Vanessa and Her Sister (15 page)

Later

Thoby and Adrian joined us this evening. It snipped the encroaching tension between Virginia and me. She asks about Clive at least three times a day, and it is only when I reassure her that I will not
ever
marry him that she lets the conversation go—exhausting. The boys leave for Italy in a few days.

4 August 1906—Blo’ Norton Hall

We wear old cotton dresses and come down to luncheon marked by our pursuits: I am dipped in paint, Virginia is stamped in ink.

The house is quiet again. Too quiet. I miss the vigorous, heavy tread
of my brothers. Thoby and Adrian have gone to ride horses down the Dalmatian coast. I wanted to go with them, but Virginia is not up to it. We had a row. Virginia is insisting on bringing Violet to Greece. A bother, as I was hoping it would be just us. I should have more patience with Virginia, but I am restless. By the afternoon, when the day is scratched and broken in, I am done with it and anxious to start a fresh one. I want to be in motion: on a ship, a horse, a train, a truck—it does not matter. I want to be moving away from here, where I worry about letters I will write and receive.

And
—A note from Desmond. They are moving out of London. And so it begins.

7 August 1906—Blo’ Norton Hall (sunny and mild)

Virginia walks for miles. She has a map and sets out like a surveyor to meet the countryside. Sometimes she bicycles (and gets grease on her hem), but most often she walks. She comes back breathless and muddy, telling tales of leaping fences and storming churches. I know I should not fret and just let her ramble as she chooses, but when she says she is writing and then does not write, I worry.

14 August 1906—Blo’ Norton Hall (windy but sunny)

Virginia keeps talking about the two of us being on “honeymoon” and I try to encourage the description into “holiday.” It is not the affection but the belligerence that frightens me. She is driven by the need to footprint, to own, to possess. A honeymoon is by nature a pairing, an exclusion.

Later

It came in the first post. Clive has responded to my messy, unflattering letter. He has developed an uncanny sureness, a certainty that I will
change my mind and marry him. He is happy in his conviction, and perversely, I am happy that he is happy.

Virginia saw his handwriting on the envelope and twice over breakfast asked me to promise that I will
never
marry him. Rather than shoring up my decision to reject him, her persistence is having the opposite effect. I can’t think why I am rejecting him now. I like his company. As far as I know it, I like his character. It is not rapture, nor even love, but a balanced liking. Is that something that should be thrown away with such vehemence?

POST CARD

This Space to Be Used for Correspondence

22 August 1906—Blo’ Norton Hall

My Violet
,
Will you come to Greece? My delicate sensibilities will be assaulted by the anatomical exactitude of antiquity—no fig leaves for this family. I am delighting in anticipation. The having is never so good as the almost having, don’t you think?

Your
Virginia

 
PS:
I have fallen in love with a story.

To:
Miss Violet Dickinson
Burnham Wood Cottage Welwyn

LANDSCAPE: THE VILLAGE OF EAST HARLING AT DAWN

25 August 1906—Blo’ Norton Hall

Now she
is
writing. Every morning she stands, smokes, and writes. She is using her travel desk from home. The wood is worn on the left top corner, where she pulls and paws when she cannot find the right word. Writing settles her. It gives her day a shape, a tempo. I hope she is working on the novel and so can keep her drumbeat rhythm for months and years instead of watching it eddy away as it does after a short article or review.

Later

“Rosamond Merridew. What do you think?” Virginia asked this afternoon.

We were walking to visit the village church, which is meant to be pretty, but I have not yet seen it.

“Rosamond Merridew? Floral. Is she a floral woman? What does she smell of?” I asked, not looking up. The road was muddy and pitted, and I worried for my new kid boots.

“She smells of earth, coffee, and raspberries. She is a
fascinated
woman, a hunting woman. She is bound up in the history of another woman who lived four hundred years before,” Virginia said cryptically.

“Careful, Virginia,” I said as I untangled her skirt from a roadside hedge. Virginia would have just torn it in her impatience to keep walking. “Who is the four-hundred-year-old woman?”

“Joan Martyn. She kept a diary following one year in her life.” Virginia leapt over a grubby puddle. “The year she decided to get married.”

There it was.

Even later (after supper)

We received a letter from Thoby and Adrian. They have had perfect weather and have ridden as far as Montenegro. Now they are headed south to the baked island of Corfu.

Virginia and I are back in London on Monday.

7 September 1906—46 Gordon Square (evening, too chilly to open the windows)

Violet
is
coming with us. She is travelling in Italy at the moment and will meet us in Athens. We have also decided to stop and see Irene’s family, the Noels, in the Greek islands.

We leave tomorrow and meet the boys in Olympia on Thursday. Olympia: where the men meet the gods.

And
—Virginia’s story is about acceptance and alienation. What does it mean to belong to a place or country or family? What is it to be English? Why do certain places hold an emotional charge and others allow the current to pass right through?

TO ANTIQUITY

POST CARD

This Space to Be Used for Correspondence

20 September 1906

Dearest Woolf
,
The Gothic family have gone a-roving and I am twenty-five miles northwest of Lairg—Where? Exactly. It is Glencarron Lodge, Bell’s abominable family’s Scottish hunting box. Bell is predictably tweedy and takes gruesome delight in shooting pretty winged things. His Parisian decadence was a façade; he fooled us all. He is a sportsman interloper sneaked into our cosmopolitan midst. But his unsinkable good humour as ever redeems him. He has become sure of Vanessa. Not for any good reason. Some internal critical balance has tipped. I hope to meet Maynard in a few days and am longing for his anaemic, effete aversion to nature. Only the Goth can pull off indecent good health, outdoor pursuits, and indoor cultivation.
  Duncan has inherited obscene amounts of money from a dead aunt and is returning to Paris. My soul is in ruins.

 
Yours,
Lytton

To:
Mr Leonard Woolf
Asst. Gov’t Agent
Jaffna, CEYLON

LOCH MERKLAND, LAIRG, SCOTLAND

POSTCARD

This Space to Be Used for Correspondence

24 September 1906

My dear Keynes
,
Help. I am abandoned in the rocky wilds of Scotland with Bell, who is either floating on his back in a rowboat, hatching beastly plots to entrap Vanessa, or out stomping through the bushes loaded for bear. None of it makes for good company. I am also trapped with his ghastly, robust family who grip their cutlery tightly in their meaty fists and discuss horses ad nauseam. Rescue me at once.

Yours,
Lytton

 
PS:
Thoby and Adrian have reached Corfu and are frolicking in the sea. We should have gone with them. I am in need of a Greek frolic.

To:
Mr Maynard Keynes
6 Harvey Road
Cambridge

THE ISLAND CHURCH AT LOCH MERKLAND, LAIRG, SCOTLAND

1 October 1906—Palace Hotel, Athens

It all began well.

Ferry to France, and then bumping, rattling trains through Italy, to the bare, hot southern tip. I am pleased with the green-lined parasols. They do cut the glare of the endless white. And the earth paused, and
then came the ocean. And what an ocean. This blue bilingual water knows itself. It is a weighted, fresh, crystal blue. I meant to read but was unable to look away from such a blue.

We changed boats at Patras, much the way one changes trains at Norwich. A small Greek man, with a thick Greek moustache, boarded the boat and organised us in perfect English. Travellers, trunks, parasols, and papers, he strapped our luggage to a small, wiry boy, sent him on ahead to the next boat and instructed us to follow. This boat, the
Peloponnese
, was smaller, tinnier, and grubbier but sailed the same gemstone sea.