Two Seasons

By J.D. Engle

A moving tribute to Virginia Woolf's classic novel To the Lighthouse, J.D. Engle’s Two Seasons continues the story of the intriguing artist Lily Briscoe, while standing on its own as a warmly involving work of fiction.

In the autumn five years after the 1927 novel's triumphant end, the now married Lily Ramsay brings family and friends together at what is essentially a farewell dinner for her terminally ill husband. Five years later, spring finds us at the Ramsay Hebrides house of the earlier novel for the wedding of daughter Rose. Celebrated as a successful artist, yet reserved and only comfortable on the margins of social settings, Lily deals with the tensions ignited by her calmer but still difficult husband and the lingering resentments of his children.

True to Woolf's theme of a senseless world temporarily leant meaningful order by artistic creation and warm human relations, J.D. Engle’s Two Seasons is the quietly riveting story of a remarkable family and of a strong female character struggling against her nature to ally these essential forces.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Jul 25, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662926648

Book preview

I

Autumn

1

Of course, she will come, said Lily Ramsay, gently settling the quilt across her husband’s legs. The sun was thin and all he’d wanted was soup. She took the bowl, its contents barely touched, small islets of poultry in a shabby beige no longer glistening with heat. Except Paris Nancy and Jasper with his children and quiet wife, they’d all piled upstairs, then shot to and from the house teasing and railing as she remembered the children they were, her standing out of the way and painting. The letter’s spidery few lines attesting to a timetable, Roger was soon off to fetch Nancy at the Victoria mail.

But her concerns are always, always other, Mr. Ramsay halted, jaw set and eyes flaring an instant the pure blue of sailing days. He stared ahead in a fierce attitude of reflection that had once unnerved students and sent the children scurrying. Then, features slumping, eyelids dropped slowly in the dipping large, heroic head.

Mrs. McGrath turned with the porringer and Lily sat beside her husband, increasingly drained, it seemed, each morning yet on occasion able to rally later in the day. He was asleep in the bergère, fatigued by the attentions and coming and going. With her they had been civil Friday and today, with their pink cheeks and taxis and admirable trim luggage, excepting the odd crate of Roger, all torn continental labels and spilled, ill-fitting edges. The window seat took the frail light, and above the contest of warmth and cold glazed the panes with fine emulsions of fog. A dozen little frames though nothing interesting to catch the eye. Content in the coming distraction of grocers and cheesemongers, she should have to accompany Cook for the last of the provisions. She signalled silently. Perhaps Rose, who’d come back with the papers and was now in her room, could descend, sit with her father, and read?

Already in her wools and hat in hand, Mrs. McGrath nodded and turned to the stairs. Lily eased to her feet and sought her things. He’ll awaken and want tea and, she hoped, vaunt the revivifying quality of a nap. Lily gently tugged the tasselled edge of the faded plaid comforter and tucked it to. The Tansley visit this afternoon she’d wished for Andrew, as she liked to think of him (but would never say in public), imagining him again strong and vigorous, with meagre Charles Tansley once more to vanquish. But he and his wan wife, Lois, Gladys, something common, had come from Liverpool Friday direct after class week. That was hardly convenient for them, and she knew she should be kinder. It was kind of Charles and of the children to drop everything and come. She would not speak of the holidays, no one would, six weeks now and perhaps (no, certainly, she corrected herself) too far off.

Rose was prompt. Dishevelled but always fetching and mysterious, she held in each hand a scrap of fabric, burnished orange velvet and a loose bolt, perhaps silk, of trailing ice blue. The sewing bag borne under her elbow spilled over in its abundance of spools and pins. Of course, I will sit until Father wakes, Rose said, her voice mild, nearly cordial, as she turned her regard quickly from Mrs. McGrath, whom she had solely addressed, to settle with her things in the settee.

2

Through the fogged whizzing windscreen, Nancy watched Piccadilly shop fronts, familiar and strange, then turned to Roger who’d insisted on paying the hackney. Even with the trimly raked hair surprising her at the station, he was still lively, more the wild Indian she’d always known than the dull Sussex solicitor she feared he’d become. There was talk of being able now to leave the bedsit for finer rooms, but soon more of the old larking as he made her go on about Paris and pulled faces asking and asking again about les Parisiennes and the flirt who lived en face met during his visit. Though she’d always returned Roger’s volleys and more, she felt more imposing presently than the little form, frightened and unsure of her French, reflected two years earlier in the eyes of the family who’d collected her at the Gare du Nord. Now he was teasing, was she ready, would the pater approve of her dissolute ways, would dear Madame wish to take her aside and exchange fond memories of Gaul? Memory flared, Libby in their other code and the pact to resist, at first whispered in upstairs bedrooms and down the hall outside the sitting room, and still in the quiet vagueness of her manner marshalled most acutely by Rose. It was childish they might admit if queried separately, but memory and loss were a firm buttress.

J’espère que non, au moins pour la deuxième. She smiled. The language came flowingly, and pride before Roger’s arched eyebrows. She had changed, with clerks and shopkeepers twice her age now attending to her corrections, lingering after class sessions, marking notes in their cahiers, and there were, she dared think, her own cahier markings these last months. The taxi slowed abruptly to raised hands and activity ahead. As she craned, gesticulations marked a long pause, followed by an elderly gentleman wavering into view, a uniformed man supporting him, a policeman or perhaps a soldier. The driver said something indistinguishable. Father, she thought, were matters urgent as they might seem, the message itself anodyne but less so the fact of a telegram delivered by a young man a rare brilliant, sunny morning shuffling through his bag and requiring a signature as her mind raced. The journey had been arranged in a trice, faster and more practicable than most things in France, Mme Lucienne gracious and the Parkers welcoming and kind in their trim Canterbury cottage. Dining, refreshed after the ferry and train, she asked what intelligence they had from London. Very little in point of fact, for Arthur, as she’d finally learned after struggle and repeated lapses to address him, now retired, saw few colleagues in his infrequent collection of mail at the university. They were certain, however, concerning a stay in hospital. No one, not even Cam, had seen fit to reveal the fact in the thin letters, more these last months, finding their way to rue Descartes, nor had Roger in the minutes since the station as, the interruption passed, they once again danced along past what was left of the park.

Nancers, anyone home? She turned to her brother and the raillery fell away. He shifted in the seat and adjusted his trousers. Is he ill?, she asked, knowing well the response and silent as Roger said he thought so, surely, then set about propping up the straw man of infirmity against the old fellow’s tough as nails refusal to yield to a paltry something like malady. He’d chosen the law, it seemed of his own will, and with it the battle for an incontrovertible verdict, but Roger was at heart the optimist who’d fish with young Macalister well into the light-starved evening, the promise of each last cast worth even the risk of a late appearance at dinner. Now unsure if she wanted the cab to dash forward or dawdle again for more hubbub in the street, she sat quietly and Roger obliged with silence.

She wished it ardently, but knew, even with her Continental family, Mother would have failed to defend her, counselling instead kindness and contending in her lovely wordless way that to yield was a woman’s finest strength. She could not think of him weak now but rather how he had not so much wished her to marry as wanted his will respected, once wrested from his work and focused like the Curie ray on the subject at hand. Harold was inarguably of good family, as God knows Father knew to his bones, the boy’s celebrated lineage so much a part of the affair. He was inoffensive, even gentle. Leaving only with her penned and repenned letter as justification was cowardly one minute, courageous the next. In the months to follow, in the filth and beauty of Paris and tumult of crowded cafes, he would recede in memory to a photograph left in an armoire, a boy in Oxford robes holding the same thin smile forever.

Through eruption succeeded by silence Father showed his displeasure. Mousey with that tight little face, she had said little in the days of revolt before the departure, but had mounted to her room the final morning with an ancient Baedeker, nib-marked, a treasure certainly, and a small sheaf of addresses. In the whispered "Bon courage, Nancy and embrace that followed, arms lay flat to her sides before, irresistibly (she was a well-bred young lady) returning a brief clasp. Turning flustered to her gathered things beside the valise, she could hear the quiet footsteps and door softly pulled to. Whether Nancy had responded she assumed but could not recall. Now the room lay ahead, the taxi gathering speed towards a past which, alternately, loomed and withdrew to a distant speck on the bitume. Shall we put on a cheery face?, she asked, wheeling to Roger. Have we a choice?," he replied, with a grave and comic adjustment of his hat.

3

Cook was quiet and purposeful, leading from merchant to merchant, adding to the delivery accounts as Lily followed, useful enough she hoped with her occasional counsel and small wheeled basket. There was not the expanse and grandeur of before the war but with her husband’s visitors, the children and their friends, the old London house was more than a match for Mrs. McGrath and the daily. Caring for her ailing father, lending him an arm and laying two quiet bowls across the old table, yes, but herself a woman with the responsibilities of such a household she could still barely conceive. Much, she’d thought and now recognized with something approaching certainty, depends on distance. The icy appraising eye distant and alone with the subject she had long cultivated. Now she was learning, had (she believed) learned to a degree, the hurly-burly of the personal and the unnerving warmth of another’s appraising eye. Completeness was a thing one could trust one had in oneself, pity others for lacking as she did her remembered friend, then the next moment find oneself windswept and solitary, a creature of yearning. The childhood drawing trick, the roughly traced box endlessly inverting by magic before one’s eyes. As she trailed a hand across the produce palping and taking pleasure in the delicate asperities, shades of bistre became a far sweep of dusty Moroccan crags, then abruptly resolved to the swollen umber distortions of bacteria under the microscope. A sack of these dirty Dutch potatoes would surely find its way hoisted to Bayley Street and up the back stoop by the grocer.

Return before Nancy’s arrival was preferable. She’d intended a report as spare and guileless as possible, and thought again of the wording, its presentation after the simple announcement of a telegram arrival this morning, a Mr. Hanlon in Paris, a precise hour and minute, and the injunction to respond while, please, taking into account hours of business operation. All would sort itself out as Nancy received her waiting message and completed the instructions. As a girl she had exceptional school certificate results, but what now came more to mind was the utter regularity of the letters to Rose and Cam and the snatches of poised, rhythmic language overheard when walking past a door ajar, the accompaniment on one remembered occasion of gales of laughter and on another Cam’s rapt silence. One could not but suspect that her writing had taken on a more formal aspect. She felt a breath of kinship for the young girl, especially a young girl perhaps with a secret, hers to be cultivated or shared as she wished, and the ache, a yearning for youth itself, the age of the possible. She consulted her timepiece. Even with the brief detour, she would arrive largely on time to prepare a welcome.

Leaving Cook to finish her errands, transporting in the laden carrier what she’d carefully planned for tonight, a small change of itinerary leading parallel to the high street and home in ample time. She was impatient but channelled her thoughts towards Nancy and the other children, who in ways she could never fully grasp had suffered in silence or muttered, broken insurrection. Can one ever know the twisted strands of disaffection and affection in others’ lives, the sailor’s knot that could never be undone but might (it was the worst of circumstances) wear away under weather and time until it falls limply from the hull to float useless in the sea. One could assist helplessly, one could throw up one’s arms and flee to the garden, one could enjoin by what little indirections one could muster that things take another course and accept the shunts and silent blows that may accompany the effort. Standing to the side long ago, she had harshly faulted her dear friend’s compliance, but then, envying the warm tumult, had revered her expert navigation among the Scylla and Charybdis of family and marriage light as a summer bark, though even her great beauty at times betrayed the leaden cargo below decks. The image failed her. She thought instead of herself apart, saw the small figure as they might see her observing behind the easel’s shield. The children racing, Mr. Ramsay strong, obstructive, lost in thought, his wife placidly reading and drawing all together in her invisible net, the canvas before her waiting. Then at some point the surprise (never less) of transport, as first one and then innumerable, compounded quandaries demanded solutions, when to push forward, when to withdraw, all in thrilling piecemeal advance towards a swelling. promising wholeness which briefly overcame the seeping doubts sure later to confirm that she could never pretend to more than the role of Sunday painter.

This was the street and she deliberately slowed her pace. On the creaky door the assertively modest bronzed plaque, Galeriste and the name well-known in certain London circles, and alongside a regiment of small aureate panes. In the November chill and damp the amber within beckoned. It was indulgence, of course, but she would look again at her brace of portraits and the several landscapes, as one might designate them though not herself, and speak briefly with the owner. Lily leaned shyly forward with her glove to trace a slight widening circle on the glass. The small entry, the wider space beyond with white walls and their daubs of colour, forms crossing the room in trousers and brogues. Under no circumstances would she now enter, she knew, though a dash of pride swirled within, and disturbed nerves and a sudden stirring flush. She looked away. Only a woman farther on with a pram. When she raised her eyes again to the scene within, one of the men, tall, thinner than the others, turned in profile to speak with another. It was James Ramsay. She quickly gathered her things and made directly for home.

4

Tea was competently served, not as in the past, to be sure, but Charles Tansley, proud of his wife and the son left with her Hounslow parents, felt sufficiently welcomed. He was the professor now who had fulfilled his potential, and if the civic universities were not of the illustrious past, they were forming the real future of England, not perpetuating its sclerotic repetitions. With the children swarming in and the clamour of one apparently just arrived from France, Nancy perhaps, in her mannish haircut and strange laced boots, he had had little time with Ramsay. Since the hazard of their last meeting at a