Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

Baggage Claim was enormous and full of strangers. When you arrive, people should meet you — the thought popped angrily into her head. Which carousel would the luggage be on? She looked around for passengers from the same plane. No, not a soul. Then she saw a sign: LONDON. Most of them must have already gone.

Unwanted bags still circled sadly, dwarfed by the spaces left by luckier ones. They all looked slightly shabby and ugly. ‘Look, they forgot us,’ they seemed to say. Gerda watched their slow dance in gathering worry (Mum only bought that case a few months ago, she claimed to cheer her up when I started boarding school). But finally, a jolt of pink, and glory — at least she still had her mum’s pet piece of luggage, at least Dad’s knife would be inside. The catches and the ‘P’ flashed gold as she swung it, light as air, to the floor. She felt loads better, instantly.

Millions of people forgot their phones. It didn’t matter, since she knew where Mum was. In a funny way, as she pulled out the handle which slipped like expensive silk into position, as the pink case followed her like a pink poodle or like a pink nut-shell with a rattling kernel, both her parents were with her now — not that she needed them, of course.

Gerda had googled public transport from the airport. She knew in theory where to go, where the airport line met the New York subway, but she havered, briefly, when she got to ARRIVALS, and TAXIS seemed to be written in sunlight, big yellow taxis bearing her away, and after all, it was her mother’s money.

Soon the yellow taxi was swooping her onward through the dazzling early afternoon. (Had she seen this — ordinary bit of it, with Dad? These roads didn’t look American enough.)

‘You did say Wordsmiths Hotel, Manhattan?’

‘Fifty-fourth Street,’ Gerda said, and felt better for the confidence of that, because streets had numbers, and she knew hers.

‘Fifty-fourth and Fifth,’ the man agreed.

Soon the towers were growing up all round them, and it was easily American enough. She saw a rabble of religious nutters with signs, bobbing. PRAISE, one said. HE IS RISEN. Briefly, it spoke to the cheerfulness in her heart. Gerda was excited; Gerda was afraid; Gerda refused to be afraid.

But what if Mum had gone out for lunch?

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ she asked the driver.

‘You’re nearly there.’ Gerda swallowed hard. What if Mum wasn’t pleased to see her?

In the stewards’ hutch on the Turkish Airlines plane, trapped between the two cabins, the staff are hyper: they are nearly there. They are nervously devouring three uneaten breakfasts and some chocolates discarded by VIPs. They have been flying for ten hours; in ten minutes they will begin preparation for landing. The party of Israelis had not been too bad, despite the commotion in the gangways: at least the children had been no trouble. ‘Better than British çulsuzlar ,’ said the chief steward. ‘Imagine having thirty-two Brits. Whining children, shouting parents, having to lie that the bar has closed. If they fight a war again, they’ll lose.’ ‘Why say that?’ Süleyman objected. He had a cousin who lived in Enfield. One day he would go and stay with her, if he could get around the problem with the visa. ‘We will never fight another war with the British,’ and he helped himself to another croissant. It wasn’t very nice, but his blood sugar was dipping, and it was a pity to let things waste. ‘In any case,’ the chief steward said, ‘we beat them last time, thanks to the Father. In the War of Independence,’ he told the two young women stewards, who knew nothing about history, so were idiots at the mercy of Prime Minister Erdogan and his ‘modernising’ neo-Ottomans, who were actually sending Turkey back into the dark ages. ‘And I never want to see you in a veil,’ he told Amara. ‘Atatürk died to get you women freedoms.’ ‘Leave her alone,’ said her friend Maha. ‘You’re just another man trying to tell her what to do.’ ‘He’s exaggerating,’ said Süleyman. ‘Atatürk died of cancer, didn’t he?’ ‘He lost us our language,’ Amara said. She was vague about it, but someone had said so.

Now the chief steward became really angry. He allowed certain freedoms from the younger staff, but nobody should traduce the Father. ‘And this means?’ he asked her. ‘You haven’t a clue. You are just repeating what Erdogan’s mob say. It was the written language Atatürk changed, so Turkey could be part of the modern world. So other countries could understand us, and we weren’t just lonely peasants on a hillside.’ ‘We weren’t peasants,’ said Süleyman. ‘Who gave us the airport?’ the chief steward demanded. ‘Atatürk. Who gave us a constitution? Atatürk. Who gave us motorways? Atatürk. Without Atatürk, you’d have no job, you’d have been married at eleven, if anyone would have you. Now get back to the cabin and collect the trays.’

‘I’m sorry, Sir,’ she said, chastened. She loved the chief steward, who’d been kind to her, kinder, in fact, than her stepfather, who had tried to stop her training, but her grandmother had stuck up for her. ‘I did not mean to insult the Father. Of course I didn’t, we grew up loving him.’ Yet he had lived so long ago. It was hard for her to imagine the 1930s, when her grandmother had been a girl. She couldn’t grasp such a vast stretch of time. An eleven hour flight could feel like a lifetime.

They all fell silent, and just for a second, as the plane banked steeply into the sun and a diamond of white light cut into the cabin, the old leader seemed to be in the room with them, his great kindly head and refulgent eyes, reassuring them about the future: they need not fear the imams, nor Syria, nor America.

‘Süleyman, you’ll get fat,’ said Amara. She was never down for long. ‘Come and help. The Americans have spilled food on the floor.’

They did the gangway run together, a left and a right, keeping pace with each other. Amara liked working with Süleyman. He told her things she needed to know, and she was not in awe of him. She wondered if he might not be normal, but at least he did not fancy her. He was a graduate; he knew things.

As they put away the containers of rubbish, she asked him, quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear, ‘Do you think it’s true what some people say, that life was better for us before Erdogan? Is it true there are lots of people in prison?’

He motioned, delicately, for her to be quiet, but smiled in a way that meant ‘Don’t worry.’ ‘Maybe things were better then than now,’ he said. ‘But life is for living. Things are good.’

She clicked the clasps of the containers shut and smiled at him. ‘Life is simple.’

VIRGINIA

The will to live, that animal will. It carries one on, past so much despair. When my father died, it seemed impossible, the disappearance of the giant father, always behind me, sheltering, looming, for he loved my writing and believed in me. The keeper of the library, who opened it to me. I was desolate. Then the wound healed over. Second by second, minute by minute, day by day, loss became — less. His shadow shrank. I saw beyond him.

Could it have been the same for Leonard?

If my father had lived, I could never have written. His weight would have extinguished me.

ANGELA

‘Virginia, have you got any rubbish? They are trying to collect our rubbish.’

Of course she didn’t care about them. She was lost in thought, she barely looked up.

VIRGINIA

(

passing a paper napkin

)

‘I see you haven’t solved the servant problem.’

ANGELA

‘Virginia, please don’t talk like that. The cabin staff are not our servants.’