Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

VIRGINIA

‘Of course they are. It’s obvious. You sit in comfort, they are servants.’

ANGELA

‘Virginia, please! Servants is not a word we use.’

VIRGINIA

(

laughing

)

‘That changes nothing. They are the servants, we are the masters — ’

ANGELA

(

protesting

)

‘Shhhushh.’

VIRGINIA

‘Oh, is it like the Jews? Are we not allowed to call them that?’

ANGELA

‘We are not going to talk about it.’

VIRGINIA

‘I start to think we were more free than you are … We talked about everything in Gordon Square. Never mind your scruples about “servants” and “Jews”. We were always talking about buggers and semen.’

( The young Hasidic woman beside her looks astonished, but then laughs .)

ANGELA

‘It’s not clever, Virginia, honestly. You did ask me to take you with me to Turkey. You can’t go on like this in Istanbul. You don’t understand. It’s a Muslim country.’

VIRGINIA

Her cheeks were getting very red again. Perhaps it was the change of life? It was clear she had no idea about Turkey, which seemed to us peculiarly free. Men urinated in the street; there were books devoted to copulation. We shopped for silver in the markets and I found a little charm, beautifully carved, of a man and woman in the act of congress. You could touch them, gently, and they performed. I still imagined, then, it would be my lot. I gave the silversmith fifteen lira.

Just when does the course of one’s life become set? I might have been a milch-cow like Vanessa …

ANGELA

‘Virginia, put your seat belt on. The air hostess is talking to you — flight attendant, sorry.’

VIRGINIA

(Yes, they were obsessed with the names of things.)

Somewhere I lost it, that little silver charm. I looked out of the window, and there it was –

ANGELA

‘Look! Quick, there’s another plane — ’

VIRGINIA

Like a brilliant silver needle, tiny — like a messenger, or the flash of a thought — a jet plane, was it, slender as a thread, fast as a minnow, sprinting below us — through blue, then cloud –

And then it was gone. And my life was changed. It was taken away, what I could have been. Those years of breakdown, after I married. Leonard was afraid, and left me alone, but part of me always regretted it. I could have been more of a wife, a mother. The window opened, and then it closed.

The beak flashed, and the fish were eaten. Before I knew it, I had grown old.

AMARA

‘Please, Miss, put your seat belt on.’

ANGELA

‘Ten minutes to landing in Turkey, Virginia. Are you excited? It will be so different from … when were you there, 1906? And the second visit was — 1910?’

My Hasidic neighbour was looking at me strangely. But Virginia was less of an anomaly than he was. Both of them were relics from another time.

VIRGINIA

‘The second time in Turkey was so different.’

The unthinkable loss after the first visit. My elder brother, my conspirator. I envied Thoby, but adored him, of course. He came with us to Greece on the way to Turkey, we rode and walked through the blue aromatic mountains, naming the gods and their transformations; he read us Greek, we drank that rough wine and I had too much and got a headache, but we plotted futures of fantastic greatness as the moon rose and fell and the crickets sang and the white vines of stars slowly faded into morning. That night I knew we would always be happy.

But I was the one who had the future. The gods demanded a sacrifice. Thoby’s muscular back as he walked ahead. The illness must have already been inside him, breeding secretly, beckoning. The Furies saw the illness stirring, it signalled to them, and their nostrils flared; they reached out and touched him with their scaly fingers. Two spots of red appeared in his cheeks. The doctors could do nothing to save him, those grave old mummers with their hopeless nostrums.

The bravest, most beautiful of us was dead. They called him the Goth, but his death was not noble. He was incoherent, incontinent, he had wagered all on his intellect, but it wasted his flesh, his big, healthy, helpless body. Days after he died, Vanessa agreed to marry Clive, his dearest friend, I lost my sister as well as my brother, and she began another life as a mother.

(She went everywhere first: sex, childbirth. When I tried with Leonard, her probing questions forced their way into my intimate places and made me feel inferior. She placed her finger on her lips — no, Ginia, too much for you: I agree with Leonard, you can never be a mother.)

In the long view, was she such a good sister?

She is not here to answer me. She was dear to me. I must not grow bitter.

Oh, Vanessa oh, my Nessa

ANGELA

‘Virginia? Did you say something?’

VIRGINIA

‘It doesn’t feel as if we’re going down.’

ANGELA

‘The pilot said we’re in a holding pattern. Which means there’s a queue of planes wanting to land. He also said there would be turbulence … we might have a bit of a bumpy ride.’

We were suddenly banking, horribly — one wing was making a bee-line for the ground.

VIRGINIA

(

leaning across her neighbours

)

‘All I can see is sea.’

ANGELA

(

peering the other way

)

‘The other side, there’s a mass of black cloud.’

Then we straightened up. We were climbing again.

The flight attendants were checking that the overhead baggage containers were closed, and walking up and down looking purposeful, removing bags from the emergency exit rows. We must have been circling for twenty minutes; I was willing the plane to start to swoop down, but at the end of each curve, it climbed once more.

VIRGINIA

I realised my companion was nervous. Yet she was the frequent flyer, not me. I wondered: dare I reassure her?

Sometimes Nessa laughed when I tried to help her. She was never so dear as when she needed me.

ANGELA

Distraction, that was what I needed. ‘Virginia, could you give me back The Times ? I might do the crossword while we’re landing … “Domestic beast starts a phrase of poem in classical denouement” … Eleven letters, begins with ‘c’. Damn this pen. You’re right, they’re hopeless.’ Was it the air pressure? I gouged the paper. Then I tried gentleness: twizzled it, shook it.

VIRGINIA

‘Crosswords, to us, were an American craze.’ (The answer to the clue was obvious, though …)

1910. Over a century ago. The message came, and I had to go. Vanessa was miscarrying in Bursa, a boat trip away from Constantinople.

It was me she asked for. Roger wrote to me. And then I showed them what I was made of. I travelled alone, I travelled hard, I refused to fear heat, or snakes, or strangers, I went by boat and bus and horseback and crossed Europe in less than four days. I found her lying in a darkened room. I became a man, off to save a woman — I was brave Gerda in my childhood book, my beautiful gold-and-green Hans Andersen’s Fairy Stories that my father bought for me when I was eleven, Gerda, my favourite, who saved little Kay, a brave girl who saved a boy — Angela had named her daughter well.

Later I used that trip in Orlando . I was Orlando . A man-woman.

The pilot said ‘Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing.’

ANGELA

The braying American was at it again, stopping me thinking about that clue. ‘It’s not their fault, they’re just, frankly, at an earlier stage of human civilisation. But at heart, they are warm, simple people.’

‘I wanna buy silver,’ his wife complained, in a grating, whining, little girl voice. ‘You gotta take me to the Bazaar, Howie. With you I know they won’t get away with anything. You can come with us, Miss — I don’t know your name.’