Adeline (15 page)

It was a line from his deathbed poems that Carrington had shared with her in one of her recent letters. They had been corresponding since Lytton’s death. She had cried when she’d read it, yet now that his death has been accomplished, she cannot grant this last request. She cannot let him rest. He belongs to me, she thinks stubbornly, though in truth he had belonged to no one, not even to Carrington. But Carrington, like her, like everyone he had seduced with the seven veils of his affections, believed that Lytton had been hers.

It is an infuriating position to be in, Virginia thinks, competing for the lion’s share of his memory, and after all those years of knowing him, knowing the slipperiness of his appeal and the shabby contents of his character. She knows better than to enshrine him, even if Carrington does not. She perfected her defenses long ago. She had secreted away sweet awkward Adeline behind a dazzle of skill. Yet Adeline remained, whereas—she marvels that this has not occurred to her before—perhaps Carrington has no such avatar inside her, and never did.

She, Virginia, like almost everyone else, had always taken Carrington for a sort of fuddled doll who, with her absurdly wide round blue-ribbon-blue eyes, her bouncing crop of yellow hair and her odd flouncing moodiness, had seemed rather unreal, like the spitting image in miniature of a real girl who had once owned her, grown tired of her and cast her off to make her hapless way in the cruel world. The cruel world she had landed in had been theirs, of course, and she had done so, or so it had seemed then, spectacularly unprepared, her head stuffed with rags, her wooden heart ripe for the plucking.

But perhaps they had all been wrong—all, that is, but the grand impresario herself, Ottoline, who, the gossip was, had had one of her bizarre short-lived affairs with Carrington once upon a time. But the rest of them at least—had they all been fooled by a façade, and the truth was far more sinister?

Perhaps the Carrington of those years had been no innocent abroad, no inert plaything waiting to be picked up, but rather a person of spectacular emptiness and cunning who had hid the horrifying vacuum of herself within a carapace of lies. Then along had come Lytton, with more than enough personality for two, and filled her with his overflow. It—their eunuch union, she calls it now, chortling cruelly—had been an act of true asexual reproduction after all. Lytton had simply replicated, made Carrington into more of himself.

Well, there is consolation in that, at least.

But Carrington. What is to become of her now that her substance is dead? Virginia has tried dutifully to console her in her letters, but her words have rung false even to herself, like the doggerel of a bought condolence. She supposes that Carrington cannot possibly know the depth and entanglement of Virginia’s feelings for Lytton and, by extension, her speculations about Carrington herself. Yet surely she is shrewd enough to sense the halfheartedness, if not the clouded hostility, of Virginia’s prose.

Carrington had already tried to kill herself once, apparently, a day or so before Lytton’s death, when it had become clear to everyone that there was no longer any hope and that the end was very near. Her husband, Ralph Partridge (he had been dragged into her arrangement with Lytton years before, poor lug, and was her husband only in name), had told Virginia and Leonard that he’d found Carrington unconscious in the garage with the motor running and had saved her just in time. Later, when she had come to consciousness, Ralph said that she had raged at him viciously for bringing her back, and he had cried miserably, asking her over and over, “How could you do it?”

He’d said he felt sure that she would try to kill herself again. It was only a question of when. She was being watched closely and cajoled out of her intentions (or so it was hoped) by everyone intimate who could be induced to come and stay at Ham Spray.

Virginia and Leonard are due to make their trip for the day on Thursday, and she is dreading it, more because she will have to invade the place that Lytton has left, the actual place where he departed, and she will have to stand there with his ghost. But his ghost will not be the Lytton she knew, nor will it be some beautified version of him glimmering in the corners of the rooms. It will be Carrington herself, his widow in all but name. It is too macabre.

Carrington has always been Virginia’s rival in some unchallenged way, unchallenged because Virginia has never thought Carrington worthy enough to combat; not an equal, as Nessa had once said of Vita. It would have been like playing chess with a goat, she thinks, and immediately regrets the unkindness, for the thought of an animal in pain has always been as intolerable to her as it has been to Leonard, and that is what Carrington is like now, a senseless, keening animal in pain.

The sight of that, the experience of it, will waste me, she thinks, send me right over, and that is not something I can afford. She does not have the resources just now, perhaps never will, to comfort her great friend and companion’s surrogate wife, or persuade her not to go ahead with what she intends when Virginia herself has tried to end her life twice. Oddly, she reflects, though one might consider experience to be an indispensable qualification for a psychiatric nurse, she feels sure that hers will be of no help whatsoever to Carrington.

The despair of those days seems so far away now, unreachable, in fact, as despair always is when she is not in it. Despair, she thinks, tacitly thanking whatever quirk of consciousness has made this true, is blessedly unknowable in memory, except as an abstraction, or as a list of the physical symptoms that characterized it: weeping, torpor, headache, inability to eat, concentrate or sleep, the constant awareness of being cold, the hands and feet like ice, then sudden fevers and heats, a racing pulse and hallucinations. This—she can only say so in the past tense—is what it was like—“like” being the apposite word, because one could only ever say what it resembled, or how it appeared, not what it was.

“Oh, Lytton,” she cries suddenly, the empty name roving through her brain, seeking its subject, echoing both meaninglessly and momentously, like the byline of a famous writer uttered by someone who never knew him. But, of course, she
had
known him, perhaps not as Leonard had, but she had known a version of him. Was there aught else?

Leonard has always maintained that Lytton had been different with him, especially when they were at Cambridge with Thoby, and shortly thereafter, less vain, less small, less slavish to the tinseled pleasures of the world. And this may well have been true. Lytton had been Leonard’s friend first, but she had known him in her own right for years, too, and as someone not yet so wholly enamored of transgression or indulgence for its own sake.

She had known him in the early days at Gordon Square, when Bloomsbury was not yet Bloomsbury but a mere gathering of lively and like-minded students of life, learning, loving and sharing as they grew. She and Lytton had spent hours together in those days, walking in Kew Gardens, talking of the strangeness of reality and human experience as they knew it. And at times like those, when they were luxuriously alone, deep in the heady distraction of ideas, Lytton had been a wonderful private sparkling man and a companion like no other.

He had been, as she had always said, a female friend in spirit, and almost in body, but with the tutored, well-ordered mind of a man. He had been—she remembers him saying this very thing the last time they spoke—like her, a true androgyne, a harmless and half-fanciful yet highly civilized creature out of Milne or Barrie or Carroll that was somehow not indigenous to the stifling culture into which he had been born, and was therefore destined to lead the vanguard out.

She tries to visualize him now, to feel and even smell him as he was then, in all his untidy gentlemanliness, looking mostly the part, but always and endearingly a little off.

Smiling, she recollects her conception of him as Tinker Bell or the March Hare, but she decides that this is not quite right. Perhaps something out of Kenneth Grahame is more apt, the Water Rat or the Mole. Yes, better, she concludes, her smile broadening. She likes this immensely: Lytton the domesticated beast. For, in truth, he had always seemed to resemble most some sort of exotic pet who had become a member of the family, and who, despite being truly dirty deep down in the pores of his skin, overabundantly hairy, greasy and faintly malodorous, had been allowed into the house to play and sleep with the children.

Perhaps, she thinks with a great deal more pettiness than she knows she ought, perhaps that is what he and Carrington had had in common all along, animal magnetism of the uncopulating kind, the goat thrown in with the racehorse to keep him company in his stall. Except, of course, Lytton had never been a racehorse, certainly not so far as his writing was concerned. She had never thought his books at all technically impressive, or even very good. He had written them simply to be able to say that he had written them, and they were full of his cattiness.

Yes, if he was to be a horsy kind of domesticated beast, after all, then he should be more of a dray horse who could speak, she tells herself, smiling again at the naughty picture of it, the two of them a prize pair of livestock, Lytton pulling the wagon, mordantly quipping all the while, and Carrington riding in it, the mum ungulate going to market. I should put that into a story, she thinks, but then immediately she feels ashamed of having shown such disrespect to her dead friend, and to his “friend” who in turn is dying of her grief.

Virginia is swerving wildly now, she knows, between jealousy and remorse, cherry-picking images and memories, but she cannot stop herself. She thinks again of Lytton’s proposal—in the winter of ’09, was it?—while Leonard was in Ceylon, and to her was still only a peripheral figure, not yet even remotely conceived of as a potential mate. Or, not by her. Lytton had had other ideas, but of course she had not known this at the time, nor had she known how frequently and intimately he and Leonard had been writing to each other all during her travesty with Lytton.

But, she considers more pointedly, what really would it have been like to have been Mrs. Strachey? A marriage of convenience, to be sure, limber no doubt and lecherous on Lytton’s part, and perhaps somewhat more adventurous on hers as well. But, she recalls—then stops herself, because she is thinking, with a sudden shock of fear, of the upholding strength of her bond with Leonard, and how abject she would have been in her fits if it, if
he
, had not been there to catch her. Lytton’s hammock, by comparison, would have been a very loose-knit and tenuous support, she concludes soberly, that much is sure.

Would she have grown with him? Would she have gone on writing by his side? Or would she have been swallowed whole just as Carrington had been? Tossed, like a dollop of spun sugar, mindlessly down his gullet. She would never be sure of herself in this, of course, of what might have happened, but she knows at least that this is exactly the right way of putting it about Carrington, because Carrington had never been whole. She was hollow, and on Lytton’s palate she had deflated and dissolved on contact, like a confection.

Yet the question remains: Would she have done likewise? She, Virginia. It seems impossible, given the rigors of her mind, Lytton’s respect and their exchanges, yet she doubts nonetheless. She doubts because, for all her output and showmanship, and even now, with a modicum of fame buttressing her, she feels somehow that she is also hollow, as hollow as Carrington. Or fragile, at the least, as friable as meringue, and as deceptively insubstantial. Goat, she reminds herself, had been her own nickname as a child. “Hold yourself straight, my little goat,” her dying mother had said. They had been her last words.

Hold yourself straight. It is still every bit as applicable. Adeline is the proof. Leonard had found her this way, for all intents and purposes a child, for though she had been a near spinster of thirty when they married, she had come to him as a maid. Nessa, having already married and started her own family, and wearying no doubt of the continued burden of her sister’s keeping, had passed Virginia on—almost eagerly, and certainly with confidence—to the dependable Leonard.

And Nessa’s trust in him had not been misplaced. Leonard has kept her—no, much more than that—he has saved her from all that might have happened to her had she been let go, turned loose or—the most dreaded outcome of all—locked up, as poor Laura had been. There is no question. Lytton could not have faced it, and she feels certain that he knew as much the moment he proposed. Taking her would have been like taking a position. And being in Lytton’s care, she concedes, would have been like being the magician’s assistant, lying there passively, smiling sideways at the public, being cut to pieces for their amusement.

Yes, she thinks, newly horrified and clear, as if she has just woken from a mortifying trance: Thank God I did not marry Lytton. Thank God
that
is not what happened. Instead, I am here now, at fifty years of age, safe in the nest that Leonard and I have built over the past twenty years. She says this word again to herself—safe—and sighs with new gratitude and relief.

Fifty is a landmark for certain, she thinks, but she has not been able to celebrate it as such. Her birthday had come this year a mere three days after Lytton’s death. She cannot help thinking that this is indicative, but she does not know—or care to consider—of what.

It is an insultingly bright and unseasonably gorgeous spring morning when they set out for Ham Spray in the Singer. Virginia is fresh and curious, as she always is at the start of a journey, though today her excitement is dampened somewhat by the task at hand. Leonard is silent and focused on the driving, still sifting, she intuits, through the jumble of his own feelings about Lytton.

How monstrously indifferent the weather is, she thinks, as she turns and looks out at the morning sun glowing orange on the new green of the trees, to shine so brazenly upon people’s suffering.

Their drive takes them due west into some of the most breathtaking country in all of southern England, meandering over the familiar downs of West Sussex, through the scrubby heaths and woodlands of Jane Austen’s Hampshire, with the slim jagged spires of Winchester Cathedral rising over it, and on into the lush plains of Wiltshire. Her eyes roam happily, gorging themselves on the scenery, which acts on her like a tincture of absinthe; floats her in the shallows of its emerald dream but never quite puts her to sleep.