No fear of Virginia Woolf

Jacklyn Cock

Naunton, the Cotswolds

From the outside their lives seemed to epitomise cosy and tranquil domesticity. Two attractive women sharing a seventeenth-century stone cottage filled with books, antiques and various small objects they had lovingly acquired over their years together. A roast meat dinner after church on Sundays, a contribution of sloe gin and apple chutney to the annual church fête. The neighbours often heard Mozart on the CD player — never any raised or angry voices. A few villagers had sometimes seen them walking hand in hand, but dressed in their Burberry raincoats and wearing wellington boots they seemed a very familiar and conventional couple.

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 Cotswolds 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 from her evening walk and drink, Angela started slicing the vegetables for supper with Sarah. 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. It was now two years since they had first met in the feminist bookshop in London where Sarah worked. Falling into easy conversation it had transpired that they shared a favourite author — Virginia Woolf. Sarah looked a little like Woolf with her high cheekbones, hooded eyelids, long neck and thin hair tied back from her face. There was an exchange of phone numbers and Sarah had then wooed Angela with extraordinary energy and persistence. There were invitations to book launches and dinners and — once she grasped Angela’s love of music — invitations to concerts and gifts of recently released CDs.

That evening Angela had prepared one of Sarah’s favourite dishes — a Thai fish curry with coconut milk, lemon grass and chili. As she measured the coconut milk Angela thought — for the umpteenth time — how ungrateful she was. Sponge-like she had passively absorbed Sarah’s loving attention, but there was none of the depth and intensity she had experienced with Geraldine. Making love with Geraldine had been like catching the back wave of a high sea. There had been the same dizzying sense of lift followed by a drop into warm wetness. There had been similar feelings of exhilaration followed by a deep peace as they lay exhausted on the beach, or on the starched white sheets of the double bed they had shared for three years.

The relationship with Geraldine had ended with acrimony and undignified accusations of betrayal. After her rape Angela had found sexual intimacy painful and even disgusting. What she hadn’t fully realised was that the sexual connection was essential to Geraldine and without it the relationship began to unravel. After Geraldine left her Angela felt diminished and cautious about trusting. It was as though a light had gone out and left a monochromatic emotional landscape.

Now with Sarah there was a kind of bland affection, support and nurturing. 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, read 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 was her Zeiss binoculars and her only indulgence was a growing library of paperback books.

It was not a very social life. 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. The weather somehow reflected her sense of emotional deadness. Fortunately Sarah didn’t seem to need much emotional response. Her 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.

That evening Sarah was in a restless mood.

As she waited for Angela to bring supper 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 Macmillans for the Marion North illustrations than I’d expected. And I know you approve of the work they do.”

“Yes, of course. But it’s a lot of money and 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?”

Sarah slammed the dish of rice onto the table. She found Sarah generous but controlling and frugal in trivial ways. Money was a source of tension between them. At the start of every month they ritually wrote out cheques for each other in what they called “the sharing of the halves”, but there was none of the easy sharing Angela had known with Geraldine. Sarah was “principled” in a rigid and moralistic way that Angela found irritating.

To distract herself and placate Sarah, Angela said, “Lets eat. It’s a simple meal, and didn’t involve visiting that expensive Italian delicatessen in Burford that always gets you talking about my extravagance  ... ‘the silver-spoon gypsy’ you used to call me in our salad days.”

Sarah started eating. “Driving down from London, I had the radio on and heard of another incident about the ‘Cotswolds stripper’, ” she commented. “One psychologist was speculating that some man-hating feminist is 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 ...”

That night, too, 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. The power of the three men, their raucous laughter as they drove the hijacked car to a deserted field, tossing their empty beer cans into the road; their angry contempt for her body and her sense of disgust and humiliation surfaced in the darkness. She relived the pain, the feelings of terror and panic as she ran — or rather lurched — along the dark road back into town sobbing and screaming for help. Ever since that time she had felt like damaged goods, a torn canvas or a Venetian glass vase smashed into irreparable fragments.

The following morning Angela scrubbed herself under a scalding shower but even then felt unable to concentrate on her editing work or even on her botanical paintings. Instead she drove the thirty miles to Oxford.

After Blackwells 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, the scene depicted in the third frame of the window. Angela loved the churchyard — deeply shaded with large, old trees, to her it contained a strong sense of spirituality that probably came from having been a site of christian workshops dating back to Saxon times.

Angela was fascinated by Frideswide. She thought of her as a feminist pioneer if that was defined to mean living out an independence from men and a commitment to other women. The legend of Frideswide depicted in the Burne Jones window showed 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 swineherds’s hut in the woods of Oxford. Following her there the knight is struck blind as he enters the town, but he regains his sight after begging for Frideswide’s forgiveness. 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 Naunton, 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 the eighth attack by the figure the local newspapers termed ‘the Cotswold stripper’. The account described the same pattern as in the cases of 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 and to find themselves naked and with their genitals painted with gentian violet. Afterwards there had been enormously embarrassing walks back to their lodgings, the loss of any money they had been carrying and the inconvenience of replacing keys, credit cards and clothing.

“It’s clearly some loony lesbian,” said a burly man sitting at the bar wearing jodpurs and a Harris tweed jacket. “A butch dyke who’s never been fucked.”

“Maybe it’s someone who’s on day-release from that big loony-bin in Stow,” his drinking companion added.

Angela left her half-finished drink on the table and opened the door.As she left the pub a strong north wind whipped through the trees and a cold drizzle began falling. Angela unzipped her anorak and raised her face to the wind and rain.

The following day, after an unsatisfactory morning trying to focus on her words and watercolours, Angela packed her usual blue Jansen backpack and set out to drive to Hailes Abbey. She threw one of her favourite books into her pack, Susan Hills’ 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 defenceless 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 Angela did not believe in god.

Leaving the church and replacing the book in her backpack, Angela set off to walk up the hill behind the ruined abbey and settled herself behind a large copper beech 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 scanned the deserted landscape with her binoculars, slipped the balaclava over her head, emptied the choloform onto a pad, gripped the hammer and moved soundlessly out from her hiding place to place herself behind him as he climbed the stile. Her breath quickened. This was the moment when — on previous occasions — she felt most fully alive, the moment when she felt strong, focused and powerful.

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’ stubble. But his reactions were those of a much younger person. He caught Angela’s raised arm and twisted it sharply. She whimpered with pain and struck back blindly. The blow caught him on the temple with a sickening, crunching sound. 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, 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 talked 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. But Sarah knew that before the rape Angela’s sexual relationship with Geraldine had been intense.

Angela’s physical energy now seemed wholly invested in keeping fit. She dug energetically in their small vegetable garden and went for long walks lasting several hours every day. Her tall figure in her leather-laced boots, open-necked shirt and wild hair reminded Sarah of Vita Sackville-West. There was a similar air of remote detachment, though Sarah suspected this came from an emotional blankness rather than the confidence of belonging to the English aristocracy.

It worried her that 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.

But Sarah still looked forward to getting home. That night Sarah would read to Angela from one of their favourite books, Virginia Woolf’s The Lighthouse. She enjoyed these times of quiet, undemanding companionship — reading aloud in the soft lamplight, the dogs asleep in their baskets next to the fireplace. Also, Angela was a gourmet cook and had promised “something Italian” for dinner that night.

But the “Italian” turned out be 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.

And 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 televison. Sarah was shocked to learn of a murder near Hailes Abbey.

“It can’t be the Cotswold stripper. 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 noticed that her hands were shaking.

“Is something wrong? Can I pour you a nightcap? A whisky mac, perhaps?”

Angela shook her head. “No thanks. I think I’ll take a sleeping pill and have an early night.”

The following morning was a wet, grey Sunday and Sarah brought Angela a breakfast of poached eggs, tea and toast in bed on a tray.

Perching herself comfortably on the end of their bed she opened the Sunday paper at the headline, “STRIPPER TURNS RIPPER”. “Local man brutually murdered,” the subheading stated above a photograph of a mild-looking middle-aged man.

Sarah began reading the account aloud to Angela.

“Last night a man was found dead near Hailes Abbey. The man has been identified as Godfrey Evans from Cheltenham, an unmarried schoolteacher who had been spending his holidays visiting his parents’ farm near Winchcombe pursuing his hobbies of birdwatching and local history. In an interview with our reporter his mother described him as a gentle, loving man and talked about how much he enjoyed 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 the previous 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 was very overgrown, so it was especially exciting for Godfrey to find the mosiac Bill Bryson describes in his account of walking around England, Mrs Evans told us. He had described the mosaic to his mother as exquisite — an intricate geometric pattern of red and white stones — hidden among the trees, ferns and moss-covered stones. It was protected only by a sheet of corrugated iron and a taurpaulin which he had lifted carefully. Underneath there were deep claw marks in the centre of the mosaic and Godfrey had worried that a curious badger could do irreparable damage. He had been searching for another little-known Roman ruin on the evening he was attacked. Mrs Evans said she was ‘devastated at the untimely death of her only child’ and ‘absolutely mystified as to who could possibly want to hurt him’. Foul play is suspected and the police are investigating.”

“How awful,” Sarah commented. “He sounds like a lovely man.”

Sarah turned to the next page and was surprised when Angela leapt up from the bed and rushed to the bathroom. Sounds of retching followed. When she emerged she pulled on some clothes and announced in a strangely muted voice, “I’m going to go for a long walk. I won’t be back for lunch.”

“But I’d planned a special Sunday lunch with a pheasant from the Oxford market,” Sarah replied with surprise.“That’s one of our special times together.”

Angela left the room without replying and Sarah heard the front door slam shut.

Feeling somewhat disconcerted Sarah wondered how to fill the next few hours. Tidying the house would be a calming ritual. She 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 lawnmower. 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 Zeiss binoculars, the blood and hair-stained hammer, the chloroform bottle and gauze pads. Dropping the binoculars she rushed upstairs.

The following hours were a nightmare for Sarah. She felt tormented by doubt. The uncertainty about what to do felt like a rat gnawing away at her stomach. What was to be done? To report Angela to the police? To confront her? Sarah thought perhaps Angela realised she was sick and wanted some authority figure — a policeman or psychiatrist, perhaps — to take charge of her life.

Sarah realised that Angela was a deeply damaged human being. She had clearly acted alone, a kind of small desert island of anger and grief unconnected to any mainland or roots. Instead of channelling her emotions after the rape and failure of her relationship with Geraldine into some kind of collective action to reassert the revolutionary potential of feminism or gay liberation, or even into a healing relationship with a therapist, she had sought meaning and purpose in solitary, individual gestures. And — Sarah felt certain — violence only bred more violence. It was the cycle Buddhism called “wrong action”.

But what was the “right action” now? The only times of escape from the nightmare seemed to be when she was “in transit”. The next day, driving fast with the air-conditioner turned on high and Mozart playing, Sarah felt strangely encapsulated and remote from her domestic situation. She felt not unlike a lady in a Chagall painting, floating above the everyday world of houses and people and problems.

She felt that she had been (and still was) living with a stranger, a dangerous stranger capable of levels of violence Sarah felt difficult to comprehend. The most sympathetic analysis Sarah could dig up from deep within herself was that Angela had been acting out a crazed feminist script — a script of retributive justice, of female revenge against male violence. The ideology of feminism seemed to frame the issues of love and loyalty and support that she was struggling with. She decided to try and probe Angela’s state of mind obliquely over the supper table.

“We were talking in the bookshop today about how violence against women and children seems to be rising everywhere. No-one seems to have addressed Virginia Woolf’s question, ‘How can we alter the crest and spur of the fighting cock?’ Most cultures still seem to define a script of masculinity which legitimates violence. And it worries me that increasing numbers of women are buying guns in the name of self-protection and independence. ”

“Yes, there’s a kind of right-wing, ‘firearm feminism’ which justifies that,” Angela replied. “Overall, the feminist movement is becoming timid and acquiescent; it’s losing its transformative potential. The rising rates of domestic violence involving both women and children everywhere show that the traditional patriarchal family is in crisis. But the range of alternative ways of loving and co-existing seem to have shrunk, along with the networks of support that earlier feminism had created. Those feminists are older now and seem 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 isn’t the same social experimentation or cultural effervescence.”

Her words struck Sarah as coming from a very deep sense of disappointment, loneliness and loss. Sarah felt overwhelmed with pity. Perhaps Angela could be healed. Perhaps if they left England with all its associations and started a new life; if she could love Angela in a steady, selfless way she could grow back into the strong, whole woman Sarah had first been drawn to.

After Godfrey Evans’ murder Angela felt blank and frozen. She operated largely on a kind of “automatic pilot” going through the rituals of editing, walking the dogs, painting wildflowers, cooking nutritious meals for a strangely quiet Sarah. On Tuesday she visited Oxford and, on an impulse, went to the Ashmolean and asked to examine the Samuel Palmers and Ruskins stored in their basement. Sitting alone in the tomb-like silence of the print room, turning the folio pages with white gloves allowed a singular focus that obliterated the images of Godfrey Evans’ face. It was while examining a very delicate Ruskin water-colour of a kingfisher that she remembered how much she used to enjoy birdwatching with Geraldine.

Geraldine had spent five years living in Botswana on the edge of the Kalahari Desert and had described to Angela how the only colours in the natural world were those of the crimson-breasted shrike and the violet-eared waxbill — names which hardly captured the thrill of spotting either of these dramatic birds against the endless brown sands and stunted trees.

.

The next morning Angela rose early and went down to the basement to get her Zeiss binoculars. English birds were duller than those of Africa, but there was the chance of seeing the blue flash of the kingfisher which had inspired Ruskin in the little stream near their home. The binoculars lay outside their leather case, the caps protecting the lenses lay loose in the backpack. It took a while for Angela to grasp what this meant and then she shivered.

It was in a tender, gentle tone that Angela offered to wash her hair as Sarah lay in the bath that evening. In the first flush of their relationship they had often bathed together by candlelight, but now tender rituals such as mutual hair-washing 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 Geraldine.

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, had been 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 Geraldine 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  …

These images gave her the strength to do what came next. She carefully drained the bath of water, and with gloved hands 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. Doing so she felt grateful for the upper-arm strength all the hours of digging in their garden had given her.

On the drive to Spoonley Woods she passed no other cars and — apart from the night sounds of owls and badgers — the wood had been totally silent. She dug the soft, moist soil as deeply as she could and carefully buried Sarah’s naked body in it. She then changed her clothes, changed cars and drove Sarah’s car back to London and parked it near the bookshop where she worked. She 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 brought her back to Stow, and a final bus ride to Naunton. A flat, exhausted feeling helped her to cope with the anxious inquiries from Sarah’s boss, her mother and finally the police. To all of them she had emphasized Sarah’s even-temperedness, their plans to visit Devon at Easter, the order of their shared, domestic life

Now, sitting under a chestnut tree on the banks of the Wye River, Angela relaxed for the first time. Her overwhelming feeling was of closure. She thought of another desperate and destructive act that had been committed in the name of feminism — the slashing of the Velasquez Venus, a slash which had flawed the canvas irreparably. Angela identified with that flawed canvas. Now more than ever she felt contaminated. She could no longer live with herself.

Angela leaned against the tree trunk and opened her scrapbook. 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, had given her life a concrete and practical direction, at least before the rape. There was a postcard of the Velasquez Venus which reminded Angela of Geraldine’s delicately curved pale body, a photograph 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’s 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 Geraldine.

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 naked form, and her own body, torn, bloody and full of pain.

The pain would be over.

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