Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

PRIVATE MEMBERSHIP: FAT FARM

This card admits one severely overweigt person to the Bendham Abbey Weigt Loss Club.

(Cindy was bright, but couldn’t spell)

Catagory: Ginger Mingers (G.M).

Name of Member: Gerda Piggius.

Duration of membership: Lifetime.

The other one said:

PRIVATE MEMBERSHIP: LOONY BIN

This card admits one severly loony person and her mother to the Local London Hampsted Loony Bin.

Catagory: Big Heads, Showoffs and Raving Mentalists.

Name of Members: Gerda I-think-I’m-a-Genius Lamb and Call-me-Mummy Lamb.

Duration of membership: Lifetime.

I stood there staring in absolute rage. Then I took the envelope and tore it in two. But I kept the cards as Evidence, and later I would be glad I did, though I shoved them at the back of the deepest drawer in my room. Even there they still managed to eat my brain. Like actual Devils, a pale pink one, a pale blue one, jeering and sneering till I took them out again and read them half a dozen times, and my blood was boiling, and I was crying, but I wasn’t sad, I was just making plans. To kill all three of them, of course.

I didn’t wonder why they did it. I knew straight away. My deepest instinct had always told me that even when they were being nice, those three girls actually hated me. But my Gollum-y side wouldn’t listen to it, because I wanted it not to be true. (And maybe Cindy didn’t totally hate me, but when she did, she knew how to hurt me.)

And it wasn’t just the insult to me. It was the insult to my mummy. (Too late now to wish I had never told my enemies I still called her ‘Mummy’.) Maybe I talked about her too much, but I had less family than they did because I’m an only child, which I like, as I don’t have to put up with brothers and sisters stealing all Mum’s love and attention. (If there were more of us, she’d NEVER email.)

And so I sette off in search of the Furies, who hadde pursued me so pitilessly, hunting me with laughter and with kindnesse. And what I dydde to them will be in Part the Fifth.

(I just remembered I told you already.) (I nearly drowned them in the swimming pool.)

So this is

The Ende of Gerda and the Furies

Honestly, are you reading this, Mummy? Do you care that it actually happened to me? And I was brave? Are you proud of me?

ANGELA

Things got better for us at the Wordsmiths Hotel. She had plenty of money in the purse I gave her and thousands in the hotel’s deposit room, an absurd amount to keep in a hotel, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. She had no passport or driving license to open a deposit account at a bank, and I was uneasy about her putting such a large amount into mine. If journalists ever got wind of this, I wanted to come out — smelling of roses (does money ever smell like roses?).

Yet I was doing her many favours. How would Virginia have managed without me? It’s true my time is valuable, too. My workshops cost $1,000 a day.

Perhaps she should have offered me a small percentage?

Five per cent. Or maybe ten. Nine thousand dollars would have been most helpful, but obviously it was up to her to suggest it. I could hardly ask her directly, could I? The Wordsmiths Hotel cost a lot of money. Without her I would have stayed on in the Waddington, ghastly though it was, and got on with my paper.

Which would have been about Virginia, true, and for which the Turks would be paying me. But the Virginia Woolf I was writing about was so much less trouble than the one I was with. The first earned me money, the latter cost me.

VIRGINIA

I wonder how much of the money is mine? After all, without Angela I would have nothing. So far she’s given me $500, and told me to be careful with it.

I think it would be fair to split the money in two, but she might not agree to that.

So I’ll ask her to work out today’s equivalent of £500 and a room of one’s own’. Then I will request it, bold as brass.

ANGELA

We took the largest rooms on the ‘literature’ floor (the entire hotel is literature-themed, and we found ourselves in two ‘queen-sized’ rooms nestling alongside each other, named ‘Hemingway’ and ‘Scott Fitzgerald’). We told reception we had two bags of valuable books to keep in their strong room. (Well, the money was the fruit of her books.)

Would my books be valuable, a hundred years later?

It didn’t matter, I was a best-seller. She seemed surprised when I told her that. Only one of her books was a true bestseller, and that was probably her worst, The Years .

— I’m not quite sure what that has proved.

Sometimes I felt almost hostile to her. Worrying about her well-being was distracting me not only from my paper, ‘Virginia Woolf, A Long Shadow’, but also from the answer to my problem: what should my new novel be about?

— That sense I was on the brink of something.

Edward had a gift for discouragement. When pressed, he would say, ‘You’re a really good writer, but I preferred your early books.’

‘Don’t you like what I’m writing now?’

A short pause before he answered ‘Of course.’

Before leaving London, I’d had lunch with the new editor at Headstone. She looked about fifteen years old in her orange jacket and plastic shorts, and assured me she was a ‘fan’ of mine.

I tried to explain what I was feeling. ‘But you’re a success,’ she said, surprised. ‘We love what you do. Everyone’s happy.’ I wasn’t totally sure she had read me, but she knew the sales figures were good and said my work was ‘wonderful’.

‘Believe me,’ she said, with an earnest expression, ‘very sadly, we’re having to shed some of our — more mature writers. But Angela Lamb is a brand!’

From that I learned only that she thought I was old.

I tried my agent: we had a coffee. She talked about my foreign rights. ‘I want to feel passion,’ I interrupted her. ‘I want to write something I feel passionate about.’ She was a nice woman. She said, ‘You should.’

Which was why I had set off for New York and Istanbul. I could have written another novel in my study. But I was looking for something else. The common life I once shared with Woolf — when ‘inspiration’ meant ‘breathing her in’. Her daring, her certainty that anything could be written. Her sense of wonder at all of life.

Well, I had certainly got close to her, even if the novel was still under construction.

In the Wordsmiths Hotel, everything was new. I carefully explained to her the taps, the safe, the television, the elevator, the CD and DVD player, though she only pretended to understand me, as I learned quite quickly from the men in the lobby after ‘your wonderful mother’ — I soon disillusioned them! — broke the TV and jammed the aircon. But she’d learned to work the hotel telephones, thankfully, which meant she didn’t always come to me when she had a problem with reality.

She marvelled at her elegant sunken bath, the soaps and oils, the high-speed lift. Especially the lift, which Virginia played in for a whole morning. I heard her laughter in the corridor.

‘Virginia, what have you been doing? Where have you been? You’re all flushed.’

VIRGINIA

‘Up to the roof-top bar and down to ‘Literature’, down to the ‘Reading Room’ and up again, down to the lobby to talk to the porters (they’re charmers), up to the top again to take in the view — you get there in seconds, it’s terrific fun! I shall write an essay on the high-speed lift!’

ANGELA

Later I knocked on her door to go to supper and found her seated at her desk, the hotel notepaper in front of her. I tried to get a glimpse of what she was writing, but she must have just started a new blank page.