December 14th, 1922
How might one describe Mrs. Nicholson? She ought to be clownish – bright as a bazaar, colored plumage – designed to attract the whole room. She has a direct, man-ish air. Even her upper lip is a little dark, as if mustached. But all of this coheres quite comfortably in her. She is not of Virginia’s breed (doesn’t have the quickness of the artist in her), but instead, like an actress, she has the ease of celebrity, the gloss of confidence that allows one to excuse anything which seems gaudy. It is impossible for her to suit Virginia’s particular taste, and yet of her type, Mrs. Nicholson is a perfect specimen. She is absolutely the aristocrat.
A bead drops – dink! – from her necklace to her dinner plate. “There,” she says, “A memento of my visit. That’s for you, Clive,” and passes it to him.
Virginia spots immediately that the Nicholsons are not, intellectually, too much to spar with. In fact, when the conversation gets important, their souls go weak under the light. Faltering, Vita Nicholson takes her husband’s lead. And that is disappointing.
So, with all that, why does Virginia feel girlish and ill-formed under her gaze?
July 16th, 1924
Vita lounges at the crux of the Dolomites, toying with the petals of androsace that crowd beside her in a smallish crevice, a scratch on the haunch of the mountain. Be still, she thinks, be still crickets of my heart. But with passion she feels herself swept up on that bed of flowers and tumbling down the mountain, like a river kicking at its banks, brawling over rock, and so – down. And whilst her mind spews downwards, her body remains inert, and is peered at by the androsace with its froth of little faces.
Will Virginia like Seducers in Ecuador? For although that woman’s tastes are rather decided, and her opinions fierce, she is the first to admit that tastes, opinions, and even beliefs are subject to the bias of the moment. Descartes’ radical doubt can become imbricated with bird song, and the ache from a hard chair, and the vision of red wallpaper, so that these things are stitched together on, for example, a Tuesday afternoon at a quarter past three. There is no guessing what ephemera the novel will contend with when it finally alights in her lap.
But first, it must be finished.
“I’m walking on now, dear,” Harold’s hand alights on Vita’s shoulder. He leans down to pluck a flower and then wanders away again, rolling its stem between his thumb and forefinger. Gentle Harold.
Later, facing a window looking out over two peaks, still warm from hiking and with the energy of the mountains in her, Vita writes to Virginia. The power of the snow has slipped under her skin, so that she feels invulnerable. The paper gleams, white and inviting. She hopes to entice Virginia away – how sweet Virginia would be, away from stuffy Gloomsbury! But Vita is aware, deliciously so, of the boundaries she skirts and traverses in writing such a letter. Attraction lies in the liminal, in the borderline dissonance, in that which is not quite improper.
July 18th, 1924
What does she mean by it?
The letter quivers between Virginia’s fingertips. “Leonard,” she says. He stirs while reading a newspaper in the armchair while she lounges on the rug before the heat of the fire.
“Here’s a letter from Mrs. Nicholson, and she says she is working on the novel.”
“Oh, Seducers in Ecuador? How much has she written?” Leonard inquires.
She looks up at his long, impassive face. She wants desperately to ask him, “Do I have a heart?” This Mrs. Nicholson – Vita – insinuates that she does not. What is that Vita says, again? Virginia examines the letter. She says that Virginia looks on everything as copy, material for her work – is that true? Human relationships included – is that true? Virginia can’t shake the idea that the woman has stumbled too close to her with talk of “copy”.
Perhaps it is not so desperate – so intimate – as that. The letter is merely a fulcrum. Their acquaintance might tip one way or the other. Isn’t that true? But Virginia won’t read the letter again. Its words begin to jangle like nonsense.
December 17th, 1925
Harold is away from Long Barn. Vita and Virginia brave the chill of the garden, staying close to the house but looking out over the lawn and the brocade of foliage around its edge. Both the lawn and its borders are laced with frost.
“Unfortunately, I have denied Leonard the pleasure of a family,” says Virginia. She seems to have plucked at the thread of a conversation that ended upwards of twenty minutes ago.
Vita says nothing. It is well known that Virginia has a certain distaste, and perhaps anxiety, for the kind of marital relations which might result in bearing children. Beyond that, it seems innately wrong to imagine her that way, clothed as she is in a dignity that she cannot abandon. Unfortunately, the same dignity only inflames Vita’s desire to see her nude of it. Imagine that – Virginia stripped of her majesty.
“I suppose I chose my writing instead,” Virginia continues, “But it was unintentionally done. It was about the time that I was waiting to hear whether The Voyage Out would be published. Leonard scurried about London from doctor to doctor – Doctors Craig, Wright, Savage, Hyslop… were there more? Jean Thomas, of course. I couldn’t stand to go myself. Nerve doctors are so formidable, and always give me feeling of having been rifled through. Between all of them, there was no strict consensus on whether a baby might help or hurt me. But then I got so ill waiting to hear about the book, that it was decided that I would never manage a baby.”
“Ill?” prompts Vita, schooling her expression.
“Neurasthenic, as they call it: destined to suffer. Rather malleable under the pressure of life, quite incapable of the fray.” Virginia examines her own hands. Her slender palms are pale with the cold, but her fingers are waxing red at the tips. “It was quite right to decide against the baby, because I’d have been a dual hindrance to it. Not only was I too unwell to care for a child, there was also the strong possibility that the child might have been as much of an invalid as I was.”
Vita cannot imagine a child, does not want to imagine Leonard and Virginia as that kind of a partnership. The day Vita and Virginia have spent together feels somehow shot through by this conversation. They’d been getting on so well. And yet, to blame Virginia for the interruption would be cruel. “I think you are too harsh on yourself, Virginia. You have so much good in you, and I think, if there had been a child, it couldn’t have helped but got some of it.”
“I promise you, I’m not wrong. Since Darwin, we’ve all had a glorious sense of what the human race might make of itself, if properly cultivated. I’m not feeble-minded as such, but – I think, for sure – I have no place in that future. You would understand if you had seen what a burden I was. I made poor Mongoose’s life very hard, especially at night and at mealtimes. I especially didn’t like to eat.”
“Because –” says Vita, before checking herself. “Because you wanted – ?”
Virginia swallows. “Yes, it was that. There were other things, too.”
“Explain it to me.”
Virginia looks over, queerly impassive. Shadows skitter across her face, cast by the bare branches of a young maple as it trembles in the breeze, sometimes flailing, but sometimes resembling, more than anything else, the careful conductor of a symphony. Virginia’s heavy-lidded eyes lie half closed as she begins to speak, “You must imagine, as I did, that everyone laughs at you. Their laughter seems to scratch away at the thin varnish covering you over. This varnish is, I mean, the only thing which keeps the world from seeing you as you are. This varnish prevents them from finding out that you are a fraud. But they will keep scraping at it.”
“You have never been a fraud,” replies Vita, and reaches to stroke Virginia’s cheek in the way she likes to be petted.
Virginia moves away from the caress. Her back straightens, and she looks mighty as she turns her gaze away. “You must let me finish,” she says.
“I will listen.”
“You are terrified of being discovered a fraud. You start to reflect on your own presumption. The space that you occupy has been bought with this false image of yourself, an image that you are not able to uphold. And without being the woman that you pretend to be, you don’t deserve –”
She pauses, as if considering how to continue. All that she has spoken so far has come calmly and efficiently, every word equally weighted – language poured in measured amounts, like water dropped by the steady turn of a watermill.
“Rather,” she continues, “To be in any room, or even to stand in the inches of air that your body takes up, is like a terrible presumption. You want to cut through life unseen. But – as it turns out – when you try to shrink from notice, you become sharp as a pin, and then, all the more, you catch people staring down your cuffs and collar, looking for what’s left. And perhaps you hope that by streamlining your body you can streamline your mind, but in reality it gets louder as you crawl inwards from your skin. Is any of this shocking you, Vita?”
“No,” she responds.
“I should have known: you can’t be shocked. But do you understand what I mean? I treated the world as if it were a whetstone from which I could retreat – inwards and inwards until I was nestled in the heart of my own self. But the more I skimmed away the taste of life, the more obvious it became that I cannot sink far enough from my own foundations. The bulbs of my bones began to protrude, as if wanting attention. Far from keeping my inside in, I was letting it out. That’s why Leonard –”
“He cared for you, quite rightly.”
“But strength and comfort – all of that, everything he offered me – it isn’t like an umbrella that two people can both stand under. It is like sustenance; by taking it, you must deprive the other. And so, I deprived my poor Mongoose, and left him quite muted.”
“Surely you don’t believe that? That strength can’t be shared, and the comfort of one must be to the detriment of the other?”
Virginia only shivers in her coat, looking smaller than she is. “May we go indoors?”
June 13th, 1926
A webbed trail of ink extends across the page as Vita writes to Harold. Virginia sits opposite, embroidering a design on mauve canvas; “Vanessa’s design,” she says. Watching a needle flashing between Virginia’s fingers, Vita can think of nothing to write to Harold, and so she puts down in her letter all of the items depicted in the embroidery. Can Harold possibly tolerate any more talk of Virginia? He seems to suspect a dangerous entanglement, but must know, surely, that Vita would do nothing of that sort if it would cause suffering to Virginia, which is to say, if it would aggravate her emotional vulnerabilities.
It is a wonder that Virginia is applying herself to the task of embroidery; all morning she has been in unaccountably high spirits. She seems to know that Vita is watching her, and throws her a coy smile. She is almost coquettish. Is it arousing or unnerving? Vita attempts to return to her letter, but feels a heat rising in her cheeks.
Virginia rises swiftly and peers over Vita’s shoulder, her breath skimming over Vita’s neck. “You have written enough,” she declares, “Let us now talk about copulation.”
“Behave, Virginia,” says Vita, unable to resist the tug of a smile, hoping that it can’t be seen over her shoulder.
“Ah,” says Virginia, pressing a finger to the letter paper where her own name now appears, “Here’s what I would have you say to Harold. He ought to give up diplomacy and find a job from £600 a year onwards. Tell him that.”
June 14th, 1926
How well she is knit, and so Vita takes her for a script.
She casts a wry eye over a curve, slips off its crest, rides the rib plane, dips to the belly, goes sleek straight down Virginia’s symmetry, carving it, taking the plane of abdomen to hip, up, over, surmounting, crawling down, tightening, overflowing, sighing down a length of thigh, then catching briefly, at the knoll where she bends, testing her circumference there, a figure of eight to tie her knee to knee, then she skims down a calf, which is sinewed from forestalling falls, four and a half decades of falling it has stumbled over, down and down, and now she is taut, slim, bundled, round the ankle, she is thin as if pinched, and then, slowly, Vita finds a heel, finds a sole, and it is thick skinned, but red, as if scoured.
She is ideal.
Nothing is said. Everything is printed in breath. Movements are first cresting, then hitched. Their nerves sting like roots, if all roots were bucking fingers tearing the skin of the earth. Vita’s fingers in Virginia’s wits, slick as a seal hide. And they crow, only to say, “Be my body, purge my spine of soil.” This is it, a shared culpability in the media of skin.
Finally, they lay with foreheads touching; two heavens pressed together, and only their paper embodiment between, a thin tissue of vitality smoothed over dual Elysium.
It is a night that they will carry on their bodies, hot and indelible.
December 29th, 1926
It is dusk. The fire lights the room with an easy haze. Virginia is, by turns, quiet and gently brilliant, talking of literature, of Mrs. Dalloway and Sir Henry Taylor. Vita sits on the floor at her knee, head resting against her lap as Virginia strokes her hair. Vita is overcome by the restful and mutual adoration between them. It is not free-falling, like infatuation, nor urgent like first love. Not for Vita, at least. It’s the tamest and tenderest creature she can imagine. How could Harold have seen a danger in it?
But thinking of danger casts a new color on the evening, and it turns nightmarish as if looked at from a queer angle. Vita is wrapped, she realizes, in a halo of premature nostalgia, keeping close the warmth of Virginia’s companionship as if it were already passed by.
It won’t be this adoration that kills Virginia, but something will.
This thought shatters Vita inwardly, and she inhales as if all the air had left her. “What is it, dearest?” asks Virginia, her hand stilling, fingertips tangled in strands of Vita’s hair.
“Nothing,” replies Vita, “Only – only that I have forgotten to send a letter that I ought to have.”
But certainty is petrifying within her.
Virginia will die young, her life cut short by some spasm of illness or grief.
Devotion must fall away.
March 14th, 1927
Virginia sits at her writing desk, a copy of To The Lighthouse in hand. It is done, utterly done, and for the moment her mind resists considering it too deeply. She sees it as a shape, one whole unadulterated shape – taut (she knows), complete, and refusing to be unraveled or reconsidered. And yet, when she thinks of Mrs. Ramsay, the novel is like a garment fitted about that woman, sometimes pinned and sometimes billowing, crimped close to some secret or other, and then undulating outwards so as to disguise another. If only one could manage oneself in the way that characters can be managed!
She ought to write something light next, something infinitely coloured. Vita would go into it. Yes, a Sapphist work, or Sapphism to be implied.
She adores Vita, but while Vita is indulging other friends, the loving must be done distantly and quietly. It’s true that previously she was several months that woman’s bauble, and several hours of each week, her craze. But now Virginia is in a lonely orbit, inclined, falling in towards an unreachable sovereign. So, gravity breeds gravity. Virginia’s composure still scatters at the sight of a woman who has a coat like Vita’s, or the back of a head that briefly becomes the breathless center of the world, until, by turning around, each scintillating incarnation of Vita reveals itself to be only another person that is not her. The illusion spoils, but for hours afterwards Virginia can feel reverberation in her bones.
Vita is light-fingered with love.
September 1st, 1927
Vita is the day and its damage. An hour, baited and then hung between her sly, saturated lips, spends itself so quickly. The moments are counted with the swallowing of tender words. She uproots them with a smile and leaves them strewn. Affection clutters the silence. And then, the mirage waits for sleep’s reprise; Vita is the night and its nurture.
That’s how Virginia has come to be here, alone, and feeling, because of course she feels, everything alludes to Vita. But Virginia has been overestimated, because there is no consistency in her, no carapace with which to fend off a two syllable bittersweetness, Vita. Here is the present, here the past, and the two chime together in the gifted moment. And harmonizing, there is a dilute voice pervading even the air. Vita is there. And she is there on Virginia’s page, increasingly encroached upon by those black letters, that black hoard, those black legs spattering and swaying – those disjointed limbs. The words consume her even as they create her afresh. Oh, Virginia’s words are sticky – clinging to her own wrist, to her own throat. Vita, Vita.
One struggles to unburden music of her ghost, or to shake loose the napes of necks which, like lily stems bobbing in the streets are now bobbing about one’s own mind. She is behind Virginia’s eyelids. Even in her sleep, Virginia paces, with a brace of lost touches in her hand. In doorways she guts the ghost of Vita daily. Imagined kisses dam her lips, ectoplasmic.
April 29th, 1936
Sissinghurst is bundled in an extraordinary commotion. Vita finds the chauffeur, Copper, in the garden room with a laceration to his head and blood soaking his garments.
“Bloody Kennelly,” explains Copper, “If you’ll excuse my language. Ambushed me in the bloody garage – pardon my profanity – with a rake. I wake up after who knows how long, and he’s tipping buckets of water over my head. He says he was trying to wake me – well it was an attempted drowning, more like. I showed him what I think of –”
“Goodness, Copper,” says Vita, “Where is Kennelly now? He will be dismissed, of course.”
“Luckily the missus came, otherwise I’d have had him – don’t know what I’d have done – bloody Kennelly –”
“You must go to the doctor in George’s car. I will send for the police and Kennelly will be gone before your return.”
Vita shakes her head as she leaves the garden room. All of this fuss over the incident with the pony. Meanwhile Punnett the builder must be thinking of his old father, who drowned in the engine tank yesterday, leaving a note to say that it was suicide.
And Hitler has taken the Rhineland, writes Harold. Britain is too frightened to oppose, Harold thinks, and will clamber out of it with dishonorable peace.
All of this pricks the ears of an animal within Vita, a primitive thing lingering in an alcove of her mind. It picks up the scent: the end is coming. But Vita puts the sensation away and focuses on the task at hand. The gardener has attacked the chauffeur. The police must be called.
January 12th, 1940
Virginia finds herself waiting for signs. There is something frenetic at the edge of her mind, and in its movement, she catches a voice: redemption is at stake, it says, redemption is at stake. But she is less like the devout awaiting the Messiah, and more like Madame Butterfly watching the horizon.
Day crumbles wearily over day, nights catch in her thought (and thoughts catch her in the night), tracing patterns across her eyelids. It’s a month now, then it’s a year. Time passes. Her strength erodes, like stone worn by lapses and ghosts. From spring to delta, she is quietly overflown.
Does Vita think of their distance? It must feel to her like an easy diminuendo. But it’s pinned to Virginia like her own shadow, a sentry that staggers her heart, and corrals her vision.
She licks her weary fingertips to put pen to paper once more in Vita’s name.
Vita,
I cling to the sweetness of remembering you. But I begin to know things that only the mold knows, and insects die by my window. How quietly they rattle against the glass, and I do not lift a finger to release them.
Set all your other moths free, darling, but never let me go.
Virginia folds the paper carefully, savoring the sharpness of the edge, and tucks it away in a notebook. It cannot be sent; they have gone too far.
February 20th, 1941
Leonard fears that Virginia will go mad again, and he knows she fears it too. He notices how she is slow in the morning, exhausted from scooping herself up to be a last-minute pretender. In the evenings she is quick, always feverish, and comes to his side, placing a just-so hand on his shoulder and clenching her fingers before exclaiming something like, “We should write just exactly as we cry,” as if it is the answer to everything.
He places his hand on hers and she stacks another firmly on his before pulling away entirely and going to stand before him with a hand on either arm of his chair.
“Your skirt –” he says, “The fire!” as the fabric skims close to the flame.
“Don’t you think,” she says, “That we should write just exactly as we cry? We’ve been pretending to be so dignified.”
“Move further from the fire, Virginia,” Leonard says.
“To put all of our need into the words seems too much like busking for love. We’re always ashamed of how we taught ourselves to write, which was by crying. We need to go back to it.”
Leonard drags her by the waist from the fireplace. When she realizes, she slips free from his hands and goes over to the window, “Is that mad, Leonard? Will I be mad again?” She shakes her head at herself, as if worries cling to her like droplets that need shaking loose.
Leonard doesn’t know how to respond.
“Yesterday I had such a sensation,” she continues, “As if I could dent the flesh of all the world, as if I could cut mountains with my canine teeth. There’s something wondrous in that. And yet I couldn’t stand for people to know that I was mad again. Once you’ve gone that way, they expect to see it on you, as if it’s a uniform you take everywhere. But if I were properly tricked out in the guts of madness, that would look very rough. No, they want the illness proven, but also sanitized, all the ends tucked in. I will have to refrain from saying ‘When I’m dead.’”
But she will think it, perhaps even on the days when she assures Leonard of her impending recovery. Life has taught her to contain contradictions.
March 28th, 1941
Virginia is on the river, locked in view of her own reflection. So it has always been, just them two. Although there was Leonard, and there was Vita, there was no way of telling them, or willing them to believe. “You must see it as I see it: backwards – backwards!” Having put love through many of its permutations, with those two most of all, how could she explain to them this drawing to a close of everything that she has been? She isn’t even quite sure that she is mad, not now. Only that she has begun to understand the blackness leaning in upon her. For so long it seemed that her life followed a senseless pattern, each crash and glittering wave of it falling after one another without conclusion. This time it is different – she feels the blackness meeting her like a warm embrace. All previous pains, all the unutterable needing to cease, has merely been the echoing back of this moment into her past, and its ricochet went back all those times to prepare her to greet this feeling as a friend – even as it says – “You must see it as I see it: backwards.”
The rest of the life she’s had, what of that? Well, it was nonsense and ephemera. Copulation to enable copulation, production to enable production, and nonsense to enable nonsense. In the end, it is all music into the breach. Only its closing makes sense, and gives her the warm feeling of coming home on the last train.
Virginia throws away her walking stick.
March 15th, 1949
Vita collides with the past at the bookshop – at its doorway – where the wet, blushing scent of spring staggers, drunk, into the crimped must of book upon book. Frisson submerges her; suddenly Virginia is there, quite palpably there, and Vita has gone two decades into her own past.
Too rapidly, her thoughts catch up and she regains the present. But she comes back hollow, tunneled out, as if on the return journey she was not wholly translated. She lurches away from the doorway, back into the street, and sags against the glossy pane of the shop front. The spring fog rolls into a sweat on her skin.
How much simpler life would be, if one didn’t catch moments of Virginia’s musk, or hear in conversation things that Geoffrey would have loved to know. Yet Vita finds herself clutching at these moments as if they were the pearlescence of a fading dream, willing herself to remain deep under. With only the twitch of a thumb, the pink shell of her dream state crumbles, wakefulness upon her. She is so dreadfully awake.
The crowd clatters past in twos and threes, oblivious to the woman with her back to a bookshop. The pattering of their conversations and the rustling of their clothes echoes comfortably between each step.
And yet the world has been torn apart twice over.
Virginia said once: I’m dead, but I’m still whirring. Was that the moment when Vita could have saved her? Should Vita have drawn it out of her, with a soft word, with a soft look, and shared in the self-cataloguing motions of grief? When Virginia’s mind ran bruised – “give them better reasons to misremember me” – her mouth full of the shards of things she thought but might not have believed – “when you live without sight of the horizon, you must find new ways to contextualize yourself” – she might only have needed someone to run with.
“You give me the feeling of catching a smile meant for someone else.”
Virginia is dead now, in body and in mind. Nothing brilliant or agonizing blisters in her anymore. Yet like an accident of genius, kaleidoscopic, she refracts upon the life she isn’t living, so that as Vita enters the bookshop, its warmth is the warmth of Virginia’s chamomile-clipped cheek, and snowdrops in a vase make a gathering of necks, slender, bowed, like Virginia in her letter writing.
And there – close to the window, soaked in the sunlight that now breaks through the fog, stands Orlando.