The Hours (17 page)

‘‘Come on,’’ Julia calls cheerfully over her shoulder, over the synthetic orange brilliance of her backpack.

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Mar
y stands for a moment, watching. She believes she has never seen anything so beautiful. If you could love me, she thinks, I’d do anything. Do you understand? Anything.

‘‘Come on,’’ Julia calls again, and Mary hurries after her, hopelessly, in agony ( Julia does not love her, not like that, and never will), on her way to buy new boots.

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Mr
s . Wo olf

V
aness
a and the children are gone, back to Charleston. Nelly is downstairs preparing dinner, mysteriously cheerful, more so than she’s been in days—is it possible that she appreciates having been ordered out on a foolish errand, that she so savors the injustice of it she’s inspired to sing in the kitchen? Leonard is writing in his study, and the thrush lies on its bed of grass and roses in the garden. Virginia stands at a parlor window, watching the dark descend on Richmond.

It is the close of an ordinary day. On her writing stand in an unlit room lie the pages of the new novel, about which she cherishes extravagant hopes and which, at this moment, she fears (she believes she knows) will prove arid and weak, devoid of true feeling; a dead end. It has been only a few hours, and yet what she felt in the kitchen with Vanessa—that potent satisfaction, that blessedness—has so utterly evaporated it might

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neve
r have occurred. There is only this: the smell of Nelly’s beef boiling (revolting, and Leonard will watch as she struggles to eat it), all the clocks in the house about to strike the half hour, her own face becoming more and more strongly reflected in the window glass as the streetlamps—pale lemon against an ink-blue sky—light up all over Richmond. It is enough, she tells herself. She strives to believe that. It is enough to be in this house, delivered from the war, with a night’s reading ahead of her, and then sleep, and then work again in the morning. It is enough that the streetlamps throw yellow shadows into the trees.

She can feel the headache creeping up the back of her neck. She stiffens. No, it’s the memory of the headache, it’s her fear of the headache, both of them so vivid as to be at least briefly indistinguishable from an onset of the headache itself. She stands erect, waiting. It’s all right. It’s all right. The walls of the room do not waver; nothing murmurs from within the plaster. She is herself, standing here, with a husband at home, with servants and rugs and pillows and lamps. She is herself.

She knows she will leave almost before she decides to leave. A walk; she will simply take a walk. She will be back in half an hour, or less. Quickly she puts on her cloak and hat, her scarf. She goes quietly to the back door, steps out, shuts it carefully behind her. She would prefer that no one ask where she’s going, or when she can be expected back.

Outside, in the garden, is the shadowy mound of the thrush on its bier, sheltered by the hedges. A strong wind has blown in from the east, and Virginia shudders. It seems that she has left the house (where beef is boiling, where lamps are lit) and

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entere
d the realm of the dead bird. She thinks of how the newly buried remain all night in their graves, after the mourners have recited prayers, laid down wreaths, and returned to the village. After the wheels have rolled away over the dried mud of the road, after the suppers have been eaten and the bedcovers drawn down; after all that has happened the grave remains, its flowers tossed lightly by the wind. It is frightening but not entirely disagreeable, this cemetery feeling. It is real; it is all but overwhelmingly real. It is, in its way, more bearable, nobler, right now, than the beef and the lamps. She descends the stairs, walks out onto the grass.

The body of the thrush is still there (odd, how the neighborhood cats and dogs are not interested), tiny even for a bird, so utterly unalive, here in the dark, like a lost glove, this little empty handful of death. Virginia stands over it. It’s rubbish now; it has shed the beauty of the afternoon just as Virginia has shed her tea-table wonder over cups and coats; just as the day is shedding its warmth. In the morning Leonard will scoop bird and grass and roses up with a shovel, and throw them all out. She thinks of how much more space a being occupies in life than it does in death; how much illusion of size is contained in gestures and movements, in breathing. Dead, we are revealed in our true dimensions, and they are surprisingly modest. Hadn’t her own mother seemed to have been removed surreptitiously and replaced by a littler version made of pale iron? Hadn’t she, Virginia, felt in herself an empty space, surprisingly small, where it seemed strong feeling ought to reside?

Here, then, is the world (house, sky, a first tentative star)

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an
d here is its opposite, this small dark shape in a circle of roses. It’s trash, that’s all. Beauty and dignity were illusions fostered by the company of children, sustained for the benefit of children.

She turns and walks away. It seems possible, at this moment, that there is somewhere else—a place having to do neither with boiled beef nor with the circle of roses. She passes through the garden gate and into the passageway, heads toward town.

As she crosses Princes Street and goes down Waterloo Place (toward what?) she passes others: a plump, stately man with a satchel, two women who must be servants returning from an afternoon off, chattering, white legs flashing from under thin coats, the cheap glint of a bracelet. Virginia gathers the collar of her cloak around her neck, though it isn’t cold. It is merely darkening, with a wind. She believes she will walk into town, yes, but what will she do there? The shops, even now, are being swept and readied for closing. She passes a couple, a man and woman younger than herself, walking together, leisurely, bent toward each other in the soft lemon-colored glow of a streetlamp, talking (she hears the man say, ‘‘told me something something something in this establishment, something something, harrumph, indeed’’); both man and woman wearing stylish hats, the fringed end of a mustard scarf (whose?) rippling behind like a flag; both of them bent slightly forward as well as toward each other, mounting the hill, holding their hats against the wind, avid but unhurried, coming home (most likely) from a day in London, he saying now, ‘‘And so I must ask you,’’ after which he lowers his voice—Virginia can’t make out the words at all—and the woman emits a gleeful little shriek, showing a

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quic
k white flash of tooth, and the man laughs, striding forward, setting down with perfect confidence the toe of one and then another perfectly polished brown shoe.

I am alone, Virginia thinks, as the man and woman continue up the hill and she continues down. She is, of course, not alone, not in a way anyone else would recognize, and yet at this moment, walking through wind toward the lights of the Quadrant, she can feel the nearness of the old devil (what else to call it?), and she knows she will be utterly alone if and when the devil chooses to appear again. The devil is a headache; the devil is a voice inside a wall; the devil is a fin breaking through dark waves. The devil is the brief, twittering nothing that was a thrush’s life. The devil sucks all the beauty from the world, all the hope, and what remains when the devil has finished is a realm of the living dead—joyless, suffocating. Virginia feels, right now, a certain tragic grandeur, for the devil is many things but he is not petty, not sentimental; he seethes with a lethal, intolerable truth. Right now, walking, free of her headache, free of the voices, she can face the devil, but she must keep walking, she must not turn back.

When she reaches the Quadrant (the butcher and greengrocer have already rolled up their awnings) she turns toward the rail station. She will go, she thinks, to London; she will simply go to London, like Nelly on her errand, although Virginia’s errand will be the trip itself, the half hour on the train, the disembarking at Paddington, the possibility of walking down a street into another street, and another after that. What a lark! What a plunge! It seems that she can survive, she can prosper,

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i
f she has London around her; if she disappears for a while into the enormity of it, brash and brazen now under a sky empty of threat, all the uncurtained windows (here a woman’s grave profile, there the crown of a carved chair), the traffic, men and women going lightly by in evening clothes; the smells of wax and gasoline, of perfume, as someone, somewhere (on one of these broad avenues, in one of these white, porticoed houses), plays a piano; as horns bleat and dogs bay, as the whole raucous carnival turns and turns, blazing, shimmering; as Big Ben strikes the hours, which fall in leaden circles over the partygoers and the omnibuses, over stone Queen Victoria seated before the Palace on her shelves of geraniums, over the parks that lie sunken in their shadowed solemnity behind black iron fences.

Virginia descends the stairs to the rail station. The Richmond station is at once a portal and a destination. It is columned, canopied, full of a faint burnt smell, slightly desolate even when crowded (as it is now), lined with yellow wooden benches that do not encourage lingering. She checks the clock, sees that a train has just pulled away and the next will not leave for almost twenty-five minutes. She stiffens. She had imagined (foolish!) stepping straight onto a train or, at most, waiting five or ten minutes. She stands impatiently before the clock, then walks a few slow paces down the platform. If she does this, if she gets on the train that leaves in, what now, twenty-three minutes, and goes to London, and walks in London, and catches the last train back (that will get her home to Richmond at ten minutes past eleven), Leonard will be insane with worry. If she calls him (there is a public telephone, recently installed, here at the

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station
) he’ll be furious, he’ll demand that she return immediately; he’ll suggest (he would never say it outright) that if she becomes exhausted and overwhelmed, if she falls ill again, she will have brought it on herself. And here, of course, is the dilemma: he’s entirely right and horribly wrong at the same time. She is better, she is safer, if she rests in Richmond; if she does not speak too much, write too much, feel too much; if she does not travel impetuously to London and walk through its streets; and yet she is dying this way, she is gently dying on a bed of roses. Better, really, to face the fin in the water than to live in hiding, as if the war were still on (strange, how the first memory that springs to mind, after all that, is the endless waiting in the cellar, the whole household crammed in together, and having to make conversation for hours with Nelly and Lottie). Her life (already past forty!) is being measured away, cupful by cupful, and the carnival wagon that bears Vanessa—the whole gaudy party of her, that vast life, the children and paints and lovers, the brilliantly cluttered house—has passed on into the night, leaving its echo of cymbals behind, its accordion notes, as wheels roll off down the road. No, she will not telephone from the station, she will do it once she’s reached London, once there’s nothing to be done. She will take her punishment.

She buys a ticket from the red-faced man behind the grille. She goes and sits, very erect, on a wooden bench. Eighteen minutes still. She sits on the bench, staring straight ahead (if only she had something to read) until she can’t bear it any longer (fifteen minutes still). She stands and walks back out of

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th
e station. If she strolls one block along Kew Road, and strolls back, she will be just in time for her train.

She is passing her fragmented golden reflection in the gold name of the butcher shop, suspended on the glass over a lamb’s carcass (a tuft of pale wool still clings to its anklebone), when she sees Leonard walking toward her. She thinks, for a moment, that she will turn and run back to the station; she thinks she will escape some sort of catastrophe. She does not do any such thing. She continues walking forward, toward Leonard, who has clearly come out in a hurry, still wearing his leather slippers, and who looks exceedingly thin—gaunt—in his vest and corduroy jacket, his open collar. Although he has come after her like a constable or proctor, a figure of remonstrance, she is impressed by how small he seems, in slippers on Kew Road; how middle-aged and ordinary. She sees him, briefly, as a stranger might see him: merely another of the many men who walk on streets. She is sad for him, and strangely moved. She manages an ironic smile.

‘‘Mr. Woolf,’’ she says. ‘‘What an unexpected pleasure.’’

He says, ‘‘Would you like to tell me what you’re doing, please?’’ ‘‘I’m taking a walk. Does it seem mysterious?’’ ‘‘Only when you vanish from the house, just before dinner, without a word.’’

‘‘I didn’t like to interrupt you. I knew you were working.’’

‘‘I was.’’

‘‘Well, then.’’

‘‘You mustn’t disappear. I don’t like it.’’

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‘‘Leonard
, you’re acting very peculiar.’’

He scowls. ‘‘Am I? I don’t know what it is, really. I went to look for you, and you weren’t there. I thought, something’s happened. I don’t know why.’’

She imagines him searching the house for her, checking the garden. She thinks of him rushing out, past the body of the thrush, through the gate, down the hill. She is suddenly, immensely sorry for him. She should, she knows, tell him that his premonition was not entirely wrong; that she had in fact staged an escape of sorts, and had in fact meant to disappear, if only for a few hours.

‘‘Nothing’s happened,’’ she says. ‘‘Just an airing along the avenues. It’s such a night.’’