Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

The pace of change had doubled, quadrupled since she wrote about time in To the Lighthouse . In the novel’s central section, ‘Time Passes’, the years crawl by in a gradual erosion of surfaces. In the far distance, the great war thunders. Entropy is slow as flowers.

Whereas now time was just a kaleidoscope of earthquakes, everything collapsing and starting again, names and technologies jumbling to rubble.

Home, I thought. My home, my family. Where were their faces in that blur of dust?

But another part of my brain was whirring. Could there be a twenty-first-century ‘Time Passes’?

Lo and behold, we were at the Whitney.

GERDA

Home.

It was empty and echoing. The house felt — cold. But it was OK. I had plans to make, now I had Mum’s money. No, I would not be staying long.

Should I have felt guilty about using her debit card to book my ticket to New York? Of course I shouldn’t. She had left it there, in the usual place under the Jeff Koons clock, with the PIN number she was always forgetting. She used a credit card abroad — something about security, but she clearly hadn’t thought about security at home, which was her fault, really, it was ‘asking for trouble’, as she said to me when I took my iPod to school, and even more careless, she had let me know where she kept her emergency stash of cash. Yay! Twenty-five crisp twenty pound notes tucked inside the paperback of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent .

‘Gerda could you listen to me for once? GERDA PUT THAT BOOK DOWN AT ONCE AND LISTEN!! I’M TELLING YOU THIS FOR YOUR OWN BENEFIT,’ she had shouted, one hot June afternoon when I’d just got home, and then I put on my Special Listening Face, so she stopped shouting and did her Extra Meaningful Voice which she used for sad things, ‘just in case something happens to me and your father.’

Well something did happen. My parents split up, and sent me away to boarding school, bastards, and no-one was here to care about me, and so I was forced to take care of myself.

And yes, I felt weird about it, but so what? In lots of adventures people Actually Kill People. What I did was not even theft.

She said it was ‘for my benefit’. She meant me to do it. I took the money.

ANGELA

First stop that day: the museums. Looking for Virginia’s old coterie.

But they were her friends, her sister, their lovers, so nothing was simple, and she was abstracted.

We tried all the museums where there might be a chance.

First the ones where I was sure we would find them.

Vanessa Bell: one painting in the Whitney. Not on show .

Duncan Grant: two paintings in collection. One on show .

And there it was. A small oil of a vase. To me, it looked at best mediocre. But Virginia lingered in front of the small grey thing for ten minutes, fixed, staring, until, gently, I pulled her away. ‘There are lots of his paintings in the Tate, London,’ I said to her, but she hardly heard me.

I was sure we’d find work by Roger Fry — Roger Fry, the man who brought modern art to London with the two postimpressionist exhibitions. Roger Fry, who Virginia had been in love with as a very young woman, the subject of her only biography. Roger Fry, once a young prince in New York, chief buyer for the Metropolitan Museum.

But he had disappeared without trace. In the Met, no-one had heard of him. I had to repeat his name several times, but was met only with polite blankness.

We had lunch in the Met’s self-service restaurant, a cavernous yellow-lit purgatory, where unreal tourists flitted by, passing grim-faced with water-glasses. There was a vague air of disrepair, as if the money had run out. The floors were cracking. There was mould on the wall. She hardly touched her greasy food, just sat there playing with it, pale and silent.

Then ‘We are near Leafy, and the Sticks,’ she mumbled.

I thought they must be parts of New York she had learned about from her new friends in the lobby. ‘I don’t know where you mean,’ I said.

‘Lethe,’ she said, this time more clearly, yet her great eyes were staring through me again. They looked vitreous, cloudy, impossible to plumb. ‘The cup of forgetfulness. I am trawling for their faces. Roger, young — his mane of hair, his eyes glowing … You must know Lethe, and the River Styx, which all who die must cross. Perhaps you don’t, if they no longer teach the classics.’

I hastened to tell her I knew both names. I felt offended that she thought I might not, and I was exhausted from all those museums, and the weight of her sadness — and my own. I couldn’t help thinking, ‘This will happen to me. This is what happens to most of us. After we die, it’s as if we never lived.’ And the Bloomsbury Group had been so famous!

(In one small island, for one or two decades.)

As the spectral tourists processed with trays, she asked ‘Do you moderns understand death? In New York, everyone’s trying to be young, and fifty-year-old women go out without skirts, and remember those creatures I kept seeing on the street who I thought had been burned, but you explained they had just had plastic surgery, and their features were smudged … Do Americans think they will live forever? Do they think they will just continue to get richer?’

I batted the question away with facts. ‘Maybe they did, but I don’t think so, now. There was an attack on New York. At the beginning of this century. It changed the way Americans thought about themselves. Three thousand people died in one day.’

‘Three thousand people? Here? Why?’

How could I explain? Impossible. ‘Partly religion. Partly power. The two things have got confused. Rich countries are hated by poor ones because they seem impervious. There’s always a struggle over resources. And as you have seen, there’s so much wealth.’

I fell silent, then tried again, but I couldn’t explain the whole of modern history, not that I understood it myself. It was complex and stupid as the Treaty of Versailles, which she had been talking about last night. It would go on forever: war, hatred, ‘I want it’, ‘No, I want it.’

‘Death was suddenly right here, in the middle of the city.’

She looked tired, and shook her head. ‘Leonard would know,’ she said. Now she was pouring sugar on the table, the sands of time from her bony hands. ‘But I wasn’t asking about politics. I was asking about … What was I asking about?’ In the yellow artificial light, she looked jaundiced. A long cobweb trailed from the lampshade.

‘I think we should go,’ I said. ‘Time to visit the bookstores.’

VIRGINIA

‘I was asking about …’

ANGELA

Her voice trailed away.

VIRGINIA

about forgetfulness

the forgotten

a fin crossing a blank horizon

something darting a small skimmed stone

stitches on the edge of vision

ANGELA

I couldn’t see what she was staring at. Then I did. There were ants on the table, carrying grains of sugar home.

They moved with blind, silent purpose, doing the thing they were born to do, one after another, an endless succession.

Virginia stood up without a word and stumbled back out into the daylight.

GERDA

When I opened my eyes I tried to be happy. Home. I’m home. Except it isn’t.

How can it be home if I wake up on the sofa, because there weren’t any sheets on the bed?

My mum didn’t leave any food at home. Or milk or even cereal. It’s vile being home without any breakfast. Mum can’t be arsed to look after me. She should have guessed I would run away. I truanted from my other schools.

(I can’t blame Dad because he’s in the Arctic. Otherwise I would, don’t worry! When dads feel guilty, they spend money.)