Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (37 page)

It helped to explain the way Ahmet looked at me. But maybe all old women imagined that. Maybe he was just a professional flirt, and I was a fool, and Angela was right.

Suddenly, I heard her voice through the wall. Of course, she had gone off to practise her paper – her ‘plenary’, as she kept calling it. Why did she have to be so self-important? –

That was unkind. One didn’t want to be spiteful. Angela had done her best for me, and slowly, I’d become fond of her. Despite her brassy air, she was vulnerable. She cared a lot about her little talk. Probably because I would be listening; she definitely wanted my approval. We had never really spoken about my work. I moved closer to the wall to listen for a moment.

‘… elitist, snobbish … self-indulgent … art for art’s sake …’

A small, cold moment of doubt. But it was obviously not me she was talking about. She must be comparing me to, say,
Katherine Mansfield.

‘… stultifying … ivory tower … not relevant to today’s … if ever …’

No, she was a fan of mine. She had told me so. It couldn’t be –

It couldn’t be – could it – that she hated me?

‘… undeserved preeminence …
Mrs Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse
…’

Yes, she was talking about me.

Of course, she had always hated me.

‘… bloodless … anaemic … breath of real life …’

She had brought me back to life to give me pain
.

There was a shudder in my bones, my heart. My stomach clenched tight against my ribcage.

I could not stay there, in that stupid modern room, alone with the menacing ‘television’ screen, its great blank eye peering down from the wall, laughing at me, staring at me, as I reeled from the spite hissing through the plaster.

(I had thought we were friends! Didn’t she like me? My heart beat loudly. I was very afraid. For who in the world would stick up for me? Who in the world would be on my side?)

No, there was no-one. I was quite alone. No Leonard to comfort me, no Nessa to listen gravely, no Ethel to huff and puff on my behalf.

I went numbly to the wardrobe. Yes, something else. My brain started playing an old song, loudly, something by – what was her name, Greta Keller, that trembling alto with the giant bosom, ‘So little time, my dear, and so much to do / So little time to make your dreams come true …’

Yes, there was a feeling of the day speeding up, I was changing, swiftly, so was Angela, the stage-set slipped and slid around me. I stared at the tiny keyhole in the wardrobe, a detail snipped from a Dodgson fantasy that at any moment might
come to an end. My second chance at life on this planet, it had been so vivid, I had been so happy, but –

she hated me
she wanted to destroy me

Suddenly I knew I must be dreaming, that terrible sense of things fading, thinning, of scrabbling to hold the scenery together, to keep out the darkness nibbling at the edges …

Her voice, inexorable, through the wall: ‘… daughter of privilege … patronage …’

80

Gerda fell asleep happy, but when she woke, at 3
AM
, she thought nothing could be worse than where she was, with one round, shocked pigeon eye staring at her in the moonlight through a crack in the crate that imprisoned it.

‘Trapped like me,’ Gerda thought. ‘Lost like me. We will never get out.’

Where was Mum? It was all her fault
. (How often had that thought come to her? It had polished its own special groove in her brain.
Mum’s fault, Mum’s fault, Mum’s fault, Mum’s
…)

Oh no, she remembered (which was worse), it’s mine.

Gerda flung out her right arm in despair, and it was caught, hard, by a big cold hand. ‘I’ll have that if she won’t,’ a boy’s voice said, his voice just breaking, greedy, harsh. He was pulling at her bracelet, which cut into her flesh.

‘Stop it,’ she shouted, ‘Mum gave me that.’

Before she could breathe, a hand grabbed her cheeks. ‘Shut up,’ said Lil, ‘or I’ll stab you, right? And you,’ she added, to the straggle-bearded boy, ‘get away from her or I’ll bite your ear off. Lie still,’ she ordered Gerda. ‘I need to sleep.’ She flung her arm back across Gerda’s throat.

Gerda couldn’t help it, she started to cry. She tried to do it silently, but after a bit, her shoulders were shaking.

Lil sat up with a jerk and loomed over her. ‘I don’t like snivelling,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

In a whisper, dreading she might wake up the others, Gerda poured it all out. ‘The truth is, I was actually looking for my mother … I did run away, that was true, and I did take her
money … but I came to look for her here, and found she was in Turkey … I’ve come to the wrong bloody side of the world … I’ve got to go to Turkey to find her … I’ve lost Dad too, he’s at the North Pole … and I’ve lost my phone, well I left it at home, which is even more fucking stupid and dickish … without my phone, I will never find my mum – ’

‘You won’t get any sympathy for losing your parents, we’ve all done that,’ said Lil Robber. ‘Lost your phone though, that’s serious. But stop the fuck crying and I’ll fix it. Long as you shut up and let me sleep, then I’ll go out to work in the morning … It’s cool what you did, all the same. Like I said, Gerda, if I had a mum, I’d run off to Morocco and find her, like you.’

‘Turkey,’ Gerda corrected, cautiously, feeling better now she had spilled her heart.

‘Turkey’s in Morocco, look it up,’ said Lil. Wrapped in wisdom, she fell asleep.

81

Feel nothing, act
. Do the thing you long for. I stepped blindly out of the sensible shoes and trousers I had worn for Scutari.

The dress, the dress –

(On, on, it hissed, the hatred spitting through the wall, the syllables even louder in the cupboard: ‘over-precious … narrow … cold …’

I was not cold! I was never narrow!)

I began to sing, anything, anything at all to drown out her lecture. ‘Come let us stroll down lover’s lane/once more to sing love’s old refrain/come let us sing auf wiedersehen/auf wiedersehen again …’

I had bought it in Bloomingdale’s, and only worn it once, a classic shirt-dress in warm pink silk. It was knee-length, quite modest, with small pearl buttons. I slipped it on; it stroked my skin. But my walking shoes looked quite wrong. Time for the other Bloomingdale’s purchase.

‘… frigid … withholding … lesbian …’

My feet slid into the taupe suede heels with marvellously seductive ankle-straps. Then I undid two buttons on the shirt, and rolled up the sleeves to look more … relaxed. Lipstick, yes. It was unsettling. My lips, coloured-in, were very full – full lips were what men liked, Leonard told me. Leonard had not been averse to cosmetics, he had confessed to me one day. I was taken by surprise, as so often by Leonard …

But his aching need. I had tried not to see it.

I could not give it. I failed to give it. The thing he wanted as a man. Because of my paramount need to say ‘No’. When my half-brothers brought me their urgencies, their hot breath, their painful rawness, I could not say ‘No’, they were my elders, and I made the error from which girls do not recover: I gave more than I had to give. Leonard let me regain some part of what was mine, though it was just a chill vacancy. How often did I make poor Leonard feel foolish, though I offered love in a hundred thousand ways, I was full of pats and strokes and kisses … The other thing I could not do. He had been with prostitutes, I knew. He was a man of the world, with a man’s desires, and I was ignorant, and wounded.

But now, it seemed, I had changed, I was ready. At 120 or so years old, something inside me had stirred and softened. I had been dead; I was alive again. Now I was ready to find a lover.

As I slipped through the door I still heard her droning. I would not let her hatred stop me.

On the landing one of the girls who served breakfast, still in her white headscarf, was delivering two cups of coffee on a tray. Her dark eyes widened as she saw me. When I looked more closely, she was very pretty. Yes, it was the one I saw on our first day, leaving the hotel with a bundle of laundry, putting her burden down for a moment to play with the golden cat on the street – then the other girl came over and hugged her. She looked genuinely pleased to see me, and that lift of the mouth, that blush of warmth was helpful, when Angela had made me feel lonely.

‘Madam – ’ she was going to ask me something, or offer me something, probably coffee, but I smiled and stopped her with a wave of the hand, ‘I don’t need anything, I’m just going out.’

Her face fell slightly, then she smiled again, set down the
tray and clapped her hands. ‘Madam is very – lovely!’ ‘Thank you!’ I sailed downstairs in my new high heels.

Thus it was that, when I entered the lobby to find Ahmet and a friend at the desk alone, and Ahmet looked up and said ‘You are beautiful, Mrs Room 15,’ I was not altogether surprised. His friend looked down sternly at the bookings, then briefly up at me, then down again.

Leonard had said it too. I was beautiful, yes. Why had I never felt myself so?

‘I would like to know many words for this. “Lovely”, “beautiful”, is not all. Will you teach me English?’ Ahmet asked. ‘You should stay long time, and teach me English.’

‘You surely learned English at school, didn’t you?’ I didn’t mean to sound rude, but he drew himself up, though he would never be tall.

‘I know many languages,’ he said, proudly. ‘I learn for myself, with my ear’ (he pointed). ‘Maybe I know more languages than you! But not well. I want to speak English like you, very beautiful.’

‘Beautifull-y,’ I corrected him. ‘Yes, Ahmet, of course I will teach you.’

‘Are you going out with your friend in Room 14?’ Ahmet asked me, sounding oddly shy.

He knew all the numbers off by heart. Or just our numbers, perhaps.

‘No.’ I must have said it forcefully.

He stared at me. ‘May I ask, where are you going?’

‘Out,’ I said. I didn’t have a clue. Perhaps he could see it in my face. ‘To eat,’ I improvised.

‘Alone?’ he said. ‘I, Ahmet, will escort you.’

‘ – But you’re working.’

‘On contrary, I have finished my working.’

His companion was muttering something in Turkish, but
Ahmet was totally focused on me. His eyes so brown, so like melting sugar, warm caramel, enfolding me, sliding lazily over the slopes and valleys of the coral silk dress, then back to my face. I bathed in his gaze. I smiled. I shifted. Deep under my dress, there was something electric.

Anticipation. A gathering. I was 120, but I suddenly thought ‘It’s what Nessa told me she felt at eighteen, while I listened dull as a stick or stone.’ In those days I had no feelings to offer. Then later when we swopped stories of bed, she made me feel gauche, clumsy, a failure.

(Although she loved me, perhaps she was glad. At so many other things I bested her: in the competition for our father’s love, for Father always favoured me; at words, which grew like grass from my fingers; at Greek, a country she never tried to enter; at parties, where she just sat like a hard black gemstone, absorbing light, while I glittered and rattled and ran on like water – so what if afterwards I was exhausted? –

But this. The secret heart of us. The womanly part, the making part, whence children, passion, the river flowed. There I was dead, and the river passed by, leaving me writing, dry, on the bank, while she struck out into the centre and swam, surrounded by men, admirers, in the morning; flanked by children, the water-babies I also loved, but could not possess; flesh in the sun, rosy, easy; once I had so longed for them; I waved across: was an aunt: was nothing.

Suddenly, now, I could be something again.)

I waited in the lobby while he got his jacket. The other man stood pretending to work but looking at me, every now and then, with an air I hoped was not speculative.

Then I knew it was, and began to enjoy it.

I crossed my legs. These American shoes were certainly not the most comfortable, but I saw his eyes were drawn to my ankles. Something about the tight little straps. When he looked
up, I smiled at him. At once his eyes dropped down, afraid, and he did a small, important frown. Yes, men had always been afraid of me. But Ahmet – no, he was not afraid.

A sweet, fresh smell on the air of the lobby. Ahmet emerged in a cloud of cologne. From twelve feet away, he was plump and short, but his smile was warm and sweet as a baby’s, his eyes embracing, his manner tender. ‘Give me the arm, dear lady,’ he said. Out the two of us stepped into the radiant world.

82

Lil slipped from Gerda’s arms when she was only half-awake, as the first rays of sun gilded the park, and the earliest joggers bounded to meet it. Before ten minutes had passed, she was back, panting, triumphant, smelling slightly of sweat. ‘There you are,’ she said, handing over a phone. ‘Now book your plane quick, before they block it.’

Sitting on the rock beside Lily’s deerhound, her hands still cold and clumsy from the night, Gerda started to do battle with the internet. There were flights today. Eleven hours in the air, if they had a seat. She would fly into Istanbul in the morning. She kept mis-typing the card expiry date, but in the end, she had entered all the details. A surge of joy filled her as the website told her to wait and not refresh her browser. Now there was nothing else she could do, by her own efforts, her own will-power, she could close her eyes and trust to fate –

If it all came right, she would get away, she could sleep on the plane, if they let her go, if she ever managed to leave the park.

That morning the light was beautiful. The gang looked more ordinary, less scary – sullen, sleepy, terribly young. One or two actually cried out in their dreams and the tall deerhound licked hands or faces, though Lily jealously kicked it away. It was her dog; it was her he must love, and perhaps she had no-one else to love her.

‘Get on with it, quick, I’ve got to fucking lose the phone,’ said Lil, who had watched most of the booking process over Gerda’s shoulder in open admiration (‘It’s different for you. You
can do all that. I haven’t got a mother with cards and stuff.’)

‘Waiting,’ said Gerda, praying it would work, pouring all her hopes on to the paralysed screen, and in this strange world, hope was rewarded, and as Turkish Airlines finally yielded a seat, Lil snatched the phone out of Gerda’s hand and disappeared into the bushes.