Vanessa and Her Sister (10 page)

TENNIS WHITES

Sunday 24 September 1905—Trevose View, Carbis Bay, Cornwall

P
acking up for our return. I salt away the least noticeable items first. Virginia is unravelled by change and will start to fret. She has taken to walking out to Godrevy Lighthouse in the afternoons, and that is when I nip round the house lifting a beach towel here and an already-read book there.

FIRST TO GO
:

Flower vases

Bedroom slippers

Dickens

LAST TO GO
:

Striped bathing costumes

Straw hats

Austen

26 September 1905—Cornwall (bright blue day)

“Ant. Ant. Ant.”

I looked over at Virginia. She was sitting on her lawn chair, loosely holding her pen but not writing. Her index finger was smudged with ink.

“Ant. Ant. Ant. Ant.”

“Dearest?” I asked gently. “Ant
who
?”

“
Ant
ant,” Virginia said, as if stating the obvious.

Thoby came round the white stone path and dropped into a chaise longue.

“Ant. Ant. Ant,” Virginia directed at Thoby.

“Yes. Good word, ‘a-n-t,’ ” he said, drawing out the small, sharp, pointy sounds. “Tricky word in crosswords. Always more of an ending: ‘defend
ant
, account
ant
.’ ”

“Ant,” said Virginia to no one.

“Ant?” asked Adrian coming up the lawn, his hair still wet and smelling of the sea. “Ginia, have we got ants?”

I looked at Virginia. She had grown bigger in the last few minutes. Rounded and settled, like a spider who is sure of her breakfast. She had caught everyone in her nonsense web. They were each wrapped and bundled and waiting for the spider feast. And she did it with a tiny word.

Virginia has been invited to teach writing at Morley College this term. She will charm her students into sailor’s knots.

28 September 1905

Sat on a long summer lawn and watched Thoby and Adrian play tennis. The last few days of the holiday are always the sweetest. The unspent mornings are more precious, and the days more frugally divided. The rules break, and the habits bend out of shape. These were the days when Mother would allow us to have nursery tea with sandy feet and salty
fingernails as we four wrung the last hours of tumbling sunshine from the summer.

Now the cases lie half-open all over the house, and my canvases will never dry in time. Annoying, but I had to work on them today in the last of the loose blue-gold Cornish light. I will have to have them sent on next week. I will miss it here.

FRIDAY EVENINGS IN AUTUMN

5 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (summer dusk)

W
e are back.

Somewhere else, the tide rolls in. The tide rolls out. London’s elegant lines are printed in street dirt. I only want to paint the sea.

7 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

The colours in my head, the colours in my heart, and the colours in my hours do not match up. My head wants to play with the textured gloss of clear white: the bruised shadows of pink, and the silver of the sunlight riding on the wave. My heart wants to plunge into the open-water freshness of the richest, purest,
bluest
blue, and my hours are muddied with the wrangling, tangled, sparrow browns of my family.

Thoby cannot get enough peace to work although
what
he is working on remains a mystery. He is meant to be reading for the bar but I am sure that on most days he is not. Adrian likewise professes his need to get “work” done, but instead he is nearly always playing the piano. Virginia rolls her eyes, lifts her brows, and talks of offices and deadlines and bylines—as if to proclaim her work to be authentic in the face of their play work. I suppose it is true, as she so often reviews for the
TLS
now.

My work I keep to myself. Painting does not qualify as work in this family of literati. Work is not work where
words
are not involved. The unfixed mark of paint alters when it alteration finds. The distribution of colours is a curious sort of hobby to them. A lightweight experiment with insubstantial shade instead of the integrity-bound dimensional shape of letters on a page.

“Writing is real expression, Nessa,” Virginia said, refusing the rosemary potatoes Sophie had made especially for her.

“Virginia, those were made at
your
request,” I said steadily as Maud took the covered dish back down to the kitchen.

I knew Sophie had used the last of her squirreled-away rosemary on them this afternoon. Sophie is always worried about “Miss Ginia” and her tendency not to eat. She shakes her head and makes noises about Lady Stephen disapproving of wasted food. It is true. Mother did hate to see food wasted. But even Mother could not get Virginia to eat. Only Thoby can do that.

“No good, Ginia? They looked good to me,” Adrian said gamely.

Nothing.

“Dearest, try. You know we all want you to eat,” I said, automatically cajoling her into nutrition.

“Violet says she is heading towards the savage land of Oklahoma, where water buffalo run through the town and people dress in feathers and paint,” Virginia said loudly to no one.

“Dearest, I think that was in the last century,” I said, trying to rope Virginia back into the realm of the everyday.

“Violet wrote and told me that she was taken captive and held at arrowpoint for two days.”

“And then got diphtheria, I suppose?” Adrian asked waspishly.

“Do just eat, Ginia,” Thoby said, laying down his book.

Maud, hearing Thoby’s intervention, sensed her cue and returned with the potatoes.

POST CARD

This Space to Be Used for Correspondence

10 October 1905

Dearest Duncan
,
My Cambridge life has bitten the poisoned apple. Failure: I am not to become a fellow. My dream will now sleep for a thousand years. I can only hope that I am rescued by seven deliciously small manual labourers and whisked off to a cottage in the glen. If so, please storm the forest astride a white stallion and move in with us.

Your
Lytton

 
PS: spending lots of time with Maynard, whom you will like. Please be jealous, chérie.

To:
Mr Duncan Grant
22 Rue Delambre
Boulevard Raspail
Paris

NUMBER 8. CAMBRIDGE COUNTRYSIDE

11 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

We have been home a week and I am still restless and unsettled. I have the loose-ended feeling of looking,
looking
. What am I looking for? Looking for substance, looking for a moment I do not understand. Is that just how this part of life is? Do we ever have the sensation of
finding
, of arriving? I worry that life is always in the future and I am always here, in the preamble, straightening up the cushions so that life will go smoothly once it does begin. How does it
start
?

I have the outstretched feeling of wanting to seek Clive’s advice, on the Friday Club, on my paintings, on my hats. Perhaps because I know he would have a definite opinion. He does not waffle as I do. He speaks and then acts. I like those short, explosive verbs.

No. Vanessa. Descend a storey. Round the stone steps of the curtain wall. Do I just seek an excuse to speak to him? I rummage for the truth and find handfuls of my own deceptiveness. Yes, no? Even I do not know the answer.

Later (past midnight)

He told me I am beautiful. Our family ostensibly values brilliance over beauty. Of course, underneath, Father expected beauty too. Tonight I closed the door and sat at my dressing table and looked in the glass, looked to see what Clive sees. I have never felt beautiful. I compare myself to the women in my family. I suppose all women do that. Mother was too hollowly drawn to be pretty, but she was arresting. Stella’s good nature made her far more alluring than the sum of her features. Then there is Virginia. Everyone turns to look at Virginia. Narrow and ethereal, Virginia’s beauty haunts.

And me? I look critically, as I would at an artist’s model. My face is a pure oval. My eyes are heavily lidded, and my mouth turns down at the corners, giving my expression a gravity I did not earn. Overlarge for my face, my eyes are a widely set soft blue-grey, like washed slate. My skin is apple pink because I never remember my hat. My conker-brown hair escapes the loose knot at my neck and is never tidy. My hands are strong but long and white. I have paint under my nails. My figure is more womanly than Virginia’s ascetic frame. I try to like it but often feel lumpy rather than purposefully curved. I look unfamiliar.

Friday 13 October 1905—46 Gordon Square (still warmish)

Tea with Aunt Anny and Virginia this afternoon was huge fun. My God, she is an eccentric old thing. Today she spoke to Virginia and me at length about the great merits of wearing woollen underwear and comfortable shoes.

Later, over dinner, I described the conversation to Thoby and Adrian. “That’ll be you someday, Nessa,” Adrian said as Sloper cleared away the soup bowls, “dropping round to make sure I clean my ears and change my socks.”

Everyone laughed but me. I do not want to become that someday.

And
—At homes start up next week. Must order more cake. I feel nervous and restless and out of practise. It has been three months.

Monday 16 October 1905—46 Gordon Square

Friday nights—for artists. Shape. Colour. Light. Depth. The fractured, messy journey of image.

I hope people come. I want so much. I want these nights to be brave. I want to elbow words out of the way and give art the floor. In Cornwall, I felt wrapped in such a sense of what was possible. Each canvas soaked up the paint hungrily. The brush thrummed with purpose. It was not the outcome that mattered but the doing. I want to bottle that feeling and serve it to my guests.

But will the evening work? I hope Friday catches some of Thursday’s magic like a sniffle on an omnibus. Maybe Thoby is right and conviction is everything.

My rules are simple and clear. We must dispense with insincere politeness—that vapid veneer of untruth that smothers London drawing rooms. Our well-mannered social deceit must not die a private death but a court-ordered hanging in the public square. The anarchic animal that is left will be a dangerous and hot-blooded thing. Unruly and impossible to predict. But alive.

And
—I have hung Great-aunt Julia’s best photographs in the upstairs hall. A long, slim row. The talented women of my family give me credibility. Why do I fret so? I tell myself it is only a party.