Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Maggie Gee
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 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.
Someone longed for me, here in New York where I never went – someone hungered, and hauled me back up, protesting, dragged 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 NewYork 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