Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (34 page)

So we carried on up – only three more turns – the voices of the gallery were coming to meet us – and she was no longer pulling at me, but I kept her hand in mine to the end, and we walked together, free-er, faster –

And then we were out. The glory of it! Light, freedom. Light, light. The world all about us. She had brought me through it.

I felt as if I had been – reborn. I was laughing, crying. There’s no other word for it.

‘Thank you, thank you, Virginia.’ I took her other hand and held it.

I thought she was going to dance with me! ‘Please don’t mention it.’ Yes, I had helped her. Still, after a second, I broke away.

We went to the balustrade and looked down. Busy tiny people, wide hoops of light. Massive pillars supporting our world. ‘This dome has fallen many times, I believe.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t say that before I went in the tunnel. Why did it fall?’

‘Earthquakes. War … human beings, always conquering things, destroying things. Warring religions, of course. Pagans, Christians, Muslims. British, French, Germans. It goes in cycles; build, demolish.’

‘But everything here feels so – permanent. So monumental. As if nothing could change it. One moment, then another moment. Everything feels inevitable. I know cities fall. And civilisations. I can do it in my head, but I can’t make sense of it, not physically, in my own human body. Which tells me this will go on for ever.’

‘You see, I have been so far away. That place where all of us must go. And when I came back, they had all vanished. It was as if we had never been. New York had forgotten Roger, and Duncan, and Vanessa. They had all – flickered out. The images they meant to capture for ever were in the stacks, or sold, or lost. And the streets were so straight, and everything so new, and the sun so bright – it all felt – shallow. Why did they ever work so hard?

‘Now the whole world looks like flats for a play.’

Of course it was different for Angela. She still had husband, daughter, a home, not that she’d learned to value them. She was clinging to the brightness of her last stretch of youth, she thought her choices would last forever, though soon a narrower corridor would take her. She dared not loosen her hold on space, she dared not loosen her grip on money. ‘Are you ready to go down again?’

The way down was easy, just an ordinary staircase. By the barest margin, I had passed the test.

At the bottom, the sun poured through the great doors. Just for a second, we remained in darkness. She took one of my hands, and pressed it on the wall. It was a moment I will not forget. So brief, this sense of being one with her. What was she giving me, a gift or a curse? I could hardly hear the words she whispered.

‘Only the stones. Only the stones. The stones remain, but we are just shadows.’

(Though just then, Angela was painfully real, probably because I had seen her suffer. One would have liked to say, ‘Nothing much matters. So save your marriage. Give Edward the money.’)

75

Gerda held Lil at bay for a second. ‘Dogs are animals. They don’t need saving.’

‘Wolfy’s different.’

‘Why?’

‘He might not come back.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he doesn’t know he belongs to me.’

‘Well … I don’t have to get him back, but I will,’ said Gerda, stripping off her trousers, shivering, but clenching her jaw so Lil didn’t see it. ‘Assertion!’ she shouted over her shoulder as she splashed into the freezing water.
Miss Larman, help me now
. She had to go straight in, no messing.

Lil was laughing demonically on the bank. ‘You’ve got a thong! I can see your bush!’

‘You won’t see me for – ’ Gerda would have said ‘dust’, but just at that moment she vanished underwater as the bottom of the lake fell away from her, and for a moment all she saw was bubbles and weed, and she swallowed death, but then she was off, swimming straight and strongly over to the side of the lake where Wolfy’s head was moving fast, the living point of an arrow of ripples, a dark triangle with a blue-white crest.

‘Wolfy,’ she called, briefly treading water, ‘Wolfy, come here!’

Come on, you bastard
, she begged in her head.
I’ve got to get you back or Lil will kill me
.

But Wolfy was not interested. He was swimming after birds. The crows had swooped away, laughing harshly, so Wolfy had settled for some inoffensive moorhens who half took off,
undignified, half-scooting on the lake away from the dog, three black and white flurries of bristling feathers, making for the green edge where they lived.

‘Wolfy!’ He was getting out now, on the East side, shaking white cloaks of water off him. ‘Come on, Wolfy, I’m not going to chase you.’ But his long hind-legs were powering him onwards, leaping and gambling through a haze of drops, and now he had found another dog, a little white poodle who yipped sharply –

‘Wolfy, come
back
!’

Yipped and nipped. Wolfy barked twice, sadly, at his would-be lover and then, a thinner, more bedraggled dog, re-entered the water with a bark in her direction, a small, gruff sound that seemed to say ‘All right, fair’s fair, I’ve had my fun.’

‘Good boy, Wolfy! Here I am!’ Gerda did a leisurely side-stroke, waiting. Yes, he was arrowing back round the shore, working his way down the grey-green line, he was only fifty metres away –

And then, quite suddenly, he wasn’t. Something strange was going on. His nose had gone up, he was bucking in the water, throwing up a spume of white spray – had something attacked him? – barking, frantic. Had he found a fish? Was he mucking about?

But the sound of terror is universal. ‘I’m coming, Wolfy!’ Gerda shouted. ‘It’s all right, I’m on my way.’

Then Gerda became ‘a living speedboat’, powering through the water so fast and straight she was just a narrow line of white spray –

Or that was the way Lil told it, later, with Wolfy half asleep at her feet.

They were sitting on the rock, surrounded by children, a circle of faces, curious, resentful, wondering why
they
weren’t heroes, not like the new ginger intruder. Someone had set fire
to a pile of boxes.

‘I’m telling you, she went like a rocket! Well, like a mermaid. Mermaids always have red hair – ’ (it was clear that none of them questioned Lil’s knowledge, which was all Assertion, and weak on Facts, but this time Gerda didn’t point that out, though she heard a child whispering ‘What’s a Murmured?’) ‘ – when she got there, Wolfy was almost drowned, he’d got stuck in the water-weeds down the edge, I expect there were water-snakes in there as well’ (‘It was wire,’ Gerda interrupted) ‘ – I WAS COMING TO THAT,’ Lil insisted, ‘so she had to drag him free, didn’t she, he’s a big dog and he was panicking, and she couldn’t put her feet on the bottom or anything, and then she saw there was like BLOOD on the water, and she had to get BARBED-WIRE off his leg.’

With that Lil held up Gerda’s hand in the fire-light and showed off the red jagged line of blood. ‘So she did all right, didn’t she?’

There was a general, grudging noise of approval, and Wolfy, who had been welcomed back with a hamburger Beardy Boy had nicked from a stall, pushed his warm, greasy, hairy nose firmly into Gerda’s palm. Under his eyebrows, Beardy Boy stared.

‘He would have got free on his own,’ he said.

‘Beard’s jealous,’ Lil said. ‘He couldn’t do it himself. He can’t swim, can he. He couldn’t be a mermaid.’

‘Mermaids are girls,’ Gerda pointed out. ‘Never mind, it’s a beautiful word.’

‘What is a Murmured?’ the same child asked.

‘A really good swimmer,’ Lil opined. ‘It isn’t a boy or a girl, it’s either. It has to be a hero when there’s a chance. Even if it hurts itself.’

76

How it fascinated me: self-sacrifice, service. Angela wasn’t feeling talkative. It was our second day, we were on our way to Üsküdar, the tram was screeching round a corner, a man got up and gave me his seat – she flashed me a look of irritation.

Üsküdar. Such a beautiful word, the Turkish word, so much softer than Scutari, not just a shield, a husky fullness, but with that strength, that ‘d’, underneath. Scutari where Florence Nightingale nursed. I longed to go there because of my mother. Florence Nightingale, twenty years older, was always a hero for my mother, though to us she seemed fabulously aged, a dragon, and because of Lytton, faintly ridiculous.

Virginia had no idea of the efforts I’d made to get her into Scutari.

Florence Nightingale’s ‘Letter to Cassandra’ was so … bitter. Yes, she was right, women’s talents were wasted, women were imprisoned in the drawing-room, but raw pain does not make good writing. I preferred to use wit. Wit and lightness. Then the men can’t laugh, or pity us.

She naturally left all the details to me. Because it was a barracks – the Istanbul barracks – the Turks didn’t welcome just anybody.
You would have thought two respectable English ladies would not be suspected of being spies. But I had to fax a letter explaining our interest, and pages of our passports, and home addresses; even then their fax accepting us had only arrived during breakfast. To all this, she was oblivious. That morning, on the tram to the ferry, she was regal, as if everything came to her by right, and she got a seat, while I did not, and the Turk who gave it stared at her … I suppose Virginia always looked strange.

From the tram to the ferry, in the early morning, skies of pearl and rose, and no-one was on deck but we two and a family (I judged, from the way they herded together) of brutal-looking people in children’s clothes – identical two-piece romper-suits with ‘UKRAINE’ written across their shoulders (‘It’s the name of a country,’ Angela explained, ‘They’re not romper-suits, we call them “tracksuits”.’) They stared at us as if we came from space. The boys had matching blonde stubble on their heads. Why did they wear the name of their country on their shoulders? Strange that this world, so international, was still so eager to declare its loyalties. Or maybe they were ‘terrorists’? Angela was tetchy, so I didn’t ask her.

The barracks was up on the hill. The only way to get there was along a huge road. It felt raw and tremendous, with the narrowest of pavements, not at all like the avenues in New York, no traffic lights or pedestrian crossings, heavy lorries roaring and trembling past us, their burdens shaking at the cords, the wind from their passing flattening our clothes and blowing our words into nothingness. I was deafened, maddened, would we get there alive? Was this terrifying artery the meaning of progress? No room for error. If you stumbled, you died.
The drivers were blind, too far above us to see as we midgets scampered along by the traffic, heads down.

At last we turned left. Yes, there was the barracks. Three sentries stared at us, amazed, from their posts fifty yards up an empty road. We had to approach under hostile eyes. ‘Smile,’ said Angela over her shoulder as she preceded me with our documents. My mouth felt dry and dusty from the road but I tried, and to my surprise, a soldier smiled back. Men were definitely smiling at me more. Turkish men must be friendlier.

A soldier – he looked around fifteen, white teeth uneven in his mouth – escorted us into the guardhouse. It was bristling with soldiers, guns at the ready, who took the documents, removed her phone. How would Angela manage without it?

‘Camera, Miss.’

I said ‘I don’t have a camera.’

Angela pretended not to hear, but the soldier asked again and she yielded – ‘But I wanted to photograph the museum!’ ‘No photos.’

‘There are a great many soldiers,’ I whispered.

‘They’re just conscripts, Virginia. Probably students. Everyone has to go in the army.’

‘Pity about the camera.’

‘What’s tragic is – I haven’t got a single picture of you.’

‘I believe it’s all about where you point it?’

‘I pointed it at you, of course!’

‘Well don’t look at me as if it’s my fault.’

‘All I’m saying is, you never come out. Perhaps you’re moving – accidentally, I mean – just at the moment I take the picture?’

‘The poor photographer blames her subjects. Though it’s true I am a reluctant subject.’

‘I might like to have a souvenir. Something I could show my daughter. I am proud to have spent time with you, Virginia.’

Then an officer arrived, middle-aged, slightly jaded, his tired smile saying he had done this before. A saloon car with a uniformed driver swept the three of us through the barracks. ‘This is the north-east tower,’ said the officer. ‘Get out here, please, for Florence Nightingale Museum.’

What had I expected? One hoped to find … her. The actual woman. Florence Nightingale. Something more authentic than Lytton’s sneering picture.

Alas, the museum was not a success. First, a room full of dreadful brown plastic soldiers, most of them not from the Crimean War. Models of guns, men in gaiters, gallant officers ordering charges. Our own officer – plump, balding, intelligent – kept disconsolately trying to please us, so one feigned interest, but it wasn’t easy.

Not destined to appeal to the author of
Three Guineas
.

‘I actually studied English Literature. I have read Graham Greene, and
Great Gatsby
. Very good author, your Fitzgerald!’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Our professor said Graham Greene was a spy. Ha, ha!’

‘I definitely prefer
Great Gatsby
.’

‘Yes, it’s better. Through here is where she lived. Follow me, please. Here are ancient bandages … But I think you English admire him very much, Graham Greene?’