To the River (23 page)

The cause of death, wrote the coroner, was ‘immersion in the river . . . by her own act so killing herself while the balance of her mind was disturbed’. Louie added in an interview years later: ‘There were heavy stones in the pockets of her jacket and she must have put them there and then walked straight down into the river. And that was terrible. It was the most terrible thing that I have ever known.’

Why does someone walk out of the world like that? When the painter Dora Carrington shot herself in 1932, two months after her beloved Lytton Strachey had died of stomach cancer, Woolf was not entirely sympathetic or endowed with fellow feeling. On the contrary, she wrote a week or so later: ‘I am glad to be alive & sorry for the dead: cant think why Carrington killed herself & put an end to all this.’ As for Leonard: ‘it was histrionic: the real thing is that we shall never see Lytton again. This is unreal.’ Time hardens such comments, calcifying them into a cruelty that was not perhaps intended, but they also form a counterweight to the sense that the river was the end Woolf plunged inevitably towards. No, even as they draw to a close gladness –
aliveness
– bubbles periodically through the diaries.

In her last winter, Woolf worked on
Between the Acts
; became treasurer of the Rodmell W. I.; played bowls. Her London house, in Mecklenburgh Square, was bombed and in October the Woolfs went down to salvage what they could from amidst the dust and rubble: diaries, Darwin, glasses, her sister’s painted china. A melancholy business, but she says she likes the loss of possessions, the liberation. Glee is in ascendance, just.
Never have I been so fertile
, she writes, and binds the mouldy notebooks in coloured paper, that
they may refresh the eye
.

Then it is colder and there is less food, and little fat. The raids continue, out on the marshes. No petrol, no sugar, a slower post. Virginia’s hand begins to shake. But England is good, England is firm, the wave of the Downs unbroken,
these deep hollows, where the past stand almost stagnant.
After Christmas there is a comet, snow; the sense of speaking into a void becomes tangible. James Joyce dies in Zurich. There are fires in London. More: there is a rent in the fabric. Nothing to nothing, one might say. Broken fingernails, broken windowpanes, streets lost, bricks turned to powder, so yes, dirty hands. Small beer, small beer. Then there is the day in Brighton with the tarts, the decision to cook haddock, a will towards cheerfulness. The diary ends with Leonard doing the rhododendrons, ends as any life might, which is to say on an in-breath, albeit an illusory one.

At some point the tide had begun to turn, the chalk banks revealed as the water drained away. Chalky waters are the best to swim in, almost powdery against the skin, the suspended particles delaying the light so that it seems perpetually imprisoned, dropping with infinite slowness towards the riverbed.

I was trying as I walked to recall Gertrude’s speech on the death of Ophelia, in which another hellish sight is tricked out into prettiness.
Like a creature native and indued unto that element
. Was that it? I suppose we are all water’s natives, swimmers first, and
indued
proclaims this while catching also, with that near-echo
endowed
, at the sense of a bride, crowned with weeds, giving herself up to the envious river. And then there was the line I thought of more than any other:
as one incapable of her own distress
.

My old Swan
Hamlet
translated the word
incapable
as
unaware
, but I suspected it was not that, or not that alone. To be incapable of one’s own distress is the opposite of suffering, for the root of the word suffer,
ferre
, is to carry. In the first state, one hurtles from pain; in the second one experiences it; one bears it up. Is this when suicide occurs, when one has been so whittled by what must be borne that the undercarriage collapses and oblivion is the only solution?

A local woman drowned in the Ouse not long before Woolf. When was it, the late 1930s? She lived up on Mount Misery, a hill between Southease and Piddinghoe that is named not by virtue of its depressing aspect but because a wayfarer is said to have prayed a Miserere there that later brought him luck. She had been a midwife, this woman, and had a son who died; her house had broken windows and one day when the tide was high she killed her dog and dropped herself into the water. Like Carrington’s death this bleak little incident is not mooned over in the diary, but it is recorded, the choice not to be; it remains.

At even the most cursory glance Woolf’s novels are riddled with absences like these, with what takes place when someone is lost or loses themselves. It is not perhaps surprising: if one were to take a biographical approach to criticism, one would certainly note that her mother, half-sister, father and brother were all dead by the time she was twenty-five, and that their presence echoes, say, through Mrs Ramsay in
To the Lighthouse
, or the vanquished Percival in
The Waves
. This is not to class her as a victim, for there’s not a man jack among us who won’t misplace someone, should we live so long.

Nonetheless, this acute sense of peril is, I wager, what drove Woolf to write throughout her life. Her take is not consoling exactly, but nor is it depressing: simply alert. I thought then, standing on the remade bank, of that chapter at the centre of
To the Lighthouse
, where over the course of years time breaks apart a house. War comes, the war that knocked down like skittles the men who walked and waltzed and talked through
Jacob’s Room
; here too it brings death. The books in the house grow mouldy, the plaster falls in shovelfuls and swallows fresh from Africa build nests in the drawing room. And then, as a pendulum slides into its opposite arc, the decay is arrested. Builders come, and housekeepers, the servants whose function it still just about is to mop and scrub and polish other people’s dirt.

One senses in this chapter, which is perhaps nineteen pages long and called, appropriately enough, ‘Time Passes’, a great battle carried out between the forces of thanatos and eros, between the desire to destroy and the contrary impulse to order, clean and build. It is a battle, I think one can fairly say, that was carried out likewise in Woolf’s own life; it is, I think one could equally add, a battle fought by everything that lives. Right at the pivot of this long scene, as the house teeters on the precipice of pitching
downwards to the depths of darkness
, Woolf begins to list the wild things that have taken refuge there. I find this passage more consoling than the mending that follows, for it seems to imply that even here, on the outer threshold of chaos, something abides; that in the untended beds that accompany human dereliction the cabbage mates with the carnation and the lavish poppy seeds itself. An unweeded garden, one might say, that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. On the other hand, one might watch those windblown sports and think, as Woolf did elsewhere,
this has a holiness. This will go on after I’m dead
, and take comfort in the thought.

There is an echo of this peculiar mix of acquiescence and defiance in the matter of Virginia’s memorial. Her body was cremated at Downs Crematorium, up on the Woodingdean Road in Brighton, overlooking the hated housing estates that sprang up in the wake of the First World War. Leonard attended the ceremony alone, and it was conducted, to his horror, to the accompaniment of the movement from Gluck’s
Orpheus
in which the suffering Orpheus finds himself in Elysium, though not yet reunited with Eurydice’s shade. Virginia had once described it as
the loveliest opera ever written
, but its hopes for the afterlife filled Leonard with rage.

He took the ashes home in a casket and buried them beneath an elm tree in the garden at Monks House, that building which seems almost to exhale damp from its greenish distempered walls. He ordered a headstone from a Lewes stonemason, and the words engraved on it were those with which
The Waves
ends: ‘Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!’ Are these the words of a lover or a soldier? They flirt; they taunt: they are steel; they dissolve with lust. Either way, they endure, as those thousands of mildewed pages have also endured, though the house that contained them was bombed; though the woman who wrote them has vanished clean away.

VII

BEDE'S SPARROW

T
HE THUNDER NEVER CAME.
The clouds were lifting now and drifting south and as they rose the heaviness seemed to drain from the day. The scales that had covered the sun slipped or broke apart, unmaking themselves as they floated high above the valley, following the same invisible path that the birds took to the sea.

It was half past five when I reached the track that forked up to Rodmell. I’d been out on the Brooks two hours, tacking the banks in the teeth of the wind. To celebrate I sat down by the stile and ate an oatcake. My toenails were bothering me, and I carried out some rudimentary surgery with the Opinel, though it wasn’t pleasant work. I thought regretfully of the small nail clippers I’d left on my desk. If only they were in my pack I could, I felt, walk on into the hills quite happily for years, though no doubt the absence of mascara would also come to bother me in time.

The Downs seemed piece by piece to have acquired dominion over the landscape. Rodmell was tucked beneath them, the poorest and richest of the houses straggling up the sides. What day was it now? I counted back on my fingers: Friday. And how near was the sea? A cormorant’s flight, a crow’s; twenty minutes by car, an hour by bike, a morning’s walk tomorrow. As for tonight, I was staying at Navigation Cottage, the house of a friend of mine, which had been knocked up at the end of the eighteenth century to house the navvies employed to restructure the river. A father and son called Tompsett lived there once, and in addition to digging the banks their duties included opening the swing bridge to let boats pass to and fro.

I lay back in the long grass and gazed out across the Brooks. There was something subtly oppressive about these flat, dredged fields and swift, featureless river. The land should have been a model of man’s ingenuity and instead the banks and ditches left me uneasy, for it seemed that the river was held back by the application of enormous force, against which it threatened momently to break through and take the valley. It was this sense of strain that bothered me, and in a way I wished it would, for I find it uncomfortable when the inevitable is postponed. I imagined it flooding every trace of fences away, imagined it flushing implacably across the fields, filling barns and houses with knots of eels. Mind you, I probably didn’t have long to wait. What will it be: a hundred years before the rising sea slips in and England’s edged with marsh again? Fifty? What a future we have stored up for us, when an ooze of mud replaces these false pastures, sheep-cropped and sewer-seamed, on which the wind rolls unimpeded.

I wasn’t being fair. The fields yielded food, and while the sewers might not be pretty, they provided essential habitats and furthermore acted as sightlines, drawing the eye backwards through time. The one opposite, Celery Sewer, ran in a series of kinks from the Cockshut to the Ouse, providing the main drainage for the Brooks. Its outfall was barred by a sluice gate that closed with flap valves first installed in 1949 by Frank Dean, the old Rodmell blacksmith, with such skill that it was reported
you could open it with your little finger
. This was the same Frank Dean who dragged the river for Virginia’s body, the same Frank Dean who waited on the bank alongside the white-faced Leonard, writing in his own memoir years later:
He was a brave man
. It was Frank who organised Virginia’s cremation, and who was inadvertently implicated in the choice of music, for Leonard wanted the Cavatina from Beethoven’s string quartet no. 13 in B flat major, but felt too shy to ask. No matter now. Both men are long gone, though Dean’s forge in Rodmell still stands, as does the tiny garage beside it, its windows crammed with shelves of dead and dying geraniums.

Caroline texted me then. It was about the cheese, which was required for dinner and which I’d successfully procured in Lewes. God, I was starving. It felt like years had passed since the pizza on the railway lands, and centuries since I last sat down and talked with a friend. I galumphed up the path, slowing only to see if there were any dead magpies in the fields. It wasn’t something I’d ever witnessed, but Caroline swore she’d seen the pied bodies stuck on sticks like scarecrows here. Grisly as this sounded, it’s nothing on a story my mother recently told. She’d been walking in the fields near her house in Suffolk and had come across a tiny cage in which was crammed a dead chicken and a live and frantic magpie. Thinking the bird had made its way in by accident she opened the latch and prodded it out, only to discover later that she’d interfered unforgivably with the local method of trapping. The birds would later be killed by means of an exhaust pipe run into their chamber, and I’d read on a shooting forum that a farmer had reputedly dispatched fifty-two magpies in this manner; one, I thought grimly, for every week of the year.