Vanessa and Her Sister (11 page)

Friday 20 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (unseasonably warm)

It worked. The result was good. Not incandescent, but solidly good. The Thursday friends blended with the newly coalesced Friday friends, and the result was complete. The evening
happened
. Arts and letters: circles drawn and understood. Lytton hurled himself headlong into the spirit of the thing and interrogated Mr Derwent Lees—a young Australian painter who looks enough like Duncan to cause Lytton distress—about the nature of blue.

Gripping the young man’s hand, Lytton wailed, “The melancholy, the drama, the pure forlorn character of blue undoes me. Ugh, Mother
needs her hankie.” The astonished Mr Lees tried to retrieve his hand. Poor man. He was taking the brunt of Lytton’s unhappiness over Duncan’s increasing silence.

Clive rolled his eyes and mutely appealed to Desmond, the good-natured diplomat, for help in rescuing the unsuspecting painter.

“Yes, but another blue, a clear, French, new-day blue, can speak of promise and renewal,” Desmond called out, rising to join the discussion.

“How Napoleonic,” Lytton said, shooting him a sulky look of spoiled fun.

“Yes,
how
Napoleonic,” Desmond said, dropping into the other basket chair, taking the statement at value, and plunging into the question. “Red, white, and blue—the Americans and the French both chose their revolutionary flags from the same energetic palette. There must be some concealed engine in that tricolour combination.” Desmond can talk to anyone about anything and make it sound both vital and charming.

Clive proved a masterful puppeteer. He is the truest bridge of arts and letters I know. He brought butter-yellow roses. I was so pleased to find him at the door and would not have preferred wildflowers at all.

And
—Clive spent a long time looking at the photographs in the hall. He had had no idea that Julia Margaret Cameron was our aunt. He recognised her work immediately.

Later (late, curled in my dressing gown with a mug of milk)

In a roomful of friends, artists, and colleagues, I look for Clive. When we speak, I do not look over his shoulder and worry about the sandwiches or the coffee or the comfort of the other guests. I am no longer the ringmaster, urging the circus horses forward. I am where I need to be and that is enough—the rest can take care of itself.

Clive. I am on home ground when I am with him. Perhaps it is because Clive blends artistic sympathy and family friendship as no one else in the room does? No. Not even I believe that. Love, then? Is this what it feels like? Safety? Warmth? Comfort? Is that enough? Can I live
without the thudding in the blood, the thrashing drama I always expected to feel? Maybe I have left it too long and am too old for that now? Perhaps. But I am not
ready
yet, I think. I am not done with this free, four-step, Stephen part of my life.

3 November 1905

Dear Woolf
,

Our weeks have grown more exciting. Intrepid Vanessa has devised a Friday evening at home to round out our Thursday thorniness. But she is uninterested in any particular brand of artistry. It is conviction and risk that compel her. She is not a disciple of any school but carefully selects sacred tenets for her three-dimensional faith from many temples. Likewise her salon does not endorse any one methodology, but rather it endorses effort. Effort and discipline are her twin gods.

Her evening changed the pitch of my week—gave it more verve and substance. The hungry young artists were so animated. One young painter actually beat his chest to make his point—thrillingly primal.

Virginia sat in the centre of the room, pinched and silent and affecting a bored expression. Her only comments (fired at close range into an unsuspecting crowd) centred on language. Her meaning was clear: image must lay flowers at the feet of text. She expected support from me and looked shrewish when, instead of taking her juicy bait, I threw myself headlong into a discussion of temperature: the loveless coldness of a world painted in blue. The loveless coldness of a world without the ripe, warming undertones of Duncan.

Bell was Vanessa’s champion. Backing her utterly, he juggled the writers and artists, pairing unlikely people and ironing the night smooth. He made the party memorable. Guessing that Bell held Vanessa’s strength, Virginia went for broke and attempted to bring the circus tent crashing down. It is her way. Do not mistake me. Beautiful Virginia is full of malice, but she is not malicious. It is just how she is built. She is governed by different forces than we. This is important to understand as I do so want you to like her. In fact, I think you ought to marry her. Was that too unexpected? Should I have let you come to that conclusion on your own? Dommage.

I do not think, in this case, Virginia meant actual harm; she just could not bear to be irrelevant. Virginia lives to be essential. That is the only way she is comfortable. But this was an evening for art, rather than books: not her forte. And so with honey sweetness she sought to upstage and invited Bell for a walk around the square to smell the last of the dying summer roses. Bell countered her by suggesting we go promenading en masse. And so like a herd of low-slung dachshunds, we trotted out into the autumn night to go flower sniffing. I look forward to next week, especially as Vanessa has promised to serve my favourite chicken.

And you, dear Leonard? How go the wilds of empire? Amazing to think of you battling through the brush, trading in the most basic elements of survival, while we sit in symmetrical squares and tinkle our teacups. You are much missed, my dear. Come home to us soon.

Always your
,

Lytton
          

PS:
Duncan’s attention is slipping—I am not imagining it. I expect the worst. I am bracing myself for tragedy and spending time with Maynard. He is a man of total self-conviction, much like the Goth, but his roots rest in a mathematical earth. He sees life, love, and human interaction as a series of knowable equations—how alarming.

PS
encore: The Mole’s novel came out last week. Where Angels Fear to Tread, from the Alexander Pope line that I don’t much care for. The publisher put down his large inky foot and insisted on a title change, and the Mole is put out. I would be too. Sales good so far, and another printing is expected. I am vert with jealousy.

8 November 1905—46 Gordon Square

Virginia would not get out of the bath, so we were dining late, but it was not meant to be a dinner party. It was a simple family meal of pea soup, cold chicken, and green salad vegetables. Maud had just cleared the soup when the knocking began, and in they tumbled.

“No, the Goth must read it first,” James Strachey said, handing the paper to Thoby.

“But the girls are here,” Clive said, as if that statement made sense. I could tell he felt awkward about interrupting our meal. We are all keen to break with convention, but arriving during dinner grated upon his sense of decorum. We expected them at ten, and it was only quarter past eight.

Thoby scanned down the page of the
Daily News
. “Ha! What a review! Where is he?”

“Still fussing with the cab, I think. You know how he dawdles,” James said.

Lytton and Morgan walked into the dining room.

“He was not dawdling,” Lytton said, smacking his pipe into his palm. Poor Lytton is rather storm-tossed at the moment. “He was making an
entrance
.” Lytton bent to kiss my cheek. “Hello, dear one.” Straightening, he said, “Clive, you philistine, the great auteur cannot just march into a room sans trumpets. Goth, my dear, fix Mother a whisky?” He dropped gracefully into a dining chair.

Thoby stood to fix Lytton a drink.

Morgan looked even more slight and frazzled than usual. “I was trying to sort out the tip for the cabbie,” he said. “He is still waiting. Does anyone have sixpence?”

I nodded to Sloper, who went out to pay the driver.

“Mole, you have outdone us all!” Lytton said, pulling Morgan to him for a waltz. I stood and pushed in the other dining chairs so they would not get knocked over. Round and round the table they went in small uneven ellipses. Maud fetched more place settings and brought back the soup tureen.

“
Remarkable!
Mastery of material! Keen insight!
Mole! This is brilliant!” Thoby said, reading fragments aloud. Virginia, brittle and still, was silent.

“I don’t like the title,” Morgan said, as Lytton released him from their dizzying waltz.

“You wanted
Monteriano
?” I asked. It was the fictitious name he had chosen to conjure the very real towered city of San Gimignano. I think it does capture the cadence and height of that hillside town.

“
The Manchester Guardian
called the title ‘mawkish’—awful,” Morgan said fretfully, folding and refolding his neat slim hands.

“Well, I think it is splendid,” Virginia said, unexpectedly. Thoby and I looked at each other, surprised. When Virginia says “splendid,” that is rarely what she means.

20 November 1905—46 Gordon Square (late afternoon, getting chilly)

Clive wants me to go to Paris with him. In fact, he invited the four of us plus Lytton and Saxon, but it is me he wants.

“It is electrifying! Such an exhibition could never happen in En- gland. We must go!” Clive said, pacing between the drawing room window and the fireplace, rolling and unrolling the newssheet into a tight cylinder. I had never seen him so agitated. “Now, Nessa! We must go
now
! It is a
moment
, Nessa! All Paris is talking! The Salon d’Automne is turned upside down by this bunch. Vauxcelles, the French art critic, notoriously hard to please, is calling them the
Fauves.
”

“The … beasts?” I translated tentatively, never sure of my French. “Is that a
compliment
?”

“The
wild
beasts,” Clive corrected. “Of course it is a compliment. They have taken the Salon by the scruff of the neck and are giving it a good shake—as wild beasts do. Henri Matisse, I met him a few years ago at a dinner party—marvellous man, bold painter, beautiful colours, can drink everyone under the table.”

I loved watching him lose his urbane calm and get boyishly excited by something.

“Nessa!” He pulled me out of my reverie. “We have to get on to Cunard today!”

Clive calls me Nessa now. Thoby smiled when he heard it. Virginia did not.

Later

When Clive went down to Thoby’s study, I read his tightly rolled-up article. M. Matisse is receiving terrible press for his shocking
Woman with a Hat
. No matter how groundbreakingly new and daringly bold he is, bad press must wound.

The exhibition finishes in six days, so there is no time. And where would we stay? An unmarried woman and unmarried man travelling alone together? Neither Thoby nor Adrian nor Lytton nor Saxon can go, and Virginia would only make matters worse. Travelling alone with a single man? Even I am not bold enough to break that rule.

25 November 1905—46 Gordon Square (late)

Clive just left with Thoby. The Steins—Gertrude and Leo, Clive called them—have bought Matisse’s
Woman with a Hat
. I am glad, as M. Matisse must feel cheered up. Clive told me Mr and Miss Stein (brother and sister, not husband and wife) also bought M. Picasso’s work, spending a huge sum of money. Clive said it was lucky, as last winter M. Picasso had no money to buy coal and so burnt his own drawings to keep warm.

Tonight Clive brought me an article by Mr Roger Fry, the art critic
who has just been named curator of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It was a piece about the
Fauves
, and it was Clive’s last-ditch effort to convince me to go to the exhibition in Paris with him.

I dined with Mr Fry once at Desmond MacCarthy’s, and although his scholarly reputation intimidated me, I liked him enormously. He had to leave early as his wife, Helen, was unwell. I think she had had a serious breakdown some months before. All through dinner, she was unable to speak to anyone on either side of her and sat in an agitated silence. Her husband watched her anxiously from the other side of the table, and as soon as it was possible, he announced their departure. Just as he was leaving, I rose and, taking his hand in mine, asked him to take good care. I wanted to say that watching over a beloved who is prone to insanity is a treacherous, guilty, and lonely road, but I did not presume that far.

Reading his words, I was reminded of his quick bright manner and sincere expression. Mr Fry’s article was visual, visceral. It nearly convinced me to discard convention and go with Clive to Paris. Nearly.