Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

Close up it was Victorian iron, like the conservatory in Gerda’s home. The roof was darker, like mauve bluebells. Gerda suspended her wet blouse and jumper on the pale iron of the verandah. At the front there was sunlight and a view of the lake. ‘You’re all right like that, it looks like a bikini,’ Lil told her. ‘I’ll take my clothes off to keep you company.’

The three of them lay in a huddle in the sun, and slowly, as Lil stroked and kissed her, Gerda’s goose-pimples subsided, and Wolfy’s flanks stopped shuddering, and only after about twenty minutes did he stand up and snuffle, feeling left out.

‘You stay and guard us, Wolfy,’ said Lily. Then they forgot him: but Wolfy stayed.

They slept, that night, in each other’s arms, on the fire-warmed rock, Gerda and Lil, by the broken crate with the pigeons in it, shuffling and ruffling and roucouling, and did not lie still until the other children, who Lil Robber had sent off to work, crept back, slowly, and they all slept together, a raft of bodies loosely patched and woven against the spring night with its chill dead wind, and whatever worse things the park contained.

VIRGINIA

Inside, of course, I was young as ever, but I evidently looked old to Angela. Thinking of Ahmet, I peered in the mirror. My hair, which had once looked straggly and grey, had a glow to it, yes, the brown glow of honey, my eyes were bright, and there again, my cheeks — surely they were pinker? And they were not hollow. They were oval, with roses. I ran my hands down the sides of my body. I wasn’t fat; I wasn’t thin. I was tall, wasn’t I? Could I be — ‘striking’? In fact, I had become what Leonard, with a wry smile, sometimes said of a passing stranger: ‘a fine figure of a woman’.

It helped to explain the way Ahmet looked at me. But maybe all old women imagined that. Maybe he was just a professional flirt, and I was a fool, and Angela was right.

Suddenly, I heard her voice through the wall. Of course, she had gone off to practise her paper — her ‘plenary’, as she kept calling it. Why did she have to be so self-important? –

That was unkind. One didn’t want to be spiteful. Angela had done her best for me, and slowly, I’d become fond of her. Despite her brassy air, she was vulnerable. She cared a lot about her little talk. Probably because I would be listening; she definitely wanted my approval. We had never really spoken about my work. I moved closer to the wall to listen for a moment.

‘… elitist, snobbish … self-indulgent … art for art’s sake …’

A small, cold moment of doubt. But it was obviously not me she was talking about. She must be comparing me to, say, Katherine Mansfield.

‘… stultifying … ivory tower … not relevant to today’s … if ever …’

No, she was a fan of mine. She had told me so. It couldn’t be –

It couldn’t be — could it — that she hated me?

‘… undeserved preeminence … Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse …’

Yes, she was talking about me.

Of course, she had always hated me.

‘… bloodless … anaemic … breath of real life …’

She had brought me back to life to give me pain .

There was a shudder in my bones, my heart. My stomach clenched tight against my ribcage.

I could not stay there, in that stupid modern room, alone with the menacing ‘television’ screen, its great blank eye peering down from the wall, laughing at me, staring at me, as I reeled from the spite hissing through the plaster.

(I had thought we were friends! Didn’t she like me? My heart beat loudly. I was very afraid. For who in the world would stick up for me? Who in the world would be on my side?)

No, there was no-one. I was quite alone. No Leonard to comfort me, no Nessa to listen gravely, no Ethel to huff and puff on my behalf.

I went numbly to the wardrobe. Yes, something else. My brain started playing an old song, loudly, something by — what was her name, Greta Keller, that trembling alto with the giant bosom, ‘So little time, my dear, and so much to do / So little time to make your dreams come true …’

Yes, there was a feeling of the day speeding up, I was changing, swiftly, so was Angela, the stage-set slipped and slid around me. I stared at the tiny keyhole in the wardrobe, a detail snipped from a Dodgson fantasy that at any moment might come to an end. My second chance at life on this planet, it had been so vivid, I had been so happy, but –

she hated me she wanted to destroy me

Suddenly I knew I must be dreaming, that terrible sense of things fading, thinning, of scrabbling to hold the scenery together, to keep out the darkness nibbling at the edges …

Her voice, inexorable, through the wall: ‘… daughter of privilege … patronage …’

Gerda fell asleep happy, but when she woke, at 3 AM, she thought nothing could be worse than where she was, with one round, shocked pigeon eye staring at her in the moonlight through a crack in the crate that imprisoned it.

‘Trapped like me,’ Gerda thought. ‘Lost like me. We will never get out.’

Where was Mum? It was all her fault . (How often had that thought come to her? It had polished its own special groove in her brain. Mum’s fault, Mum’s fault, Mum’s fault, Mum’s …)

Oh no, she remembered (which was worse), it’s mine.

Gerda flung out her right arm in despair, and it was caught, hard, by a big cold hand. ‘I’ll have that if she won’t,’ a boy’s voice said, his voice just breaking, greedy, harsh. He was pulling at her bracelet, which cut into her flesh.

‘Stop it,’ she shouted, ‘Mum gave me that.’

Before she could breathe, a hand grabbed her cheeks. ‘Shut up,’ said Lil, ‘or I’ll stab you, right? And you,’ she added, to the straggle-bearded boy, ‘get away from her or I’ll bite your ear off. Lie still,’ she ordered Gerda. ‘I need to sleep.’ She flung her arm back across Gerda’s throat.

Gerda couldn’t help it, she started to cry. She tried to do it silently, but after a bit, her shoulders were shaking.

Lil sat up with a jerk and loomed over her. ‘I don’t like snivelling,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

In a whisper, dreading she might wake up the others, Gerda poured it all out. ‘The truth is, I was actually looking for my mother … I did run away, that was true, and I did take her money … but I came to look for her here, and found she was in Turkey … I’ve come to the wrong bloody side of the world … I’ve got to go to Turkey to find her … I’ve lost Dad too, he’s at the North Pole … and I’ve lost my phone, well I left it at home, which is even more fucking stupid and dickish … without my phone, I will never find my mum — ’

‘You won’t get any sympathy for losing your parents, we’ve all done that,’ said Lil Robber. ‘Lost your phone though, that’s serious. But stop the fuck crying and I’ll fix it. Long as you shut up and let me sleep, then I’ll go out to work in the morning … It’s cool what you did, all the same. Like I said, Gerda, if I had a mum, I’d run off to Morocco and find her, like you.’

‘Turkey,’ Gerda corrected, cautiously, feeling better now she had spilled her heart.

‘Turkey’s in Morocco, look it up,’ said Lil. Wrapped in wisdom, she fell asleep.

VIRGINIA

Feel nothing, act . Do the thing you long for. I stepped blindly out of the sensible shoes and trousers I had worn for Scutari.

The dress, the dress –

(On, on, it hissed, the hatred spitting through the wall, the syllables even louder in the cupboard: ‘over-precious … narrow … cold …’