Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

I suppose she might actually do better than me!

I couldn’t be jealous of my own daughter.

GERDA

These girls at school started calling me fat. I was going through a sturdy phase. They can all shut up, I like my food, and I know I’ll be beautiful in the end. My mum and dad always told me I was, and two boys fought over me at St Mark’s. But then these girls did something really bad, and I had to pull one of them’s hair quite hard, and two of them fell in the swimming pool, after I gave them a tiny shove.

I may be fat, but I’m quite strong. I’d forgotten one of them couldn’t swim.

So then I was in a lot of trouble. But it wasn’t fair to call me a bully. I tried to tell my mum what had happened but I know from her emails she didn’t take it in — ‘Marvellous, Gerda, I’m glad you’re having fun.’

I love my mum but she’s slightly defective. Which is a word she uses for Dad. Or men in general. My mum is Sexist! Although she tells me not to be.

I am recording criticisms, in a notebook I aim to leave in my room in the holidays, so she can read it.

In fact that wouldn’t work at all, because I don’t think Mum’s a sneak. In fact she couldn’t be arsed to sneak.

Meaning, she isn’t that interested.

Only because she has so much ‘Pressure’. She talks a lot about ‘Stress’ and ‘Pressure’.

Being successful is a ‘Pressure’!

She should go back to being poor again.

(I take that back, she needs money for ME.)

So I will have to read my list aloud. Possibly at bed-time, when she’s tired. She gives readings, so will I.

Later I’ll be more famous than her. Har har har on Mum.

I do love her though. I don’t mind admitting it.

I like her when she tickles me, and when I lie down and she pulls my feet, which sounds perverted, but is Normal. I liked her to do that since I was a baby, and when she hasn’t got Pressure, she will.

Mummy. Mum. She’s in my heart. But the words have started to feel weird and echo-ey. As if she’s floated off somewhere, or both of us are floating away.

(Maybe I’ll start to call her ‘Mother’. That word’s like an enemy.)

ANGELA

Zoos are always remarkably expensive. I don’t want to sound mean-spirited, but it didn’t seem to have occurred to Virginia that someone was having to pay for it: $40 is not nothing!

I’m not asking for much, just a ‘thank you’.

VIRGINIA

The zoo crouched close to Fifth Avenue. A short walk across a burst of green. The architecture was … suburban. Some of those people were staring at me.

It was frightening to see how much things cost. I pretended not to notice her paying. I had no money, no money at all.

This expensive zoo was small and old. This couldn’t be the future, surely? London Zoo was so much larger. Those iron cages looked Victorian. Again I thought ‘It’s just a dream.’

But the American voices were so loud and real, and the light was sharp in the woman’s wrinkles. Her mouth was tight as she searched for the dollars. There were fat children eating coloured ice creams. One of them looked at me and giggled.

I liked to know what I earned, as a writer. But when we went out together, Leonard paid.

ANGELA

‘Poor polar bear. So huge and yellow. It looks sort of … left behind. I can’t help feeling sorry for it.’

VIRGINIA

The woman was jumping to conclusions.

‘It would devour you. One swipe of its paw. Pif, paf! You would be gone.’

ANGELA

Thank you.

VIRGINIA

A second later, it had slipped into its pond, and an African keeper said ‘Hurry downstairs,’ where we found a wide window under the water, and almost before we had got used to the dark and the bright blue oblong of glass beside us, a massive turbine of white and yellow erupted against the stillness, and two pink paw-pads pressed at the window before the bear forged back up to the surface — immense power, effortless — a swirl of bright bubbles like a cape of minnows. I felt to my marrow the thrill of life. I was there, I saw it. I was alive.

And yet, that wall of glass between us. A line where two universes collide. The bear was totally indifferent to us.

Of course, I wanted to tell Leonard.

ANGELA

She was enjoying herself, I know. Her eyes brightened. She was walking fast.

We loved the underground viewing window for the penguins! I had only ever seen them above ground. Hobbity creatures with a comic waddle. Swimming, they were unbelievably swift — straight as an arrow, aerodynamic. So fast that when they shot up to the surface they took off out of the water like birds!

The first time it happened Virginia hooted, we stood there together and laughed with pleasure — a line of tiny planes taking off, kids shooting off the end of a slide. I thought, Gerda would love the penguins. And as I thought it, my iPhone pinged.

Guilt. Of course it would be Gerda. The email was short and to the point. ‘What are you DOING? I miss you, Fish Face.’

Darling Gerda. I emailed back, ‘Doing my duty. Are you in a lesson?’ I was going to add more, I really was, but when I looked up, Virginia was gone.

I found her outside in the late sunlight, watching a rocky island in a lake where two blond monkeys were pressed together. Delicate ears, bright pink faces. One moment wrestling, the next caressing. Maybe they were lovers, or brother and sister, or both, but they lived in a world of two.

Virginia didn’t acknowledge my presence. She watched the monkeys, far away.

VIRGINIA (

still not looking at Angela

)

‘I blame myself. I abandoned him. I thought he might work better without me.’

ANGELA (

too quickly, wanting to help

)

‘Leonard did work. Don’t torment yourself.’

One monkey leaped on the other’s back, mounting it, briefly, then stroked or cuffed the underling’s head. For a while they nuzzled and licked each other. All the time Virginia was watching them. Two strands of grey hair whipped across her face, blowing across her wounded mouth.

I felt protective, but her eyes flashed back at me.

VIRGINIA

‘What do you mean? What do you know? Why are you calling my husband “Leonard”?’

(The woman dares to know more than me, she knows everything about my husband –

I’m a wicked woman. I left him, left him)

ANGELA

‘I know — Mr Woolf — wrote many books. And — people loved him.’

VIRGINIA (

sighing

)

‘So he did go on. He did his work. I wanted nothing more than that.’

(And yet, that furious stab of hurt.)

This stupid, unfamiliar place. The poor monkeys, on their barren island. Yet they are happy because they are two. Grooming each other, chattering, tickling, playing at tag — so once did we.

If only you were here, my love. We could walk out and face them arm in arm. He would take my hand, if we were alone, and we would walk under the elms together. Somewhere, perhaps, we are walking still. If I had woken before he died, I know I could have found him again, just a little older, a few years sadder …

I will not deign to ask her about him, this yellow-haired, vulgar-looking, fat-breasted woman with her harlot’s painted lips and eyes. How did I get trapped with her? She has nothing to do with me!

Where are my friends, who understand? Who would have helped him after I …

But they are gone, if he is gone.

And oh, Vanessa. Lytton. Vita. Even poor old Ethel, and Clive. Dear familiar names and faces. Must I be thrown among common strangers?

Another, separate, point of pain. For oh my Angelica — beloved niece, fairy child with a mouth like your mother’s — it is not bearable if you are dead.