Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

But I still felt the cold of the shop window, the moment my eyes got used to the dark and focused on the emptiness.

There were plenty of people on the pavement outside Borders. But something strange was going on. The windows were in the grip of some fever. Garish red and yellow notices, ugly as a municipal flower-bed, pushed up brutally across the glass: ‘90 % OFF!’, they shouted, ‘50 % OFF!’ Black on yellow, fighting a glaring scarlet background. People were pouring through the doors. Virginia and I were carried in with them. Inside, though, we all paused, puzzled. You couldn’t see the books behind a forest of signs, all of them shouting percentages at us.

‘It’s a New Year sale,’ I said to her. ‘Sales make a lot of money for shops.’

But then I thought, it’s not New Year, it’s far too late for a January sale. And ‘90 per cent off’? How can they make a profit if everything is 50 per cent to 90 per cent off?

My eyes were hurting. The figures were jumping, 50! 90! inside my head.

A plump young woman in a too-tight overall was hurrying through with a pile of books. I stopped her and asked, ‘What’s going on? It’s a strange time to have a sale.’

She looked at me, dead-eyed like a fish, too fat, too hot, on the point of expiring. ‘It’s a sale,’ she repeated, stubbornly.

‘But is it a …?’ No, I could not say it.

And then she said it. ‘A Closing Down Sale.’

‘Why are you closing down?’ She said nothing. ‘ Why are you closing down? ’ I insisted, hearing my voice shoot up an octave. But I must be nice, it was not her fault, she was only a few years older than Gerda.

‘Is there a Literature section?’ I asked.

She looked as if she didn’t know the word. Perhaps it was my English accent, for after three seconds with her brain ticking over she suddenly said, ‘Oh, literature . Like criticism . That’d be in Academic. But I’m not sure there’s anything left.’

We stood for a second and stared at her, and she at us, uncomprehending. Should we have tried to bridge the gap? But she had turned and gone, it was already too late. Virginia and I stayed still for a moment, two authors becalmed in a flood-tide of panic.

‘I shouldn’t have brought you here,’ I said. ‘We’re going to look for a real bookshop.’

‘Could we try a smaller one?’ she inquired. ‘In my time, we never had such — monstrosities .’

‘Maybe we should never have had them either. Maybe they’re dinosaurs who grew too big.’

They had swallowed up food, coffee, cards, events, readings, signings, music. The books grew worse, and the choice less, 2 for 1 on celebrity memoirs, dreadful novels by chefs and actors. Till the customers noticed they were being sold rubbish.

And then, basically, we were all fucked. Not that I would ever say that to her.

But then I did. ‘So we’re all fucked.’

She froze for a moment, looked at me doubtfully, and then exploded into peals of laughter, rocking about in her turquoise shantung, shoulders shaking in the harsh fluorescent light — morning sunlight on a beetle’s back. I thought for a moment she would actually take off! Her smoke-blue hat was whirling, spinning, and her laugh rang out and everyone was staring, and I was laughing because she was laughing … then her hat fell off, and both of us stopped.

I had to find a place where books were still sold. I asked, on impulse, a thin elderly couple, the man silver-curled, with intelligent spectacles, reading outside a café near Borders. He gave Virginia’s hat an admiring smile. Too late I saw his book was on accountancy. But he listened to me and answered eagerly, ‘31, West Fifty-seventh Street. Rizzoli’s bookstore. It’s a jewel. Honestly. You’ll love it.’

We did. From the moment we saw the shop front, an arch of glass and stone and behind it, not SALE notices, but rows of books. They were playing Mozart softly inside. The galleried floors were Victorian, detailed. I went to the till on the ground floor and asked the smiling youth for Woolf. ‘Virginia Woolf.’ He nodded, eagerly, his long hair shaking like a spaniel’s, and sent us up to the third floor.

But Third Floor was ‘European Languages’. A thirty-year-old woman sat by the till, engrossed in reading. ‘Excuse me. Virginia Woolf?’ I asked, doubtful. ‘We were sent up here.’

‘Ah yes, Woolf,’ she said, without surprise, eyes still on her page, and checked the computer. ‘Yes. We have her in Spanish, French and let me see, yes, Italian.’ Virginia’s face rearranged itself, she had been afraid there would be nothing here either, but now she was uplifted, her eyes brightened.

And there they were, her boats, safe home. Sheltered in the harbour in their different liveries. ‘There you are, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own in all three languages. And several copies,’ I said.

‘ Una Habitación Propia ! It sounds like “Clean your room, young lady”,’ Virginia exclaimed, plucking out a copy, but I could see that she was pleased. ‘I like the Italian title better, which makes it sound so delightfully selfish — Una Stanza tutta per se . Oh, and I love La Signorina Dalloway , so sinuous and silky … So these are the books they prefer,’ she mused. ‘But you said Between the Acts is thought my best?’

‘By some critics. And some writers. Like me,’ I said, shyly, for I did admire its spare certainty. ‘But everyone likes To the Lighthouse ,’ I said.

I left her crouched like an awkward cormorant, bent over the books she was feeding upon, and went downstairs to find her books in English. Perhaps she would like to re-read her work. Perhaps, after I’d left for Istanbul, someone could organise some readings — performed by a ‘Woolf look-alike!’ She would play Virginia Woolf to the life!

I returned to the original polite young man. ‘Were you lucky with your search?’ he asked me.

‘Yes, thank you. But of course they were translations. I’m eager to find the originals.’

He looked slightly blank. His skin was flawless.

‘In English.’

He tried his computer again. ‘I’m sure we would usually have her in English,’ he said. ‘Perhaps someone has just bought them.’

I thought I would push it a little further. ‘Have you read her yourself?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve read her.’ His voice was charming, educated, light. My liking for him grew apace.

‘She’s taught on university courses?’

‘Yes.’ He was giving me everything I asked for — except, of course, the actual books. But the bookstore was Italian, they specialised.

I should have left it at that, and we’d have been ahead. But because I was in charge of Virginia’s possessions, the gloves and umbrella she handed to me (though I too am absent-minded! I too am a writer! Usually, others look after me ), I had stopped to stuff them safely in my hold-all, which delayed me enough for one more bit of conversation. Three floors up, I heard her feet coming down, her large feet in the metal-tipped shoes that must have been standard in her day.

The young man said, with gathering confidence, ‘I associate her poetry with Sylvia Plath.’

‘With Sylvia Plath?’ I said, puzzled. ‘Her poems?’

‘Yes, I suppose because they’re both a little dark. Woolf’s poems are dark, wouldn’t you say?’

Dark, not to say unknown, I thought, but I just smiled and nodded, and the feet clumped nearer, and she was suddenly right with us, Virginia Woolf, solidly real, smiling, clutching a carrier-bag of her books, the real author, back from the dead. Back from the mists of oblivion which swirled around us even here, blurring the angles of names and faces, unpicking carefully-worked sentences and knitting them all into a matte of grey weed. Sucking us all into a vast indifference, where Plath and Woolf could be confused, two strange women who killed themselves.