Adeline (6 page)

To concede failure, and so relatively early in life, that is a sin against suffering, surely? This is what he has always said in his own defense, and all teasing aside, it is a view Lytton, Keynes, Forster, Bell and all the others share. It is what defines them as a group, their belief, and their insistence, held over from the Apostles, but perfected in their soirées: Everyone must speak clearly and honestly always, saying precisely what he
or she
means, and only that. They—Bloomsbury, as they are called—have been abused by society’s dogs, branded as precious and self-indulgent aesthetes who are not in any way serious about real life. But this is untrue, philosophically and demonstrably untrue, and the lie of it makes him angry. Yes, they have had their sport, their fun-making, down-dressing and hoaxes, but they have never been frivolous or disinterested. They have always cared.

What are people like him for, he has always said, if not for this? The effort, the attempt to work out in the closed room what has gone wrong in the trenches? Is this in no way laudable? He thinks of the many ifs this entails. Even if implementing all this higher good is just a dream, even if whatever paltry sand hill of progress he and his cohorts erect is sure to be swept away with the next war’s tide, and finally, even if entropy is the inescapable rule, who can live without illusion?

He can’t.

She can’t.

For a moment, the thought of Virginia holds him suspended as he conjures up her face, with its looming-browed sleepwalker’s eyes, staring at him through the rushing hours of the day. No, she is not Lytton. She is not a man. She does not have a man’s conviction, his command, his stoic forbearance. But she has her own amalgamation—inventive, surprising, new—and he loves her for it all the same. It complements and comforts him in ways that Lytton and the others do not and cannot. Those eyes of hers have seen right the way through the kaleidoscope, well into the belly of illusion, but they have also seen too much of this world, which illusion cannot touch.

Thinking this, he comes back to the day’s first notion—art as the beneficiary of businesses well run—and he adds to it something far more personal, the fruit of his current thinking. The role he plays in her life, and she in his. This morning, in the bath, he resented her privacy, her shutting him out, but now he asserts it in a different way, seeing that they are doing, each in his or her own idiosyncratic way, the same thing.

Their life, their bond, their work and their circle of closely kept friends are about one thing: maintenance of the necessary illusion.

It is what he does every day, for her and for himself, in order to go on. And she, in turn, does it for him and for herself for the same reason. And that is also why she falls so hard when she falls, because she, too, knows that when the scrim falls away, all of their pondering and their ponderous scribbling is futile. At those times, she knows it better than he. But sometimes, in denial, or in the fury of her dream, she finds the strength to go on with the charade. For how long he cannot say, nor can she.

It is the most tenuous strand between them, as well as the staunchest, the one they cannot break, however tortuously they twist it. It is also the only real argument they have—managing this sustaining falsehood—in a thousand times and forms, the same tug of war where neither stands nor falls, but both are dug in to the waist, resisting. In this, theirs is a marriage like all marriages, he presumes, an embattlement of foxholes. And the tether between? Well, he can’t help invoking Lytton again: “That is the free means of torture doled out with the vows. One is given just enough rope to harangue, but not to hang by.” That is the sum of it, hilarious and difficult, though his own way of putting it is, as usual, more sedate. Together they uphold a fantasy that upholds them both.

The subject is inexhaustible. Marriage. It is on everyone’s mind, even—he smiles fondly—the filthy minds of buggers. He, accordingly, has put a great deal of thought into it. Marriage is a black box. Someone said that once. He cannot remember who. But it is true. So very true. No one else can know what goes on inside a couple’s life together, or untwine the cat’s cradle of intimacy that weaves between husband and wife. The couple themselves cannot really know, though daily their hands jigger the threads. They can know only in one sense, kinetically, habitually, as hands do, performing expertly and without thought a task they have repeated many times. But there remains the great riddle of personality, and how to domesticate it.

This has always been of particular interest to Virginia in her work. It is the substance of
Dalloway.
How do you make romance into a way of life? Can you? Especially when there is so much confusion in what you feel. At times, thankfully, it can seem clear and singular, as when you are sitting in the parlor of an evening, smoking by the fire and thinking, I am content. But far more often it is mangled and alloyed, or it does not come through at all, because sorting out the junk heap of your heart is more than you can manage most days. So you leave it dark.

Virginia had written as much in
Dalloway: What can one know even of the people one lives with every day?

And the answer is: very little. Only what one knows by rote, and the rest is wisps and guessing, a mist of fogs and foreign atmospheres that may, when you’re lucky, burn as bright and enchantingly as the boreal lights, but may as likely stir up a tempest, or cast a gloom, grim and suffocating as a mine.

This is one thing that Lytton will never understand, even knowing Virginia and him as he does. Lytton had chosen not to marry, as so many of his fellow unfortunates had done—using a wife for cover and then keeping on as before, having assignations on the sly in alleyways and cheap hotels, avoiding arrest. Lytton had been honest enough in that. He is living with Carrington, but it is a knowing arrangement. Both of them are having their affairs with other men. They are maintaining their own illusion, perhaps, but it is not the same.

When it had come to magnetizing Virginia and Leonard, way back in the dark days of the Edwardian lacuna, as they had dubbed it—1901 to 1910—the marriage question had turned into a very strange ball of wax with Lytton. It had been an odd, odd business all the way round. Leonard does not like to recall it in detail—he finds the melodramatic highs and lows of his youthful confessions, almost all of which were made to Lytton, embarrassing—yet, when he is being honest with himself, he is unsparing.

It had happened while he had been abroad in Ceylon. He had left in 1904 and not returned until 1911, and all that time he had been out of pocket, so to speak, with what was then only the proto-Bloomsbury crowd. He and Lytton had written to each other almost daily throughout. It had been, in many ways, the flowering of their friendship, for they had relied on each other like family, when in truth family was rarely this reliable or close. They had held and bucked each other up through the inevitable comedowns and disappointments of postgraduate life. They were not in Arcadia anymore.

They had poured out their broken hearts to each other on every subject, from the minutiae of Leonard’s administrative duties in the jungle, trying to hack a semblance of order out of the underbrush, to Lytton’s unrequited passion for his cousin, Bloomsbury’s resident Lothario, Duncan Grant. Their correspondence, lengthy, deep and lasting, had got them both through seven long years of alienation and unhappiness.

But then, in February of ’09, Lytton had written with the strange news that he had proposed to Virginia Stephen, and what was more, she had accepted him. But in the very next sentence he had gone on to say that it had all dissolved quite quickly, as both of them had realized the folly of such a course.

In Leonard’s estimation, the proposal itself had not been altogether out of place. In his letters, Lytton had confessed to feeling lonely, as Leonard had himself, and to being full of anxiety about where his life was going. Marriage had seemed a logical next step and certainly one that would afford him the much-needed warmth and approbation of, as he’d put it, “the phalanx of the norm.”

But then, within days—and this, looking back on it now, Leonard sees is the part that had been truly out of place—Lytton had proceeded to extol the virtues of Virginia, and essentially to play the part of the pimp in inducing Leonard to come home and pay his own court to her.

Why not you, if not I? he’d said. If you ask her, she’ll be sure to accept. It’s a natural fit, practically incestuous, what? And on and on. He’d been a relentless winking eye on the page for months afterward. And, while Leonard had been much more attracted to Vanessa when he had met the Stephen sisters for the first time, on a visit they’d paid to Thoby at Cambridge—she was the more beautiful, everyone agreed—Vanessa had already married Clive Bell. And marrying Thoby’s sister was practically like marrying his own sister. The same had been true of Clive’s marriage to Vanessa. They were all as close as kittens, first the men, and then the women, too.

He sits up suddenly at this, remembering the day’s mail. He looks impatiently around his desk and begins riffling through masses of strewn paper. There is an unanswered letter here somewhere from Tom Eliot. His own form of epistolary coaching, but this time from the midst of the marital experience, one husband to another. He has been advising Tom for several years now, both in writing and in person. It was only natural. Leonard’s and Tom’s marriages are quite similar in certain respects, and Tom and his wife Vivien have become more or less sucked into Leonard and Virginia’s extended brood. Close as kittens.

Tom and Vivien had been married in ’15, just three years after he and Virginia had been, and, like them, without fanfare, in a peeling London registry office. They moved in the same circles. They practiced the same trade. Leonard had assumed his current literary editorship of
The Nation
, for example, only after Eliot had been offered it and turned it down. Two years ago, he and Virginia had been the first to publish Tom’s abstruse and groundbreaking work
The Waste Land
in book form under their very own Hogarth imprint. It was the poem that had really set Tom on his way to becoming the towering literary figure he had long dreamt of being. Virginia herself had set the type.

Now Tom is joining the Faber & Gwyer publishing firm, a competitor to Hogarth, and that, after Virginia had worked tirelessly, raising funds to free him from the drudgery of his former position at Lloyd’s bank. It is a touchy business at times, their various entanglements—that is Bloomsbury now, every bit as much as it was back when—yet the man-to-man correspondence Leonard is sharing with Tom is quite different from the one he had with Lytton. It is more mature, for one. Thus far, it has managed to survive the stranglehold of the pile.

There are other parallels between their marriages, though he does not like to dwell on them. Vivien suffers from a nervous disease whose origin is at best poorly understood. According to Tom, it manifests physically most often during menstruation, and, much like Virginia’s disorder, in headaches, which precipitate violent upheavals in her mood. Both couples are childless, and for the same reason. Fearing exacerbation in the mother, as well as the likelihood of passing the defect to the child, the doctors have advised against conception.

But this, as far as Leonard is concerned, is where the likeness ends. Vivien is no Virginia. Not a practiced or established artist, not an intellectual and decidedly not a genius, however Tom might sometimes boast about her brains and her indispensability to his work.

Yet Tom has come to think of Leonard as something of a source, someone who knows all about managing troubled and troublesome wives, and who can advise discreetly on how best to bring about the kind of lasting connubial truce Tom seems convinced that he and Virginia enjoy. Mostly this is true, and Leonard won’t shatter the illusion. He’s worked too hard for it. Besides, as it happens, he does know quite a lot about balancing in a squall. He has gotten his sea legs by painstaking trial and error over the last thirteen years. Why shouldn’t he share what he knows? And why shouldn’t he receive the occasional comradely boost from a husband who finds himself at times in similar straits?

He has found Tom’s letter at last, and he will answer it now, before lunch, when his thoughts on the subject are focused, if not quite fresh. He has wasted much of the morning in thought. This at least is something to do and to finish. The press of manuscripts and his own research can wait.

THE AFTERNOON SUN
is bright and keen on the bricks of the cobble path, and gently warms Leonard’s calves and thighs as he kneels, deadheading the sweet peas that he has trained so carefully all season. Lean cane stakes, five feet tall, are posted a foot apart in neat rows up and down the length of the path on both sides. Between them he has threaded four-by-four-inch knotted cross-hatchings of string, an active system of support, both supple and strong, that took him many hours to fashion. By means of it, the plants have thrived through the usual whips and bastings of an inclement English spring, coiling their tendrils up and through the subtle trelliswork and hanging tightly, even through the worst of it. Now he is having his reward. The flowers are a boisterous profusion of pink and lavender and magenta, which—he repeats this pedantically every year—this pruning will enhance and prolong well through the summer.

Though the sun is out at last, the air is still cool, as it so often is in early June when it has rained this much. The water meadows are swamped and the river Ouse is a milky torrent overflowing its banks. She is standing above him on the path, alert and attentive, her arms wrapped about her in place of a shawl, watching him pinch and discard the errant growths.

He never says so outright, he wouldn’t, but he wants this ritual to be observed, daily, she suspects it would be, if he had his way, but weekly will do. He needs her to appreciate his competence in this, to note and acknowledge the details of his craft, and so she does, outwardly, though it is really he, not his gardening, that she is observing so closely.