Adeline (16 page)

They have been driving for at least an hour this way when Leonard breaks the silence.

“I think it was histrionic of her to have tried it,” he says.

Virginia knows whom he means, of course, but she reaffirms it nonetheless, as though the name is part of the spell that has been cast over them, and repeating it will help them to break free.

“Carrington?” she says.

“Yes, Carrington,” he repeats angrily. The name is a curse for him, too.

He has been brooding about Carrington’s suicide attempt for some time. Out of the corner of her eye, Virginia has been watching the conflict in his thoughts cramp across the peaks and hollows of his face. She knows exactly what is troubling him. He resents being thrown in like this to mop up after a family disaster. Carrington is not family, or even a particularly close friend, but her connection to Lytton, especially now that he is dead, has placed her firmly among the array of Leonard’s other self-imposed responsibilities to the people he loves, and his conscience is at him as usual to do right by his friend.

The specter of self-inflicted death is something he and Virginia have lived with all their married life. When Virginia took an overdose of veronal one month to the day after they celebrated their first wedding anniversary, it was Leonard’s quick thinking and decisive action that had saved her. Since then, nothing they have ever said or thought on the subject has been untainted by this past, and it cannot be now. It is always there, she knows, and it is best to declare it outright.

“Did you think it histrionic of me?” she asks.

“No,” he says defensively. “You were ill. It’s different.”

“Perhaps
she
is ill.”

“No, she’s upset.”

“Yes, well, that goes without saying under the circumstances.”

“Precisely,” he exclaims, thumping the steering wheel. “She is feeling what any person in her position would feel, what we are all feeling in our own ways.”

“You disapprove, then, of her way of feeling.”

“I simply think she has behaved badly. Inconsiderately.” He pauses here, seeming to consider other, ruder adverbs that he might use, but he loses his temper instead and shouts, “For pity’s sake, there is her husband to think of!”

“Oh, come now,” Virginia says. “You know as well as I do that Ralph has his own life with Frances, and has done so for a very long time. Carrington only married him at Lytton’s behest, to preserve their tawdry little ménage.”

“I don’t care,” Leonard crows. “A marriage is a marriage, and she owes him that consideration.”

“The consideration of what, exactly?” she asks, a touch combatively.

“Of not doing him harm. He was clearly devastated by the incident. He said as much to her repeatedly.”

“So he claims.”

“Well, I don’t doubt it. He may be living happily with another woman, but he still cares very deeply for Carrington. She had no right.”

“We all of us have that right, Leonard,” Virginia asserts, looking righteously away.

“Nonsense,” he says, turning toward her. “We have obligations to other people.”

She is still staring out the window, and everything about her says that, like it or not, the case is closed. She does not care to contest the obligations of marriage just now.

“Well, in any case,” she says at last, turning back to him with a glassy expression, “approaching Carrington with an attitude of disapproval will not be of the slightest use to anyone today, and may in fact make things worse. What’s more, since I know you to be incapable of disguising your thoughts, I’d suggest that you let me do the talking, or perhaps find some other employment while we are there.”

“May I remind you,” he says, matching her tone of cool reproof, “that your attitude toward Carrington is hardly unmixed.”

“You needn’t worry. I am, after all, expert at dissembling when required.”

There is a heavy pause.

“So you are,” he mutters, glaring at the road. “So you are.”

Neither of them says another word.

By the time they reach Ham Spray, emerging from the dappled nave of elms that shelters the long avenue of approach, the house is awash in midday sunshine. The glare off the white clapboards is nearly blinding, and both Virginia and Leonard are squinting like moles as they get out of the car. Carrington is not there to meet them, nor is there any sign of her when they knock as loudly as their knuckles will bear on the splintered oak door. But they find that it has been left open, as it swings ajar with the last of Leonard’s arduous raps.

Still no Carrington. Calling to her, they step into the hall, but there is no response, no sign even that anyone is at home. They look warily at each other for a moment, wondering if Carrington may have tried something again, but decide that panic is premature and continue making their cautious way through the house.

Stealing through it this way, tentatively, their light footsteps echoing faintly through the lofty Georgian rooms, is like sneaking into a museum after hours, or—the decor is so fantastical, yet so familiar—like walking around inside someone’s mind. The walls, the fireplaces, even the furniture are painted and tessellated with Carrington’s work, and hung with pictures by Duncan Grant, Henry Lamb and many more of their gifted mutual friends. The house is alive with boldness and the signature blur of color and line that made this place unmistakably their home.

Leonard and Virginia have seen this before, of course. Indeed, it resembles the interiors of their own homes, which have been decorated by many of the same artists. But now, in all its undiminished beauty, the work seems to jump out at them with a kind of garish irony, bearing unrepentant witness to the death it has overseen and the mourning it still contains.

They proceed to the sitting room where Carrington is crouched in the armchair nearest the hearth, though the fire has not been lit. With one glance, Leonard knows enough to retreat. He tries waving meekly and saying hello, but Carrington gives no indication that she has heard, and so making a sign to Virginia that he will wander and wait for her in the drive, Leonard bows out.

Moving slowly and haltingly—she is not sure whether Carrington quite knows that she is there, and she does not want to frighten her—Virginia eases herself into the armchair opposite. It is more sunken and worn than the one Carrington has chosen. It must have been Lytton’s perch, but Carrington will not presume to occupy it, or some such nonsense. Carrington will have to be the one to start this. The protocols of grief are obscure at the best of times, and the lady of the house is looking decidedly unhinged.

Her famous bob of flyaway fair hair is now the color of dried mustard seed and thickly molded in a mass around her skull, like a boxer’s headgear. It looks as though she hasn’t washed it since Lytton died, perhaps since he fell ill, both of which are distinct possibilities. She is as pale and expressionless as lard, not a speck of color or emotion on her face, except in her eyes. They are startling as ever, though they look almost violet against the whites of her eyes, which have turned a semipermanent shade of coral pink from the crying. She is wearing a large, rumpled grey pullover and a grimy pair of old riding breeches. Her feet are bare.

There is nothing to say. Everything is painfully explicit. Everything, from Carrington’s urchin-like appearance, to the rows and rows of Lytton’s books, slotted like soldiers into the narrow shelves that line each wall, to the soot-blackened maw of the empty grate, it has all become so physically evident, so conspicuous an expression of loss, that Virginia is too daunted to speak.

Carrington is no help. She has no interest in overtures. Every grace has been consumed by the vortex of this place.

“I have been reading Lytton’s copy of Hume,” she says finally, abruptly and far too loudly, as if she is deaf, or has not spoken to another human in years and does not remember how to do it.

Virginia makes a strangled noise of assent—mm, or hmm—but it’s no good. Even that sounds vulgar to her now, like a gourmand tasting the soup.

“He is very good on the subject of suicide,” Carrington resumes. “He says that ‘a man who retires from life does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good.’”

She has clearly memorized the passage, Virginia observes. This must be the kind of thing she has been doing these past few weeks, holed up here in Lytton’s mausoleum for days at a stretch, veiled like an odalisque, with redolent old kerchiefs of Lytton’s tied around her face, trying to breathe him back to life.

Hume is not someone Carrington would have read while Lytton was alive, much less understood—or not without the help of Lytton’s constant tutelage. He was always one to prattle and instruct, whenever, wherever, garrulously holding forth as if the whole world and everything in it were his entourage by right of birth, and he was bound to share the gift of his erudition. In lieu of his seed, Virginia thinks, he no doubt sprinkled their pillow talk with such pearls—the learned sayings of great men—and Carrington surely swallowed them as eagerly as if they were pearls of those other ejaculations she so vainly desired him to emit.

Virginia is trying so very hard to be good, and outwardly she has been good, or passive, at least, but she cannot stop this cruel soliloquy from banging on inside her head. For every word she thinks to say, this voice has a dozen unsayable ones threatening to interrupt.

“Should we be talking of Hume?” she says finally. She knows it is inane, but it is the only neutral thing she can think of to say.

“Why not? We have no God,” says Carrington, as if she is in fact some self-styled student of Lytton’s who has crashed a legitimate tutorial and is damn well going to show the boys that she has read the material.

“No,” Virginia agrees. “We have no God.”

“So, then,” Carrington says, “there is no morality. Ethics is all we have left . . . Hume argues”—she is quoting again—“that ‘no man ever threw away a life while it was worth keeping.’”

It is becoming downright eerie listening to this, Virginia thinks, like talking to a haywire machine or a ventriloquist’s dummy that has animated itself. Carrington is gone.

“Worth keeping,” Virginia repeats, stalling. A mumbled yes is Carrington’s only response.

“That is the question,” Virginia continues solemnly, some part of her having decided that playing at pap philosophy is as good a way as any to placate an automaton.

“What makes a life worth keeping?” she ventures, a bit absently now, as if she is indeed talking to herself.

Carrington does not say anything to this, and so Virginia adds, more assertively, “The answer is different for everyone.”

“My answer was Lytton,” Carrington declares, and Virginia can feel her annoyance welling up.

“That is no answer, Carrington. No one person can give entire meaning to another person’s life. You are not Lytton, and he was not you, and he was certainly no answer to anything.”

“You did not know him as I did,” Carrington says, and Virginia nearly has to cover her mouth to stop herself from blurting: You did not know him at all, you gibbering sycophant. You couldn’t have. You do not have the capacity. But with a sudden strength of determination that she manages to drag up and out of her abiding love for Lytton, she is able to control herself, and instead she merely sighs and takes Carrington’s hand.

“No, of course,” she says quietly, “each of us knew him quite differently. Leonard could tell you things about Lytton that might surprise you. They have me.”

“I doubt it,” Carrington says petulantly, staring into the nonexistent fire.

Deluded fool, Virginia thinks. As she tries stroking Carrington’s hand, the putrid thoughts go on inside her head. Carrington, how pathetically little you knew of your master. What a mirage you made of your life. Virginia knows that she will have to seize on the superficial pity that these thoughts inspire if she is to avoid the stew of ill feeling that lies beneath.

“There is much more to you,” she lies, “more value in your life than whatever Lytton gave it. You must see that.”

“No. I do not see it. I see only death. That is my answer now.”

I cannot keep this up, Virginia thinks, exasperated. The horrid brat is determined to fight. Is she deliberately trying to provoke me because I am who I am, or would she do this with anyone? Well, Leonard was right to call her histrionic. She sounds like a penny dreadful. Oh, but damn Lytton. He really has taken everything out of her, and now there is nothing left.

This is the last clear thought Virginia has.

For some reason that she will never understand no matter how many times she goes over it in the days and weeks and years to come, this last thought shakes her violently as she thinks again of the personal vacuity that she had been pondering at Monk’s House just a few days before, the hollowness, both Carrington’s and her own. And then somehow, suddenly, very suddenly—and a little frighteningly, because this has never happened this way before—she feels this hollowness become itself and expand inside her like an obliterating gas. She knows then that she will not stand apart from this scene any longer.

There is the familiar collapse that happens in her chest, a complete dusting of the construct, all the jealousy and pettiness and disdain for the lesser creature—what lesser creature?—all the structure of a lifetime’s defense implodes in a moment, as it has done so many times before when she has been so desperately shortsighted and alone, as Carrington is now.

It is all over very quickly, the sham, the highhandedness, the handholding, the bleary-eyed attempt at objectivity, none of which she had pulled off in the slightest. And then, looking about at the fallen fabrication of herself, at the rubble of all this mental scenery, at the mote-strewn air and the light hazing through it, she sees only Adeline intact, standing there looking like the smirking aftermath of a very old practical joke. Really? her expression seems to say. We got you again?

“Then I will talk to you about death,” Virginia says, breaking out of her daze and sounding mechanical herself, or insane. But she does not feel insane. Not in the least. She feels relief, and the elation of at last being able to speak with brutal honesty to another living soul about this one thing. Can it be true? Finally, she sighs, someone I can really talk to about it, and not correctly, not consolingly, not to save or salvage—because that is just the folly of propping up a life that is sliding to its end—but truthfully, morbidly, because sickness is the only path we are on, any of us. Death the only possible outcome. So say it, she urges herself. Just say it. Out loud. To someone. For once.