Adeline (12 page)

“But, you see,” Virginia says, filling the space, “I have always insisted that sex is in the mind. These bodies of ours are donkeys, and merely doing it is . . . well . . . merely doing what donkeys do. It’s utterly ridiculous when you think of it. Aristophanes showed as much—and we laugh right along with him. But we don’t really get the joke, because we
are
the joke.”

She pauses, narrowing her eyes still more behind the smoke from the cheroot.

“What a pagan act of worship copulation is. Two animals praying their hearts out to the graven images of each other. We’re only one burnt offering short of the good old days.”

Lytton laughs. “I suppose self-immolation after coitus would have defeated the purpose—decidedly not adaptive for the survival of the species.”

“And so, to wit,” Virginia says, taking a long drag on the cheroot and blowing the smoke into a wide fan in front of them, “we have the ceremonial cigar instead.”

They are playful again.

“Or,” Lytton says, reverting to his pedantry, “we join at the spine, as Plato had us. The beasts with no backs. We are the third sex, you and I,” he chirps invitingly, turning and bending his knees to his chest so that he can put his feet on the bench and lean back against Virginia. “Half male, half female, fused but facing away. Children of the moon, he called us, Mrs. Woolf.” He howls and smiles back at her.

She laughs heartily, and following his lead, turns aside, puts her knees to her chest and leans against him, so that they are sitting back to back like bookends.

“I do think, in any case,” she resumes, “that you were a bit heavy-handed in the book.”

“Dramatically, you mean?”

“Well, yes, that. It’s all a little breathless, you must admit.”

“Potboilerish?”

“Not quite,” she says, nudging him. “But one does have the feeling at times that one is being played to, or that the words are being worked into a lather for one’s . . . how can I put this delicately . . . titillation.”

“Then we are back to Tiberius, are we?”

“No, no. And that isn’t primarily what I meant to say. I meant that you are heavy-handed not just in tone, and in the way you set your scenes, but in your use of sexual symbolism.”

“Too many pricks?”

“Or their stand-ins, yes, if you must.”

“Of course I must. We buggers are compulsive about such things, don’t you know?”

“Oh, stop. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Well, it may horrify you to know this, but I received a very thoughtful and complimentary letter from Dr. Freud on the subject.”

“I’m not in the least surprised or horrified, actually. The master loves to be stroked, and you have shown yourself to be an apt pupil.”

“Now that is a horrifying thought. Stroked? First Ottoline, now Sigmund. You would have me assuming the position with every last troll of our acquaintance.”

“Hardly. But it does prove my point. It’s simply your tendency to overinterpret when it comes to matters of sex.”

“Yes, well, who are we to talk, I suppose, you and I? We are hardly Rhine maidens.”

“Ha! Speak for yourself, Nibelung.” Slapping her thighs in delight, Virginia adds, “God, but you know that brings me right back to the old days in Gordon Square when Leonard was just back from Ceylon and we used to go to the opera or the ballet or the theater every night. I’ll never forget introducing Leonard to the Ring Cycle at Covent Garden. Poor thing. What he did for art in the name of love. We’d start in the afternoon and we wouldn’t finish until after eleven. By the end of it, he was as miserable as a wet cat. I can still hear him saying, in his wonderfully correct but cantankerous way, ‘Well, now that’s done, I’m glad I’ve seen it, but I have neither the desire nor the courage ever to do it again.’”

Lytton laughs. “Oh yes, yes, you’re right, I do remember that, conscientious Leonard sternly doing his duty and grimacing all through it. I had such fun watching him squirm. Well, I suppose to the unenamored, Wagner is rather the cough syrup of high culture.”

“Leonard says we were members of the Wagner cult.”

Lytton laughs again. “Didn’t you and your brother Adrian go almost ritually to Bayreuth for the festival every year?”

“Yes, yes. It’s true. It was all very en vogue in those days, and you were playing the procurer, so I suppose lonely Leonard, coming as he was, all parched and primed out of the jungle, was left with very little choice.”

“Procurer indeed!” Lytton cries. “And primed? What can you mean?”

“You know precisely what I mean, you awful little man. You’d been working him up to me for months, courtesy of the Royal Mail.”

“Well, it hasn’t turned out so badly, has it?”

“On the contrary, I owe you a great debt of gratitude for giving me away.” She casts a reproachful look in his direction. “At the altar, I mean, of course. You were the best possible substitute for Father.”

Lytton is pleased with this formulation, but, charged as it still is, he knows not to let it lie there undiverted for long.

“Which, incidentally, brings us nicely round again to Dr. Freud. You may find this interesting,” he says, pulling a letter from his breast pocket and lovingly unfolding it.

“No,” she cries, wheeling around out of her bookend, seeing that he has produced the actual letter. “You haven’t!”

Lytton nearly falls over backward without her support, but grasps the bench’s arm just in time. Recovering himself and putting his feet back on the ground, he says, “I have, as it happens.”

“Unbelievable,” Virginia says, dropping her arms to her sides and letting her legs fall wide out in front of her under the folds of her long skirt, as if she cannot be bothered with posture at a time like this.

“I’m quite proud of this artifact,” Lytton says, not looking at her. He holds the letter out in front of him as if he is a clerk in a courtroom verifying evidence. “And so I quote,” he continues. “‘You’”—he turns to Virginia—“and by ‘you,’ he means, of course, me, Lytton Strachey, the author.” Peering over the top of his spectacles, he lets his eyes rest on her for a moment, then turns back to the letter.

“‘You are aware of what other historians so easily overlook’”—he raises his finger and slows his reading for emphasis—“‘that it is impossible to understand the past with certainty, because we cannot divine men’s motives and the essence of their minds and so cannot interpret their actions. Our psychological analysis does not suffice even with those who are near us in space and time.’”

He pauses, poking the upraised finger at the air. “‘So that with regard to the people of past times we are in the same position as with dreams . . . As a historian, then, you show that you are steeped in the spirit of psychoanalysis . . . you have approached one of the most remarkable figures in your country’s history, you have known how to trace back her character to the impressions of childhood, you have touched upon her most hidden motives with equal boldness and discretion . . . and it is very possible that you have succeeded in making a correct reconstruction of what actually occurred.’”

He puts the finger down, and beginning slowly once again to fold the letter along its creases, he adds crisply, “End quote.”

“Oh, God,” Virginia sighs. “Not again. Do you know I had this same argument with Leonard years ago when we first acquired the rights to publish Freud’s papers?”

Lytton does not indicate that he has heard. He is still putting the letter back in his breast pocket, and with absurd care, as if it is a papyrus.

“You are right in one respect, however,” Virginia continues. “I do find it interesting that he admits to the impossibility of knowing the motives of other minds, even those that are nearest to us. But then he proceeds nonetheless, and by means of his own clumsy methods, to presume to analyze those very motives, or at least to praise you for doing so in his stead. The man’s arrogance is quite breathtaking.”

“Clumsy methods—thank you. That’s very kind,” Lytton says absently, looking out again over the garden.

“Well, I’m sorry, Lytton, but you have rather co-opted him whole hog,” Virginia says harshly. “And that business about Essex’s execution being an expression of Elizabeth’s hatred for her father. The Electra Complex, is it? . . . Let me see if I have this right. Her father, that most virile man of men, Henry VIII, who executed her mother, Anne Boleyn, thereby committing a crime, which, though she secretly wished for it, naturally gave rise in our little fiery redheaded queen-to-be a seething hatred not just for papa, but for all men. Kill mommy, marry daddy, and cover your guilt in hatred. That’s just about it, yes? And that’s already too much, but you don’t stop there. Yet another Complex—capital C—must come into it. And so the beheading of Essex is also the great standing metaphor for castration. The woman’s abiding desire to do it, and the man’s abiding fear of having it done. Bravo and presto. There you have it. Your first-class degree in Viennese twaddle.”

Lytton is looking at her in genuine disbelief, as if he has just been deliberately scratched across the cheeks by a passing squirrel.

“My, my.
Quelle harangue, ma chérie
,” he says, falling back against the bench with his legs still firmly crossed. “But hark!” he shouts in his stage voice, thrusting his arm out in front of him. “Our Vestal Virgin speaks the truth. And woe betide those who hear it, for her tongue is mightier than the sword.”

Virginia makes a sour face and righteously stubs out her cheroot on the arm of the bench.

“Forgive me for saying so, my dear,” Lytton adds sarcastically, “but I believe it may be you who has just won the award for dramatic performance.”

“Oh, damn it,” she says, throwing the butt of her cheroot into the grass. “Freud makes me mad. Always has done. It’s not you.”

“Maybe a little bit me,” Lytton gently suggests. She does not reply to this, and so he goes a bit further. “Perhaps my Essex has feared de-pronging at his virgin’s hands.” He looks at her submissively, adding, “Do you think?”

She smiles. “Perhaps.” Looking out at the afternoon light, she puts her hand on his and adds, “Perhaps the complex, if not the prong, has been on both sides.”

He smiles down at her hand as she withdraws it, and murmurs, “Yes.”

They sit in contented silence for several minutes, listening to the bees coming and going at their business in the flower beds, and to the innumerable sparrows and finches gossiping away. Then a thrush alights nearby, and its insistent airy cry spears the chatter of the common throng as if someone is at the piano in the corner of a cocktail party, fiddling with the farthest treble keys.

“Are you happy with Carrington?” Virginia asks finally.

Lytton takes a moment to reply. He wants to say this well and simply.

“She brings me tea and biscuits as I work,” he begins, pausing respectfully between each phrase so that he can pare the next. “She looks after my feebleness. She is enthralled by my every bon mot. And you are right, I do need an audience. I always have. She is like some gentle creature of the forest who has wandered into my ruin and made the poppies grow there, and the daisies and the clover, too, in all the cracks and empty spaces where the wind had whistled through.”

Virginia sighs. “And the boys?”

“They are the wind still whistling through,” he says with regret, “in all the rooms where I have not let her enter.”

“And are there so many?”

“Boys, or rooms?”

“Rooms.”

“No. Not so very many. But they remain. And they remain empty. The company is always temporary, and the emptiness always hurts, but I cannot do otherwise.”

“And Carrington?”

“She, too, has vacancies, and guests.”

“But it works?”

“Yes. Strange—but it seems to.” He turns to her. “And what of you and Leonard?”

She does not hesitate.

“We have a phrase we use for it. It sums up the pattern of our lives. We spend our mornings in contemplation and literary toil. We spend our afternoons walking and gardening. In the late afternoon or early evening we sometimes have a game of bowls. We have supper, and then we sit in the sitting room across from each other by the fire and smoke and talk and read. And every now and then, one of us will look up and say, ‘Are you in your stall, brother?’”

Lytton grins, and they lapse again into the tributary silence for which both their recitations have seemed to call. This is yet another precarious place in both of them where they cannot linger too long.

“And what do you hear of your young nephew up at Cambridge?” Lytton says finally, changing course.

“Julian? Oh, all the best and the usual. He’s joined the Apostles, of course.”

“Of course.” Lytton nods. “And good.”

“He’s having the ripe loving time: the Greeks, the greens, the punts and the pederasty. I don’t know if that last bit is really his inclination, or if he’s just doing what you all did when it was the time to do it, but whatever the case, he claims to be sleeping with one of his fellow students, Anthony Blunt.”

“Interesting.”

“I suppose,” Virginia says. “Or par for the course. But he does seem to be getting all the benefit of his time there. He’s writing poetry. He’s growing. He seems happy.”

“Then he is indeed doing what he should, and when,” Lytton replies, a bit sadly. “He will never be so happy again.”

“That does seem true of you all,” Virginia says. “I’ve seen that. Leonard is happy in his own way now, I know that, but I think he still looks back on those days as blessed, and their particular bliss as irretrievable. He tries to keep it kindled with you and the others when you assemble, but it’s not the same.”

“No, it is not the same. Life goes on, as they say, but something of us does not go with it. It gets left behind somehow, and the separation always gapes.”

“I know precisely what you mean,” Virginia says. “I don’t mean about being at school, of course, or the pleasure young men take in all-male company, but about leaving parts of you behind as you go through life. I have done so, too, and it’s painful, like a fracture in the bone that never heals, and always aches when it’s going to rain.”

She considers this. Coming back to the book, and wanting to say something critical that is not personal, but still important and true, she adds, “I wonder if this isn’t the limitation of biography.”