Adeline (2 page)

Then, more gently than before, if this is possible, he says, “Have all the animals had breakfast?”

“Yeees,” she drawls, with only a trace of impatience. “Bath always follows breakfast.”

In truth, her breakfast tray lies mostly untouched beside the chair in her room, the bun pecked at as if by a marauding sparrow. The egg is still in its coddling cup, uncracked, the mug of milk has gone cold, its scorched meniscus wrinkled into a skin.

“Splendid,” he says, as if replacing a prop stethoscope around his neck. “And the music?” he adds jauntily.

Obediently, she places her fingers on her wrist, counts the beats, which are eager now, but not uproarious.

“Positively funereal,” she lies. “A veritable dirge.”

“Love?” He prods, knowing he must push her for the fair answer.

She sighs loudly, bustling into the words, so that he will not hear the irritation in her reply.

“Coming down from the climax, dear heart. Not to worry. We are not at full tilt.”

He places his right palm and his forehead very gently against the door.

“Promise?” he says.

“Promise,” she echoes wearily.

He rests there for a moment, rolling his brow against the grain of the wood, fighting the momentary impulse to kick open the door, rush in, hoist her from the water by her throbbing wrists, drag her dripping and kicking into her room and belt her into her armchair, beside which he knows the breakfast tray has long since been abandoned to the drying air, like the heap of last night’s supper.

But the fury passes as quickly as it came, and he feels his sudden burst of will dissolve into the helplessness of his regard for her. Let her be, it counsels for the thousandth time. Let her be. She is where she is, and where she is you cannot follow.

So it is. He knows this is true. He has always known it. He thinks of the way she is in the world, of how her mind separates her from it even as it aids a deeper communion, and this helps him to relax. Let go.

He thinks of how, when they are out walking together in town, people, women, children stare and titter, discomfited by her; something in her slightly shabby, raffish style of dress, perhaps, or her distracted air of always being not quite there, that marks her out as one of the touched, the unlike. Why this makes people laugh he has never quite understood. But there is more of awe than ridicule in it, and he knows that it is really just a shortfall in them, an inability to compass her strangeness. They, too, cannot follow.

Yet, he reminds himself, as he so often must at times like this, when she is on the precipice of breakdown, her strangeness is just that. Other, not wrong. Not mad, or not wholly mad. Verging on it, yes, but she is there, in a real place nonetheless, threading the shadow line of thought where light and darkness meet, a line that is no line to speak of, and has abysses either side.

Yes. He knows all of this. Yet he cannot back away from the door. His palm is still there flat against it, reaching for her. Will you be all right? it pleads. Will we?

Thinking this, he smiles at his own need, his own willing part in the conjugation. He worships her oddity even as he worries it, wringing it through his mind like beads through his fingers. At last, he pulls his head away from the door, straightens himself as if one of the servants has come into the hall, though no one has. It is only her discernment he fears, even through the thick oak planking between them.

Superstition gets the better of him, even as his hand drifts toward the knob, then retreats: She will know what I am thinking. She has that gift. She knows the ciphers of my brain, just as she knows the secret speech of rocks and trees and the language of the light on them. Silliness, he chides himself, to think this way, but there it is.

He remembers her teasing him early in their courtship and in that first teetering year of their marriage, when he did not yet know what she was capable of. Taking his habitually trembling hand in hers, and looking contemplatively into the middle distance, she had simply tossed the atrocious cliché at him, or so he’d thought, as if he wouldn’t know what it was.

“You are my rock,” she’d said solemnly.

And he, hurt, not getting it, had answered flatly, “Yes, of course, and rocks don’t speak or think or feel.”

She had started violently at this as soon as he’d said it, turning on him and taking his gaunt face in her cold, searching fingertips. “Oh, but they do,” she’d protested. “They do.”

Trust her, says the voice of his experience now, and obediently he steps back from the threshold.

Now one of the servants, Nelly, does come halfway into the hall, craning at him to ask what she can do, clear the breakfast tray, perhaps, or expedite an exit from the bath. He shakes his head, and reluctantly she disappears. He waits for the slow weight of her to unburden the stairs and recede.

Satisfied, he addresses himself once more to the door.

“I’ll leave you to the slow movement, then, shall I?” he inquires with a solicitude he cannot conceal, and a small smile at the double entendre. She herself has compared the creative act to defecation. He hopes she will hear the levity in his words and his willingness to leave her to it, however
it
transpires.

But she does not reply, and so he waits a moment longer.

Immediately he hears her standing in the tub, the cataract coming down loudly around her. He hears the squeak of one foot pivoting as the other reaches for the floor, and then the soft whiplash of it, too, pulling out of the water. She will not use a bathmat, despite the servants’ frequent complaints, preferring instead to watch the runoff darken the slate beneath her, each stain unique as a cloud in which she can discern a recognizable shape.

He turns at last and begins his own slow descent of the stairs, reminding himself not to fret or feel dismissed by her silence: She is engaged elsewhere, he tells himself, not absent, not ignoring. Yet, in the craw of him, there is still the prick of a childish petulance that wants its way, attention paid.

The tyranny of illness, he thinks before he can stop himself. He takes it all. He props her up, he steps away, he ministers, he allows. He maneuvers, always within the confines of this hysteria.

He falters on the shame of the last word, stopping on the stairs and sitting on the warp of a worn step. Tracing the whorls of the wood with his fingertip remorsefully, he cannot believe that this, of all words, has come into his mind. He will not claim it as his own. It is too grotesque. These are the villains speaking in him, saying the worst conceivable thing.

It is their malevolent pull that he feels when he is sitting quietly in Fabian meetings or at some other solemn event. It is their call to mischief he hears goading him to shatter the decorum of his politic life. At such times, he sits, his weak hands wedged beneath his scrawny thighs, his caved torso rigid against the seizure that he fears will make him leap from his chair and begin shouting irrevocable curses that will banish him from the company of all right-thinking men
and women.

Yes, women, he thinks. Right-thinking women.

Who, after all, is hysterical? It is your hands that are always shaking, he reminds himself bitterly, looking down at them as they lie on the step quivering.

He winces and turns on himself sardonically now, as if in the voice of some hectoring Greek chorus. Shake, you fool, and see to your wife, because she is your
superior
in every way, or have you forgotten? He feels the usual sting of this assessment, which is both his own and everyone else’s, though it is never said aloud. He will always grind himself on the wheel of her genius, grappling for purchase against it, and the inadequacy it feeds in him.

Those who can’t write, print—is that it?—says the same goading voice in him. He is digging into the step and pulling up a large sliver, which catches on the soft flesh beneath his fingernail and makes him pull back sharply. Was that the truer reason for acquiring the printing press? Not for her but for you? Bury your squelched attempts in a pile of worthier submissions, hers prime among them? But squelched by whom? Not by her, certainly, or not actively by her. By the image of her? Or the shadow it has cast over your—ah, there is that obstetrician’s word again—hysterical imagination?

Envy is an opportunist, he knows, and in moments like these, when he has been tossed to the point of senselessness for weeks on the welter of her moods, he is susceptible to petty resentments; the jargon of those Neanderthal practitioners he has consulted over the years.

He can see them now, the innumerable boors of the medical profession, hunkered behind their monstrous clawfooted mahogany desks. God, had he not heard enough of their smarmy club talk about “women’s troubles”? How little they understood and how pompously they pronounced, as if it was all simply a matter of bringing her to bear.

Yet clearly he is no better, carping their carps, and more shamefully still, doing so in the confines of his head where no one can hear or hold him to account.

He stands again and hops angrily down the remainder of the steps, punching at the sides of his thighs. Within three long, swift strides he is in his study, with its anodyne fug of pipe smoke, damp wool and old books. He breathes it, standing there, gazing fondly round the room, the few prized possessions of his life in letters, and his mind begins to clear.

He seats himself purposefully at his desk, and with his thumb begins to strum one of the many reams of manuscript that lie before him in stacks, neatly spaced like city blocks seen from above. The floorboards above him creak, and he casts his eyes up at the ceiling, following the swift, light progress of her footsteps and then the muffled yet firm closing of her door. He waits, but hears nothing more.

He will not see her till the afternoon, if then, when they will both abandon their labors for the outdoors, he in the garden, where the plum trees need pruning and the vegetable plots weeding, she on the downs, where she will stride out her demons and shout their execrations to the air. He shifts in his chair, pencil in hand, takes up the nearest pile and begins to read.

From its accustomed place in a wad on the floor, Virginia retrieves the threadbare floral print dress that she so often wears when she is working. Gathering it hastily between her thumbs and forefingers, she places it like a wreath around her neck and shoulders, pulls her arms roughly through the sleeves and lets it fall loosely over her narrow hips.

The fabric, seldom washed, is grubby with use, oiled and inked and sweated in, so that it is as flanneled and funked as a beloved toy bear. When they are at each other, Leonard complains about this garment, its shabbiness, its ubiquity, its smell. He has dubbed it the Lambeth laydeez ’ousecoat, but she thinks of it more as an artist’s smock, like the one Nessa sometimes wears.

The dress. Distress. The lighthouse lays its caress.

Absently, drifting in the rhythm of the phrase, she scans the breakfast tray. Standing over it, she stiffens, eyeing the delinquent bun as if it were a calling card left by one of those unctuous second-tier society women whom she somehow both needs and loathes.

It must be dealt with. But how?

She stares at it for a moment longer, hating it irrationally, for itself and for all that it represents, the blameless bread placed before her each morning like a reproach. Doctor’s orders. The indignity of it, the intrusion. She feels her scalp prickle with indignation. Then, gripped by a sudden fury that some overseeing part of her knows is absurdly disproportionate, she seizes the bun and rips it to bits. Before she can stop herself and think—the lavatory would have been wise—she strides to the open window and hurls the pieces out.

She doesn’t bother to see where they have landed, but she will have to check when she goes out this afternoon. It is the kind of thing Leonard will notice and say nothing about, though he will no doubt scratch it into his diary as diligently as he records every other assertion of her ill health.

Ah, well, she allows mockingly, one must do what one feels. There are many reasons. Not just one, infallible, but varieties of sane response and a host of sensible premises behind them, whatever the logicians might say. But there is only one intimate to receive them, two if she counts Nessa, but lately she does not.

So, then, I count on misinterpretation instead. How, really, could it be otherwise? My food lies decimated in the azaleas, truly one-tenth dispensed, if that, and the remainder is for the birds. She smiles at the pun, hearing some fusty Victorian shrew exclaiming, “This breakfast is for the birds,” or one of the servants, clearing away yet another unkempt meal, declaring, “Good lord, ma’am, but you do eat like a bird.”

But then her mind snags more hurtfully on the birds, because it is in fact they who speak to her in the voices that no one else can hear. If only the bread would placate them, she yearns, or make their learned shrieking intelligible to someone, anyone, else. There is so much pain in this lack of understanding, so much terrified struggle in these fits that Leonard and the others see as mutinies. But it is concord she wants most, strives for so desperately in everything she writes. There must be a way, she urges herself each time, some way to inscribe the storm of her experience so that she will not have to be alone with it.

She thinks of John Clare’s plaintive lines, and feels their same regret:

. . . Even those I loved the best

Are strange—nay, they are stranger than the rest.

She falls with a hollow thump into the worn armchair, which enfolds her like a mouth, the molded cushions tonguing the length of her like an indulgent mother cow. She places the lap desk across her knees, slides the pen into the yellow calloused groove between the first and second fingers, first and second knuckles of her right hand, steadies the paper with her left hand and poises the nib.

She looks up at the facing wall where a lozenge of nacreous light displays the shadow of a breeze-blown branch trembling. She gazes at it for a long moment, entranced, then drops her eyes to where her knobbled fist has already begun to make its slow, mesmeric way across the page. She follows it lovingly, indulgently, tilting her head to the side like a small child drawing her first sun. The trick, the quickness, is in the fingers, hinging tirelessly above the stylus like some huge and bloodless insect spinning out worlds. She loses herself in the motion, the pleasant scratch and whisper of the act, and, relinquishing herself wholly now to the illusion, she disappears.