Moments of Being

  The two drawing rooms opened out of the hall; the front and the back drawing room. The front, facing the street, was comparatively light; the Watts portrait of father faced the door, a flattered, an idealised picture, up to which father would lead admiring ladies; and pause and contemplate it, with some complacency. But “Lowell said it makes me look like a weasel,” he once said. There was the grand piano upon which Christmas presents were stood; and Stella’s writing table in the window; and the round table in the middle, which, when supplemented by a small folding table which has followed me, unwelcomed, even to Monks House, made the tea table. The tea table, the very hearth and centre of family life, the tea table round which sat innumerable parties; on which, when Sunday came – the tea table’s festival day – pink shell plates were placed, full of brown Sunday buns, full of very thin slices of white and brown bread and butter.

  The tea table rather than the dinner table was the centre of Victorian family life – in our family at least. Savages I suppose have some tree, or fire place, round which they congregate; the round table marked that focal, that sacred spot in our house. It was the centre, the heart of the family. It was the centre to which the sons returned from their work in the evening; the hearth whose fire was tended by the mother, pouring out tea. In the same way, the bedroom – the double bedded bedroom on the first floor was the sexual centre; the birth centre, the death centre of the house. It was not a large room; but its walls must be soaked, if walls take pictures and board up what is done and said with all that was most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life. In that bed four children were begotten; there they were born; there first mother died; then father died, with a picture of mother hanging in front of him. The house mounted in three roomed storeys above that bedroom. Above father’s and mother’s bedroom floor were the three bedrooms of George, Gerald, and Stella; above their bedrooms our night and day nurseries; above that the great study with its high ceiling of yellow stained wood; and the servants’ bedrooms. There were different smells on different landings of that tall dark house. One landing smelt perpetually of candle grease; for on a high cupboard stood all the bedroom candles. On another half landing was the water closet; with all the brass hot water cans standing by a sink. On another half landing was the solitary family bath. (My father all his life washed in a yellow tin bath with flat ears on which the soap stood.) Further up, was a brown filter from which once the drinking water presumably was supplied: in our day it only dripped a little. At that height – it was on the study half landing – carpets and pictures had given out, and the top landing of all was a little pinched and bare. Once when a pipe burst and some young man visitor – Peter Studd? – volunteered help and rushed upstairs with a bucket, he penetrated to the servants’ bedrooms, and my mother, I noted, seemed a little ‘provoked’, a little perhaps ashamed, that he had seen what must have been their rather shabby rooms. My father’s great study – that study had been built on, when the family grew – was a fine big room, very high, three windowed, and entirely booklined. His old rocking chair covered in American cloth was the centre of the room which was the brain of the house. He had written all his books lying sunk in that deep rocking chair; which swung up and down; for it was so deep that his feet were off the ground. Across it lay his writing board; with the sheets of foolscap always folded down the middle, so that he could make corrections in the margin. And there was his fine steel pen and the curious china inkpot, with a well, lidded, out at the side. All his books were dipped out of that well on the point of Joseph Gillott’s long shanked steel pens. And I remember the little flat shield that his pen had rubbed smooth and hard on the joint of his forefinger. Minny’sfn59 portrait by Watts – a charming shy face – nestling away, not noble, not heroic, but shy and sweet, hung over the fireplace; and in the corner by the window stood a stack of rusty alpenstocks. From the three long windows one looked out over the roofs of Kensington, to the presiding Church of St Mary Abbots, the church where our conventional marriages were celebrated – and one day standing there father saw an eagle. It was, I thought, like him that he knew it for an eagle at once; and at once verified the fact, from the paper, that it was an eagle that had escaped from the Zoo. He would not make up stories about wild eagles flying over London. The room smelt perpetually of tobacco smoke.

  The street below was a cul-de-sac. Our house was near the blank brick wall at the end. Hyde Park Gate, which led nowhere, but made a little sealed loop out of the great high road running from Hammersmith to Piccadilly, was something like a village street. One heard foot steps tapping along the pavement. Most of the people passing bowed to each other as they met. One recognised them approaching. That was Mrs Muir-MacKenzie; handsome, distinguished. That was the pale Miss Redgrave; or that was the red-nosed Miss Redgrave; or that was the ancient Mrs Redgrave, veiled, in widow’s weeds; going out in her bath chair with a Miss Redgrave in attendance – if it was wet she had a glass pane let down so that she looked like a museum specimen preserved under glass. There was also, in a house with a queer flight of angular steps, ‘Her Grace’ as the nurses called her – an old Duchess of Grafton. There was the house of the famous – somehow infamous – Mrs Biddulph Martin, the rich American, whose garden wall bulged out. “Why don’t you make a good job of it?” said George to the workmen who were pointing the wall. They said they could only carry out orders; the wall continued to bulge. Mrs Biddulph Martin was tarnished perhaps by some connection with women’s rights. So too certainly was Mrs Ashton Dilke, our next door neighbour. Indeed a man threw a stone at her at some meeting; and my mother, who had signed an anti-suffrage manifesto, holding that women had enough to do in their own homes without a vote, made kind enquiries through us, of the Dilke’s governess. But Mrs Dilke, save for that eccentricity, was the pink of fashion; a very pretty woman, and so well dressed, that we used to notice her new dress, and to say “Mrs Dilke has far more new clothes than you have” to mother, who never had new clothes, and dressed always, I think, in a very simple sewing woman made black dress. And further up the street was Aunt Minna’sfn60 house, where she lived solitary with her perennial parrot and her perennial Italian manservant. He changed; but his name was always Angelo; and he was always small and greasy; and played bagatelle with us in his shirtsleeves in the basement. The house with the locked gate and the many steps in the middle of the street was famous for the ‘big dog’. People called Maude lived there; impecunious, shifty, disreputable people; who could not pay their bills; and thus kept their gate locked and the big dog behind it to frighten duns. As one passed he sprang down the steps barking; and one day knocked me over and bit or bruised my arm. Then the villagers got together and brought a police court case: and Mr Plowden the magistrate was so impressed by my evidence – or rather my state of mind – that he ordered the dog to be destroyed. “But we don’t want him destroyed,” Mrs MacKenzie insisted, “only restrained.” For it was agreed that it wasn’t the poor Maude girls’ fault – the handsome dark girls who lived behind the locked gate, scaring duns, were to be pitied for their disreputable parents’ discreditable imprisoned lives.

  Everybody knew everybody, and everything about everybody, in Hyde Park Gate. It was a trial, if you disliked the gradual approach of a familiar face as I did, to see the MacKenzies or the Redgraves coming nearer and nearer until you had to stop or at least smile. The houses were all individual houses; some towering high, like ours; others, like the Redgraves’, long low houses almost country houses; some had strips of garden; others were flush with the street. But they became stereotyped, pillared, and pompous up at the top fronting the main road. Incredible as it now seems, I can remember that one of these pompous houses had a carriage and pair with a coachman and footman who wore powdered wigs, and yellow plush knee breeches and silk stockings. Yet the owners were of no particular importance; and yet nobody thought such magnificence was strange. Perhaps one house out of every six in Hyde Park Gate kept a carriage, or hired one from Hobbs whose livery stable ope
ned its great yard in the middle. For there was only the red bus to take people “into Town,” as father called it, or, if you could afford it, a hansom or four-wheeler from the rank. The underground, a sulphur smelling steam clouded tunnel with trams running, I suppose, rather seldom, was far away – at Kensington High Street, or Gloucester Road. My father and mother always took the red bus, to them a hansom by day was an unknown luxury. My mother did all her immense rounds – shopping, calling, visiting hospitals and work houses – in omnibuses. She was an omnibus expert. She would nip from the red to the blue, from the blue to the yellow, and make them somehow connect and convey her all over London. Sometimes she would come home very tired, owning that she had missed her bus or the bus had been full up, or she had got beyond the radius of her favourite buses. But more often she would have some story to tell of her bus adventures – a talk she had had with the conductor, or how a fellow passenger had said this or that. “She sat weeping,” I remember she said, “and I could only lend her my scent bottle.” My father always climbed on top and smoked his pipe; she I think never did that, but, if she could, chose the corner seat and talked to the conductor. He would tell her his troubles; as the two stubby horses ploughed their way along the streets, those old omnibus horses who lived, it was said, only a year or two, for the pulling up to take in passengers destroyed their constitutions. Once a year about Christmas we saw a brace of pheasants swinging from the driver’s seat – the gift of the Rothschilds.

  The streets were full of horses. The streets were littered with little brown piles of steaming horse dung which boys, darting out among the wheels, removed in shovels. The horses kicked and reared and neighed. Often they ran away. Carriages crashed together I remember in High Street; horses went sprawling; they shied; they reared; wheels came off. The street rocked with horses and smelt of horses. The horses were often gleaming, spick and span horses, with rosettes in their ears; the footmen wore cockades in their hats; foam flecked the bright silver harness; coronets and coats of arms were painted on panels and among the sounds of the street – the tap of hoofs, the rush of wheels – one heard a jingling and metallic noise as the harness shook and rattled. But only solitary hansoms, or little high butchers’ carts, or private broughams came clopping down our quiet Hyde Park cul-de-sac – our “backwater,” as father called it.

  My room in that very tall house was at the back. When Stella married, Vanessa and I were promoted to separate bed sitting rooms; that marked the fact that we had become, she at eighteen, I at fifteen, young ladies. My room, the old night nursery, was a long narrow room, with two windows; the fireside half was the living half; the washstand half was the sleeping half. It had been ‘done up’ at George’s cost, I rather think; all traces of the night nursery were abolished. In the living half was my wicker chair, and Stella’s writing table made after her design with crossed legs, and stained green and decorated by her with a pattern of brown leaves (at that time staining and enamelling and amateur furniture decorating were much the rage). On it stood open my Greek lexicon; some Greek play or other; many little bottles of ink, pens innumerable; and probably hidden under blotting paper, sheets of foolscap covered with private writing in a hand so small and twisted as to be a family joke.

  The sleeping side was dominated by the long Chippendale (imitation) looking glass, given me by George in the hope that I should look into it and learn to do my hair and take general care for my appearance. Between it and the washstand, under the window, was my bed. On summer nights, I would lie with the window open, looking up at the sky, thinking, for I recall a story I wrote then, about the stars and how in Egypt some savage was looking at them; and also listening. Very far off there was a hum of traffic. In the mews one heard the stamp of horses; a clatter of the wheels and buckets. In a bedroom window, one of the Queen’s Gate back windows opposite, I could see Sir Alfred Lyall dressing and undressing. One of the windows was broken; the servants said there lay the wedding feast still untouched; for a bridegroom had failed, or a bride had died. Certainly there was a dusty broken window. Of a summer night I sometimes heard dance music and saw the dancers sitting out on the leads; saw them passing and repassing the window on the stairs. One night I lay awake horrified hearing, as I imagined, an obscene old man gasping and croaking and muttering senile indecencies – it was a cat, I was told afterwards; a cat’s anguished love making. George, on the floor below, kept a store of old electric light bulbs which he shied at cats – pop-pop they would explode against the wall. Often I would lie awake till two or three, waiting for Nessa to come and see me after her party. I would read by the light of a candle, and blow it out as I heard her and Gerald approaching. But Gerald pinched the top of the candle, found the wax soft, and so detected me.

  Which should I describe first – the living half of the room, or the sleeping half? They must be described separately; yet they were always running together. How they fought each other; that is, how often I was in a rage in that room; and in despair; and in ecstasy; how I read myself into a trance of perfect bliss; then in came – Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, my father; how it was there I retreated to when father enraged me; and paced up and down scarlet; and there Madgefn61 came one evening; and I could scarcely talk for happiness; and there I droned out those long solitary mornings reading Greek . . . And it was from that room Gerald fetched me when father died. There I first heard those horrible voices. . ..

  If that room, which is now I think cut into cubicles for the hotel guests – after we left it it became a Guest house – could bring out its ghosts, the business man from Birmingham, the lady from Cheltenham up to see the Royal Academy, would be amused; also pitiful; and perhaps one of them would say what an odd, what an unwholesome life for a girl of fifteen; I suppose they would add: “Such a life is quite impossible nowadays.” And I suppose that, if one of them had read To the Lighthouse, or Room of One’s Own, or The Common Reader, he or she might say: “This room explains a great deal.”

  But of course I was not thinking when I lived in my back room at H[yde] P[ark] G[ate] of Birmingham business men or ladies from Cheltenham. But I was thinking; feeling; living; those two lives that the two halves symbolized with the intensity, the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis and emerges and sits quivering beside the broken case for a moment; its wings still creased; its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight.

  Anyone, whether fifteen or not, whether sensitive or not, must have felt something very acute, merely from what had happened. My mother’s death had been a latent sorrow – at thirteen one could not master it, envisage it, deal with it. But Stella’s death two years later fell on a different substance; a mind stuff and being stuff that was extraordinarily unprotected, unformed, unshielded, apprehensive, receptive, anticipatory. That must always hold good of minds and bodies at fifteen. But beneath the surface of this particular mind and body lay sunk the other death. Even if I were not fully conscious of what my mother’s death meant, I had been for two years unconsciously absorbing it through Stella’s silent grief; through my father’s demonstrative grief; again through all the things that changed and stopped; the ending of society; of gaiety; the giving up of St Ives; the black clothes; the suppressions; the locked door of her bedroom. All this had toned my mind and made it apprehensive; made it I suppose unnaturally responsive to Stella’s happiness, and the promise it held for her and for us of escape from that gloom; when once more unbelievably – incredibly – as if one had been violently cheated of some promise; more than that, brutally told not to be such a fool as to hope for things; I remember saying to myself after she died: “But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this” – the blow, the second blow of death, struck on me; tremulous, filmy eyed as I was, with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis.

  Yesterday (18th August 1940) five German raiders passed so close over Monks House that they brushed the tree at the gate. But being a
live today, and having a waste hour on my hands – for I am writing fiction; and cannot write after twelve – I will go on with this loose story.fn62

  By the time I had that room, when I was fifteen that is, “us four” as we called ourselves had become separate. That was symbolized by our separate rooms. Yet we were not so separate as boys and girls, brothers and sisters, often become when the boys go to public schools and the sisters stay at home. Mother’s and Stella’s deaths, I suppose, united us. We never spoke of them. I can remember how awkwardly Thoby avoided saying “Stella” when a ship called Stella was wrecked. (When Thoby died, Adrian and I agreed that we would go on talking about him, “for there are so many dead people now.”) This silence, we felt, covered something; something that most families had not. But without that bond, mine was from my earliest childhood so close with both Nessa and Thoby that if I describe myself I must describe them.

  When Stella died Thoby was seventeen – two years older than I. But long after that I was acutely conscious of him. Even as a little boy he was dominant among us. He could impose himself. He was not clever; he was not a funny talkative child; he was a clumsy awkward little boy, very fat, bursting through his Norfolk jacket. He dominated and led in our world. But even to the grown ups he was rather formidable. Father had to be sent for once or twice: I remember Thoby struggling like a tiger with Gerald. He was large and clumsy. He grew very quickly out of nursery ways. I cannot remember him childish, as Adrian was. But then mother was not so much at her ease with him as with Adrian. Nor he with her. He was not clever; but gifted. And his gifts were natural to him, naturally it came to him to look distinguished; to be silent, to draw. He would take a sheet of paper, hold it at an odd angle and begin easily, naturally, drawing a bird, not where I expected, but at some queer place, so that I could not guess how the bird would become a bird. He was not precocious; but won prizes now and then, yet failed to win a scholarship at Eton. His Latin and Greek were very rough, I think the masters said. But his essays showed great intelligence. Yet it was through him that I first heard about the Greeks. The day after he came back from Evelyns, the first time, he was very shy; and odd; and we went walking up and down the stairs together; and he told me the story of Hector and of Troy. I felt he was too shy to tell it sitting down; and so we kept walking up stairs and then down; and he told me the story rather fitfully, but excitedly. Also he told me stories about the boys at Evelyns. Those stories went on all through Evelyns, through Clifton, and through Cambridge. I knew all his friends through those stories. He had a great power for liking people, for admiring them. And they amused him; I think I felt that he enjoyed Evelyns; and Clifton, because he liked being on his own, and held his own; and was admired, but was also dominant there too. He held his own, he put up with disagreeables; he was far more philosophic, because more in his element at school than Adrian was. And he exacted his rights. The Pup had to apologise when he put another boy over him as head of the house; he was not going to be passed over. He was not easy to put upon. And yet he had no reason to assert himself; he did not expect to win things; he admired the boys who were good at football; good at Latin; but unenviously. I felt he had taken stock of his own powers; would come into possession of them all in good time; and enjoyed slowly and deliberately without being worried or upset whatever came his way at Clifton. He was tolerant; not critical; not precocious; biding his time, and serenely taking his place. And beneath this reserve, when he was with us, I felt, though he could not say a word ever about his feelings, a dumb affectionateness, a pride in us, and something melancholy too – perhaps the deaths of mother and Stella made him older than his age. And father’s extraordinary demonstrative love for him.