Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (44 page)

The room paused, electric, horrified. I felt dizzy. The audience spun. I did not know what to say to her. I have always been afraid of hatred. I opened my mouth. No sound came
out. I stared, dry-lipped, across the room. Perhaps it was true. I had not cited. I had abandoned my written draft, which made many nods to academics. I had trusted the text, Virginia’s text, and tried to please the audience. Yes, I was a crowd-pleaser. Her furious face said she saw through me.

‘I – I don’t know how to answer you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps I spoke as a writer, not a critic.’

‘WHAT DOES THAT MEAN??’ she screamed at me. She was hanging on to the mike for dear life. Professor Melike was standing beside her, trying to wrestle it away. Moira mimicked me in a monkey squeal. “I speak as a writer, not a critic.”WHY DO YOU THINK WRITERS ARE BETTER THAN CRITICS? Why do you think you’re better than me?’

‘I don’t,’ I said. (Though maybe I did.)

Then I saw my Gerda was waving her hand from the middle of the room, and calling something. I heard ‘… the microphone?’

With a little grunt, Moira lost her grip, and Melike staggered backwards, the mike in her hand. It was ferried backwards over rows of heads to the one where Virginia and Gerda sat together.

‘
She
’s got to say something,’ Gerda said, once the mike was in her grip. She passed it across to Virginia. There was a brief semi-struggle between them. Virginia was trying to push it away, but suddenly she smiled, took it, stood up.

‘Mrs Woolf,’ she said, in her extraordinary voice, low, murmurous, amused. The room, already turbulent, rippled again, a kaleidoscope quake like the start of a migraine. ‘Make what you like of
that
. I am happy to be a distant relation. Two things. First, I liked the lecture. And, of course – I liked the quotation.’ A short laugh at her own wit, which was rather lost on the audience. ‘Secondly, though, there should be no difference between a writer and a critic. I am a writer and a critic. Virginia Woolf was a writer and a critic. Criticism, in
my day, her day, was no different to good writing. It wasn’t hard to understand. I have to admit – (Professor, I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten your name, the woman at the front who spoke so –
loudly
) – the meaning of your title escaped me. Why would one write about “
Confusions
”? Perhaps I misheard. Was it “Confucians”?’

She sank down, smiling at her own pun, and passed across the microphone.

Gerda had it. Gerda stood up. ‘I admit I am only fourteen,’ she said. (The
liar!
) ‘So I don’t know nearly as much as a professor. But surely writers came first. If there weren’t writers, there wouldn’t be critics, ‘cos they wouldn’t have anything to write about. That’s all I wanted to say.’ Abruptly, she sat down. Almost as quickly, she bounced back up again.

‘I forgot, I want to say something else. Which is about
young
people. I’m young obviously. And so are all these’ (pointing to the ranks at the back of the room). ‘I don’t want to diss Virginia Woolf, because I think she’s wonderful, and also, with her being here, it would be rude. But there’s one bit of
A Room of One’s Own
I disagree with.’

(I was getting anxious. My daughter’s ego! At primary school, the teachers would take me aside and tell me they couldn’t stop Gerda talking.)

‘It’s the bit about Mary Carmichael. She is the made-up “young woman” in
A Room of One’s Own
, in case you haven’t read it, who is supposed to be the next generation of writers. Virginia Woolf makes her quite good, but not
that
good. Well just because she’s young, that doesn’t prove it. Mary Carmichael might actually be a genius. Even if she’s only a teenager. And the same goes for all these Turkish students, the girls. No-one knows about them, because I expect they write in Turkish – well only Turkish people know, that is – or maybe no-one knows at all.’ (
Gerda, you’re talking much too fast!
) ‘I’m not just
saying that
I
could be a genius. Whereas Virginia says, it could take a hundred years before a woman writer was really great, which leaves out
her
, who was already great, the greatest writer, maybe, I’ve ever read, but then, as I said, I am only fourteen – and to be honest, thirteen, fourteen in two weeks. It didn’t take a hundred years at all. It’s already happening. It’s already happened.’

With that, thank God, she sank down again, and yielded the microphone to a steward.

‘Time for maybe one more question,’ I said.

A hand was waving by a pillar at the back. A girl. Hang on, two girls, two hands waving. I blinked and stared. No, just one. I was having problems focusing. Could it be that the whole row had got their hands up, waving like a field of young corn? As the hands waved, the audience was blurring; stirring, now, like waves on the sea. I felt very hot, as if I were melting. Was it the menopause? I had to hang on, but I signalled to Professor Melike. ‘Is it possible to open more windows? …Yes, there are questions at the back?’

Only one hand, only one question. A girl student with an intelligent frown, raven-black hair, a computer on her lap. ‘Virginia Woolf, she was rich, she had – what do you say, connections, publishers. How do we do what she did? For her, I think it was more easy.’

An inspiration. ‘Do you write?’ I asked. ‘I think you want to write yourself. How many of you,’ I looked along the rows, ‘how many of you students want to write?’

Hands unfolded, slowly at first, then a growing series of notes, like music, pale minims of faces with their stems of arms. I looked at them. They were beautiful. So many of them, a harmony.

Energy, a flurry, in the middle of the room. The worn-looking woman who had asked the first question had her
thicker, older arm in the air. She was mouthing something I couldn’t hear. Then I lip-read it, or imagined it. ‘Not only students’, she was trying to tell me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘Not only students. Anyone here who wants to write.’

And yes, not far from the woman, there was Gerda, strong white arm jostling the air.

Not much more than a child, but she needed to write. Virginia sat stock still beside her.

There was a ripple, a slow stirring breeze that came from somewhere closer to the stage. Was it the windows that had been opened? No, the front rows were pushing up shoots, the lecturers, the research assistants, who toiled in libraries, who sweated over footnotes, who laboured with passives, ‘It is sometimes asserted …’, ‘It is believed …’, their hands were moving, their fingers uncurling, loosing their tension, opening up like flowers, they were smiling at me, a little shyly, maybe, but they were alive, their eyes were shining –

I was staring out at a room that was a forest. Sun poured in through the windows on the right, the filmy white curtains blew like water, the living things were unfolding in their seats, they were stretching and moving, free at last, there were small cries and laughter and delight as they looked around them and saw what was happening, the hall around them swam and shifted, they turned in their seats and found each other, some were embracing, two were kissing, then another two, the students were rising to their feet, girls at the front of their section were dancing, oh girls with garlands in their hair, those circlets, sun-lets of red and white buds I’d seen on sale in the Hippodrome –

Now Moira Penny was on the move, like a fluttering bat in her blue-black garments, but she was making, aslant, for the window, she knelt in the wall of white sunlight, she raised both
her arms to the wash of heat, she laid down her pain, she was young again – ’

They no longer needed me – did they? Were they still waiting for an answer, or had they found it in each other? What had I got to say to them? I had asked the question – who wanted to write? – and the seed was stirring in everyone – but what came next? What could I tell them?

The student with the laptop thought Virginia was lucky. ‘
Virginia Woolf, she was rich … How do we do what she did? For her, I think it was more easy
.’

I looked for Virginia. Would she have an answer? And I saw what I had not expected. She sat isolated in the middle of her row. Gerda had left her, gone to dance with the students, the garlanded girls in their youthful roundels, off with the raggle-taggle-gypsies-oh …

Virginia sat alone. She alone was unmoving. Yes, a stillness at the heart of the hall.

The sunlight pinned her to her seat. Her face was like a photograph, the sun so sharp she was black and white, her lines erased, a perfect portrait, marble-pale twin of that famous profile taken of her as a very young woman. No-one surely, could fail to realise. This was Virginia Woolf to the life. Yet animation had drained from her. She was motionless, she was stiller than paper.

A brightness on her cheek. With a great effort, she raised her hand. As if she was lifting lead through water. She was – yes, she was trying to speak.

I tapped my microphone for quiet. The noise it made went on and on, a thunder-roll of sound in this luminous room, this sunlit ballroom of dancing bodies, and they went on moving, weaving through each other, and the whispers darted around like swallows, splitting, spinning and finally joining in a joyous place where everything was known, ‘It’s her! Yes! Virginia
Woolf! Virginia Woolf is in the house!’

And the room fell silent, at last, for her. This was the room, the room she had asked for. This was the room she owned and ruled.

She did not stand; she did not, could not. She was straining to speak. It would not come.

I remembered the voice with which she’d first spoken, in the New York Public Library, hoarse, broken. I thought, ‘She’s leaving us again. Oh stay, please stay and answer them.’

On eddying currents, the mike reached her, a tiny dark boat, buffeted, it was in her white hand, so pale, so thin. Rumbles of thunder around the room. Outside the window I saw lightning flashes, and inside the room, but perhaps that was motion, the interweaving of limbs, glances, a shimmering in and out of focus, the wing-tips stretching and hovering.

We all heard her when she tried again. Out of the silence, it broke into being, her breaths, she was breathing, we heard her breathe, Virginia Woolf breathed hard for us, Virginia struggled to stay alive. Then the relief of her first words. ‘My friends – ’ But those drawling vowels, so narrowly formed, so definite a badge of the class she had come from.

No, she was more than her voice, her presence. Virginia was everything that she had been. But I thought:
Virginia is going home
.

‘You are my readers. Thank you, friends. Some of you, readers who would be writers. You are the minds I spoke about, the writers of a hundred years later. What do I have to say to you?

‘The young woman questioner thought I was lucky. And I admit I had great good fortune. Who is to say what I would have written without my father, without Leonard, without servants. What would I have written without money? Five hundred pounds and a room of my own?’

Wrong message, Virginia
, I thought, anxious.

‘But I tell you this: I
would have
written. Somehow I would have found my voice. I would have found a way to be heard, published.’ (For a moment, there, her voice strengthened. In my memory, that was when her voice was strongest.)

‘And so must you. And so will you.’ There was a pause, or a fault with the power supply. Perhaps it was to do with the weather, which was crackling merrily around our heads. ‘The young woman beside me tells me that now it is easier to self-publish, but some of you feel ashamed to do this. Remember, nearly all my books were self-published.

‘What else can I say to you?’ A longer pause. Her breath laboured.

‘The light is on you. It is in this room. You are in the sunshine which, while it’s here, feels as though it will last forever.

‘There is only one kind of luck for writers. There is the room. This sunlit room. I entered in the early morning. Before my evening, I had flown again …

‘Write while you’re here. Write while you can. Write for your time. And for each other.

‘Maybe because I missed my evening, I’ve been allowed to slip back again … the absolute glory of a moment’s sunlight …’

Slower, quieter. Each word grew fainter, stretches of space between the stitches. Breaths so light the words were gossamer, silver.

‘But I am only a visitor. I ached to write … But for me, that’s over.’

We spun like planets around her star, so far away now, so barely here. More gulfs of light in the walls of our world, faces like petals, shining, falling, I tried to clutch at my text, at texture, space was splitting into thousands of threads, a thunder of feet, someone near, was it Gerda –

‘Write,’ Woolf managed. It was a whisper. ‘Your turn now … I shall write no more.’

My eyes were going. A cascading migraine shook the room into a deck of cards, a brilliant shuffle of hearts, diamonds, the jacks and queens were revolving, cartwheeling, Virginia’s image stayed for a second, translucent, hanging over our crumbling building. Moonrise over the Sea of Marmara, a white fingerprint, fading, flickering

The room split apart, the set dismantled

 
The universe fissured.

 
We fell through the air –

95

– The plane soared on above the earth, the flight staff stumbled down the cabin, replacing cushions, picking up toys, Virginia Woolf was thrust into my hand –

Yes, I was holding ‘Professions for Women’.

A flight attendant waved a mobile. God, it was mine. I reached out to reclaim it.

Yes, the plane, the storm, the shock

the blind white flash as we spiralled down

I struggled to collect myself.

Put the phone back in your pocket
.

Something was there, obstructing it. I pushed, impatient, but force got me nowhere. I loved my coral suit too much to risk tearing the pocket, so I stopped and explored its satin crevice. Something small and round and solid. I pulled it out. It was a brilliant glass disk, a shiny bull’s-eye with rings of cobalt and lighter blue, on a cord of gold silk. Sky: sunlight. Life was sunlight. And then it darkened. And shone again. Maybe the universe split every moment. Minute changes of light or viewpoint …