Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (22 page)

I was – completely in the midst of life. Partly because Angela was rather stout, so I felt the pressure of her arm, and the Jewess with the baby had sharp elbows which she waved around as she fed her child, and we all played bit-parts in the comedy above the clouds as the Jews performed their primitive rituals –

How agreeable to feel relatively modern, for once!

But as I watched the couple to my left I started to like them, for they loved one another. It was unmistakable, their tenderness; and the same was true of the wider group, who constantly made contact with each other; they almost seemed like one family, and not Leonard’s squabbling, divided one. Maybe religion did unify people. Like the New York Christians, bobbing in bliss. Maybe believers were happier than us.

Until, that is, the Christians fought the Jews, the Jews the Mohammedans, the Mohammedans the Hindus …

And the rhythms started to become soothing, till in the end,
they smoothed me to sleep.

I laid my head on the breast of the night.

When she put out her light, it was gone midnight.

(Gerda, also high in the air, flying in the opposite direction to New York, was trying to balance her book on her tray while eating the extra chocolate mousse she had persuaded her neighbour to yield. Gerda was happy. On her wrist she was wearing Mum’s gold bracelet, which had magic charms of animals, deer, pigeons, a friendly dog. ‘That’s a nice bracelet,’ the woman said; she had a daughter around Gerda’s age.

But Gerda hardly noticed. ‘I’m reading,’ she said, which was just a Fact, and not Bad Manners. She was far away, in a world of crowing cocks and candles, and faint green stains on the waves at daybreak.

Here Mr. Carmichael, who was reading Virgil, blew out his candle. It was past midnight.

… But what after all is one night?

Still Mum always told her to be polite, and with a sigh, Gerda briefly stopped reading the ‘Time Passes’ section of
To the Lighthouse
to say ‘Excuse me, thank you for my pudding.’

47

… what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave.

Night, however, succeeds to night.

And only when Virginia was asleep – I was afraid she would read my secrets on my face – only then did I do what I wanted to do.

For among the films on offer that night I’d seen one choice I never expected.

A film I knew all too well, though even three years ago, hard to watch.
The Palace of Ice
was a documentary made to raise awareness of global warming, starring a father and daughter who sleighed across the Arctic.

So long ago. Or so it seemed. But what is three years, after all? Is it possible that then we were a close family? So recently, such an ache ago.

Three years. Gerda was, let’s see, nine or ten. Edward must have been forty? It was Edward’s idea. They made the film together.

But who had to deal with all the problems? With the furious school, who never accepted that travels in the Arctic were educational, with tracking down extra-warm thermals for Gerda, and patient lists of everything she needed – all right, to be fair,
she
made the lists, but I found it all, I ticked it all
off! Who had to extract school-work for her to do on the trip from the self-righteous primary school teachers? ‘She may be bright, but she does need to work. It’s not good for children to feel exceptional.’ But even as they said it, I knew that she was, and I knew they knew it, for they let us go.

(Let
them
go, I mean. No, not me. I was never invited on their adventures.)

So who was left crying at Heathrow Airport when they went through the doors of the departure lounge? – I can see them still, I love them still, for all my hurt do I love him still? – two backs disappearing, one small, one tall, unnaturally inflated by the blue duck-down parkas they could not fit into their luggage, going away from me into nowhere, but his hand, his dear big hand, on her shoulder, and her round face turned up to his, as usual. I could only see part of her cheek, her eyes, but every particle of it was smiling, she was totally happy, alive with laughter.

I could never love my own father like that. But Edward was Gerda’s role model. I think she wanted to be him, not me. That wasn’t easy for me to see.

(And now I wonder: who did the leaving? Did I go away too much myself, to write? Did
I
leave
them?
What was the truth? Flying through the air, so far above the earth, our story fell apart, my role became less certain.)

And now it was here, the film they made,
The Palace of Ice
, and to be fair, I knew how much it had cost Edward as he struggled to keep the backers on board, to balance the books and appease Channel 6, who veered from one mad suggestion to another as different editors tried to make their mark. He had to keep believing it would happen. It was one of the ways he gave Gerda confidence, his buoyant belief in the next new thing. He always worried less than I did. (Of course, he could leave the worrying to me.)

I paid the price. For I did the dull things once her Grandma and Grandpa were no longer around, homework, bedtimes, early mornings – so yes, I was the dull one, and yes, I felt resentful.

When she came back from the trip, she was so round and rosy, so sturdy and so full of – yes, joy. She had had her father to herself, she had been round the world, why shouldn’t she be happy? And besides, she had been off school for five weeks. ‘Mum! Mum!’ She rushed straight in and hugged me. ‘I’ve never been so happy in my whole life!’

I was happy for her, I was happy for them, I was happy for Edward, but of course I felt – lonely. There is an arithmetic of happiness: other people’s doesn’t always add to your own, sometimes there is only so much around, and if you see too much of it has gone to others –

I looked at them, radiant, framed on the doorstep, his tall form outlined against the light behind her, and his hair was long, and his beard was long –

What I saw was duty. A lot to do. They would come in laughing, not wiping their feet, and their bags would be full of dirty washing.

‘That’s great, Gerda. Tell me all about it. But first, to look at you – you need a bath. Did she wash her hair
once
while she was away?’ I turned to Edward, behind her in the doorway.

‘What kind of welcome is that?’ he asked.

‘I’m only joking. I’m so happy to see you.’

But they had been so long away …

I would not think about that day. The precipitous decline into actual screaming.

Gall and wormwood rose under my ribs.

No, press the button, the film had begun. Great sheets of ice: aerial footage shot with a hand-cam from a small plane, and as I looked at it, my bitterness went, and I saw how wide,
and how beautiful, and how little we human beings mattered, and I wept. Nothing, nothing but love for them.

Then Edward turned the camera into the cabin, and there was Gerda, three years younger. My child, who will always be part of me, and I of her, though she will have to forget me, at least enough for her to shine.

In our short, human lives, three years could be everything. Everything could change. From a child, to a woman, an angry young woman, a teenager sent away to school.

I had only done the best for Gerda. The best for her – and the best for me.

I stopped the film for a moment, and breathed deeply.

(Another Gerda, on her own trajectory over the ocean, under the stratosphere, went on reading
To the Lighthouse
, unknown to Angela, far away. Only two hours until she landed, only two hours to reach the lighthouse, no-one must interrupt her now.)

Round Angela, Virginia, and all the sleeping bodies on the Turkish Airways plane, the semi-night of an enormous machine. The engines must always go on turning, the electricity can never go off. The flight staff are doing their calculations: how many vegetarian meals had been eaten? Maybe Yasemin had not cleared the rubbish away, or Emir was taking his break early. It didn’t matter, someone must bring aspirin to that mother with four children and a terrible toothache.

All right for the pilot: gallant at the helm, he could trust his computer to carry them onwards, over the Atlantic, above thousands of feet of ice crystals and roaring air currents, with his coffee beside him that someone else had made; eagle-eyed, erect, the brain behind the beak, thinking, perhaps, of his garden in Denizli, if the lilies would be standing when he got home, if his beloved
zambaklar
would have survived the winds,
and whether that heron would have taken his carp: his duty is simply to be a brain, while the flight attendants, most of them, fortunately, women – he considers it more natural than having men, though sometimes the families made terrible trouble (it was easier for women to look after people, even these new feminists could not deny that) – the flight attendants care for the great bird’s body, the bodies of the passengers, the body of the plane.

Angela jerked awake in dreadful anxiety. A dream of the day after Gerda started boarding school (the child was very brave, she had barely cried, perhaps she didn’t really mind leaving home?) Angela, too, was perfectly calm, yet she woke in the night and stumbled down the dark landing to go to the bathroom, Gerda’s light was showing, she walked in, unthinking, to switch the light off as her daughter slept, and stretched out her hand to feel the warmth of her cheek.

But Gerda having left the day before, she reached further, and further, touched nothing and no-one. She clutched at the duvet: her arms remained empty.

48

How long, after all, is five weeks? – I think now. That was all the filming took. Not so very long to be apart. Though I had to live it day by day, and every day they were together. It was nothing, a breath, in the life of our marriage – we had been back together for half-a-dozen years. Yet it caused a little crack, and then another crack showed, and the ice that we lived on started breaking into pieces.

Now we were all so much further apart, and neither of them knew what flight I was on, those sweet, banal ties of everyday knowledge, tender, restrictive, were long gone. I didn’t notice them passing, forgot to regret them. Now, too late, I felt the loss.

At least I knew Gerda was safe in Hampshire, that was what one paid for, at that type of school, the knowledge that people would look after one’s daughter.

(At Bendham Abbey, Bendham, Hampshire, the Head was reading Gerda’s email, livid. ‘The arrogance of these ghastly parents! She doesn’t have the courtesy to pick up the phone … And she may be an author – have you read her stuff? – but she can’t spell “Truly”. Ah well, that’s that. I had hopes for that child. In six years, we’d have made something of her. Now, of course, the mother will spoil her.’

Three thousand miles away, ‘that child’ is swooping, motherless, towards New York.)

Edward had been gone now for over three months. For two of those he had been back in the Arctic. That terrible last scene when he told me he was going, and I said, in that case, don’t bother coming home …

No, I refused to think about that.

Compared to five weeks, three months was a lifetime. (Though Gerda’s school terms were twelve weeks long, which I had promised would be over in an instant – )

I hoped, suddenly, piercingly, that Gerda was all right, that she had not been lonely without us, but the pain was too much, and I pushed it away. If she wasn’t happy, she would tell me about it.
She’ll be surprised how fast time passes. The young are different: they feel things less. I managed to find her an excellent school
.

All around me, sleep and stillness. In the half-dark, they were all connected, an arm flung out, a leg, a foot, sleeping forms turned to one side or another, some with dropped jaws and open mouths. Business people at the top of their game, temporarily soft and boneless as children. Hands curled loosely, wavering outwards – unprotected, entirely themselves. Virginia – I hardly dared look at her –

I risked it. She lay there, marmoreal, grave, a life-mask of the famous face, no longer disrupted and humanised by little throbs of need or humour. As at the beginning, I was moved, awed.

Nothing, it seemed, could break that image, that pale, silent, Olympian stillness which, second by second, in the sleeping cabin, seemed to fold our stories into itself. I looked away, afraid. I resumed my film. (Could I even exist, so near such greatness?)

(But ‘What is smallness, what is greatness?’, Virginia had written.)

Once in the middle of my film, just once, a man at the front
of the cabin had a nightmare and there was a roar, a rupture of the calm, and a flight attendant came rubbing his eyes, his shirt loosened at the neck, and hovered above him till he slept again. Then again peace descended; I watched the film until 3
AM
, I became part of it, I sleighed with them, their dear warm bodies inside layers of furs, under ice-blue skies and long-set sunlight, across the endless fields of white, I smiled to myself to see them laughing as Edward tried to push Gerda’s shoes on over layers of socks and they both got the giggles, or Gerda shouted with triumph when she managed to get the fire to blaze up, and their fire-lit shadows wavered on the snow; then there was the dazzling light of morning: all over the ice figures were stirring …

But no, I had slept through the end of the film.

A white scimitar of light had pierced the cabin.

49

A baby mewed briefly, then another, and another, and the mothers were stretching and enfolding their young, and the flight attendants, smiling and tidy again, came down the gangway with a drinks trolley – ‘Sir? Madam? Tea? Coffee?’ – and everywhere people were raising their blinds, round lids over a line of bright blue eyes.

Now the morning light became a brilliant white sheet and all the little creatures were waking quietly, bleached out by a night of excessive activity: the praying, the reading of old testaments, the caressing and dressing and undressing of babies and toddlers and their passing from loving hand to hand over seat-arms and across gangways. The crew (Turkish Muslim and one Armenian Christian) try to wheel their breakfast trolleys up and down, their demeanour as polite and cheerful as ever, 30,000 feet above the sea.