The Dalingridge Horror – a play by Alysse Aallyn

(Leonard & Virginia Woolf in the Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall)

VIRGINIA
If only I could trust you.

LEONARD
You can.

VIRGINIA
But these drugs turn my brain to cotton wool. There’s a pattern behind the cotton wool, if only I could find it. Did you know the Duckworths, that incestuous race, were cotton merchants? Coining money from the cotton wool that packs me now. If only I could fight back! But my will is so fragmented. My theory is that we all live so dishonestly, unconsciously, disconnected and detached. You are such a stranger! Everything about you is different. That must be why I married you.

LEONARD
Tell me everything, Virginia. Tell me what you fear, so we can kill it.

VIRGINIA
Where does one begin? Last night I looked in the mirror beneath a pitiless light and suddenly a dreadful animal face showed itself behind me. He bellowed, he stared, his nostrils flared. The pig’s snout broke the mirror until my thighs ached. How could one forget the thrusting of that ugly snout, the snout that meant starvation, pain and death? The purple foaming stain. Somehow it was all my fault. Roars of laughter at my expense. Dream or was it a memory? All that’s left is hopeless sadness. Being dragged down into a pit of absolute despair. Powerlessness. Paralysis. That’s what I remember.

LEONARD
Begin at the beginning.

VIRGINIA
The beginning is insomnia. I lie awake at night listening to a senile old man gasping, croaking vile indecencies. I thought it was Father, having a fit of the horrors. But the nurse said it was only a cat. Or perhaps the beginning was the whooping cough. I think I knew happiness before I became so ill. The grownups laughed with me, not at me. Whooping cough steals the breath – none of us could breathe. The atmosphere was tangled, matted with emotion. All the children came down with it, all of us gasping. Mother ran from bed to bed until her skin was paper thin and the bones stood out. I used to wonder if Mother had traded my life for hers, until I remembered she preferred the boys. Women serve, men are served.

LEONARD
But all of you recovered.

VIRGINIA
They threw me into a tank with Gerald, the alligator. Drowning. I knew I must not sink. Couldn’t get my head above the whirlpool.

LEONARD
Go on.

VIRGINIA
They covered the mirrors when Mother died. I was thirteen. Vanessa was sixteen, Thoby fifteen. Stella was twenty-five, quite grown up. George was twenty-seven, Gerald twenty-four. Adrian was twelve. No one told me what was happening. I was taken to her bed to say good bye but Mother seemed reproachful, so condemning and stern. She said, “Hold yourself straight, little Goat.”

LEONARD
Why were you called Goat?

VIRGINIA
I was Goat because I couldn’t control my purple rages. The others hated that he talked to me and gave me books. He didn’t allow Stella to read Cousine Bette but said it couldn’t harm me, because I had read Gibbons on the fall of Rome.

LEONARD
Did everyone have nicknames?

VIRGINIA
Adrian was Wombat, Nessa was the Saint. Thoby was the Goth because he fought. Mother advised self-control to everyone but Father. My mother had two characters, I think. Her real self, and the Angel in the House. Stifler and the life-giver. And to this day I have the oddest feeling that I’m two people, too.

LEONARD
Are you talking about the poet Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House?

VIRGINIA
Yes. Wasn’t she so popular? Singing, “Sacrifice. Sacrifice yourself.” I caught her by the throat and killed her. It was self-defense. I had to kill her or she would have killed me.

LEONARD
Your mother died of pneumonia, Virginia. Don’t feel guilty, Children are disgustingly violent, every one of them. It’s a wonder anyone lives to grow up. I’ve decided brute strength is the enemy of thought – that’s why bullies rule and why we must all be pacifists and abjure force, even though it goes against our natures. Tell me, was this “angel” thing why Nessa was called Saint?

VIRGINIA
No. That was because she was too proud to tell a lie. We hid from Father in the garden, and when he demanded, Didn’t we hear me calling? We all said No. Only Nessa said Yes. I told her she was an old fraud.

LEONARD
Goat is the worst name, I think.

VIRGINIA
No, that was Stella! She was the Cow, because she brought the milk.

LEONARD
These nicknames are strangely degrading.

VIRGINIA
I named myself Miss Jan. I so longed to be someone else. Laura was the worst of us but she was called Her Ladyship of the Lake.

LEONARD
How old was Laura and why on earth was she called that?

VIRGINIA
Laura was exactly Gerald’s age. But she was gone by the time mother died. Sent away, because she wouldn’t mind. Father said she was the Giver of the Sword because she forced him to punish her. Then she screamed so he had to punish her more. When Maitland was writing Father’s life he said that everything about Laura would have to be suppressed. Everyone hated Laura.

LEONARD
Why did you hate her?

VIRGINIA
Temper tantrums. We all had temper tantrums, but hers were worse. Father was still having them, but Mother could calm him.

LEONARD
So, Laura went to an asylum?

VIRGINIA
When I was ten. Until then she lived with a governess at the top of the house. At night, we heard her howling like an animal.

LEONARD
Did your parents ever say what exactly was the problem?

VIRGINIA
Mother said she was wicked. Father said she was perverse. Thoby thought she wouldn’t stop touching herself. I read all Father’s letters when I helped Maitland with his book. Father begged Mother to marry him to help with Laura.

LEONARD
But she couldn’t help, could she?

VIRGINIA
Abominable system, family life. It goes from ignorance and indifference to denial and contempt, open attack and ultimate destruction. None of it was Mother’s fault. She was always visiting the poor and making them clothes. I always thought the poor knew how to enjoy themselves better than we do, because we are cooped up, day after day while they walk out freely.

LEONARD
Did you ever visit Laura?

VIRGINIA
Once I went with Stella. Laura spoke only gibberish. The only comprehensible sentence was, “I told him to go away.” I couldn’t go back because that was where I saw the deformed men.

LEONARD
I don’t understand why Stella was The Cow. Wasn’t she a young, beautiful girl?

VIRGINIA
I thought her lovelier than Mother. She was so pale, so white, she looked like cow parsley by moonlight. I don’t think Mother loved her, really. She was Mother’s loyal handmaid. Stella taught us our letters. She was supposed to look after Father when Mother was gone, and Mother was absent a lot.

LEONARD
Where did your mother go?

VIRGINIA
Nursing the sick. Mother loved nursing the sick, she said they were easier than the well. She seemed always so far away, in her mind. When we spoke to her she looked through us as if she didn’t see us. While Mother was gone, Stella stood in for her.

LEONARD
Didn’t Stella have a life of her own?

VIRGINIA
She turned down proposals, I know that. Mother didn’t want her to marry. Cousin Jem was obsessed with her – we children were frightened of him.

LEONARD
Cousin Jem? Wasn’t he the mad cousin?

VIRGINIA
Yes, but before he was locked up, he conceived a passion for Stella. He would run into the house, shouting, while Stella fled up the front stairs. He pursued her, bellowing, right to the nursery where he speared our toast on his swordstick. I thought he looked like a tormented bull. Father said to tell him Stella wasn’t home, but Mother said she could never bar her door to Jem. She said she loved him and he needed us because he was banned from all his clubs. Once he abducted me and Mother.

LEONARD
He abducted you?

VIRGINIA
Yes, funny, I’d forgotten it till just this moment. I suppose that’s how memory works. He took us to his rooms because he wanted me to pose for him. Mother didn’t want to go, but she couldn’t stop him. As he painted, he declaimed his own poetry:

“if all the harm that were done by men
were doubled and doubled and doubled again
squared and raised to the power of ten
there wouldn’t be nearly enough, not near
to keep a small girl for a tenth of a year.”

LEONARD
And you were a small girl.

VIRGINIA
I was. The smallest. I never saw the picture.

LEONARD
How did you get away?

VIRGINIA
Did I get away? I don’t remember. I always stammered when I told him Stella wasn’t home so he knew I was lying. When he grabbed me by the collar I thought of the Ripper Man who had been in all the papers. This is what they must have felt, those women, when they were grabbed by Ripper Man. I’m afraid I wet myself and Nurse was angry. She punished everything I did, but I never listened to her. Nurse claimed all emotions like fear, dread, disgust – come from desiring the wrong food or not moving one’s bowels. Children must accept whatever’s given. If you show a preference, then that’s the very thing you’re not allowed to have. It’s as bad for a girl to cry for what she wants as for a boy to land a blow. Yet we did both, because Nurse was nobody.

LEONARD
Cousin Jem was taken away to the madhouse. That was a good thing, surely.

VIRGINIA
Where he starved himself to death, and that’s what I shall do if ever you lock me up in one of those places.

LEONARD
Go back to your mother’s death.

VIRGINIA
I didn’t know what had happened until I saw the nurses crying. I thought they were pretending and we should laugh at them but everyone pulled a face. I went to kiss Mother but she was cold as iron. I never touch iron without thinking of her. Father caromed off people and walls, seeking anyone to wail against. It was like being shut up in a cage with a wild beast.

LEONARD
My family was rigidly quiet when my father died. Stiff upper lip, get on with it, try harder, everyone must buckle down. That sort of thing.

VIRGINIA
A family is a conspiracy, driven by uncontrollable lusts. I saw a man sitting with mother’s corpse but the others saw no one there. We became unmoored, entering a time of hopeless suspense, muddle, mismanagement, battling the stupidity of those in power. It was as if a finger had been laid upon our lips, sentencing us to a sultry, opaque miasma that choked us and blinded us. Father shouted at Stella if she didn’t stock his writing paper or ordered too much fish. I knew it really was because she couldn’t tell him he was a first-rate writer, as mother always did. Stella had no mind and nobody respected her. Poor father was haunted by fears that he only had a third-class mind.

LEONARD
And did he, do you think?

VIRGINIA
His ego crippled him. Self-assertion is so loathsome. Father began writing The Mausoleum Book. About death. He wailed from the top of the stairs, “We perished, each alone.” Nothing is to be dreaded so much as egotism. Stella tried her best to rescue us. I wasn’t kind to her because she dragged me to the dentist and ordered all my clothes. I couldn’t bear standing for inspection while being stuck with pins. She was made me wear stays for the first time. Then Stella fell in love.

LEONARD
With Jack Waller Hills. Did you like him?

VIRGINIA
I did then, but I realized later he was a terrible old Fascist. He used to say, “the weak are wrongdoers who foul the nets.” I know he meant me, that I was a weak wrongdoer. In the end, he was a typical man who liked to have his way. He always put his great hoof down. But at first, he seemed the only truth-teller we had ever met. I was thirsty for knowledge, and he knew things. He taught me how to sugar trees for moths, how to collect and mount butterflies, how to take pride in killing beautiful things. He told me everything about sex, about “street love”, common love, why it is that women can never walk alone. I was so shocked. I asked, What about honor? He said men never think of honor, that they had women constantly, so all their talk of purity is nonsense. Every man has his whore. Every woman except the cheap ones must be locked up tight. Yet they call women fallen! Men are the whores. It makes no sense to me.

LEONARD
It does sound mad.

VIRGINIA
The night Jack proposed a tramp broken into the garden. Thoby threatened him, shouting at him to go away. We were always frightened of tramps – it seemed they could get in anywhere. I was afraid one had invaded the house and was lurking and leering, waiting to pounce. But it was only Jack. When Father found out about the engagement he tried to stop the wedding but Stella had her own money so he could do nothing. He postponed the wedding until Stella agreed to buy the house next door so that she could still take care of him. During all this Nessa and I were forced to chaperone. You can’t think how awful it is to sit between a couple whispering and trying to touch. I was so angry at Stella I broke my umbrella in half.

LEONARD
Child chaperones? Whatever will they think of next?

VIRGINIA
I know! I often think I’m the only one who isn’t crazy! Stella and Jack convinced the aunts that Nessa and I could accompany them properly to Bognor but immediately we got there they sent us two out into the rain so they could be alone. We were soaked to the skin!

LEONARD
Was there no one who could speak for you?

VIRGINIA
The old aunts were the worst of the lot. They curdled our brains with their falsehoods and their pieties. The wedding was the most horrible ordeal. Nessa and I resolved to be Stoic and show no emotion, as if it were nothing touching us. If ever you show feelings you are treated like a beast at the zoo and will never escape the cage. Thus we were buried beneath obligations, under torrents of uncomfortable clothes, awkward visits and unspeakable rituals. I think we are to be congratulated, you and I, that we sidestepped that whole mess so neatly.

LEONARD
Yes, the registry office is so much better. It’s over so fast. But after the wedding?

VIRGINIA
The happy couple went to Italy, and we were left alone with Father. He was awful to Nessa, how I hated him! He shouted at her as he’d shouted at Stella. But Nessa stood up to him, she was a rock, she didn’t care. That’s when she summoned up her supreme indifference. It’s the bane of all who love her.

LEONARD
But Vanessa had no money of her own.

VIRGINIA
No. If Stella hadn’t given us allowances we would have had to beg Father for every penny. And then Stella and Jack came home early because Stella was ill.

LEONARD
What was wrong with her?

VIRGINIA
Violet Dickinson told me Jack must have hurt her with his violent lovemaking. That he broke her somehow. But Violet was just a spinster, so what could she possibly know? The doctors called it appendicitis but you know what cretins they turned out to be. They couldn’t operate because of the baby – she was pregnant, of course. On the night she died, I was sleeping in her new house – in her dressing room in fact –

LEONARD
You were sleeping in Stella’s dressing room?

VIRGINIA
Yes, I’d been so ill, you see. I always got ill when people went away. But Stella was dying so they sent George to fetch me. George the over-fed pug dog, fat as a louse, beady-eyed as a rat. He wrapped me in Stella’s fur cape and carried me back to Father’s house.

LEONARD
And then?

VIRGINIA
Stella died and Jack was left bereaved. Now we had two widowers wailing. The men in our family hardly waited for the bodies to be buried before turning to their next victim. I remember Jack holding my wrist on one side so tightly he left bruises, and George holding me on the other side. I was trapped, you see, I couldn’t get away. George won so Jack settled on Nessa. They actually wanted to marry! I couldn’t believe it. I told Nessa, you can’t be serious! She said, “So you’re against me too,” and gave me a look that broke my heart. But she knew they couldn’t marry because of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Act.

LEONARD
They could have married in France.

VIRGINIA
That’s what they say about everything, that “the French get away with it.” Luckily it all blew over because Nessa was granted a place at the Slade. Then I was quite alone. George pounced immediately and began ordering clothes and jewels to release me into society. I was the sacrificial offering to his violent gusts of passion and his mean little piggy brain.

LEONARD

And then?

VIRGINIA

And then Father began to die and I went mad a little. After he died, I went mad a lot.

LEONARD

Well, it isn’t any wonder, from what I’ve heard. If you are mad then so am I.

VIRGINIA
You can’t think how long I’ve waited for those words!

(she reaches out a hand to him – he clutches it and kisses it)

LEONARD

Dearest! You will always be my only love!

(they gaze at each other, both trembling with pent-up emotion)

VIRGINIA
But darling, if Dr. Craig consigns me to deepest darkness you will have to marry someone else. You can’t waste your life waiting for me.

LEONARD
That won’t happen. Craig says our future’s what we make of it.

VIRGINIA
Oh, honey mongoose! Let’s make a pact right now to rise above the nay-sayers. You have given me all the best things I have ever had in life, rescued me from the cliff edge again and again. You have been absolutely perfect to me, and I have been disgraceful to you. You work so hard and I do nothing. It’s all my fault. I was mad and angry before I met you and I am madder and angrier right now. I want you to know that I do want to cuddle you but I don’t know how to show it. In spite of my vilest imaginings I’ve always known that I love you and that you love me.

(he leans his face towards her, she awkwardly moves closer and they kiss delicately)

LEONARD
Virginia, I promise not to ever push you any farther than you want to go.

VIRGINIA
Oh honey! And I promise to follow all your rules; early bed, milk for breakfast; just so long as I can always read and write.

(they embrace)

LEONARD

If ever you cease writing I shall divorce you immediately.

VIRGINIA

(laughing awkwardly as if she has forgotten how)

It’s a bargain. Oh, darling, shall we really have our own press and print all our own work?

LEONARD
Yes, and some of your friends if they are good enough. You decide.

VIRGINIA

And can I have a bulldog, too? I’ve always wanted a bulldog pup.

LEONARD

Certainly, my pet.

VIRGINIA

And can we live in London? A new house all our own?

LEONARD

Not London but perhaps some leafy suburb.

VIRGINIA

Leonard! Suburbs!

LEONARD

Think of the bulldog, Virginia. He must have a healthful life.

VIRGINIA

You’re right of course, Leonard. You are always right.

LEONARD

Bulldogs need a place to roam.

VIRGINIA

Fresh air and food. Lots of good red steak.

LEONARD

May I order dinner now, Virginia? Surely, it’s time.

VIRGINIA
Yes, Leonard.

(She clutches his hand fiercely while with his other he rings the bell) CURTAIN – END