Читать книгу Virginia Woolf in Manhattan - Maggie Gee - Страница 19

12

VIRGINIA

I suppose he had to identify me.

Did the horror of that start to eat my face? Did the sight erase poor Leonard’s memory of what he once thought beautiful?

Wracked on the bed, I remembered my crime.

ANGELA

She was pale as wax, and sat there trembling.

‘Mrs Woolf? Virginia?’

She shook her head, again and again, like a dog shaking water away.

VIRGINIA

‘I don’t know you. Why are you here? Why won’t you let me use your phone?’

ANGELA

Her breath rasped like an old man’s.

‘It’s the twenty-first century. Some way through. My name – I’ve told you several times – is Angela Lamb. And I’m alive. It feels to me as if we’re both alive. But Leonard – well, he died long ago. You can’t call him. I’m so sorry.’

She stared back at me, blind with anger. Her hand still stretched towards the phone.

I spoke more brutally than I intended. ‘The world you knew is – everything’s gone.’

‘Gone? What are you talking about?’ But her arm drew back, her shoulders bowed.

For a minute she sat there saying nothing, kneading the bed-cover with big white hands. She looked – epic. I will never forget it. I did feel pity, but also … the writer in me was trying to record it. How could I ever describe this moment?

I was there. I was – chosen to see it. Somehow I had to find the words.

The tears began to roll down her face, bright ropes of water on her dry white skin. She cupped her hands, and her head dropped into them. The clever long skull with its silver hair. She sat, a dead weight. A broken statue. A water-streaked monument on a stained bed, in the wrong room, in the wrong century.

I was there, myself, with Virginia Woolf. Later, much later, I am writing it down.

Neither of us spoke for a long time.

‘I know this is hard. I’m so sorry to tell you … But you see – we’re in the twenty-first century. Leonard would be what, well over a hundred. He had his life. It did continue. After you – ’

And there I fell silent. ‘I mean. It’s seven or eight decades since you – ’

But I couldn’t say to her ‘since you died’. I couldn’t say ‘since you killed yourself’. That phrase is an impossibility. It can never be said between two human beings.

We sat there, two tall, solid women in a room that felt too small for us, a banal, real, insect-sprayed room in Manhattan where no-one cared if they poisoned the guests so long as the bed-bugs didn’t survive, and the radiator hummed, and the traffic roared, and everything was as real as this table.

I knew too much, and she too little. By suicide, she had lost the right to know about the man she loved. She had turned her back, gone on alone.

(A stab of pain. Was it what I had done? The last thing I’d shouted as he strode down the hall: ‘Don’t come back. Don’t bother to phone.’ And then he didn’t. He didn’t phone. He thought I meant it. He was a man. I dragged my thoughts away from Edward.)

I, a mere stranger, knew more than Virginia. That Leonard had managed to write again, loved again, been happy again.

I thought: I can’t tell her he was happy.

(And what if Edward is happy again? What if he has another woman?)

‘I say, Virginia – Mrs Woolf – let’s go out, before it gets cold.’

VIRGINIA (angrily wiping her face on her sleeve)

‘It’s all my fault. I left him alone. I thought he would be able to work, without me …’

ANGELA

‘This is too much for you. And me! You like walking, don’t you? I need some air. Perhaps you would come for a walk with me?’

VIRGINIA

‘I must go home. I need to go home.’

ANGELA

Desperation makes you creative. ‘The zoo. There’s a zoo. You would like the zoo. A zoo in the park you caught a glimpse of. Central Park. It’s beautiful.’

VIRGINIA (pulling herself together)

‘Of course I have heard of Central Park.’

ANGELA

‘Would that be – agreeable?’

She gave an almost imperceptible nod.

VIRGINIA

‘Better than staying here, I suppose.’

ANGELA

‘That’s settled, then. Rest, then a walk. First I need the bathroom. Oh, perhaps you need the bathroom?’

VIRGINIA (coldly)

‘I bathe in the morning.’

ANGELA

‘Lavatory. Closet. Oh, I don’t know. I will leave you to it.’

I couldn’t bear to be inches away when Virginia Woolf was – no, impossible. I took my phone out into the corridor. It was ridiculous, of course.

(For several days that’s what I did, and for my own needs ran down to the lobby and queued behind the departing guests, tripping over their long mule-trains of baggage.)

When I came back, she was emerging from the bathroom. ‘All right?’ I said. ‘You – push down the handle.’

She looked at me, indignant. ‘I’m used to water closets,’ she said. ‘We had one installed at Monk’s House. Yours is rather … elaborate, of course.’ I glimpsed something scarily like contempt, and banned myself from noticing.

‘Virginia, you’ll need a coat.’

Now I was glad I’d brought too many clothes, with a view to impressing American men (small chance of that with her in tow.) I beckoned her over to look in the wardrobe and indicated my second favourite, a smart narrow coat of merino wool, black and slick as a liquorice stick. She shook her head.

No, she was stroking, with her long, sensuous, lingering fingers, my favourite Stella Maris trench coat, beautifully, generously cut from blue mohair. The yoke floated out like a sail at sea. It had sharp reveres and an indigo belt, such a beautiful belt of shiny blue snakeskin, no-one should wear that coat but me …

I never learned to say ‘No’ to her.

Soon we were tensed on the brink of the street. I caught our reflections in the lobby mirror. I was sombre, invisible beside my companion, the ivory oval of her face suspended over her long blue body, fabulously winged like a Morpho butterfly. Everyone turned to stare at her.

(She couldn’t have done without me, though.)