Adeline Read online

  Adeline does not answer. She has broken off, breathlessly, her chest rising and falling, flustered under her hand, which has moved from her neck to her sternum and curled itself into a fist. She has only a little more to say, but it is the most important part. She does not want to leave it for Virginia.

  I was in a trance like that, she says, the words coming quickly once more, drifting blissfully for I don’t know how long, when all at once in a kind of mindless but somehow knowing flash I understood.

  She is speaking now in Virginia’s language, the adult mind changing with the child’s, but the words are still in her mouth, running out.

  I knew what was happening. I was not having a fit or a breakdown. I was not even having a vision. I was the vision. I wasn’t watching the foam and the waves and the lichen and the rocks change places and repeat. I was not finding their pattern . . . Do you see? . . . I had been woven into it. There was no separation. No girl on the lawn and no sea out there, no world with people and things and spaces and thoughts between. There was just this boundless, flowing sameness beneath everything, and I was part of it.

  “Yes,” Virginia answers dreamily. Her eyes, like Adeline’s, are no longer engaged. They are somewhere else, and she is smiling absently at what she has heard, entranced by the recovery, amazed and not amazed at all, but pleased to find this event perfectly preserved, shelved inside her, and retrieved intact.

  They are the same now—almost—the woman and the girl, but Adeline is eager to remain apart, just that little bit separate, and poised to finish her side of the story.

  Without my noticing it, she says, animated once more, Old Woolly had gotten up from his chair, come all the way across the lawn and sat down beside me. I knew he was there only when he put his hand on my arm, his whole heavy hand on my forearm, and then squeezed. I looked at him, still half through the dream, and I thought he must be a ghost. He appeared so suddenly, and he was so pale and startled-looking.

  It was so unlike him, she says, touching Virginia’s shoulder, demonstrating what she wants to say. Well, you know he never got up from his chair except for meals or if the weather was turning, and he never put his hand on anyone’s arm, especially not like that, as if he didn’t know himself that he was doing it until he was pulling away.

  Virginia nods her agreement and places her own hand on her shoulder, gently covering Adeline’s.

  And he pulled away so suddenly, Adeline continues, encouraged by the touch. As if he had been given a shock. But he never took his eyes from my face.

  She turns to look at Virginia full on, adding,

  He looked at me almost as you do, searching me, but he was also afraid, so afraid and completely without understanding. He looked for such a long time and in such a panic that I thought perhaps he had been paralyzed or struck just as I had been.

  He looked . . . how can I explain this? She searches for the words, scowling down at herself as if the obstruction is in her bowels or some farther reach of the illusion. She lights up triumphantly when she finds them.

  He looked as if he was trying . . . with the whole . . . the whole force of his intellect to reconstruct something . . . like an event . . . an experience . . . no, no a revelation . . . yes, a revelation, like mine, that had been made to him whole, all at once, a moment before, but which had shattered against his categories and was now lying in pieces behind my eyes.

  She is well satisfied with this description, and slows, warming to it now with the full power of her instinct.

  He didn’t speak for a long time, but finally, when he did speak, it was in a terrible hoarse whisper that was so dry and far away and scratched with pain that it didn’t sound like human speech. “Sadness,” he said. “So much sadness.” That was all. Just that. And then streams of tears burst from his eyes and fell into his woolly beard, and he began shuddering with these awful wrenching sobs.

  Adeline’s voice dies away here, and the sight of her fades for a moment with it. Virginia, returning to her present self, alone in the sterile room, recites, very slowly,

  . . . the waves draw back, and fling . . .

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  Yes, she remembers sweet Woolly now. His reading of her that day, his consumption of her, as if he had sucked the sadness through her like a liquid meal and been sickened by it. It was the sadness she herself had suckled from the world without diminishing it, had consumed and likewise been sickened by.

  It had been there for a long time, this malaise, ebbing and flowing without warning or cause, or none that she had ever discerned. But she had not recognized it, not known that it could be conveyed, not until that day on the lawn with Woolly, when the transmission was unmistakable.

  And the poem, too. Matthew Arnold’s mesmerizing poem. She had read it so many times as a child, and heard it, those three haunting lines in particular, their hard, insistent wistfulness, ringing in the crash and recession of the tide outside her window in St. Ives as she lay in the dark nursery for hours, listening. It was in the sea, the poet had said, in the waves, the ceaseless, torpid repetition of the waves, which themselves were so much more than waters. It was there beneath and constituting everything, as she now, and she then—as Adeline—had understood.

  And so it would be in her rendering. The shadow play of memory and time, etched, as it was in life, in the dream language of light. The past is here now, she asserts, and I, this manifestation, am in the past.

  Yes, the past, she repeats, and Adeline, who is the girl that she once was, the bright Victorian girl shut behind dark paneled doors with her thirteen, fifteen, eighteen years of life and a Greek lexicon. She is the girl stopped in time who could not speak or feel at the side of her dead mother’s bed. She keeps the cold, clear information of those days, unclouded by revision or the lies of age. She is there still, communicating, conjured by this strange Virginia, who is the woman she did not become.

  Here, now, that same Virginia is thinking of those old days again, both fondly and not—of her lessons opened on the desk, and the lexicon, and Father downstairs in a temper curled like a gargoyle, glowering over his own dry books and papers.

  She thinks of the word itself, “lexicon,” and chops it now to her fancy, though it is not technically correct. LEX/ICON. Word idol. Idolatry of words. The sacred word, which, of course, she ponders, is John. The Gospel of John.

  The Word was with God, and the Word was God. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.

  There is the expression she is aiming for. This is the book she wants to write about her childhood. The light as language, the language as light, penetrating darkness, and the despair that lies enshrouded in the world, appearing to her. That alone is the revelation. Poor, plodding Woolly, who could not contain it, and she, equally untrue, gaping out at the bay where the lighthouse stood, inconsequent in daylight.

  This is the only deity she accepts. God as word as light. This is the only phrase of any gospel that resonates, and it is rightly incongruous to the rest, this strange and surprising rendering of God in the Greek: logos.

  I was so happy there, Adeline says, appearing again. She is sitting upright now on the bed, bouncing lightly, her arms and legs crossed playfully, like a Red Indian. I was so happy there by the seaside, with Mother and Father and all the children together.

  “We were so happy there,” Virginia corrects, smiling into the past.

  Were you there? I don’t remember.

  “I will be,” Virginia answers, placing a hushing finger against her own lips.

  Adeline smiles and does the same. I will keep our secret.

  “You do. You have always done. And I will write it down. I will put it into a story, so that we may be free of it.”

  To the Lighthouse, she thinks. That is the right name for this journey.

  Adeline grimaces, as though the idea of putting their secrets on the page di
scomfits her deeply. But it is not that.

  “What is it?” Virginia asks, alarmed.

  It hurts, Adeline groans, and presses her hands to her abdomen.

  Virginia leans over and puts her hand there, too. “Here?”

  Yes, Adeline whimpers, moving her own hands away and allowing Virginia’s to rest there instead.

  “Is it the pains?” Virginia asks, moving her hand to Adeline’s forehead to see if there is a fever. “Like before?”

  Adeline nods, still grimacing.

  “Does it hurt here, too?” she asks, pressing her palm and the back of her hand by turns against Adeline’s brow.

  A little, Adeline replies, her face relaxing slightly as the worst of the cramp subsides.

  “Better?” Virginia asks, removing her hand.

  Yes, says Adeline weakly, taking a deep breath. As she lets it out, she drops her chin to her chest. Virginia moves her hand to the back of Adeline’s neck and begins to massage it.

  “There now,” she whispers, repeating Nessa’s healing words. “Breathe, dearest. Breathe. It will go.”

  Adeline breathes for a few moments, resting there and letting her head bob gently under the pressure of Virginia’s touch. Then, with a sudden rush of anger, she sits up again and, glaring at Virginia, says,

  Why must it hurt?

  At first Virginia does not reply. This is not something she wishes to discuss. They have done so before. And anyway, Adeline is not green. She is very young, but she knows what she is about. She knew well in advance of the event what to expect at the onset, mostly because Nessa, being older and having been through it herself, prepared her. Still, she has been frustrated, upended by this abrupt and unwelcome end to the carefree reign of girlhood. She wants to be soothed.

  As Virginia watches her face, reading all the feelings that are passing so transparently across it, Adeline sighs and looks away, as if to deflect the scrutiny. But she looks back again quickly to insist on an answer. She appears more confused now than annoyed, her features wrinkled into a pout around the tense determination of her mouth. She is touchingly unsure and inquisitive, like someone who has had her heart broken for the first time and thinks that if she can only pinpoint the source of this curious discomfort she can make it go away. Virginia is moved by the guilelessness of this and smiles.

  “You know why it must hurt, little goat,” she answers, kindly but firmly. “So that we might bear a child.”

  I know that, Adeline exclaims, exasperated. She looks away again, her eyes filling with tears. But why must it hurt so much?

  “I don’t know,” Virginia concedes. “That I do not know. But you must endure it all the same, as I do, without knowing or understanding. You must be strong.”

  She says this confidently, like a mother, as Nessa said it to her, but she is sensitive to Adeline’s complaint. The severity of the affliction has always troubled her, and the unfairness of it, too, which had always made her feel resentful of Nessa, and by extension other girls, whose intimate lives she was not acquainted with but whom she assumed, like Nessa, were more the norm, and had monthlies that were far less debilitating than her own.

  For Nessa, she remembers, there had been no affliction to speak of. Nessa’s monthlies were simply there for a short time, and then they weren’t. They were dealt with as swiftly and summarily as all other minor dramas of that time of life. Head colds, pimples, the periodic bleed, they were all one to Nessa, inconvenient, but unremarkable and, most important of all, passing.

  Unlike Virginia—very much unlike her—Nessa had seemed to glide effortlessly into womanhood, bearing the burdens of her sex lightly on her shoulders, even flourishing them like a cape, and duly coaxing forth her share of muddled young bulls.

  Nessa had found their entrance into society as tiresome as Virginia had—they had done much of it together, sitting alone, wilting in the corners of countless festive and outlandish rooms, longing for rescue—but Nessa had carried it off infinitely better. Nessa was prettier, or had been considered so, and this had made it easier for her to hide in plain sight. She had been steady, patient and unprepossessingly stylish enough for both of them, holding herself straight, as their mother had advised, remaining as quietly decorous and unthreateningly beautiful as a porcelain vase, while Virginia had sat beside her like some lesser appurtenance, dull and lifeless to the eye, but fuming inside, digging her nails into her palms and stifling her cries.

  Nessa had done it all so very well: come up, come out, taken on, shrugged off, found art and pursued it, married before she was thirty (and a man of the arts as well as one of her choosing, no less), had children, took lovers, and now lived an open, charmed bohemian life at home and abroad. There were no seams showing in her world, only the unbroken expanse of her fulfillment, stretching effortlessly, endlessly and enviably in every direction.

  Has Nessa any children? asks Adeline, tugging at the root of Virginia’s thought and squeezing it, with a child’s unfailing accuracy and indifference, precisely where it is most inflamed. Virginia can’t help chuckling at the cruel, inveterate ways her mind has of tearing at itself.

  “Why, yes,” Virginia says with sarcastic cheerfulness, “indeed she does. Nessa has three children: Julian, Quentin and Angelica. And—would you believe?—they are all now older than you.”

  Truly?

  “Yes. Truly.”

  All Stephens?

  “No, Bells. Nessa’s husband’s name is Bell.”

  Oh . . . And do you like them?

  “Indeed, I like them very much. Julian especially. He’s the oldest and very clever.”

  Cleverer than I?

  “No, little one.” Virginia smiles. “Just different. He’s a boy.”

  Like Thoby?

  “Yes, in fact. Julian reminds me very much of Thoby.”

  Adeline accepts this without comment. She knows that their elder brother, her adored Thoby, died young. They have spoken of it before, and while Adeline seems in some manner to have acknowledged the fact, she has kept it aside and separate. She has not let it in. When they mention Thoby now, they do so like this, briefly and carefully, but his name is always drenched in love. Virginia suspects that for Adeline, halted as she is in the past, Thoby is still there, alive as ever, or nearly so.

  Adeline has never asked about the others, not even their youngest brother Adrian, who seems to be more of a figment in her memory than even Mr. Wolstenholme, though Adrian is still very much alive and well. She has certainly never ventured to inquire about their half siblings, George, Stella, Gerald and Laura. Virginia is grateful for this, because she cannot bring herself to think, much less discuss the fate, of Laura in particular, their father’s daughter by his first wife. It is simply too awful to contemplate, and too close. Laura had lived with them for several years, and even gone with them to St. Ives, but she had been put away in an asylum several years before their mother died.

  With Nessa, of course, it is different. Adeline can feel her fully, and she is still amazed to hear that her playmate sister is really all grown up with children of her own. She is troubled by it, too, and makes the inevitable comparison to herself.

  How strange, she murmurs, looking down dolefully for a moment at her empty lap. But then, looking up again, she adds with the same innocent incisiveness as before, And you?

  Again Virginia smiles, thinking how satisfied her enemies would be to know that she is every bit as cutting with herself as she is with all the unsuspecting greenhorns she humiliates at parties.

  “No,” she concedes, “I have not been well enough for that.”

  Oh, Adeline murmurs guiltily, looking down once again at herself, the body that is bewilderingly to blame.

  “It’s all right,” Virginia says, taking up one of Adeline’s hands. “Really. It is.”

  Adeline nods reluctantly, knowing that it is not really all right at all, but that there is nothing she can do.

  So, then, there is only me? she offers, meaning to condole, but her voice is pit
ched greedily like a spoiled only child’s, delighted to reaffirm that her mother’s affections will not have to be shared.

  “Yes. There is only you,” Virginia agrees, adding somberly, “and the work.”

  But I am the work, Adeline cries. This is one of the things she has learned, but still, she needs to hear it said.

  “That’s true,” Virginia obliges. “You are the work.”

  When I can do it, she thinks. When the pains and the headaches and the episodic flares and despondencies don’t keep us down. When we are not racked in this dilapidated body, leaking through a cracked brain, whirling without sleep, fingers picking purposelessly at food. And all the while, these people that I am, we are trapped and talking to ourselves, both as we are now and as we were then, because there is no one else.

  So, yes, Virginia sighs, you are the work. But when we are well again. When we are not mad. No, she catches herself here, we are not mad. I am not mad. I am not. I will not be that woman out of a novel from the last century, locked away and wailing in the attic. I am now, and I am putting it down as testament. My past, my people, my evidence, my will.

  9:54 A.M.

  LEONARD IS SITTING at his desk thinking about numbers. Household accounts. The cost of things. Money coming in, going out. This is all quite personal to start, as it must be. What they spend. What they can afford. Down to the shillings and pence. To him, this is not only responsible, but indicative. It tells the story of their life, any life, both as history and moment, however one may dream.

  After all, he reaffirms soberly, dreaming is the luxury of order. Art is the beneficiary of businesses well run.

  He can make such heretical pronouncements to himself here, straightedge in hand, drawing the table of the year’s earnings and expenditures. Yet he wonders how thoroughly it divides him from his peers, if at all, or if, to the properly initiated, this is just the rusty old paradox of political economy, known and politely overlooked, like the flaws in the people one loves.