Soft Skull: Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury by Sigrid Nunez

From Chapter One:

It was a Thursday in July. That afternoon Leonard and Virginia Woolf drove from London to Cambridge to visit their young friends Barbara and Victor Rothschild. The Rothschilds had been married the December before. They lived in a grand old gray house called Merton Hall. When the Woolfs arrived, they found Barbara waiting outside for them. She sat on a chair on the lawn, a large straw hat shading her pretty face. They had known her since she was a baby. Now here she was expecting a baby herself.
They had tea-just the three of them; Victor was napping. Fresh lemonade-with gin, if they liked-and thin, freshly cut sandwiches. The room was filled with flowers set in large alabaster bowls. A bee had got indoors and kept drifting from bowl to bowl, from red rose to yellow rose, murmuring indecisively. Barbara was indecisive too. What to name the child if a boy? What to name the child if a girl? She and Victor were going abroad soon-where should they stay? Then Victor joined them, ruddy and bright-eyed from his nap and all eager to show them the garden. Virginia, who was very particular about gardens, did not care for this one ("stuck like a jam tart ... a pretentious uncared for garden," she derided it two days later in her diary).
As they strolled the narrow paths-Virginia with Victor; Barbara and Leonard behind them-the afternoon shaded to evening. It had been a scorching day. Now came a breeze, pleasantly moist, and a nightingale sang. The sun, suspended between two dark elms, quivered like a struck gong. It would have been a shame to go in, and so they ate dinner on the lawn, with the shadows darkening and the sky turning ever different, deeper blues. When the first stars appeared, the nightingale fell silent, as if this were what it had been singing for.
It was a sumptuous dinner. Leonard ate with delight, praising the fish, the meat, and the wine. But though she admired the lavishness with which they were being regaled, Virginia ate slowly, without appetite. This was not unusual; Virginia often had to force herself to eat. But when Leonard praised the fish, Virginia praised it too. When he said his chop was perfectly done, she said that hers was too. And when he took a sip of his wine and pronounced it superb, she nodded agreement, though she had not yet taken a sip of her own. Much care had been taken to please them, and such care must be thanked.
Though she shared in the conversation and heard every word, Virginia never stopped taking in what was happening around them. A writer, said her father's old friend Henry James, must be someone who notices everything. (So avidly did Virginia observe this rule, Leonard sometimes had to chide her in public for staring.) The changing light, the changing colors of the sky, the flight of swallow and bat, when the nightingale sang and when it did not-none of this was missed by Virginia. They were eating dessert-strawberries and cream-when she noticed something across the lawn. Some creature, small and gray. But what? Virginia narrowed her eyes and tried to discern it. A squirrel, she thought. But no: it was about the size of a squirrel, but it did not move like one. This thing crept, Virginia observed, as squirrels do not. No, that was not the brisk, skip-hopping scuttle of the squirrel. Was it a rat? she wondered, noticing now, with a slight shudder, the long thin tail. Again no. That was not the unmistakable hunched silhouette of the rat. Could it be a cat, then? A very small cat-a kitten? Virginia remembered that she had seen a cat earlier, when they were having tea, and she had counted four kittens tumbling about the garden. But none of them, as she recalled, had been gray.
It was not a kitten. It was-
"A marmoset."
Victor said the words just as Virginia was about to say them herself. Among the many pets that had lived at one time or another at her childhood home in Kensington there had been a marmoset. But that had been very long ago, and Virginia had all but forgotten it.
Now Victor picked up his plate and laid it on the ground. He clicked his tongue. "Mitz!" he called. "Here, Mitz! Come, come!" And Mitz came-not bounding across the lawn as might have been expected, but slowly, haltingly, like a toy dragged by a string.
"I'm afraid she's not very healthy," Victor said. "I think she's got rickets."
How small she was! A mere scrap of monkey. You could have balanced her on your palm, like a fur apple. A head no bigger than a walnut, two black pips for eyes, and the tiniest nostrils-mere pinpricks. Her fur was mostly gray-squirrel gray-but tufts of lighter fur grew out from the sides and the back of her head (a rather clownish effect, it must be said). Seizing a strawberry in both paws, she crammed it into her mouth. She ate far too quickly to enjoy it, with quick glances left and right, as if she feared some other creature would appear out of the grass to snatch it from her. Now she had cream all over her face. Still chewing, she picked up another berry and began to cram it into her mouth. While the others laughed, Virginia looked away. Virginia was squeamish about gluttony. ("I dont like greed when it comes to champing & chawing & sweeping up gravy," she once told her diary, raging against a certain dinner guest.) But Virginia was too fascinated to avert her eyes for long. Something human, all too human, about that naked little face-Virginia had always imagined the faces of elves looking perhaps like this. Elfin face, body and tail of a rodent: it was this combination that made Mitz such a wonder. You looked at her and thought, How grotesque. And the very next instant, How adorable. And then, How grotesque, again.
"Where did she come from?" Leonard asked.
"South America, originally," said Victor. "I found her in a junk shop. I bought her for Barbara." At this Barbara said nothing, but the way she rolled her eyes spoke loudly enough. Virginia understood. A healthy monkey was a strange enough gift for a woman expecting a baby. A sickly one...
"Funny thing about this species," said Victor, perhaps also reminded at that moment of his wife's condition. "The males help the females to give birth."
Virginia's jaw dropped. An astonishing picture rose in her mind. "How-what�?"
"We don't think we want to know," said Barbara, rolling her eyes again and gently patting her domed midriff (the child was due in September).
A footman arrived to clear the table. Glancing at Leonard, Virginia saw that he was frowning, and she thought she knew exactly what his thoughts were: A junk shop! What had this poor creature been doing in a junk shop? Victor was right: Mitz was not healthy. That halting walk probably did mean rickets. Her coat was not sleek as it should have been, but rough- and dry-looking, with a few bald pink spots where sores might have healed. The fur round her neck was worn away and the skin was chafed. Apparently, Mitz had once been chained....
Berries devoured, every last trace of cream licked away, Mitz uttered a string of cries-a shrill, gibbering monkey-sentence that rose at the end, like a question. As no one could interpret, no one could answer. She searched the four faces hovering against the darkening sky, and whatever it was she wanted she seemed to find in Leonard's long thin bony one. She jumped in his lap.
"You've made a friend," said Barbara. And Victor said, "I've never seen her take so quickly to anyone."
Virginia was not surprised. The Woolfs (or the Woolves as they were more commonly known) had been married for twenty-two years, and in twenty-two years Virginia had had many occasions to witness how animals took to her husband. He was a great lover of animals, and if he had found a sick monkey languishing in a junk shop she was sure he would have rescued it just as Victor had done. Though she was also sure he would never have tried to pass it off as a gift.
Mitz perched on Leonard's knee. With the tip of one finger, he was rubbing the top of her head in a circular motion, in a way she seemed to like. Her eyes closed. She wrapped her tail tightly around her. She dozed.
Brandy was served. Leonard lit his pipe and Victor his cigar. Conversation resumed. Conversation was mostly serious that night and kept coming round-as was no doubt the case at many another dinner table-to the same topic. Three weeks earlier, in Germany, hundreds of people had been slaughtered. This had confirmed many people's worst fears about Hitler, who had come to power the year before. These days the possibility of war was on everyone's mind. For the Woolfs the 1914 war remained a searing memory. One of Leonard's brothers had been killed in that war and another badly wounded (in the same attack, as it happened, and hit by the very same shell). Another war such as the 1914 war and, Leonard said, civilization would be destroyed.
The breeze that had cooled them while they ate had turned sharper. Barbara snuggled deeper into her shawl. Virginia draped a cardigan over her shoulders. Within the house, servants were going from room to room, closing windows, drawing curtains. Mitz smacked her lips in her sleep-dreaming of berries and cream?
Leonard looked at his watch. "Good heavens," he said. It was past ten. The Woolfs had to be going. Leonard stood up, waking Mitz, and as he tried to put her down, she clung to his sleeve, his trouser leg, his shoe.
"I believe she's fallen in love," Victor said, and everyone laughed.
Before the Woolfs drove home, they were taken back into the house to see the library. Victor had a very fine collection of books, many rare editions, encased in red morocco. The Woolfs admired a volume of Wordsworth, a first edition of Gulliver's Travels. Most of the books had been bought recently-it was Virginia's The Common Reader that had awakened the bibliophile in him, Victor said. Again Virginia bit her tongue, saving her criticism for her diary: "Ah but that isnt the way to read.... Too easy; sitting at Sotheby's bidding."
On the way back to London Virginia kept yawning. They did not usually stay out so late. She and Leonard talked about the evening, poking fun at their friends (the garden, the books), just as rich people so often fear literary people whom they've wined and dined will do on their way home. Still, there was much to be envied about the Rothschilds. Not the wealth, for the Woolfs disdained wealth, but the future, the baby coming in September, their whole lives ahead of them. In a word: youth.
Twenty-two years before, when they were first married, Leonard and Virginia had thought they too would have children.
They drove with the top cranked back. The road was empty, the fields were black. It was midnight, the nineteenth of July, 1934.