Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (10 page)

Maybe she’s started another novel. I shall finish
Part the Second
here, and email her.

23

Virginia was hyperaware of odours. Chemical odours, not her own. She found the interiors of buildings stifling. I took her for a walk in Central Park. She became so elated I started to worry.

Free at last! We had been walking for an hour and still not reached the northern tip. It was almost like being in the country. (Not quite: running people kept passing us, covered with sweat, attached to machines.) Spring had scattered the park with beauty – as we entered from Fifth Avenue, the sun on the plane trees was fresh & bright, each tiny leaf was blowing, dancing – the stuck traffic had turned to a procession, yellow taxis played their horns, blinkered horses shook coloured plumes & even the plastic flowers on their carriages shone with life, quivered like feathers – sea-winds had blown the grime away – everything looked crystalline. A fur of tiny yellow-green crystals electrified the outline of branches, mauve and white crocuses starred the grass, there were dazzling mirrors of silver-blue sky on the frieze of pale towers around the edges.

She knew about plants, much more than I do. ‘Oh, look at this darling maple,’ she cried, pointing to a gnarled, slightly stunted tree that in close-up was covered with vivid red-yellow flowers that burst straight from the wood, small tufts of tassels.

So fiercely young. A wrinkled black tree bleeding bright blossom before it had leaves. ‘It’s an old tree that can’t wait to be young.’

So many things made her laugh with pleasure. Her teeth were bad, grey-blue and yellow, but her face was still astonishing, transfixed with joy in this New York morning –

Why did I feel – excluded?

Perhaps I was losing my joy in living, the magical thing that Gerda has. Was it because I was responsible, and always thinking about someone else? First Gerda, of course, but now Virginia.

I worried about her, so very happy, too soon after being so sad.

The rest of that day went on practical matters. We needed violet ink and dip pen. Virginia simply could not comprehend that a pen and ink might be difficult to find.

‘It won’t be a problem. Everyone needs pens,’ she kept insisting, obstinate.

‘Actually, Virginia, no, they don’t.’

‘But
children
can’t use those electric writing-books’ (at first she called my computer that, because to her it was a book on which one wrote.)

‘Actually, Virginia, yes, they do. It’s a laptop, as I said. A laptop.’

‘Laptop,’ she said. ‘Yes, I like it. Short, and final, open and shut. Like “lapwing”, yes, a bird on the lap. A flap of the wing, it’s done. Laptop.’

‘Nice, Virginia, yes. To us, though, it’s just – functional.’ It was slightly annoying, the way Virginia arrogated to herself the role of poet. I could have thought of all those things. But
because she got there first, I didn’t.

In Bloomingdale’s, though we were looking for ink, Virginia was constantly distracted, astonished by the wealth of the twenty-first century. ‘The colours are so – dense and deep,’ she said. ‘So bright as well. You’re
drenched
with colour.’ She kept crying out and pointing: curtains of peacock-blue moiré satin, piled cushions of crimson devoré velvet, pale lemons, terracottas, all peculiarly bright and clear against Bloomingdale’s sharp black-and-white floor-tiles. Crystal, silk, soft leather. Gleaming porcelain, gold and silver. The blaze of electric light dazzled her. ‘How do they make the lights so
bright
?’ Of course, her last memories were of the war, the browns and greys of the austerity years. Her eyes widened further when she saw the prices.

‘Is everyone in New York a millionaire?’ she asked.

‘Manhattan is mostly the rich and their servants.’

(Perhaps no world should have so much money? The bit of me that grew up working-class still had an appetite for more. New York – the city with everything. Things were less comfortable when one was with Virginia.)

And could we find pen and ink? We could not. It was as if our world no longer needed to be written. It was simply
there
, solid, confident, lush.

We tried in Sachs, we tried Bergdorf Goodman – everywhere we went, the idea of ‘pens’ was met with polite astonishment.

‘We used to stock them, but not for years.’ There was a tacit comment:
you’re out of date
, and of course, Virginia
was
out of date, it was one of her plus points, really, being vintage –

But had
I
become vintage without noticing? I had a pen in London, I used it for signing, a beautiful Waterman with a gold barrel that Edward gave me for a wedding present – and for heaven’s sake, I was not exactly old.

I was only forty-nine, and on Facebook and Twitter!

Going round with her must have made me seem older. I suppose, age-wise, she looked like my mother, but in some respects she felt like my child. I was her midwife in the twenty-first century.

After hours of searching and repressed irritation, – why did she never stay where I left her? – we found the pen in the oddest place, thanks to a recommendation from the Waddington doorman, who bought razors there. It was a first-floor business up a dark stairway on Fifty-seventh called ‘Shaverland’, which had a sideline in antique pens. An old man who introduced himself as Moshe nodded and frowned when we told him what we wanted. Sighing, he got up and stood on a chair, huffing and puffing alarmingly, to pull out drawer after drawer of pens. Each time he heaved himself up, swearing, lurched perilously back again, then finally laid down the drawers side by side, with a triumphant crash, on the glass of his counter.

‘Dat’s all I got,’ he lamented. ‘Once I had ten times more of dese things. Take your pick lady, just take the lot. It kills me getting up dere after them.’

‘I don’t care to write with fountain-pens,’ said Virginia, unmoved by the effort he’d made. ‘I have used them, but they make a mess.’

‘Well fountain-pens is what I got,’ he said. ‘You want computers, you go elsewhere. De udder lady asked me for antique pens. Course all pens is antique nowadays.’

Not hoping for much, I explained what we wanted – ‘Dip pens.’ His eyes lit up behind crusted spectacles. Wrapped in a soft, ink-stained pink cloth he kept half a dozen old dip pens, which he spread triumphantly in front of us, then limped off to fetch a big bottle of black ink, an aged, moth-eaten piece of blotting-paper, and a lined notebook. ‘See, lady?’ he said to
Virginia, who was still looking sceptical, ‘we got da lot here, we got it all.’

‘Choose, Virginia. Try one out.’

Sulkily she chose two or three. She had evidently taken against this process. I was so looking forward to seeing her writing, but she dipped the first pen, scratched it on the paper, frowned, dipped and dipped again, an irritable bird bent over the inkwell.

‘Your ink has run out,’ she said crossly.

‘It ain’t!’ he protested. ‘You’re doin’ it wrong.’

They glared at each other over the counter. ‘She is a professional writer,’ I put in.

‘If ya don’t want it, don’t take it.’

‘Take it, Virginia. Choose one or two.’

‘How can one choose when one cannot test it?’

‘It’s OK,’ I told the man. ‘These will be fine.’

‘Your friend don’t know how to use a pen.’

‘I most certainly do!’

‘Ya don’t.’

‘She is actually a very well-known writer.’

‘Yeah? What’s your name?’

She stared at him, then with deliberation enunciated ‘Virginia Woolf.’

‘Virginia Who? I ain’t heard of you. You’re not Jackie Collins. You’re not Stephen King.’

‘Well
I
have never heard of
them
.’ Thank God Virginia started laughing.

I mollified him by paying – though it was an absurdly small amount. We left with directions to an art shop selling coloured inks.

By eleven that night I had diluted half a bottle to a shade resembling the Goldstein signatures. It took me hours of trial and error, and the floor of the shower was lavender. Virginia
wasn’t helping at all, flipping through shopping channels on the TV, exclaiming softly, clutching the remote.

‘No, nothing like it,’ she said, at last, glancing briefly across. ‘I’d never choose a colour so anaemic. And the books have been away from the light, so the signatures would be bright, surely?’

Why hadn’t she said that in the first place? Lost in her novel dream of shopping.

We used the untouched half. A clear light purple.

‘Better practise first,’ I told her. ‘Your hand might be shaky after all this time.’ I tore out a page from the hotel pad and left her alone while I rinsed the shower and then myself.

What happened after that was rather odd. I came back refreshed to find her sitting there frowning. ‘It’s the pens, not the ink. The ink won’t come out,’ she said.

‘Right, Virginia.’ I wanted this finished so I could settle down and email Gerda. (That nagging awareness: I kept forgetting her. Luckily she was a self-sufficient child.)

‘Let me try.’ I tried. The pen worked perfectly. I signed my name with a flourish. ‘You’re just not pressing hard enough.’

In the end we had to do it together. I sat beside her on the bed, with the books open on my bedside table, slipped my hand over the back of hers – cool, bony, the veins making ridges like water-contours in hard sea-sand – and with my hand pressing hers, it worked, the familiar writing, clear and bright, and my heart jumped as I read what she’d written.

In
Orlando
, she wrote ‘For my sweet Vita, to travel centuries and worlds with you – Virginia’.

In
To the Lighthouse
, she excelled herself.

For Leonard, always and only Leonard
.

Your V
.

‘Well
done
, Virginia. I think they’ll love it.’

It turned out to be an understatement.

But I woke up at three in the morning, the anxious hour, with Woolf snoring beside me, and all I could think about was Gerda. In the end everything was for her, for Edward didn’t love me any more – (it was partly why I changed my number, because he had it, but never called; I refused to blame reception in the Arctic.) Now there was only me and Gerda. ‘For Gerda,’ I thought. It was all for her. Everything I did would be for her.

‘Dearest Gerda, I’m thinking of you. It’s gone 3
AM
in NYC and I miss you so badly my sinuses ache. It’s getting tiring, looking after Virginia. Soon we’ll be moving to another hotel …’

I planned the email in my head, I thought of the loving things I would say, but my thoughts kept creeping away to Woolf, what on earth I would do with her in the long run. Since I was the only person she knew, just one lone person in the whole modern world – how would I ever get rid of her?

Sleep stole back and dragged me under.

First thing next day I went down to Reception and booked Virginia her own room. I had to pay for two nights in advance, which would give me time to find somewhere else. It was worth it to know I could have my life back.

Could I? Would my life ever recover?

24

I sent
Part the First
and
Part the Second
to my mother, but still the woman did not respond, just sent me bulletins about what SHE was doing, and then I began to feel worried, because although Mum could sometimes be forgetful, she didn’t usually forget me for
weeks
. She claimed it was all because she was looking after this ancient freak (I admit that is what I thought about Virginia, mostly because I hadn’t read her) – but I knew she didn’t love Dad any more, and I thought she was probably having an affair. She had bought a lot of new clothes since the break-up, and started wearing very bright orange lipstick, which of course did not suit her Big Orange Face.

She hasn’t really got an orange face, I said it because I am angry with her. Har har har on Mum.

Things were still not going well at school, either. Nor did I feel quite ready to put my Great Getaway Plan into action.

For a start, since my mother was in America, I didn’t want to give her worry, not THAT much worry, in any case, and although she knew I was brave, and a mensch, (as Dad said when he first saw me ride my bike no-hands), she would certainly worry if I ran away and some idiot teacher from here rang and told her, and they would be shrieking, which is what they do whenever something slightly out of the ordinary happens, like two girls falling in the swimming pool and one of them, Linda, who was a non-swimmer (but I didn’t know that) losing her specs (har har har) and having to be life-saved by the other, who did it badly and nearly strangled her, and all
the shouting got a lot of attention – so although I was sitting in the library by then, reading a book about Manhattan (to see if there were dangerous beasts in Central Park, since that was near where my mother was staying, and I thought that might explain her silence, if she had gone walking and got a bit Gored) – my house mistress came and hauled me out and shouted loudly in the corridor.

‘Why did you push those girls in the pool? Gerda I will not tolerate bullying.’

‘Then why did you let those girls bully me?’

‘Don’t answer back!’

‘That’s not an argument.’

I had taught my mother that ‘Don’t Answer Back!’ wasn’t a valid argument – it’s something that grown-ups always say when they can’t come up with anything better – but evidently no-one had told Ms Cannon.

I accept that wasn’t the right time to try, and soon I was waiting to see the Head Teacher.

But I had better go back to the beginning, or actually we had got to the middle, and I will write down my side of things, which none of the teachers has bothered to hear, and then I will email it to my mother. In the end, sheer volume will wear her down. There will be room for nothing else in her inbox.

I am falling asleep, I will write it in the morning.

25