Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

And with me suddenly were two Gerdas, the red-haired child of five or six who used to dance like an elf in the sunlight and the Gerda of today, heavier, steadier. How my girlie would love to be here. She had always loved holidays, travel, adventure. I suppose in that way she resembled her father, though of course he took everything much too far …

My dearest daughter. My darling girl. Late at night, when my chaperone duties were over, I started so many emails to her, falling asleep with them still unfinished, the drafts a layer-cake of good intentions.

Not that I should wholly blame Virginia. Sometimes I had certainly put work first. But that was nothing to feel guilty about. Someone had to think about the bills. Her father had contributed almost nothing during the first few years of Gerda’s life, and now he swanned casually off around the world, but he never seemed to worry, he never felt guilty!

But maybe all of us should have felt guilty, in our tiny, fractured, nuclear families. Yes, Mum and Dad had helped with Gerda, but of course they grew old, and of course they died, and a working mother must sustain a career, so the children never get quite enough care — not even with the most responsible parents. I had tried to be responsible, from the start.

Lucky Virginia. Poor Virginia. Nothing to feel guilty about. But no small hands around her heart.

As we filed on to the boat and climbed the steps to the viewing deck, I said to her ‘My daughter loves boats. Gerda would really enjoy this trip.’

But the wind took my words, and she didn’t know Gerda, and in any case, the boat was leaving the quay and her eyes were already fastened on the view, the dazzling expanse of blue water, the skyscrapers diminishing into the distance, grey and blue and bronze and pink, and there across the bay, the pale grey-green lady, bleached by distance and the sun. She held up her torch: her arm looked white. Still far away, she looked small, hermetic.

Still far away, but growing by the minute.

I had loved the Statue of Liberty since my first trip to New York, ten years ago, when I first got an American publisher. I felt she held that beacon up for me. Her stone tablet became my book. That vision of a welcome to America.

Today, she was waiting for Virginia and me. I fixed my eyes and my hopes on her.

Yet none of it was personal. She was beautiful because she welcomed us all. The ‘huddled masses’, the refugees … even if their children were those fat adolescents sulking with popcorn in the queue for the ferry.

(I knew that Gerda had put on weight, most of it in that first term at school. Was even that going to be my fault?)

Virginia practically ran round the boat, this morning’s stiffnesses forgotten. I followed the yellow of her coat as she jostled boldly for the best view among the batteries of clicking cameras. As the statue hove huge out of the sea, the battle for the side of the boat grew fiercer, but somehow Virginia was holding her own.

Perhaps she was so eccentric-looking that no-one bothered to object — of course I had got used to her, but her lambent eyes and full tremulous lips, so classic, so Victorian, looked even more astonishing above her brisk yellow twenty-first-century trench-coat. I watched her changing sides of the boat with a great sliding ‘Whoop!’ as it veered around the approach to the jetty of Liberty Island, her hair flying free from its normal bun, laughing happily into the wind as the horn of the boat played a great trombone –

The Statue of Liberty towered above us.

Then a crush of people fought to be first off the gangway, and I watched her anxiously from the back, her slim yellow back marking her tracks, her wild grey halo bobbing up and down, while the boat docked, and I saw, amazed, she was making progress, she was pogo-ing through, she was burrowing headlong towards her goal, now she was almost at the front of the line –

They opened the gates.

Virginia stormed it!

She was off over the grass ahead of all of us.

I was left panting far behind.

VIRGINIA

Once one’s off the boat, one approaches from behind. I was desperate to get ahead of the mob. She loomed ahead of us, too big to take in, planted on her big cairn of brick. I was panting, half-running, to stay ahead and I could not hurry while looking upwards, so I saw her in snatched glances, like a Wyndham Lewis drawing, her back, her huge foot, her tremendous arm, the strong, groomed hair, so different from mine …

Then I rounded the corner, came out on the green foreshore, and faced her at last. I saw her whole.

Yes, I saw her clear for a second. I wept.

For there was my fond, foolish dream. The model of the just female warrior. Tall, kindly, an amazon. The mother brave enough to hold up the light — Vanessa’s dust jacket for To the Lighthouse . Her strong, bent arms, her intent gaze, the way she stoutly faced the sea, searching out those in need of her, the storm-tossed ships from all over the world –

(not turning inwards as poor Mother did, reading the Bible, mending the sock the servants were too tired to darn, polishing the hearth that was ‘not polished properly’ — ‘Sit down, Julia, you’ll exhaust yourself’ — visiting the sick and caring for little ones, not her own little ones but those of the benighted, chastising herself for what she had not done, rebuking us mutely for our failures of duty, driving herself onwards, always on, her cheeks growing hollower, her face falling in, her eyes flaming brighter as they sank into their sockets, her whole body burning up from within like a narrow white candle stuck fast on a table, flaring up, finally, then fading out. That terrible attrition behind closed doors. Only terror for us, locked outside, whispering children without understanding. She grew weaker, finally, until she died. How did that help us? We were left lonely.)

Here she was, now, my Liberty. No-one could interfere with her. Her body was formed from massive blocks of limestone, her crown an immense defence of green metal. She did not worry. She did not fret. Her strong calves walked. She was marching on the future.

I stood in her shadow, near her huge feet. I was ahead of the crowd, alone with her. Her head was hundreds of feet up in the air, her massive eyeballs scanned the horizon, looking for those who needed care.

I felt I was with Mother, too. That she, and all the suffering, were here. That with Liberty, mothers could be tired children. That they could rest, and she would care. Julia’s head leant upon my shoulder.

The air was cool, but the wind had dropped. I realised how exhausted I was. I had been dragged through time, summoned into this world like a book requisitioned from a distant library … A great ache of weariness wrapped my body. Sleep drifted up and took me down. I was safe to fall, I was coming home

ANGELA.

‘Virginia? Virginia ?’

I couldn’t see her, but I knew she was there. A huge crowd circled the monument. The twenty-first century having fun: taking photos, playing loud music, wrestling, shrieking, eating their picnics, cross-eyed boys playing video-games, three Japanese girls in pink trying to break-dance, a Chinese teacher with terrible acne shouting and sweating as he marshalled the children, two tall blonde sisters — northern Europeans? — doing double-jointed yoga near the foot of the statue, a circle of well-behaved primary school children cross-legged on the ground around their leader, each with their different-coloured lunchbox, a roundel of plastic flowers on the green — I hurried through them — where was Virginia?

Then at the centre, a huddle of people, a cage of figures bending over someone.

For a moment, as I pushed my way through to her, I thought that she — that she was gone. But just as I got there, the cage-bars loosened, the bent figures straightened, I saw Virginia — stretched on the ground — but yes, she was moving. As I called her name, she began to sit up. I could see in her eyes, small-pupiled, stunned, that she felt overrun with people, pressing all round her, blocking out the sky.