Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (23 page)

The American in the row in front had started talking to his bouffant wife, who was coming to Istanbul for the first time, and a student with long straight pale caramel hair unlucky enough to be sitting next to him. Was she married? he had to know. Why not? Actually, she was studying Islamic art at Columbia University. ‘I thought art was forbidden in Turkey!’ he roared, over the top of her explanation. ‘So that’ll be a short thesis, right?’ ‘Well – ’ ‘The men don’t understand our women, honey. So dress modestly, especially being blonde, or they’ll be all over you like flies.’

‘Really?’ The student’s voice was American too, but her ‘really’ could not have been more cynical.

Virginia’s first remark, which came 0.5 seconds after she had said ‘Good morning’ to me, reverted to the Jewish question.

‘Is it that Jews don’t like to be Jews? Is that why they prefer to be called “Jewish people”?’

‘Actually, I don’t even know. I don’t think it’s that, in this case. It’s different when they’re among themselves, I believe that then they do say “Jews” …’

I wished we had never started this.

‘They are among themselves, Angela, there’s at least two dozen of them, look.’

‘
No, don’t point, Virginia
. It’s too complicated. Take my word for it. It is my century, for heaven’s sake. Just wait until we’re off this plane.’ (But I felt – mealy-mouthed and uncertain, suddenly.) ‘Look could we not talk about the Jews – Jewish people, I mean, could we stop? It isn’t relevant to Istanbul. It’s mosques we’re going to look at. And churches. The Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque and so on.’

‘Aya Sophia. Is that … St Sophia? I went there. We went there. Vanessa and I. People stared at us. Back at the beginning of the century.’

‘Back at the beginning of your century: 1906, I think it was. You wrote about it. You were very young. Of course people stared. You and Vanessa were both so lovely.’

‘Twenty-four. I would love to go there again.’

Everything was ahead of me then.

‘Ten years older than my daughter. I wonder if you will ever meet her.’

‘We went there in the evening. We were curious. I wasn’t afraid of anything …’

The lights came on slowly – candles. We women were upstairs, we went up a long ramp, you could hear children calling somewhere like birds. It was … dim, when you looked down, dim murmurings, amber air and shadows, people kneeling and rising in long lines like waves on the sea, and the world going on indifferently around them, the business of the world. I was impressed, but it was all a mystery, it was so other, such strangeness.

‘I thought: we can never meet, Christians and Mohammedans, we are as different as – well, as different as you and me.’

‘Are we so different?’

‘Don’t you think so? You’re so … tidy. And of course, so … modern. Whereas I am ancient, a dinosaur. I never had children, you’re a mother, I was an old wife, and you’re divorced – ’

‘No!’

‘Of course we’re different.’

‘I’m not divorced.’

‘Separated?’

‘Nonsense!’

‘You said – ’

‘Nothing of the kind. Edward’s away. In the Arctic. It’s true that we quarrelled. But I think he still loves me. Not that it’s relevant. But as it happens, we’re not formally separated.’

‘Sorry. (
Pause
.) You are lucky, then. I will always miss … Always.’

‘You quarrelled too. In the
Diaries
.’

Damn. I had given it away again.

‘Did he say that in his diaries? And publish them?’

‘Maybe I’ve got that wrong.’

I couldn’t tell her that I’d read her diaries. That everyone at the conference would have read them. Or perhaps I should. Perhaps I should warn her. Her clear instructions: destroy my papers.

‘All married couples sometimes quarrel. After all, two worlds are forced together. As different as, well … I don’t know.’

‘New York and Istanbul, perhaps?’

‘But Leonard and I were both very English. My brothers were his friends at Cambridge. It was inevitable that we should meet. Yes, he was a Jew, but – ’

‘
Jewish
. But yes, I see, it was different for you. Edward and I were from different classes. His family were Danish, though they’d anglicised their name, he had gone to Cambridge, he was middle-class – ’

(
Pause
.)

‘And your family?’

Her tone was kind, encouraging, yet in it I detected a hint of malice.

‘Perhaps they were from the lower orders?’

‘We don’t use those phrases.’

‘Have I offended you?’

‘It’s not your fault, but you’re – just as you said, a dinosaur. And now I am going to read my book. Which is by a modern novelist. You don’t seem anxious to learn about those. You might like to read my newspaper. It’s
The Times
, and I bought it at the airport, so it’s two days old, but all the same, it might help you – catch up, Virginia. With the modern world. Really, you could update yourself.’

She saw I was annoyed, and took the paper, but when I looked across two minutes later, she was sound asleep, as if it was bedtime. But then, we were soaring across time zones

and she, after all, was from another century

time travel

could it really happen?

(
Angela’s eyes blur over her pages
.)

(Gerda is landing in New York. The woman next to her sitting by the window who gave her the chocolate mousse earlier points out Manhattan as they fly overhead. So many tiny towers
that they seem like a life-form, bristling like crystals alongside the blue water, and down the middle, the great crack of green. ‘That’s Central Park.’ ‘I know,’ says Gerda. It looks amazing in the morning sunlight. ‘Isn’t that gorgeous?’ the woman says. Then ‘Your mother will be so happy to see you.’

‘Yes,’ says Gerda, in a slightly strange voice, not adding ‘Although she doesn’t know it yet.’)

50

I had slept like a child, and when I woke, the life of the plane was in full swing.

‘Where are we?’

‘Somewhere over the Balkans,’ said Angela.

‘The Balkans? Is there still fighting there?’

‘Well, there was … quite recently. If a decade ago is “recently”. People thought there would never be fighting in Europe again, after your war, you know what I mean.’

‘They said that about the Great War, too. The war to end war. The Great Lie. Fortunately Leonard was too blind to fight. So there’s no fighting in Europe now?’

‘There is trouble in Iraq,’ said Angela, ‘and Afghanistan. And Syria. And Palestine. We are up to our necks in it.’

Where were these countries? I was slightly vague. Leonard would have known, of course. Somewhere in the Middle East, I was sure, somewhere near the cradle of all mankind, the Tigris and Euphrates. How beautiful our language is.

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold
…

Why were men always fighting each other?

The cabin girl – no, what did they call them? In my day, of course, they had cabin boys – came down the corridor with difficulty, ‘Excuse me, Sir,’ ‘Excuse me, Miss,’ using her trolley like a slow, polite chariot, and lurched to one side as she bent over me, trying to proffer a plastic tray that held some kind of
packaged fodder, with a sidelong glance at the stubborn man who, evicted from the gangway by her mission, was making her roll like a ship at sea as he strained to stay standing and praying in his seat.

The rosy-cheeked young woman beside me was suckling again, I could hear the baby’s happy lip-smacks under the modest cloth that veiled her breast, but her Bible was tucked in the crook of her empty arm, her eyes followed the characters, her lips moved softly. The cabin girl’s eyes fell on nothing directly, but you could see she deprecated any religion that stopped her doing her morning duties, you could see that she only wanted to help, she was not ambitious, she wanted us happy, the flock of passengers in her care, she avoided the scorn and anger of the world, the furious intensity of this faith or that which made them fight wars, and obstruct her passage; she had only benefactions to distribute. With a smile that pulled hard at the lines in her lipstick, she hauled herself upright again and said, in automatic answer to my ‘Thank you’, ‘Not problem, Miss. Please first erect the seat.’

Was the cabin girl’s job one long sorrow and trouble? In some corner of some cubicle, wherever they could hide, she might steal an hour or two’s sleep or gossip, but was it worth it when in a few minutes she’d be getting up again and struggling on? What did she feel about her work, which we always made her do again?

She fed us, we ate, we pushed it away, she had barely finished distributing the trays before she had to take it all back where it came from. Always conjuring things up, then accepting their destruction, whereas a writer’s work was aimed at survival. (And I had survived. A small surge of joy.)

It wasn’t easy, the world she knew, the eternal world of the servant class which Vanessa and I had hoped was ending. We had both vowed to do without servants! What a liberation
from their suffering! Who wanted them, sullen in some basement room not far enough away from one’s own? Yet we had no running water till the 1930s, and at Asheham, endless chamber-pots, earth-closets, buckets. Our arms couldn’t carry them. Without servants, Vanessa’s and my work would never have got done.

Bowed down, they always were, with weariness, and how wearying for us to see their pain and hear their awful protestations of duty, the way they vowed they would never leave us, when all we longed for them to do was leave.

What should we have done? There was no answer; and the modern world seemed hardly any better. Our hotel had servants – the Wordsmiths Hotel, with its literature-themed rooms and bookish clients. Yet back up in the bedrooms were the same maids, somehow enduring the same duties, groaning faintly, on creaking knees because how else, pray, could you clean under beds? Was there any difference but the colour of their skin and the strange electric music mine sang to? She had to clean the bathroom, bleach the lavatories, take up mats, put down new towels …

And who was to say if this African woman might have been a great poet, had she but had the chance? Might have given form to that hard, harsh life? Might have made each one of her peers a hero, and at last enlightened us about their story – a story as epic as any of ours? Who knew if one of them burned to do it, without the words, without the schooling?

That’s where it came from, our shame, our awkwardness. Because, I think, one has always known it. We had the luck, and they did not.

Yet she sang along to that fizz of music, which must have been some kind of consolation. Perhaps this new century had given them hope, they had freedoms our servants never dreamed of, and though I didn’t care for how they used their
freedom – that crowd at the Statue, so loud, so venal! – they had hopes that their children, perhaps, would be masters, and one had to accept that was no bad thing.

‘What am I,’ she might ask, or ‘What is my life? What brought me from Africa to this strange place?’ They had the luxury of questioning, of not just trudging down the path like dumb brutes. The difference between us was no longer so obvious, I told myself, sipping my morning cup of tea and imagining my next consolation, the coffee.

But the cabin girl continued her rounds as before.

51

‘Look at the queues for the lavatories. I suppose one must go and join them. So international, the modern world. That woman in a sari, those Africans … You said Edward was an explorer. Which countries has your husband explored?’

‘Exploring isn’t like it was in your day. He has an ecological agenda …’

‘But where?’

‘So many places.’

‘Do men and women share the bathrooms?’

‘In which country?’

‘Here on the plane, of course. I thought that was forbidden for Mohammedans? Don’t bother to answer, I will go and find out.’

And with that, she was up, so I got up too quickly and dropped my book, while Virginia hared off down the gangway, disrupting people’s breakfasts, tripping over their feet.

The truth was, I couldn’t instantly remember the countries that Edward had been to. I always had my own books to write, so I couldn’t really focus on what Edward was doing, whereas Gerda, being a child, had a little globe and marked his position with gobs of Bluetack.

Virginia had asked me early on about Edward. She fired off questions like a Catherine wheel. (Not always. She’d never asked about my novels. Or novels in general, by modern writers. There was only ONE writer who interested her. Or was I being slightly unfair?)

I told her how Edward began as a romantic. About me, about travel and nature. I left out the fact that he had been married, I spooled to our wedding in a blur of confetti. I went too fast, my words sounded hollow, and surely her sharp ears noticed it.

When we were first in love, before I got pregnant, he wanted to share everything with me, his love of wilderness, nights in the open. We fled the city and found each other on various unspoiled European beaches. But the sand-flies bit me, the sand blew in my eyes, and I grew tired of it, and he was disappointed. He was thinking about something bigger than we were – the fate of all humans, so he claimed – while I was obsessing about my comfort.