Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (41 page)

‘We are here,’ said Ahmet. He pulled me closer. The house
was set back, in a snaggle of doors. I tripped on something – a dog, a cat? – and cried out. Instantly he hushed me. There was a sharp, animal smell. The only light came from the street. I realised I was a little afraid. He was searching for something – must be his keys – but his other hand was upon my breast, which he’d suddenly found underneath my blouse, pushing in boldly between the buttons. ‘Very nice,’ he said, as the keyhole yielded. ‘Very nice breast. Very nice … nipple.’ He said it ‘nip-lay’. His accent made the word beautiful. My breasts felt strange, full and hard, like fruit.

(Fruit and flowers on a balcony, yes. Once when Leonard and I were young we were driving through France on our way to Spain and we stopped at an inn in the Pyrenees. Next day was hot, we decided to stay while a fault with the carburetor was fixed. We walked, as usual; had wine at lunch; read a little, then both felt sleepy. The balcony had an arbour of vines which made it like a nest, underneath: white stars of light pierced the greenness; when we got used to the dark, we saw the grapes, great purple clusters with a bloom of sweet dust. Leonard picked some; the bench was inside but the maid had left its striped seat to air, beside a dry pot of geraniums, and a ray of sun found the silk of one flower, a brilliant purple, bruisable. We sat down together, like children in a tent. We started eating. We were hazed by the sun from our morning walk. More sunlight found us; it was circling south. Suddenly I felt my breasts were aching. Thinking, unthinking, I told Leonard. He bent and kissed them, fed me a grape, felt my nipple, and it swelled in the heat underneath his fingers, and without planning it, we tried it again, the thing that had not gone well for us.)

The hall light went on. It was harsh on Ahmet. He looked a little like a plump schoolboy. Inside, his house was surprisingly respectable; big stuffed sofas, antimacassars, a general air of fancy dress. But the light died almost instantly, he lit a large
candle, we were back in mystery, there was fire in his eyes, two perfect flames, and I looked more closely, and saw myself, tiny, the reflection of a full, unfamiliar face.

‘So beautiful,’ repeated Ahmet. He pressed very close. That smell I loved, of vanilla and lemons. ‘Would you like Turkish tea? Would you like lie-down?’

But I did not intend to lie about it. ‘I like you, Ahmet.’ It was so easy! ‘I like you a lot. I want – to kiss you.’

And then we were kissing in the flickering light. New odours: candle-wax, musk, cinnamon. Noises from the street: barking, engines, faintly the goat-bell sound of the tram, the melancholy call of cool mountains in Europe, but I was warm, here in Istanbul, there was not a scintilla of doubt in my body, and I, or the wine, swam in the moment, smelled it, savoured it, vowed to remember.

(That day on the balcony. We’d tried this before, but there was still the faint hope that it would be different, the dazzled blank hopefulness of wine and sun, I would let Leonard do it and everything would change, if he were different, could I be different? – and which came first? We were chicken and egg, awkward, tense-thighed, a tight flurry of feathers, my blouse on the ground, the sawing sound of his dusty panting, the warm hard stone which softened none of his cockerel force, this had nothing to do with my own dear husband, and his eye shone, desperate, staring, mad, and then it was over, and I had felt nothing, just hard dry friction and loneliness.)

I don’t recall how we reached Ahmet’s bedroom. I know that I had slipped off my shoes – the pain so sharp, the relief so sweet. I think he took me by the hand. ‘Bedroom,’ he whispered, as if there were listeners. This time he did not put a light on. It smelled of him, and of something – earthy, not unpleasant, not socks, surely? He opened the window. The night rushed in, sweet as beginnings, fresh and cool.

Gently, Ahmet sat me on the bed. I stretched out my fingertips and found the wall. It was obviously only a single bed, but that was good, we would be close together. In any case, I dared not stay overnight, Angela would notice, Angela would worry!

(In retrospect, yes, I had forgotten my conference. But that was tomorrow, this was the present, I could not think about the morning.)

There was just a great hunger I knew he would fill. He was doing something odd by the side of the bed, kneeling on the rug, gently parting my knees. There was a tickle in my throat; was he a dog? – but no, I liked dogs, my satin-eared spaniel, the panicky urge to cough left me as my elegant shell-pink American undergarments (thank God! my old ones had been blunt white cotton) were lifted away like a silken veil, and I had no time to feel shy or worried, my nakedness felt the faint breeze in the air – a millisecond later, Ahmet was there, and my hands reached out of their own accord and pulled his dear head with its wire-fuzz of hair (round as an infant’s, I thought, briefly), towards the lost place at the heart of me, and my secret part was no longer empty, my lips, my openings were made complete by the hot rose of his working mouth, he was kissing me at my deepest centre, it pulled and called and gathered me, there was a warm vortex, growing, glowing, low down in my back a congestion began, I was drawn down into my deepest body, my head, my belly, my thighs were all one, something was radiating out through my core, up through my stomach, spine, ribcage; my eyes were closing, my lips parting, it was lifting me up, no choice but go further, I pressed against him, my hands urged him on, oh more, higher, the peak, oh go on –

and a broadening wave of silent laughter broke in my body, glossy, muscular, rolled from my toes up to my shoulders, it
found no limits, surged on and on, and somewhere a long croon of ecstasy began, somewhere in the room a cat’s voice unspooled through octaves of sound, a cat in bliss – and as it abated, the ebb-tide of blood warmed every abandoned cell of my body, finally freeing, unfastening me –

‘Shush, Ginny, shush’ – his voice, breathless.

I realised the deep-throated sound was my own, a ribbon of happiness thrown from nowhere: my body singing its own lost song.

In a split second, the man was inside me. I was the sand as the sea pressed in, he entered me as the waves rolled onwards, he waited, kissing me, ‘Beautiful woman,
seni seviyorum
,’ and the more he kissed me, the further he came, and soon we were rocking in time like a boat, was I the boat and where were we sailing as we swayed together in the cinnamon night, ‘I love you, Ginny,
tim eyot
,’ and I didn’t know, was he laughing or crying? the waves grew higher, he was brave, he was desperate, at the height of the storm he was my sailor, I held and stroked him, his back, his neck,

gather – gather – no otherness –

I thought, in a tear-drop of light, my Leonard –

and with an explosion of helpless noises, a broken, happy, almost childish sound, he lay inside me on the distant shore.

Briefly, I think, both of us slept.

I woke unhappy to jerking and banging. A woman was shouting outside the room, or maybe a little further away. Ahmet must be pulling his trousers on, I heard his belt buckle hit the wall and coins were falling from his trousers.

‘Who is it? What’s happening?’

‘I think – is Mother.’

‘Why is she here?’

‘Because she live here. But she is supposed to stay with sister. I think they have another quarrel.’

‘What shall I do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It must be all right for you to have … girlfriends.’

Even in that crisis, I enjoyed the term. I wasn’t dead, nor old: I was a girlfriend. But as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. It could not be all right for him to have girlfriends, and if Mother saw me, it would be worse still.

‘No, not all right.’

‘How does she know I’m here?’

‘Maybe we leave something in drawing-room?’

‘Oh God, I left my shoes in there.’ Not that I’d be able to get them back on.’ My feminine, painful, American shoes.

‘Is OK, I tell her I clean them, for hotel.’

It transpired, in the end, that all Mother wanted was a kindly ear for her tale of woe – the sister’s lies, the thieving nephews. There was a side-door via a neighbour’s garden. This house was only a block from the hotel, though our roundabout route had made it feel much further. He was very insistent that he should come with me, and I equally insistent that he should not.

The shoes remained a problem, and we only solved it once we realised we had similar size feet.

Which is why, at half-past eleven that evening, I was stomping – a verb I had never used, a verb for negroes, a verb from jazz – I was stomping, feeling both proud and foolish, downhill through a back street in Istanbul, under the stars, under a winking moon, born up by drink and by my warm, calm body, in a coral dress and shiny black men’s lace-ups.

And yes, I was singing. ‘They’re singing songs of love, they’re all for me …’

The night of love was not yet over.

94

10.45
AM
: we arrived united. In fact, she seemed in a very good mood.

The architecture: Ottoman grandeur. Young dark-eyed people smiled at us, in twos and clusters; notebooks, backpacks. Not like the English; few were fat.

I forgot, or forgave, the panics of the morning now I had what I needed, Virginia’s blessing. I was not an academic, but I took enough pride in having had an academic training (first generation in my family, so it mattered) to want to make a good impression. Academics didn’t always like novelists. Especially conference-going hybrids like me. As the first plenary speaker, I felt exposed.

But, yes, Virginia’s good opinion mattered.

Even the opinion of this modern chimera, from whom I could never gain any credit. One quote from Woolf on the cover of my novel! … No, she would never bother to read me. To be fair, I had never seen her reading. Or writing, when it came to that.

It was odd, affecting, this perilous friendship. It was in itself and for itself, no-one knew about it, it could end any second, I had no photographs or messages.

(So was she – could she be – just a projection? No, I protested,
it could not be true. She laughed, she ate, she frequently crossed me, my Virginia Woolf was definitely human
.)

Professor Melike was excessively delighted to see me, boring through the crowds with clipboards and coffee cups to
seize me by both hands, and kiss me. A pantomime of elaborate relief. Of course, the traffic jams, terrible, yes, but they had sent the car, yes, never mind, she hustled us towards the hall for a sound check. I tried ‘This is a friend of mine …’, she barely blinked, but as we strode up the stairs, she heard ‘distant relative of Virginia Woolf’s,’ and stopped dead, causing chaos behind us, people collapsing like a house of cards, to shake Virginia’s hand and make her welcome. ‘An honour,’ she panted as she hurried us on.

We were in the great hall. Marmoreal cool that promised heat in the afternoon. Through the pointed window I saw a swallow. Melike summoned the sound engineer. Ah, the microphone, a black beetle on a stick. I told him the contents of my breakfast, as usual, biting back the desire to add ‘but I could scarcely eat a mouthful, because Virginia had not got up.’ The lectern was too big and imposing. They would see my face like a tiny rubber ball, balanced on a tower of shiny wood. Never mind, today I needed protection. My hangover was bouncing lightly in my head.

The audience began to arrive. The staff came and sat at the front, as usual. The students flooded into the rows at the back, got out their mobiles, and started texting. I was introduced to my introducer, and then to the head of department, or dean, who would be introducing my introducer, and then to another even grander book-end, possibly the warden or vice-chancellor. Everybody looked terribly old and solid, except for the students in their distant youthfulness, their hands and fingers flickering like wings and their laughter silvery as the swallow’s.

Gerda
– a stab of missing her. Two weeks to her birthday and the end of term.

We stood on the stage like awkward relatives arriving for our own funerals. Virginia tried to make her escape before
the obligatory photographs, but Professor Melike insisted she stayed. As the cameras flashed, the whisper spread among the little cluster of nodding grandees: ‘distant relative … lawyer … Stephens.’

My stomach was tightening. I wanted this over. I took a brief overview of the hall. Good attendance. At the back, the young. In the front few rows, some familiar faces. There was Ray Kuyperman, smiling slightly. And no – oh no – that familiar figure, Moira Penny, somewhat paler and more startling than before, her hair in two braids of vivid magenta. Dr Moira Penny, the academic who at one stage was such a fan of my work, but who in some unfathomable way I had hurt and disappointed. The critical study of my work she had planned had long been stalled, and I hoped, aborted. I turned away before she caught my eye. (Didn’t Moira write about Virginia Woolf? Good, then she wasn’t here stalking
me
.)

The audience settled. Most of the stage party left and assumed positions in the front row, leathery and awkward as seated turtles. I put on my glasses. The vice-chancellor tapped his microphone and made a thunderous rumble of sound. There was miming between him and the sound engineer, and audience laughter as the latter rushed forward and tripped on the steps up to the platform. My glasses felt hot upon my nose. At last, the introductions had begun.

The students started texting again after a brief pause of static hope. There was praise for the organisers, the university, Professor Melike, the introducer. Some of what was said gained a ripple of applause; I heard the phrase, ‘intellectual freedom’. Finally the introducer praised me, in a fancy-footwork Wikipedia shuffle in which all the grammar was pointlessly inverted to add an air of originality (I wrote the entry, I should know):‘… Iceland Prize … best-selling … ground-breaking …’

Yes, it was me. I was gurning horribly. The flying fingers at
the back had stopped moving.

I thanked everyone as briefly as I could. My glasses lighted on Virginia’s face. There she was, sitting on her own. She had wandered away from the academics. I was going to deliver my gift to her. I had long loved her. I would defend her. None of the rest of it mattered, finally. I had never been able to say what I wanted; never told her why I loved her work; never quite had the in-depth discussion that I had always longed to have. What would remain of us was love. But the light fell strangely; her face was a blank.