Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (19 page)

‘I am a little afraid of boats.’

Absurd, I have already drowned. Yet here I am, still ‘a little afraid’, as I was always a little afraid when my father took us out in the boat …

‘Must get the bill. Virginia – ’

‘I might just sit here a while longer.’

‘How will you get home?’

She didn’t answer, she was deep in thought, but when she spoke, her voice was calm.

‘I’ll sit here for a while, with Leonard.’

They were playing ‘Just one of those things’. One of our favourites. He sat there beside me.

I needed Angela to go away.

‘How will I get home? In a taxi, of course. I can command New York taxis.’

Normally I wouldn’t have left her, but I was in no state to take decisions.

‘Virginia – I believe you. See you in the lobby, 10
AM
.’

42

Angela is walking briskly through the sunlight near Battery Park towards the ticket office for Liberty Island, but Virginia is lagging
.

‘Yes yes I admit it, you’re right, I shouldn’t have had those extra glasses.’

‘My fault. I shouldn’t have left you there.’

‘I enjoyed it.’ (
Pause
.) ‘I am an adult.’

‘A policeman found you sitting on a fire hydrant. You’re very lucky he brought you back.’ (
She walks even faster
.)

‘I wasn’t sitting.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘I had attempted to leapfrog it. That is why I cannot keep up this pace.’

‘All right, Virginia. I hoped we would get the twelve o’clock boat … but maybe time doesn’t matter.’

‘No, time matters, don’t be absurd.’

So hard to understand while you’re in it. Only when you’re near the end …

(
Suddenly striding out
) ‘Yes, we must catch this ferry, you’re right. You see, I don’t want to miss anything. In case … they take me back.’

(
Pause
.)

‘I do so love it, in the light.’

‘I hope you had a good time last night?’

‘They have little books of quotes at the back. I tore out a poem by Dorothy Parker.’

‘You tore the book?’

She looked ashamed.

‘All right, I admit it. I tried to copy it, but the stupid biro didn’t work. The one you gave me. It doesn’t work.’

She was suddenly annoyed, her cheeks flushed with blood.

‘Well I’m sorry the biro didn’t work,’ I said. ‘But for
goodness sake, Virginia, we’ll buy another.’

Her frown relaxed. ‘I suppose we can. It will be all right, won’t it?’

‘Of course it will.’

Then she showed me the poem and I nearly fell over. It was ‘Resumé!’

‘I love that poem!’

‘Let’s read it aloud!’

And we did, badly, both holding the paper, when we got to the quay, panting and laughing –

‘Razors pain you,

Rivers are damp

Then we decided to write our own version. It was such fun! We made up the lines together, and I wrote it down in my notebook.

Shavers cut you,

Streams are muddy,

Poisons gut you

And jumping’s bloody.

Shooting’s noisy,

Hanging’s a dive,

Gas is queasy –

GIRL, STAY ALIVE!

It’s not every day you get to write a poem with Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Parker.

43

We missed the ferry, not that it mattered. I teased Virginia a lot – I think she half-enjoyed being treated as a wicked woman of the world. ‘Leonard used to monitor my drinking,’ she said. ‘He didn’t like me to get too excited. It was nice to let go, just once in a while. I felt – careless. I just didn’t care. And because he’s not here, I looked after myself. I had to get myself back home.’

The strange thing was, she was looking younger, despite the headache that creased her forehead. Her cheeks were pinker, her jaw-line firmer.

And then there was her
joie de vivre
. Her endless curiosity, which made her seem twenty years younger than she was. Wherever we were, her eyes swooped around like birds skimming back from a long migration. On the boat, she bought herself two packets of biros: she seemed ridiculously pleased.

I liked her company.

I liked Virginia.

Even when we had to wait for forty-five minutes, snaking in line through the sun and wind with hordes of heavy-legged tourists in shorts … no, probably they were Americans. Why did Americans always look like tourists?

Perhaps because they wore so few clothes, though this was only a faint spring heat-wave, with wintry breezes still blowing off the sea and a crisping of small white curls on the water. As if they’d thought: Spring! Time for a sun tan. As if they did not understand weather, or seasons, living as they did in airconned homes. Why should I be snippy? They were bent on fun.

That day felt like a holiday. Everyone was there, waiting for the voyage, the world and his wife in sunny mood. Dreadlocked young African Americans gyrating their hips to the rhythm of their iPods. Half a dozen Muslim youths in white tunics, clustered together in a laughing murmur, but every so often looking around them, their black beards jutting defensively forward. Later I saw the grim body-search as they went through security for the ferry. Three elderly, masculine, English women, two of them in nautical caps and blazers, speaking in voices nearly as fluting as Virginia’s, shouting about
Fidelio
at the Met. And, of course, the children – the children. The children, so much lighter than us, doing handstands and cartwheels, running about. Except the ones who were too fat to run, standing with stout knees pressed against one another, their cheeks churning secret comforts against the gum.

And with me suddenly were two Gerdas, the red-haired child of five or six who used to dance like an elf in the sunlight and the Gerda of today, heavier, steadier. How my girlie would love to be here. She had always loved holidays, travel, adventure. I suppose in that way she resembled her father, though of course he took everything much too far …

My dearest daughter. My darling girl. Late at night, when my chaperone duties were over, I started so many emails to her, falling asleep with them still unfinished, the drafts a layer-cake of good intentions.

Not that I should wholly blame Virginia. Sometimes I had certainly put work first. But that was nothing to feel guilty about. Someone had to think about the bills. Her father had contributed almost nothing during the first few years of Gerda’s life, and now he swanned casually off around the world, but he never seemed to worry, he never felt guilty!

But maybe all of us should have felt guilty, in our tiny, fractured, nuclear families. Yes, Mum and Dad had helped with
Gerda, but of course they grew old, and of course they died, and a working mother must sustain a career, so the children never get quite enough care – not even with the most responsible parents. I had tried to be responsible, from the start.

Lucky Virginia. Poor Virginia. Nothing to feel guilty about. But no small hands around her heart.

As we filed on to the boat and climbed the steps to the viewing deck, I said to her ‘My daughter loves boats. Gerda would really enjoy this trip.’

But the wind took my words, and she didn’t know Gerda, and in any case, the boat was leaving the quay and her eyes were already fastened on the view, the dazzling expanse of blue water, the skyscrapers diminishing into the distance, grey and blue and bronze and pink, and there across the bay, the pale grey-green lady, bleached by distance and the sun. She held up her torch: her arm looked white. Still far away, she looked small, hermetic.

Still far away, but growing by the minute.

I had loved the Statue of Liberty since my first trip to New York, ten years ago, when I first got an American publisher. I felt she held that beacon up for me. Her stone tablet became my book. That vision of a welcome to America.

Today, she was waiting for Virginia and me. I fixed my eyes and my hopes on her.

Yet none of it was personal. She was beautiful because she welcomed us all. The ‘huddled masses’, the refugees … even if their children were those fat adolescents sulking with popcorn in the queue for the ferry.

(I knew that Gerda had put on weight, most of it in that first term at school. Was even that going to be my fault?)

Virginia practically ran round the boat, this morning’s stiffnesses forgotten. I followed the yellow of her coat as she jostled boldly for the best view among the batteries of clicking
cameras. As the statue hove huge out of the sea, the battle for the side of the boat grew fiercer, but somehow Virginia was holding her own.

Perhaps she was so eccentric-looking that no-one bothered to object – of course I had got used to her, but her lambent eyes and full tremulous lips, so classic, so Victorian, looked even more astonishing above her brisk yellow twenty-first-century trench-coat. I watched her changing sides of the boat with a great sliding ‘Whoop!’ as it veered around the approach to the jetty of Liberty Island, her hair flying free from its normal bun, laughing happily into the wind as the horn of the boat played a great trombone –

The Statue of Liberty towered above us.

Then a crush of people fought to be first off the gangway, and I watched her anxiously from the back, her slim yellow back marking her tracks, her wild grey halo bobbing up and down, while the boat docked, and I saw, amazed, she was making progress, she was pogo-ing through, she was burrowing headlong towards her goal, now she was almost at the front of the line –

They opened the gates.

Virginia stormed it!

She was off over the grass ahead of all of us.

I was left panting far behind.

Once one’s off the boat, one approaches from behind. I was desperate to get ahead of the mob. She loomed ahead of us, too big to take in, planted on her big cairn of brick. I was panting, half-running, to stay ahead and I could not hurry while looking upwards, so I saw her in snatched glances, like a Wyndham Lewis drawing, her back, her huge foot, her tremendous arm, the strong, groomed hair, so different from mine …

Then I rounded the corner, came out on the green foreshore, and faced her at last. I saw her whole.

Yes, I saw her clear for a second. I wept.

For there was my fond, foolish dream. The model of the just female warrior. Tall, kindly, an amazon. The mother brave enough to hold up the light – Vanessa’s dust jacket for
To the Lighthouse
. Her strong, bent arms, her intent gaze, the way she stoutly faced the sea, searching out those in need of her, the storm-tossed ships from all over the world –

(not turning inwards as poor Mother did, reading the Bible, mending the sock the servants were too tired to darn, polishing the hearth that was ‘not polished properly’ – ‘Sit down, Julia, you’ll exhaust yourself’ – visiting the sick and caring for little ones, not her own little ones but those of the benighted, chastising herself for what she had not done, rebuking us mutely for our failures of duty, driving herself onwards, always on, her cheeks growing hollower, her face falling in, her eyes flaming brighter as they sank into their sockets, her whole body burning up from within like a narrow white candle stuck fast on a table, flaring up, finally, then fading out. That terrible attrition behind closed doors. Only terror for us, locked outside, whispering children without understanding. She grew weaker, finally, until she died. How did that help us? We were left lonely.)

Here she was, now, my Liberty. No-one could interfere with her. Her body was formed from massive blocks of limestone, her crown an immense defence of green metal. She did not worry. She did not fret. Her strong calves walked. She was marching on the future.

I stood in her shadow, near her huge feet. I was ahead of the crowd, alone with her. Her head was hundreds of feet up in
the air, her massive eyeballs scanned the horizon, looking for those who needed care.

I felt I was with Mother, too. That she, and all the suffering, were here. That with Liberty, mothers could be tired children. That they could rest, and she would care. Julia’s head leant upon my shoulder.

The air was cool, but the wind had dropped. I realised how exhausted I was. I had been dragged through time, summoned into this world like a book requisitioned from a distant library … A great ache of weariness wrapped my body. Sleep drifted up and took me down. I was safe to fall, I was coming home

‘Virginia?
Virginia
?’

I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there. A huge crowd circled the monument. The twenty-first century having fun: taking photos, playing loud music, wrestling, shrieking, eating their picnics, cross-eyed boys playing video-games, three Japanese girls in pink trying to break-dance, a Chinese teacher with terrible acne shouting and sweating as he marshalled the children, two tall blonde sisters – northern Europeans? – doing double-jointed yoga near the foot of the statue, a circle of well-behaved primary school children cross-legged on the ground around their leader, each with their different-coloured lunchbox, a roundel of plastic flowers on the green – I hurried through them – where was Virginia?

Then at the centre, a huddle of people, a cage of figures bending over someone.

For a moment, as I pushed my way through to her, I thought that she – that she was gone. But just as I got there, the cage-bars loosened, the bent figures straightened, I saw Virginia – stretched on the ground – but yes, she was moving. As I called
her name, she began to sit up. I could see in her eyes, small-pupiled, stunned, that she felt overrun with people, pressing all round her, blocking out the sky.