I visited Monk’s House in Rodmell where Virginia and Leonard went whenever they needed to escape London. There is a large garden that joins onto green fields. Then there are the Downs, which is where everything ends. In the garden is Virginia’s wooden writing room, next to which there is a sweet chestnut tree whose trunk surges up towards another ending, which is the sky.
Monk’s House is green on the inside. In Virginia’s downstairs bedroom there is the brown armchair where she sat when it was too cold to be anywhere else. (Vanessa painted her in this chair and Virginia seems almost to be asleep, although she is holding some sewing or knitting.)
While I am at Rodmell I look for a long time at the chair which seems to me to have the quality of the furniture in The Waves. It has a sturdy ordinariness. It will always exist. It is rather drab with a high back. It also contains a person who is no longer there.
I stare at Virginia’s chair. It has its back to a window that looks onto the garden where there is an apple tree with a few fallen apples on the ground. (I remember that the painter John Nash would work facing away from the window lest he be tempted by the outside.)
Quite high on the chair-back there is a dark oily stain. This is where Virginia’s head rested when she was writing or sewing (or asleep). I think about Virginia’s stalky neck and about her hair which was brown and rather thin. Lightly she must have sat, for her body was thin too.
I think that the dark stain on the chair-back is the least and most ordinary thing about the chair. Then I think that the stain is the least and most beautiful thing about the chair.
I stare at Virginia’s armchair until it is time to walk out of the house past the green walls, past the lamps and shelves and the beautifully decorated kitchen table. I leave through the old blue gate and step into the outside which is evening.
we have scarcely broken into our hoard 