Adeline by Norah Vincent

Author:Norah Vincent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Early September 1932

IT IS THE same now every summer. Guests. An endless parade of unwanted guests at Rodmell. The idea of entertaining always appeals, but then, when the people come, and they stay, and they stay, and they draw on her greedily like leeches, extracting all the best material that she has been saving for her work, well then, it is no fun at all. Then it is like enduring some quack treatment, ordered but clearly daft, and possibly harmful into the bargain. Then she can feel herself desiccating like clay, her face aching under another forced smile, and she finds herself sitting for the last half of the engagement like some melancholy recluse longing for the fullness of solitude.

Is this what it means to be famous, she wonders, or to preside over a famous group? Though infamous is more the judgment now, she hears. Among the up-and-coming set of standouts, the Bloomsberries are right out of fashion: a bunch of self-indulgent, pseudo-socialist, bed-hopping prudes—and yes, the last is a real epithet, apparently, the received contradiction in terms, used and endorsed by all who are anybody, intellectually and artistically on the rise.

And, oddly—this is a very new feeling—in the right mood, she finds that she cannot disagree. She hasn’t yet said this in company, but it has been on her mind. In fact, privately, when she doesn’t have her fists up for debate, she thinks it rather a deft summation of their disease. They really are a willfully ignorant contradiction in terms in almost every way, a pack of cross-dressing Quakers, a gaggle of loose-limbed pacifists dancing atop the cenotaphs. They had been virgins—most of them, well into their primes—who had thought, mistakenly as it turned out, that you could root out a century of squeamishness by playing at sexual excess.

The hubris of the young. It never fails to amaze, she thinks, even retrospectively, in oneself. They, every last one of them, from herself to Leonard to Lytton to Ottoline and on and on, are Victorians—period, full stop—no matter what they pretend. Yes, they have had the nerve to call themselves Georgians, but nerve is all it has been. And Lytton, who had so famously and pricklingly purported to dress down the great era of the Empire once and for all in ’19, had done nothing of the sort. He’d merely pulled off an elaborate stunt that the public had mistaken for a serious treatment. No. They had all been raised at the knee of the Dour One, buttoned up in black, and there they remained, in id if not in fact.

Tom Eliot is the exemplar of their type. He embodies what he isn’t. Or—to put it more accurately, and for the sake of the enemy’s argument, more irrefutably—he emblazons what he isn’t all over his skin in every detail, like some savage’s tattoo, because he can’t, in fact, embody it. That is Tom. That is all of them. All over.

Tom is coming to tea this afternoon, as it happens, and with his awful raving wife Vivien, too, of course.

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