To the River (21 page)

We navigate by omens such as these. You don’t have to be a poet to be prone to apophenia, to seeking meaningful patterns in the scattered, senseless data of the everyday. In a certain mood, the earth itself can seem a ouija board, calling out its advice, discharging symbol after symbol, relentless and malevolent, though to ordinary eyes nothing more has happened than a single black and white bird winging down the sky. I once dated – in fact loved – a man who left me as we walked together through a field. As we had been talking, he told me, he couldn’t help but notice that we walked in separate furrows that ran parallel but did not conjoin. This, it seemed to him, was the essence of our relationship, though whether the path had clarified our fate or actually authored it I didn’t ask.

Martin. Christ, why was I thinking about him? I shook myself physically, like a cat caught in the rain. These were marsh thoughts, uneasily buried: the doomed woman, the lost lover. They belonged to the region I was entering, the reclaimed fields of the Brooks, crisscrossed with sewers and barred with sluice gates. In the winter the ditches run like mercury but now they were brackish and dully green, home to marsh frogs, those alien interlopers that do not croak but cackle as you pass. Virginia Woolf drowned herself down here, in the lowlands that stretch between the Downs. It was hardly any wonder my mind had taken a ghoulish turn.

I came out from under the bridge then and as I stepped into the light I caught a flash of colour. At the foot of one of the pilings there was a single pyramidal orchid the flushed pink of a cat’s tongue. I didn’t know what it boded but it made me smile, growing there unlooked for in the trampled dirt at the base of a bypass. And then – as if I’d cried out for omens to the sibyl of the underpass – something dark shot through the space at the corner of my eye and disappeared into the river. I stepped back, stunned. What the hell had happened? Had a car shucked a hubcap as it swung across the bridge? As I craned to see a cormorant emerged from the water, lifted briefly to the air and then settled demurely on the surface.
Show off
, I muttered.
I can swim too you know.
The cormorant ignored me, as a creature that can fly through two elements no doubt has the right to do.

It was half past three. I didn’t have far to go: a couple of miles of river path and then a skim over the fields to Rodmell, where Virginia Woolf had lived, off and on, from 1919 to her death in 1941. She loved walking in this marsh, and it wasn’t hard to see why. God, but it was beautiful. I’d given up trying to fight through the vegetation at the top of the embankment and had climbed down to the water’s edge, following a faint, yellowing path through the same blue-green grass that had earlier reminded me of wheat. Last time I’d been down here I got caught in a torrential rainstorm and had to fight my way through dripping grasses the height of my chest, until I was as conclusively drenched as if I had walked home along the riverbed.

Now I felt more like I’d fallen to the bottom of a glass dome. The Downs rose all around me and beyond them was the sky, chalky too, screened with fine cloud like the scrim that drops before a play. Behind me great white cumuli were building. A storm? It was hot enough. The air felt tense and fidgety against my fingertips and as I glanced again over my shoulder I saw the clouds above Falmer had tarnished to a spoiled grey. Something stank to high heaven too. I nosed around and turned up the corpse of a rabbit, its fur tugged into damp little tufts as if it had been suckled.

A man passed me then, moving quickly, binoculars slung about his neck. We smiled silently at one another and it struck me for the first time how safe I felt. Five days of walking, speaking hardly at all, and I seemed to have become immersed in the world, neck-deep, the panic that had shadowed me for months dissolved away. My phone had bleeped periodically but I hadn’t answered it. I didn’t want to rupture the buoyancy that had come so unexpectedly. At home, solitude had begun to terrify me, the threat of it, stretching endless and paper-white, though in the past I’d always loved to be alone. But here, in the fields, moving at my own pace, I did not feel islanded or isolated. There was too much occurring. Like – now! – those two oystercatchers on the far bank, still as bookends, monochrome save their tangerine beaks, crying in pitched, plaintive voices
peeppeeep peeeppeep
peeppeep
.

The path stretched on before me, almost flush with the ruffled water. A train went by, calling its way to Southease, and down in the Brooks I could see a pair of tractors clearing the field, the men concealed within their cabs. There was something very strange about walking aside such brimful water, as if I could step down onto it and continue along that shifting track. The river was completely opaque now, aglint with borrowed light, its surface coloured the bluish-green of spilled petrol, teased by the wind and current into tufts and crests and little waves. Behind it I could see the bald chalkpit at Asham, where Virginia once leased a house. It was where she went to recuperate after her third breakdown, and she kept a funny sort of nature journal there, full of spare, painful accounts of moths sighted and mushrooms gathered. Her wedding night was spent at Asham, and she finished her first novel,
The Voyage Out
, whilst staying there too, in the west-facing rooms that rose out from the hill like the prow of a ship.

The house is long gone now. It was engulfed by a cement works in the 1930s and slowly wrecked by the clouds of chalk, which covered everything in a fine, wheezy dust, screening the windows and spoiling the garden and the bordering elms. It grew derelict and was pulled down entirely in 1994, when the works – now turned into a landfill site – were expanded in size. In his autobiography Leonard Woolf remembers finding the house for the first time, hidden in a hollow of the Downs amid a great field of sheep. ‘The grass of the garden and field seemed almost to come to the sitting rooms and into the windows facing west,’ he wrote. ‘One often had a feeling as if one were living under water in the depths of the sea behind the thick rough glass of the room’s long windows – a sea of green trees, green grass, green air.’

It wasn’t green any more. The chalk had been quarried away, and the holes that remained gummed up with disposable nappies, household waste and the corpses of cattle infected with BSE. The pits had been cut down to below the water table and not all of them were originally lined, so that for a time the waste leached chlorine and ammonia into the long ditches that snaked down to the river. The site had reached capacity a month ago, on 16 May, the pits chock-full with rotting rubbish. And soon, or so the waste company promises, Leonard’s green grass will be restored, the cap of downland smoothed back across the foxed, bedevilled earth.

Virginia thought that Asham was haunted, and wrote a short story based on her experience there. The doors, she wrote, used to open and close all night, and a couple would whisper and sigh as they tiptoed between the rooms. Had the cement works flighted them, I wondered, or had they persisted in the dust until the abandoned house was pulled apart? I liked to think that if you found the right spot amid the bin bags you would hear them, voices hushed, still patrolling a house that had long since fallen away.

I’d been reading Woolf’s diaries and letters all spring, buying cheap paperbacks with ugly covers that had to be shipped from America. I coveted the beautiful Hogarth Press editions, which sold in Lewes for horrendous, heart-stopping prices. We used to have a couple of them at home, shifting bookshelves as we moved from place to place, and the last time I visited my mother I brought one back:
The Flight of the Mind,
the first volume of letters. The spine was a pale flinty grey like the breast of a pigeon, tattered at its ends and bleached a little by the sun. On the frontispiece my father had written in his tight, distinctive hand
To Denise, from Peter, with much love,
3
December 1976.
The date was her birthday, the last before I was born. I couldn’t imagine my parents as a couple, though I’d seen photographs of them smiling in cut-off shorts, leaning against a bottle-green TR6 or messing about on a friend’s speedboat. I wondered if she’d asked for the book. For Christmas, Matthew had given me a Hoover.

Little stories kept coming back to me now, and phrases I found so pleasurable I rolled them around within my mouth. Woolf wrote often of the river, and I remembered a story late in the diaries of a flood that had occurred just south of here. In the early years of the Second World War, a bomb was dropped near Rodmell that ruptured the banks of the Ouse, those same banks that William Jessop had contrived to fix the river to its course. The water swelled out blue across the fields and the marsh was returned to the inland sea of medieval times, the bridge cut off, the road impassable. On Guy Fawkes Night, Woolf wrote of the beauty of this
unfathomable
sea, adding: ‘Oh may the flood last for ever – a virgin lip; no bungalows; as it was in the beginning.’

The pleasure of isolation quickly palled, as it always did. To read Woolf’s diaries is to be tugged to and fro between the irreconcilable desires for solitude and company, the twin fears of being islanded and swamped. The experience of being marooned at Rodmell, which war and flood made literal at last, was both delicious and deadly; the waters which had risen up about Monks House were at once generative and barren.

Water, in Woolf’s personal lexicon, represented a way of slipping the superficial self – the self who played bowls, or minded when a hat was criticised – and ducking down into a deeper, nameless realm. When Virginia writes about writing, which is often, the images she employs are liquid. She is
flooded
or
floated
; she
breaks the current
. When the books are going well she plunges off, happy as a swimmer, into the marine element of private thought. When the work is going poorly, however, when headaches prevail or sleeplessness sets in, her descriptions begin to acquire a nightmarish dryness.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the novels she wrote should be so flush with waterways.
The Voyage Out
begins aboard a liner bound for South America, and
To the Lighthouse
is set so close to the edge of the Atlantic that the sound of the sea is heard on almost every page. The movement of water intersperses the action of
The Waves
, and in
Orlando
two lovers are divided when the frozen Thames melts into teeming life again. As for her last book,
Between the Acts
, written as bombs undid the architecture of London and the Woolfs were once more marooned in Sussex, it revolves around a deep pond filled with lilies, in which the silvery flashes of fish – carp, were they? – are sometimes briefly glimpsed.

What is one to make of this great weight of waters? Though they are beautiful, they carry with them the risk of annihilation too. Take that fishpond with its red and white lilies, the size of dinner plates, that bloom by day and close when it grows dark. The servants won’t walk near it at night because a lovesick woman drowned there once, though when men came to dredge it all they managed to salvage was the thighbone of a sheep. Or there’s that strange puddle in
The Waves
which Rhonda finds herself unable to cross, a scene repeated in Woolf’s own fragmentary memoir,
A Sketch of the Past
: the
grey, cadaverous
puddle that threatens identity itself.

Water is dangerous then, even – that
cadaverous
– deadly. But. I didn’t want to be tugged by hindsight, to weight every word with what would take place, years later, in the Ouse. Thanatos, the death impulse, the urge towards non-being, is said to be the opposite of eros, and yet it is shot through with its own sort of sensuality. I thought of a letter Virginia had written to Nelly Cecil while she stayed in a house near Rye, amid the cornfields and sheep-pastures that had once, not so long ago, been sunk beneath the sea. ‘I feel like one rolled at the bottom of a green flood,’ she wrote, ‘smoothed, obliterated, how should my pockets still be full of words?’ Does this prefigure what was to come?
Vaticinium ex eventu
. The prophecy comes after the event. And is it not necessary to dissolve the self if one hopes to see the world unguarded?

The day was growing hotter. Big river-coloured dragonflies were lifting into the warm air and up above the pylons one or two seagulls were drifting south amid an unruly sky, the clouds torn into scraps and orts. They were bringing the hay in on Rise Farm. I could see five tractors by the hedge, though only one was mowing, the cut grass drifting behind it like smoke. The next field had already been baled in blue plastic, the exact colour of surgical scrubs. An oystercatcher cried a warning then, and as I turned a speedboat came bouncing down from Lewes. A topless man was steering and a woman and black dog sat huddled in the prow. They were flying the Jolly Roger and as they passed the wake slung out, thick and creamy, and sloshed itself against the shore.

The path had broadened and now the long grass also came to an end, giving way to pink cranesbill and clover, the little tipped yellow heads of black medick and a few of those giant dog daisies that are also known as marguerites. A wind had got up from somewhere, whipping the river into actual waves. Those clouds – I looked more closely – did not bode well. Oh
hell
. I was caught equidistant between Rodmell and Lewes, right where I’d been in the last downpour. There was nowhere to shelter out here: no trees, no bridges, not even a wall. I shoved my notebook in my pocket and glowered furiously at the sky.

Thunderheads were building above Lewes. I could see them massing behind Mount Harry, banking by the prison and the old racecourse. A haze had fallen ahead of me, dimming the fields and turning the air almost to gauze. The light fell through the altocumulus of a mackerel sky, each scale thickly whorled and pale as spun sugar.
Mackerel skies and mare’s tails make tall ships carry low sails
, I muttered to myself. The sun burned through like magnesium, a distant, impeded thing. My right eye had begun to run with tears, though whether from the light or pollen I couldn’t tell. White, negating white, the colour of the refiner’s fire. Christ is said to have come back from the dead dressed in white, his raiment exceeding fallen snow, white as no fuller on earth could make it with their baths of chalk and urine. This sky might also have been run through a fulling mill, scoured, ground and pinned on tenterhooks to dry. I cupped a hand about my weeping eye and carried on, trying not to look at the veiled sun.