Talland House Read online

  TALLAND HOUSE

  ALSO BY MAGGIE HUMM

  Feminist Criticism: Women as Contemporary Critics

  The Dictionary of Feminist Theory

  Border Traffic: Strategies of Contemporary Women Writers

  A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Literary Criticism

  Practicing Feminist Criticism

  Feminism and Film

  Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema

  Snapshots of Bloomsbury: The Private Lives of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

  Feminisms: A Reader

  The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts

  Copyright © 2020 Maggie Humm

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63152-729-6

  E-ISBN: 978-1-63152-730-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020904171

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Note that British spellings are used throughout this book.

  “To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.”

  OSCAr WILDE, The Critic as Artist

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  From her birth in 1882, Virginia Woolf enjoyed the happiest summers of her life at the family holiday home Talland House, St Ives. After the death of her mother Julia in 1895 the family sold the lease of Talland House. Woolf recreates these summers in To the Lighthouse partly fictionalizing her father and mother as Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, and her sister Vanessa as the painter Lily Briscoe. The sudden death of Mrs. Ramsay in the novel, mentioned only in parentheses, is one of the most shocking deaths in twentieth-century literature. To the Lighthouse means a great deal to me. My mother was forty-nine when she died, and I was thirteen, the same ages as Julia Stephen, and Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) when Julia died. Woolf ’s descriptions of Mrs. Ramsay I found extraordinarily moving when I first read the novel as an adolescent, so I had to discover how Mrs. Ramsay died.

  CONTENTS

  I

  1919: THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

  II

  1900: ST IVES

  III

  1919: THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

  IV

  1909: ST IVES

  V

  1914–1918: LONDON. WORLD WAR I

  VI

  1919: THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

  VII

  1919: ST IVES

  I

  —

  1919

  THE ROYAL ACADEMY, LONDON

  PLUCKING A GLASS OF CHAMPAGNE FROM A PASSING waiter, Lily was desperate for a cigarette, but none of the ladies were smoking.

  “Can you see my painting?”

  “There it is, Lily,” Eliza said. “Look—they’ve placed it at eye level! Not skied at all.”

  “Goodness. I imagined the Royal Academy would hate my colours.”

  “You’re a revolutionary,” Eliza said, smiling, as she rearranged the French lace around her shoulders. “Clashing colours are the thing. It’s a new era.”

  Lily raised her glass to Eliza. She knew she could paint and Dahlias might change things; she felt this with a brilliant intensity, like holding a nugget of gold. The blooms in the painting were almost alive. But never as much as in Talland House garden, where her beloved Mrs. Ramsay’s favourite flowers stood glorious in front of a purple escallonia hedge.

  The gallery was too crowded and hot to think clearly. Painting was the one thing she thought about, and she couldn’t hide the joy she got from it, a sense of completeness, of being herself, of feeling as if she’d taken wing and everything else was insignificant. And it was the one thing she’d ever been good at.

  Draining her glass, Lily strode after Eliza to the end of the high-ceilinged room. It was full of men in top hats dressed in black frock coats stretched over fat stomachs, but their clothes weren’t for mourning. They weren’t examining the pictures much at all, looking for their own kind, their own “set,” with flushed red faces, moustaches grown into noses, waistcoats dotted with shiny buttons.

  “A new era? So why do men claim they won the Great War,” she said, wondering where the waiters had gone with the champagne, “when they’ve only won it for half the population, and the other half have taken a step backwards?”

  “Don’t bother about them,” Eliza said. “Let’s see who else is at eye level.”

  During the war, what with the nursing, there’d been a few hours snatched here and there for painting in the small studio close to Father’s study, but the moments after painting were liberating. Those Sunday evenings had made her feel free, walking alone to Victoria and the tram back to the hospital, sometimes as late as midnight. Trees appeared taller in the shadows; houses haunting in the blackout, no glints allowed from windows. With iron railings torn from their sockets to be melted down for guns, the remaining rounded shapes along the perimeters of houses were like animal footprints, making her imagine black leopards prowling the streets of South Kensington. There was beauty and adventure in London’s wartime streets.

  In the next gallery, Lily could feel her face becoming shiny. “I’m thirsty,” she said, smiling at Eliza. “Let’s go and have tea.”

  The crowd parted, and in front stood two men, one older with a younger companion, declaring a painting’s surface was too flat. It was his rich tenor voice Lily recognized first. Her memories hadn’t faded over the years. Now her whole body felt warm, and, with a stomach twist of embarrassment, she turned to Eliza.

  “It’s Louis Grier and Hilary Hunt,” she whispered.

  It was the effect of Louis’s smile and the touch of his hand Lily most remembered, and somehow, for a moment, the gallery seemed to be as vibrant as its art. He was well dressed in a three-piece suit rather than the old rough trousers spattered with paint she was used to, but he still wore the same jaunty hat he’d always worn. The hair peeking out was almost completely grey; he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Hunt hadn’t aged so well, seemingly settled into a suit like a stout businessman. Lily felt pulled back to St Ives, but she wasn’t an indecisive young girl any longer. If only she’d been braver, more honest then about her feelings for Louis. Was it too late? She stood behind him, scrutinizing the painting. The image was too conventional, not true of her memories of Cornwall’s dramatic seas, and she nodded in silent agreement with him. Both men turned, smiled broadly in recognition, and doffed their hats.

  “Miss Briscoe, such a pleasure to see you and Miss Stillman again,” Louis said, and Hunt smiled. “I saw your name in the catalogue. Many congratulations! We hoped you might want to see Cornish scenes in the exhibition, and here you are.”

&nbs
p; His eyes were steady, looking intently at her before gesturing at the painting, and she felt her spine prickle under his gaze.

  “Is this depiction of St Ives contemporary or too traditional?” he asked. “What do you think?”

  He could still make it seem as though her opinion mattered to him.

  “It’s too fussy.” The sudden certainty of her view warmed her cheeks. “It lacks the line of your Silver Nights, and it needs more texture.”

  “Well, yes, my painting was decently reviewed,” Louis smiled, “but that was many years ago.”

  He hadn’t lost his Australian accent. She glanced down at her serge dress, smoothing an imaginary crease in the skirt. Her mother always said her little daughter had Chinese eyes, and she wished she’d risked oriental silk, or at least something more vivid than black, but it was her ideas he’d admired, not her clothes. He’d agreed with her that you couldn’t die from working too hard, only from boredom.

  “Your name is not in the catalogue, Mr. Grier. I didn’t think you’d be here.” Had he been in the war? But he’d never been interested in the military and seemed completely unharmed.

  “I chose not to submit. There was too much work in Australia, so I’ve missed all the British exhibitions for a few years. I return to St Ives next month. Australia has claimed me for far too long.”

  Everything seemed suspended as she remembered the first time he held her arm steady for the long brushstroke needed for a horizon; her whole body warm despite the chilly sea air; the two of them painting together on St Ives quayside; the drizzle on her eyelashes; their evenings in the Sloop Inn, its upper room always full of cigarette smoke, firelight, student laughter. Somehow, she’d felt at the centre of the world watching Louis grasping a tumbler of whisky, his deep brown eyes smiling endlessly it seemed at her stumbling appreciation of seascapes, her attempts to describe what she saw not as boats. “I see simply colours and mass,” she’d said, trying so hard to impress him, while the peaty smell hung in the air enveloping them both, and his hand was close to hers, speeding up her heart.

  Hunt’s voice called her back. He was watching her with raised eyebrows as if about to dispense some superior thought.

  “How much our dear friend Mrs. Ramsay would have praised your success, Miss Briscoe,” he said. “You must miss her a good deal.”

  “I do,” Lily said. “I haven’t seen her since before the war.”

  In her mind was the final meal in Talland House before the guests all returned to London for the winter, the wine-infused stew and the treble-soft birdsong in the garden; Mrs. Ramsay placating her husband at the other end of the table with nods and smiles, her face so familiar Lily could remember every detail when she closed her eyes. With a smile, she turned to Hunt, who was gazing uneasily at Louis.

  “I take it you don’t know?” Hunt said to her in a low voice. “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Heard what?” Lily asked, feeling both men’s gazes on her face.

  “Perhaps we might all step into the alcove,” Louis said, almost in a whisper, as he guided them over. “I regret to say, I’m not sure how to tell you.”

  What could it be? Something about the Ramsays?

  The dark recess was silent, the drapes at either side partly obscuring their group from the crowded gallery.

  “It’s difficult to give the sad news directly,” Louis said, fumbling his words.

  “I worked as a nurse. So did Eliza,” Lily said impatiently. “We’ve seen everything. We won’t faint.”

  “It’s about Mrs. Ramsay’s death,” Louis said hesitatingly.

  It felt as if the gallery throng were closing in on her as she absorbed his words.

  “She died over two years ago,” Louis said.

  “No!” Eliza said. “That can’t be.” She turned to Lily.

  “Dead?” Lily asked, faltering. “How?”

  “She was caring for a young man near her Kensington home one week, and dead by the end of the next,” Hunt said. “Rheumatic fever. So sudden and tragic.”

  His mouth was moving. Lily could sense the words in the air, but she felt as though she were outside of time, where nothing seemed to matter but everything might. She could hear Hunt murmuring to Eliza about Mrs. Ramsay’s children, about Prue dying in some illness connected with childbirth.

  “Andrew, of course, was killed later in the war,” Hunt continued. “A lethal shell. He expired instantly they said. Such a gifted young man! Thank goodness their mother died before them and was spared from knowing her children perished.”

  As Lily stood motionless, the memory of Mrs. Ramsay sitting in a glow of candles at the dinner table dimmed, becoming a palimpsest under the news.

  As she watched, Hunt gazed around the room and seemed about to continue, but Louis raised his eyebrows. The two men caught eyes for a moment and Hunt paused.

  “I understand,” he said, “Mr. Ramsay stood to inherit all the art—her portraits by Watts, Burne-Jones, and Rothenstein.” He looked at Louis before continuing. “Those albumen prints taken by her aunt are quite valuable now, I believe.”

  Louis put a hand on Hunt’s arm. Lily stared through Hunt, amazed at how callous and crass he was to talk about the value of Mrs. Ramsay’s art; Lily was somewhere above herself with everything tiny and far away. Her cheeks were wet, and she felt a wave of gratitude as Louis held out a handkerchief with an apologetic wince.

  “I do regret our abruptness,” he said. “Her death was so sudden, not the lingering state one would expect with a fever. So it was a shock to us all. I thought the news more generally known. You were once such good friends of the Ramsays. I imagined you would be some of the first to hear. It was unconscionable to speak in public. Please, let me escort you both outside into the tea area. More air there.”

  He offered his arm to Lily and she stumbled forward, thinking of the day Mrs. Ramsay first invited her to Talland House. There was something not quite right, something troubling about the Ramsays she’d tried to fathom, tried to counter with her affection for Mrs. Ramsay and painting her portrait, but, as her senses filled with the escallonia scent from the garden high above St Ives on what had been the last warm day of summer, the sweetness was all she could remember.

  II

  —

  1900

  ST IVES

  IT WAS AUTUMN, BUT THE PLATFORM ALREADY SPARKLED with frost in the early evening. Shivering from the chilly breeze, Lily stood alone beside her trunk, waiting for the one porter. The long train journey from London and the change to the branch line at St Erth had taken all day, but as the local train crested the sand dunes, she had a glorious view of St Ives’s harbour, the seagulls twisting iridescent in the sun, a lighthouse seemingly close enough to touch. The weeks ahead spread out before her like a freshly washed sheet. Here no one knew her, here there were no family responsibilities, here she could be herself or whatever herself would become. She could paint alone all day, perhaps find student friends, gain a new kind of family. What mattered most was she was in St Ives with the most up-to-date art techniques in England.

  Tired, hoping to be met by someone from the studios, the station seemed tiny, and there was a pig’s snout poking around a corner of the waiting room, grubbing up the vestiges of a flower bed. It was such a provincial scene, scarcely a week since she’d left the Gare du Nord’s soaring, magnificent industrial roof and the station’s perpendicular glass, as high as Notre Dame’s west window, but she’d run out of money in Paris. At least the chilly air cooled her cheeks, reddened by sitting for hours in stuffy carriages.

  “Miss, there’s a horse and trap in front of the entrance,” the porter said, walking up. “I was told the boy will take you to your lodgings.”

  As she climbed onto the trap, the lad pushed her trunk under his seat with a casual swing, scratching the top, and she held on tight to her artist’s satchel. The narrow road began its ascent, climbing high into the town, curving left and then right, the sea blazing red behind her. Directly ahead, a church steeple w
as baked gold by the last rays with the town’s low buildings, sinking into their stupefied sleep, clustered around its base for shelter. The beauty of it all struck her with its extravagance.

  She glanced at the boy, loving the way in which evening light made faces such a warm deep pink. She thought he might be older than his scrawny size suggested, and shy, as he spoke without looking at her.

  “I’ve been instructed to take you to Mrs. Trevelyan’s cottage in Fore Street, Miss.”

  “Quite right, thank you. That’s where I’m staying.”

  At the next turn, the trap braked, and she dug into her purse for a coin sufficient for the ride, gazing up at the lodging house. A pig squealed from the cottage yard alongside, a tang of smoked fish coming from barrels near the steps was almost bearable, and the door, set into the cottage’s slate and granite façade, was glossy with a polished brass knocker. In front of the doorway, Mrs. Trevelyan stood, smiling. She was short and rounded by layers of skirts resembling Mother’s favourite maid, and she looked a kind woman with her broad, dimpled face. Lily smiled back.

  Pleased her new landlady carried the trunk upstairs, Lily gazed around her bedroom, shining in the raking beams from an attic window. A blackened grate was squared by a mantelpiece close to an iron bed with its own gas bracket. The wardrobe was narrow but with a shelf large enough for her two hats. A low chest of drawers had been covered with a strip of oil cloth matching the linoleum pattern on the floor, and the homemade bedside rug, a kaleidoscope with pieces of thick cotton cloth—reds, yellows, umber, and gentian tessellated like a Roman mural. Perhaps Mrs. Trevelyan had an eye for design. Lily imagined winter evenings, when the storms freed the fisherwomen from endless net repairs, all the women together round some cottage table, cutting and pressing fragments of old clothes through tough hessian mesh, in a cabal of gossip. There was room for an easel under the sloping roof, where she could easily stand upright close to the window.