Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

VIRGINIA

‘You see, I have been so far away. That place where all of us must go. And when I came back, they had all vanished. It was as if we had never been. New York had forgotten Roger, and Duncan, and Vanessa. They had all — flickered out. The images they meant to capture for ever were in the stacks, or sold, or lost. And the streets were so straight, and everything so new, and the sun so bright — it all felt — shallow. Why did they ever work so hard?

‘Now the whole world looks like flats for a play.’

Of course it was different for Angela. She still had husband, daughter, a home, not that she’d learned to value them. She was clinging to the brightness of her last stretch of youth, she thought her choices would last forever, though soon a narrower corridor would take her. She dared not loosen her hold on space, she dared not loosen her grip on money. ‘Are you ready to go down again?’

ANGELA

The way down was easy, just an ordinary staircase. By the barest margin, I had passed the test.

At the bottom, the sun poured through the great doors. Just for a second, we remained in darkness. She took one of my hands, and pressed it on the wall. It was a moment I will not forget. So brief, this sense of being one with her. What was she giving me, a gift or a curse? I could hardly hear the words she whispered.

VIRGINIA

‘Only the stones. Only the stones. The stones remain, but we are just shadows.’

(Though just then, Angela was painfully real, probably because I had seen her suffer. One would have liked to say, ‘Nothing much matters. So save your marriage. Give Edward the money.’)

Gerda held Lil at bay for a second. ‘Dogs are animals. They don’t need saving.’

‘Wolfy’s different.’

‘Why?’

‘He might not come back.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he doesn’t know he belongs to me.’

‘Well … I don’t have to get him back, but I will,’ said Gerda, stripping off her trousers, shivering, but clenching her jaw so Lil didn’t see it. ‘Assertion!’ she shouted over her shoulder as she splashed into the freezing water. Miss Larman, help me now . She had to go straight in, no messing.

Lil was laughing demonically on the bank. ‘You’ve got a thong! I can see your bush!’

‘You won’t see me for — ’ Gerda would have said ‘dust’, but just at that moment she vanished underwater as the bottom of the lake fell away from her, and for a moment all she saw was bubbles and weed, and she swallowed death, but then she was off, swimming straight and strongly over to the side of the lake where Wolfy’s head was moving fast, the living point of an arrow of ripples, a dark triangle with a blue-white crest.

‘Wolfy,’ she called, briefly treading water, ‘Wolfy, come here!’

Come on, you bastard , she begged in her head. I’ve got to get you back or Lil will kill me .

But Wolfy was not interested. He was swimming after birds. The crows had swooped away, laughing harshly, so Wolfy had settled for some inoffensive moorhens who half took off, undignified, half-scooting on the lake away from the dog, three black and white flurries of bristling feathers, making for the green edge where they lived.

‘Wolfy!’ He was getting out now, on the East side, shaking white cloaks of water off him. ‘Come on, Wolfy, I’m not going to chase you.’ But his long hind-legs were powering him onwards, leaping and gambling through a haze of drops, and now he had found another dog, a little white poodle who yipped sharply –

‘Wolfy, come back !’

Yipped and nipped. Wolfy barked twice, sadly, at his would-be lover and then, a thinner, more bedraggled dog, re-entered the water with a bark in her direction, a small, gruff sound that seemed to say ‘All right, fair’s fair, I’ve had my fun.’

‘Good boy, Wolfy! Here I am!’ Gerda did a leisurely side-stroke, waiting. Yes, he was arrowing back round the shore, working his way down the grey-green line, he was only fifty metres away –

And then, quite suddenly, he wasn’t. Something strange was going on. His nose had gone up, he was bucking in the water, throwing up a spume of white spray — had something attacked him? — barking, frantic. Had he found a fish? Was he mucking about?

But the sound of terror is universal. ‘I’m coming, Wolfy!’ Gerda shouted. ‘It’s all right, I’m on my way.’

Then Gerda became ‘a living speedboat’, powering through the water so fast and straight she was just a narrow line of white spray –

Or that was the way Lil told it, later, with Wolfy half asleep at her feet.

They were sitting on the rock, surrounded by children, a circle of faces, curious, resentful, wondering why they weren’t heroes, not like the new ginger intruder. Someone had set fire to a pile of boxes.

‘I’m telling you, she went like a rocket! Well, like a mermaid. Mermaids always have red hair — ’ (it was clear that none of them questioned Lil’s knowledge, which was all Assertion, and weak on Facts, but this time Gerda didn’t point that out, though she heard a child whispering ‘What’s a Murmured?’) ‘ — when she got there, Wolfy was almost drowned, he’d got stuck in the water-weeds down the edge, I expect there were water-snakes in there as well’ (‘It was wire,’ Gerda interrupted) ‘ — I WAS COMING TO THAT,’ Lil insisted, ‘so she had to drag him free, didn’t she, he’s a big dog and he was panicking, and she couldn’t put her feet on the bottom or anything, and then she saw there was like BLOOD on the water, and she had to get BARBED-WIRE off his leg.’

With that Lil held up Gerda’s hand in the fire-light and showed off the red jagged line of blood. ‘So she did all right, didn’t she?’

There was a general, grudging noise of approval, and Wolfy, who had been welcomed back with a hamburger Beardy Boy had nicked from a stall, pushed his warm, greasy, hairy nose firmly into Gerda’s palm. Under his eyebrows, Beardy Boy stared.

‘He would have got free on his own,’ he said.

‘Beard’s jealous,’ Lil said. ‘He couldn’t do it himself. He can’t swim, can he. He couldn’t be a mermaid.’

‘Mermaids are girls,’ Gerda pointed out. ‘Never mind, it’s a beautiful word.’

‘What is a Murmured?’ the same child asked.

‘A really good swimmer,’ Lil opined. ‘It isn’t a boy or a girl, it’s either. It has to be a hero when there’s a chance. Even if it hurts itself.’

VIRGINIA

How it fascinated me: self-sacrifice, service. Angela wasn’t feeling talkative. It was our second day, we were on our way to Üsküdar, the tram was screeching round a corner, a man got up and gave me his seat — she flashed me a look of irritation.

Üsküdar. Such a beautiful word, the Turkish word, so much softer than Scutari, not just a shield, a husky fullness, but with that strength, that ‘d’, underneath. Scutari where Florence Nightingale nursed. I longed to go there because of my mother. Florence Nightingale, twenty years older, was always a hero for my mother, though to us she seemed fabulously aged, a dragon, and because of Lytton, faintly ridiculous.

ANGELA

Virginia had no idea of the efforts I’d made to get her into Scutari.

VIRGINIA

Florence Nightingale’s ‘Letter to Cassandra’ was so … bitter. Yes, she was right, women’s talents were wasted, women were imprisoned in the drawing-room, but raw pain does not make good writing. I preferred to use wit. Wit and lightness. Then the men can’t laugh, or pity us.

ANGELA

She naturally left all the details to me. Because it was a barracks — the Istanbul barracks — the Turks didn’t welcome just anybody. You would have thought two respectable English ladies would not be suspected of being spies. But I had to fax a letter explaining our interest, and pages of our passports, and home addresses; even then their fax accepting us had only arrived during breakfast. To all this, she was oblivious. That morning, on the tram to the ferry, she was regal, as if everything came to her by right, and she got a seat, while I did not, and the Turk who gave it stared at her … I suppose Virginia always looked strange.