Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

So I carefully tore the pretty envelope open, without damaging the lettering. I thought I would stick it on my cork-board, which hadn’t got enough things on it yet. Then other people would be curious and I would say ‘Oh my friends did it for me,’ and they would know that I had good friends.

I couldn’t take in what I saw at first.

Mummy, this is a Cliffehanger.

VIRGINIA

Loping in to Goldstein’s out of the brightness, I felt half at home for the first time since I had woken in this new world.

It was shady, and cool, and full of books, and the furniture, when I looked quickly, seemed familiar, dark and sober like my parents’ house, though soon I saw it was all artifice, smooth modern copies of teak or mahogany.

It didn’t feel like a bookshop to me. It called itself a ‘gallery’, with books displayed like jewelled objects. As if they were not to be used every day. Part of me liked that, part did not.

(At the Hogarth we made our books beautiful too. When we first started, we knew nothing about business, but we knew what we wanted;Vanessa designed all my dust jackets, & minded about each tiny detail. We came as near to a quarrel as we ever had since the smoothing away of childhood hatreds when she didn’t like the final version of Kew Gardens . An hour of torment as she talked to me with terrible calm reasonableness that was worse than any rage could have been.

After that, Leonard and I were even more careful. Our books were not éditions de luxe — we had a horror of Victorian ornateness, of gold-tooled curlicues and pompous typefaces — we wanted simple, beautiful things.

Nessa’s drawings were just a few strokes, almost childlike — nothing to the untrained eye — but those few strokes made something perfect: a bowl of flowers on an empty stage for Jacob’s Room , the novel that ends with emptiness — Nessa understood without being told. For The Years , that cursed brute of a book that weighed on me like an overstuffed sofa (though Americans all went mad for it!) Nessa made something that ached with lost time, a pattern of repetitive, cycling suns getting smaller and smaller, going on for ever, and just one cut rose, dark as blood. For The Waves , she drew shell-shapes of light and water and two figures standing for all my characters, one rushing forward into the water, the other hanging back, turning towards us.

Of them all, one cover was probably my favourite. To the Lighthouse has a bright tower — masculine, powerful — that somehow holds within it a female form, her arms lifted. The gesture of a powerful mother, not the angel in the house but someone stronger, tall and courageous, a light-bringer, a light-giver — Grace Darling, perhaps? Florence Nightingale? Yes, a brave, strong, luminous angel. All my life I had looked for such a figure.

How lucky I was to have such a sister — how cursed she was to have one like me.

Though once at least I could be of service, when Julian died and she needed me.

I had loved my nephew always, even when we quarrelled. But perhaps I liked being, for once, a mother — for a while I was a mother to her …

‘May I help you, Madam?’ a young man said. He startled me; I was daydreaming. And I found myself saying something quite unexpected, for Angela and I had discussed it all and I had learned my words off by heart, I was supposed to tell him I had some books that were left me by a great aunt, a writer — but suddenly something different escaped me.

Because I was drawn back into the past, and forgot the part I must play in the future. I thought, I have never seen Between the Acts . My last novel that I thought so bad. That the Furies took and tossed in the air till all I could see of it was failure and darkness. In the world I lived in, it was never born. Never born, like my own children.

I couldn’t bear to stay alive to see it. By the time it was published, I was dead.

Did Leonard ask poor Nessa to do the cover?

(It was I.

I .

Who asked it of her. By slipping away, while they had to continue. How she must have suffered, doing that task.)

‘Are you OK, Ma’am?’

‘Perfectly, thank you. I wonder … do you have a copy of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts ?’

Surely he would know me, recognise me. But he smiled at me with bright, neutral eyes and said ‘I’m happy to say we do.’

Angela looked at me accusingly but I mouthed ‘Later’, and followed him.

Almost at once, I glimpsed my name. Suspended in a glass case on the wall, I saw the copy of To the Lighthouse , which Angela had told me they had. I felt a brief, intense uplift of pleasure to see how it sailed there like a pale ship, safely afloat in the twenty-first century.

The boy meanwhile had taken a slim volume from a bookcase and, holding it like a precious flame, lightly cupped between both hands, said ‘This is our copy of Between the Acts . If you’d like to sit down, you can inspect it.’

Inspect it! As if it might be defective! Now the moment was here, I became afraid. I felt an almost religious dread — not that I have ever been religious.

Like the Ancient Mariner, my blood thicks with cold

as if I was daring to look behind the curtain

& see something I should never have seen

as if I had forfeited the right to see it, because of the terrible

thing I had done –

‘Forgive me,’ I said, & looked away for a second before I could bring myself to focus.

‘Sorry, Ma’am?’

‘Nothing. A slight headache.’

And then I looked, and saw in a flash how perfect it was. Perfectly simple. Yet everything was there. All the unsayable. Only Nessa … only my sister.

After the finale of the village pageant, the actors go home to the drama of their lives. My last page ends with the actors starting to play their part in this bigger pageant. From their act of love, new life will be born

I could not do it the doctors stopped me

could not make life as other women did

this mystery that was all the world needed

Nessa had drawn a stage with theatrical curtains — a graceful bow to the theme of the pageant. Closed, as if for an interval, when the curtains come together and the cast disappears so the audience, briefly, may come to life and chatter.

But these still curtains had another meaning. The show was over. I had slipped from the theatre.

And garlanding the curtains she had drawn roses, prodigal roses, country roses, and I knew the roses were thrown there in mourning, her wreath for the sister who had gone away.

‘Sorry,’ I breathed. ‘Forgive me, Nessa.’

Her cover wrung my heart, yet it couldn’t be bettered. The artist in me bowed to her. It was her goodbye, her delayed reply to the terrible note I left for her.

The artist bowed, but the sister howled. The sister in me was wrenched with pain.

She who had known me from the start

she had slipped away, she was lost in time

the emptiness the blind, mute ache

she had to die without my comfort

Where were her ashes? Where did she die? She was older, I should have sat by her bed. With my act I had lost the chance to accompany her through the only life we had, the life we had shared since we were children, scene by scene, side by side.

Nessa must have been lonely without me. Duncan would have been off with boys, and what use to her, really, was poor red-faced Clive?

I do not know if she grew old . This thought transfixed me, a nail in my forehead.

Why had I never understood? Why did the thought of their pain not stop me?

Was I as selfish as Leonard once said, in one of the worst arguments we had? Afterwards he told me it wasn’t true.