Vanessa and Her Sister (6 page)

Tuesday 2 May 1905—46 Gordon Square

The sedative worked, and Virginia slept for eighteen hours straight. Sleep rights her as surely as the lack of it derails her.

Virginia—irritated at her outburst—is now sulking, reading three books at once, each about Spain, and speaking only in Spanish.

Thursday 4 May 1905—46 Gordon Square

A busy at home tonight, but everything went wrong. Twice I showed my hand and revealed my staggering ignorance. Who knew Tacitus was Roman and not Greek? “Listen to the name,” Virginia said, as if she were teaching a child to spell. I nodded but did not answer. Herodotus. Theodorus. Tacitus. I don’t see it.

5 May 1905—46 Gordon Square

The house was quiet today. No one mentioned the date. It has been ten years. Thoby and I remember it all, but what of Virginia and Adrian? She was thirteen, and he only twelve. What do they remember? The long night before when no one slept? Beautiful, calm Stella, her hair pulled back in a blue kerchief, sitting by Mother’s bed? Mother’s dry steep fever and her digging, racking cough? The doctor arriving just before dawn? Thoby was so angry that Father had not sent for him before. “Your mother would not allow it” was all Father said.

Mother died just after eleven in the morning. Sophie had made roast chicken for luncheon, but we did not eat until after midnight.

Friday 12 May 1905—46 Gordon Square (late)

Virginia came in to talk as I was writing in bed tonight. I had to quickly pull the coverlet up over this notebook. Since
The Manchester Guardian
accepted her article on the inn in Andalusia earlier this month, she has been even more insistent about who is the
writer
and who is the
painter
. Letters are public and mine naturally get compared to Virginia’s. My appalling spelling, my clunky phrasing, my mismatched metaphors rolling around like loose boulders, my handwriting that slopes uphill no matter how squarely I face the page—invariably, they do not equal Virginia’s hammered prose.

And
—Dinner with the Balfours tomorrow with George and Margaret. No doubt they have several eligible young men they would like us to meet. A white glove and seed pearl evening. It will be dreadful.

Thursday 18 May 1905—46 Gordon Square

Restless and unable to settle this afternoon. I know my demons are out in force because it is another Thursday, and after last Thursday’s disaster, I am nervous. Last week my newly shored-up confidence broke away like wet sand. In four hours the serious, literate men will arrive,
and while Virginia will amuse them with her circus acrobatics of witty, well-turned phrases, cleverly layered and underscored by her ruthlessly subtle mind, I will worry if the cocoa is served and if Lytton likes the fish.

I think in
mass
. In colour and shape and light and volume and texture. Not in words. Words delicately sewn around an abstract idea leave me feeling large and awkward and with nothing to say.
What is the meaning of good?
My mind asks “What is the colour of good? What size? What light? Where to put the bowl of poppies?”

Later

Not good. Wombat would not stop barking, and Lytton did not care for the fish. He would have preferred chicken.

1 June 1905—46 Gordon Square

Working on my portrait of Virginia and thinking about the effect of thickly layered paint. How to do it without losing the light? The translucence? I want it to be heavy but not dull, or perhaps thick but not heavy? Whistler does it and creates a finely blurred texture without the weight. I want the paint to mix right there on the canvas rather than safely on my palette. Homer’s ocean in
Breezing Up
has the thickened quality, but the effect is a threatening underwater darkness rather than slides of light laid against one another. I wish for depth done with more paint rather than less.

I will ask Mr Bell about it.

5 June 1905—46 Gordon Square (a warm evening)

“But Nessa, do you think it’s true?” asked Virginia tenaciously, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. The window was open, and I could hear the rumble of the Number 16 omnibus.

“I don’t know, Virginia,” I said, wrapping my breath around a patch
of calm. “I only did a semi-rest cure, and I certainly did
not
fall in love with my doctor.”

The bathwater was beginning to cool.

“Elizabeth Robbins says it is inevitable,” Virginia persisted. “A certainty.”

“Well, it wasn’t inevitable for me,” I answered, gathering my hair in my wet hand and twisting it into a messy knot at the back. As I raised my arm, Virginia’s eyes dropped unembarrassed to my exposed right breast and I quickly slid deeper into the soapy water.

“Nessa, do you think it’s true?” she repeated in a mechanical, deliberate voice.

“It must be,” I conceded. “If Mrs Robbins claims that in her—what is
The Dark Lantern
—a novel?”

Virginia nodded.

“Then it must be true.”

Satisfied, Virginia left me to finish my bath.

IN A CAMBRIDGE GARDEN IN JUNE

Sunday 18 June 1905—Grantchester Inn, Cambridge

“V
irginia?” Lytton said, offering her a sugar bun. “Mmm. No. I thought not.” Lytton wiped his fingers on one of the blue napkins and replaced the bun in the basket.

They are so alike in their determined fastidiousness, I thought, watching them sitting side by side on the riverbank. Brilliant, awkward, delicate, charming fusspots. They have both fastened on to this idea of calling those in our closest circle of acquaintance by their Christian names—not just when referring in conversation, which we already do anyway, but in
person
. It has always been easy to be familiar with my female friends such as Nelly and Snow, but I am finding it challenging in mixed company. Mr Strachey is Lytton—but that is no effort, as Lytton is such a thin, pressed name and suits him so well. Flamboyant, dainty, and usually lovesick, Lytton is a hypochondriac who is always ill or reading French literature and never shies away from outrageous topics. It would be impossible to be formal with him when he is so determined to be
informal
.

I do not want to seem fusty and Victorian and am trying to remember to use Christian names but I keep misstepping. Yesterday I offered
Mr Bell
tea, sandwiches, and finally an umbrella. Virginia wished I would sit down and not fuss.
Clive
feels so personal, and the nature of
the name is so loose and abrupt—like sliding on silk down a grassy hill and landing with a gentle thump. He never corrects me, nor prompts any untoward intimacy, and he keeps calling Virginia and me “the Miss Stephens.” But my Miss Stephen is gentler, softer, more lit by sunlight and fragranced with honeysuckle than Virginia’s dusty, bookish-sounding Miss Stephen. Terrible and meaningless, but I am pleased to be the more endeared for once.

I closed my eyes to the afternoon sunshine. Getting Virginia to Cambridge had been like moving a pound of ants. She became convinced that the train would derail, the luggage would be stolen, Wombat would be lost, Thoby would fall ill, she would catch it—and on and on. She can do that as she knows I will take up the slack, arrange the tickets, see to the luggage, find the porter, water the dog, speak to the servants, and pack the sandwiches—and of course I do.

Turning away, I watched as a pair of fat, curvy swallows dipped and fell through the summer sky.

Later—Grantchester Inn (eleven pm)

The talk at supper centred on the Apostles—who is and who isn’t. I knew the Apostles were an elite, strictly by invitation, all-male (naturally) debating society of the brightest young men in the university. But I didn’t know it was called the Apostles because there can only be twelve members at Cambridge at one time, although old members seem to stay involved for life. Lytton told me that the art critic Mr Roger Fry still comes back for meetings when he is in England. Thoby says that Desmond, Morgan Forster, Lytton, Saxon, and Mr Leonard Woolf, who is now a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service, are all Apostles. Apparently Lytton’s friend, the brilliant Mr Maynard Keynes, who is reading economics at King’s, just joined them as well. Thoby does not seem the least bothered not to have been asked, but I think the subject makes Adrian uncomfortable.

19 June 1905—Grantchester Inn

At the inn to change into a warmer frock and then tea with Walter Headlam and his protégé, the beautiful Mr Rupert Brooke, who is another of Thoby’s sparkling university friends. Mr Brooke’s flexible skin is smooth like rosebud china, and his glossy hair sits in heavy gold chunks. His cloudy blue-eyed expression is distant, and his bearing is aloof. At luncheon, I worried I was boring him and stopped talking mid-sentence. He did not pick up the thread of the conversation, and we sat in strained silence until Thoby swept him off for badminton on the lawn.

And
—Lytton’s cousin, the painter, Mr Duncan Grant, another slim, beautiful, elfin man, has joined our party. Lytton will bring him to supper.

Later (two am, crickets outside)

It all came together tonight—the way one hopes an evening will do. Virginia, when she chooses, can unify a party the way a comet does. She never missed. Her words fell light as cream, and her high-boned face invited rather than challenged. She was just enough. She was beautiful.

I sat back and watched as all the bright young men in the room fell in love with her.

And—
It was good to have another artist in the room. Duncan’s hands are long and soft, with a small, neat callus on his thumb from holding a brush—the painter’s hallmark. I felt it when he shook my hand.

21 June 1905—46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury (hot)

Home, and I have begun sketching for another portrait of Virginia (a small oil). I always paint Virginia. I tell myself that it is the lean planes of her beautiful face that draw me, but really, it is her company I seek. This one is a simple composition: Virginia seated in the shabby green wing chair, her face quarter-turned to the right and resting in her open hand.

The pink dusk brushed the moment with nostalgia. I remembered Virginia sitting in that chair when it lived by the fireplace on our nursery floor
at Hyde Park Gate. She would sit just that way and wait her turn as Nanny or Stella brushed my thick, tangled hair first. Virginia always wanted to go second. She said she loved to watch me getting my hair brushed.

She posed for an hour this evening, until the June light failed. Her eyes closed in comfort, and her face settled into her hand in a way it never does when she is in conversation. Her fine hair, a paler brown than mine, was swept back from her elliptical face into a loose knot and lay in the shallow curve of her long neck. She did not speak nor try to break the moment but kept impossibly still. When Virginia knows I am watching her, she does not try to be anywhere else.

23 June 1905

Jaffna, Ceylon

Lytton
,

Civilisation has found its way to my doorstep. Today my Sinhalese houseboy brought in my tin-lined crate containing my Voltaire, Johnson, Spenser, Herbert, Elton, Galsworthy, Trollope, Dickens, and Tennyson. I had given up hope it would ever reach me.

Elton’s verses loop round my thoughts. “Luriana Lurilee,” like a summer hoop on a warm gravel drive. The Goth always recites it in June. I miss the restrained green of an English summer. Will the strangeness of this country always shock me?

Package of semi-finished prose that I am semi-pleased with to follow.

Yours
,

Woolf

HRH KING EDWARD VII POSTAL STATIONERY

FLOWERS AT THE DOOR