Adeline (8 page)

“Damning with Tom’s praise, then,” he ventures playfully. Sharing allusions—this time, it is to one of Tom Eliot’s poems—is one of their deepest bonds, stronger than any temporary discord.

“But,” she says, narrowing her eyes at him a little impishly, “and I know it will shock you to hear it, I have never been content with small talk, and I was not now.” More seriously, she adds, “The truer meaning still eluded me.”

They have reached the orchard, and she stops beside one of the plum trees to examine the young fruit. It is coming along nicely. Leonard is pulling his shears out of the front pocket of his gardening trousers so that he can carry out the task he has set himself: removing any dead or diseased limbs from the canopy. She sees that he has already brought out a small stepladder for the purpose. It stands propped against the trunk, and he is reaching for it. In one swift motion, he pulls it toward him, rattles it open and sets it on the ground in front of him.

“In fact,” she says, watching him ascend, “to be quite serious, I was in something of a crisis over it. Disturbed and vexed by the limits of my reach.”

He is reaching for one of the branches just as she says this, and he smiles down at her.

“I knew I needed a finer instrument,” she says, not smiling back, “to scratch this particular itch. I knew I needed a more . . . well, I suppose . . . a more abstract technique, but I couldn’t think what that was, or how to go about it. So I sat there for a long time, thwarted and angry.”

She takes another long, contemplative drag on her cigarette and stares at the smoldering cherry on the tip, which is bulging now quite close to the butt end that she is holding pinched between the edges of her fingertips. She considers whether to put it out, but decides against it.

“But then, finally, something happened, a shift of some kind in my thinking. And suddenly, oddly, everything was clear. I knew at once what I had to do. Actually, it was quite funny, now I think of it. I sat up, took myself by the scruff and said, ‘You must stop this atrocious rationalizing!’”

Leonard looks down and rolls his eyes at her teasingly, as if to say, Not this tiresome anti-man business again. But she is not looking at him.

“I was exhausted, I suppose,” she sighs conclusively, her brief comic burst having disappeared, “by the futility of trying so hard to nail a rigid frame around this clouded mental event from the distant past.”

She is frowning as she thinks of this, still eyeing the butt between her fingertips, but then her eyes widen excitedly as she asserts, “So I dropped it. I simply dropped it—all my learning and reaching and intellectual pretense—dropped it all, and for the sheer pleasure of watching it shatter like the looking glass itself might once have done had I had the gall to put my little head through it. Except that shattering is not actually what happened. It was a transformation far more subtle and strange, a sort of liquefying, I would say, as if the glass had dissolved into quicksilver.”

“Hmm,” Leonard interjects a little breathlessly from his perch, where he is wrestling free a tangled branch. “That
is
strange.”

“Yes, I thought so. Anyhow, that is how it came through. It was as if I had stumbled upon an entirely new way of seeing. And when I say seeing, I mean not only the incident in the past, but the whole, the absolute whole of everything. There I was, seeking it without knowing, and then, well—then it simply came.”

Leonard makes another murmur of interest, like an accompanist punctuating a singer’s voice, though this time he seems to be taking the matter in. He has frozen with the shears in the act of making a cut, and lowered his head thoughtfully.

Seeing that he has stopped, she says, “This is where it gets a bit involved.”

“All right,” he says, snipping off the branch and tossing it to the ground. “Try me, then.” Raising his arms again above his head and grasping the tree so that he can lean back and turn himself all the way round on the stepladder to face her, he adds, “I’m listening.”

She smiles fondly at him. She has decided to abandon the dying cigarette at last, and snuffs it between her thumb and finger, enjoying the mild sear of it on the stained, toughened skin of her fingertips.

“I saw at once,” she says, “in that image of myself as a child, looking at myself in the looking glass, the revised vision of myself as an adult. Do you see?”

Leonard nods, but he is clearly not seeing, and she shakes her head.

“No. I have said this far too simply. It was more than that. Much, much more than that.”

Leonard is wise enough to say nothing, but his eyes are fixed expectantly on her.

“How can I explain this properly?” she says. “I saw myself, you understand. I was there. A person of surfaces in the glass. But then, dizzyingly, ecstatically even, I plunged below that surface and saw myself
as a self
, a multiple, layered, simultaneous self that could not be contained in the two dimensions of the looking glass.”

She seems more pleased with this rendition, and he nods again, as the rest of her thought tumbles out.

“And then, beyond this even, I saw that this self of mine was—like every other self—almost endlessly myriad and diverse, and as phantasmagoric as the spaces and times through which it flickers and flits.”

Glancing at her briefly as she is finishing, he can see that her eyes have turned a little wild. He will encourage her discovery, but he wants this whiff of mania to subside. He is still standing on top of the stepladder, balancing with his hands gripping the branches above, but now he is looking off, over and past the orchard. His mouth is set firmly, the lips pulled tightly, as if he is confronting a problem that has just arisen in the fields.

She has stopped speaking. She, too, can feel that her energy is high. She looks to see how Leonard is taking this. “What?” she asks innocently.

“You have had one of your revelations,” he says proudly, but there is a note of caution there, too. “How wonderful.”

“An overwhelming revelation,” she corrects.

“Yes, yes, I see that.”

“
The
breakthrough.”

“For the next book?” he asks.

“For everything,” she cries. “This is the novel I am to write,
and
this is how I am to write it. It is the subject and the form. Do you see?”

“Yes, quite,” he says stiffly.

“Here is the multifoliate self on its journey through the dream of time, in language that shimmers and billows and flows with the narrative of experience.”

Her enthusiasm is carrying her right away, just as he feared it might, and the words are coming too fast to control.

“It is what I began somewhat shallowly, imperfectly in
Dalloway
,” she says. “It is everything of the world that I wish to convey in a work of art, if it can be conveyed—though I am not at all sure that it can be. Still, I must try. I must keep on from where I began, invent and reinvent a method, a new composition that can communicate this vision.”

“You think now that
Dalloway
is incomplete, then?” he asks, a little foolishly. In the past, she has cuffed him for asking these kinds of questions, because she has seen that he was merely using them as drags. But mercifully, this time she accepts it.

“Yes. I do.
Dalloway
was a start, but I didn’t carry it off. Lytton said as much when he read it, and I was grateful for his honesty.”

“What did he say, exactly? I don’t recall.”

“He said that it was very beautiful, but that the events and the people, Clarissa in particular, did not quite stand up to the language or to the ideas that I had put into their heads. He thought that perhaps I had not yet mastered my method.”

“And you agree?” he asks. This is another patent stall, but again, she seems content enough to answer.

“Yes, though I did not know how much until this morning.”

“I think you should bear in mind,” he says, “that Lytton can be rather shallow in his tastes. He does not have the stamina he once had to linger in the depths. He prefers high drama to contemplation.”

As Leonard comes down from the ladder, he adds, “
Dalloway
is profoundly psychological. I am not surprised that Lytton did not have the patience for it.”

This appeal to her vanity has its usual effect. As he lowers himself onto the grass, he can see that she, too, is easing down into the talk.

“Yes, perhaps he didn’t,” she says, “and on the whole I agree. I am generally disinclined to take his criticisms of my work entirely to heart. But in this case I think he was right, and what’s more, it didn’t bother me much to hear him say so. Given my usual sensitivities, I think that means something.”

“Yes, I suppose it does. You are never this sanguine about reviews.”

She has taken out her tobacco—a good sign of the desired shift in her mood—and is rolling herself another cigarette. She concentrates on this, tightly packing the moist shag, frowning as she considers what he has just said. She shoots him a mildly testing look over the top of the roll as she licks and seals the paper, but says nothing. This, too, is an encouraging sign.

“You know,” Leonard ventures, more confidently, “it strikes me that you are touching on cosmology here, and that it is Newton, perhaps more than Freud, who is leaving you dissatisfied.”

“How do you mean?” she asks. Her tone now is almost demure.

“Well, Newton’s is the insufficient universe you have described—the one symbolized by your looking glass—rigid and superficial, the picture of discrete entities obeying laws.”

He is still standing on the grass next to the stepladder, but he has put away his shears and taken out his pipe, which he is now packing and preparing to light.

“Yes,” she says patiently. “Go on.”

“Well,” he resumes, putting the pipe in his mouth and striking a match against the tree. “Is that not your objection to Freud as well? The superficiality of his vision? Or did I misunderstand?”

He holds the match to his pipe and begins to puff, his eyebrows rising inquisitively from behind the column of smoke.

“Old astronomy, old art, old medicine,” she asserts, driving home the previous point, but with much more control. “They are the same blunt instruments. We are here now, modern man, looking into the enigma of the self, and Freud offers us only egos and ids. We are searching up and out, seeing through, seeking our glimpse of the unfathomable, and this . . . scatological charlatan . . . is telling us to look down, between our legs, where, he assures us, all the truest answers are to be found.”

Leonard pulls the pipe from his mouth and smiles at her in spite of himself.

“Yes. Yes,” he proceeds more smoothly, “I understand your objection to Freud, though part of it, you must admit, is purely xenophobic—”

She begins to object, but he cuts her off affectionately.

“But Newton was an Englishman, and he was making the same mistakes, albeit centuries before. Still, you call it Germanic imbecility in the mouth of Freud, but I am right about the cosmology, and I’m sorry to say that the modern improvement on Newton that you are so clearly invoking comes from the same Teutonic stock.”

“What
are
you babbling about?” she squawks, but there is delight in her voice.

“You said this very thing in passing at one point in
Dalloway
,” he says. “Like poor Septimus watching the aeroplane disappear in the sky, it is with the eyes of Herr Professor Einstein that you are seeing your new world.”

“Oh, don’t tell me about Septimus,” she cries. “Or Einstein, for that matter. Yes, it’s true, I referred to Einstein in
Dalloway
, and yes, I meant it, but right now, the thing I am talking about right now, well, I am not seeing with anyone’s eyes. I am not seeing with eyes at all. That is the point.”

Leonard is not remotely convinced, of course, but he is too relieved by the turn in her to do more than puff contentedly at his pipe and wait.

“I am saying merely,” she resumes, “that the old ways of thinking will not do when we are trying to capture the mystery of consciousness, the complexity of the human personality or the shifting texture of the world as it really is. Newton, Freud, they are stuck in the same dead nomenclature. Using it in this context is like trying to play a violin with a cudgel, or like conducting a séance—as the devotees of Dr. Freud no doubt would—by defecating on the floor. Only the flies will gather.”

He is enjoying this immensely, and grinning. She is whipping herself up again, but harmlessly.

“But it is not just science that has it wrong,” she is saying. “Even language as we have used it, the corseted novels, poems, plays we have known, they are all still more of the same. Inadequate to the task. Henry James is the prime example. When in art we attempt to render a person, his concerns, his time and place, we say with Hamlet that we hold the mirror up to nature. And so we do—so I did in the hall in Talland House—but that is precisely what is wrong. We reduce this thing we are reaching for to our limited terms, and in doing so, we are merely aping (and I use this word particularly) what we do vainly every day in the dressing room—what I was doing as a girl in the house in St. Ives.

“We look in the looking glass to see ourselves. But we do so—I say again—
vainly.
For what is vanity but action in vain, ineffectual, a mistake, the primate’s blunder of taking the beguiling silver surface for the thing itself. We reduce the wonder of ourselves and the universe to two dimensions, an ape, or a silly little girl, primping before a plane of glass.”

Leonard is beaming. The thrill of her mind never loses its power to beguile. Yet he is struck by the predominance of her vanity in all this, though he knows that he should not be struck at all, since vanity is one of the traits in her that is most familiar and entrenched. It played its vital role in the subtext of this exchange.

And yet, he marvels, look how she plays it. For all her flaws and failings, all the hardships of staying by and righting her, there is this: She knows herself. She knows that she is vain. What’s more, she has turned the awareness on itself. She is making art of it—and science and metaphysics, too. Talking with her this way ameliorates everything. Without bodies, it is how they make love.