Vanessa and Her Sister Read Online Free PDF

Gordon Square
    The house was quiet today. No one mentioned the date. It has been ten years. Thoby and I remember it all, but what of Virginia and Adrian? She was thirteen, and he only twelve. What do they remember? The long night before when no one slept? Beautiful, calm Stella, her hair pulled back in a blue kerchief, sitting by Mother’s bed? Mother’s dry steep fever and her digging, racking cough? The doctor arriving just before dawn? Thoby was so angry that Father had not sent for him before. “Your mother would not allow it” was all Father said.
    Mother died just after eleven in the morning. Sophie had made roast chicken for luncheon, but we did not eat until after midnight.
    Friday 12 May 1905—46 Gordon Square (late)
    Virginia came in to talk as I was writing in bed tonight. I had to quickly pull the coverlet up over this notebook. Since The Manchester Guardian accepted her article on the inn in Andalusia earlier this month, she has been even more insistent about who is the writer and who is the painter . Letters are public and mine naturally get compared to Virginia’s. My appalling spelling, my clunky phrasing, my mismatched metaphors rolling around like loose boulders, my handwriting that slopes uphill no matter how squarely I face the page—invariably, they do not equal Virginia’s hammered prose.
    And —Dinner with the Balfours tomorrow with George and Margaret. No doubt they have several eligible young men they would like us to meet. A white glove and seed pearl evening. It will be dreadful.
    Thursday 18 May 1905—46 Gordon Square
    Restless and unable to settle this afternoon. I know my demons are out in force because it is another Thursday, and after last Thursday’s disaster, I am nervous. Last week my newly shored-up confidence broke away like wet sand. In four hours the serious, literate men will arrive,and while Virginia will amuse them with her circus acrobatics of witty, well-turned phrases, cleverly layered and underscored by her ruthlessly subtle mind, I will worry if the cocoa is served and if Lytton likes the fish.
    I think in mass . In colour and shape and light and volume and texture. Not in words. Words delicately sewn around an abstract idea leave me feeling large and awkward and with nothing to say. What is the meaning of good? My mind asks “What is the colour of good? What size? What light? Where to put the bowl of poppies?”
    Later
    Not good. Wombat would not stop barking, and Lytton did not care for the fish. He would have preferred chicken.
    1 June 1905—46 Gordon Square
    Working on my portrait of Virginia and thinking about the effect of thickly layered paint. How to do it without losing the light? The translucence? I want it to be heavy but not dull, or perhaps thick but not heavy? Whistler does it and creates a finely blurred texture without the weight. I want the paint to mix right there on the canvas rather than safely on my palette. Homer’s ocean in Breezing Up has the thickened quality, but the effect is a threatening underwater darkness rather than slides of light laid against one another. I wish for depth done with more paint rather than less.
    I will ask Mr Bell about it.
    5 June 1905—46 Gordon Square (a warm evening)
    “But Nessa, do you think it’s true?” asked Virginia tenaciously, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. The window was open, and I could hear the rumble of the Number 16 omnibus.
    “I don’t know, Virginia,” I said, wrapping my breath around a patchof calm. “I only did a semi-rest cure, and I certainly did not fall in love with my doctor.”
    The bathwater was beginning to cool.
    “Elizabeth Robbins says it is inevitable,” Virginia persisted. “A certainty.”
    “Well, it wasn’t inevitable for me,” I answered, gathering my hair in my wet hand and twisting it into a messy knot at the back. As I raised my arm, Virginia’s eyes dropped unembarrassed to my exposed right breast and I quickly slid deeper into the soapy water.
    “Nessa,