The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (6 page)

On the surface Virginia's ideas appear commonplace, for most people try to make sense out of chaos, but she gradually introduced a mystical element into her thinking:

the whole world is a work of art … we are parts of the work of art.
Hamlet
or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words.
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It was through words that Virginia tried to make order out of chaos. She discerned:

some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me, it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when, in writing, I seem to be discovering what belongs to what.
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That rapture always visited Virginia in the early stages of her novels: she galloped ahead without pause, free of anxiety, in control of events, powerful and self-contained.

*   *   *

Stella Duckworth came naturally to be a second mother to Virginia and Adrian. She had been devoted to Julia – a ‘beautiful attendant handmaid, feeding her mother's vivid flame, rejoicing in the service and making it the central duty of her life' – and looked on her mother as ‘a person of divine power and divine intelligence'.
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The umbilical cord was never cut and mother and daughter developed a telepathic understanding of each other. Stella had almost no independent life and apparently no desire for one. She could not bear to be parted from her mother and even a short separation distressed her. When she was rarely persuaded to go away for a holiday she was ‘white as a ghost' for days before taking a tearful leave, which the watchful Virginia always noticed.
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She attracted men but invariably refused their proposals. Since Julia believed that ‘an unmarried woman has missed the best of life',
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she would have pushed Stella into marriage before long, had she not died. While the family was at St Ives in the summer of 1894, Stella turned down for a second time her most persistent suitor, Jack Hills, and afterwards a fascinated Virginia listening intently through the bedroom wall, heard the sound of her crying.

The twelve-year-old Virginia's ideas of marriage reflected her age: gathered mostly from books and passing remarks and regarded with a mixture of fear and excitement. The subject was never discussed in any real terms at home and Virginia, although puzzled by Stella's resistance to marriage, may have intuitively understood why. Twelve years later, when Vanessa began to hint at marriage, Virginia was to echo Stella's tearful cry, ‘What can it matter where we are so long as we are all together?'
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Men could sometimes seem alarming. Virginia's huge, handsome, cyclothymic cousin Jim Stephen was attracted to Stella and liable, when hypomanic, to burst into Hyde Park Gate and demand kisses.
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It was both thrilling and frightening, made more so when Virginia and Vanessa were told to pretend that Stella had gone away.

When Virginia was five or six years old, her half-brother Gerald stood her upon a table and explored her ‘private parts', an act she recalled years later with a ‘shiver of shame'.
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The effect on her psycho-sexual development was probably minor but her dislike of Gerald was enduring. Her attitude to George, her other half-brother, was much warmer although he is held to be a sexual monster by Virginia's feminist admirers. In her childhood he was a father-figure and Virginia looked on him then with affection. When he died in 1934 she was distressed, and her last conversation about him with her doctor, shortly before she killed herself, showed she ‘evidently adored him'.
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After Julia died, George continued to live at Hyde Park Gate ‘in complete chastity' until he was 36 when, soon after Leslie's death, he achieved his ambition of marrying into the aristocracy.
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Before then he undertook to bring out his half-sisters in society, and for several seasons Virginia endured the ordeal of dances and dinner parties that, although they provided interesting material for future writing, left her cold with embarrassment and boredom. According to Virginia, when she was half-asleep in bed, George would creep in and throw himself on top of her crying, ‘Don't be frightened … and don't turn on the light. Oh, beloved. Beloved!'
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George invariably behaved like an affectionate puppy with his half-sisters, embracing them in public and kissing them exuberantly. He may well have lain on Virginia's bed and kissed her and uttered endearments – it was quite in keeping – but it is unlikely that he went further. She gave a witty account of these encounters to the Memoir Club which reduced everyone to tears of mirth. George was, she declaimed in hypomanic style, ‘not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls, he was their lover also.'
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In July 1911 when hypomanic and prone to fantasise, she revealed ‘all George's malefactions' to her old Greek tutor and friend Janet Case, who was so shocked ‘she dropped her lace, and gasped like a benevolent gudgeon. By bedtime she said she was feeling quite sick, and did go to the W.C., which, needless to say, had no water in it.'
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Virginia pulled no punches when high! A year earlier in the summer, she had fabricated an absurdly funny but malicious story about Vanessa that had so outraged their humourless friend Saxon Sydney Turner that Vanessa had to protest angrily.

The account of George's lovemaking probably contains a core of truth but there is no evidence that Virginia was distressed by it. On the contrary, she may have been amused and enjoyed the fondling. Petting with parental substitutes (and George was still one in 1902) always gave her satisfaction. It may also have reassured her that male sexuality was harmless.

Chapter Five

Deaths – The First Major Breakdown, 1904

Julia died on 5 May. Leslie was distraught; he had once again been abandoned. The 13-year-old Virginia was confused. She frightened her half-sister Stella by telling her, ‘When I see Mother, I see a man sitting with her.'
1
Perhaps in Virginia's imagination Julia had left the Stephens to rejoin Herbert Duckworth.

It was impossible to grieve and mourn at Hyde Park Gate. The sound of Leslie groaning and repeating his wish to die tolled like a knell through the darkened house, and a steady stream of visitors repeated platitudes and shed tears. Virginia could speak to no one of her loss and fears, her sense of abandonment, the desperate need for affection. The children clung together but none of them spoke of their mother or her death.

Stella, at first too shocked even to speak Julia's name, hid her feelings in public. When Virginia surprised her alone and in tears, she sprang up, wiped her eyes and protested that nothing was wrong. Still, in the end, it was Stella who rescued Virginia from ‘this great interval of nothingness'.

Pulling herself together, Stella took charge of the family; there was no one else. She looked after her stepfather and attended to his comforts, listening patiently to his self-pitying stories. The more she gave, the more he demanded and, as time passed, Stella, trying her best to emulate Julia, grew thin and pale with exhaustion. Julia's death had taught Leslie nothing. His tyrannical egotism and need for sympathy blinded him to Stella's distress.

She was [he told a friend] my great support; she is very like her mother in some ways – very sweet and noble and affectionate. I am sometimes worried by thinking that she ought to be a wife and mother and that she may find reasons for leaving me.
2

When she did marry, two years later, his world turned topsy-turvy.

Virginia was seriously ill for many months after Julia's death but she did not become insane. She retreated to her room, her refuge and hiding-place, and became almost housebound. The outside world was threatening and she feared meeting people. Depression and anxiety almost paralysed her; she slept badly and lost weight. She could no longer write or even read for a time. But she did not go mad; she remained, trembling, in touch with her surroundings.

Stella came to her rescue. Her half-sister became the mother-figure she needed. She looked after Virginia with great understanding and affection, far more so than Julia had done, and gradually Virginia responded and began to feel more secure. Stella insisted on Virginia leading an ordered life, drinking supplementary milk, taking her medicines and following Dr Seton's prescribed routine. She had to go out several times a day; usually to walk with Leslie in Kensington Gardens, meet Vanessa after her Art class, and to shop or make social calls with Stella. As she improved she began to devour books at such a rate that Leslie was concerned. But he liked his daughter's bookish voracity, and he discussed books with her and advised her on what to read. Virginia thrived and her admiration for her father grew.

Fifteen months after Julia's death Virginia's anxiety returned when Stella became engaged to Jack Hills. There was ‘excitement and emotion and gloom' in the family. Adrian cried. Leslie was upset but said, unselfishly for once, ‘We must all be happy because Stella is happy' – a command which, poor man, he could not himself obey.
3
Virginia was as distressed as her father, angry and appalled at the prospect of losing her second mother. That October she had panic attacks and Dr Seton reimposed restrictions on her reading and mental activity.

Stella's marriage did not take place until April 1897, due to Leslie's delaying tactics, but the wait was beneficial to Virginia. Stella went to great lengths to include her half-sister in the wedding preparations, and to reassure her she was not being abandoned. She repeatedly emphasised she was leaving home only to move into the house across the street, and she would continue to see and watch over Virginia as before.

Virginia's jealousy of Jack, mild in comparison to Leslie's, slowly diminished. She made an effort to get to know him and she came to picture his love for Stella in idealised terms. It was her ‘first vision then of love between man and woman' and she envied their closeness.
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Jack was passionately and demonstratively in love and Stella responded by growing in confidence and looks. As Virginia saw their happiness her anxiety abated and by the beginning of 1897 she was well enough to start a diary.

However, as the marriage date neared, her fears re-emerged. She delayed until the very last moment, going to church to hear the banns read, although that may have been more a protest against attending church than the marriage itself, and she refused to kneel. She bought a wedding present, a lamp, just two days before the wedding and the strain was so great she almost fainted and had to be brought home by cab.
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She and Vanessa were bridesmaids; ‘Goodness knows how we got through it all – certainly it was half a dream, or a nightmare', Virginia recorded.
6

Stella returned home from the honeymoon at the end of April feeling ill, with ‘a bad chill on her innards', eventually diagnosed as appendicitis complicated by peritonitis.
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Three months of intermittent illness followed, during which time Virginia's state of mind mirrored Stella's condition. At first she could not sleep alone and moved into Vanessa's bedroom. She haunted Stella's bedside. Her relief when Stella improved was enormous; ‘Now that Old Cow [Julia's nickname for Stella] is most ridiculously well and cheerful … thank goodness'.
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But Stella's improvement was short-lived, and Dr Seton stopped Virginia's lessons in Greek and Latin and ordered extra milk and medicines. A week before Stella's death Virginia collapsed with ‘rheumatism' and ‘fidgets', and was put to bed.

Stella died on 19 July, after a mistimed operation. Had Dr Seton been in attendance (he was incapacitated by sciatica) he might have opposed the surgeons and perhaps saved Stella's life – and altered the course of Virginia's. Her lifelong distrust of doctors had a firm foundation.

Stella's death, coming so soon after her mother's, was shattering. ‘But this is impossible,' Virginia kept repeating to herself, ‘things aren't, can't be, like this.'
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Her diary tailed off and ended with the year, not to be resumed for 20 months. However, the ending was not entirely without hope: ‘Courage and plod on – They [the years] must bring something worth the having.'
10
This time Virginia could grieve, for she was able to talk and share her feelings with Vanessa and Jack.

Before Stella died it was known she was pregnant; Virginia may have connected her death in some way with sex. There was gossip at the time that Jack ‘had in some way injured' his wife through his rapacious sexual demands and roughness.
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According to her friend Violet Dickinson – who later became another maternal substitute for Virginia – Stella had found intercourse painful.

Problems built up between Virginia and Vanessa over the following two years, which were not unlike the complications that were to follow Vanessa's marriage to Clive Bell ten years later. Jack Hills continued to haunt the Stephen family, visiting Hyde Park Gate every evening and spending weekends with them at holiday time. Vanessa and Virginia took turns to comfort him, listened to him sympathetically and held his hand. At Painswick, where the Stephens stayed after Stella's death, one or other of the sisters walked in the garden with him after dinner, and that September they stayed with him at his parents' home, Corby Castle.