopes she refused for love of him. He does not understand her at all.
I felt scooped out, hollow, and detached when she told me. I heard myself offer pale platitudes and empty words of confidence. I am becoming someone I do not recognise.
CLARISSA
9 October 1909—46 Gordon Square
Just back from Seend and the horrors of the Bells. Clive’s family do not improve with time. How is it that they are able to spend their days gossiping, shooting, and wondering if it will rain and then go to sleep, wake up, and do it again? It eludes me.
Now home and we are having a party. I say “we,” but Clive had to stay in the country. So who is coming? Ottoline and Philip, Walter and Henry Lamb, Lytton’s sisters Pernel, Pippa, and Marjorie (Lytton is in Cambridge), Duncan and Maynard, Adrian, Morgan, Gwennie Darwin, Saxon and Virginia, Bertrand Russell (but not his wife, Alys, whom he does not love any more), Irene Noel, and Tudor Castle, who is mild but very funny and definitely my favourite of Adrian’s Cambridge set. Desmond and Molly missed their train this afternoon and so cannot come. I know the evening will be fraught as Ottoline and Henry Lamb are having a stormy affair and poor Irene is desperate to catch Tudor’s attention. It will be a grim coupled-off evening.
I wish Clive were going to be here to smooth out the social crinkles, but he has to stay in Seend to take care of some family business for his father. I know he is really going to be spending his time with his battleship-bosomed, double-chinned Mrs Raven Hill, but I was too proud to say so. She is overblown, flashy, and extroverted, but I remember her being amusing in a crass sort of way. Perhaps I was the exception all alon
g and his tastes truly run to that sort of showy woman?
I suppose the real trouble for him is Virginia. I am certain that Clive has been unable to seduce her. Virginia’s resolve is steeled by distaste rather than virtue. But it hardly matters. Intention is the thing that harms us.
Since the summer I have been trying to accept Clive’s view of modern marriage. The notion forces me to run anti-clockwise and upends all that makes sense in my mind, but at least we have honesty between us again. That alone sits well with me. He is Julian’s father and my husband, and so there we are.
Later
It was an awkward party. I tried to coax the evening into a proper shape, but it refused. Ottoline and Henry sat far apart but kept staring at each other while Philip and Walter made stilted conversation. Pernel, Pippa, and Marjorie spoke to Bertie Russell and Morgan about women’s suffrage all evening. They were uninterested in speaking to anyone else about anything else. Wonderful if one is at a political rally but difficult at a party. I know Maynard was disappointed, as he had just finished Morgan’s extraordinary futuristic story, “If the Machine Breaks,” and wanted to speak to him about it but never got the chance. It is different from anything else Morgan has written. It is his answer to H. G. Wells, and it is terrifying.
Irene was laughing too loudly, trying to interest Tudor Castle, and Ottoline watched disapprovingly. Ottoline draws her lovers in with melancholy sensuality rather than brash sparkle, but Irene does not have the nuance for that. Virginia tried to ignite a whispered conversation with me, but I refused. Beyond that, both she and Saxon remained stubbornly silent. Adrian and Duncan sat in a corner talking together, and Maynard and Hilton wandered out to the balcony. I was worried it would be awkward between Hilton and Virginia, but it was not. Virginia was in a difficult mood to start with so perhaps the tension with Hilton simply got folded into the mixture. I am sure she was put out that Clive was not here.
