Authors: Norah Vincent
Now Nessa is panting to regain her lost breath, and she has fallen once more against the chair, weak-eyed and faintly blotched, like a person who has been released at long last from a sickness that has convulsed her for days.
But Virginia has not turned away or broken down under this abuse. She has heard everything. But she is not incensed. This time—which in most ways has been so much like all the other times that she and Nessa have fought this fight in the past year—this time it is different. She is amazed. She has been looking on and listening in awe as this same, familiar lifetime’s worth of sibling rivalry and grievance, pressurized by time into a gorgeous, clear, diamond-hard expression of hate, has come roaring out of Nessa word-perfect. And the most perfect word of all is right there where it should be, in the center.
“You have said it in a single word,” she says, with what is possibly more love and admiration than she has ever said anything to anyone, and Nessa cannot believe it. She is dumbfounded.
“What?” she croaks, turning limply once more to look down at her sister, as if she has just materialized from within the lamp on the night table.
“Conceived,” Virginia says.
“What?” Nessa says again, this time truly vexed that her sister cannot respond like a normal human being and simply take a tongue-lashing for what it is. I beat her, Nessa marvels, and she will not go down. She will not cry or just bloody well go to the devil under the punishment. No, not Virginia. She’s in heaven. Harm is manna to her. She doesn’t know up from down, and now, of all these damned, demented manias of hers, she is cuckoo over a common word.
“I have not
conceived
,” Virginia continues deliberately, undaunted by Nessa’s caustic stare. “I did not have a child . . . and in that . . . is everything. Everything of me, and everything that is between you and me. Everything that you have said, and everything that has happened here this morning.
“It has been one long, relentless progression. Cause and effect.” She pauses. “Shall I enumerate?” She raises her fingers to tick off the links in the chain. “Because I was mad, I could not have a child. Because I could not have a child, I could not be a mother. Because I could not be a mother, I could not be a woman, or a wife, or a sister, or a self. I could not be sexually free. I could not give my husband what he wanted. I could not nurture and take care. I could not learn how to love. I could not feel anything properly, and so I could not be whole. And in all these ways, dear sister, I have hated you, because you have been whole, and you have done all of those things. Always. And in that hatred of mine for you, it is all contained—the closest thing that I have ever felt to what you know as love.”
She scrambles to her feet. “So yes, Nessa,” she says finally, commandingly, looking down on her sister from her full height. “That is my response. Your one word has said what I could not. Not in all the circuitous obsessing that I have done this very morning. Not in all my life, in all the reams and reams of paper I have covered with ink. And so, as ever, as always—my precious, my astonishing sister—I am here, standing aside, admiring you.”
Virginia falls back onto the bed, exhausted. They are both spent. Nessa cannot bring herself to say a word. There is no point. The venom is out, the festering wound lanced and drained. The treatment will do for now, until the blister fills once more, and they must go through all of this again. It is what they do.
There is a tap on the door, which they have left wide open, and Leonard has appeared in the doorway, knowing all. Not that overhearing is the reason he knows. He is well acquainted with this match. He is often its umpire after the fact.
“Shall we go downstairs and have our tea?” he says quietly, but they are all quite aware that this is not a request.
Virginia rises mechanically from the bed, and Nessa from the chair, and they file past Leonard into the hallway and down the stairs to the sitting room, where Louie has set out cups and a warming pot and a plate of forlorn-looking lemon curd scones.
ACT V
Saturday, 22 March–Friday, 28 March 1941
LEONARD IS SITTING
smoking his pipe in one of the armchairs in the sitting room. Looking around him as he puffs, he thinks of how, years ago, he and Virginia had painted these walls themselves. They’d chosen what they considered a suitably unconventional and vibrant mint green to bring a touch of much-needed whimsy, as well as an illusion of spaciousness to the low ceilings and thick, dark exposed beams of this seventeenth-century cottage. They had done well, he thinks. He has always been happy in this room.
Today, however, is an exception. Today he is thinking through the strategy he has devised for how best to deal with Virginia in the coming days. For some weeks now she has been showing all the recognizable signs of becoming unwell again, but he has been more uncertain than usual how to proceed. In desperation—he has admitted this only in the past twenty-four hours, and then, only reluctantly—he has turned to their friend Dr. Wilberforce for help.
Leonard and Virginia have known Octavia Wilberforce since 1928. She is a wonderful woman, solid, dependable, and though she is only six years younger than Virginia, and eight years younger than he, she is not a woman of their time. She has lived her life with great fortitude and dignity, Leonard has always thought, and delightfully against the grain.
She was born and raised in a large upper-middle-class family in Sussex, the daughter of a typical English country gentleman. But early in life she set her mind on studying medicine, and despite the many obstacles that stood in the way of any woman pursuing such a career at that time, she succeeded in qualifying as a physician in 1920.
She established her practice in Brighton in 1923, not far from Rodmell, and Virginia and Leonard have had her and her longtime companion, the American actress Elizabeth Robins, to tea frequently at Monk’s House over the years, more so since the war began. Octavia brings them fresh milk and cream from her own Jersey cows, and they give her figs and apples and anything else she wants from the garden.
Leonard has grown quite fond of her, and for one reason above all: because he trusts her. She has been Virginia’s unofficial internist for some time, and, as far as he is concerned, the only consistent antidote that has ever presented itself to those quacks and crackpots of Harley Street.
There have been no bona fide psychiatrists. With due respect to their friend Freud, Leonard does not believe that such an entity exists. Not for Virginia certainly, and never, as now, in extremis, when she both needs and refuses help most.
In her case, surely, but in all such cases, he thinks, when one is dealing with the most complex and intimate terrain of an individual, the term “professional help” is an oxymoron. None of these so-called specialists has ever understood Virginia well enough to navigate her mind. No one knows the topography as he does. No one knows the risks.
When Virginia is like this, at the crisis point, she is like a wild animal being hunted for sport in her own back garden, and he is like some softhearted gamekeeper creeping up on her, trying to keep her out of harm’s way as a pet. There are only two choices: death or captivity.
If he moves to cage her she may run, back into the hostile territory of her own mind. Eventually the hounds will run her down. If, on the other hand, he leaves her to her will, the end result will be the same. The right course is not obvious. It never has been, but this time it must be carried out against the backdrop of another world war, which is buzzing and booming all around them at very close range like some cruel manifestation of her madness. He does not think that he can handle her alone, and no one else will do. Octavia is their only hope.
Yesterday, when she’d come to tea, he’d asked her, and she’d agreed, to give Virginia a full physical examination at her surgery in Brighton on Thursday, as well as a mental evaluation to follow, though this, they both emphasized, must happen in the strictest confidence and under the guise of a friendly visit. It is the only way that he will be able to persuade Virginia to go at all, much less to engage in anything resembling a discussion of her state of mind.
He’d finally been able to tell Octavia the full extent of his concerns, and to ask her to help him coax Virginia into a rest cure, but only after having spent three days agonizing over the decision. He’d gone back and forth with himself about how much deceit might be allowable if it was in Virginia’s interest, or how much it was even possible to deceive Virginia when she was in such an anxious and watchful state. Yet a decision had to be made; that much he’d settled on. The breaking point had been reached.
It had happened last Tuesday afternoon. He’d been working in the garden when Virginia had wobbled in from one of her walks on the downs, wet to the skin and shivering, looking very rattled and tossed about, as if she’d been in a fight. He’d asked her what had happened, and she’d said she’d slipped and fallen into one of the drainage dykes along the Ouse. Outwardly he’d accepted her explanation, but inwardly the high wire of indecision he’d been walking for the previous five or six weeks finally snapped. Then and there, he’d resolved to act.
Nothing about the war—not the air raids, not the destruction of their old London house at 52 Tavistock Square (which, thankfully, they had already vacated) or the damage inflicted on the new one in Mecklenburgh Square, not the threat of invasion, not even the plan he and Virginia had made to asphyxiate themselves in the garage rather than be taken alive by the Nazis—none of it had made him feel anything remotely this intense.
In fact, in comparison the loud, acrid reality of the Blitz had left him cold, bored even, by the waiting, the constant waiting in shelters, in queues, on trains and in stations, sitting out the interminable delays and tortuous detours on his trips to and from London. Even Dunkirk had seemed unreal, and that had been a village event. He had seen the boys from Rodmell and Lewes scarpering home in tatters, each to his sobbing mother’s embrace. Yet he had felt only the thin, obligatory disgust and indignation that he’d felt in one form or another since Hitler had come to power in 1933, but which had atrophied since with overuse. The war had resigned him to the slow, steady onset of barbarism and his fate.
It was nothing like this.
He is a man at odds with himself. He has always been so, a misanthrope at home who has been nonetheless compelled to do right by his fellow man in the public sphere. In his heart he condemns most men as idiots and churls, yet out in the world, by the rule of international law, he is bent on saving mankind from himself. In this way, the war is like the manifestation of his madness, too. It is his deepest mental conflict writ large, blazing across the sky in burning fuselage and gunfire, exploding the foundations, the very bricks and mortar of civilization as he sees it, in the city that he loves, and, worst of all, staring blankly out of all the loathed and filthy faces of the brutes who are fighting on behalf of his cherished cause.
And where is Virginia in this? She is one of the exceptions, one of the few bright lights of his existence and of the species, that make the rest of this Pandæmonium endurable. She and the others like her, the artists, the philosophers, the best in mind and spirit, are all that can be salvaged from the catastrophe we call Earth, and all that keeps whatever godlike power may exist from tearing it all down in disgrace.
The threat to her is a threat to the idea of everything he stands for and to the only thing he believes in. It reawakens him to the terror of meaninglessness. It shakes him all through, like a dull iron bell tolling a reminder of the defining contradiction of his life: He has indulged himself in the delusion of progress, to inching ever upward on a journey that he has always known was going downhill. It has never changed. He has never changed. It is like a puzzle turned upside down and backward, wrapped inside a lie. He has never been able to stop caring about something that he knows will come to nothing, and he has never been able to stop trying to forget what he knows.
That is Virginia. That is love, a justification, a corrective walking around in the flesh, which is simply, always there, and for no good reason, but is beautiful enough, redeeming enough, purely in its essence, and just because it happens to exist, to ameliorate the futility and the savagery of being alive.
But she is not the only source. He has made sure of that. She is an example, one incarnation picked out of chaos that he has chosen to live with every day so that he might point to her and tell himself: This is why I do it. This is how.
But there are other people, other creatures, other ways. There are the Apostles (who survive), his animal companions, his garden, music, art, books. They serve the same purpose, and he has placed them carefully around himself as touchstones. They are always within reach, and that is why the thought of Virginia’s death shakes him as profoundly as it does, but it does not shatter him. He has never, he would never, give so much power to one hope.
And yet Virginia is singular. She is in fact not of a kind, but her own kind, and there will never be another. He does not want to see her go so soon. And she needn’t.
Not long ago she was happy, perfectly happy. She had said so. So had he. They had been walking together on the downs one afternoon, talking about her work, and the work of all writers, speculating about what a writer is and what he might be for, and there had been—they had both noted it—that low pleasant hum of contentment between them, the deep sense of satisfaction that always swelled in both of them when they were flying together in thought. It was another of their jokes. They called it being in a state of classical grace. When they were walking out there across the fields, side by side, heads turned in the same direction, eyes and minds on the horizon, they said they were like the Greek ideal of friendship carved in an Athenian frieze, or painted on an ancient urn such as the one Keats immortalized.