Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

VIRGINIA

By the time we left the restaurant, our plans were settled, and Angela’s mood had become benign. (Angela, of course, believed in plans. She was still young — I was a century older. Leonard had been the planner, not me. Yet nothing turned out as he thought in the beginning.)

We would go to Pera: just across the bridge from the Old City, it would be there still. (‘Lots will have changed,’ she cautioned me, ‘but they can’t change the sea. It’s beautiful.’) We would visit the Harem, in Topkapi Palace. We would go to Aya Sophia, of course. We would visit Scutari, for Florence Nightingale. And of course, on the third day, my conference. The conference, I corrected myself.

‘Great, we have got ourselves organised,’ she said, as we emerged on to the main street. ‘And of course, I will need some time alone to practise.’ ‘Practise?’ ‘My paper for the conference, yes.’ ‘Two days isn’t really enough, is it, for everything we want to do?’

ANGELA

I could hear the sadness in her voice, as if she was coming to the end of an outing, and perhaps she was, perhaps we both were, for surely this episode couldn’t last, and we wouldn’t have much longer together — which would help me keep my patience with her.

GERDA

What’s hard for a child is, you don’t choose your parents. Specifically, you don’t choose your mother, yet once you are born, you are landed with her, nearly all the time, for years and years, and you have to be good, you have to make her love you, because she’s the one who gives you things.

It’s better when you have two parents because one can make up for the defects of the other, which was what Dad did quite well, when he was there.

Being with Lil was a bit like that. I did like her, yes, but I was lumbered with her. Suddenly she was all I had got. I slept as close to her as I could.

I admit I told her a fib about my mother. Not really a fib, but not the whole truth. ‘I ran away from this school like a prison. My mum didn’t care, so I stole her money, and came to the other side of the world.’

Lil Robber just said ‘It’s cool what you did, robbing your mum to go round the world. If I had a mum, I’d do that.’

The trouble was, none of them did have mums. They smelled, this gang, in the middle of the night, sweetish, oniony, kicking and mumbling and snuffling around me. Moaning their way through small panicky dreams, maybe of terrible deeds they had done, maybe of terrible things they had suffered. Lil Robber smelled different, of chlorine and pondweed, because she washed ‘most days’ in the lake, although she never washed her clothes, just stole new ones when they got dirty, and her fantasy (in which I now had a role) was to wash, naked, like she usually did, ‘but sometimes people see me, and then I feel silly, cos I just climb out again like a moron, and it’s slippery down there, so you can fall over’. Instead she would push off, ‘like a fish, you get me’, and go swooping away from them through the deep water, and not come back till they had all fucked off. ‘You don’t learn to swim all at once,’ I said cautiously, as she was drifting into sleep, but Lily stiffened, and said quite loudly ‘You told me you won actual medals, so you gotta be good at teaching it,’ and I said ‘Yeah, I hope I am, but you might be crap at learning, Lily,’ and after a pause, Lil Robber laughed, and tucked her arm painfully tightly around me, and started snoring on my neck.

At first Beardy Boy pretended he was keen on me. He looked at me as if he was having horrible thoughts. But everything he did was like a test. He gave me chewing-gum out of his pocket but I could see what his pocket was like. ‘Nah,’ I said, but I held back from saying what I wanted to say, which was ‘Urrghhhh, disgusting, I wouldn’t eat that even if I was starving.’

(Which by the way, I was, pretty much.)

He offered to do me a tattoo, the next morning. It was the first thing he said as we were waking up. ‘No,’ I said, without even thinking. ‘Why not, ya scared?’ he sneered, ‘Ya soft?’ And I was scared, and compared to him, I was soft, but I knew the others were listening, and Lil was too, to see how I’d cope, so I said ‘Because your hand would shake. Because you look like you’re always wanking,’ and then Lily laughed, and I felt better, but he stared at me like he wanted to kill me.

So then it was just Lily and me. And I was dependent, as if she was my mother.

But I did choose her, and she chose me. So that was a bit of an advance on childhood. And I knew I had to survive on my own, because in the end I would get my parents back — I thought I would, I had to believe it — but I had found out they would not live for ever. Most of these kids’ parents were already dead.

I knew I was different, but in a way, as time went on, we would all be the same. We were the young, alone with the future, while the parents would slip away into the past.

Tour of Istanbul, Day One

1. The Harem

2. Aya Sophia

ANGELA

Yes, we were different generations — Virginia could have been my great-grandmother! But sometimes we did have fun together.

VIRGINIA

We breakfasted on the roof of the hotel, on a blazing Istanbul morning. The roof-top terrace was a skating rink for sunlight; a minaret soared alongside us, slender-necked, heron-like, looking upwards, then a tumble of reddish tiled roofs, then blue, blue, pearl and blue.

‘What are we looking at, Angela?’

A sturdy guest enlightened us, setting down her teacup. British. Common. Northern. ‘That’s Sea o’ Marmara. And over there, that’s Golden Horn.’

Those names from long ago: poems, even in her strange dialect. We were gazing across the roof-tops to the blue and pink Sea of Marmara. Painted, as before, with pearl-white light, but it had become a thoroughfare. I remembered small boats like homing birds, dancing on the waves between the islands. Now the ships were flat and black and steady, a heavy, constant line of morse — the work of the world was getting done. In the distance, dove-grey-blue, the islands, the same islands I had loved before, though we never landed, we just slipped past them, floating on a distant layer of sea-fog, catching my desire, veiled, mysterious, as if all the loved faces might be there, peering towards me, across the water … I shook my head. ‘Let’s get breakfast.’

But Angela pointed at the roofs nearby. Close-up, the view was less romantic. ‘You see, there’s still rich and poor,’ she said. Rusting railings, burnt-out wood, broken roof-ridges where seagulls stalked, a muddle of forgotten white plastic chairs on a dismal terrace with broken pipe-work. A stone’s throw away were the new hotels, small shining enclaves of sunlit breakfasters gazing out across the city. Travellers like her. Golden flotsam. So many people seemd to travel now, but did the money ever reach the poor?

(At least it was paying the men in the lobby. A surge of pleasure when I thought of them.)

We returned from the buffet with plates of spiced sausage. ‘We arrived over that sea,’ I told Angela. ‘I’d hardly slept. I was so excited. We passed a pretty little tower — ’

‘Oh yes — I’ve been past it in a ferry. The guide called it — Leander’s Tower, or The Maiden’s Tower. You know, Hero and Leander. But the Turks call it something different, something like Kid, or Kin — ’

‘Kiz Kulesi,’ said the same sturdy woman, sitting at the next-door table. ‘Very fairmous. Yer can get it on tea-towels. Fridge magnets.’

‘Are you from Yorkshire?’ I asked. ‘I haven’t heard that accent for — a very long while.’ (And indeed I hadn’t: for a century or so.)