Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

8) Not getting me a better phone

9) Having boyfriends — YUCK — and disgusting ones

10) I’m sure she does. Yuck Yuck Yuck

11) Going on about HER in general

12) Talking though I told her not to

13) Taking back the one jacket of hers I would EVER borrow, and refusing to lend it again just because it had a teeny bit of sick on the pocket — doesn’t she want me to look nice?

14) NOT READING MY EMAILS PROPERLY’

I think when I read this to her at home, I shall deliver Point 14 in a deafening shout, because she will have stopped listening by then.

— When is my mother coming home again?

ANGELA

Our brief rapprochement could not carry us through. I ordered sandwiches from room service, she did not like them and asked for more. I confess I grew irritable — ‘You did choose BLT, Virginia, I warned you it would be disgusting.’

I was exhausted, and doing my best, and her BLT cost $20, and she ate the fries, so we couldn’t send it back. I needed her to sleep so I could catch up with email.

I tentatively offered to lend her some pyjamas but she just shuddered and shook her head. So I went to the bar for half an hour, telling her she might like to take a bath, and came back to find her standing at the dressing table, jacketless, shoeless, quivering with energy, her hair a thin mermaid screed across her shoulders. She was trying to open my computer! Instinctively I moved to stop her.

‘No, Virginia, it’s a machine. It’s complicated. I’ll show you tomorrow.’

She definitely had not taken a bath.

She told me ‘she wanted to see how it worked’, but why was she prising it open with a fruit knife?

Then I retreated into the bathroom, and when I came out she was dead asleep — asleep not dead, I checked from her breathing — stretched out stiff as a religious relic on the twin bed I’d slept in the night before, her handsome head smack in the middle of the pillow under which my sleep socks and radio were hidden. The night was chilly, but I tried not to blame her. It was a relief to put the light out. I thought, ‘In the morning, she’ll be gone.’ I had started to hope it was a dream.

Alas, I woke almost hourly to hear her snoring, and she was up before I opened my eyes in the morning, standing foursquare staring out of the window. She had put her jacket and shoes back on. I thought, I am going to have to crack the washing problem, and swung my legs straight out of bed.

‘Morning, Virginia,’ I croaked. ‘Would you like me to run a bath for you? A nice hot bath, you know, before breakfast?’

VIRGINIA

She talked to me as if I were a child. Quite soon I found she was obsessed with bathing. She seemed to do it nearly every day! Perhaps she perspired more than normal.

Ignoring her was the best policy.

ANGELA

She turned, briefly, from her brown study. ‘The towers,’ she said. ‘So beautiful.’

She breakfasted quite docilely on toast, staring round the room at the other guests and for the most part ignoring me, but once she had finished, she became impatient. We got back to the room and she went to the cupboard and without a by-your-leave, started to put on my blue coat. My blue coat. The coat I loved.

‘Virginia, I’m not ready yet. Also, you won’t need the coat today. It’s not that cold. I will put it back for you.’

I needed to do a little research before we set out to make ourselves rich. I switched on my laptop. The room was so small I had been forced to put it on the dressing table. Writing is the space where we try to escape our real-life names, our familiar faces — but here I was forced to stare in the mirror.

That day, however, it was an advantage. I used the mirror to keep an eye on Virginia.

(What if she suddenly tried to climb out of the window? I had only just got her, I mustn’t lose her — though part of me already longed to be free. The physical presence of the twentieth-century’s greatest female literary icon, with her faint sour smell of earth and pondweed, wasn’t so easy to get used to.)

I could see her sifting through my things, lifting and fingering my possessions. Death seemed to have removed her inhibitions. I understood, but it made me feel anxious. Would she judge me by my reading matter? Eminent Victorians would make the grade, but what would she think of my bedtime reading, snatched up at the airport to help me sleep? The OK! Special on Jordan’s surgery, ‘Step-by-step: How Jordan Remade her Body?’ I supposed she would scarcely understand it. But no, she was leafing through it fascinated, chuckling from time to time. ‘Do you like pornography?’ she asked. ‘In my day, one would have hidden it.’

‘It’s not pornography, Virginia.’

She waved a photo at me triumphantly: Jordan’s gigantic, conical breasts.

‘No, Virginia, it’s normal. Women just make their breasts bigger.’

‘Women make their breasts bigger? What do you mean? Have you made your breasts bigger?’ She came round to stare at my chest, avid.

‘ No , Virginia, certainly not, I really can’t explain this now.’

My life had become her research project, a kind of reverse archaeological dig. I tried to ignore her and get on with my mission.

Now she had dropped OK! on the floor and was stood transfixed by the window again, staring out at the bright buildings, their white cliffs pitted with thousands of windows. Her wattled neck smoothed out like a heron’s as she peered over at the street below. Then she hunched her chin upon her chest and squeezed her forehead against the glass. Urgent, anxious, inquisitive; a monkey, now, pressed against the bars. She was full of new, restless life, making sounds, low hungry murmurs.

I googled ‘rare books Manhattan’.

But there she was, peering over my shoulder, her shadow darkening the screen. ‘What kind of typewriter is that?’ she asked. ‘May I?’

Before I could stop her she was pressing the keys, her heavy arms displacing mine, that cloying odour of weeds again, pale lizard fingers slow and clumsy — I tried to remember, had she always written longhand? Yes, but she had typeset for the Hogarth Press. She was supposed to be good at that. The comfort of metal letters in rows.

The text in Google was gibberish. Maybe Leonard corrected everything. She threw her arms up in frustration, long heavy wings of an albatross.

‘These keys don’t work. Where is the paper?’

‘There is no paper, Virginia.’

‘How can it work without paper?’

She looked at me, stubbornly uncomprehending, then pounced on the tiny hotel pad which lay by the TV remote control. ‘This is the paper. But where does it go?’

‘It doesn’t. Writers don’t write on paper.’

‘There cannot be a world without paper.’

‘Well there is still paper, but’ — I tapped the machine — ‘not here.’

We stared at each other across chasms of time. ‘I promise I will explain later.’

But she sat there on the bed, directly behind me, watching every move with distrustful eyes, as I clicked on the website of Goldstein & Sons. Rare books, Madison Avenue. Pictures of a book-filled gallery came up.

‘So the film you are watching is connected to the keyboard?’

‘It isn’t a film, Virginia.’

‘We had cinema, you know, in our day. Leonard and I were fond of films. I am perfectly acquainted with cinema.’

‘Virginia, it isn’t cinema.’

‘It’s this stick that makes those pictures, is it not?’ And before I could stop her she had snatched the TV remote control that lay by the pad and was pressing buttons at random.

And then the yellow room became bedlam, for the TV suddenly blasted out full volume, and it was the news from Afghanistan, a deafening stutter of machine-gun bullets, the dead booms of bombs exploding, buildings black against crackling orange, and she made a choking, inchoate noise and in her panic must have pressed again, for now we were watching a black-and-white Second World War film, and planes were whining down overhead, a swarm of planes with Nazi markings, and I heard a howl, she was actually howling. I wrestled the controller away from her, and the room was quiet as death again, except for the traffic and her breath, tearing.