Adeline (28 page)

Octavia does not like the sound of this. “Because you are looking,” she says.

“And”—Virginia smiles to soften the correction—“because they are
there.
”

They have always disagreed about such things. Octavia is, by nature and training, firmly on Leonard’s side of the divide, brashly sensible and dismissive of any mystic tendency or shade of the occult. Those are not really the right terms for what Virginia is getting at, but even “metaphysics” is a word Octavia would utter only with extreme prejudice, or as a rebuttal, exclaiming it above the fray, in the style of the logical positivists. She’d have done well at Cambridge.

True to form, Octavia pauses, unwilling to press the point of what may or may not be, so to speak, there. Instead, she goes back to the name, and asks, a touch reproachfully, “About Septimus, you were thinking of the past, were you not? The time when you, too, threw yourself from a window, and to the same purpose?”

“Not successfully, alas.”

Octavia chooses to ignore this. She does not indulge self-pity in illness. And when it is mixed, as it is so potently in Virginia, with the grandiosity of social class—or perhaps it is simply bohemian pretense, she does not care to differentiate—it is a luxury she will not countenance.

“It was during the breakdown that followed your father’s death, was it not?” she says, with an unavoidable clutch of the schoolmarm in her voice.

For a long moment Virginia does not answer. She is staring at the floor. Her hands are cold and shaking in her lap.

“I am not referring to my father,” she says at last.

“All right. Then what?”

“I was thinking of Septimus’s condition and particularly of the last war. The treatment and,” she hesitates on the damning word, “the harm.”

She pauses on the implication in this, to make Octavia hear it. She brings her hands to her lips, to warm and settle them and to prolong the effect of what she has just said, then drops the hands back into her lap with a dull thud, as if they are broken things with which she can do nothing. Shifting once more to her purpose, she continues. “As a doctor, did you never have occasion, at that time when you were at the war hospital, surely to . . . ”

Virginia is troubled by how to say this well. Her eyes stray anxiously about the room. Her hands have come alive again without her realizing. They are fidgeting in front of her, seemingly of their own accord, as if they are trying to knit but do not know how. These are dangerous signs. Octavia leans forward in her chair and takes hold of the bucking hands. Their iciness is shocking, but she betrays nothing as she lowers her face very close to Virginia’s and gazes firmly at her.

“To do what?” she says softly.

Virginia’s eyes suddenly stop pinging, and lock with startling ferocity on Octavia’s.

“To do nothing,” she says emphatically. There is a pulse of anxiety in her throat that half strangles the words.

Octavia is not keen on this line of inquiry, nor on the obvious effect it is having on her patient. She has the familiar sense, as she so often has with her old friend, of being led, but she will follow only so far.

“What do you mean, nothing?” she declares more than asks.

The word “nothing” has a jab in it that warns, but Virginia evades it, taking a warier tone.

“Those soldiers, like Septimus, psychologically destroyed yet being forced to resume ‘normally.’” She pauses, considering this, then changes her mind. “Actually, no, perhaps that’s wrong. This will be more immediate for you—not those like Septimus, but the ones whom no one could mistake, those who had been defaced and mangled beyond resemblance.”

Octavia pulls away.

“You know nothing of that reality,” she says testily. “You know only abstractions.”

“I was not there on the field or in triage, if that’s what you mean,” Virginia says, recoiling, too. “Though that is hardly a fault. Still, I believe I knew enough. I am thinking in particular of the drawings that were done in the surgeries, the places you were. At the time, my sister had access to some of Henry Tonks’s pastels through the Slade, and she showed them to me. The faces of those men—it was a parade of horrors.”

Octavia explodes.

“A parade? I have no need of your descriptions of the
pastels
you saw in a parade, or of the sanitized infirm you spied hunkering in Bloomsbury. I saw the beastliness raw, firsthand, unfiltered. And as for the renderings of artists on the subject, well, that was pure voyeurism and conceit. These were not subjects. These were not props for an argument against war. These were men. Maimed, denatured, sacrificed men.”

“You sound just like my nephew Julian,” Virginia says.

“Then I should think him a very sensible young man.”

“He’s dead. And he wasn’t sensible at all about war. He died nearly four years ago in Spain.”

That’ll take the spunk out of her, Virginia thinks. And it does, momentarily.

“He joined the Republicans?” Octavia asks.

“He drove an ambulance,” Virginia replies, making it clear that she will entertain no further questions about Julian or his views on war.

“Virginia,” Octavia says, after a mystified pause, “why, of all things, are you speaking of this now, when we are in the midst of another war, the threat of destruction literally hanging over us so low that we can see the swastikas on their tail fins?”

“Now it is you who do not need to tell me,” Virginia cries, her hands beginning to jump again. “Those planes have flown over our garden in broad daylight. They fly back and forth above us every night on their bombing runs to London. I am well acquainted, thank you, with the threat of these days. I am not linking wars frivolously, or their victims. I am not putting my abstractions in place of your carnage. You are missing—oh, you will make me too angry now.”

She waves a dismissive hand and turns half away. Now they are both sitting very stiffly at attention. The ticking of the brass-faced mahogany clock on the wall and the tightness of their breathing are the only sounds.

Octavia will wait. She knows that she has lost her temper, which is a sorer point in her practice than it would be if she had not had to fight so hard for it. She has emotional control, but in this unaccustomed role as adjunct psychiatrist to a friend, not enough. Not nearly enough. She knows that she must listen less reactively, and Virginia must go on of her own accord.

There is a softening now between them that comes of knowing what is at stake. It happens quickly when they are sharp with each other like this, because of the strain. It is ever-present, the friendship, the struggle, women, the profession, the finer balance required, yet so often lost. They forgive each other instantly for all the harshest things, even as the disagreements persist.

“Fine, then,” Virginia says. “We will speak in the present tense.” She is in full possession of her forces now. “These horrors you point to, they are not fresh to me. But I assure you, they are quite familiar. I knew them first as a young girl, and they have been with me all my life. I have lived in their shadow always, even as I have gone on with what was expected. All these years, as the ghost of me proceeded, or seemed to, at meals, at tasks, at gatherings, some piece of me remained apart, terrified, while the partygoers went on unawares. In this I have always been strange. But now, as the commonplace horrors of the war encroach, you, too, all of you, the average, are set apart from the habitual mundane. You, too, feel horror, the same commensurate, explicable horror that is being felt in common by everyone around you. Well, I say welcome to it, because, you see, I am not surprised. I felt this horror as a child, just standing before a puddle in a garden path. I have felt it many times since, sitting in the bath or standing in a shaft of sun slicing through apple blossoms. But now, at last, blithe being has caught up to me. The outer and the inner crises have met. Now, when the horrors are everywhere, when the world is a whirlwind of shared distress, I am snug in the storm’s eye. I am home.”

Octavia can say nothing at first. She is caught by the pity of this, as Virginia intended her to be, humbled as if by a slap to the face. There is no refuting it. Here is a hell she has never known. Her clinician’s hauteur shrivels under it, again, as Virginia knew it would. She is ashamed of having been angry, and perhaps unfair about the wounded men, but she is also irked by having fallen into the rhetorical trap that she sensed all along was being set for her. With Virginia, this always inheres. Octavia tries to weaken her resentment, and with it the underlying sense that they are in a battle of wills, but the stiffness is still there in her voice when she says, at last, “What is it, then, that you are asking me?”

“I was asking you about those men. Those particular men that you saw and knew and ministered to in the hospital.”

Again Octavia cannot help prickling. “And what of them?”

They are back where Virginia wants to be, and it is infuriating.

“Did you never think . . . did they themselves at times . . . not ask you to desist . . . to mitigate their suffering by . . . ”

But Octavia cannot let her go on. The point is too sore.

“You have not the first notion of their suffering,” she erupts. “I will not speak any more of this.”

Virginia is quicker this time. Having expected the outburst, she evades it in one turn, and presses on more surely.

“Then speak of
me.
Sufferings are not comparable, I do realize. I cannot know theirs, and they—you—cannot know mine. I am not asking you to. I am merely trying to find in your experience, your practice as a doctor, something to help you grasp—”

“I believe I can grasp,” Octavia snaps, “and without your help, whatever it is that you have to say.”

Virginia sighs and folds her arms firmly across her chest. She slides her hands into her armpits, trying again to warm them, and to ward off the worst of the misunderstanding.

“Then ‘grasp’ is not what I mean,” she says more plaintively. “I cannot say what I mean anymore. Still, I must say this. I need to say this to someone. To you. I know that you will not want to understand it, but I am asking you to try. Please, Octavia. There is no one else.”

The turnabout is sudden, and Octavia feels the pang of her own harshness, as well as the love that is between them.

“But how could I not want to understand? Have we not spoken together of many difficult things, Virginia? Have I not done so willingly? Usefully?”

“This is different.”

“How?”

“It will be much more difficult.”

“Tell me why.”

“It will be difficult for you more so than for me, and—you are right, I said this stupidly just now—not because it is difficult to grasp, but because it is difficult to concede. I do know you, Octavia, a little. You will not agree, and that is the least of it. You will loathe this instinctively. You will not hear of it, and so, I fear, you will not hear it, and that is why you will not understand.”

“So, you mean ‘understand,’ then, as in ‘agree.’ No, it was more than that. You said ‘concede.’ You need me to concede?”

“I need you not to act.”

Octavia pauses to adjust to this twist. She knows, of course, what Virginia means, but she had not expected her to say it quite this way.

“I see,” she says finally.

“Do you?”

“Well, it is only implied, as it ever is with you. You have not said the words. But yes, I believe I see where you are leading.”

“And will you follow?”

“I don’t know, Virginia. I really don’t know. I can listen. That much I can promise you. I can talk, if that will be of use to you. And I can do so as carefully as I am able, knowing you, and knowing the perils of too forceful an intervention in your case. But I cannot say that I will sit by and nod approvingly at everything you say, or indulge you in these flights to which you are prone. I would not do so in any argument with anyone. That is my way. You know it. You expect it, and I think you respect me for it. You could not have come here thinking that would change.”

“No. Indeed not. And that is why you are unique. The others are too close, too convinced of their clear-sightedness and my lack of it, to see clearly or discuss openly matters that frighten them, and which, in the end, are mine alone to decide. But you are just close enough, and just remote enough, to meet me where I am. Or you can be, if you are willing. I believe now that Leonard was right in this, after all. I did not come here thinking this, but I am beginning to see what it could mean. I know that what I will be asking you to do will not be easy for you, as my doctor and my friend. I know that you will fight it, because that is what you do, but I hope that you will do so in this room alone with me, without the threat of forceful intervention. I cannot have that. I have seen it done to other women, and I will not allow it to be done to me.”

“So you are to dictate terms.”

Octavia is turning pink around the eyes and nose. Her mouth is a tight line.

“If that is what you call it, then yes,” Virginia says. “I say only this: Do not force me to Septimus’s means.”

“Do I understand you?” Octavia cries. “You propose to throw yourself from the window if I do not consent?”

“It is not a proposition.”

“No. Indeed. It is a threat.”

“Don’t reduce it to the absurd, Octavia. You are not a simpleton.”

“How gracious of you to say so,” Octavia says, more acidly than she’d meant to. Hearing herself, she stops, and tries smoothing the taut front of her skirt. She takes several deep breaths to regain her composure, but she is too annoyed to calm herself fully.

“It is you who are behaving like a child,” she says. “An adolescent, actually, a hormonal, histrionic adolescent. Are we still in Brighton, or have we been transported suddenly to the West End? It is too absurd, Virginia. There is no one watching. It is just the two of us here in the surgery. You cannot elevate this to a performance. You cannot supplant life with art, nor death for that matter. Do not gloss it simply to disguise the fact that you are doing nothing more exalted than playing the part of the thwarted ingénue who would have her way at any cost.”