Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (2 page)

But first of all: work to do. Off to the New York Public Library.

(Inside, part of me was still shaking. I’d felt shallow or hollow, ever since that terrible blaze of white light.)

The woman in charge of the private Berg Collection where the Woolf manuscripts are kept gave me an oblong yellow reader’s card: ‘ANGELA LAMB is hereby admitted to the BERG COLLECTION (Room 320) for research on VIRGINIA WOOLF. This card is good through 27 NOV 2020 unless revoked.’ I like membership cards. They make me feel entitled. I haven’t always felt that way.

Virginia, of course, was born entitled. But part of me is still the daughter of Lorna and Henry, born in Wolverhampton.

Statutory humblings. Abandon your coat, your briefcase, your camera, your pens, your phone before you can enter. I didn’t mind. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her!

Then the librarian explained.

There’s a rule that only applies to Woolf, because she is so valuable: no original manuscript material can be accessed. ‘I’m afraid you have to read her on microfilm.’ But it’s hardly the same, is it? She hasn’t breathed on that film, or used it, or touched it.

I was muttering furiously under my breath, head down because I didn’t want to be evicted from this submarine, cosy, womb-of-a-room where only the two librarians and I were working. At least I was
near
those manuscripts. At least I sat two feet away from the heavy glass case where the walking stick she carried on that final day was lurking, a horrible thing of
dark, hooked cane. It looked – cursed. I’m allergic to suicide. And yet, it was a link to her.

Who has more right than me to read her?

All the senseless ‘No’s of my life jostled and surged in my head as I sat there. Virginia, I thought, Virginia, I crossed an ocean to get close to you. Can’t they let me reach you somehow? I sat there and longed: for her elegant angular writing, her amused, classic face. English! She was English, but these rich Americans had filched her!

Then the pleasant girl brought me one article, a strange piece Woolf had written for
Hearst Magazine and Cosmopolitan
in 1938, a carbon copy on thin onion-skin paper, with a few corrections in ink. The title was ‘America which I have never seen interests me most in the cosmopolitan world of today’.

And at once I was enjoying the dance. ‘Cars drive sixty or seventy abreast,’ she assures us (though she never went there!). ‘While we have shadows that walk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them, which is the future.’ I was smiling as I read. I’ll take you home to Europe, I silently promised, if I can get to you I’ll slip you in my bag and take you back to Sussex, to Leonard, to Lewes …

Perhaps I had spoken aloud – ‘I’ll take you back to Leonard, to Lewes’ – for one of the librarians was staring at me fixedly.

Or not at me. No, behind me.

I heard, or half-heard, a croaking sound. Half-human. Distressed. Straining. And I turned in my chair. And saw.

Did I hear ‘Leonard’? Did I say ‘Leonard’? Can I now even remember how it was?

Suddenly from nothing

was I something again?

My own voice waking me from too far away –

hearing my own voice
 
rather deep and tremulous, I thought & almost –
old
–

 
(for inside I was still young, a girl, when I died)

I followed it up

from the depths of cold watery sleep

 
into the warmth of a small dim room I did not know

a woman breathing as she read, lips half-moving, very serious,

      
a sigh
     
a small smile

She was reading me with such strong desire and I wondered

‘Who is she?’

she has blonde hair
     
but she is not young

I am on the threshold
 
I’m too tired
 
I don’t know

a fish jerking
 
it’s me that she’s reading
 
yes, it’s my soul it’s me
–

And she reeled me in, hauled me up. A strain like a tooth being pulled.

This woman. This strange woman. That was all I thought. Tall and dusty in bedraggled green and grey clothes. A suit. The librarian said, ‘Excuse me. May I help you?’ Then closed in on her like a gaoler.

Stirring and gathering myself
 
too late to go back –

an ache
 
coming together

puckering a long fall of satin curtain

a wavering

a pulling together
 
not wanting

to be seen

exposed

her eyes, their eyes

but
oh
–

the waking of the light

in the dark so long
 
lost in my own crushed rib-cage

weighted with mud and slime
 
though dying
 
was no

worse than the terror
 
nothing

is worse than the terror

Here, I am suddenly here.

Warm wood. Women. Electric lights. A strange room.

Two books in my hands. Yes, they’re mine. Hold them close to my body, hide them. Mine.

And, as if new-born, no fear. Was it over?

Almost before I knew what was happening, she was gone. In a pincer movement, two librarians hustled her out of the door. ‘If you don’t have a need for access to original material …’ one was saying, and the strange woman gaped like a fish, while the other librarian intoned, ‘The librarians in the
open
reading
rooms will be happy to help you.’

The door swung shut. There followed a hubbub of librarian excitement, which is quiet, but the first words I could make out were ‘Who was THAT?’

And as soon as I heard it as a question, I knew the answer, and made for the door.

Out on the landing, a gaggle of Japanese tourists with cameras, a big-nosed man in a red woollen hat – but not her. So I ran down the stairs, and there, on the last flight but one, by a seat where a black boy in shades was sleeping, there she stood, yes it was her. A tall angular shape from the back, not going forward, hovering, leaning, like a tall-masted sailing ship. Her white fingers trailing on the balustrade, then touching two books, which she clutched to her ribs, shyly, as if in wonderment.

My breath caught. I slowed down, and came to her step by step.

Step

by

step.

I was afraid. I kept walking, I drew abreast.

I was any fan, any groupie, suddenly. I could see her face. Her great globes of eyes, darting down, away: hunted.

Perhaps I should have left her. But how could I have let her stumble out on to the streets of Manhattan on her own?

I had to say: ‘
Virginia?
’

She said my name, that first time, as if I belonged to her. They
shan’t have me! She said ‘Virginia?’ and I was off like a hare. There were red ropes, I went the wrong way, a man in uniform stopped me & asked to look at ‘those books’, I had two of my own & he looked at me hard and said ‘Ma’am, are these from the library?’ – but I said ‘No’ & rushed on, with her after me. And then –

Half of me was laughing, half of me was shivering, nothing like this had ever happened, not to me. But I couldn’t let her go.

It was brilliant; it was impossible; it was so thrilling I could hardly breathe. It was Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. And I reached out my hand.

She
touched
me. It felt – electric. You see, I wanted –

It was like dipping my hand in water.

I wanted to come back.

2

I loved my life: I was in the thick of it. Things I had earned by writing my books. Yes, I’ve earned them, and I enjoy them. Films, travel, clothes, chocolate. I loved my daughter – I love my daughter. (It seems a long time since I emailed her.)

I love good food, and taking out money, nice thick chunks of it out of the wall. And no, I don’t have to feel defensive. My parents were poor, and my mother couldn’t cook. I like the sunny side of the street, because when I was a child, days were darker. When I was a child I was often afraid. And of course, more recently, problems with Edward. Eco-heroes are hard to live with.

It was more a question of living without. Edward was on an expedition to the Arctic, financed by a cat’s cradle of grants. I hadn’t wanted him to go. There were a series of explosive rows before he went. I told him, if he was leaving me, he needn’t bother coming back.

I hadn’t expected to be alone. But who wants to be with the wrong person? I knew my life was about to get better.

And so I paused before pushing onward. A dark smudge on the event horizon. Something brief as a fin surfacing.

(Because reading Virginia Woolf isn’t simple. I love her, but parts of her make me shiver. And sometimes – yes – she creeps into my head, a pale bony version of the woman she was, and she’s pointing to places I’ve never been, tunnelling away from air and sunshine. Although of course she can be very funny.)

In that instant the universe split, and I was sucked into this particular story.

There she was, white, in front of me.

‘Virginia?’ I sighed, a second time.

3

A yellow-haired female was gaping at me. Not respectable. Primped & painted. Yet her demeanour was kind enough. All around us, more painted women. Everyone smelled of chemicals. There were many Africans and Chinamen.

Was it Wolstenholme’s laudanum? How had I lost myself again?

The world whirled round me, I had no centre, perhaps the voices would begin.

Yet part of me was still, quiet. A child, watching. Was I reborn?

Then, too late, I remembered my manners. We stood in the foyer of the library, the great loud streets roaring past outside, but there was still glass protecting her – I felt from the start I would have to protect her. ‘Mrs Woolf?’ I corrected myself. ‘Mrs Woolf? May I help you?’

‘I think,’ she said – such a beautiful voice, but absurd! If she tried to give a reading today, people would laugh out loud at her fluting vowels, her long ‘I’s like ‘A’s, her ‘a’s like ‘e’s – ‘I may perhaps need help. I seem to have forgotten where I am.’

And I stammered, ‘The New York Public Library.’

‘A library?’ Large eyes, grey-green, puzzled. Blurred or misted with age or doubt. Blinking out from caves of bone. ‘Perhaps there is a telephone?’

‘Use my mobile,’ I said. ‘But we must go outside.’

She stared, then continued as if I had not spoken. ‘Is there a telephone I might use?’

So many things to explain to her
. But first I must get her to some kind of shelter. Virginia Woolf on these blaring streets … ‘Come back to my hotel. It’s not far.’

On the other hand: Woolf in my modern room – modern to her – small, slightly seedy, the radiator humming, my shabby 1970s Waddington Hotel?

Her voice became more imperious. ‘I’m so sorry, I don’t know your name, but I really must telephone my husband.’

And then I was overwhelmed with pity. She did not know that he was dead! But I said – that temptation to show my knowledge – ‘Leonard.’ There must have been something in my tone, for she looked back at me, alarmed. ‘Are you an acquaintance of my husband’s?’

‘I’ve heard of him. Everyone has.’

And her long, almost equine face relaxed. Those mournful, haunted eyes sparkled, her full lips lifted in a sweet, shy smile. Yes, a chalice of happiness. ‘Do you think so? Mr Woolf will be amused to know that.’

You love him still
, I thought with pain, pain for her and then for me – Edward said he loved me, but he still walked out. Had I ever been loved as Virginia was?

‘You’ll have to come with me,’ I said, almost brusque (people were starting to stare at her). And then, as kindly as I could, ‘Come with me, I’ll look after you.’

And yes, that’s what I tried to do.

4

My mum picked up this weird old woman. That’s what I thought till I googled her. For a bit, Mum thought about nothing else. She claimed this person was ‘very famous’. Mum didn’t bother to explain to me. I just thought, ‘Yeah, she’s got a loony in tow.’

She should have told me. I would have believed her. And in the end – but that’s much later.

5

Virginia smelled. Of mud, and roots. People were pausing and sniffing the air as they pressed through those great library doors. I wasn’t able to be objective. I thought, it’s a dream, of course it’s a dream, but please don’t make me wake up until –

I needed to learn what she had to teach me. Maybe everything. About life, and writing. She had the secrets. She’d reached the end. The hard truth people can never tell us. At least, that’s something I’ve always thought. Not till the end is the pattern complete. But then they slip away through the gate. They can’t come back, we can’t ask questions.

Yet here she was. Virginia.

Have I slipped my leash?

I think that’s it.

I’ve made it through to the other side, the place I never

believed could be.

At first I thought, banally, I was dreaming.

Now, all round me, this dream has flesh

bars
 
bricks
 
towers
 
trees
 
tall silver-grey trees

beside the library
 
crows
 
yes
 
flown out of my past

friendly crows
 
‘
Kaar, Virginia
’

& now I have to find the others.

(I don’t think everyone is here. No matter, so long as Leonard is.)

He must be here. He wouldn’t leave me.

6

‘This is Fifth Avenue,’ Angela says, as Woolf steps tremulously along the pavement. ‘Incredibly famous street, Virginia.’

Yes. The greatest, straightest avenue in one of the greatest cities in the world. Shining street surfaces, traffic lights, pavements without cracks or pot-holes. City of dreams: city of films.