Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (11 page)

Angela fussed about the smallest things. The trip to Goldstein’s would be an adventure! I had carried off impersonations before, of course, when we were all young, and afraid of nothing. If I could play an Abyssinian prince with a flimsy false beard and burnt cork on my skin and convince the whole crew of HMS
Dreadnought
, fooling Goldstein’s would be perfectly simple. One just needed confidence, a sense of fun.

I wish she were a woman of one’s own type. I am not a snob, but perhaps she lacks breeding, and many situations make her anxious. After all, we were only going to a shop.

Yet after she found me a room of my own, she virtually demanded that before we go to Goldstein’s, I use the peculiar shower attachment in my bathroom, which she explained in tedious detail. I didn’t listen. I soaked the floor! –

I think it was the same neurosis about hygiene that made her insist on new underclothes even before we bought skirts and blouses. She kept saying ‘shush’ like some wretched governess when the brassieres made me hoot with laughter. They were called things like ‘Lilyette’ and ‘Bali’! To think modern women should wear contraptions that make their bosoms stick up like hay-stacks! – and some of them make them bigger with plastic, like that funny Mrs Jordan in the magazine! – and the knickers covered nothing, they were strings with lace. ‘I draw the line at buying these.’ ‘Then you’ll just have to wash out your own each night,’ she said rather strictly. (Why? are they mad with cleanliness, today’s
humans?) So I asked if they had some not made of string, and chose some French knickers in pink satin. I think it was malice that made her ask for ‘large’. She herself is on the large side, but I am not.

New outer garments were more of a problem. There was really no necessity, my suit would be good for several more years. I did not want to be obliged to her, and of course she was using her own money until I had managed to get some of my own.

I resisted, but she insisted, so we ended up back in Bloomingdale’s.

And then my mood underwent a sea-change, for oh, the glory of Bloomingdale’s! One particular colour called to me; one particular part of the spectrum. I wanted to be warm again. I think I had been cold for such a long time. I wanted to be in summer, although of course this was still only spring. Anything from yellow through orange to pink. The sunshine colours. An Italian wall. A street of Spanish orange trees. Angelica’s cheek on a July afternoon. Apricot: marrying pink and gold. It called to me from a satin hanger. Golden blush on a warm pink silk that glowed in their white extravagant light. A shirt, long-sleeved, with curved reveres that had something dashing, something dry about it – I tried it on last of a pile of things, I was about to take it off and leave, but at the last second I turned up the collar in the mirror of the changing-room – and in that instant, looking back at me, boyish, over my shoulder was the ghost of a self I had been once, witty, wide-eyed, mischievous, young. I peered through the curtains and summoned Angela.

‘I want to keep this,’ I said, and laughed.

‘Why are you laughing?’ She sounded suspicious. ‘Did you choose the most expensive one?’

It wasn’t her fault. Though she had good points, she
constantly showed a side that was – common. I don’t like to use that word, of course one’s egalitarian, but Angela was obsessed with money. Perhaps she could not sell her books. When I inquired, she got rather angry & claimed she was actually ‘a best-seller’. I was fifty before I started making money, so I tried to judge her less severely.

Today I will have money of my own! One does need money – I’ll try that again. We all need money and a room of our own – I must remember not to use the ‘one’, I have noticed it’s fallen out of fashion, as if no-one wants to be singular now. Everything is ‘we’ – they feel things in herds, the citizens of the twenty-first century.

Regrettably, her guess about the blouse was right! ‘That will be $400, Ma’am.’ ‘
$400
?’ Angela stared, her mouth tightening like the mouth of a purse.

I didn’t actually see her pay, she just gave him a small plastic card on which I suppose her address was written. The man put her card into a tiny machine that must have printed her address for their records. I would learn to do all these things in time – one would have to learn, if one was to stay.

To me, the prices made no sense at all, they were all unimaginably enormous, but she acted as though I had done it on purpose. For some reason I found that amusing, as if I were a young girl laughing at Nurse, so we left Bloomingdale’s with her in bad humour and me snorting quietly behind her.

But for me, the shopping trip was a success. I had a new skirt as well as the blouse, quite hideous but serviceable, in olive-green wool, which had the advantage of covering my knees, & it did go well with the apricot shirt, like leaves and fruit, like a late warm summer –

 
(if I were with Nessa, it would have been fun – )

This morning, the woman was annoyed again. Apparently I’d ‘spoiled the effect of the new clothes’, by snatching up my old tweed jacket at the last moment as a cover-up. I don’t know why, I suddenly felt naked, as if I might be laughed at in my brand-new get-up. With my tweed jacket, I had an old friend.

She sat as far away as she could on the seat of the yellow taxi. Because I knew she was trying to help me, I turned to her as we stopped at the traffic lights – curious traffic lights they have, bright yellow, suspended from blue sky, thin air – and said ‘You see, this jacket is moral support. Because I’m going to lose my books. They’re all I have left from – the old world. My jacket keeps me company.’

And at once she melted, and smiled at me kindly, and said ‘Of course, I understand. It’s just, that blouse cost $400. I’ve never spent that much on a blouse. I suppose you can’t understand our money. Perhaps you will, when you have some of your own. Before you know it, it will be gone.’

And then she said something more interesting. ‘You don’t have to worry about losing your books. You’ll be able to buy copies in any bookstore. Lots of people read you, as I said, Virginia. At least, those people who still read. We’ll go and buy you new books today.’

America wasn’t as I had once imagined, cars streaming smoothly to their destinations – ‘seventy abreast’, I think I wrote – no, they all cut across each other, and every ten minutes they all ended up in a blank stand-off of honking metal, noise I had never heard or imagined, the driver of the taxi-cab was swearing loudly and I said we should get out and walk, but Angela told me it was perfectly normal, ‘Sit tight, Virginia, it won’t take long. New York is like this every day. I don’t want you to get there looking wind-blown.’

It seemed I had to play the lady.

I didn’t want her to look like a loony. Getting a great writer into the shower is not the easiest thing to do, but I had managed that semi-successfully – her hair looked sweet and fluffy at breakfast, and without the odour, her beauty shone through – then at the last moment, what did she do? She only snatched up her pondweed jacket.

Yet I was growing fond of her.

The trouble was, she took up all my time. I was busy with her from morning to nightfall. I vowed that day I would update Gerda. I hadn’t been reading her emails properly. Not that I needed to worry about her. She had been so happy at all her schools, whereas other mothers had been through hell.

I said, ‘Virginia, about my daughter – ’

But at that moment, the taxi stopped, I saw the dark towers, we were there.

26

(This is a quote I have borrowed from Byron, which is one of the Best Bits in English.)

So we’ve come to the part where Cindy and her sidekicks gave me the ‘Special Present’ at breakfast. And I was confused about what to do, as they seemed to expect me to open it at once, with everybody looking, but I felt embarrassed, and besides I wanted to save it till later when there wasn’t so much to be happy about.

I did feel happy that Saturday breakfast. It was just because they’d taken trouble. Someone had really thought about me, though Mum had vanished across the Atlantic and Dad was working at the North Pole (this isn’t a joke, he’s a climate scientist, quite famous actually, Edward Kaye).

You could see from the envelope that they’d taken trouble with my name, written in beautiful lettering, probably by Cindy, who is artistic, though the art teacher hasn’t noticed it. So I thought that what was inside could only get better, and I always save the best till last.

So I just got up and said ‘Thanks a lot, I’ll open it after morning lessons,’ and they looked disappointed, but that seemed normal.

But actually I couldn’t wait. Only Cindy was in my set for English and she stared at me through the whole lesson. I thought it was a look of adoration, and I kept on waving and smiling at her (I am a Dimwit. I AM A DIMWIT! WRITE THAT OUT FIVE THOUSAND TIMES).

But I’m not a Dimwit, remember. They are.

Because when I finally got to my room after lunch, I couldn’t bear to wait till bedtime, and besides I wanted to tell them I liked it, because that would make them happy too.

So I carefully tore the pretty envelope open, without damaging the lettering. I thought I would stick it on my cork-board, which hadn’t got enough things on it yet. Then other people would be curious and I would say ‘Oh my friends did it for me,’ and they would know that I had good friends.

I couldn’t take in what I saw at first.

Mummy, this is a
Cliffehanger
.

27

Loping in to Goldstein’s out of the brightness, I felt half at home for the first time since I had woken in this new world.

It was shady, and cool, and full of books, and the furniture, when I looked quickly, seemed familiar, dark and sober like my parents’ house, though soon I saw it was all artifice, smooth modern copies of teak or mahogany.

It didn’t feel like a bookshop to me. It called itself a ‘gallery’, with books displayed like jewelled objects. As if they were not to be used every day. Part of me liked that, part did not.

(At the Hogarth we made our books beautiful too. When we first started, we knew nothing about business, but we knew what we wanted;Vanessa designed all my dust jackets, & minded about each tiny detail. We came as near to a quarrel as we ever had since the smoothing away of childhood hatreds when she didn’t like the final version of
Kew Gardens
. An hour of torment as she talked to me with terrible calm reasonableness that was worse than any rage could have been.

After that, Leonard and I were even more careful. Our books were not
éditions de luxe
– we had a horror of Victorian ornateness, of gold-tooled curlicues and pompous typefaces – we wanted simple, beautiful things.

Nessa’s drawings were just a few strokes, almost childlike – nothing to the untrained eye – but those few strokes made something perfect: a bowl of flowers on an empty stage for
Jacob’s Room
, the novel that ends with emptiness – Nessa understood without being told. For
The Years
, that cursed brute
of a book that weighed on me like an overstuffed sofa (though Americans all went mad for it!) Nessa made something that ached with lost time, a pattern of repetitive, cycling suns getting smaller and smaller, going on for ever, and just one cut rose, dark as blood. For
The Waves
, she drew shell-shapes of light and water and two figures standing for all my characters, one rushing forward into the water, the other hanging back, turning towards us.

Of them all, one cover was probably my favourite.
To the Lighthouse
has a bright tower – masculine, powerful – that somehow holds within it a female form, her arms lifted. The gesture of a powerful mother, not the angel in the house but someone stronger, tall and courageous, a light-bringer, a light-giver – Grace Darling, perhaps? Florence Nightingale? Yes, a brave, strong, luminous angel. All my life I had looked for such a figure.

How lucky I was to have such a sister – how cursed she was to have one like me.

Though once at least I could be of service, when Julian died and she needed me.

I had loved my nephew always, even when we quarrelled. But perhaps I liked being, for once, a mother – for a while I was a mother to her …

‘May I help you, Madam?’ a young man said. He startled me; I was daydreaming. And I found myself saying something quite unexpected, for Angela and I had discussed it all and I had learned my words off by heart, I was supposed to tell him I had some books that were left me by a great aunt, a writer – but suddenly something different escaped me.

Because I was drawn back into the past, and forgot the part I must play in the future. I thought, I have never seen
Between the Acts
. My last novel that I thought so bad. That the Furies took and tossed in the air till all I could see of it was failure and
darkness. In the world I lived in, it was never born. Never born, like my own children.

I couldn’t bear to stay alive to see it. By the time it was published, I was dead.

Did Leonard ask poor Nessa to do the cover?

(It was I.

I
.

Who asked it of her. By slipping away, while they had to continue. How she must have suffered, doing that task.)

‘Are you OK, Ma’am?’

‘Perfectly, thank you. I wonder … do you have a copy of Virginia Woolf’s
Between the Acts
?’

Surely he would know me, recognise me. But he smiled at me with bright, neutral eyes and said ‘I’m happy to say we do.’

Angela looked at me accusingly but I mouthed ‘Later’, and followed him.

Almost at once, I glimpsed my name. Suspended in a glass case on the wall, I saw the copy of
To the Lighthouse
, which Angela had told me they had. I felt a brief, intense uplift of pleasure to see how it sailed there like a pale ship, safely afloat in the twenty-first century.

The boy meanwhile had taken a slim volume from a bookcase and, holding it like a precious flame, lightly cupped between both hands, said ‘This is our copy of
Between the Acts
. If you’d like to sit down, you can inspect it.’