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The Violetta Letters
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Copyright © Carmel Bird 1995.
All rights reserved.
A woman wearing a blue dress walks barefoot along a clifftop high
above the sea, which is calm and clear and green as glass. The
full skirt of the dress catches at the woman's knees and billows
out behind her in the breeze. A worn leather satchel containing
her shoes and books and cigarettes hangs from her shoulder, bumps
against her thigh as she makes her steady way along the cliff.
She is deep in thought. It is late afternooon. The place is lonely
and remote; there is nothing between this woman and the sea.
She reaches a place at which the cliff juts far out into the sea,
and there, high up on the point, she stands and stares for a long
time at the horizon.
Laura Field has come to the clifftop, not very far from the Goddards'
seaside retreat. It is the cliff where Ambrose used to walk his
dogs. Laura knows this. She sits down on the grass and from her
bag she takes the small red book, The Eagle and the Dove, unties the ribbon, opens the book and studies it page by page.
She plans, when she has looked at it, to throw it into the sea.
She reads the library stamp -- date on or before which this item
must be returned. The black and white photograph of the medieval
walls of the city of Avila; the mermaid colophon of Michael Joseph
Ltd, 26 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1. The date, 1943. A note
from Vita Sackville-West: 'Owing to the impossibility of communicating
with France, I have been unable to ask permission from the Carmel
of Lisieux for the reproductions of illustrations from L'Histoire d'une Éme, but I trust that some day they may forgive me the unavoidable
discourtesy.' 'Set and printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers
Ltd, at the Gresham Press, Woking, in Bembo type, eleven point,
leaded, and bound by James Burn.' A lion sits on top of an image
of an open book which bears the words 'Book Production War Economy
Standard'. A black and white photograph of a letter from St Teresa
-- an exuberant joy in the handwriting, the marks of ancient folds
in the paper.
The woman comes to the end of the book, reads the poem Therese
Martin wrote to Memory, and the prayer she wrote for France to
offer to Joan of Arc, the Liberating Angel. Then she turns the
page and finds, in very small neat handwriting, a collection of
letters written on the blank section at the back. Across the top
is written: `The street I live is Loneliness; My house has no
address; The letters that I write myself begin Bonjour Tristesse.' And following is a series of strange sad little notes, love
letters, addressed to Therese in her own handwriting and signed
by 'Violetta'.
The last letter is an entreaty from Violetta to Therese:
Sweetest angel of damage and death, I instruct you to burn all my letters for I fear our plans to be together will be discovered. I will write no more. I further instruct you to meet me by the swings. We will be united as we have never before been united, and together we will don our wings and fly into the bright sun of eternity. My own heart's darling, come to me, I burn with longing.
Violetta
Laura turns the pages over and over, reading and re-reading the
Violetta letters. Then, without thinking, or so it seems to her,
she begins to tear the pages of the book from their binding where
they had long ago been assembled and fixed by James Burn. In a
long, hypnotic ritual, she slowly releases single pages into the
air. They flutter seaward in little flurries. Some pages she ignites
with her cigarette lighter, and, as the pages burn, she lets them
go, and they are taken up by a soft wind, blown, charred paper
and ash, out to sea.
When Laura holds only the cover and the ribbon, she lets them
drop over the edge of the cliff. The red wings of the cover open
and close in downward flight towards the sea; the scarlet ribbon,
serpentine, moves slowly.
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The Elephant Thoughts of Dr Ambrose Goddard