Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

Compared to five weeks, three months was a lifetime. (Though Gerda’s school terms were twelve weeks long, which I had promised would be over in an instant —)

I hoped, suddenly, piercingly, that Gerda was all right, that she had not been lonely without us, but the pain was too much, and I pushed it away. If she wasn’t happy, she would tell me about it. She’ll be surprised how fast time passes. The young are different: they feel things less. I managed to find her an excellent school .

All around me, sleep and stillness. In the half-dark, they were all connected, an arm flung out, a leg, a foot, sleeping forms turned to one side or another, some with dropped jaws and open mouths. Business people at the top of their game, temporarily soft and boneless as children. Hands curled loosely, wavering outwards — unprotected, entirely themselves. Virginia — I hardly dared look at her –

I risked it. She lay there, marmoreal, grave, a life-mask of the famous face, no longer disrupted and humanised by little throbs of need or humour. As at the beginning, I was moved, awed.

Nothing, it seemed, could break that image, that pale, silent, Olympian stillness which, second by second, in the sleeping cabin, seemed to fold our stories into itself. I looked away, afraid. I resumed my film. (Could I even exist, so near such greatness?)

(But ‘What is smallness, what is greatness?’, Virginia had written.)

Once in the middle of my film, just once, a man at the front of the cabin had a nightmare and there was a roar, a rupture of the calm, and a flight attendant came rubbing his eyes, his shirt loosened at the neck, and hovered above him till he slept again. Then again peace descended; I watched the film until 3 AM, I became part of it, I sleighed with them, their dear warm bodies inside layers of furs, under ice-blue skies and long-set sunlight, across the endless fields of white, I smiled to myself to see them laughing as Edward tried to push Gerda’s shoes on over layers of socks and they both got the giggles, or Gerda shouted with triumph when she managed to get the fire to blaze up, and their fire-lit shadows wavered on the snow; then there was the dazzling light of morning: all over the ice figures were stirring …

But no, I had slept through the end of the film.

A white scimitar of light had pierced the cabin.

A baby mewed briefly, then another, and another, and the mothers were stretching and enfolding their young, and the flight attendants, smiling and tidy again, came down the gangway with a drinks trolley — ‘Sir? Madam? Tea? Coffee?’ — and everywhere people were raising their blinds, round lids over a line of bright blue eyes.

Now the morning light became a brilliant white sheet and all the little creatures were waking quietly, bleached out by a night of excessive activity: the praying, the reading of old testaments, the caressing and dressing and undressing of babies and toddlers and their passing from loving hand to hand over seat-arms and across gangways. The crew (Turkish Muslim and one Armenian Christian) try to wheel their breakfast trolleys up and down, their demeanour as polite and cheerful as ever, 30,000 feet above the sea.

ANGELA

The American in the row in front had started talking to his bouffant wife, who was coming to Istanbul for the first time, and a student with long straight pale caramel hair unlucky enough to be sitting next to him. Was she married? he had to know. Why not? Actually, she was studying Islamic art at Columbia University. ‘I thought art was forbidden in Turkey!’ he roared, over the top of her explanation. ‘So that’ll be a short thesis, right?’ ‘Well — ’ ‘The men don’t understand our women, honey. So dress modestly, especially being blonde, or they’ll be all over you like flies.’

‘Really?’ The student’s voice was American too, but her ‘really’ could not have been more cynical.

Virginia’s first remark, which came 0.5 seconds after she had said ‘Good morning’ to me, reverted to the Jewish question.

VIRGINIA

‘Is it that Jews don’t like to be Jews? Is that why they prefer to be called “Jewish people”?’

ANGELA

‘Actually, I don’t even know. I don’t think it’s that, in this case. It’s different when they’re among themselves, I believe that then they do say “Jews” …’

I wished we had never started this.

VIRGINIA

‘They are among themselves, Angela, there’s at least two dozen of them, look.’

ANGELA

‘ No, don’t point, Virginia . It’s too complicated. Take my word for it. It is my century, for heaven’s sake. Just wait until we’re off this plane.’ (But I felt — mealy-mouthed and uncertain, suddenly.) ‘Look could we not talk about the Jews — Jewish people, I mean, could we stop? It isn’t relevant to Istanbul. It’s mosques we’re going to look at. And churches. The Aya Sophia, the Blue Mosque and so on.’

VIRGINIA

‘Aya Sophia. Is that … St Sophia? I went there. We went there. Vanessa and I. People stared at us. Back at the beginning of the century.’

ANGELA

‘Back at the beginning of your century: 1906, I think it was. You wrote about it. You were very young. Of course people stared. You and Vanessa were both so lovely.’

VIRGINIA

‘Twenty-four. I would love to go there again.’

Everything was ahead of me then.

ANGELA

‘Ten years older than my daughter. I wonder if you will ever meet her.’

VIRGINIA

‘We went there in the evening. We were curious. I wasn’t afraid of anything …’

The lights came on slowly — candles. We women were upstairs, we went up a long ramp, you could hear children calling somewhere like birds. It was … dim, when you looked down, dim murmurings, amber air and shadows, people kneeling and rising in long lines like waves on the sea, and the world going on indifferently around them, the business of the world. I was impressed, but it was all a mystery, it was so other, such strangeness.

‘I thought: we can never meet, Christians and Mohammedans, we are as different as — well, as different as you and me.’

ANGELA

(

hurt

)

‘Are we so different?’

VIRGINIA

(

pealing with laughter, then stopping, genuinely surprised

)

‘Don’t you think so? You’re so … tidy. And of course, so … modern. Whereas I am ancient, a dinosaur. I never had children, you’re a mother, I was an old wife, and you’re divorced — ’

ANGELA

‘No!’

VIRGINIA

‘Of course we’re different.’

ANGELA

‘I’m not divorced.’

VIRGINIA

‘Separated?’

ANGELA

‘Nonsense!’

VIRGINIA

‘You said — ’

ANGELA

‘Nothing of the kind. Edward’s away. In the Arctic. It’s true that we quarrelled. But I think he still loves me. Not that it’s relevant. But as it happens, we’re not formally separated.’

VIRGINIA

‘Sorry. ( Pause .) You are lucky, then. I will always miss … Always.’

ANGELA

(

watching her rapt, tender face

)

‘You quarrelled too. In the Diaries .’

Damn. I had given it away again.

VIRGINIA

‘Did he say that in his diaries? And publish them?’

ANGELA

‘Maybe I’ve got that wrong.’

I couldn’t tell her that I’d read her diaries. That everyone at the conference would have read them. Or perhaps I should. Perhaps I should warn her. Her clear instructions: destroy my papers.

VIRGINIA

‘All married couples sometimes quarrel. After all, two worlds are forced together. As different as, well … I don’t know.’

ANGELA

‘New York and Istanbul, perhaps?’