No fear of Virginia Woolf

Guiting Power, the Cotswolds

Angela glanced at the kitchen clock and put Susan Hill’s The Magic Apple Tree away. It was a marvellous guide to living in the English countryside with its lyrical descriptions of the small events brought on by the weather and changing seasons. The book also conveyed a sense of friendliness and community spirit, and Angela followed many of the same rituals. Now it was time to walk the dogs before a drink at The Fox.

It was a lovely autumn evening. Angela thought that this autumn in England wasn’t so much a “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness” as of bright sunshine and highly-coloured trees. The leaves reflected the golden, honey colours of the buildings of Cotswold stone and the stubble of the harvested fields. For a brief moment her mood somehow reflected this golden light, but this was as temporary as the autumn changing of the leaves is the preparation for a winter dying.

Returning home after her evening walk and drink, Angela started slicing the vegetables for supper with Sarah. They had met in the feminist bookshop in London where Sarah worked. Angela had been looking for a new translation of the Odyssey and they had got talking about the literature of the sea — Homer, Conrad and Melville. It transpired that they shared a favourite author — Virginia Woolf. There was an exchange of phone numbers and Sarah had wooed Angela with extraordinary energy and persistence. There were invitations to book launches and dinners and — once she understood Angela’s love of music — invitations to concerts and gifts of recently released CDs.

Slicing the onions Angela thought — for the umpteenth time — how ungrateful she was. Sponge-like she had passively absorbed Sarah’s loving attention. But while there was none of the depth and intensity she had experienced with other women, there was a bland affection and nurturing. Sarah would soon be returning cold and tired after the long drive from London. Supper was her only good meal of the day and Angela tried to make it wholesome.
“Wholesome” — this was the word she often used to herself to describe Sarah. She reminded Angela of wholewheat bread — she was plain, solid and filling — a total change from the other women in Angela’s life.

At the level of appearance the present arrangement of quiet, domestic routines seemed to suit her and Sarah well. Angela seemed content to be alone with her dogs for much of the time, earn small amounts of money editing manuscripts for a large publisher, and paint specimens of the wildflowers she collected on long, solitary walks through the Cotswolds countryside. She was trying to honour the values of simplicity and sharing, celebrating the natural world and consuming as little as possible. She had no interest in clothes or furnishings — her most precious possession were her Zeiss binoculars and her only material indulgence a growing library of paperback books.

Angela’s life now was very settled. There was only a weekly visit to Oxford to buy groceries and visit Blackwell’s book shop. In fact, for Angela the move from London to the Cotswolds represented something of a retreat from human interactions and engagements. Especially in the winter months the Cotswolds had a sense of bleak isolation that was carried on the wind and rain and the sounds of birds and sheep. Sarah’s energies were largely invested in her work at the feminist bookshop as well as in political struggles, and after four days in hectic London, the drive to the Cotswolds and Angela’s home cooking and undemanding attention were a respite.

However, that evening Sarah was in a restless mood. Angela had prepared one of her favourite dishes — a Thai fish curry with coconut milk, lemon grass and chili. As she waited for Angela to bring it out of the oven she leafed through the mail on the kitchen table.

“What’s this, Angela?”

It was a letter from the Rape Crisis Centre in Burford praising the generosity of the donor who had posted them a cheque for five hundred pounds.

Angela bent over the stove. “I got more from Macmillan’s for the Marion North editing than I’d expected.”

“But there’s lots that we need to do to the cottage. What about our plans to install a conservatory, and the trip to Devon we’ve talked about doing at Easter?”

To provide a source of distraction Angela began serving dinner.

“Driving down from London, I had the radio on and heard about another incident in the area,” Sarah commented. “One psychologist was speculating that some man-hating feminist was responsible, but another maintained that a woman wouldn’t have the physical strength. But in my opinion these cases require more precision and agility than brute force. It’s strange ...”

Angela’s evening drink at The Fox was more than a social ritual. It was a good opportunity to encounter any tourists visiting the area, to engage them in conversation and learn of their plans.

After editing work on a new Doctorow novel Angela drove the Land Rover to Sudley Castle, where she liked to watch the visitors and feed the black swans. Afterwards she drove along the lane towards Spoonley Woods. This was one of her favourite places. She parked the car in some trees, took out her packet of sandwiches and sat down to wait.

Godfrey was spending his holidays visiting his parents farm near Winchcombe. He enjoyed their quiet companionship but missed the children and his life as a housemaster. During term time he read the evening papers with a pair of scissors in his hand cutting out items of interest to pin on the notice board outside his classroom. One of his history classes were doing a project on Roman Britain and this morning over breakfast his mother had suggested he visit the ruins of a Roman villa dating from the second century in Spoonley Woods, and take some photographs. The whole area is very overgrown, so it was especially exciting for Godfrey to find the mosaic Bill Bryson described in his account of walking around England. The mosaic is exquisite — an intricate geometric pattern of red and white stones — hidden among the trees, ferns and moss-covered stones. It is protected by a sheet of corrugated iron and a tarpaulin which he lifted carefully. Underneath there were deep claw marks in the centre, and Godfrey worried that a curious badger could do irreparable damage. He was bending down examining the intricate geometric pattern of the mosaic when he suddenly felt a blow to the head and a soft chloroform pad covering his nostrils.

Angela slept badly. During the day she didn’t allow herself to think of the rape but at night in her shallow sleep the memories were clear and vivid, and the feelings of terror and disgust were strong. The next morning she felt unable to concentrate on her editing work or even on her botanical specimens, and instead drove the thirty miles to Oxford.

After Blackwell’s she visited one of her favourite places — Christchurch Cathedral with its marvellous Bourne-Jones window of stained glass telling the story of the eighth-century figure of Frideswide, the patron saint of Oxford. The stained glass had been cleaned and was glowing with deep, rich colour. Afterwards she drove to the healing well at Binsey that is depicted in the third frame. Angela loved the churchyard — it is deeply shaded with large, old trees and a strong sense of spirituality that probably comes from having been a site of Christian workshops dating back to Saxon times.

She was fascinated by Frideswide and thought of her as a feminist pioneer if that meant independence from men and a commitment to other women. The legend of Frideswide depicted in the Burne Jones window shows her refusing marriage to a young king and (with the help of her female companions) escaping and travelling up the river to hide in a swineherd’s hut in the woods of Oxford. Following her there the knight was struck blind as he entered the town, but regained his sight after begging for Frideswide’s forgiveness. She then founded a monastry in Oxford and devoted herself to teaching and healing until her death in 727. Angela thought about how little was known of her. Legend has it that the town of Oxford developed around a mid-Saxon monastic church (the predecessor of the present Christ Church cathedral) at a major crossing over the river Thames, and that Frideswide was the first head of the church. Driving home Angela thought about the name Frideswide, which means “Peace-strong” in Saxon. It was how she used to think of herself before the rape. .

Back in Guiting Power, with the dogs tied to a doorpost outside The Fox, Angela ordered a gin and tonic and sat quietly in a corner reading the local paper. There was a lengthy account of another attack on a visiting tourist. The account described the same pattern as seven other attacks on men in the area — in each case they had been young, walking alone or with another man in some isolated place, had experienced a sharp blow to the side of the head, lost consciousness and woken to the sweet smell of chloroform, finding themselves naked and with their genitals painted with gentian violet. Afterwards there had been enormously embarassing walks back to their lodgings, and having to face the loss of any money they had been carrying and the inconvenience of replacing keys, credit cars and clothing.

The following week, after a morning with her words and watercolours, Angela packed her usual backpack and set out to drive to Haile’s Abbey. This time — anticipating a long wait — she included one of her favourite books in her pack, Susan Hill’s The Spirit of the Cotswolds. Angela had had another troubled, interrupted night and felt exhausted and agitated. She tried to calm herself by sitting quietly in the little church and studying its exquisite, faded wall paintings of St Catherine and St Margaret. The painting of the hunt was strangely inappropriate for a church. The solitary hare, trapped by the huntsman and straining greyhounds, reminded her of herself in her younger days — the defenseless quarry of another kind of hunt. Susan Hill had also been troubled by the painting; she described it as “a beautiful, primitive thing” and speculated that it was perhaps “a picture with a moral, perhaps the artist was appalled by the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the sport and painted his picture in a church as a cry to God for vengeance on behalf of all such poor hunted creatures.” But — despite the weekly ritual of churchgoing — Angela did not believe in god.

Replacing the book in her backpack Angela set off to walk up the hill behind the ruined abbey and settled herself behind a large copperbeech tree. She did not have long to wait. In the dusk a ruddy-faced walker, dressed in grey corduroy trousers and with an elaborately carved walking stick was approaching. Angela readied herself — she scanned the landscape with her binoculars, slipped the balaclava over her head, emptied the chloroform onto a pad, gripped the hammer and moved soundlessly from her hiding place to place herself behind him as he climbed the stile.

Perhaps she had become overconfident — this would be her thirteenth victim; perhaps she was tired; but this time everything went wrong, horribly wrong. As she raised her hammer the man turned. His face registered surprise rather than fear. It was a tired face, lined and with several days’ grey stubble. But his reactions were those of a much younger person. He caught Angela’s raised arm and twisted it sharply. She cried out in pain and struck back blindly. The blow caught him on the temple and his body twisted sideways and fell to the ground.

Driving back from London Sarah forced herself to examine why she felt tired and depressed. The tiredness was understandable — it had been a hectic week — but the depression seemed connected to Angela.. These days she seemed so remote, self-contained and hard to reach. Sarah still found her stunningly beautiful with her short, curly black hair and delicate features, but it had been months since they had made love. The books spoke of “lesbian bed death”. Sarah wondered if Angela really was a lesbian. She often quoted a former lover about how everything was “shades of grey, rather than black and white”, including sexual orientation. She described lesbian sex as “marshmallow love — soft and sweet” — which made it sound comforting rather than exciting.

Also, Angela seemed to be increasingly anti-social. When they had first bought the cottage they had both enjoyed having friends for the weekend, taking them on long country walks and cooking enormous, elaborate meals. It felt a pure kind of life far removed from the centres of power and entertainment. Now it just felt lonely.

Sarah’s deepest commitment was not to Angela, or any individual person, but to the cause of feminism, and she worried that women’s bookshops like hers were closing all over England and the US. No-one seemed to connect this closure of space to buying through amazon dot com. Overall the feminist movement was becoming timid and acquiescent; it was losing its transformative potential. Even living in a closed, monogamous couple relationship with Angela seemed to be a very flawed accommodation of patriarchalism. In the sixties and seventies feminists had stressed the importance of attacking the heterosexual roots of the patriarchal family, but this seemed to have come full circle. Sarah felt very critical of the efforts of the gay community to obtain institutional recognition of stable relationships. Certificates of recognition carrying the entitlement to spousal benefits, and the demand for the legalisation of same-sex marriages were now a major focus of the gay and lesbian movements and seemed to Sarah to be conservative initiatives. Certainly the patriarchal family was in crisis — at least in the North — as rising rates of violence against both women and children indicated. But the range of alternative ways of loving and co-existing seemed to have shrunk, as had the networks of support that earlier feminism had created. Those feminists were older now and seemed to be committing their energies to narrow, privatist concerns like building “successful” careers and comfortable homes rather than to any public struggles or communal projects. There wasn’t the same social experimentation or cultural effervescence.

But Sarah looked forward to getting home. Angela would read to her from Alexandra Kollontai about the revolutionary life and from Adrienne Rich about the significance of resistance to “compulsory heterosexuality” and how it had existed in all cultures and times. Also, Angela was a gourmet cook and had promised “something Italian” on the phone the previous day.

However, the “something Italian “ turned out be packeted tagliatelle and tinned bolognese sauce. Sarah felt disproportionately disappointed; she realised that without any deep sexual connection, she had come to rely on Angela’s culinary efforts as expressions of love. That evening Angela was especially quiet. After their simple meal, eaten in the kitchen without any of the usual touches like candles and a jar of wild flowers, they listened to the news on television. Sarah was shocked to learn of a murder near Haile’s Abbey.

“It can’t be the joker. Those attacks were never vicious. They were too precisely planned and the single blow to the head almost surgical.”

Angela sighed and turned the page of her book. “Don’t let’s talk about it. It’s too awful.”

Sarah tended to be very untidy, but occasionally — probably once a month — she enjoyed re-establishing order in her clothes cupboards and bookshelves. It felt like soaking in a hot, scented bath after coming home from a camping trip with blackened fingernails and sweaty armpits. This time she even ventured down to the basement which was full of old clothes to be delivered to Oxfam, boxes, empty glass jars which Angela collected to take to the home industry ladies, a broken lawn mower.

It was behind the mower that Sarah noticed a blue Jansen backpack. It looked unfamiliar and she opened it half-heartedly. It took a while for her to grasp the significance of the brown and hair-stained hammer, the chloroform bottle and gauze pads.

Confronting Angela was quite the worst moment of Sarah’s life. There were no denials or explanations, and Angela didn’t argue with Sarah’s determination to go straight to the police. Sarah thought perhaps she realised she was sick and wanted some authority figure — a policeman or psychiatrist — to take charge of her life. There was even a tenderness, while Sarah would have found angry denials easier to deal with. It was in a tender, gentle tone that Angela offered to wash her hair as Sarah lay in the bath, trying to summon her energy and thoughts before driving to the police station in Stow. In the first flush of their relationship they had often bathed together by candlelight, but now tender rituals such as mutual hairwashing had replaced passion. Sarah closed her eyes as the familiar fingers gently massaged her scalp. Maybe this was all a nightmare from which she would soon awake.

But there was no awakening for Sarah.

Angela poured herself three fingers of whisky. Drowning Sarah had been easy; Sarah had given her no alternative. Warmed by the whisky Angela put one of her favourite pieces of music on the CD player — Mozart’s Jupiter symphony played loud and very fast under Herbert von Karajan. She lay on the grass in front of the cottage and tried to decipher some of the constellations in the stars above. They seemed pale and distant, nothing like the bright, powerful presences she had seen in other parts of the world she had visited with Sarah. .

Going inside she opened up her photograph album which recorded some of those visits. There were many pictures of the two of them, happy and laughing — for instance in Madagascar where they had gone to see the “indri” — the strange panda-like lemur found only in the rain forests. Lying curled up under their mosquito net in the little hut near Perinet Reserve and hearing the indri’s piercing call — a cross between a whale song and a police siren — was one of the most intense experiences of Angela’s life. There were other photographs which recalled their many shared moments of a quiet intensity — watching the sunset on Kuta beach in Bali; a rising moon as they sailed down the Nile to Luxor; waiting to see the red and green colours of the quetzal in the soft, misty Costa Rican cloud forest; the Taj Mahal reflected in the Agra river; Acoma Pueblo, called the “Sky City” because of its striking location atop a three hundred foot high mesa in the desert of New Mexico; their first sight of the towers of San Gimiano shimmering in the heat. On that occasion Sarah had been attending a conference in Florence and in the hot summer evenings she and Angela had climbed out of their little attic room and danced naked on the roof to the music of the Pointer Sisters and within sight of the Duomo.

Sitting under a chestnut tree on the banks of the Wye River Angela relaxed for the first time in weeks. She had been clever and resourceful. She had carefully drained the bath of water, and with gloved hands had wrapped Sarah’s body in a zipped sleeping bag and loaded it into the boot of her Land Rover together with a spade and pick. On the drive to Spoonley Woods she had passed no other cars, and apart from the night sounds of owls and badgers the wood had been totally silent. She had dug the soft, moist soil as deep as she could and buried Sarah’s body in it carefully. She had then changed her clothes, changed cars and driven Sarah’s car back to London and parked it near the bookshop where she worked. She had spent the few hours left of the night in an internet café surfing the net before catching a taxi to Paddington, and then two different trains had brought her back to Stow, before a final bus ride to Guiting Power. A flat, exhausted feeling helped her to cope with the anxious inquiries from Sarah’s boss, her mother and finally the police. Angela felt she had made only one mistake — that was in telling the policemen who came to her cottage door that while Sarah had no enemies that she knew of, there had been threatening phone calls lately, perhaps from some lunatic man she had encountered in the bookshop. She had emphasised Sarah’s good-naturedness, their plans to visit Devon at Easter, the order of their shared, domestic life. The two policemen had looked a little blank and uncomprehending, but seemed hostile only the following week when they returned to tell her that a phone check had not revealed any calls from unknown sources.

For the umpteenth time Angela wondered why she had gone to all this trouble. Perhaps to protect her family, or perhaps her own reputation — though that would require a level of pride or vanity she didn’t feel. Her overwhelming feeling was of closure. She leaned comfortably against the tree trunk and opened her scrap book. She had followed Emerson’s advice to “make your own bible” and had spent hours compiling a book of pictures and quotations from women — feminist pioneers who, she felt, gave her life a concrete and practical direction. There was a postcard of Rachel Carson and long passages from The Silent Spring and The Sea Around Us copied out in her careful hand; pictures of Toni Morrison, Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, and most relevant to the moment — Virginia Woolf.

As she had imagined Virginia Woolf’s last actions, Angela worked quickly and methodically. Unlike Virginia, she was following a script. She selected a large stone and forced it into one of the pockets of her heavy, sheepskin jacket. Her adaptation of Virginia’s script involved a bottle of dormonot sleeping pills, which she swallowed with the help of some whisky. The last thing she had done before leaving the house was to fill her hip flask. It was a lovely little object — antique silver with brown leather. It had been a birthday gift from Sarah.

Angela settled down to wait for the sleeping pills to take effect and the Wye River to rise. The water would feel cool and cleansing. It would wash away the images of Sarah’s pale naked form, and her own body, torn, bloody and full of pain.

The pain would be over.

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