Adeline (19 page)

Yes, Virginia thinks—glancing over at Vivien, who has wandered to the rhododendrons nearby and is staring at them as if they have faces—just look to your wife. She is a veritable pharmacopoeia on stilts, and the Dharma Body of the Buddha is apparently in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, after all.

But despite her annoyance, Virginia identifies with what Tom is saying. It is, of course, her mindscape he is describing, and the essence of what she has been trying to convey in her work. The same is true of him, and this is what has always drawn her closest to him in spirit, his deep understanding and expression of this shared experience, the profound mysticism of everyday life. Thinking this, she feels snubbed by his pedantry, which seems artificial and intentionally insulting. He has never taken this tone with her. She dearly wishes that he had seen fit to say something about
The Waves
, or would now, but today he seems determined not to acknowledge her as a peer or as the confidante that she has often been to him.

Well then, she resolves, taking an emboldening sip of her drink, I can give as good as I get. Raising her now half-empty glass, she says, “I should like to make a toast.” Over her shoulder, she calls in the direction of the rhododendrons, “Vivien?”

“What?” gasps Vivien, startled from her reverie. Turning suddenly with a bracing hand over her heart, and surveying the group with huge, accusing eyes as if the three of them are fiends who have just materialized to torment her, she says angrily, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, dear,” Virginia says as if she is speaking to a cretin. “Only we’re having a toast. Come join us.”

Warily approaching them, Vivien looks over the low table where the drinks tray is set. Gesturing nonsensically at it, she cries, “Why have you taken these? Are you trying to confuse me?”

“No one has taken anything,” Tom says. “Now sit down.”

Leonard is more consoling. “Yes, Vivien. Please do sit down. We should so like your company.”

“Oh, you should,” Vivien mutters. “You
should
, if it weren’t for . . . ” But she trails off without finishing and decides instead to smile at Leonard. She does so almost pleadingly, as if she is asking for his forgiveness, or thanking him in a backhand way for his persistent gentleness in what even she knows is quickly becoming a debacle.

“Now,” Virginia says, to break the spell of Vivien’s appeal. Turning to her husband, she announces, “Leonard and I have just celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary.”

In the awful pause that follows, this jab does its dirty work, and Virginia smiles, adding, “So, a toast, then. To marriage, and death do us part.”

Tom gamely raises his glass, but with a noticeable sneer, and says the obligatory “Here, here.” He cannot bring himself to say the words “marriage” or “death,” however, and he sets down his glass without taking a drink.

Leonard is balancing his glass on his knees, with both hands wrapped protectively around the stem as if he intends to plant it. “To marriage,” he says dolefully, casting a reproachful glance in Virginia’s direction, but he does not move.

Vivien has lit up at the challenge. Seizing the Martini shaker and popping the top off, she salutes Virginia with it, nodding to acknowledge her opponent. She then downs the contents like a Viking, so violently that half of it streams out the sides, down her cheeks and onto the front of her dress. Her thick coating of face powder has washed away in stripes from the corners of her mouth like a tragedian’s frown. The sight of her is so distressing that Virginia has to look away.

Vivien swipes at her chin with the short sleeves of her frock, sighing contentedly at her achievement; another conflict successfully provoked. She is very clever—at her best really—in the heat of a good row, and so she is now. She loses no time in cutting to the quick.

“
What you get married for
,” she squawks in a perfect cockney, modifying her husband’s famous line just slightly for the occasion, “if you didn’t want children?”

This is almost unanswerable, and it hangs there over the four of them, dangerously pregnant and inadvisable, like some depraved piñata that has been filled with nails and nitroglycerin.

We should have expected this, Virginia thinks, determined, at least for the moment, to deflect the palpable bull’s-eye of this taunt. Vivien has always claimed this line as her own, her indelible contribution to the greatest poem of the twentieth century, a mere five hundred lines, give or take—she remembers the drudgery of setting the type—that had arguably grown more iconic in its first decade of existence than even Tom himself.

But it had been they—Tom, Leonard and Virginia and their forward-thinking press, not Vivien Haigh-Wood cum Eliot—who had brought this monumental work of art into the world. Who was this harridan to think she could turn it on them like this? It is unconscionable cheek.

But she knows she should not allow herself to be drawn into a brawl. It is, of course, what Vivien has intended all along, and that is among the best reasons to avoid it. Deny her her scene.

And yet, children. Children, damn her. It is
the
incontestable absence that has always bound the two couples together. How terribly and precisely it has touched all the maladies of sex and creation that Leonard and Virginia have stubbornly refused to acknowledge they have in common with Tom and Vivien, but which, just as stubbornly, some part of them has always known they have in common all the same.

And the poem. It was devilish quoting the poem to this end, for it was the poem, and the very autobiographical pain of it that Vivien was pointing to in that line, that had once brought them so close to Tom, and in some ways to Vivien, too. It was the poetry, the life and life-giving force of letters that they had all seen living on as their legacy in place of children. Subliminally, but no less passionately for being so, this was what had inspired them to collaborate in the first place. But since then it has only torn them fretfully, fitfully, yet never quite fully apart.

The moods, the troubles, the sicknesses. They are at the root of it all, writing, not writing, surviving, not surviving, marrying—how? And staying that way or not. And, most of all, or worst of all, not having children. The chafe of it never goes away. No matter how they write it—question it, dismiss it, defer to it, going over and over it with their pens, as if scratching it obsessively on the page can desensitize the nerve—nothing has changed.

It is why they are here having “tea” at this late date, and with so much festering displeasure between them. Tom and Vivien are on the verge of what is likely to be a permanent separation. Virginia and Leonard are more together than ever. And yet. Yes, and yet, here they are, at each other like badgers in a sack. All except Leonard, who is trying, as always in his quiet way, to make peace.

They are as combustible as the times, these four, and lining up on opposite sides. She has heard rumblings about Tom’s growing fascist sympathies as well as his anti-Semitism. The Jew-baiting has always been there, often in muted form, but now, from what she’s heard, it is beginning to leak out. Meanwhile, Vivien reputedly worships Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts and skulks about London with a knife. Not that her behavior at present can count for much, yet even so, Virginia wonders, how much of this viciousness—and it
is
coming from both of them, she feels sure of that—is bound up in a politics that, of late, has become all too personal to everyone?

Here, after all, is Leonard, the socialist, pacifist Jew who has just come out with his own book on the prevention of war—Tom has made no mention of that either—arguing that the roots of armed conflict lie in the very jingoism that the lovely couple before them would seem to endorse and embody.

No one says any of this, of course. No one will. But it is there, suppurating.

They are opposites who have been stranded, by fate or biology or sheer bad luck, in the same shameful fix: Barren and squirming on the razor’s edge of matrimony and madness, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, they are too alike to bear it and too disparate to come to terms.

Children, as everyone is so fond of reminding them, are the future. So, they have always consoled themselves, are ideas and works of art. But, as Vivien has so cruelly conveyed with that single, vilely chosen snippet of verse, they have none of the former, precious few of the latter, and nothing in the end that has any real power to avert teatime spats, much less world wars.

If anyone has bothered to dispute Vivien’s last words, Virginia has been off spiraling too ponderously to have heard, but she doubts it. They are all as listless and dejected as prisoners. By the look of him, Leonard is too drained or despondent to try to shepherd them back to neutral. He is looking longingly at one of the apple trees as if he is thinking of hanging himself from it. Tom has lit a cigarette, and is smoking it like it is his last. He is holding it so still in front of his mouth, merely opening and closing his lips to drag and exhale, that the ash on it is nearly an inch long. Even Vivien seems mollified by her joust and its deadening effect. She knows that it has hit home and doesn’t seem to require a retort. Virginia’s torpor has told her as much, though she would have known anyway. She knew the instant she opened her mouth that there would be no going back.

Despite her better judgment of only a few moments before, Virginia cannot bring herself to leave this comment or its mouthpiece unquashed. But before she can summon the killing words, Vivien erupts again, responding as she has been doing all along, not to Virginia herself or this situation, but to the years of unaccepted likeness and dislike that are between them.

“You are a wicked, wicked woman, Mrs. Woolf,” she cries. “The White Devil indeed.”

“I beg your pardon?” Virginia scoffs.

“Or didn’t you know? Since we are talking of the poem,” replies Vivien. “We emended those lines for your sake.”

“We?” cries Virginia. “Hah! I doubt that very much. But remind me, since you clearly fancy yourself the coauthor, which lines were those?”

Not to be outsparred, Vivien focuses her eyes fiercely for the first time all afternoon and raises her voice to a volume that even the servants must be able to hear inside the house. “Remind you,” she shouts, “must I?” She shoots Virginia a withering look. “Well, of course, having never been formally schooled, you could be forgiven for not knowing your Webster.”

This is too absurd to acknowledge, one of Vivien’s characteristic flights of delusion, for as everyone has always lamented on Tom’s behalf, one of Vivien’s chief faults has always been her scholastic deficiency.

“My dear Vivien, you forget. We knew you back when. We know you now.” Virginia casts her eyes across Leonard and Tom, to reinforce the suggestion that they are sharing a private barb. “And you are nothing more than what you have always been: a dull-witted and failed arriviste clinging to the coattails of your betters.”

But Vivien will not relinquish so easily what she knows she has gained. Pretending not to hear, she picks up her glass, which still has some liquor left, sweeps it instructively over the company and, ignoring the splash that falls across the front of her frock, goes on with her lesson.

“The original lines, as they appear in Webster’s play, are as follows,” she slurs pompously: “
But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, for with his nails he’ll dig them up again.
”

She pauses dramatically here, the remainder of her face powder seeming to puff off of its own accord, as if from a barrister’s wig in the heat of a summation.

“In
The Waste Land
,” she continues, as if anyone needed reminding of the poem’s title, “we rendered them thus:
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men, or with his nails he’ll dig it up again.
”

She pauses again to suppress a burp, and draws herself up, as if she is addressing a group of feckless students rather than the author and publishers of the work in question. “An interesting change, don’t you think?” she says, adding triumphantly, “Especially in light of the latest discovery at Ham Spray.”

At first no one can take this in. The unexpected affront to Lytton’s and Carrington’s deaths is so much more of an outrage than anyone had expected even Vivien to commit, that for a solid thirty seconds no one reacts. Vivien sits patiently upright, beaming with the success of this strike, sipping demurely at the dregs of her drink. The other three are slumped more lifelessly than they were before, like novelty toys that have been unceremoniously unplugged.

Virginia turns wordlessly to Tom, not for confirmation of the truth of what has just been said, for she does not for one instant believe that there is any truth in it, but for some acknowledgment of the sheer magnitude of the treachery that his wife has managed to unleash, and he to tolerate. But Tom is frozen with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, terrified, mortified or both. She sees immediately that he will be of no use.

She looks at Leonard. He, too, is a wreck of disbelief, the Englishman still clinging to his raft of good manners, stunned into mute passivity. Seeing that she is the only one willing to or capable of defending herself, Virginia turns at last to address Vivien, who, this time, has been attentively awaiting her reply. The look of venomous anticipation in her eyes provokes a frenzy.

“You witch!” Virginia shrieks, lurching forward as if she means to strike Vivien, but drawing back at the last moment. “How dare you mention that accursed place? You can have no idea what it was like in that house. What we went through. We were there the day before Carrington shot herself.”

She stands, white with rage, overturning her chair behind her onto the grass and swiveling on her heel to march into the house, but Vivien is too quick for her.

“Oh yes,” she says exultantly, “I know you were there, and that you spoke with Carrington alone.” She takes a short mocking breath and turns her head on its side. “One can only wonder what you said to her.”

She keeps her head on its side. Her smeared face is now gashed by a vile, gummy grin, and her eyes are so maliciously bright that she looks possessed.