Virginia Woolf in Manhattan (17 page)

I thought I would push it a little further. ‘Have you read her yourself?’

‘Oh yes, I’ve read her.’ His voice was charming, educated, light. My liking for him grew apace.

‘She’s taught on university courses?’

‘Yes.’ He was giving me everything I asked for – except, of course, the actual books. But the bookstore was Italian, they specialised.

I should have left it at that, and we’d have been ahead. But because I was in charge of Virginia’s possessions, the gloves and umbrella she handed to me (though I too am absent-minded! I too am a writer! Usually, others look after
me
), I had stopped to stuff them safely in my hold-all, which delayed me enough for one more bit of conversation. Three floors up, I heard her feet coming down, her large feet in the metal-tipped shoes that must have been standard in her day.

The young man said, with gathering confidence, ‘I associate her poetry with Sylvia Plath.’

‘With Sylvia Plath?’ I said, puzzled. ‘Her poems?’

‘Yes, I suppose because they’re both a little dark. Woolf’s poems are dark, wouldn’t you say?’

Dark, not to say unknown, I thought, but I just smiled and nodded, and the feet clumped nearer, and she was suddenly
right with us, Virginia Woolf, solidly real, smiling, clutching a carrier-bag of her books, the real author, back from the dead. Back from the mists of oblivion which swirled around us even here, blurring the angles of names and faces, unpicking carefully-worked sentences and knitting them all into a matte of grey weed. Sucking us all into a vast indifference, where Plath and Woolf could be confused, two strange women who killed themselves.

‘Do you have anything by Angela Lamb?’ I asked suddenly. Yes, I had been self-denying, I’d only thought of Virginia, but at the last moment, my ego woke.

Polite puzzlement: the expression I dreaded. ‘English novelist, contemporary, winner of the Iceland Prize,’ I gabbled. ‘She isn’t so well-known over here.’ (I said that because Virginia was listening.)

‘L-A-M-B?’ he asked. He pretended to look on the computer. ‘No, I’m afraid we must have sold the last copy.’ He smiled at me and in his expression I read the faintest hint of pity. How many other authors went into bookshops and innocently asked for their own work?

I saw Virginia was watching me. In those luminous eyes, mixed emotions. She was sorry for me, that I could see, but there was also a fleeting look of triumph she didn’t entirely manage to hide, a quirk of the lip, the briefest smirk. I didn’t even hate her for it. We were trodden like grapes, we went down into mulch, only a few names got on to the wine-bottles.

I couldn’t bear to meet her gaze. ‘Come along, Virginia.’

Just as we were going through the door, the nice young American voice hailed me. ‘Ma’am? I’ve found something here. Forthcoming. The paperback of
Lost Children
. By Angela Lamb. That was the name …? Says here it won the Caffe Nero Prize (we’re not familiar with that over here) and is the book of the upcoming movie. With Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. In
any case, we’ve got five copies on order. If you like, I will set one aside for you.’

I beamed upon him. Yes, exactly, Brad and Angelina, take that! Gerda had been insane with excitement, it seemed more about Angelina than Brad. Only I and a few other people knew that the film, in fact, was not a goer. Scripts one to four had all been crap. But I wasn’t going to spoil his illusions.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be in Turkey,’ I told him. ‘But really – you’ve been most helpful.’

Together we practically sailed down the street, ready for our drink at the Algonquin. We had both survived the waves of destruction!

I said, ‘Virginia, I’ll drink to you.’

(I tried to forget that before my reprieve I had felt a moment of temptation to tell Virginia that the assistant had confused her with an American poet …)

She said, ‘Angela, I’ll drink to
you
.’

40

Would she still be with the mad old woman? (Which is what I still thought Virginia was, because I hadn’t yet gone to my mother’s bookshelves and borrowed her books to read on the plane, in order to find more reasons to hate her.)

They were probably getting pissed together!

I’ve decided NEVER to drink wine. Mum gets Idiotic on wine, and talks a lot about herself. (Except when she’s with Dad; they just quarrel.) (Well, to be fair, they SOMETIMES quarrel, and now of course that’s the bit I remember. Sometimes it made them all lovey-dovey, and sometimes Mum could be quite funny, though I did not encourage her.)

All right, I couldn’t bring my dad home, but at least I had Mum’s address in New York, not that she gets any credit for that, when she said she and Virginia were moving I nagged her to tell me, in case I needed her, obviously, and she emailed back ‘Don’t be silly, Gerda, you are so wonderfully self-reliant! But you’ll like the name, it’s the Wordsmiths Hotel.’

Mum had the conference to go to, too. The diary said she would be back in a week, and obviously I couldn’t wait till then.

Staying in the house-which-was-once-my-home was like being the last bit of coke in a can. Poked back in the fridge, with the bubbles gone.

‘Self-reliant’. It sounds OK. A bit like ‘valiant’, a word I like. Everyone should rely on themselves. Nobody does that more than me (though this is an Assertion, not a Fact, as my
History teacher is always saying.) But it’s not enough to have ONLY yourself. My namesake, Gerda, in Hans Andersen, was helped by a lot of different people on her Great Journey Round the World to look for Kay (who despite his girl’s name, was a boy, of course. Cool for a girl to save a boy, but she still needed help from the Sorceress and the woman of Lapland and the woman of Finland and best of all, the Little Robber Maid, who kept a reindeer, and lent him to Gerda, and gave her berries, but stole her fur muff, and had a knife, oh the Little Robber Maid is TOTALLY cool. She is my favourite character.)

I have been self-reliant about going to New York. I booked my own ticket, I packed my bag, I printed off maps from the internet. Such a sensible city, so clear and straight! I went to New York once with my dad, when I was seven years old, and kept a diary, which I realise now is excellent, though when I was eight I thought it was pathetic. And although I don’t really remember it, there had been ages when he wasn’t at home, and I only vaguely knew I had a dad. Mum does remember and it makes her cross, when she feels like having a go at Dad. ‘You were never around when she was little.’ But then they fell in love again or something, and Dad came back from Denmark or wherever and lived with us, and of course I thought it would be for ever …

Still best of all was having Dad to myself, so I loved our trips, with Mum Not Nagging. And America was our first Big Adventure, so sometimes I replay it all in my head.

Dad bought me striped cutoffs and expensive rollerblades, which caused a row after we got back from New York because Mum insisted they were ‘dangerous’. (I love my dad. My dad is – my dad. He is always doing ‘dangerous’ things. And he took me to FAO Schwarz’s toyshop, even though it was ‘not ecological’, as Mum pointed out, which was mean of her.
And later she relented and let me go rollerblading, as soon as she saw I was good at it. She even got some herself, and fell over, and Dad said ‘You’re too old for that,’ and she went red in the face, and silent, though later she pretended she thought it was funny.)

I won’t go to FAO Schwarz this time, because I am almost too old for toys. I do remember it, though, being happy. Why must being happy make you sad?

Being with Dad was more exciting than anything, just on our own, har har on Mum, so I got all the treats, and Dad was mine. But we knew we’d go home, and Mum would be waiting, and she would hug us, and tell us off, and make us have baths and proper meals. We knew we would all be together again. And home was home. But that was then.

41

Oh, the Algonquin was marvellous. The silky calm after the blaring streets.

Yet, oh, the Algonquin made me sad!

I loved it as soon as we walked inside – it still had that feel of the 1930s. High ceilings, elegant lamps. Red, so red, with satin-striped armchairs and rose-patterned carpets. Cool and quiet.

Just a hint of the brothel about it; which, for writers, is appropriate.

This was the New York I might have visited with Leonard if we had said ‘yes’ to that vulgarian. The American woman who came to see us and offered to display us like monkeys in a cage. The money was extraordinary, so we listened. ‘You will give some talks and answer questions.’ I did admire her brazenness. The profit motive was all there was to it. She wanted to make money to buy more of the food and drink that had made her skin so shiny and pink, stretched tight over mounds of flesh.

I don’t know why I hated her.

She was a different kind of woman, one who made me feel … insubstantial. Both superior and inferior, for I couldn’t understand any world she lived in. (I was different now. I wanted to know.)

We said ‘No’ to her, so we never saw New York, though
every time I had a book published we sent over hundreds of special copies that I’d sat for hours patiently signing. I wouldn’t have bothered, but Leonard insisted. ‘America is an important market.’ He was practical, Leonard, as well as clever. If he were here, he would know what to do, I would not be dependent on her … But Angela tries to be kind to me.

The voices in the Algonquin were a low, polite murmur, and the music played in the same gentle register, so it took a few minutes to separate the two. We sat at a table at the back, in shadow.

As we got used to the dark, cream lilies bloomed like small pale faces from vases in corners. Writers met here, the Algonquin set; we knew about them in England of course. Dorothy Parker was a name on our horizon, a little danger behind my back like a wasp buzzing & fizzing at the window – but she was a journalist, not a real writer! – (I never strove to be a wit) – and the more friends urged me to read her stuff, the more I knew I never would. She was far too young! These clever young women … Hadn’t she been unhappy in love?

‘When did Dorothy Parker die?’ I asked Angela. I wanted to be sure.

‘Oh ages ago. Before I was born.’

‘Did she have children?’

‘I don’t think so.’

A tiny surge of satisfaction. ‘She was very funny, but she wasn’t happy?’

‘How would we know? She was really funny. And good, Virginia. Really good. I am surprised you never read her. She’s the only one whose name has survived. Of all that circle. She eclipsed them all.’

Ah, so Angela admired her. Why should I feel jealous? A thought struck me. ‘Did she – she didn’t – kill herself, did she?’

There was a half-hidden note of longing. She didn’t want to be the only one. It shocked me, but I told her the truth. ‘In the end she died of a heart attack. But you’re not far wrong. She tried four times.’

I pitied her then. To have gone through the horror. To try and fail so many times. I envied her, too, because she beat her Furies.

Now I knew she was dead, I wished I had read her. I no longer needed to be – jealous. The ugly thing I felt for Katherine Mansfield, and she’d died too, and I was sad.

And then I wanted to write about my feelings, as I had long ago when Katherine died. To wield the delicate tweezers of words; to pick up the sentiment ready for dissection; to hold myself under the pitiless light. That urge to write, the pleasure-muscles tensing …

Before they could move, the new fear pounced. The novel sense of helplessness. I had started to flinch away from the attempt, in case a series of accidents – yes, I was sure, they were just accidents – my weakened hand, the hopeless pen – should harden into a change of state. In case I could not – simply could not –

Like the young man who happens to fall; has another fall; so many excuses. So many good reasons why it should happen. But he falls again; he falls again. Until the inevitable diagnosis.

I dared not voice it to myself.

Could I survive, mute, diminished?

Each time I tried, the void had yawned. The paper seemed to eat my words. It stared at me: a terminal blankness.

Terror winked. I had to write. Don’t think about it, think about it, think.

(Was it because of my decades of silence? Had my voice dried, constricted?)

‘Dorothy Parker’s like you, Virginia. She’s survived as the others fade. In Britain, no-one still remembers, I don’t know, Marc Connelly or Robert Sherwood. Everyone knows Dorothy Parker.’

‘Maybe the others weren’t any good?’ I needed to believe it happened for a reason.

Yet, surely, Duncan and Roger had been good. That feeling of emptiness in the Met, the sense of bodies being washed downstream …

They can paint no more. Have no more chances.

‘Alice Duer Miller was part of the circle, a gifted poet, but she’s disappeared. I’m afraid it’s just what happens, Virginia. History has to simplify things. And someone vivid like Dorothy Parker – or you – well, you throw the rest into shadow.’

‘Vivid. Yes, I like that word.’

She thinks me vivid.

Yes, I was good.

There was nothing to be frightened of, then, was there? The small white faces, the Algonquin lilies, bloomed round the room, peering towards us, wanting to be with us. Longing to be vivid, out in the light, talking, writing, shining with luck, the luck we have.

Yes, I had everything, because I’d come back. That was the
luck. To be here in the moment …

But if I couldn’t … of course I could. I was a writer. Writers must write.

Something dislodged inside my brain. I looked at Angela, hating her. I must not hate her. I was slipping, falling …

‘I’m hungry,’ I said. ‘I’m thirsty, too. Will they bring us some, what do you call it, nibbles?’ (It was a vulgar word she used.)

‘Bring us some nibbles, waiter, please. And tea, Virginia? Or something stronger?’

‘Wine, please. I need a drink.’