Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (27 page)

(In New York, Gerda’s unhappy. She has saved half the chocolate bar she bought at the airport in case there is an Emergency, because Dad once said ‘Always save half your rations when you are on an Expedition’, but the uneaten chocolate in her pocket makes her hungry. And she’s asked the taxi to stop, on a whim, ‘I am going to buy my mother a present,’ because she saw the bookshop, and she suddenly couldn’t bear to reach the hotel,
just in case – just in case Mum isn’t …

‘I can’t park here,’ the driver said. ‘You can walk from here, it’s only half a block,’ pointing up the street, in a would-be reassuring fashion. Gerda pays him the money, and gets out, very slowly, cautious as a snail.)

In both cities, poorer people run from the thunderheads above in a last-ditch attempt to escape the rain,
It’s here
– tangling up the runners as they put on a spurt, pitting the surface of the Hudson and Newark Bay and the swells of Bosphorus and Marmara the same – hissing past slates and bouncing back up again with terrible force from drains, turning streets dark, turning shoes, coats, gutters, bags, leaves, dust, stone – now everything’s black.

(Fifty-third Street quickly turns into a river, and Gerda makes up her mind and darts inside the bookshop.)

Just a few bright drops of time are left for a hundred silver sardines on Galata Bridge, Istanbul. Scooped out by the veil of lines that trail from the blue iron parapets, they swim on bravely in polystyrene boxes. In plastic beakers, smaller fry bunch like flowers: sprats lie head-down in a collar of blood.

The rain hits Galata, the fishermen run, Ali picks up, drops, then kicks over his box, and a single fish slithers and buckets through the rails and leaps, leaps for the sea. Alive!

‘The fish is very good here, Virginia,’ says Angela, rubbing her eyes. ‘You must try the fish.’

Virginia’s eyes brighten. ‘I adore fish.’

(In New York, the rain is battering the glass, there don’t seem to be many adult books, and the dark-haired man at the till looks depressed. Gerda compromises with a large greetings card: there are plenty of witty ones, not all of them pathetic.
But she chooses one with two women, one of them looking more like a granny, captioned in silver ‘ I couldn’t live without you. You gave me life. Mum, I love you.’ Of course it is soppy, and she prefers the others, but she buys this one, which speaks her heart.

Then she slips into the children’s corner of the bookshop. If her mother were here, Gerda would refuse to go there. But Gerda suddenly wants to be a child. She has finished
To the Lighthouse
, her brain is tired. Sitting at the table for crayoning, Gerda writes a message of love to her mother. Happy, she sets off again down the pavement; her two bags feel as light as birds, perching for luck on her left shoulder; the downpour is over: sun in the puddles. Nothing will go wrong. It will be perfect from the start. Gerda splashes pell-mell along the New York street towards Mummy, Mummy, Mum, Mummy.)

58

The hotel Angela picked is in Istanbul’s Old City: Sultanahmet, not far from the Blue Mosque, the university, Aya Sophia, the Grand Bazaar. But some way away from the crowded main streets, with their belling of tramcars on steel tracks, their touts and pedlars on the lookout for the throngs of tourists from richer countries – ‘Hallo! Speak English?’ – selling everything from ice cream and corncobs to $10,000 carpets, which may be worth $1,000.

‘It’s very strange the way time passes,’ says Virginia as they climb out of their taxi. ‘And everything but us remains. We came by sea, before, in the very early morning, we came up on deck to see the dawn, and it burned on the golden domes and windows. My sister has gone. All of us have gone. But those airy domes are still standing, as if the past had waited for me.’

‘Don’t talk to me for a minute, Virginia, I’ve got to pay the taxi,’ Angela says. ‘Unless of course you’ve got the money ready? No, I thought not. Right, I’m doing it.’

Angela wishes, briefly but intensely, that she were travelling with Gerda. A young child, not an elderly one. Enough of the past. She longs for the future.

Yes, she needs a rest from Virginia.

59

‘Hallo?’

I had hardly got there. I had not unpacked. She rang, making demands, as usual.

The hotel’s wireless key didn’t work. It was typical, typical, just my luck. I needed to de-stress with my email. But the phone rang before I could think.

‘Angela! Is it you?’

‘Obviously.’

‘You see, I managed the telephone! I am getting the hang of the twenty-first century. I love my room! – so much plainer than the one at the Wordsmiths Hotel, but it’s bigger. Whenever you’re ready, I would like to go out.’

‘Virginia, give me a minute. You’re sure your room is bearable? ’

‘It’s delightful. The window opens on the street.’

‘Well close it at once. That’s not safe.’

Naturally I took no notice. A bird was singing, there were people going home, women were laughing and calling to each other. It was small-scale, human. It felt almost familiar. The air was cool and freshly washed. My curtain moved like the sea in the breeze.

‘Are you going to close it?’

‘Mmm. Though I need some air. I remember walking through the streets, at sunset. From Pera, we saw over the Bosphorus …’

‘I know, I know, but I’ve got things to do.’

I didn’t mean to be short, but yes, I did know because of course, as ever, it was in the
Diaries
, that secret passage so many of us had crept down without her knowledge or consent.

And yet, the writing, the writing … what a loss if Leonard had obeyed her! Her description of Aya Sophia … As usual, when I really thought about her writing, my irritation with her vanished.

(Would I ever get the chance to tell her what her work meant? How she had changed possibility for all of us? I tried often to express my love for her work, but all it evinced was a glazed, distant look as if I were showing some kind of bad manners, and then I grew shy, and my words faded. Would she always see me as a glorified servant?

Of course, in her work, she wrote better than anyone of her time about the lot of servants; but her horror and shame about the life they lived – which she knew made her own life possible – sometimes came out in contempt and hatred. But the best of her, the best of her … she deserved to be remembered by the best of her.

I could not bear it if Virginia despised me
.)

‘Let’s meet for supper. Seven o’clock?’

She said, ‘But that is two hours away. I think I might go and stretch my legs.’

‘Virginia, you cannot go out by yourself!’

But I could. I did. I unpacked my coat, my yellow coat that made me feel youthful. I had the Turkish money we’d changed at the airport. It felt like toy money, crisp and strange. Maybe I would go and buy presents with it. Yes, I had always loved buying presents!

(But then I thought, who for? And felt sad. No, never mind, live in the moment.)

I left the window open to air the room. I’m afraid it is a lower-class attitude, assuming all foreigners are thieves. The wind played lightly with the curtains, and through them I saw a veiled young woman emerge from our hotel with a bundle of laundry, so maybe she had been working here – she bent down in the street to play with a cat, a thin golden cat with a triangular head and delicately arching spine, her hand rose and fell, it was a kind of ballet, then another young woman crossed the street, she was waiting for her, the two embraced – a leaf blew in and caught in the casement, edged with a line of diamante rain-drops, and suddenly I was completely happy.

To be on my own. Alive. In Turkey. Laughing with pleasure, I went out into the air.

60

Gerda, half the world away, is marching on her Promised Land – Central Park, where she was once so happy swooping on her new rollerblades, out of control, towards her father, screaming with joy, mad with terror. Gerda has eaten a hamburger (yum!) with orange, pecan and maple syrup (yuck!) and one supersized portion of fries.

One road to cross before she gets there.

But Gerda is fleeing unfriendly voices, truth-telling voices, harsh and loud.
Retard! Moron! Dimmoid! Malco!
She is summoning all her reserves of self-love against the self-hatred that’s out to get her. She isn’t afraid, not really, not yet, because she dare not feel the fear.

Mum isn’t here

Dad isn’t here

The men in the Wordsmiths Hotel had been kind. Yes, they knew Angie Lamb and Mrs Woolf. They had left ‘only the other day’.

‘They can’t have done,’ Gerda told them, flatly. (
They had gone! Gone! Was it possible?
)

The younger man looked. ‘Yeah, they checked out. The English ladies. Both of them.’

The older man expressed admiration, tilted towards Virginia. ‘Extraordinary lady.’

‘Which hotel have they moved to, please?’ Gerda had struggled to sound normal but her voice came out squeaky,
like a bossy mouse.

‘They never said. Just “Istanbul”.’

(Istanbul! Not possible! Stupid hotel man has got it wrong!) ‘No, she was actually going to a conference. My mother is a writer. It’s an … international conference.’ But as she said ‘international’, trying to impress them, trying to sound cool, Gerda started to worry, started to shake, could not shut out her terrible fear. It had kept on coming for her, ever since she’d landed, snaking towards her from the shallow water where she stumbled on problems too big for her –

‘Your mother did say she had a daughter.’

‘I think it was the other one who mentioned you,’ the younger, thinner man interrupted.

Gerda was torn between feeling sad her mother hadn’t mentioned her and proud that Virginia Woolf, superboffin writer of the supercool book she had been reading on the plane, actually knew that she existed. But gone! Gone! She must not cry.

The older man gave her a good look over, smiling and frowning through gold-framed glasses. ‘You better stay here while we contact ya mother. She musta left her mobile number.’

‘No, it’s all right,’ said Gerda, dry-mouthed, ‘you can leave that to me, I’ll give her a ring.’ If they phoned up to tell her Gerda was here, Mum would have a heart attack!

‘It’s fine,’ she said. Then she had started to gabble. ‘I’m actually eighteen, I’ve got her debit card, she told me to take it, she knew I was coming.’ (It sounded unbelievable; it
was
unbelievable.) ‘I’d better just book in here for one night.’

‘We’ll give her a call, any case.’ The younger man was looking hard at her now, taking in her clothes, which had hamburger stains, her uncombed hair, her improbable bag, pink and gold, an eye magnet, the equally impossible age she claimed.

‘Take a seat, young lady, make yaself at home,’ the older
man added kindly (that Angie was a frost, you have to pity the daughter), but Gerda had darted past the younger one, the pink case flying out weightless as a wing, calling over her shoulder ‘Don’t trouble my mother, I’m going to be on the first flight home,’ as the older man shouted ‘Hang on, don’t go!’

Their last sight of Gerda was running through a cohort of Japanese book-lovers who were just arriving, making her look bigger and older than she was.

‘How old is that kid?’

‘She said eighteen.’

‘I thought that Ginny said thirteen … Coulda misheard her with that crazy accent. Still, I better ring her mother. Let her know. Or do you wanna call her?’

But at that moment, the Japanese commenced intensive communal check-in, and the phone call to Angie Lamb was forgotten.

61

The city was just as I remembered. It was steep, so steep, the street we were in, and the hotels were dark, wooden-fronted. Narrow passageways, roughly cobbled, plunged down, down to where the water must be. So many things were almost familiar.

The tremendous change was the great snake of traffic that bumped its way down the centre of the highway, where once we saw carts, donkeys, dragomen. But the same array of physiognomies that I remembered from before, streaming down the pavements on both sides of the street, pale European (though perhaps they were Circassian, the sultans had chosen Circassian wives for their beautiful white skin and red Russian lips, I had read in Melek-Hanum’s autobiography), Mongol, with those high cheekbones and strange, slanted, intelligent eyes (when I made simple observations of this sort to Angela, she contradicted, or disapproved, but honestly, how can one make sense of the world if one never hazards a generalisation? It is part of the work of ordering particulars; otherwise one’s totally at sea. But my thoughts weren’t allowed in the twenty-first century). Strong thickset men with short beards or dark jowls who could have been Turkish, Greek or Italian, talking loudly as they strolled in pairs; a few with jutting beards and downcast eyes which flicked up, momentarily, at my yellow coat; women with luxuriant blue-black hair that fell like blackbird’s wings down their backs; others in every form of veil, some thick and padded out behind like an eccentric kind of back-to-front nosebag, long, tight overcoats in pastel shades,
the belt pulled draw-string tight at their waist, plus high-heeled shoes and heavy eye make-up – after a bit I saw it was a uniform for grouplets of young women clinging together, I supposed they were religious, but why the heavy eye makeup? – then other girls in the lightest of head-scarves, and some with curled yellow-blonde hair and dark roots; and women who must be from Arab countries, black from head to foot, only the eyes showing, which made them look curiously guilty as I caught little flashes of hidden life. A pale hand came out of one shroud, suddenly, and cuffed a small boy on the head, a little modern boy in shorts and a T-shirt which I saw, as I bent closer, read SPIDERMAN; he had a red plastic gun in his hand with which he was prodding his small, veiled sister. There were men who were clones of those I’d seen in New York, in crumpled business suits, with bulging briefcases, watching passing women with abstracted eyes; other men in calf-length tunics, pyjama trousers, and small round hats: and as I gazed at all the faces, skin-colours, sizes, I thought ‘This country could rise again, maybe there will be a new Ottoman Empire, for after all, it sits at the isthmus of the world, it looks east and west, it is Asia and Europe. With the power of contradictions, it can rule us all. Look how vigorously people stream down the street, they have finished a day’s work but they are not tired.’ I could hardly wait for supper, so I could tell Angela!