Virginia Woolf in Manhattan Read online

  VIRGINIA WOOLF IN MANHATTAN

  ALSO BY MAGGIE GEE

  Novels

  Dying in Other Words

  The Burning Book

  Light Years

  Grace

  Where Are the Snows

  Lost Children

  The Ice People

  The White Family

  The Flood

  My Cleaner

  My Driver

  Short Stories

  The Blue

  Memoir

  My Animal Life

  MAGGIE GEE

  Virginia Woolf

  in

  Manhattan

  TELEGRAM

  For Mine Özyurt Kιlιč, with love, and for my friends in Istanbul

  PART ONE

  London-New York

  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.

  1

  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 ga
rden, 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.

  Someone longed for me, here in New York where I never went – someone hungered, and hauled me back up, protesting, yanked me through hedges & gates of dreams, and untidy, sleepy, stunned, I was suddenly half-awake in Manhattan, Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, and it is – can it be, really? – the twenty-first century. You see, I wanted –

  ANGELA

  I wanted to sound up to date, that was all. Because my Istanbul paper was called ‘Virginia Woolf: A Long Shadow’, and I decided to look at the primary sources. I’d forgotten a lot since I first read her. So I booked a last minute package to New York, where Woolf’s manuscripts are kept.

  She did mean so much to me back when I started. Yes, she was a talisman.

  Something more fundamental than the paper. Where was my life, and my writing, going? I thought it might help to be close to her.

  Perhaps I should begin with my daughter. (V. never had children, of course. There I’ve done better.) Gerda is thirteen. I have kept her alive! And she’s newly away at school. A rather good one, Bendham Abbey, though no-one in my family had ever been to public school before. Hard, very hard for me, sending her away, and Edward protested … don’t think about that. Second term, Gerda would be fine. Mobiles were banned – it’s archaic, but apparently, problems with theft, concentration in lessons. I told her we could email every day …

  -ish. So that was fine. In theory.

  Of course, I am busy, as I explained to Gerda.

  Odd thing – Virginia’s the quintessential English writer – but there they all are, in the New York Public Library, all those famous manuscripts, Orlando, The Waves, To the Lighthouse. In the Berg Collection, the dim red leather comfort of the Berg.

  I suppose in the UK I’ve got used to being treated with a certain – not deference, no, but people have been nice to me, since I won the Iceland Prize. And the Apple Martini Prize. My name has become quite well-known. The Apple Martini shifts a lot of books, and actually made me money. Me and Gerda and Edward, that is. Holidays in Egypt, Australia, Jamaica. A new, better house. I’m a success. Success, success, that shiny slippery word, which I hope will never slip away from me.

  Once people I met on planes or trains would ask ‘Will I have heard of you?’ and I would say, ‘Probably not.’ But now they say, with a dawning smile, ‘Oh yes, you’re quite famous, aren’t you?’, and ask if I’m going to write about them, and I smile at them politely, thinking ‘Not a chance.’ Then they ask me if I know JK Rowling, and I say ‘I met her at a party once, but really she was talking to Philip Pullman,’ and honestly, they still get quite excited.

  I am successful, and I’m still quite young. Though not as young as I used to be.

  VIRGINIA

  She ran after me as if I were a brigand. Once I saw it was a middle-aged woman, I let myself be caught. But it unsettled me, the way she said my name. Not ‘Mrs Woolf’, ‘Virginia’.

  She knew my name.

  ANGELA

  To be honest, in New York my name means very little. Whereas Virginia Woolf was huge here in her lifetime – New York Herald Tribune No 1 best-seller with The Years, on the cover of Time magazine, etc. And afterwards, she did cast a long shadow.

  Growing bigger and deeper in the seventies and eighties as all the other women were eclipsed. On every university women’s studies literature course, first and dead centre: Virginia Woolf and this, Virginia Woolf and that, Virginia Woolf and the also-rans. She’s special, clearly, but all the same – isn’t it just easier to fetishise one person? Then you don’t have to think about the rest.

  I’m certainly not jealous.

  In her best work, she wrote for everyone. The clarity, the astonishing reach, the perception.

  VIRGINIA

  When I died I thought I was almost forgotten, gone.

  ANGELA

  So this is what happened, as I understand it. (Only Gerda will believe me. She stares right through me with those pale blue eyes half-hidden by long thin red-blonde lashes, and then she shivers and hugs herself and says, sing-song, ‘Re-ally, Mummy?’ Gerda was raised on fairytales.)

  New York. No pickup at the airport. When I called the hotel to remonstrate, they said there was no record that the plane had landed. Sleepless night, glaring orange hotel sign outside my window. Everything felt frazzled and burnt out. Yet underneath, something itching, energetic.

  I slept. And woke: to a new beginning.

  A new day, after all, in New York! One of my favourite things, a New York morning. So what if the breakfast room was overcrowded? A fat man shouldered his way out and I nipped into his seat by the window. Sun on my eggs. Outside, the wide street streaming with purpose. I’m a positive person, it’s one of my virtues – Edward was a bit of a moaner. The gorgeous light scored straight to the park. The hotel was a dump, but near Central Park.

  I love it all. The skating rink, the joggers, the lake, the spring trees, that delicate yellow – the zoo. Oh yes, I love the zoo. It’s a play zoo, really, tiny and lovely. Monkeys, bears, in the heart of the city, so alien and mysterious. Alive in the moment, so different from us.

  But first of all: work to do. Off to the New York Public Library.

  (Inside, part of me was still shaking. I’d felt shallow or hollow, ever since that terrible blaze of white light.)

  The woman in charge of the private Berg Collection where the Woolf manuscripts are kept gave me an oblong yellow reader’s card: ‘ANGELA LAMB is hereby admitted to the BERG COLLECTION (Room 320) for research on VIRGINIA WOOLF. This card is good through 27 NOV 2020 unless revoked.’ I like membership cards. They make me feel entitled. I haven’t always felt that way.

  Virginia, of course, was born entitled. But part of me is still the daughter of Lorna and Henry, born in Wolverhampton.

  Statutory humblings. Abandon your coat, your briefcase, your camera, your pens, your phone before you can enter. I didn’t mind. I was excited. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on her!

  Then the librarian explained.

  There’s a rule that only applies to Woolf, because she is so valuable: no original manuscript material can be accessed. ‘I’m afraid you have to read her on microfilm.’ But it’s hardly the same, is it? She hasn’t breathed on that film, or used it, or touched it.

  I was muttering furiously under my breath, head down because I didn’t want to be evicted from this submarine, cosy, womb-of-a-room where only the two librarians and I were working. At least I was near those manuscripts. At least I sat two feet away from the heavy glass case where the walking stick she carried on that final day was lurking, a horrible thing of dark, hooked cane. It looked – cursed. I’m allergic to suicide. And yet, it was a link to her.

  Who has more right than me to read her?

  All the senseless ‘No’s of my life jostled and surged in my head as I sat there. Virginia, I thought, Virginia, I crossed an ocean to get close to you. Can’t they let me reach you somehow? I sat there and longed: for her elegant angular writing, her amused, classic face. English! She was English, but these rich Americans had filched her!

  Then the pleasant girl brought me one article, a strange piece Woolf had written for Hearst Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1938, a carbon copy on thin onion-skin paper, with a few corrections in ink. The title was ‘America which I have never seen interests me most in the cosmopolitan world of today’.

  And at once I was enjoying the dance. ‘Cars drive sixty or seventy abreast,’ she assures us (though she never went there!). ‘While we have shadows that walk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them, which is the future.’ I was smiling as I read. I’ll take you
home to Europe, I silently promised, if I can get to you I’ll slip you in my bag and take you back to Sussex, to Leonard, to Lewes …

  Perhaps I had spoken aloud – ‘I’ll take you back to Leonard, to Lewes’ – for one of the librarians was staring at me fixedly.

  Or not at me. No, behind me.

  I heard, or half-heard, a croaking sound. Half-human. Distressed. Straining. And I turned in my chair. And saw.

  VIRGINIA

  Did I hear ‘Leonard’? Did I say ‘Leonard’? Can I now even remember how it was?

  Suddenly from nothing

  was I something again?

  My own voice waking me from too far away –

  hearing my own voice rather deep and tremulous, I thought & almost – old –

  (for inside I was still young, a girl, when I died)

  I followed it up

  from the depths of cold watery sleep

  into the warmth of a small dim room I did not know

  a woman breathing as she read, lips half-moving, very serious,

  a sigh a small smile

  She was reading me with such strong desire and I wondered

  ‘Who is she?’

  she has blonde hair but she is not young

  I am on the threshold I’m too tired I don’t know

  a fish jerking it’s me that she’s reading yes, it’s my soul it’s me –

  And she reeled me in, hauled me up. A strain like a tooth being pulled.

  ANGELA

  This woman. This strange woman. That was all I thought. Tall and dusty in bedraggled green and grey clothes. A suit. The librarian said, ‘Excuse me. May I help you?’ Then closed in on her like a gaoler.

  VIRGINIA

  Stirring and gathering myself too late to go back –