All the Lives We Ever Lived by Katharine Smyth

Author:Katharine Smyth
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

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Shortly before the start of “Time Passes,” Mrs. Ramsay visits her youngest children in the nursery, where, to her annoyance, she finds them sitting up in bed, quarreling over the boar’s skull that their uncle sent them from the colonies and that she foolishly allowed them to hang from the nursery wall. Although James shrieks whenever his nurse tries to remove it, Cam is terrified of the horrid shadows that it casts across the room. “Well then, we will cover it up,” says Mrs. Ramsay, who, trying and failing to find something suitable in the children’s drawers, takes off her shawl and winds it round the skull, transforming its jagged bone into a soft shape upon which to project the most enchanting fantasies. She “laid her head almost flat on the pillow beside Cam’s and said how lovely it looked now; how the fairies would love it; it was like a bird’s nest; it was like a beautiful mountain such as she had seen abroad, with valleys and flowers and bells ringing and birds singing…” When these words, echoing ever more rhythmically, finally succeed at sending her daughter to sleep, she crosses to James’s side of the room to assure him that his beloved skull remains intact. “See, she said, the boar’s skull was still there; they had not touched it; they had done just what he wanted; it was there quite unhurt.” James hops from bed to make certain and then, once he too is tucked in, Mrs. Ramsay pulls down the window, gets “a breath of the perfectly indifferent chill night air,” and steals downstairs to meet her husband.

I first learned of her death exactly five years before my father’s collapse. It was the night after Christmas, and I was curled up on a cot in my grandmother’s study. The others had gone to bed long before, and, rather like the novel’s poet, Mr. Carmichael—who stays up late reading Virgil but eventually blows out his candle, as if to say that unlike Dante we must navigate this hell without assistance—I was reading well into the early hours. I can still remember my grief and indignation at the revelation; what shocked me most, at least at first, was its detached and oddly graceless language, trapped between the bars of a parenthetical aside: “[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]” These words were appalling. I loved Mrs. Ramsay deeply, already, and I saw her death—not only bracketed, but the subject of a subordinate clause!—as a cruel trick; it made me want to toss the book aside, in anger and sadness, yes, but also because the prospect of confronting the next ninety pages without her seemed intolerably dull. I understood even then that it was life’s cruel trick and not Woolf’s own—that, as the premature deaths of Stella Duckworth and Julia and Thoby Stephen attest, the universe is eminently capable of dealing out the “holocaust on such a scale” that Mrs.

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