Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (4 page)

Yellow varnish
 
this yellow room

cruel that Octavia asked me to try ‘for Leonard’, as if I had no care for him, and she, a stranger, knew everything

I have tried so hard. I can try no longer

The Furies waiting where the path disappears

The hideous old women bare their claws at me, wet-mouthed, whispering as they crawl towards me, brown scaly talons and hanging flesh

I could smell their furious iron-rich breath, the great blades of their scissors wet with light, the hellish light of the blue spring sky, gnawing my fate before I was ready

I loved my life but I had to go, once the Furies smell you you can only flee. I knew that day I could not outrun them, the sky was cloudless, they had me at bay –

I wrote to Leonard & I wrote to Vanessa. Words I had practised many times. With the breath of the Furies hard in my ears & their split yellow nails, like torn bamboo, sharpened ready to gouge my eyes out.

In this hostile, stinking, yellow room the dreadful words return to me, words that can never be unsaid, the deed, once done,
that can never be mended

the wound I dealt him, the grief I gave him

darling Leonard
 
how I struck at his heart

knowing I must hurt him, I pulled on my coat, thrust my hand deep into the pocket as I almost ran down through the meadow, it was ready now for the fate it must carry, yes, I had gone too far to go back,

a tiny voice like the voice of a child that wanted to be born

was crying Stop
 
a tiny part of me cried in the night

 
small, stubborn, a scintilla of light

trying to escape me, trying to get out

but the path led straight to the river bank
 
the Furies behind me every step of the way
 
behind me, ahead of me, snapping at my ankles, tearing at my stockings like vicious brambles,
 
battering my ears with icy hatred, whipping me onwards,
flee, flee

this time I knew they would never release me

the river roaring

full of crazed blue light
 
Omega chunks of blue and brown

feel certain I am going mad again

 
can’t go through another of those terrible times

begin to hear voices
 
can’t concentrate

I am doing
 
what seems the best thing to do

You have given me the greatest possible happiness
 
I don’t think

two people could have been happier

could have been happier

this terrible disease

    
I can’t fight any longer

After a long silence, her voice came, hoarse. ‘I did it, didn’t I. That terrible thing.’

Sitting on the woman’s ugly bed, which was broken-backed under a yellow-gold cover, with nameless shadows, wine or blood – it groaned beneath me like the sea, as if my grief was too heavy for it, & I groaned louder, I groaned like old metal, I groaned like banks of black stones on a beach, moaned in pain like a wounded beast

I remember

the clumsy walk at midday with the voices shrieking and baying behind me, the yelps of the Furies hounding me down through the meadows I had loved for so long, the skin on my back crawling with terror,
Virginia, you’re mad again

I remember

thrusting the stone in my pocket

large, heavy, waiting for me, the stone like a toad on the river-bank

I held it
 
weighed it in my hand

blind, brutal
 
I choose you

forcing the stitches of my pocket apart and as it started to tear,
as I heard the silk split, I stopped myself, gently, be gentle with it, yes, I controlled it, the heavy bludgeon

remember

the brute knocking hard at my flank as the Furies reached me and I jerked away, their black hide blotting out the sky, great shrieks of raucous joy as they pawed me, knowing my fear would drag me down and hold me under the green tangled water — but a voice in my head still whispered
Leonard
, a woman’s voice said
how can I leave you?

Leonard, Leonard. Yes
, again.
Leonard my love. I can’t leave you
.

But it was too late for him to save me. Or my dear sister who was so patient, with her stooping head and steady eyes.

Yes, it was true. I left him behind. I loved my husband but I left him behind, & slipped through the door where none can follow.

11

Two o’clock in the afternoon, though several lifetimes have slipped away. Two fragile organisms, blown together. Dandelion clocks on a dirty bedstead. Angela, Virginia.

She was washed downriver like a broken doll. He had to identify her three weeks later. Children thought she was a log in the water. They stoned it, hard, to make it sink. The happy bird-calls of adolescents. Then one boy realised it was a body.

Down in the street, the cold is beginning a slow fight-back against the spring heat-wave. The dark, repressed, pauses, alerted. Soon it will be able to creep back into the gullies. Then it will climb up the buildings again.

Angela looks around her and shivers. ‘Mrs Woolf, are you all right?’

12

I suppose he had to identify me.

After that, did the horror start to eat my face? Did the sight erase poor Leonard’s memory of what he once thought beautiful?

Wracked on the bed, I remembered my crime.

She was pale as wax, and sat there trembling.

‘Mrs Woolf? Virginia?’

She shook her head, again and again, like a dog shaking water away.

‘I don’t know you. Why are
you
here? Why won’t you let me use your phone?’

Her breath rasped like an old man’s.

‘It’s the twenty-first century. Some way through. My name – I’ve told you several times – is Angela Lamb. And I’m alive. It feels to me as if we’re both alive. But Leonard – well, he died long ago. You can’t call him. I’m so sorry.’

She stared back at me, blind with anger. Her hand still stretched towards the phone.

I spoke more brutally than I intended. ‘The world you knew is – everything’s gone.’

‘Gone? What are you talking about?’ But her arm drew back, her shoulders bowed.

For a minute she sat there saying nothing, kneading the bed-cover with big white hands. She looked – epic. I will never forget it. I did feel pity, but also … the writer in me was trying to record it. How could I ever describe this moment?

I was there. I was –
chosen
to see it. Somehow I had to find the words.

The tears began to roll down her face, bright ropes of water on her dry white skin. She cupped her hands, and her head dropped into them. The clever long skull with its silver hair. She sat, a dead weight. A broken statue. A water-streaked monument on a stained bed, in the wrong room, in the wrong century.

I was there, myself, with Virginia Woolf. Later, much later, I am writing it down.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

‘I know this is hard. I’m so sorry to tell you … But you see – we’re in the twenty-first century. Leonard would be what, well over a hundred. He had his life. It did continue. After you – ’

And there I fell silent. ‘I mean. It’s seven or eight decades since you – ’

But I couldn’t say to her ‘since you died’. I couldn’t say ‘since you killed yourself’. That phrase is an impossibility. It can never be said between two human beings.

We sat there, two tall, solid women in a room that felt too small for us, a banal, real, insect-sprayed room in Manhattan where no-one cared if they poisoned the guests so long as the bed-bugs didn’t survive, and the radiator hummed, and the traffic roared, and everything was as real as this table.

I knew too much, and she too little. By suicide, she had lost the right to know about the man she loved. She had turned
her back, gone on alone.

(A stab of pain. Was it what I had done? The last thing I’d shouted as he strode down the hall: ‘Don’t come back. Don’t bother to phone.’ And then he didn’t. He didn’t phone. He thought I meant it. He was a man. I dragged my thoughts away from Edward.)

I, a mere stranger, knew more than Virginia. That Leonard had managed to write again, loved again, been happy again.

I thought: I can’t tell her he was happy.

(And what if Edward is happy again? What if he has another woman?)

‘I say, Virginia – Mrs Woolf – let’s go out, before it gets cold.’

‘It’s all my fault. I left him alone. I thought he would be able to work, without me …’

‘This is too much for you. And me! You like walking, don’t you? I need some air. Perhaps you would come for a walk with me?’

‘I must go home. I need to go home.’

Desperation makes you creative. ‘The zoo. There’s a zoo. You would like the zoo. A zoo in the park you caught a glimpse of. Central Park. It’s beautiful.’

‘Of course I have heard of Central Park.’

‘Would that be – agreeable?’

She gave an almost imperceptible nod.

‘Better than staying here, I suppose.’

‘That’s settled, then. Rest, then a walk. First I need the bathroom. Oh, perhaps you need the bathroom?’

‘I bathe in the morning.’

‘Lavatory. Closet. Oh, I don’t know. I will leave you to it.’

I couldn’t bear to be inches away when Virginia Woolf was – no, impossible. I took my phone out into the corridor. It was ridiculous, of course.

(For several days that’s what I did, and for my own needs ran down to the lobby and queued behind the departing guests, tripping over their long mule-trains of baggage.)

When I came back, she was emerging from the bathroom. ‘All right?’ I said. ‘You – push down the handle.’

She looked at me, indignant. ‘I’m used to water closets,’ she said. ‘We had one installed at Monk’s House. Yours is rather …
elaborate
, of course.’ I glimpsed something scarily like contempt, and banned myself from noticing.

‘Virginia, you’ll need a coat.’

Now I was glad I’d brought too many clothes, with a view to impressing American men (small chance of that with her in tow.) I beckoned her over to look in the wardrobe and indicated my second favourite, a smart narrow coat of merino
wool, black and slick as a liquorice stick. She shook her head.

No, she was stroking, with her long, sensuous, lingering fingers, my favourite Stella Maris trench coat, beautifully, generously cut from blue mohair. The yoke floated out like a sail at sea. It had sharp reveres and an indigo belt, such a beautiful belt of shiny blue snakeskin,
no-one
should wear that coat but me …

I never learned to say ‘No’ to her.

Soon we were tensed on the brink of the street. I caught our reflections in the lobby mirror. I was sombre, invisible beside my companion, the ivory oval of her face suspended over her long blue body, fabulously winged like a Morpho butterfly. Everyone turned to stare at her.

(She couldn’t have done without me, though.)

13

So Mum stopped answering my emails. I hated this school. I was furious. Then she sent an email that explained nothing.

I thought ‘Who IS this Genius?’

Next day I googled Virginia Woolf. Fuck me, 5.9 million results.

Then I found out she was actually dead.

I really started to hate my mother.

Was it a kind of celebrity worship? Virginia was one of the first celebs, with her background and her beauty. Let’s face it, it wasn’t just raw talent. It must have helped her, knowing everybody (which certainly couldn’t be said of me).

Privilege. It can make you hate them.

This isn’t really what I meant to say. Because yes, she was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, the most famous Victorian man
of letters, yes, she was friends with EM Forster and Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey, yes, she had a small private income and looked like a clever, dreamy angel – but she wrote like an angel, as well. A pinioned angel, not the household kind.

Delicate, witty, brutal. Woolf does it all, at the speed of light. Each time I read her, I admire her more. I try to be critical. But she’s just … good.

And if she was privileged, I accept it. Because she did it for all of us. Showed she was cleverer than the men. Showed what we were capable of. I told Gerda, ‘She’s a genius.’

All the same – she was privileged.

I hated the idea of Virginia Woolf. I mean, my mum was a writer herself. Why did she have to be obsessed with this Virginia? Why’s
she
s’posed to be such a genius? I might be a Genius myself one day.

But mum didn’t care, she just ignored my emails, or sent back three lines about her own life.

I felt so lonely in that phonebox. Geniuses need encouragement.

What hope is there for the rest of us, who don’t have Woolf’s advantages?

Then I remembered Hans Andersen. He had to leave home when he was younger than me. His parents were actual
peasants
. I don’t suppose anyone encouraged
him
.