To the River (22 page)

It was a strange landscape at the best of times, the Brooks, the land so flat and intermarried with water. I’d read in a history of Lewes that when the river ran high and threatened to breach the banks farmers would stake nets cattycorners between the hedges to catch the fish as they washed across the grass, and furthermore that it is from this practice that the phrase
a pretty kettle of fish
takes its origins, for the nets were known as kettles. I don’t know if this is true, though. Such origin tales always strike me as dubious, like the claim that the Ouse comes as a contraction of the Waters of Lewes, which over time got rubbed down by use to the Wose and thence the Ouse.

Thinking of the marshes and their periodic immersions reminded me that there was another element to Woolf’s story of the bombed river. In a letter to her friend, the irrepressible composer Ethel Smyth, she sketched the landscape again, this time inserting herself in the frame.

Then, to my infinite delight, they bombed our river. Cascades of water roared over the marsh – All the gulls came and rode the waves at the end of the field. It was, and still is, an inland sea, of such indescribable beauty, always changing, day and night, sun and rain, that I cant take my eyes off it. Yesterday, thinking to explore, I fell headlong into a six foot hole, and came home dripping like a spaniel, or water rugg (thats Shakespeare). How odd to be swimming in a field! Mercifully I was wearing Leonard’s old brown trousers. Tomorrow I buy a pair of cords for myself. Its raining, raining . . . and I’ve been walking, walking. The road to the Bridge was 3 foot in water, and this meant a 2 mile round; but oh dear, how I love this savage medieval water moved, all floating tree trunks and flocks of birds and a man in an old punt, and myself so eliminated of human features that you might take me for a stake walking.

Critics have tended to regard this incident in a sinister light, as a portent of what would take place on the same ground a few months on. As Hermione Lee, the most acute of Woolf’s biographers, explains, ‘it is an alarming conjunction of wanting to be immersed in the savage water, and wanting to become anonymous and featureless’. I’m not sure, though, that I agree. If we have any hopes at all of seeing the world, it is in those moments when the ‘I’ winks out, when the self empties or eddies away.

On the subject of stalking, the naturalist Annie Dillard wrote: ‘For . . . forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired with electrodes, my EEG would have been flat.’ This sort of dislocation with the human, identifying instead with dead or lifeless matter, seems both a natural and a necessary part of becoming absorbed in the wider realm. There’s a note of ecstatic surrender in Woolf’s description of the
savage medieval water
, of the fluxing world in which she has become so thoroughly dissolved, and though it is close to the desire for self-annihilation, it doesn’t seem to belong entirely to someone who has lost faith with life.

But there’s a larger problem here. The tendency to wring prophecy from the tide of material that Woolf left behind seems to sit uneasily with what she herself thought of the past. As she experimented with memoir, biography, and novels that contained elements of each, she noticed that the process by which events are converted into history is inevitably distorting, for the past acquires in the telling a shape and coherence that is absent from the present. It’s an observation that she expressed sharply when she came to write of her brother’s death, describing it, as I have already noted, as ‘one of the falsifications – that knell I always find myself hearing and transmitting – that one cannot guard against, save by noting it’.

Some patterns can only be observed at great distance, it’s true, but in order to view life in this way something else must be sacrificed, for when we look with hindsight, from the final outcome back, we see events inflected with a meaning that the one who lived them never grasped. I don’t believe there is a single person who’s not troubled sometimes in the course of their days by a sense of occlusion or tenuousness, a sense that their actions occur within such a great expanse of darkness on either side that they might prove at the last incoherent and devoid of sense. ‘Yes, I was thinking,’Woolf wrote in her diary at around the same time that the Ouse was bombed; ‘we live without a future. That’s what’s queer, with our noses pressed to a closed door.’ She was speaking of the war, but I think that what she said is true of every day, whether bombs rain down or not, for the future is by its nature contingent and to read every event in terms of what is yet to occur disjoints the moment in which life is lived, divesting it of that uncertain, glancing quality that is the hallmark of the present.

Still, one can’t ignore the great weight of stories about immersion and submersion, about going under and being washed away. There were two in particular that had stayed with me, one written when Woolf was very young and one in the final winter of her life. I’d read them both on a snowy day in the archive at the University of Sussex, where an assortment of Leonard and Virginia’s papers and letters reside in a series of mushroom-coloured cardboard boxes that smell faintly, as indeed does much of the library, of meat stew.

The first, ‘A Terrible Tragedy in a Duck Pond’, was written when Woolf was seventeen, in the miserable wake of Stella’s death, as a gift for her friend Emma Vaughan. It concerns a real incident in which Emma, Virginia and her younger brother Adrian capsized and sank a punt while playing aboard it late one night and with what was evidently hysterical good cheer. As the title suggests, the account is a self-conscious parody of a newspaper report, the sort of exercise one might be set at school, though Woolf of course never went, learning Greek from Janet Case and delving the rest from her father’s shelves.

Woolf’s gift as a mimic lends liveliness to her novels – that magpie ear for found dialogue – and her ventriloquism is an essential component of her satire. Here, the narrator employs the portentous, inadvertently bathetic tones of the provincial journalist, sloppy with facts and imaginatively unequal to the tragedy he has himself fabricated: the terrible drowning of three young people.

The waters rose & rose, irresistible, calm. One moment dry & vigorous, then thrown from the warmth & animation of life to the cold jaws of a sudden & unthought of death – what change could be more absolute or more dreadful? Alone, untended, unwept, with no hand to soothe their last agonies, they were whelmed in the waters of the duck pond, shrouded in the green weed (we believe it to be a species of Anseria Slimatica) which we have mentioned above.

If nothing else, it stands as an effective warning to any future writer who might seek, impertinently, to reimagine Woolf’s own death.

This overwrought report is followed by what purports to be ‘A Note of Correction and Addition to the above, by one of the Drowned’, in which the first story is undercut by the revelation of the survival of the boating party and its gleefully dripping progress back to the house. Though the humour is somewhat dependent on the squawking in-jokes that make Bloomsbury so oxygenless, there was something about the interplay of the two voices that I found intriguing, the first stitching a narrative that the second unpicks and reweaves. Then there were the final lines, which picked up on a problem that would dog Woolf throughout her life: how to capture in language the multiple impressions that the mind in a moment possesses. ‘Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary,’ she writes, ‘& ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once . . . St John, happy creature, has a piano to speak for her with its variety of voices; but even that fails completely to carry forth the flood.’

Her tongue is firmly in her cheek and yet the last phrase stands out. I thought of the polyphonic voices of
The Waves
, unspooling their torrents of words that beat again and again at the limits of perception. Carrying forth the flood: it seemed to catch precisely what Woolf set out to do.

As for the other story, it was not so light-hearted. It was written a few weeks before Virginia’s death, and was evidently inspired by a visit to Brighton described in the diary, when, hovering at the edge of a complete breakdown, she became disturbed by a grotesquely fat woman eating cakes in Fuller’s teashop, and by the smell of fish and the embarrassment of
ping
in the little lavatory at the Sussex Grill while two
common little tarts
stood outside rouging and exchanging gossip. The event exercised her and she wrote it out in various incarnations. It was eventually published posthumously as ‘A Watering Place’, her final story.

The version I’d seen in the archive was a photocopy, full of typing errors and crossings out, tucked within its own manila folder and filed at the bottom of a box of drafts. Because of paper shortages during the war, it had been typed on the back of two corrected pages drawn from the manuscript of
Between the Acts
, though I couldn’t remember now which scenes they’d held. It was set, anyway, in a little seaside town also pervaded by the smell of fish. There is a sense of unreality to this liminal, watery place. Its population – the old men that stand on the parade and watch the waves; the women with their tottering shoes and strings of pearls – have the look of shells, ‘hard but frivolous . . . as if the real animal had been extracted on a pin’. At one o’clock, the action – but it is not really action – moves to a restaurant where, upstairs in the first floor lavatory, three women stand painting their faces, their talk interrupted by the flushing waters of the cubicle next door.

Much is made of the collusion of artifice and nature within this small partitioned space. Then the women begin to talk, their words borrowed in part from the Brighton tarts. They talk; the flush comes down; it drowns them out; it drains away; they are revealed. There is a horrible rhythm to the scene, which rapidly abandons all pretence at realism and turns the women back into little fish, smelling of ‘some queer fishy smell that seems to permeate the whole watering place’. The story ends abruptly with a swerve of tone that seemed to me a last-ditch attempt at prettification, one of those sea changes that converts bones into coral, eyes to pearls, death to a submarine and static mirage: ‘But at night the town looks quite ethereal. There is a white glow on the horizon. There are hoops and coronets in the streets. The town has sunk down into the water. And the skeleton only is picked out in fairy lamps.’

Oh, water beautifies all right. You wouldn’t know at a glance that it ran quick with nitrogen; you wouldn’t see the shopping trolleys or the occasional swollen body of a sheep, leaching out its gases, eyes picked away by the glinting, darting fish. Water conceals rot, smoothes edges, turns shards of glass into smooth green bullets, discards the resurrected on bank and beach, trees tumbled to stars, plastic addled into opacity.

Then there’s that awful rhythm: vanquish; retreat. In an earlier version of the story a lavatory attendant is also present in the room, a woman who ‘inhabits a fluctuating water world . . . constantly tossed up and down like a piece of sea weed’. I read somewhere that this thrusting up-down motion is supposed to mimic the trauma of the sexual abuse Woolf suffered as a small child at the hands of her half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, but I didn’t think it needed to be skewered so neatly to retain its power: that part voluptuous, part nauseating sense of surrender to a greater force.

Let me take you: that is what the water says. Lean back, abide with me. Endow yourself and I will dandle you, though dandle, to be sure, is not so far from mangle.

The low ground by the river came then to an abrupt end and I struggled up the bank to the path that threaded along the top. But this too was almost overwhelmed by vegetation, so that with every step I had to break bodily through the entangled, chest-high grass. The wind was full in my face and my eye would not stop streaming. I continued doggedly along, head down, listening for the first break of thunder.

I’d come to where the misfit stream Glynde Reach entered the river, its muddied waters sluicing down the Levels into the greener Ouse. The railway, which ran right through to Newhaven on the eastern bank, crosses the Reach at this confluence and as I approached I counted twenty-one swans gathered by the bridge. One had black plastic caught somehow around its wing, though this did not prevent it from dipping beneath the surface in search of food, raising its head in that inelegant waggle-gulp manoeuvre as it swallowed down a root or leaf. Fish were jumping in the shadows and as I passed I could make out a ruffled line where the two rivers met, a serpentining cord of ripples that tightened almost to a crest.

Asham was dead ahead now, the white scar bared to the eye. Before the cement works closed there used to be an aerial ropeway, dismantled now, that ran down the hill to the water’s edge, linking the quarry to a concrete wharf where barges delivered coal and collected cement. It was here that Virginia’s body was found, on 18 April 1941, three weeks after she’d walked into the river, by two girls and two boys who’d stopped on their way to Seaford to eat their lunch and had as they sat in the field become preoccupied with flinging stones at a floating log to knock it into shore. As it drifted closer they saw that it was not a log. One of the boys waded out and, turning the body, cried out:
It’s a woman – a woman in a fur coat!

She was wearing Wellington boots and her hat remained wedged on by a string of elastic tied beneath her chin. The policeman, Collins, whom she’d recently described as rude and rasping after an altercation about blackout curtains, noted when he came to fetch the body that her watch had stopped at 11 .45 a.m., which is to say a good hour and a quarter before Leonard, on 28 March, had found the letters she’d left for him in the upstairs sitting room at Monks House and run pell-mell through the Brooks to find her. Seeing her walking-stick lying upon the bank, he knew at once what had occurred, though Collins, summoned by the housekeeper Louie Mayer, had dived and dived while the blacksmith Frank Dean and his son brought ropes and dragged the river.