Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

She left me the small, bitter cup.

She got the cream, and I the grounds. Her tall angular shape between me and the window, a cone of darkness drinking my prize.

Yes, I thought, we are in her shadow.

I watched her grey-green orbs dipping and sweeping. She was almost in a trance. What was she learning?

I saw she didn’t want to talk to me. Her mind was working on its own, and her bony hands like sea-creatures scampered across the table-top, climbing the curve of her narrow glass ( my narrow glass, I reminded myself), skating down to the base again, twisting the metal frame that contained it, lifting her tea-spoon, putting it down.

And suddenly I remembered The Waves . ‘Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup … things in themselves, myself being myself.’

‘Myself being myself.’ I knew what she meant. It was why I fled home and its social duties — why I fled Gerda, which makes me ashamed. Because I wanted to be myself. Was I myself in my writing, at least?

Was I good enough to stand naked?

She was good enough. God, she was good. She even managed to write well about coffee.

I watched her swallowing my latte. Yes, of course, she was ravenous. She was sucking it down in great raw gulps, as if she was trying to drink the world. She hadn’t eaten or drunk for decades!

She said ‘Could you bring me another, please? Then I will telephone my husband.’

Bring me another! Did she think it was free? Unlike her, I did not inherit money. She spoke to me as if I were a servant. Of course I would try not to hold it against her, but well — my grandma was a servant.

Still — ‘I will telephone my husband’ — annoyance yielded to a surge of pity.

How could I possibly begin to tell her?

Everyone she knew was dead .

ANGELA

Safety. I still hadn’t got her to safety. That was the mantra in my brain. Through a blur of noise, speed, fear I guided her back to the Waddington.

Virginia Woolf, that leviathan! How lucky I was to be in this dream — or was she lucky, to share my dream? Did the dead get holidays?

Briefly, I moved through space beside her, and every step felt dangerous. Thank God it wasn’t very far. The Waddington, Seventh Avenue. The last hotel I would have chosen.

Perils of last-minute internet packages. Flights were cheap, but what a dreadful flight!

The lift. I do remember that. She cowered from the walls as if they were shrinking. I slipped my keycard across the room door and saw her eyes fixate, briefly. Then we were in, and she saw the phone. ‘No, Virginia, wait a moment.’

I expected the dream to fall apart. I think I hoped that waking would save me, but the unspeakable silence extended — she was still there, and I was still there, and the room was as constricting as before, like the small-sized room where everyone dies, for I had looked after Henry and Lorna, and once you have seen your parents die, nothing is quite as it was before.

Somehow she’d have to be told about Leonard.

And I began to try to explain.

VIRGINIA

‘The twenty-first century,’ the woman said, for the second time, patiently, slowly, as if I were a child or an idiot.

And so it all started to scream in my head, the noise of the traffic five floors below us — the moans & gurgles of the radiator — this yellow-haired woman who looked so hard at me, & took my arm, & told me lies — this strange small room full of ugly furniture, the pale telephone like none I had seen that squatted on her bedside table like a sickly, sleeping, dachshund pup, & this dyed stranger did not want me to use it –

I must wake up It’s time to wake up

‘You can’t call him,’ she said to me. ‘I’m so sorry, he — can’t be called. As I said, it’s the twenty-first century.’

‘Of course, of course I must call my husband — ’

I MUST WAKE UP IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP

I strained to wrench myself out of the dream –

The detail felt too sharp for a dream. This box-like, tiny, oblong room, the ugly bed with its poor, bare, bedhead — the square black screen staring out from one corner, some awful cinema machine — the cheap brocade curtains, the poisonous smell this woman said I was imagining.

Could it be true that I had jumped a century?

Could I be … back?

I stared out of the window. A strip of sky. A ray of light.

A sudden jolt of absolute beauty. Through the mean window it signalled to me a world of new signs, flashing, glowing.

But Leonard. Leonard . Was he here too?

Odd that I can’t remember how I left him. I can’t remember yesterday. And yet I surely spent it with him. My mongoose love, my beloved mate. With whom I’ve had such happiness. They underrate the joy in marriage. No-one could be happier than we have been –

I don’t think two people could have been happier

Stare at the floor, the yellow walls, the painted-over wallpaper. The nameless spots and spills and smears. The human body, leaking stains

No, look away, that air, that sky

‘Virginia do you want some water? Virginia? Virginia ?’

‘Leave me alone. Please be quiet.’

For I heard a voice of terrible clarity, reading the note that I had written, picking me up by the scruff of the neck and shaking me with guilt and horror –

(Somewhere in the room, a loud bell shrilled. The woman started patting her body frenetically, up and down, like a meaningless dance. Then she dragged a small box out of her pocket. Now she was talking and smiling to herself.)

I understood. Another telephone. In this strange world, some did not need wires, some slept like dogs on bedside tables. I would make her give it to me, and ring Leonard. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Sorry, Gerda.’

GERDA

I sneaked to the village before detention and called my mother from a phonebox. It smelled of London: smoke and old wee. London! Where I wanted to be. She didn’t sound at all happy to hear me, and she was talking much too quietly.

‘Sorry I haven’t been in touch. There’s someone here. Sorry, Gerda — ’

‘Who?’

‘Someone who is right beside me . Someone very famous I’m having to look after. Someone special. I’m busy , darling.’

‘How about looking after your daughter? Aren’t I special? I hate you, Mummy.’ I banged the phone down, though it missed the cradle and swung there, hopeless, like a baby on a cord. Banging its head against the glass. Just for a moment, I felt powerful, but it was raining outside the box, there was nothing I knew, just the horrible village.

I was the baby, swinging, hopeless.

ANGELA

She knows she is not supposed to call me. But that’s children: they choose their moment. They ask a lot. Though one gives it gladly. I had told her never to hang up on me.

Virginia, too, was like a child. She showed no interest at all in me. Yes, I pitied her pain over Leonard. But I had worries of my own. I had no clue what was happening to Edward.

However much I tried not to care, I didn’t have a heart of stone. Some of the time they would be using huskies, but some terrain would be covered on foot. Edward had done special training for months — I should know, I had complained enough when he didn’t do his share of the household chores — but he was also accident-prone, and health and safety were not his forte. He was cavalier about equipment, and frostbite, and when I fretted, called it ‘fussing’.

What if I just read about his death in the papers? Did he, or his team, know where I was? I’d left my new mobile number with the neighbours, but had Edward actually noticed our neighbours? Men could be impervious. I didn’t want to hear the news from strangers. How could I ever tell Gerda?