Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

What they don’t realise — splitting up parents — is that it splits us up as well. There’s a feeling, non-stop, at the back of your brain. A sort of numb feeling that all you have to do is run it all backwards, and maybe you’ll get back to a year ago, or two, or three, or whenever our family was last happy — (I want to cry when I think the words ‘our family’, because ‘family’ used to give me a warm feeling, and my parents were special, which made me proud) — but this time around I would make it better, whatever I did that helped it go wrong. Yes, I admit I sometimes made trouble.

And the place you went back to, without cracks or splinters, that would be home, for all of you, and you’d never have to leave, unless you chose to.

Though of course, one day, I would, and I will.

It’s children who should leave, not parents. So there’s always someone for us to go home to.

As things are, I can’t ever go home. I’ve got here, haven’t I, but everyone’s gone.

My family. Which was once complete.

A little island where I lived with them.

Now I look back, it’s gone small and misty. I peer like a div but I can’t see our faces.

I think about now, and everything’s bad.

Dad’s in the middle of the Arctic circle. Teeny little matchstick man. Maybe he’s shouting, I can’t hear him. Maybe he’s trying to shout my name.

Mum is swanning it in Central Park. She and Virginia, both Being Famous, neither of them thinking about me for a moment.

I’m coming to get you, just you wait .

ANGELA

I had thought we would stroll through Central Park, thus crossing item 3 off our list — it should have taken half an hour or so. But as soon as I looked at Virginia in the daylight, I saw she would not be able to do it –

It was a cool, cloudless spring day. The glory of above-the-ground. I was relieved to be out in the light, and surely the walk would be good for her?

But something had happened to her in the Met, or perhaps in the other museums that morning.

Hard to remember, hard to describe. I was never clear about what I saw.

Virginia had chilled and faded. She had hesitated on the wide flight of steps that leads down from the portico of the Met, and I took her hand, and it was very cold, as cold, or nearly, as that very first time, when it felt like trailing my hand in water.

VIRGINIA

Something came up from the ground, a deep shudder

yes, they were calling me down to them

darling Nessa Roger Duncan

reaching out beseeching me no, I was not ready

to join them

dead deep cold of a place without sun

left alone, I was slowing, stopping

but a hand her outstretched hand touched me

ANGELA

Her light had gone out. Her face was grey. She was smaller, slighter than before.

I dropped her fingers, because I was afraid, but I tried to smile at her, I spoke to her urgently, ‘ Virginia? Let’s get a taxi to the bookshop.’

She didn’t answer. She was suddenly stooped. She clutched her turquoise shantung against her, the curve of her collarbone sharp in the light, wrapping her rich shot-silk around her as if she was trying to hold the heat in.

‘Cold,’ she whispered. ‘Cold as winter. I didn’t know New York was so cold.’

But there by the pavement stood the line of yellow taxis, a chunky string of cheery toys, waiting for life, movement, money. Avoiding her hand, I pushed her towards them.

She was in the taxi, I slammed the door. Concentrated sunlight poured through the glass. It soared, in that small space, like an anthem, and she sat and slept for a while, which scared me.

But as she slept, she relaxed, expanded.

A flush of colour returned to her cheek.

We were heading for the big Barnes and Noble that took up five floors of the Lincoln Center. My first intention was to impress her. It was a wondrous bookshop that I knew well, with classical music in the basement and a café with a view on the fifth floor. My original mission had been rather gung-ho: to show her what my century could do. Choice! Speed! Image quality! Tables groaning with glossy hardbacks, international art books with colour photography she and her contemporaries could only dream of, swathes of foreign languages, psychology, philosophy, politics, economics. But after the sadness of the art galleries, I was focused on showing her her own books.

We would find her in depth in the Literature section — I had no doubts; I’d bought her books there before. After that, I decided, tea and cakes. Perhaps in Le Pain Quotidien? A little bit of Europe on the 72nd, yet with a certain homespun rigour; plain wood tables, good-for-you bread. That would put life back into her veins. She could sit and drink tea and enjoy her book jackets. Nourishing titbits of critical praise! (And if my books were there, she’d be able to see mine. The critics had been kind to me. At least, the ones we selected for the jacket.)

If only it had happened that way.

Barnes and Noble’s flagship store had closed. There was a small, legal notice on the central doors. The last book had been rung through the tills the week before. Soon a discount clothing store would take its place. Where once there had been five floors of books, there were now five floors of emptiness. It had gone dark, my beautiful building.

The palace of books. While my back was turned, there had been a violent overthrow. I peered through the glass and at first saw nothing, then less than nothing — empty shelving, crumpled bits of paper, a SALE sign lying at an angle to the wall.

‘Oh, Virginia, I’m sorry. It’s closed down. I don’t know why.’

‘But you said it was the best bookshop?’

‘Yes. Did I? No — there are others.’

I wanted to protect her from the blow I felt. We were both authors. Authors need bookshops. Tunnels of ore waiting to be mined. But no, the canaries were dying in their cages. The human customers had rushed for daylight. I took a step back, and turned away.

The space outside the Lincoln Center was too wide, too windy, the polished stone reflecting sky, blank, stupid, and nothing was written, and maybe one day there would be no more writing. Only images. Only surface.

‘It’s rather a shock to me. Everything’s — gone.’

And suddenly Virginia was comforting me. ‘It’s just a shop,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. Bookshops closed down in our day too. They are only businesses, my dear. The books themselves will live elsewhere. Maybe they are going to live in your … laptops? We have other lives, I think, I hope … I know I wrote that somewhere. Yes, of course, Between the Acts .’

‘But you despaired,’ I said to her. I realised I was leaning on her, slightly, her triangular figure in its gorgeous clothes suddenly taller, steadier, sheltering me from the blaze of sky.

‘Yes, I despaired,’ she said. Briefly, her voice was rough with sorrow. ‘But never about a business, dear. I thought I would go mad again. I thought my writing was a failure — ’

‘Yes, sorry. Stop, Virginia. What I’m feeling is trivial.’

‘Sorrow is sorrow. We all despair. But now we must find another bookshop.’

‘There’s another good one: Borders .’

The next second, she left me there and struck out boldly for the kerb, where her turquoise arm with its long white pinion waved at the sun for a yellow taxi. One veered towards her and she turned to me, elated by this new success. Inside the taxi she chattered gaily about the book business in the 1920s and 1930s, the risks they took with the Hogarth Press; how they taught themselves to print with a pamphlet — ‘The printing press cost us less than £20!’ — the pleasure of selling 134 copies, ‘but all the same, we made a profit — and then later, of course, we published Tom Eliot!’