Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (3 page)

‘Yes,’ Woolf says, ‘I’m not a bumpkin.’ She looks to her left: streaming ribbons of cars, and windows as far as her eye can see. Rare yellow-green trees wave messages; there’s a faint green fingerprint, Central Park.

And back to her right: more towers, more cars, the blinding glass of skyscraper windows. She turns, like a horse fretting in its collar, to the left again, irritable, hoping against hope for something different. How can buildings have grown so tall?

Her great eyes search for that slim glimpse of green. There, yes. Still yellow with spring.

I could go there and be happy
.

A half-thought forming:
Alive again
.

But they’re both hemmed in with right-angles.

Two lost ants. Tiny nets of nerves. Glittering scraps of spider’s web.

7

She was like a trapped animal.

Of course, they have built over the past. Once Manhattan must have had fields.

And then – oh shit – she launched herself forward.

It was the noise, roaring, blasting. And sun on a thousand surfaces. Shards of sky, elbows of trees, clouds leaping out at me from strange tall buildings. The sky and the city had been smashed together, with jagged pieces thrown everywhere. I thrust the books deep into my pockets, I would need my hands to protect myself, my head spun, I walked forward, blind –

‘What in hell are you DOING! Madness!
Beyakoof
!’

A yellow car had almost hit me. The wind knocked me sideways, and I saw the furious face of the driver. He had small wire glasses under his turban. Where was this place & who were these people? I stood quite still in the middle of the road & cars screamed past me & I wasn’t afraid.

I had been changed, because I wasn’t afraid. Perhaps the darkness had finally left me. Wherever I had been – for however many years – I had left my fear behind like a parcel, & something began in the midst of my confusion, although I was dazed, something started – a jolt of joy, which could not be stifled, small as a child set free in a hayfield, stunned for a
second then gathering pace, dancing across, the yellow dust flying –

‘
Kaar, Virginia
.’ A crow welcomed me back to the pavement where it pecked at a crack, pecked at the gap between the worlds.

She almost died before her new life started!

She dragged me – pulled me hard by the arm, I nearly struck her for her impudence – into a place that smelled of fried meat. I have always hated restaurants. Music I had never heard before – loud drumming & someone shouting – I placed my hands over my ears & said, ‘Where is the telephone?’

‘Please sit here, where you are safe. There are things I must explain to you, but first I will get some coffee – I don’t remember if you drank coffee?’

The woman spoke as if she knew me!

I mean, there’s been coffee since the eighteenth century, but God knows which modern kind she’d like, latte, cappuccino, Americano … Expresso seemed like the safest choice. Was there anything about it in the
Diaries
?

‘Yes, of course. I
adore
coffee.’

I came back from the counter balancing my tray and saw her, for the first time, clearly, from a distance.

First, though old, she was beautiful. Very pale, drawn like a bow. Thin and tall. Her eyes, avid.

Second, she was extremely odd. Two small children were staring at her, American children with little round bellies. She was like a great mayfly, long neck poking forward. Straggling limbs, her knees jutting out. Then two long feet like heavy boats that might float away from her altogether. Greasy grey hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her long column of neck. She wore a long woollen suit that might have been tailored, but didn’t fit, as if she’d tried to shrug it off but then given up in embarrassment. Yet her long white hands and blue-white wrists had escaped, and couldn’t wriggle back in again. She didn’t look unhappy, but intensely self-conscious. At the same time, she was curious. Her eyes flicked up, her eyes flicked down. Her eyes went swooping round the room, hungry to see everything. I thought, what will she think of us? – Plastic surfaces, harsh colours, half-dressed people celebrating New York’s unnatural spring heat-wave.

I brought back an expresso for her, and my normal creamy half-shot latte, which came in a rather attractive tall glass. Without hesitation, her starved bony hand reached across the table and closed on my latte.

She left me the small, bitter cup.

She got the cream, and I the grounds. Her tall angular shape between me and the window, a cone of darkness drinking my prize.

Yes, I thought, we are in her shadow.

I watched her grey-green orbs dipping and sweeping. She was almost in a trance. What was she learning?

I saw she didn’t want to talk to me. Her mind was working
on its own, and her bony hands like sea-creatures scampered across the table-top, climbing the curve of her narrow glass (
my
narrow glass, I reminded myself), skating down to the base again, twisting the metal frame that contained it, lifting her tea-spoon, putting it down.

And suddenly I remembered
The Waves
. ‘Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup … things in themselves, myself being myself.’

‘Myself being myself.’ I knew what she meant. It was why I fled home and its social duties – why I fled Gerda, which makes me ashamed. Because I wanted to be myself. Was I myself in my writing, at least?

Was I good enough to stand naked?

She
was good enough. God, she was good. She even managed to write well about coffee.

I watched her swallowing my latte. Yes, of course, she was ravenous. She was sucking it down in great raw gulps, as if she was trying to drink the world. She hadn’t eaten or drunk for decades!

She said ‘Could you bring me another, please? Then I will telephone my husband.’

Bring
me another! Did she think it was free? Unlike her, I did not inherit money. She spoke to me as if I were a servant. Of course I would try not to hold it against her, but well – my grandma
was
a servant.

Still – ‘I will telephone my husband’ – annoyance yielded to a surge of pity.

How could I possibly begin to tell her?

Everyone she knew was dead
.

8

Safety. I still hadn’t got her to safety. That was the mantra in my brain. Through a blur of noise, speed, fear I guided her back to the Waddington.

Virginia Woolf, that leviathan! How lucky I was to be in this dream – or was she lucky, to share
my
dream? Did the dead get holidays?

Briefly, I moved through space beside her, and every step felt dangerous. Thank God it wasn’t very far. The Waddington, Seventh Avenue. The last hotel I would have chosen.

Perils of last-minute internet packages. Flights were cheap, but what a dreadful flight!

The lift. I do remember that. She cowered from the walls as if they were shrinking. I slipped my keycard across the room door and saw her eyes fixate, briefly. Then we were in, and she saw the phone. ‘No, Virginia, wait a moment.’

I expected the dream to fall apart. I think I hoped that waking would save me, but the unspeakable silence extended – she was still there, and I was still there, and the room was as constricting as before, like the small-sized room where everyone dies, for I had looked after Henry and Lorna, and once you have seen your parents die, nothing is quite as it was before.

Somehow she’d have to be told about Leonard.

And I began to try to explain.

‘The twenty-first century,’ the woman said, for the second time, patiently, slowly, as if I were a child or an idiot.

And so it all started to scream in my head, the noise of the traffic five floors below us – the moans & gurgles of the radiator – this yellow-haired woman who looked so hard at me, & took my arm, & told me lies – this strange small room full of ugly furniture, the pale telephone like none I had seen that squatted on her bedside table like a sickly, sleeping, dachshund pup, & this dyed stranger did not want me to use it –

I must wake up
 
It’s time to wake up

‘You can’t call him,’ she said to me. ‘I’m so sorry, he – can’t be called. As I said, it’s the twenty-first century.’

‘Of course,
of course
I must call my husband – ’

I MUST WAKE UP
 
IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP

I strained to wrench myself out of the dream –

The detail felt too sharp for a dream. This box-like, tiny, oblong room, the ugly bed with its poor, bare, bedhead – the square black screen staring out from one corner, some awful cinema machine – the cheap brocade curtains, the poisonous smell this woman said I was imagining.

Could it be true that I had jumped a century?

Could I be … back?

I stared out of the window. A strip of sky. A ray of light.

A sudden jolt of absolute beauty. Through the mean window it signalled to me a world of new signs, flashing, glowing.

But Leonard.
Leonard
. Was he here too?

Odd that I can’t remember how I left him. I can’t remember
yesterday. And yet I surely spent it with him. My mongoose love, my beloved mate. With whom I’ve had such happiness. They underrate the joy in marriage. No-one could be happier than we have been –

I don’t think two people could have been happier

Stare at the floor, the yellow walls, the painted-over wallpaper. The nameless spots and spills and smears. The human body, leaking stains

No, look away, that air, that sky

‘Virginia do you want some water? Virginia?
Virginia
?’

‘Leave me alone. Please be quiet.’

For I heard a voice of terrible clarity, reading the note that I had written, picking me up by the scruff of the neck and shaking me with guilt and horror –

(Somewhere in the room, a loud bell shrilled. The woman started patting her body frenetically, up and down, like a meaningless dance. Then she dragged a small box out of her pocket. Now she was talking and smiling to herself.)

I understood. Another telephone. In this strange world, some did not need wires, some slept like dogs on bedside tables. I would make her give it to me, and ring Leonard. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Sorry, Gerda.’

9

I sneaked to the village before detention and called my mother from a phonebox. It smelled of London: smoke and old wee. London! Where I wanted to be. She didn’t sound at all happy to hear me, and she was talking much too quietly.

‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. There’s someone here. Sorry, Gerda – ’

‘Who?’

‘Someone who is
right beside me
. Someone very famous I’m having to look after. Someone special. I’m
busy
, darling.’

‘How about looking after your daughter? Aren’t I special? I hate you, Mummy.’ I banged the phone down, though it missed the cradle and swung there, hopeless, like a baby on a cord. Banging its head against the glass. Just for a moment, I felt powerful, but it was raining outside the box, there was nothing I knew, just the horrible village.

I was the baby, swinging, hopeless.

She knows she is not supposed to call me. But that’s children: they choose their moment. They ask a lot. Though one gives it gladly. I had told her never to hang up on me.

Virginia, too, was like a child. She showed no interest at all in me. Yes, I pitied her pain over Leonard. But I had worries of my own. I had no clue what was happening to Edward.

However much I tried not to care, I didn’t have a heart of stone. Some of the time they would be using huskies, but
some terrain would be covered on foot. Edward had done special training for months – I should know, I had complained enough when he didn’t do his share of the household chores – but he was also accident-prone, and health and safety were not his forte. He was cavalier about equipment, and frostbite, and when I fretted, called it ‘fussing’.

What if I just read about his death in the papers? Did he, or his team, know where I was? I’d left my new mobile number with the neighbours, but had Edward actually noticed our neighbours? Men could be impervious. I didn’t want to hear the news from strangers. How could I ever tell Gerda?

It would break her heart. She loves her father.

10

1941. I am back in the gyre, water corkscrewing towards perdition. I am fifty-nine. I will never be older.

The thing I wrote before I set out. That day in March. I remember it.

The skies were clear, blue and bright, a great blue blank bearing down on me, dazzling, blinding, and naked terror, everyone would know, everyone would see me

everyone would say the book was no good

The day before, I had seen the doctor. Octavia asked me to take off my clothes
 
take off my clothes so she could see me what did she know?
 
too young to be a doctor!

I told her no, there was nothing wrong.

Why did Leonard make me visit her?
 
sharp eyes peering at my nakedness
 
that terrible look of pity, kindness, yes yes Octavia, yes,
thank you
, thank you, my hands are always cold (
thank you, that hardly proves your brilliance
)

(I didn’t say it, I was polite)
 
Leonard had told her to ask me to rest
 
I saw his careful hand behind
 
it now they would all gang up on me

she asked me to ‘Try, try for Leonard’

That night I could not sleep at all

The morning, clear
 
everything clear
 
it was very cold I fetched my fur
 
I needed one last touch of comfort
 
flowers in the garden were too bright
 
fat yellow daffodils, harsh, triumphant