Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

The rain hits Galata, the fishermen run, Ali picks up, drops, then kicks over his box, and a single fish slithers and buckets through the rails and leaps, leaps for the sea. Alive!

‘The fish is very good here, Virginia,’ says Angela, rubbing her eyes. ‘You must try the fish.’

Virginia’s eyes brighten. ‘I adore fish.’

(In New York, the rain is battering the glass, there don’t seem to be many adult books, and the dark-haired man at the till looks depressed. Gerda compromises with a large greetings card: there are plenty of witty ones, not all of them pathetic. But she chooses one with two women, one of them looking more like a granny, captioned in silver ‘ I couldn’t live without you. You gave me life. Mum, I love you.’ Of course it is soppy, and she prefers the others, but she buys this one, which speaks her heart.

Then she slips into the children’s corner of the bookshop. If her mother were here, Gerda would refuse to go there. But Gerda suddenly wants to be a child. She has finished To the Lighthouse , her brain is tired. Sitting at the table for crayoning, Gerda writes a message of love to her mother. Happy, she sets off again down the pavement; her two bags feel as light as birds, perching for luck on her left shoulder; the downpour is over: sun in the puddles. Nothing will go wrong. It will be perfect from the start. Gerda splashes pell-mell along the New York street towards Mummy, Mummy, Mum, Mummy.)

The hotel Angela picked is in Istanbul’s Old City: Sultanahmet, not far from the Blue Mosque, the university, Aya Sophia, the Grand Bazaar. But some way away from the crowded main streets, with their belling of tramcars on steel tracks, their touts and pedlars on the lookout for the throngs of tourists from richer countries — ‘Hallo! Speak English?’ — selling everything from ice cream and corncobs to $10,000 carpets, which may be worth $1,000.

‘It’s very strange the way time passes,’ says Virginia as they climb out of their taxi. ‘And everything but us remains. We came by sea, before, in the very early morning, we came up on deck to see the dawn, and it burned on the golden domes and windows. My sister has gone. All of us have gone. But those airy domes are still standing, as if the past had waited for me.’

‘Don’t talk to me for a minute, Virginia, I’ve got to pay the taxi,’ Angela says. ‘Unless of course you’ve got the money ready? No, I thought not. Right, I’m doing it.’

Angela wishes, briefly but intensely, that she were travelling with Gerda. A young child, not an elderly one. Enough of the past. She longs for the future.

Yes, she needs a rest from Virginia.

VIRGINIA

(

rings Angela’s room, with deliberation, peering at the paper where she’s written the number down

.)

‘Hallo?’

ANGELA

I had hardly got there. I had not unpacked. She rang, making demands, as usual.

The hotel’s wireless key didn’t work. It was typical, typical, just my luck. I needed to de-stress with my email. But the phone rang before I could think.

‘Angela! Is it you?’

‘Obviously.’

‘You see, I managed the telephone! I am getting the hang of the twenty-first century. I love my room! — so much plainer than the one at the Wordsmiths Hotel, but it’s bigger. Whenever you’re ready, I would like to go out.’

‘Virginia, give me a minute. You’re sure your room is bearable? ’

‘It’s delightful. The window opens on the street.’

‘Well close it at once. That’s not safe.’

VIRGINIA

Naturally I took no notice. A bird was singing, there were people going home, women were laughing and calling to each other. It was small-scale, human. It felt almost familiar. The air was cool and freshly washed. My curtain moved like the sea in the breeze.

ANGELA

‘Are you going to close it?’

VIRGINIA

‘Mmm. Though I need some air. I remember walking through the streets, at sunset. From Pera, we saw over the Bosphorus …’

ANGELA

‘I know, I know, but I’ve got things to do.’

I didn’t mean to be short, but yes, I did know because of course, as ever, it was in the Diaries , that secret passage so many of us had crept down without her knowledge or consent.

And yet, the writing, the writing … what a loss if Leonard had obeyed her! Her description of Aya Sophia … As usual, when I really thought about her writing, my irritation with her vanished.

(Would I ever get the chance to tell her what her work meant? How she had changed possibility for all of us? I tried often to express my love for her work, but all it evinced was a glazed, distant look as if I were showing some kind of bad manners, and then I grew shy, and my words faded. Would she always see me as a glorified servant?

Of course, in her work, she wrote better than anyone of her time about the lot of servants; but her horror and shame about the life they lived — which she knew made her own life possible — sometimes came out in contempt and hatred. But the best of her, the best of her … she deserved to be remembered by the best of her.

I could not bear it if Virginia despised me .)

‘Let’s meet for supper. Seven o’clock?’

She said, ‘But that is two hours away. I think I might go and stretch my legs.’

‘Virginia, you cannot go out by yourself!’

VIRGINIA

But I could. I did. I unpacked my coat, my yellow coat that made me feel youthful. I had the Turkish money we’d changed at the airport. It felt like toy money, crisp and strange. Maybe I would go and buy presents with it. Yes, I had always loved buying presents!

(But then I thought, who for? And felt sad. No, never mind, live in the moment.)

I left the window open to air the room. I’m afraid it is a lower-class attitude, assuming all foreigners are thieves. The wind played lightly with the curtains, and through them I saw a veiled young woman emerge from our hotel with a bundle of laundry, so maybe she had been working here — she bent down in the street to play with a cat, a thin golden cat with a triangular head and delicately arching spine, her hand rose and fell, it was a kind of ballet, then another young woman crossed the street, she was waiting for her, the two embraced — a leaf blew in and caught in the casement, edged with a line of diamante rain-drops, and suddenly I was completely happy.

To be on my own. Alive. In Turkey. Laughing with pleasure, I went out into the air.

Gerda, half the world away, is marching on her Promised Land — Central Park, where she was once so happy swooping on her new rollerblades, out of control, towards her father, screaming with joy, mad with terror. Gerda has eaten a hamburger (yum!) with orange, pecan and maple syrup (yuck!) and one supersized portion of fries.

One road to cross before she gets there.

But Gerda is fleeing unfriendly voices, truth-telling voices, harsh and loud. Retard! Moron! Dimmoid! Malco! She is summoning all her reserves of self-love against the self-hatred that’s out to get her. She isn’t afraid, not really, not yet, because she dare not feel the fear.

Mum isn’t here

Dad isn’t here

The men in the Wordsmiths Hotel had been kind. Yes, they knew Angie Lamb and Mrs Woolf. They had left ‘only the other day’.

‘They can’t have done,’ Gerda told them, flatly. ( They had gone! Gone! Was it possible? )

The younger man looked. ‘Yeah, they checked out. The English ladies. Both of them.’

The older man expressed admiration, tilted towards Virginia. ‘Extraordinary lady.’

‘Which hotel have they moved to, please?’ Gerda had struggled to sound normal but her voice came out squeaky, like a bossy mouse.