Vanessa and Her Sister (7 page)

Monday 3 July 1905—46 Gordon Square (a hot, close day)

T
he card was simple. Just his name and mine. No “compliments.” No “thanks.” No reason.

“Hothouse,” said Virginia, sniffing the fresh blooms.

“Mmm.”

“But you prefer wildflowers,” Virginia said.

“Mmm.”

Later (four pm)

It is an afternoon for Blake. Coleridge is too long-winded, Byron too close to the fleshy surface, Keats too mopey, and Shelley too soft. I want the thundering, ripped edge of Blake. Pacing in the garden, in my studio, down the long hall as if to the beat of a drum.

· ·

I
LEFT WITHOUT EXPLANATION
and took myself for a walk to Green Park. The fat bumblebees stepped on the early summer flowers, and two boys in matching caps were flying a white, white kite.

He does. He doesn’t. He can’t. He won’t. Why would he? How would I? My mind folded and refolded the questions. The boys tipped
their heads back to see the white kite sail over the trees, and their caps fell off.

Clive as a suitor. I sat on a damp wooden bench. Virginia will say that Clive is prosaic. She will compare him to Thoby’s clean, marble nobility and find him meaty and overcooked. Why should I care what she says? What anyone says? Why indeed, and yet I do. It is a weakness. Thoby likes him enormously, and that counts for much. That said, I am not sure Thoby would rank him as a gentleman;
gentlemen
do not come from families who have
earned
their fortune and
built
great mock Jacobean heaps in the country. My Duckworth half-brothers will look down their noses at his lack of connection, but then George is getting anxious that I marry
someone
so maybe he would not mind? Lytton, I know, disparages Clive’s noisiness, his sportiness, his indelicate energy, his new money and vulgar house, but enjoys Clive’s company despite his complaints.
Everyone
enjoys being with Clive. In conversation, he is like the dancer who lifts the ballerina with great, invisible skill. He makes the lifted partner feel beautiful.

And me. What do
I
think of Clive?

I like him. But it stops there. I do not think I could love him. I remember Stella when she decided to marry Jack. I watched her with the critical eyes of a younger sister but I could find no flaw in her certainty. She was alight. She was sure. She
recognised
him. He was hers. She had been waiting for
him
. I do not recognise Clive. He is not mine.

· ·

E
VEN AFTER ALL THIS TIME
I wait for Mother’s firm hand on the door handle, for Stella’s light, quick step in the hall. I keep my questions planted in a tidy hedgerow, in readiness for them. But now I am the sureness, the footstep, and the others keep their questions for me.

· ·

F
LOWERS ON MY DESK
. They need not present a dilemma. They need only bloom, wilt, and go away. Dinner party tonight with George and
Margaret at her parents’, Lord and Lady Carnarvon’s great house in Bruton Street. I am sure I will be seated next to—

Much later (eleven pm)

We’re back. No idea who I thought I would be seated next to. In fact, I was seated next to a red-faced, braying man whose name I can’t remember. I have no patience for these formal evenings any more. Tonight the butler stood by the door like a sentry and belted out the name of each guest upon arrival. That is how it was done when we were young, but now it strikes me as ridiculous.

All the wit and laughter eddied around Virginia, at the other end of the table. She can be so charming when she chooses to be.

I should go and help Virginia sort her seed pearls from her hairpins. Mother left her the four beautiful blue enamelled hairpins she always wore, and I am terrified Virginia will lose one. She always leaves her things in a tangle on the floor.

4 July 1905—46 Gordon Square

I had no idea Clive’s flowers had upset her so much. I thought if I brushed the topic aside, it would disappear like dust and Virginia would forget about it. I know she is terrified I will get married, just as I am afraid that Thoby will get married. As soon as one of us goes, the thing unravels and the whole of us comes apart. But I thought she would realise that
Clive
could never hurt us. I would not give the four of us up for Clive. How could I?

I misread her mood yesterday.

“Nessa!” Virginia banged the front door shut. “No, no, Sloper, I want to give them to her myself. Nessa!”

“In here, dearest!” I wiped my hands on the old blue cloth and stood back to look at the painting. The nose. I hate doing faces—the inexactitude. Better not to define them at all.

“For you.” Virginia held out a bunch of fresh-smelling wildflowers. “To replace those hothouse impostors,” she said, frowning at Mr Bell’s flowers in the blue vase.

“They are lovely, dearest,” I said, taking the prickly bundle. Dirt still clung to the roots.

Maud put them in the green glass vase.

“Place of honour, Nessa,” Virginia said. And so Mr Bell’s flowers were moved to the windowsill. Wildflowers preside over my desk.

A THURSDAY EVENING AT HOME

Thursday 6 July 1905—46 Gordon Square (midday)

T
he birdwatching party has returned. Thoby brought me one of his beautiful jaybird sketches, this one with a pale touch of morning blue on its wing. Now I have three bird drawings from him. A triptych.

I want to tell him about Clive’s flowers, but the moment has passed. I put the card inside my copy of
Middlemarch
, and Maud threw the flowers away when they began to wilt. Hothouse flowers never last long. Clive is coming to Thoby’s at home tonight. I am worried I will be childish and awkward and avoid him.
And
—Virginia is
finally
wearing her new spectacles, turns out they were in the china inkpot on her desk.

Later—4.15pm (guests invited for nine)

“Nessa!” Thoby called from the bathtub. “Did you tell Sophie how many?”

“I don’t
know
how many,” I said from my sitting room. After working on my Virginia portrait all day, I was cleaning my brushes. I rinsed the turpentine from the bristles as Thoby counted aloud.

“Lytton, Lytton’s sister Marjorie, Lytton’s cousin Duncan, Lytton’s friend Mallard something, Bell, Desmond, Saxon, Hilton Young, Lady
Ottoline, I think. What is that, nine, plus us?” Thoby’s voice was muffled, and I was sure I had some of the names wrong.

“Mallard? Like a duck?” I asked, coming into the hallway to stand outside the bathroom door.

“Duck?” said Virginia, running lightly up the stairway. “Did Thobs bring a duck home?”

“No! For dinner tonight!” Thoby shouted from the tub.

“You killed a duck! Thobs, you are only supposed to
watch
the birds!” Virginia shouted back.

I knew she knew exactly what he meant. When Virginia is in a good mood, she enjoys hysterics. It is when she is quiet that one should be careful. The stillness that presages the squall.

“If I had known you were going to kill wildlife,” Virginia continued loudly, “I would have hidden your shoes.”

Thoby’s bath ended in defeat. I could hear his sigh of resolve and the thick thud of his book hitting the white-tiled floor.

Later—five am

They have gone, and I am too finely tuned to sleep. It all came off very well. Virginia was loose and laughing instead of taut and bright. She spoke earnestly to Desmond about the eleven new pens she tried this week. Virginia is passionate about good pens.

Lytton’s cousin Duncan Grant, a gentle, observant sort of person, was a focal point. Without trying, he grounds, pulling interest and conversation to him like a cape. Lytton is obviously half if not wholly in love with him, and everyone else just wants to see Duncan made happy. When you meet him, his well-being instantly becomes your concern. Unusual that he can accomplish so much with so little effort.

Despite my worrying, I was not awkward with Clive at all. We stepped out onto the shallow balcony and talked of last winter’s Whistler exhibition, and painting lemons in Paris and flowers in Berkshire and picnicking on rocky beaches in Studland and reading Victorian novels
on trains, but were interrupted when Lytton called us back into the room.

I never found the right moment to thank him for the flowers.

And
—“Mallard” turned out to be Maynard Keynes, Lytton’s young economist friend from Cambridge—with whom I understand him to be occasionally involved? But then, I may be wrong. I often am.

7 July 1905

Dear Woolf
,

These Gordon Square evenings always start off with a delicious twinge of awkwardness, a hesitant lining up at the starter’s marks. Throats are cleared, equipment checked, strings tightened, shoulders set, and we are off!

Each in our own way tries to pretend away such bourgeois discomfort. The Goth muscles through it in his large-scaled, country house charm sort of way, robustly enquiring after books and health. Saxon, blinking into the middle distance, adopts the air of a man who does not expect to speak or be spoken to. I know he must communicate with people all day long at the Treasury, but I can’t picture it. Virginia rises above it all like a bony wraith waiting impatiently for a good reason to come down. Desmond, unhurried and late, sits on the farthest sofa and stretches forward his loosely jointed limbs. I am sure he spends the evening hoping that no one will ask about whatever article he has failed to turn in that week. I sit in one of the basket chairs by the tall windows looking over the square and do my best to say shocking things. All assembled, we begin.

Darling Duncan—a new initiate—is urbanely unbothered by the tension. My dear, there is ferocious tension—a paramount need to say important things and discuss worthy subjects: Good, Beauty, Truth—all very Keatsian. The stakes are high. One feels quite gladiatorial stepping into this arena of ideas. It is not an easy win. A subject is introduced but often flames out. Another is offered, volleyed, but fails to catch. But from these clipped efforts grows a rhythm, an unshelling, a feeling of group endeavour. Eventually the air takes, and the evening finds its shape.

Bell, usually so bluff and unflappable, has been out of step recently. I met him the other night on my way to Gordon Square. I do not often bump into him, as he approaches from King’s Bench Walk and I come from Gray’s Inn Road, but on Thursday I found him lurking in the square behind a boxwood hedge. We stood in the shadows like assassins and he told me the source of his agitation. It is Vanessa, the Goth’s sister. It is, I think, obsession rather than love but he insists it is the one wrapped in the other. He is determined to act despite almost certain failure. He sent flowers that were either ignored or misconstrued and then were elbowed out by some of Virginia’s meadow weeds. He is now in search of a more telling declaration and is talking about armfuls of roses. He might have remained in Paris overlong.