Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

‘… and every window and roof was shining.’

ANGELA

Of course. The first volume of the Diaries . Her beloved elder brother died. And yes, years later, just across the sea in Bursa, Vanessa had a miscarriage.

‘You might not want to go back, Virginia.’

‘I miss Europe,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘I like Manhattan, but everything’s new. I would be nearer to … my country .’

That ‘my country’ harrowed me. Of course, without me, she would be lonely. Istanbul would be nearer home. Old Europe, old Asia, not new New York.

‘You would have to fly. On a jet plane. They go higher and faster than your planes did.’

‘Can one still see the ground?’ she asked me.

‘Sometimes, yes. Through gaps in the cloud. It’s like looking down on a map of the world.’

She clapped her hands together, perfectly happy.

VIRGINIA

‘I would love to fly, of course I would. And Angela — I have a passport!’

ANGELA

Thus, in a single conversation, it was settled. From those few moments, the whole mad chapter. Her friends in Reception helped with Turkish Airlines; there were still a few seats on the morning flight.

‘You know we probably can’t sit together?’

‘I am an adult,’ Virginia said.

We bought a cheap suitcase in downtown Manhattan, a padlock and a packet of address tags, hurried back to our rooms and packed.

‘To Hotel Golden Horn, Istanbul.’ She laughed with joy when I wrote our address.

GERDA

To the Lighthouse , Gerda reads, with cynicism.

Then she leans back and closes her eyes. She’s on the plane, she’s off to New York, she’s got her mother’s stupid book …

Time for a little self-congratulation.

1. She has escaped her terrible school without being spotted.

2. She has replied, in a masterly fashion, by email, to the increasingly urgent phone messages the head has been leaving for her mother. ‘Gerda is now safe with her parents. We are removing her from your school because you have failed to deal with Bullying. Gerda as you know is a gifted child …’ Gerda had fun for another paragraph or two before ending, ‘Yours Truely, Professor Angela Lamb.’ No-one would guess it was from her! (Normally, Mum never used the ‘Professor’, but this was a moment when it might be useful.)

3. She is finally about to read a book by her mother’s new girlfriend, so soon she will know how crap she is, from the point of view of a Genius (Gerda), and she will enjoy telling Mum that, and it will be great, in any case, to sit on a plane reading a book and eating airplane food, which is superdelicious compared to the nutritious rubbish school served up. Or dry cereal, which she’s been living off (much too busy to go to the shop.)

To the Lighthouse . Gerda unfastens her seat belt, looks at the book jacket and considers. As a title, it’s a bit shit, which is what she had hoped and expected to find.

To the Nuthouse , she re-titles it.

But then she remembers Wikipedia said that Virginia Woolf had gone mad in real life, and she remembers the Bullies, at school, who gave her a ticket to the Mental Hospital, and starts to feel a bit ashamed.

Maybe she should give the book a chance. Soon, after all, she’ll be back with Mum, and everything will be all right. She imagines the first enormous hug.

To the Mother, she thinks. To Mummy. To Mum. To New York and my defective mummy. She slips off her shoes, smiles out of the window at bright blue air, and sneers joyfully down at her pages.

Within twenty minutes Gerda is gripped.

ANGELA

The taxi crawled towards the airport. With luck — and Virginia certainly had luck, coming back from the dead is virtually unheard of! — we might make the plane, despite the coincidence of two horrendous traffic accidents. Both the usual exits from Manhattan were blocked.

Stop, start. Stop, stop.

‘What will happen at my conference?’ Virginia asked.

I pretended not to hear. At moments like this, I couldn’t deal with it. I had specific worries, like her fake passport. Missing our flight, getting arrested.

Wherever we got stuck, that late afternoon, horrors. An old woman vomited by a wall against which a line of carrier bags slumped like drunks. LAST DAYS, said a small forest of signs on a corner. A group of people, eyes half-closed in the sun, faces blank and blissful, were waving to and fro in unison. Their lips opened and shut like happy goldfish. One sign, black on orange, shouted KINGDOM, another one, PRAISE. The believers faced inwards, and pointed upwards.

Virginia said ‘Is that a cult?’

‘Oh — they’re just evangelicals.’

‘Missionaries?’

‘Protestants.’

‘Protestants were never like that in my day.’

‘Well — it’s an anti-hierarchical thing.’ I couldn’t be bothered to explain.

‘Meaning?’ she said. I looked out of the window. ‘Angela, please, I need to understand.’

She knew how to make me feel guilty. Sighing in the heat, I set out once again to explain the madnesses of my world.

‘People seem to want to shake up religion. Go back to the beginning. Be passionate. Radical Christians, radical Muslims, even Buddhists are getting het up. It’s a rebellion against — ’

‘Rationality?’ she interrupted. ‘I hoped you’d be growing more rational.’

She had a way of blaming modernity on me. ‘We seem to be going in the opposite direction.’

The taxi wasn’t moving in any direction. The lanes ahead were chockablock. In an hour and twenty minutes, the gate would close.

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I interrupted.’

‘Virginia, I’ll explain later.’

We were in gridlock. The fumes were acrid. I shut the window, and the heat was intense; flies in a box of glass and metal. Manhattan was not so safe after all, so radiantly open, so transparent, with its lattice of streets laid bare to the sky. I was suddenly glad Gerda wasn’t here. Edward had brought her here, when she was little, and they both insisted she’d enjoyed herself, but it wasn’t really a city for children — it felt like a blocked sink.

We had to get out: we couldn’t get out. The traffic was stifling, the noise was thick, like a badly made, scratchy blanket. Being locked in made us vulnerable, as if we could be crushed by a single blow.

New York became a trap. Not right at the core of things after all, not the place where everything important happened, fame, money, publishers.

It made me long for — Istanbul. City of a thousand entrances.

She was talking again. I zoned back in.

‘What will happen at my conference?’ she repeated.

‘You’ll see,’ I said, turning my gaze away from the eagerness in her great orbs. (I had forebodings. What would she make of Bakhtin? Derrida ?) ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t call it “my conference”, Virginia. Even though it is, in a way. The organisers won’t understand … I honestly can’t think at the moment, I just want us to catch our plane.’ Oh dear, I was sounding irritable. Perhaps she was traumatised by fear of flying. ‘Are you OK, Virginia?’

VIRGINIA

I was fine, not grumpy and nervous, like her. Raring to climb the steps of that plane.

All day, my companion had been pale and grim, and snapped at me when the cab was two minutes late, and when I protested, said ‘It’s all right for you.’ She was using that expression a lot, and sighing. Perhaps she found travel stressful.

I’m sure I’d done everything I could to help. Except for leaving my handbag in reception, but they managed to locate it without too much trouble, only then of course I had to tip them again, and Angela looked ‘stressed’ as the moderns say, when they gave me their addresses, one by one, and we exchanged politeness, and the ‘guys’ made me promise to write to them, and she suddenly shouted, out of the blue, ‘The fucking cab will get tired of waiting!’ which certainly cast a pall over proceedings, even though she was soon saying ‘Sorry, sorry’ — it was only the third time I heard her swear, and the first time it had been directed at me. Though now she was being quite lax with the driver, who could surely find an alternative route. ‘Why doesn’t he go faster? Should one suggest it?’