Vanessa and Her Sister (46 page)

“But I thought that it was all all right now,” Virginia said desperately.

“No, Virginia,” I said. “You are my
sister
. It will never be all right.”

It will never be all right. I had not understood until that moment. An even tide rolls in with the certainty of fracture. The boat ripped to the keel. The anxiety over. The balance tipped. It can
never
be all right.

Monday 1 May 1911—Hotel Bristol, Constantinople

Train in an hour. We came back to Constantinople for two nights, and we are to take the Orient Express back to Paris this evening. Harry, Roger, Virginia, and Clive have gone to the bazaar to look for exotic fruit to bring back for the boys. I am parked in a deck chair on this sun-washed terrace overlooking the blue sea until they return. I do not mind. After the constant rumble and hum of travelling companions, it is luxurious to be alone. I am not waiting. I am not waiting for anyone any more. It was me I was waiting for.

Today I have the sensation of being on a swing, sailing high over the ground. Below, Roger is waiting to catch me in his warm, capable heart. Clive lounges against a tree and, if he thought he could, would snatch me from falling too far through the open air. Perhaps there are others waiting. Others watching.

But then, perhaps I do not need to be caught.

PART FIVE

T
HE
B
ELLS AND THE
W
OOLVES

· ·

1912

“Memory,” he often said, “is an excellent compositor.”

(
DESMOND MACCARTHY
)

RESOLUTION

Saturday 5 October 1912—Grafton Galleries (early—seven am)

O
pening day. The Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition.

Roger let me into the gallery. With long neat fingers, he traced the bones of my face, and, bending, kissed the soft patch below my ear, the spot he loves. And then he slipped away. He knew I wanted a moment alone. His deft understanding is my North Star.

Two rooms. My footsteps crack the velvet silence.
Nursery Tea
is bearing up well in a room full of Matisses, Picassos, Braques, and Cézannes. I worried she would look provincial and domestic in this company, but just as Roger insisted, I was wrong. She is holding her own. I close my eyes and say goodbye. I wish her well. In three hours she will no longer belong to me. Her brushstrokes will grow unfamiliar, and our history will be wiped clean. She will start fresh. That is what happens when a painting puts on her boots to meet the world. Duncan tried to explain that loss to me long ago.

Duncan’s jagged poster hangs in the window, announcing the exhibition. I have the early sketches he made for the design. Roger brought them over last week, folded and crumpled in his pocket. I smoothed them out under some heavy books. Clive wants to frame them.

Three hours. And then the crowds will come. They will be more prepared now. Last time they were taken wholly unawares by Cézanne’s
stark mountains and Gauguin’s plush Tahitians. They were too startled to be urbane. They will try not to make the same mistake twice, but Roger thinks that Picasso’s cubist
Girl with a Mandolin
alone will stump up plenty of fresh outrage. I do not want to see that. The red faces and meaty fists. Roger can describe it to me later when we are alone.

In three hours, Virginia will be the first through the door. Leonard has been Roger’s secretary for the exhibition, and since last spring Leonard and Virginia do everything together. The Bells and the Woolves. There is a lovely symmetry in four. Before Virginia and Leonard married two months ago in a poky room at St. Pancras registry office, I could not quite see it. They seemed mismatched, like odd socks. Bound together by decision rather than affection. Leonard is so inflexibly good, so direct, so sincere, and so grave. Virginia’s wit frothed around him like a party dress.

The wedding day bulged with thunder and split wide with lightning. The sheeting rain washed the greasy pavement clean. Clive, soaked with misery at losing both Stephen sisters, hardly looked up from the salmon carpet as I sat with Julian and Quentin and watched the bride and bridegroom. Dear Leonard wore a sun-faded suit, as he could not afford to buy another, and Virginia spoke her vows in a voice too low to be heard over the storm. She stood willow-stripling straight, and hawkish Leonard curved towards her like a moon. All her life Virginia has been in terrible motion, as if she runs on the belief that there is always a better place to be. She charms and sparkles and binds us to her on her way, and she does not slow her pace. But standing beside Leonard, she gathered in one level grassy place, and I watched him tense with the lean, sharp hope that she would stay.

Now I see it. He moors her. He is Virginia’s to the bone. And someone needs to be Virginia’s. Perhaps it will change us. Perhaps she will grow safe, and I will grow trusting. Or perhaps we will go on as we are: Leonard will wait for Virginia, and Virginia will wait for me.

I breathe in the freshly dusted room, the bold paintings, and the clear lights. The bell rings, the gallery door opens. Roger is back. I will
stay to watch the first wave of people break over the gallery floor, and then I will leave.

“Ready?” he asks gently, careful not to disrupt the cathedral air around us.

“Ready.” I love being an artist today.

5 December 1912

Dearest Ginia
,

Now Quentin has caught Julian’s cold, and so I do not think we will be able to come down after all. Shepherding one drippy runny child to Sussex is a challenge, but two is impossible.

Yes. You are the woman in the painting. I can see you are different. I can see you are changed. Your happiness makes you supple and warm.

But you are on the far bank, Virginia. I am replanted in different earth. Still, you are my sister, and in that we are twinned always. Look for me. I will be watching you from here. But to begin again? No, Virginia. There can be no beginning again. Love and forgiveness are not the same thing.

Vanessa

AUTHOR’S NOTE

What became of them …

ADRIAN STEPHEN

In 1914, Adrian married Karin Costelloe, a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. When military conscription was introduced to England in 1916, the couple became conscientious objectors and spent World War I working on a dairy farm in Essex. After the war, Adrian pursued a medical degree and went on to become one of England’s first psychoanalysts. During World War II, Adrian renounced his pacifist views and volunteered as an army doctor at the age of sixty. He died in 1948.

OTTOLINE MORRELL

At the outbreak of World War I, Ottoline and Philip Morrell declared themselves to be conscientious objectors and invited fellow pacifists Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, and Lytton Strachey to live with them at Garsington, their country house in Oxfordshire, for the duration of the war. The Morrells maintained their harmonious open marriage until Ottoline’s death in 1938. Her lovers included Dora Carrington and Bertrand Russell. She continued to support artists and writers to the end of her life, among them Mark Gertler, Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot, and Siegfried Sassoon.

DESMOND MACCARTHY AND SAXON SYDNEY-TURNER

During World War I, Desmond MacCarthy worked in naval intelligence. After the war he returned to journalism, writing a weekly column under the name “The Affable Hawk.” In 1920 he became the literary editor of the
New Statesman
and eventually went on to become the literary critic for
The Sunday Times
. He never finished his novel. Saxon Sydney-Turner never married and never left the Treasury Office.

MAYNARD KEYNES AND E. M. FORSTER

Maynard Keynes went on to marry Lydia Lopokova, a ballerina from the Ballets Russes. He became arguably the most important economist of the twentieth century. E. M. Forster published five novels and then stopped writing fiction at the age of forty-five. He lived for another forty-six years, publishing nonfiction. His sixth novel,
Maurice
, was written in 1913 but was not released until 1971, a year after his death. It tells the story of homosexual love in the early twentieth century.

ROGER FRY

Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry became lovers in 1911. She did exhibit her work at his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912. Their affair continued until the end of 1913, when Vanessa transferred her romantic affection to Duncan Grant. Roger Fry was heartbroken, and letters written years after the affair speak clearly of his profound attachment. He and Vanessa remained dear friends. He was close to her children and often a guest at Charleston, her home in Sussex.

Helen Fry was never released from the mental hospital. After her death in 1937, it was discovered that her insanity was caused by an irreversible thickening of the skull. Roger wrote to her every week for the rest of his life.

When Roger Fry died, after a fall in 1934, his ashes were buried at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, in a casket designed by Vanessa Bell.

CLIVE BELL

Clive and Vanessa Bell never divorced. In 1919, when Vanessa gave birth to her third child, Angelica, by Duncan Grant, Clive claimed the child as his own. Clive had a string of relationships for the remainder of his life, most notably with the writer Mary Hutchinson.

In 1914 Clive Bell published
Art
, developing the theory of significant form and earning a reputation as an influential art critic and theorist.

The Bells’ elder son, Julian, named for Thoby, became a writer and poet and served as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. He was killed in 1937 at the age of twenty-nine. Quentin Bell became an artist and author. He wrote several books about the Bloomsbury Group, the most well known of which is a biography of his aunt Virginia. His daughter, Virginia Nicholson, generously helped in the research for this novel.

LYTTON STRACHEY

During World War I, Lytton Strachey applied to be a conscientious objector but was exempted from military service on health grounds. He spent most of the war at Garsington, Lady Ottoline Morrell’s country home.

In 1918 Strachey published
Eminent Victorians
. It was an immediate success, and his career as a biographer was established.

In 1917 the young painter Dora Carrington fell deeply in love with Strachey. She and her husband, Ralph Partridge, lived in a romantic partnership with Lytton at Ham Spray House in Wiltshire. Lytton died of undiagnosed stomach cancer in 1932. Dora Carrington committed suicide two months later.