To the River Read online

  Spring was giving way to summer. I’d decided to leave the city on the solstice, the hinge point of the year when light is at its peak. The superstitions about the day appealed to me: it’s when the wall between worlds is said to grow thin, and it’s no coincidence that Shakespeare set his topsy-turvy dream on Midsummer Eve, for on the year’s briefest night magic and misrule have always held sway. England is at her most beautiful in the month of June, and in the days before I left I began to feel almost maddened by my desire to get out into the flowering fields and enter the cool, steady river.

  My flat began to fill up with anxious lists. I purchased a rucksack, and a pair of lightweight trousers with blossom printed jauntily along the waist. My mother sent me a pair of sandals of unparalleled hideousness that she swore – falsely, as it turned out – were designed to prevent blisters. I spent a pleasant afternoon booking rooms in pubs along the route, including the White Hart in Lewes, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought Monks House at auction and then, in the excitement of the moment, had a brief and violent fight. I also bought a vast quantity of oatcakes and a large slab of cheese. I might lack variety, but I wouldn’t starve.

  In all this time I’d barely spoken to Matthew, and the night before I left, I did a forbidden thing. I rang him and at some point in the tangled, recriminatory conversation that followed I began to weep and found I couldn’t stop. It was, though I didn’t know it then, the nadir, the lowest point of that dismal spring. The next day was the solstice; after that, though the days began to shorten, something in me started to lighten and lift.

  II

  AT THE SOURCE

  THE SWIFTS WERE THERE WHEN I woke, rising as if from deep water, rinsed clean by sleep for the first time in months. The swifts were there, and a fox in the car park of the hospital, a scrawny, mottled orange-grey fox, who sat and scratched in the sun and then slunk back into the shadows of the old incinerator. It was 21 June, the longest day of the year, the sky screened by fine cloud, the sea swaddled in mist. My pack was ready at the bottom of the bed, stuffed with neat layers of clothes and maps, the side pockets bulging with bottles of suntan lotion and water, a battered copy of The Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe and a rusty Opinel that no longer locked.

  I sang as I made the coffee. I felt almost weightless after last night’s tears, as if they’d dissolved a burden that had hobbled me for months. That afternoon I planned to walk from Slaugham to where the Ouse began, in a little clay ditch that ran at the foot of a hawthorn hedge. And from there I’d take a long curve south by south-east, crossing and recrossing the stream day by day until I reached Isfield, where the path and the river ran as one through the low chalk valley that led to the sea. A week would do it, I reckoned, with plenty of time for detours on the way.

  The night before, I’d spread three Ordnance Survey maps across the floor and drawn a skittering Biro line along the route I thought I’d take, patching together footpaths and lanes to get as close to the water as I could. But no matter how much I deviated from the official Ouse Way, which seemed positively hydrophobic at its start, for the first three days I’d see water only in glimpses. There are no automatic rights to roam riverbanks and much of the land the Ouse coils through is private, strung with the barbed wire and Keep Out signs by which England’s old divisions are maintained.

  I got the same train I used to catch to work, the Bedford service, which inches in and out of London, hiccuping to a halt at each of the little country stations. Haywards Heath would be the best bet, I reckoned. From there I’d take a cab to Slaugham, where I could leave my bag at the Chequers and search for the water unencumbered. I leant my head against the grubby window, drinking in the light. The line was trimmed with a ribbon of wasteground, full of the everyday plants the eye elides: brick-pink valerian, rosebay willowherb, elder, bindweed and marguerites. Outside Hassocks I caught the yellow flare of evening primrose. When it’s hot, you often see a fox coiled here, a rust-spot amid the metallic glint of poppies. Today nothing stirred but the wood pigeons, clapping their wings and calling out their five syllables over and again.

  The Chequers was a pretty white pub on the edge of the village green. Inside, it was deserted and stupefyingly hot. A Polish girl showed me to my room, pointing out the fire escape where I could gain access after hours. I flung my bag on the bed and went into the fields empty-handed, my pockets weighed down with maps. The air seemed to have set like jelly, quivering as I pressed against it. I climbed south between paddocks of horses, past empty, secretive gardens littered with abandoned tricycles and trampolines. By the time I reached Warninglid Lane the sun was the highest it would be all year and there were circles of sweat staining my T-shirt. As I came out from under the pines, the heat hit me smartly across the face. There was a rabbit by the verge, its guts unslung and draped across the road, the dark beads of excrement still visible beneath the puckered skin.

  I’d looked at this square of the High Weald on maps for months, tracing the blue lines as they tangled through the hedges, plaiting eastward into a wavering stream. I thought I knew exactly where the water started, but I had not bargained for the summer’s swift uprush of growth. At the edge of the field there was a hawthorn hedge and beside it, where I thought the stream would be, was a waist-high wall of nettles and hemlock water dropwort, its poisonous white umbels tilted to the sky. It was impossible to tell whether water was flowing or whether the ditch was dry, its moisture sucked into the drunken green. I hovered for a minute, havering. It was Sunday, hardly a car passing. Unless they were watching with binoculars from Eastlands Farm there was no one to see me slip illegally across the field to where the river was marked to start. To hell with it, I thought, and ducked beneath the fence.

  The choked ditch led to a copse of hazel and stunted oak. Here the trees had shaded out the nettles and the stream could be seen, a brown whisper, hoof-stippled, that petered out at the wood’s far edge. There was no spring. The water didn’t bubble from the ground, rust-tinted, as I have seen it do at Balcombe, ten miles east of here. The source sounded a grand name for this clammy runnel, carrying the runoff from the last field before the catchment shifted towards the Adur. It was nothing more than the furthest tributary from the river’s end, its longest arm, a half-arbitrary way of mapping what is a constant movement of water through air and earth and sea.

  It’s not always possible to plot where something starts. If I went down on my knees amid the fallen leaves, I would not find the exact spot where the Ouse began, where a trickle of rain gathered sufficient momentum to make it to the coast. This muddy, muddled birth seemed pleasingly appropriate considering the origins of the river’s name. There are many Ouses in England, and consequently much debate about the meaning of the word. The source is generally supposed to be usa, the Celtic word for water, but I favoured the argument, this being a region of Anglo-Saxon settlement, that here it was drawn from the Saxon word wase, from which derives also our word ooze, meaning soft mud or slime; earth so wet as to flow gently. Listen: ooooze. It trickles along almost silently, sucking at your shoes. An ooze is a marsh or swampy ground, and to ooze is to dribble or slither. I liked the slippery way it caught at both earth’s facility for holding water and water’s knack for working through soil: a flexive, doubling word. You could hear the river in it, oooozing up through the Weald and snaking its way down valleys to where it once formed a lethal marsh.

  On Valentine’s Day, before things began to go awry, Matthew gave me a map he’d made of the Ouse. He’d photocopied all the relevant OS Explorers in Huddersfield Library and then, in his obsessive way, had calculated the extent of the drainage basin, cutting the sheets along the wavering line of the watershed. Each tributary had been coloured with marker pen, orange for the Bevern, pink for the Iron River, green for the Longford and the misfit Glynde Reach. I stuck the parts together with Sellotape and for months it was tacked to my wall: 233 square miles of land the shape of a collapsed lung. By April the sun had bleached the colours away, and at some
point that spring I took it down and slid it to the bottom of the papers that lined my desk.

  I thought of it then, as I stood in the wood. On the map, the ditch had been coloured blue. It meant nothing in itself: a place where deer drink, a channel cleared centuries before to stop the field from flooding. A leaf drifted down and floated slowly east. I couldn’t remember when it had last rained, when this water might have gathered, seeping steadily through the grasses until it trickled here. The average residence time of a single water molecule in a river this size is a matter of weeks, though this depends on currents, rains and a dozen other vagaries. If instead it infiltrates the soil, becoming groundwater, it may linger for centuries or, if it’s sunk deep enough, hundreds of thousands of years. Isotope hydrology suggests that the trapped fossil water in some of the world’s largest confined aquifers is over a million years old. These aquifers often underlie deserts, and it is strange to think that buried beneath the Kalahari, the Sahara and mile after mile of the arid centre of Australia are vast vaults of ancient water, stored in rock or silt. In comparison, this ditchwater at the river’s head was brand new, freshly fallen from the sky. Much of it would be wicked up by the sun before it reached Slaugham Mill Pond, where it could circle with the carp for fifty years before rushing south to rejoin the sea, a thousand tonnes a minute.

  The stream was barely shifting now and it was hard to believe it could change its nature so entirely. There was a stinking pond at the edge of the trees, and a tractor waiting for the morning’s work. The oats had yet to ripen and everything stood very still. I could hear the faintest trickle of water pattering past roots and tiny stones, and as I waited there I remembered a stray line from a poem by Seamus Heaney, part of the vast disordered library of river literature. It was about dowsing, and it seemed to catch something of water’s strangeness: ‘suddenly broadcasting through a green aerial its secret stations’. It might have been the thought of fossil water that had nudged it into my mind, for I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that the planet contains hidden lakes and rivers as well as those that run open to the sky; the sort of concealed richness that Auden was thinking of when he wrote ‘In Praise of Limestone’, which ends:

  Dear, I know nothing of

  Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love

  Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur

  Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

  In Heaney’s poem, water announces its presence with a pluck that jerks the forked hazel rod uncontrollably. The act seems wholly magical and so it is perhaps unsurprising that dowsing – water witching as it is known in America – has performed poorly in scientific trials, proving no better than mere chance at finding the conduits through which water passes beneath rock and soil. Be that as it may, humans by necessity must once, like all animals, have been attuned to the dark frequency by which water travels. No doubt this sensitivity has grown vestigial now, or become gummed up by car horns and the repetitive trilling of mobile phones, and yet there have been many times when, out walking in a wood, I have found myself drawn by chance or instinct to a pool or stream I didn’t know existed.

  I squatted beside one of the stripling oaks, crushing a fresh holly leaf into my knee. I was feeling uneasy, and the sense of trespass in the little copse had become overwhelming. The sources of rivers are often freighted with taboos, and for all their eerie beauty they do not seem, at least according to the records of mythology, wise places for humans to tarry. The seer Tiresias is said to have been blinded when he saw the goddess Athena bathing in a spring on Helikon Mountain, and his gift for prophecy came as recompense for the punishing loss of his sight.

  According to the poet Callimachus the encounter happened in midsummer – a day like today – when Athena and the nymph Khariklo, Tiresias’s mother, were lying together in the creek. It was high noon, that still moment when the world is stunned by heat. Only Tiresias remained on the hill, hunting for deer with his dogs. He’d grown thirsty in the sun and he climbed down to the stream for water, not knowing it was occupied. Athena saw him pushing through the trees and she blinded him instantly, for it is forbidden to see a goddess undressed, even one who regularly bathes with your mother. Helikon, I shall not walk on you again, cried the nymph Khariklo. Your price is too high: my son’s eyes for a few stags. And so Athena cleaned the boy’s ears to make amends, that he could hear what the birds said, and tell it to the Boietians and to the mighty descendants of Labdakos. It was a harsh price to pay, though better, as Athena pointed out, than the fate that befell the hunter Actaeon, who was torn apart by his own dogs for seeing Artemis bathing, so that his mother had to collect his scattered bones from among the briars and brambles.

  It would have to be a diminutive goddess to bathe at the Ouse’s source, and yet the stream no longer seemed a benign place to be. The sense of trespass stayed with me as I looped back to Slaugham, through a private lane that led past a barn in which there hung a motionless trapeze. The path climbed up through a field of horses in medieval jousting masks and into a meadow of bent, brome and Yorkshire fog, full of bees out milling the clover. The pink and tawny grasses dipped and swayed, and above them the bees moved singly, humming as they passed until the air was full of sound.

  This was better. I lay down in the sun and curled my legs beneath me. The noise was very lulling, and as my eyes began to close I remembered with the intensity of a dream an afternoon I’d once spent sprawled face down on a dirt bank in Scotland, watching bees entering and leaving a network of tiny caves that they’d cut into the earth like troglodytes. There were so many bees coming and going that the whole hillside seemed to struggle in the hot pine-scented air, agitating over and over itself. There must have been far more beneath the ground, and from each of the holes rose the sound of their wings: a distant, atonal hum, as if the soil had bedded down and was singing to itself.

  Leonard Woolf used to keep bees. He had a hive at Monks House, the cottage in Rodmell that the Woolfs bought soon after the end of the FirstWorldWar, and the occasion of their swarming provoked a strangely sexy entry in Virginia’s diary:

  Sitting after lunch we heard them outside, & on Sunday there they were again hanging in a quivering shiny brown black purse to Mrs Thompsett’s tombstone. We leapt about in the long grass of the graves, Percy all dressed up in mackintosh, & netted hat. Bees shoot whizz, like arrows of desire: fierce, sexual; weave cat’s cradles in the air; each whizzing from a string; the whole air full of vibration: of beauty, of the burning arrowy desire; & speed: I still think the quivering shifting bee bag the most sexual and sensual symbol.

  A few sentences later, still intoxicated by the image, she describes an ugly woman at a party, adding, ‘Why bees should swarm round her, I cant say.’

  It seems a very complete Woolf that emerges from this episode: sensuous, exact, perhaps herself more wasp than bee, but nonetheless as attuned to nature as she is to artifice, and keen above all to get to the bottom of things, to find the exact word to pin down a sensation or sight she’s apprehended in the world. The diaries, it is true, are more shaggy, more luxuriant than the novels, and there is a stronger sense of a writer at play, practising her craft. But the polymorphous sexuality evident in this episode is entirely characteristic, and offers an appealing counter to the Virginia of the popular imagination, who might as well be made of glass.

  One of the myths perpetuated about Virginia Woolf is that she was, as her name suggests, sexually unreachable: Patience on a monument, a woman constructed of alabaster and a fizzing brain. Certainly it is true that she told Leonard before the two were married, back in 1912, that she felt no physical attraction for him. But their courtship had its own charge and was, pleasingly enough, full of water, not all of it of the conventionally romantic kind. They went on a date to the Titanic inquest, had an initial kiss by the English Channel at Eastbourne and, on the afternoon when Virginia first declared her love, took a boat trip up the Thames at Maidenhead. A photograph taken at the
time shows her looking both nervy and tough; it is a distinct improvement on the emaciated portrait in which she sits beside the poet Rupert Brooke, who looks like a plump Apollo – and also bears a distinct resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio – in comparison to the chicken-bone girl squinting at his side.

  Leonard and Virginia spent their first weekend together in Sussex, in the hills that overlook the Ouse, which passes in that region between the Downs at the base of a broad marshy valley, its final territory before the sea. Wandering through the green rolling fields, they came upon Asham, the house in which they would soon begin almost three decades of marriage. At the time of their wedding, both were in their thirties; both on the verge of completing their first novel. Leonard was Jewish, kindly, intense, his brilliance combined with a cold practicality that even then set him slightly outside the chatter of the Bloomsbury set. He had recently returned from Ceylon, where he had been working as an administrator under the auspices of the Colonial Civil Service. His father was dead, and he was afflicted despite his admirable strength of mind with a tremor of the hands that in times of stress he was helpless to control.

  As for Virginia, she was an orphan. Her mother had died when she was still a child, and in 1902 her irascible father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the mountaineer and critic, was diagnosed with the bowel cancer that would kill him two years later. In the wake of each of these bereavements Virginia’s mental health became unstable and she suffered the breakdowns that would, in the years after her death, come to define her. But she emerged from her madness determined to work; to write, and in this she was successful.

  These two people, then, formed an alliance that cannot really be described as conventional. The marriage was consummated, but the sexual side never exactly took off and was soon abandoned. Virginia had a third breakdown just over a year after the wedding, and attempted suicide by overdosing on the sedative veronal before returning to a fragile equilibrium. Leonard took on at least sporadically the role of nursemaid and sometimes jailer, insisting on a programme of regular meals, early nights and limited excitements in order to keep his wife from toppling towards insanity again. But it should not be thought that Virginia was a vapid, vacant invalid, disconnected from the world in which she lived. She possessed throughout her life a glittering charm, much commented on by friends and enemies alike, as well as an acute sense of the ridiculous that made her almost incapable of self-pity.