Authors: Norah Vincent
“Tenderly what?”
“Anonymous.”
“How typical of you. You will destroy him with this. It is not an act of love. It is nothing but an indulgence of pure selfishness and thoughtless disregard.”
“Again you oversimplify. You forget that love is never one impulse, never one face, but many and varied and as conflicted as the truth always is. In my love for him, among many, many other contradictions, there is contained the cruelty of parting, and in his love for me, also many-faceted and at odds, there is the fulfillment of having me gone.”
Octavia flattens one side of her mouth and shakes her head in disapproval. She is not remotely convinced, but she does not wish to wade any further into the double meanings of Virginia’s marriage, if that is indeed what they are, or, and this is the more likely truth, into the rhetorical rings she runs round it to justify her will.
“And Vanessa?” she asks instead.
“She is my heart,” Virginia says. “She will know.”
What can she say to such a thing? Virginia has dismissed her sister’s grief in two short sentences. It is like slamming a door. Octavia feels as if she is being systematically shut out, and there is nothing she can do but give in.
“What of me, then?” she says meekly.
“Oh, my dearest Octavia,” Virginia says, her face melting into an almost unbearable kindness. “You are an oak. A sturdy, stalwart English oak. You will stand yet for a long time.”
This reply is even more pat than the last. There is no way in. The conversation is at an end. Now all she can do is stall for time. She looks at Virginia once more, pleadingly, searching her face for some response, but Virginia is in a cocoon, her expression as blank and inaccessible as if it were wrapped in gauze.
“All right,” Octavia says at last, sighing hugely and wiping the corners of her eyes. “I will agree to let you go and not to act. But on one condition.”
Virginia says nothing. She merely tilts her chin to one side to indicate that she has heard. This hurts Octavia, but there is nothing for it. She can only finish her part of what is already done.
“That you promise to let me come and see you tomorrow,” she says.
Virginia pretends to consider this for a moment. “The day after?”
“All right, then. The day after. It is a promise?”
“Yes,” Virginia says, and smiles.
Octavia stands. “Right, then, let me get you your milk.”
SHE IS SITTING
at her desk in the writing lodge at the end of the garden, looking down at the blotter where a stripe of weak sunlight is lashing across it at the corner like the ribbon on a gift. She has placed a piece of sky-blue stationery squarely at its center, and the pen beside it, stiffly vertical, like a display. They—the paper, the pen and she in the chair—have been here like this since just before six, when the night guns at Newhaven had finally gone silent and the swarms of Luftwaffe had buzzed back across the Channel, having laid their iron eggs.
Often now, it is the silence that wakes her, the cessation that is somehow more horrifying than the cannonade. This is what woke her again this morning. She crept down to the lodge immediately to write the necessary notes, just as the horizon was beginning to glow, the trees and the shrubs and the rooftops standing black against the rose quartz of the sky like chessmen, arrayed round the clearing in the orchard.
She sat here for a long time, watching the sun assert itself in lancing shadows and shafts across the grass, and feeling the room brighten almost undetectably, as if from within, each molecule its own source, slowly dialing up the light. Now the sun is well up and the first rays have begun to penetrate the foliage that surrounds the low triptych of windows behind her. She looks at her watch to confirm the hour. Five to nine. She can delay no longer.
Grasping the watch, anxiously twisting its face toward her, she thinks again of the guns, the cannonade and the hour. When it begins, when it stops, and the undissuaded dawn it leaves to ripen, festooned by a cacophony of birdsong. This is when the voices are loudest in her mind, shouting over the larks and the thrushes and the wrens like a rowdy parliament.
They are a predictable group, tailored for the occasion by the blights and scorns of memory.
There is her Tom, now Poor Tom, or Tom o’ Bedlam, who comes ringing off the pages of Shakespeare with his penetrating nonsense, except that it is not really nonsense in the mouth of her stern, snake-eyed old friend, having, as it does, all the marks of his strict diction and the cold burn of his marmoreal skin. His is the dominant voice, her haunting competitor, here to the end, to beguile and torment her.
Then, for contrast, or because it makes a kind of twisted sense, there is her lovely gone Lytton, whose conversation she had craved so wretchedly every day of the last long nine years until he came alive again in this chorus this morning, shrill as ever, the quick dead Fool to Tom’s Tom.
And then—because who else could be her Lear?—there is the old magus himself, Yeats, no longer the wan, dusty keeper of the curio shop, nor the suspiciously rosy beneficiary of a vasectomy. He is resplendent in his greyness now, both powerfully dull and shining, striated and smooth-edged, like an unfinished statue of the great poet himself, striding out of the sculptor’s block, which is not marble or bronze, but one of those pure broadcasting minerals he had spoken of, titanium, perhaps, or zinc, hewn from the singing side of a mountain.
Finally, as always, there is Adeline, who is an angel of decorum, the Cordelia of this cast, speaking only when spoken to, or when the moment is perfectly right, the briefest, gentlest, most apposite words imaginable.
These are the personae—canonical, of course—that have come booming through her morning, just when the real cannons stop. From the canon for the canon’s hour, she has aptly chosen
King Lear.
She saw
Lear
once in the West End with Tom, she recalls, years and years ago when they were young, and they had laughed, as the young do, at its tragedy, which at the time had seemed absurdly lachrymose and contrived. But now it has appeared, the real thing, like the ghost of irony personified, precisely on its hour to have the last laugh.
Yes, the canonical hour, she thinks. There is also that. Terce, is it? Nine a.m.? Tom would know. He had told her once in the full flush of his conversion, but she had not paid much attention, having been at the time too preoccupied with forced discretion, swallowing the quips and carps that had kept rising to her lips like the bile in her gorge. She had detested his weakness in going over to the Church, like a traitor to the other side. But then, she had known everything he was running from—Vivien’s bane—and she had sympathized with him then, as she had sympathized all along. She had, she thinks now, always done her utmost to help him with the ill-starred accidents of his life, even as she had recoiled, and behaved every bit as badly as she had well.
Poor Tom, who had swallowed the catechism whole, and for what? To mark the hours in Latin? Or for comfort? To hide his furtive weeping boy’s head in the clergyman’s skirts? To pour all his festering confessions where they could never be retold?
Nine a.m. is Terce
, says the pinching voice of Poor Tom.
The third hour. The hours are marked in threes. Six a.m. is the first hour, Prime. Nine a.m. is the third hour, Terce. Noon is the sixth hour, Sext, and three p.m. is the ninth hour, None. Pity your Latin was always so poor. But then, what can one expect of a woman, and self-schooled?
She sighs at the old dig of this remark. It presses, as always, on the wound of insufficiency in her. It is the same thing again, the dread of being found out, or deemed an ignoramus by all those impeccable men who had come to her, armed to their gnashing teeth with all the academic rigors of their higher educations.
She unhands the watch and picks up the pen. Terce, then. She must be terse. Her eyes stray to the vase of the season’s first yellow primroses that she has placed at the corner of the desk, and grimacing at the pun, she thinks sourly, This is something
he’d
have done. Joyce, the gaudiest by far of that baccalaureate lot. James Augustine Aloysius Joyce—she had seen the full train of his name in his obituary only two months ago, on January 13, just two weeks shy of her fifty-ninth birthday. She nods to her galvanized Yeats, as if to say, He was not my Irishman of choice.
Strange. Yeats, too, like Lytton, and like Joyce, had died in January, within days of her birthday in ’39.
Bloody Joyce, that other creed-besotted sot and friend of Tom’s. He’d have punned on “Terce,” just as he had punned on a thousand other liturgical bug words, because, try as he might, he had never been able to get the Rome out of the boy. And Tom, the dolt, had put it (or its kissing cousin) willingly in, the mumbo jumbo of Canterbury.
It had been a bond in them, surely, the yoke of the Church, in the one case never quite thrown off, and in the other manfully taken on. It was all the same, a talking point between. She, too, had been a common subject for them to feast on, no doubt, as they were sharpening their knives on womankind. It was Tom who had told him, of course. Who else? “Virginia Woolf doesn’t care for
Ulysses
—thinks you’re a he-goat showing off.”
Well, she
hadn’t
cared for it, and he
was
a he-goat. So what?
She doesn’t want to think of how the rest of that conversation must have gone. But it had registered, her remark, enough to warrant a retort from the he-goat himself. He’d put it in, amidst the other gobbledygook, in his final tome, his last inscrutable testament,
Finnegans Wake
, published of course by Tom at Faber, and the whole civilized world had promptly fallen before it, panting like a parish of evangelicals. It was almost beyond belief. The precious Irish choirboy, speaking in tongues, had paused to stick out his tongue at her. Well, well, she couldn’t help but feel flattered. It was right there on page five, unmistakable (or was it?): “hegoak.”
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.