Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (16 page)

(I can’t blame Dad because he’s in the Arctic. Otherwise I would, don’t worry! When dads feel guilty, they spend money.)

What they don’t realise – splitting up parents – is that it splits
us
up as well. There’s a feeling, non-stop, at the back of your brain. A sort of numb feeling that all you have to do is run it all backwards, and maybe you’ll get back to a year ago, or two, or three, or whenever our family was last happy – (I want to cry when I think the words ‘our family’, because ‘family’ used to give me a warm feeling, and my parents were special, which made me proud) – but this time around I would make it better, whatever I did that helped it go wrong. Yes, I admit I sometimes made trouble.

And the place you went back to, without cracks or splinters, that would be home, for all of you, and you’d never have to leave, unless you chose to.

Though of course, one day, I would, and I will.

It’s children who should leave, not parents. So there’s always
someone for us to go home to.

As things are, I can’t ever go home. I’ve got here, haven’t I, but everyone’s gone.

My family. Which was once complete.

A little island where I lived with them.

Now I look back, it’s gone small and misty. I peer like a div but I can’t see our faces.

I think about now, and everything’s bad.

Dad’s in the middle of the Arctic circle. Teeny little matchstick man. Maybe he’s shouting, I can’t hear him. Maybe he’s trying to shout my name.

Mum is swanning it in Central Park. She and Virginia, both Being Famous, neither of them thinking about me for a moment.

I’m coming to get you, just you wait
.

39

I had thought we would stroll through Central Park, thus crossing item 3 off our list – it should have taken half an hour or so. But as soon as I looked at Virginia in the daylight, I saw she would not be able to do it –

It was a cool, cloudless spring day. The glory of above-the-ground. I was relieved to be out in the light, and surely the walk would be good for her?

But something had happened to her in the Met, or perhaps in the other museums that morning.

Hard to remember, hard to describe. I was never clear about what I saw.

Virginia had chilled and faded. She had hesitated on the wide flight of steps that leads down from the portico of the Met, and I took her hand, and it was very cold, as cold, or nearly, as that very first time, when it felt like trailing my hand in water.

Something came up from the ground, a deep shudder

yes, they were calling me down to them

darling Nessa
 
Roger
 
Duncan

reaching out
 
beseeching me
 
no, I was not ready

to join them

dead deep cold of a place without sun

 
left alone, I was slowing, stopping

but a hand
 
her outstretched hand
 
touched me

Her light had gone out. Her face was grey. She was smaller, slighter than before.

I dropped her fingers, because I was afraid, but I tried to smile at her, I spoke to her urgently, ‘
Virginia?
Let’s get a taxi to the bookshop.’

She didn’t answer. She was suddenly stooped. She clutched her turquoise shantung against her, the curve of her collarbone sharp in the light, wrapping her rich shot-silk around her as if she was trying to hold the heat in.

‘Cold,’ she whispered. ‘Cold as winter. I didn’t know New York was so cold.’

But there by the pavement stood the line of yellow taxis, a chunky string of cheery toys, waiting for life, movement, money. Avoiding her hand, I pushed her towards them.

She was in the taxi, I slammed the door. Concentrated sunlight poured through the glass. It soared, in that small space, like an anthem, and she sat and slept for a while, which scared me.

But as she slept, she relaxed, expanded.

A flush of colour returned to her cheek.

We were heading for the big Barnes and Noble that took up five floors of the Lincoln Center. My first intention was to impress her. It was a wondrous bookshop that I knew well, with classical music in the basement and a café with a view on the fifth floor. My original mission had been rather gung-ho: to show her what my century could do. Choice! Speed! Image quality! Tables groaning with glossy hardbacks, international art books with colour photography she and her contemporaries
could only dream of, swathes of foreign languages, psychology, philosophy, politics, economics. But after the sadness of the art galleries, I was focused on showing her her own books.

We would find her in depth in the Literature section – I had no doubts; I’d bought her books there before. After that, I decided, tea and cakes. Perhaps in Le Pain Quotidien? A little bit of Europe on the 72nd, yet with a certain homespun rigour; plain wood tables, good-for-you bread. That would put life back into her veins. She could sit and drink tea and enjoy her book jackets. Nourishing titbits of critical praise! (And if my books were there, she’d be able to see mine. The critics had been kind to me. At least, the ones we selected for the jacket.)

If only it had happened that way.

Barnes and Noble’s flagship store had closed. There was a small, legal notice on the central doors. The last book had been rung through the tills the week before. Soon a discount clothing store would take its place. Where once there had been five floors of books, there were now five floors of emptiness. It had gone dark, my beautiful building.

The palace of books. While my back was turned, there had been a violent overthrow. I peered through the glass and at first saw nothing, then less than nothing – empty shelving, crumpled bits of paper, a SALE sign lying at an angle to the wall.

‘Oh, Virginia, I’m sorry. It’s closed down. I don’t know why.’

‘But you said it was the best bookshop?’

‘Yes. Did I? No – there are others.’

I wanted to protect her from the blow I felt. We were both authors. Authors need bookshops. Tunnels of ore waiting to be mined. But no, the canaries were dying in their cages. The human customers had rushed for daylight. I took a step back, and turned away.

The space outside the Lincoln Center was too wide, too
windy, the polished stone reflecting sky, blank, stupid, and nothing was written, and maybe one day there would be no more writing. Only images. Only surface.

‘It’s rather a shock to me. Everything’s – gone.’

And suddenly Virginia was comforting me. ‘It’s just a shop,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. Bookshops closed down in our day too. They are only businesses, my dear. The books themselves will live elsewhere. Maybe they are going to live in your … laptops?
We have other lives, I think, I hope
… I know I wrote that somewhere. Yes, of course,
Between the Acts
.’

‘But you despaired,’ I said to her. I realised I was leaning on her, slightly, her triangular figure in its gorgeous clothes suddenly taller, steadier, sheltering me from the blaze of sky.

‘Yes, I despaired,’ she said. Briefly, her voice was rough with sorrow. ‘But never about a business, dear. I thought I would go mad again. I thought my writing was a failure – ’

‘Yes, sorry. Stop, Virginia. What I’m feeling is trivial.’

‘Sorrow is sorrow. We all despair. But now we must find another bookshop.’

‘There’s another good one:
Borders
.’

The next second, she left me there and struck out boldly for the kerb, where her turquoise arm with its long white pinion waved at the sun for a yellow taxi. One veered towards her and she turned to me, elated by this new success. Inside the taxi she chattered gaily about the book business in the 1920s and 1930s, the risks they took with the Hogarth Press; how they taught themselves to print with a pamphlet – ‘The printing press cost us less than £20!’ – the pleasure of selling 134 copies, ‘but all the same, we made a profit – and then later, of course, we published Tom Eliot!’

But I still felt the cold of the shop window, the moment my eyes got used to the dark and focused on the emptiness.

There were plenty of people on the pavement outside Borders. But something strange was going on. The windows were in the grip of some fever. Garish red and yellow notices, ugly as a municipal flower-bed, pushed up brutally across the glass: ‘90% OFF!’, they shouted, ‘50% OFF!’ Black on yellow, fighting a glaring scarlet background. People were pouring through the doors. Virginia and I were carried in with them. Inside, though, we all paused, puzzled. You couldn’t see the books behind a forest of signs, all of them shouting percentages at us.

‘It’s a New Year sale,’ I said to her. ‘Sales make a lot of money for shops.’

But then I thought, it’s not New Year, it’s far too late for a January sale. And ‘90 per cent off’? How can they make a profit if everything is 50 per cent to 90 per cent off?

My eyes were hurting. The figures were jumping, 50!, 90!, inside my head.

A plump young woman in a too-tight overall was hurrying through with a pile of books. I stopped her and asked, ‘What’s going on? It’s a strange time to have a sale.’

She looked at me, dead-eyed like a fish, too fat, too hot, on the point of expiring. ‘It’s a sale,’ she repeated, stubbornly.

‘But is it a …?’ No, I could not say it.

And then she said it. ‘A Closing Down Sale.’

‘Why are you closing down?’ She said nothing. ‘
Why are you closing down?
’ I insisted, hearing my voice shoot up an octave. But I must be nice, it was not her fault, she was only a few years older than Gerda.

‘Is there a Literature section?’ I asked.

She looked as if she didn’t know the word. Perhaps it was my English accent, for after three seconds with her brain ticking over she suddenly said, ‘Oh,
literature
. Like
criticism
. That’d be in Academic. But I’m not sure there’s anything left.’

We stood for a second and stared at her, and she at us,
uncomprehending. Should we have tried to bridge the gap? But she had turned and gone, it was already too late. Virginia and I stayed still for a moment, two authors becalmed in a flood-tide of panic.

‘I shouldn’t have brought you here,’ I said. ‘We’re going to look for a real bookshop.’

‘Could we try a smaller one?’ she inquired. ‘In my time, we never had such –
monstrosities
.’

‘Maybe we should never have had them either. Maybe they’re dinosaurs who grew too big.’

They had swallowed up food, coffee, cards, events, readings, signings, music. The books grew worse, and the choice less, 2 for 1 on celebrity memoirs, dreadful novels by chefs and actors. Till the customers noticed they were being sold rubbish.

And then, basically, we were all fucked. Not that I would ever say that to her.

But then I did. ‘So we’re all fucked.’

She froze for a moment, looked at me doubtfully, and then exploded into peals of laughter, rocking about in her turquoise shantung, shoulders shaking in the harsh fluorescent light – morning sunlight on a beetle’s back. I thought for a moment she would actually take off! Her smoke-blue hat was whirling, spinning, and her laugh rang out and everyone was staring, and I was laughing because she was laughing … then her hat fell off, and both of us stopped.

I had to find a place where books were still sold. I asked, on impulse, a thin elderly couple, the man silver-curled, with intelligent spectacles, reading outside a café near Borders. He gave Virginia’s hat an admiring smile. Too late I saw his book was on accountancy. But he listened to me and answered eagerly, ‘31, West Fifty-seventh Street. Rizzoli’s bookstore. It’s a jewel. Honestly. You’ll love it.’

We did. From the moment we saw the shop front, an arch of glass and stone and behind it, not SALE notices, but rows of books. They were playing Mozart softly inside. The galleried floors were Victorian, detailed. I went to the till on the ground floor and asked the smiling youth for Woolf. ‘Virginia Woolf.’ He nodded, eagerly, his long hair shaking like a spaniel’s, and sent us up to the third floor.

But Third Floor was ‘European Languages’. A thirty-year-old woman sat by the till, engrossed in reading. ‘Excuse me. Virginia Woolf?’ I asked, doubtful. ‘We were sent up here.’

‘Ah yes, Woolf,’ she said, without surprise, eyes still on her page, and checked the computer. ‘Yes. We have her in Spanish, French and let me see, yes, Italian.’ Virginia’s face rearranged itself, she had been afraid there would be nothing here either, but now she was uplifted, her eyes brightened.

And there they were, her boats, safe home. Sheltered in the harbour in their different liveries. ‘There you are, Virginia.
A Room of One’s Own
in all three languages. And several copies,’ I said.

‘
Una Habitación Propia
! It sounds like “Clean your room, young lady”,’ Virginia exclaimed, plucking out a copy, but I could see that she was pleased. ‘I like the Italian title better, which makes it sound so delightfully selfish –
Una Stanza tutta per se
. Oh, and I love
La Signorina Dalloway
, so sinuous and silky … So these are the books they prefer,’ she mused. ‘But you said
Between the Acts
is thought my best?’

‘By some critics. And some writers. Like me,’ I said, shyly, for I did admire its spare certainty. ‘But everyone likes
To the Lighthouse
,’ I said.

I left her crouched like an awkward cormorant, bent over the books she was feeding upon, and went downstairs to find her books in English. Perhaps she would like to re-read her work. Perhaps, after I’d left for Istanbul, someone could
organise some readings – performed by a ‘Woolf look-alike!’ She would play Virginia Woolf to the life!

I returned to the original polite young man. ‘Were you lucky with your search?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, thank you. But of course they were translations. I’m eager to find the originals.’

He looked slightly blank. His skin was flawless.

‘In English.’

He tried his computer again. ‘I’m sure we would usually have her in English,’ he said. ‘Perhaps someone has just bought them.’