Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (36 page)

We sat outside with our tea and two large pieces of apricot pie. Every so often, the waitress came out and smiled. At intervals, panting people came hurrying through from the direction of Istiklal; the waitress talked to them, her face briefly serious. At the next-door table, a group of three moustachioed middle-aged men in vests – what people now called ‘T-shirts’ – made flamboyant jokes and swam with their hands. Then they were joined by a tall, elegant woman, a redhead, with a careful coiffure. She had a raucous laugh that didn’t go with her dress or her svelte silhouette, like a resting greyhound. The foursome sat and smoked and shouted. The kindly waitress seemed to know them well.

After a while there were no more dishevelled people hurrying through from our narrow passage. The sound of sirens and whistles faded away. This little courtyard felt like somewhere else, Italy perhaps, a theatrical world of sunlit laughter where police and rioters could not come.

The thing we had shared – fear, then relief – must have loosened Virginia’s tongue, and made her daring.

‘May I ask you a question about your husband?’

‘Go ahead.’ I was flattered. Most of her questions were about modernity, which made me feel like Wikipedia.

‘I need some wine,’ she said suddenly. I waved my hand, and the sweet girl came. ‘Two large glasses of Turkish red.’ Was it illegal yet? Evidently not.

‘Cheers!’ said Virginia, holding hers up to the light, and we
touched glasses, and she smiled at me. Virginia was almost a modern woman. She drank deeply, and then again. The group next door was louder than ever. The loud-voiced woman had a smoker’s laugh.

Virginia’s question was not what I expected.

‘Angela – do you miss your husband? Physically, as it were.’

‘Physically? Do you mean – you don’t mean sexually, surely?’

She was blushing. She did mean sexually!

‘Actually, I do, Angela. Yes.’

How could I talk about sex to
her
! She wasn’t a girlfriend! She was … Virginia! Famously chaste, traumatised! What was that passage in ‘Professions for Women’? She said women couldn’t write about the body.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Oh … I just wondered.’ Her eyelids dipped, she took another sip, but when she looked up again, her eyes were mischievous. ‘I have been having … feelings. Feelings I haven’t had for some time. Some time before I died, that is. One hadn’t felt – desire – in ages.’

Angela looked as though I’d shot her. Stricken, that’s the only word for it, as if I had somehow let her down. Or let myself down. A puritan! I thought. Yes, of course, these modern feminists are puritans.

But after a moment, she started to smile.

‘Virginia? Are you really? – I don’t know what to say. It’s sweet. Put it down to coming alive again. It probably gives you all kinds of feelings. Nothing to be guilty about. It’s not abnormal for – ’

She stopped.

I knew quite clearly what she meant to say. ‘Not abnormal for older women.’ She didn’t understand! I no longer felt ‘older’!

‘The point is, Angela, I find myself thinking – about the people I see in the street. And … in the lobby. Turkish people.’

I didn’t say that it was mostly one man, Ahmet, who occupied my mind. His dark-eyed charm, his currant-bun dimples. Whenever he saw me, that warm, flawed smile. Marzipan skin, sensuous lips. Under his smart work-clothes, his muscled plumpness.

All so very different from Leonard. A shiny berry, a wiry twig.

‘There’s nothing wrong with having these thoughts.’ (Though Virginia was old enough to be my mother!) ‘But don’t, you know, be too friendly in the lobby. I told you before, they won’t understand. They’ll think you’re, well – ’ I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t say ‘They’ll think you’re up for it.’

And then I did. ‘They’ll think you’re up for it.’

My wine had almost gone; the blood was coursing through my
veins. ‘I was wondering. I don’t know what you think – After all this time, do you think I could …?’ Perhaps I spoke louder than I meant. Would people hear? I didn’t care. ‘Why do you assume I am not “up for it”? If that is what you modern women say.’

‘Virginia?’

‘
Virginia??
’

‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I’m a writer. We’re not supposed to shun experience. So many things I have never done. I can’t be a Turk, or an American. I can never be a member of the working classes. One has to be born to it, don’t you think? But for some reason – since coming back – one has felt … “I might, perhaps, like to try that.” Try it again, as a new person. With a new person. Say, a Turk.

‘Why are you staring? I’m not a virgin. Do my readers expect me to be a virgin?’

‘A Turk? Not with a Turk, Virginia.’

‘Why not?’

Angela’s mouth had gone thin and cross. Then she laughed.

‘You’re teasing me, of course. I fell for it.’

‘No, I’m serious. I was never able to write about the body … But that’s not the point. I just – want to do it.’

‘But, Virginia! Everyone knows … It’s just not you. You can’t do it for research.’

‘Maybe I’ve become a different person. Maybe I never was that person. Why can’t I, you know, with a Turk?’

‘Of course you can’t, it’s ridiculous. Turkish men! Impossible.’

The next-door table were definitely listening. Angela’s mouth opened, then closed again. She looked flushed; confused; her shoulders drooped. It didn’t take long for her to recover.

‘It’s just so stereotypical! Older woman, western, comes to Turkey for sex! It’s a cliché, Virginia! It’s … orientalist!’

She pronounced this triumphantly, as if it clinched it. Her final ‘-ist’ sprayed the air with saliva. ‘Orientalist? Is that bad?’

(She said it as if it meant ‘murderess’. I was not familiar with the usage.)

She was smiling again, superior, maddening, her lips moving with unvoiced words, looking down that fine-cut nose at me.
Why did my opinions suddenly seem flimsy? She was arrogant! And ignorant! Yes, Virginia Woolf was
ignorant
!

Orlando
suffered from the same kind of thinking. Romantic Gypsies. Sentimental fantasies. The East with a soft erotic glow. Perhaps I should add that to my paper. Perhaps I had always been too respectful.

‘Of course you can’t know about Edward Said, he was a brilliant thinker, a profound thinker, he revolutionised the way we write about the East. But you must see it’s a stereotype, deciding to go to bed with a Turk?’

‘Would you rather I had sex with – whom, exactly? A Belgian? An African?’

‘Good heavens, here’s Ray Kuyperman. Professor Kuyperman! Come and join us!’

‘ – No, I will sleep with whomever I want to.’ But I had to break off. A tall thin man had materialised in the square behind us.

‘Ladies!’ he said, manifestly startled, almost as though we had somehow caught him out. ‘Angela Lamb! What a surprise! Of course, you are giving a reading at the conference. And one of the plenaries, I believe. But – what are you doing here?’ Rimless spectacles. Firm jaw-line. He gestured vaguely around the tables. One of our neighbours raised his hand, but Kuyperman ignored them.

‘This is Virginia, a friend of mine. Virginia, this is Ray
Kuyperman, from the University of Witwatersrand. Which is in Africa, but actually he’s Belgian. He lives in Brussels most of the year.’

‘How convenient!’

‘You must be joking. The travelling is dreadful.’

‘Were you caught up in the demonstration? Is that how you came to be here, like us?’

‘Pure chance, dear lady.’

He had beautiful manners, but under the surface he was agitated. The man with the longest moustache next door was definitely trying to attract his attention, but Kuyperman seemed oblivious. The red-head’s beautiful cream silk scarf had fallen on the ground under their table. Something odd about her neck. Oh, and her hands, in flamboyant rings, heavy silver crusting the knuckles – but the fingers extended too far from the rings, and the nails, when they came, were square and broad. Those elegant legs. Those enormous feet! Of course, she was a man. Feeling shy, I looked away.

‘Are you here alone? Why don’t you join us later on? I have to go back and prepare my talk, but we’ll go out to eat, I expect.’

‘Professor!’ A chorus, rather loud, almost jeering, from the raffish group at the next-door table. ‘Academics,’ he mouthed to us, ‘I must say Hallo.’

We agreed he might call at the hotel at eight.

‘By the way,’ he said to her as he turned away, ‘You are awfully like the other Virginia, as everyone must tell you!’

She looked at him – a long, noticing look – and smiled, but said nothing.

‘Distant relation,’ I said. ‘Through Leslie Stephen’s brother, the judge.’

‘Really?’

‘I am related to the judge,’ I confirmed. (Quite true, he was my uncle.)

By now the homosexuals – for now I was sure – and the red-headed transvestite at the table next door were laughing openly in Kuyperman’s direction. As we left, one made a slight, ironic bow. Why had he not introduced us to them? Was homosexuality still taboo? Kuyperman was evidently one, but who cared?

The crush on Istiklal had eased. The police-buses were still there, but the shouting had stopped. The young people holding up their magazines had gone. I hoped they were not inside the buses. A few policemen stood around, hard-eyed.

‘He’s distinguished-looking, don’t you think?’ she asked me.

‘Who?’

‘Ray. Professor Kuyperman. I’m sure he’d love to have dinner with you.’

Evidently she was match-making. Trying to divert my attention from Turks. Marching across the Galata Bridge, she explained his work.

‘He’s a well-known scholar. Loves your books, especially
Orlando
. I’m amazed they haven’t asked him to do a plenary. His best-known book is
Quiddities: Denaturalised Concepts of Sex, Gender and Queer Love in Orlando
.’

‘Good heavens.’

‘I think he’s single.’

‘Quite.’

Back at the hotel, we went to our rooms. I thought with shame of my attempt to confide. She had simply refused to hear what I was saying. So modern women were prejudiced too. I was too chaste, I was too old, I must always be what I was before – so many boundaries around desire. Angela could not help or advise me.

So I’d have to find it for myself.

I would search for the long-lost secret garden I dreamed of when I was just a girl. Before what was hidden was stolen from me.

78

When Lil told the gang about Gerda’s great swim and how she saved Wolfy from the barbed wire, she said not a word about what happened after.

The three of them were reunited. Gerda and Wolfy were both sopping wet, standing there shivering and dripping in the sunlight, hidden from view by the trees round the lake from the grownup world of robbers and killers. (Lil had told Gerda stories about things so terrible that Gerda only knew them from fairy tales. ‘You’ve got to be careful. I’ll look after you,’ Lil had said.)

It was nearly midday. The sun was hot. Lil kept hugging Gerda’s wet body. Wolfy was whining and licking his leg, but it was Gerda that Lil worried about. ‘You’ll have to get dry,’ she said, protective. ‘This is the Ramblers, this wood, it’s famous.’ ‘What for?’ Lil Roberta didn’t answer her. ‘I know a place that’s beautiful.’ She led Gerda, dripping, through narrow paths to a sort of greenhouse, but without any glass, a Japanese-y shelter that looked from a distance as if it was made of pale blue lace. ‘This is the Ladies Pavement,’ she said, proudly. ‘It’s a secret.’

‘Pavilion,’ said Gerda, reading the plaque.

‘Same thing,’ said Lil.

(But it wasn’t, thought Gerda. Softer, fuller. She’d been to school. She loved ‘pavilion’.)

Close up it was Victorian iron, like the conservatory in Gerda’s home. The roof was darker, like mauve bluebells. Gerda suspended her wet blouse and jumper on the pale iron of the
verandah. At the front there was sunlight and a view of the lake. ‘You’re all right like that, it looks like a bikini,’ Lil told her. ‘I’ll take my clothes off to keep you company.’

The three of them lay in a huddle in the sun, and slowly, as Lil stroked and kissed her, Gerda’s goose-pimples subsided, and Wolfy’s flanks stopped shuddering, and only after about twenty minutes did he stand up and snuffle, feeling left out.

‘You stay and guard us, Wolfy,’ said Lily. Then they forgot him: but Wolfy stayed.

They slept, that night, in each other’s arms, on the fire-warmed rock, Gerda and Lil, by the broken crate with the pigeons in it, shuffling and ruffling and roucouling, and did not lie still until the other children, who Lil Robber had sent off to work, crept back, slowly, and they all slept together, a raft of bodies loosely patched and woven against the spring night with its chill dead wind, and whatever worse things the park contained.

79

Inside, of course, I was young as ever, but I evidently looked old to Angela. Thinking of Ahmet, I peered in the mirror. My hair, which had once looked straggly and grey, had a glow to it, yes, the brown glow of honey, my eyes were bright, and there again, my cheeks – surely they were pinker? And they were not hollow. They were oval, with roses. I ran my hands down the sides of my body. I wasn’t fat; I wasn’t thin. I was tall, wasn’t I? Could I be – ‘striking’? In fact, I had become what Leonard, with a wry smile, sometimes said of a passing stranger: ‘a fine figure of a woman’.