Maggie Gee - Virginia Woolf in Manhattan

There is thunder as Angela flies to New York with Virginia Woolf in her handbag, lightning crackling off the wings of the plane.

Bad karma — not that she believes in it. The flight is delayed and the pilot greets them with a warning. ‘We’re expecting a little turbulence today so if the seat belt signs go on, we’d ask you to return to your seats and keep your seat belts fastened …’

Electricity flashing on chemical-rich pools 3.5 billion years ago started life, Angela reads. The power of lightning. She snaps her book closed at once. Life on Earth , it’s called. Death in the air , she’s thinking.

Taxiing, now. Too late to leave the plane.

The passport in her locker says ‘Angela Lamb’. Place of issue, London. Date of birth, 20 May 1966. There are many stamps on its pages, she’s a Frequent Flyer, she should be accustomed to storms.

The contact name at the back is still Edward Kaye, because she doesn’t know how to change it. (In any case, is she ready? They’re married. She’s in her mid-forties. Too late for another child, with another man.) Angela has one child: an only child: Gerda.

Life must have started in lots of different places, she decides as the honeyed arpeggios of the safety film unfurl. Many organelles — was that the word she liked in the book? — many cells, many pools, times, universes, lightning streaking through it all. Strong enough to spiral through billions of years, splitting and changing, unstoppable, playful.

Life! (Is it a waste to marry only once?)

What will life do next? Where are they going?

Angela’s itinerary’s crazy: London-New York-Istanbul. Angela will fly direct from New York to Istanbul, nearly eleven hours. There are easier ways of doing it. Still Angela’s diary is demanding, geography must bend to accommodate her — the curve of the earth is certainly not going to stop her. New York for the New York Public Library, where she will read Woolf’s manuscripts in the private Berg Collection. Then Istanbul to give a paper at a big international Woolf conference, ‘Virginia Woolf in the 21st Century: Cross-cultural and Transformational Approaches’, at Istanbul University. She’s not an academic, not really, she tells people, but yes, she does a few ‘university gigs’, she has an ‘attachment’ (a Visiting Professorship).

Her real work is writing novels. She’s published by Headstone Press, recently subsumed into the gigantic Haslet group, who also make large profits from chopped, reconstituted meat. She’s popular, yes, she’s won prizes including the Iceland Prize, but she craves more: respect. To be counted as literature, which she loves — though she also likes money.

Now she’s picked up, as an alibi for take-off, Virginia Woolf’s ‘Professions for Women’, written in 1931, a human life time ago. It’s a brilliant essay, but she’s reading the same sentence over and over. Something about Woolf’s difficulties with sex and the body. ‘Telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet …’

Roaring down the runway!

And, as ever, part of Angela thrills to the speed as, at the last moment, the bullet full of people noses up, up, into the air. She’s flying!

And a thought out of nowhere floats across the cabin, light as a mosquito, and lands, invisibly, on her: if I’d met Woolf, if she had met me, on the same loop of the ribbon of spacetime, what would she have thought of me?

Would she have — liked me?

— Would I like her?

Charged with electricity, the thought darts onward.

Around them, around all the silver planes in this part of the air, lying this way and that below the stratosphere like so many unmagnetised iron filings, the weather systems surge, gigantic, careless, throwing off sparks from tremendous anvils fifty thousand feet up. Most jets fly at thirty-five thousand feet, so everyone’s under the cosh. The pilots are not so much tense as alert.

The chief steward of Angela’s flight is chatting to the pretty new flight attendant as she does her checks. He’s stimulated by her frightened eyes with their brown Bambi lashes. ‘There’s no danger from lightning as you know,’ he tells Neela, trying not to look too directly at her breasts. ‘The fuselage acts like a giant Faraday cage.’ Her pupils are blank, unfocused, she has no idea what he’s talking about. ‘If we take a strike, which we won’t, it would exit near the static wicks on the wings.’ ‘Wicks,’ she says, clutching at his words, ‘on the wings,’ and she sets down her pen very carefully. ‘There was something about that in the training sessions,’ but she’s thinking the wicks of candles, burning, blazing, if it happens, I hope I’ll be brave .

Still climbing.

Everyone’s hoping they’ll break into sunlight soon, but they don’t. They continue to shudder through cloud, and the seat belt signs remain on. Outside the window, the streaming greys are uneasy, with distant flickers that may not be flickers at all, they hope, just minute changes of light or viewpoint.

Some haul the Safety Instructions from the pouch in front of them and stare at the cracked plastic with pictures of blank little humans doing the right thing and surviving. It doesn’t show what to do if there’s lightning.

A loud creak and all the video screens come down from the roof of the cabin, stay blank, go back up. Uneasy laughter. It happens again. They laugh less, look around, not long enough to meet other eyes. Have the plane’s electrics gone wrong?

For some reason, Angela is thinking of Edward. Gerda and Edward. They have been the twin pillars of her world, but now it’s all up in the air.

Then the PA crackles into action. ‘Will everyone please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened.’ The pilot’s voice sounds urgent. ‘We are about to go through a period of turbulence.’

Now the plane starts to jerk like a conker on a string. There’s a loud crack, some enormous force that’s indifferent to them, they are tiny and nothing and someone is sobbing.

All bets are off: Neela screams as the plane falls through space-time: thoughts collide,

Mum told me not to do this job

Edward Gerda love

Virginia Woolf goes flying through the air

and lands somewhere else entirely

Yes, it’s begun.

VIRGINIA

Suddenly there’s time again; & I’m in it.

Plenty of time.

(Is there? — or just a bright gap in the night of unknowing?)

I spent … seven, eight decades … in the dark — a normal lifetime.

And now I am here — am I? Back on the blade of the here & now.

Will I leave any mark when I write? Will this new world read me?

Its unending light, which they all take for granted, cuts orange slats in the blinds of my room at night. Past two, three, four in the morning, the light streams on, and my head strains away like a land-locked sea lion.

I used to live, long ago, in a low quiet house, which had darkness at night & smelled of the garden, lilacs & roses, cut grass, cheroots … Leonard. June nights: him safe in the house nearby. Bats & owls, my brain racing, sometimes, but often calm — knowing I was home. One doesn’t notice how sweet … (Who was it that said ‘Observe perpetually’?)

Somehow I slipped a century. Stones in my pockets weighted me down — I sank, bursting — Then nothing. So many years in the dark. It seems I was not forgotten.