Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (13 page)

‘Those helmets look like German helmets,’ I told him, but he just laughed and grunted.

It took an age for us to creep past them. Plenty of time for us to look at them, plenty of time for them to look at us and see the evidence at our feet, though none of them showed the slightest interest. ‘GRANDMOTHERS AGAINST GREED’ – a tanned, lined woman sat cross-legged on the pavement and waved at passers-by, her long white hair blowing out like Medusa’s. What if she caught my eye? I looked away. I felt like a criminal, caught red-handed. One was not used to having so much money.

One felt – at fault, with the mob outside, this cheerful mob of bright-coloured people. Perhaps there was a feeling that we should have been with them, for one or two of them were sitting down, their signs propped beside them, reading books, & the tents were like strange, fluorescent life-forms on these rigid streets where nothing was growing. ‘QUESTION WHAT YOU KNOW’ was like a thought that had skipped into life from my own pages. Yet soon their noise became tiresome, a cacophony of whistles scraping at our eardrums.

We had to get the loot back to the hotel
.

Yes, we were there. ‘Hurray!’ said Angela. We forgot the demonstration and enjoyed the money.

29

For the first time I felt this writer who came from the future was pleased with me. Pleased with the real Virginia, not the dead Virginia she knew from the writing.

I was not my everyday self in my novels, because they rarely allowed me to be funny.

In life I was always hooting with laughter, people were ridiculous, life was absurd. And so was I, and Nessa, and Leonard, and all my loves, Lytton, Ottoline, Roger, old Ethel Smyth like a charging shire-horse …

Of course I was myself in my diaries, but they were my secret, and never published. By now they are destroyed – I asked Leonard to do it. He would never reveal me to the eyes of others.

The diaries were the place where I laughed, and examined myself, and found myself and others wanting. And learned my craft. Most days I wrote something. Except when the shadow came upon me, and even then, I tried to track it, tried to record my fight to stay sane. Hundreds of thousands of words I wrote.

Was it a waste, since no-one ever saw them? There in the diaries, I captured my world. The texture of the hours and minutes: the shining lawns between day and darkness.

Sadness brushes me – lost, forever.

Would I re-read it if I could?

No, no time, I am a new person. When I’m less tired, I will write all this newness (I’ve tried, as it happens, a couple of times, and I don’t want to upset Angela by complaining, but
the pens she bought from that huckster are useless.)

‘We’re changing our hotel,’ Angela announced. ‘You have no need to economise, and I’m only at the Waddington by accident. I suggest a little place called the Wordsmiths Hotel. Though I’ve only got four days left in New York.’

She only had four days left in New York!

I thought, what will happen after she’s gone? Will she take me with her? Where is she going? What will happen about the money?

Wherever she goes, I must go.

30

(This is the part after the
Cliffehanger
, which is where I was going to open the envelope that had the special secret surprise that my friends who were really the
Furies
gave me.)

I did open it. This is what happened.

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

There were two squares of cardboard, one pink, one pale blue. Each of them had a tiny photo of me, which they must have taken off my Facebook site. They looked like membership cards.

They were. One said:

The other one said:

I stood there staring in absolute rage. Then I took the envelope and tore it in two. But I kept the cards as Evidence, and later I would be glad I did, though I shoved them at the back of the deepest drawer in my room. Even there they still managed to eat my brain. Like actual Devils, a pale pink one, a pale blue one, jeering and sneering till I took them out again and read them half a dozen times, and my blood was boiling, and I was crying, but I wasn’t sad, I was just making plans. To kill all three of them, of course.

I didn’t wonder why they did it. I knew straight away. My deepest instinct had always told me that even when they were being nice, those three girls actually hated me. But my Gollum-y side wouldn’t listen to it, because I wanted it not to be true. (And maybe Cindy didn’t totally hate me, but when she did, she knew how to hurt me.)

And it wasn’t just the insult to me. It was the insult to my mummy. (Too late now to wish I had never told my enemies I still called her ‘Mummy’.) Maybe I talked about her too much, but I had less family than they did because I’m an only child, which I like, as I don’t have to put up with brothers and sisters stealing all Mum’s love and attention. (If there were
more of us, she’d NEVER email.)

And so I sette off in search of the Furies, who hadde pursued me so pitilessly, hunting me with laughter and with kindnesse. And what I dydde to them will be in Part the Fifth.

(I just remembered I told you already.) (I nearly drowned them in the swimming pool.)

So this is

Honestly, are you reading this, Mummy? Do you care that it actually happened to me? And I was brave? Are you proud of me?

31

Things got better for us at the Wordsmiths Hotel. She had plenty of money in the purse I gave her and thousands in the hotel’s deposit room, an absurd amount to keep in a hotel, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. She had no passport or driving license to open a deposit account at a bank, and I was uneasy about her putting such a large amount into mine. If journalists ever got wind of this, I wanted to come out – smelling of roses (does money ever smell like roses?).

Yet I was doing her many favours. How would Virginia have managed without me? It’s true my time is valuable, too. My workshops cost $1,000 a day.

Perhaps she should have offered me a small percentage?

Five per cent. Or maybe ten. Nine thousand dollars would have been most helpful, but obviously it was up to her to suggest it. I could hardly ask her directly, could I? The Wordsmiths Hotel cost a lot of money. Without her I would have stayed on in the Waddington, ghastly though it was, and got on with my paper.

Which would have been about Virginia, true, and for which the Turks would be paying me. But the Virginia Woolf I was writing about was so much less trouble than the one I was with. The first earned me money, the latter cost me.

I wonder how much of the money is mine? After all, without Angela I would have nothing. So far she’s given me $500, and
told me to be careful with it.

I think it would be fair to split the money in two, but she might not agree to that.

So I’ll ask her to work out today’s equivalent of £500 and a room of one’s own’. Then I will request it, bold as brass.

We took the largest rooms on the ‘literature’ floor (the entire hotel is literature-themed, and we found ourselves in two ‘queen-sized’ rooms nestling alongside each other, named ‘Hemingway’ and ‘Scott Fitzgerald’). We told reception we had two bags of valuable books to keep in their strong room. (Well, the money was the fruit of her books.)

Would my books be valuable, a hundred years later?

It didn’t matter, I was a best-seller. She seemed surprised when I told her that. Only one of her books was a true bestseller, and that was probably her worst,
The Years
.

– I’m not quite sure what that has proved.

Sometimes I felt almost hostile to her. Worrying about her well-being was distracting me not only from my paper, ‘Virginia Woolf, A Long Shadow’, but also from the answer to my problem: what should my new novel be about?

– That sense I was on the brink of something.

Edward had a gift for discouragement. When pressed, he would say, ‘You’re a really good writer, but I preferred your early books.’

‘Don’t you like what I’m writing now?’

A short pause before he answered ‘Of course.’

Before leaving London, I’d had lunch with the new editor at Headstone. She looked about fifteen years old in her orange jacket and plastic shorts, and assured me she was a ‘fan’ of mine.

I tried to explain what I was feeling. ‘But you’re a success,’ she said, surprised. ‘We love what you do. Everyone’s happy.’
I wasn’t totally sure she had read me, but she knew the sales figures were good and said my work was ‘wonderful’.

‘Believe me,’ she said, with an earnest expression, ‘very sadly, we’re having to shed some of our – more mature writers. But Angela Lamb is a brand!’

From that I learned only that she thought I was old.

I tried my agent: we had a coffee. She talked about my foreign rights. ‘I want to feel passion,’ I interrupted her. ‘I want to write something I feel passionate about.’ She was a nice woman. She said, ‘You should.’

Which was why I had set off for New York and Istanbul. I could have written another novel in my study. But I was looking for something else. The common life I once shared with Woolf – when ‘inspiration’ meant ‘breathing her in’. Her daring, her certainty that anything could be written. Her sense of wonder at all of life.

Well, I had certainly got close to her, even if the novel was still under construction.

In the Wordsmiths Hotel, everything was new. I carefully explained to her the taps, the safe, the television, the elevator, the CD and DVD player, though she only pretended to understand me, as I learned quite quickly from the men in the lobby after ‘your wonderful mother’ – I soon disillusioned them! – broke the TV and jammed the aircon. But she’d learned to work the hotel telephones, thankfully, which meant she didn’t always come to me when she had a problem with reality.

She marvelled at her elegant sunken bath, the soaps and oils, the high-speed lift. Especially the lift, which Virginia played in for a whole morning. I heard her laughter in the corridor.

‘Virginia, what have you been doing? Where have you been? You’re all flushed.’

‘Up to the roof-top bar and down to ‘Literature’, down to the ‘Reading Room’ and up again, down to the lobby to talk to the porters (they’re charmers), up to the top again to take in the view – you get there in seconds, it’s terrific fun! I shall write an essay on the high-speed lift!’

Later I knocked on her door to go to supper and found her seated at her desk, the hotel notepaper in front of her. I tried to get a glimpse of what she was writing, but she must have just started a new blank page.

The lobby staff seemed to adore Virginia. They obviously thought she embodied Olde Englande, and bathed her in courtly bows and beams whenever we left the hotel together.

(Yes, very sweet, but Virginia milked it. Sometimes I felt I hardly existed.)

She was learning to do things solo, thankfully. Which was a relief, since now I had only two and a half days left in New York. The conference was preying on my mind. I still hadn’t finished revising my paper, though I was getting my quotes together. The hostile critics could be so savage! Sometimes I found that rather bracing, and allowed myself a horrified snicker. Of course I didn’t say a word to Virginia.

As things were, would I be able to leave her?

‘Virginia, we must make a plan.’

32

I have received an email from my mother. I am obviously Concerned about her, which is what she sometimes says about me, when she is on the phone to other mothers, but she doesn’t mean it, she is just getting in on whatever they say they are worried about, eg. Drugs, Sex, Boys etc., though I have never done any of that.

I WILL FIND A WAY TO WORRY HER LATER!

Hallo Sweet Pea!
(It’s what she calls me, I TOLD her not to)

(But she doesn’t mean it, she’s just saying it, whereas I AM a Genius, with a Genius IQ. My old school told her, but she forgot. I TOLD HER THE STORY REALLY HAPPENED TO ME. SHE REALLY IS UNSATISFACTORY. Or perhaps she has lost her glasses again, and I’m not there to help her find them.)

(Yes, but she didn’t believe MY story!)

(She made Woolf sound like a total mong. The writer who I love at the moment is Kurt Vonnegut, because he is funny. And great. He’s dead like her, but he didn’t kill himself, in fact he fell over and hit his head and died despite not wanting to. I thought, ‘He’s loads better than that old woman.’)