Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (31 page)

I admit I told her a fib about my mother. Not really a fib, but not the whole truth. ‘I ran away from this school like a prison. My mum didn’t care, so I stole her money, and came to the other side of the world.’

Lil Robber just said ‘It’s cool what you did, robbing your mum to go round the world. If I had a mum, I’d do that.’

The trouble was, none of them did have mums. They smelled, this gang, in the middle of the night, sweetish, oniony, kicking and mumbling and snuffling around me. Moaning their way through small panicky dreams, maybe of terrible deeds they had done, maybe of terrible things they had suffered. Lil Robber smelled different, of chlorine and pondweed, because she washed ‘most days’ in the lake, although she never washed her clothes, just stole new ones when they got dirty, and her fantasy (in which I now had a role) was to wash, naked, like she
usually did, ‘but sometimes people see me, and then I feel silly, cos I just climb out again like a moron, and it’s slippery down there, so you can fall over’. Instead she would push off, ‘like a fish, you get me’, and go swooping away from them through the deep water, and not come back till they had all fucked off. ‘You don’t learn to swim all at once,’ I said cautiously, as she was drifting into sleep, but Lily stiffened, and said quite loudly ‘You told me you won actual medals, so you gotta be good at teaching it,’ and I said ‘Yeah, I hope I am, but you might be crap at learning, Lily,’ and after a pause, Lil Robber laughed, and tucked her arm painfully tightly around me, and started snoring on my neck.

At first Beardy Boy pretended he was keen on me. He looked at me as if he was having horrible thoughts. But everything he did was like a test. He gave me chewing-gum out of his pocket but I could see what his pocket was like. ‘Nah,’ I said, but I held back from saying what I wanted to say, which was ‘Urrghhhh, disgusting, I wouldn’t eat that even if I was starving.’

(Which by the way, I was, pretty much.)

He offered to do me a tattoo, the next morning. It was the first thing he said as we were waking up. ‘No,’ I said, without even thinking. ‘Why not, ya scared?,’ he sneered, ‘Ya soft?’ And I was scared, and compared to him, I was soft, but I knew the others were listening, and Lil was too, to see how I’d cope, so I said ‘Because your hand would shake. Because you look like you’re always wanking,’ and then Lily laughed, and I felt better, but he stared at me like he wanted to kill me.

So then it was just Lily and me. And I was dependent, as if she was my mother.

But I did choose her, and she chose me. So that was a bit of an advance on childhood. And I knew I had to survive on my own, because in the end I would get my parents back – I
thought I would, I had to believe it – but I had found out they would not live for ever. Most of these kids’ parents were already dead.

I knew I was different, but in a way, as time went on, we would all be the same. We were the young, alone with the future, while the parents would slip away into the past.

71

Tour of Istanbul, Day One

1. The Harem

2. Aya Sophia

Yes, we were different generations – Virginia could have been my great-grandmother! But sometimes we did have fun together.

We breakfasted on the roof of the hotel, on a blazing Istanbul morning. The roof-top terrace was a skating rink for sunlight; a minaret soared alongside us, slender-necked, heron-like, looking upwards, then a tumble of reddish tiled roofs, then blue, blue, pearl and blue.

‘What are we looking at, Angela?’

A sturdy guest enlightened us, setting down her teacup. British. Common. Northern. ‘That’s Sea o’ Marmara. And over there, that’s Golden Horn.’

Those names from long ago: poems, even in her strange dialect. We were gazing across the roof-tops to the blue and pink Sea of Marmara. Painted, as before, with pearl-white light, but it had become a thoroughfare. I remembered small boats like homing birds, dancing on the waves between the islands. Now the ships were flat and black and steady, a heavy, constant line of morse – the work of the world was getting done. In the distance, dove-grey-blue, the islands, the same islands I
had loved before, though we never landed, we just slipped past them, floating on a distant layer of sea-fog, catching my desire, veiled, mysterious, as if all the loved faces might be there, peering towards me, across the water … I shook my head. ‘Let’s get breakfast.’

But Angela pointed at the roofs nearby. Close-up, the view was less romantic. ‘You see, there’s still rich and poor,’ she said. Rusting railings, burnt-out wood, broken roof-ridges where seagulls stalked, a muddle of forgotten white plastic chairs on a dismal terrace with broken pipe-work. A stone’s throw away were the new hotels, small shining enclaves of sunlit breakfasters gazing out across the city. Travellers like her. Golden flotsam. So many people seemd to travel now, but did the money ever reach the poor?

(At least it was paying the men in the lobby. A surge of pleasure when I thought of them.)

We returned from the buffet with plates of spiced sausage. ‘We arrived over that sea,’ I told Angela. ‘I’d hardly slept. I was so excited. We passed a pretty little tower – ’

‘Oh yes – I’ve been past it in a ferry. The guide called it – Leander’s Tower, or The Maiden’s Tower. You know, Hero and Leander. But the Turks call it something different, something like Kid, or Kin – ’

‘Kiz Kulesi,’ said the same sturdy woman, sitting at the next-door table. ‘Very fairmous. Yer can get it on tea-towels. Fridge magnets.’

‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t heard that accent for – a very long while.’ (And indeed I hadn’t: for a century or so.)

‘Plenty of people talk like me back orm. Tell yer what though, I haven’t eard one with a voice like you for decairds.’ She stomped off into the breakfast buffet. I hooted with laughter. I couldn’t help it.

‘Virginia, stop offending people!’ But Angela was laughing, too.

‘Three days,’ I said. ‘I’ve only got three days, but that’s what it took Jesus to rise from the dead. And I have already done that part!’

‘Virginia, you might be surrounded by Christians.’

‘I would like to go back to that tower. Adrian called it Leandros Tower. The Maiden’s Tower, you said. I saw it when I was a girl, that first morning, when my heart was so light.’

(That day I saw nothing but golden bubbles rising row upon row on a dark green hillside. The domes were so airy, they were like glass. I was running from side to side of the deck, and Nessa told me I was over-excited, and one of the sailors kept pulling my arm and pointing – ‘Üsküdar,’ he said. It looked like a barracks with four tall towers, on the eastern shore, dark against the sunrise. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Thank you.’ But he wouldn’t let go, he wanted to teach us. ‘Florence, the lady, the famous English lady,’ he said for the second time. ‘Üsküdar.’ Vanessa put two and two together. ‘Oh he must mean Scutari, Virginia. The hospital where poor Florence Nightingale wore herself out.’ Nearby there was a tower that seemed to float on the water, about three hundred yards from the shore. Was it a lighthouse, was it a boat? Because it seemed to move with the waves, or I did, dizzy with beauty and lack of sleep. ‘That’s charming,’ I said. ‘Does some princeling live there?’ And Adrian, who had done some research, said ‘It used to be the custom post. There’s been a tower there for a thousand years.’ ‘Adrian, don’t exaggerate’ – we never believed what Adrian said. As the youngest, he naturally got bullied. ‘I’m not exaggerating. It’s famous. The Tower of Leander, where Hero lived. Her lover Leander swam the Hellespont to woo her, which even you girls must know about. One night it was too stormy,
but she told him to come, and her light blew out, and her lover drowned.’ ‘Wasn’t that the Dardanelles?’ said Vanessa. ‘I’m sure you’ve muddled it up, Adrian.’ ‘It’s not me who’s muddled,’ he said, and reddened, as poor Adrian so often did.)

‘I love the story of Hero and Leander,’ Angela said, as she stirred her coffee. ‘Though why is it always the men who do the swimming?’

‘We all swam in the sea at St Ives,’ Virginia said. ‘Thoby was best, of course he was. Not that it helped him, in the end.’

‘I always wondered,’ Angela said, looking out over the water to the far horizon where the blue islands hung low in the mist, ‘did Hero let the lamp go out on purpose? I mean, I know the night was stormy, and she shouldn’t have begged him to make the crossing – but what if it was worse than that? What if she actually let him drown? What if she thought about all the effort and mess of loving a man, and deliberately didn’t replace the oil? And when the flame flickered out, just went to bed?’

‘That’s a terrible thought,’ I said, and it was, but part of me felt – exhilarated. Women could be wicked, as well as good.

We were helping ourselves to water-melon. It was red and succulent, dripping wet. I thought, ‘I will take another slice.’ Briefly, my eyes met Angela’s.

‘So can we change your, what do you call it, schedule?’ I asked. ‘Let’s say Scutari and Kiz … What was it?’

‘Kiz Kulesi,’ said the Yorkshire woman, who was piling her plate with her third lot of rolls. ‘I’m a teacher, see. I’m good at nairms.’

She was smiling now. I had a second chance. I never wanted to hurt anybody, though I hurt Adrian and hurt Leonard, and sometimes, I know, I laughed when I shouldn’t. ‘Most kind of you. Thank you,’ I said.

Yes, I would meet Angela in Reception.

72

I put my new hat on; inspected the mirror; it looked – jaunty. I took it off. But we were going for a jaunt! I put it on again, and went downstairs. She didn’t arrive. I wasn’t perturbed, my friend Ahmet was there from the day before, standing smartly suited with two friends. They were talking, but he was pleased to see me.

‘Very nice,’ he said, expansively, smiling meaningfully at me. The other two men looked at him sideways.

‘What, precisely?’ He looked baffled. ‘What is nice?’ I encouraged him. The man next to him was muttering in Turkish, and his face was disapproving. ‘
Ayip! Ayip!
’

‘Oh, hat,’ Ahmet said finally. ‘
The
hat, I think is the right way.’

‘This hat? I bought it in Istanbul,’ I said. Somehow I didn’t think he meant my hat.

I started to think – could it be? Perhaps he liked me as a woman. Old as I am. Was it possible? Were tendrils of feeling extending towards me, like tiny green vines unfurling in the garden?

His colleagues didn’t seem happy with him. Perhaps it was wrong, as Angela would say, ‘culturally’, for him to talk to me. Or perhaps it was the way he looked at me, for rather too long, that his colleagues disliked. ‘Kiz … what is the name of the famous tower?’

‘Kiz Kulesi,’ he said with a delighted air. ‘Yes, I can arrange trip to this.’ He tapped his forehead, as if advertising his brain.

‘Do we take a taxi?’

‘Very long journey by taxi.’

‘Taxi and boat?’

‘No, I take myself.’

I must have looked puzzled, for he mimed driving. Then he gave me an enormous smile. ‘Maybe tomorrow? Or tomorrow of tomorrow?’

At that moment, Angela stormed into reception.

‘He’s RUINED my day.’

Had I upset her by talking to Ahmet?

‘He has that effect on me, every time. I’m doing fine without him, then he rings. Come on Virginia, let’s get going.’

‘Ah – I see – your husband.’

‘You probably don’t see, Virginia. These things are different when you have children. I told you – did I? – he’s in the Arctic Circle, he’s on an expedition, he’s always away – well the funding’s run out, they’ve lost their grant, and he seemed to think that I – why should I?’

‘Why should you what?’ But she wasn’t listening. ‘Are you all right?’ But I saw she wasn’t. Her eyes were red. She had
been crying.

She tried to speak, but her voice tore. ‘Gerda – Gerda – ’

‘There’s a problem with your daughter?’

‘Gerda will blame me. Children do.’

I’d been perfectly happy in my own sunny room. Then the phone rang, and it wasn’t Virginia – I saw him in my head, as I stared at the phone, his faraway voice worrying like wire, a tiny figure dwarfed by all that ice, muffled in furs, his face a blank, he seemed to have turned into someone else – I knew even then that Gerda would judge me. She loved her father, always, blindly. Daughters are very hard on mothers.

I didn’t care. I was angry too. A gross black spider ran across the floor.

‘No! Not a chance! No, you bastard! You’re
always
away! Don’t dare to ask me! You’ve already taken money from our joint account! I know you have, so don’t deny it.’ I didn’t say what I could have said – ‘I never wanted you to go.’ I switched off the phone and stamped on the spider, once, twice, and then it was still. That little fucker would run no more.

Her epic of complaint continued as we made our way through the Hippodrome, transformed by daylight into a market. The wretchedness of women through the ages filled my ears …

But the day was dancing before my eyes – men with red-and-white-striped awnings on their carts selling roast yellow sweetcorn with a fringe of brown tassels, men selling chestnuts in pouting black skins through which the flesh of the nut glistened, men doing theatre with ice creams, juggling the ball of ice into the cone, bowing to the queue of squealing girls who were wearing wreaths of artificial rosebuds sold by
a man who sat on the kerb – to me the day was a holiday, but Angela, beside me, was voluble and blind. The seagulls wheeled overhead, so white, free-er than us, without human feelings.

‘He thought that I would bail them out. He seems to think I’m a millionaire.’

‘Bail them out?’

‘Pay for them. Let him have the money to finish the journey.’

‘I thought you were a millionaire?’ I interrupted. ‘I thought you were a best-selling author?’