Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

‘Virginia? Are you all right?’

She crouched in a corner by the door, a tangled, darkened, thing from the river, her elbows raised to protect her head. It took twenty minutes to comfort her.

I had to explain it, bit by bit. I showed her the TV, I showed her the remote, but I saw she couldn’t take it in. I went to the bathroom, leaving her alone, and came back to find her peering round the back of the laptop, her hand exploring the reverse of the screen.

‘Virginia, what are you looking for?’

‘The opening for paper to come through.’

‘I said, no paper.’ I had to distract her. ‘But look, we’ll do an internet search on you.’

I typed ‘Virginia Woolf’, and then showed her the figures — 5,900,000 hits.

‘That means nearly 6 million references to you. And look, those are just some of the pictures.’ I showed her a jewel-like line of images.

She stared away into the middle distance, her eyes sharp and then unfocused. ‘So really, this is a kind of book? And this keyboard is to search the index?’

‘In a way,’ I said. ‘Look, it shuts like a book.’ And I made to close the lid, but her hand stopped me.

‘Leonard,’ she said. ‘Is he in your book? Will you type “Leonard Woolf” into the index?’

I did. ‘One million three hundred and eighty thousand hits’, I said. ‘That means, nearly one and a half million references. And look, there are the pictures again.’ A line of bright thumbnails like the ones of her.

‘Why are they so small?’ she said. ‘I must see him!’

Three of the six thumbnails showed them together. The first one I clicked on was a wedding photograph, sepia. She was so different! A full-bodied woman with a fresh, round face, looking slightly too hot, febrile, female, in an elaborate, patterned, ankle-length dress. A deep soft flounce over the bosom, and a wide-brimmed hat laden with flowers. But under the half-veil across the forehead, two large, naked, pale-lashed eyes gazed off to the side away from Leonard, a narrow youth with thin sloping shoulders and a full, melancholy mouth like hers. He did not look like a jubilant bridegroom. I call him a youth, but he did not look young. I had never realised he had jet-black hair — in the photos I knew, he looked grey and dusty. Virginia was larger and heavier than him! Such a weight of worry he was taking on … yet everyone said he was deeply in love. And there was her mouth — that sensual mouth, hard to attach to someone virginal.

And because I had read the biographies, which told us more than anyone should know about another human being unless they are their parent, sibling, child, I knew what years were to follow the wedding — descents into madness, violence, depression. Her new husband struggling to cope.

(She was also saner than anyone. The cool intelligence of most of the Diaries . Pages bubbling with happiness.)

Virginia gave a small ‘Oh’ of longing. Old, she reached out, and touched the screen, the space where they were alive and young, illuminated in my machine, the time capsule I took for granted.

They looked so alive, but they were unresponsive, the sepia couple who long ago were totally taken up by their moment.

She pressed the screen and I pulled her back.

‘Will it move?’ she said. ‘Can you make us move?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not like that. It’s what it is. It can’t be changed.’

‘I wondered … if it could be changed.’

She wasn’t just talking about the image. She knew too well what lay in their future.

I said, as gently as I could, ‘Would you like to look at the other photos?’

Leonard alone. He was forty years older. His long thin face engraved with lines. Those eyes, intelligent, used to sorrow, deep-set under strong grey eyebrows. And the mouth still full, a young man’s mouth — a foreign face, not an English face, that was my instinctive judgement. But that was how Bloomsbury thought of him: ‘Virginia’s marrying the Jew.’ Both a joke and not a joke.

‘Mongoose,’ she said, almost inaudible.

This time I refrained from showing knowledge. What would she have thought if I answered ‘Mandril’? His name for her.

His beloved baboon.

I knew too much, we knew too much. Their secret bestiary of names.

‘It’s enough,’ she said, and turned away. ‘Perhaps you would save that page number?’ Her back was rigid, her voice formal.

‘Mrs Woolf, it would be an honour.’ I didn’t correct her idea of the computer. ‘I can find it for you whenever you want.’

‘Please,’ she assented, still turned away.

I went back to my search for a few moments, checking that Goldstein was what we wanted. ‘Goldstein & Sons, Rare Book Dealers. Madison Avenue. Shall we walk?’

And so we did, an incongruous couple flashing past the Easter windows; Virginia, though stooped, inches taller than me. To my surprise, after a shaky start, she began to lope two paces ahead, a steady, strong, athletic walker despite her grey hair and unnerving pallor.

I had to half-run to keep up with her, though every so often she would stop dead and stare at something I would never have noticed — I no longer saw the advertisements like acid flowers bursting from the pavements, I didn’t notice the fetish shoes, six inches high with inch-thick platforms; I took the display of wealth for granted. I actually had to pull her away when she shrieked with laughter at two women, obviously well-to-do, walking arm-in-arm against the sunlight, perfectly outlined from loin to ankle, the shapes of their hips, their crotches, their thighs, in skin-tight black leggings and ankle-boots, and above the waist, boxy expensive jackets, ropes of pearls, vast sunglasses and artfully streaked hair falling below their shoulders.

‘They go out without skirts,’ she hooted, happily. ‘What fun to see New York prostitutes! Leonard would laugh.’

‘Virginia, they’re not prostitutes. It’s just the fashion of the day. I agree it’s strange, but they don’t feel naked. Everyone pretends not to notice.’

‘But I could see everything ,’ she insisted. ‘Of course they can only be prostitutes.’

‘You’re going to see lots of women like that.’

‘And no-one laughs? No-one says anything?’

‘Not in New York, Virginia.’

She was pounding along like a racehorse once more, but I saw from her furrowed brows that she was thinking. And then she stopped and smiled at me, her head tipped bird-like to one side. ‘It’s Hans Andersen’s story, the one I love.’

And I said, as we started to walk again, past a mirrored building that showed us, large, shivered into two rivers of fragments, as a bird flicked over our reflected heads and blinding sunlight made us blink at each other and think for a second we could be friends: ‘Yes, it’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”.’

GERDA

I do have a lot to tell my mother. Failing that I shall write it down.

My Battle with the Furies,

Part the First

(I have decided to write it like an epic. I have chosen an epic typeface. Just seeing those letters cheers me up. I do need cheering. I am On My Own .)

I know it isn’t good to get into fights. But I also know that you have to be brave. It’s like in that enormous great book, Cat’s Eye , which I liked a lot until it got too long, where the girls start doing mind games on each other.

No-one was ever going to bully ME. My mum taught me that, which I’m grateful for, because my mum was bullied at school.

So I knew I had to stand up for myself. Anyway, why should they call me fat? Ayesha was ugly, but I didn’t complain, and Linda had big pink ears like a monkey, but I had never mentioned it, and Cindy had skinny legs like sticks and I’d seen her breakfast: like, ONE cornflake.