Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

‘Well I have never heard of them .’ Thank God Virginia started laughing.

I mollified him by paying — though it was an absurdly small amount. We left with directions to an art shop selling coloured inks.

By eleven that night I had diluted half a bottle to a shade resembling the Goldstein signatures. It took me hours of trial and error, and the floor of the shower was lavender. Virginia wasn’t helping at all, flipping through shopping channels on the TV, exclaiming softly, clutching the remote.

‘No, nothing like it,’ she said, at last, glancing briefly across. ‘I’d never choose a colour so anaemic. And the books have been away from the light, so the signatures would be bright, surely?’

Why hadn’t she said that in the first place? Lost in her novel dream of shopping.

We used the untouched half. A clear light purple.

‘Better practise first,’ I told her. ‘Your hand might be shaky after all this time.’ I tore out a page from the hotel pad and left her alone while I rinsed the shower and then myself.

What happened after that was rather odd. I came back refreshed to find her sitting there frowning. ‘It’s the pens, not the ink. The ink won’t come out,’ she said.

‘Right, Virginia.’ I wanted this finished so I could settle down and email Gerda. (That nagging awareness: I kept forgetting her. Luckily she was a self-sufficient child.)

‘Let me try.’ I tried. The pen worked perfectly. I signed my name with a flourish. ‘You’re just not pressing hard enough.’

In the end we had to do it together. I sat beside her on the bed, with the books open on my bedside table, slipped my hand over the back of hers — cool, bony, the veins making ridges like water-contours in hard sea-sand — and with my hand pressing hers, it worked, the familiar writing, clear and bright, and my heart jumped as I read what she’d written.

In Orlando , she wrote ‘For my sweet Vita, to travel centuries and worlds with you — Virginia’.

In To the Lighthouse , she excelled herself.

For Leonard, always and only Leonard .

Your V .

‘Well done , Virginia. I think they’ll love it.’

It turned out to be an understatement.

But I woke up at three in the morning, the anxious hour, with Woolf snoring beside me, and all I could think about was Gerda. In the end everything was for her, for Edward didn’t love me any more — (it was partly why I changed my number, because he had it, but never called; I refused to blame reception in the Arctic.) Now there was only me and Gerda. ‘For Gerda,’ I thought. It was all for her. Everything I did would be for her.

‘Dearest Gerda, I’m thinking of you. It’s gone 3 AM in NYC and I miss you so badly my sinuses ache. It’s getting tiring, looking after Virginia. Soon we’ll be moving to another hotel …’

I planned the email in my head, I thought of the loving things I would say, but my thoughts kept creeping away to Woolf, what on earth I would do with her in the long run. Since I was the only person she knew, just one lone person in the whole modern world — how would I ever get rid of her?

Sleep stole back and dragged me under.

First thing next day I went down to Reception and booked Virginia her own room. I had to pay for two nights in advance, which would give me time to find somewhere else. It was worth it to know I could have my life back.

Could I? Would my life ever recover?

GERDA

I sent Part the Firstand Part the Secondto my mother, but still the woman did not respond, just sent me bulletins about what SHE was doing, and then I began to feel worried, because although Mum could sometimes be forgetful, she didn’t usually forget me for weeks . She claimed it was all because she was looking after this ancient freak (I admit that is what I thought about Virginia, mostly because I hadn’t read her) — but I knew she didn’t love Dad any more, and I thought she was probably having an affair. She had bought a lot of new clothes since the break-up, and started wearing very bright orange lipstick, which of course did not suit her Big Orange Face.

She hasn’t really got an orange face, I said it because I am angry with her. Har har har on Mum.

Things were still not going well at school, either. Nor did I feel quite ready to put my Great Getaway Plan into action.

For a start, since my mother was in America, I didn’t want to give her worry, not THAT much worry, in any case, and although she knew I was brave, and a mensch, (as Dad said when he first saw me ride my bike no-hands), she would certainly worry if I ran away and some idiot teacher from here rang and told her, and they would be shrieking, which is what they do whenever something slightly out of the ordinary happens, like two girls falling in the swimming pool and one of them, Linda, who was a non-swimmer (but I didn’t know that) losing her specs (har har har) and having to be life-saved by the other, who did it badly and nearly strangled her, and all the shouting got a lot of attention — so although I was sitting in the library by then, reading a book about Manhattan (to see if there were dangerous beasts in Central Park, since that was near where my mother was staying, and I thought that might explain her silence, if she had gone walking and got a bit Gored) — my house mistress came and hauled me out and shouted loudly in the corridor.

‘Why did you push those girls in the pool? Gerda I will not tolerate bullying.’

‘Then why did you let those girls bully me?’

‘Don’t answer back!’

‘That’s not an argument.’

I had taught my mother that ‘Don’t Answer Back!’ wasn’t a valid argument — it’s something that grown-ups always say when they can’t come up with anything better — but evidently no-one had told Ms Cannon.

I accept that wasn’t the right time to try, and soon I was waiting to see the Head Teacher.

But I had better go back to the beginning, or actually we had got to the middle, and I will write down my side of things, which none of the teachers has bothered to hear, and then I will email it to my mother. In the end, sheer volume will wear her down. There will be room for nothing else in her inbox.

Gerda and the Furies,

Part the Third

I am falling asleep, I will write it in the morning.

VIRGINIA

Angela fussed about the smallest things. The trip to Goldstein’s would be an adventure! I had carried off impersonations before, of course, when we were all young, and afraid of nothing. If I could play an Abyssinian prince with a flimsy false beard and burnt cork on my skin and convince the whole crew of HMS Dreadnought , fooling Goldstein’s would be perfectly simple. One just needed confidence, a sense of fun.

I wish she were a woman of one’s own type. I am not a snob, but perhaps she lacks breeding, and many situations make her anxious. After all, we were only going to a shop.

Yet after she found me a room of my own, she virtually demanded that before we go to Goldstein’s, I use the peculiar shower attachment in my bathroom, which she explained in tedious detail. I didn’t listen. I soaked the floor! –

I think it was the same neurosis about hygiene that made her insist on new underclothes even before we bought skirts and blouses. She kept saying ‘shush’ like some wretched governess when the brassieres made me hoot with laughter. They were called things like ‘Lilyette’ and ‘Bali’! To think modern women should wear contraptions that make their bosoms stick up like hay-stacks! — and some of them make them bigger with plastic, like that funny Mrs Jordan in the magazine! — and the knickers covered nothing, they were strings with lace. ‘I draw the line at buying these.’ ‘Then you’ll just have to wash out your own each night,’ she said rather strictly. (Why? are they mad with cleanliness, today’s humans?) So I asked if they had some not made of string, and chose some French knickers in pink satin. I think it was malice that made her ask for ‘large’. She herself is on the large side, but I am not.