Adeline by Norah Vincent Read Free Book Online Page B

the cat’s cradle of intimacy that weaves between husband and wife. The couple themselves cannot really know, though daily their hands jigger the threads. They can know only in one sense, kinetically, habitually, as hands do, performing expertly and without thought a task they have repeated many times. But there remains the great riddle of personality, and how to domesticate it.
    This has always been of particular interest to Virginia in her work. It is the substance of
Dalloway.
How do you make romance into a way of life? Can you? Especially when there is so much confusion in what you feel. At times, thankfully, it can seem clear and singular, as when you are sitting in the parlor of an evening, smoking by the fire and thinking, I am content. But far more often it is mangled and alloyed, or it does not come through at all, because sorting out the junk heap of your heart is more than you can manage most days. So you leave it dark.
    Virginia had written as much in
Dalloway: What can one know even of the people one lives with every day?
    And the answer is: very little. Only what one knows by rote, and the rest is wisps and guessing, a mist of fogs and foreign atmospheres that may, when you’re lucky, burn as bright and enchantingly as the boreal lights, but may as likely stir up a tempest, or cast a gloom, grim and suffocating as a mine.
    This is one thing that Lytton will never understand, even knowing Virginia and him as he does. Lytton had chosen not to marry, as so many of his fellow unfortunates had done—using a wife for cover and then keeping on as before, having assignations on the sly in alleyways and cheap hotels, avoiding arrest. Lytton had been honest enough in that. He is living with Carrington, but it is a knowing arrangement. Both of them are having their affairs with other men. They are maintaining their own illusion, perhaps, but it is not the same.
    When it had come to magnetizing Virginia and Leonard, way back in the dark days of the Edwardian lacuna, as they had dubbed it—1901 to 1910—the marriage question had turned into a very strange ball of wax with Lytton. It had been an odd, odd business all the way round. Leonard does not like to recall it in detail—he finds the melodramatic highs and lows of his youthful confessions, almost all of which were made to Lytton, embarrassing—yet, when he is being honest with himself, he is unsparing.
    It had happened while he had been abroad in Ceylon. He had left in 1904 and not returned until 1911, and all that time he had been out of pocket, so to speak, with what was then only the proto-Bloomsbury crowd. He and Lytton had written to each other almost daily throughout. It had been, in many ways, the flowering of their friendship, for they had relied on each other like family, when in truth family was rarely this reliable or close. They had held and bucked each other up through the inevitable comedowns and disappointments of postgraduate life. They were not in Arcadia anymore.
    They had poured out their broken hearts to each other on every subject, from the minutiae of Leonard’s administrative duties in the jungle, trying to hack a semblance of order out of the underbrush, to Lytton’s unrequited passion for his cousin, Bloomsbury’s resident Lothario, Duncan Grant. Their correspondence, lengthy, deep and lasting, had got them both through seven long years of alienation and unhappiness.
    But then, in February of ’09, Lytton had written with the strange news that he had proposed to Virginia Stephen, and what was more, she had accepted him. But in the very next sentence he had gone on to say that it had all dissolved quite quickly, as both of them had realized the folly of such a course.
    In Leonard’s estimation, the proposal itself had not been altogether out of place. In his letters, Lytton had confessed to feeling lonely, as Leonard had himself, and to being full of anxiety about where his life was going. Marriage had seemed a logical next step and