Читать книгу Virginia Woolf in Manhattan - Maggie Gee - Страница 9

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ANGELA

I loved my life: I was in the thick of it. Things I had earned by writing my books. Yes, I’ve earned them, and I enjoy them. Films, travel, clothes, chocolate. I loved my daughter – I love my daughter. (It seems a long time since I emailed her.)

I love good food, and taking out money, nice thick chunks of it out of the wall. And no, I don’t have to feel defensive. My parents were poor, and my mother couldn’t cook. I like the sunny side of the street, because when I was a child, days were darker. When I was a child I was often afraid. And of course, more recently, problems with Edward. Eco-heroes are hard to live with.

It was more a question of living without. Edward was on an expedition to the Arctic, financed by a cat’s cradle of grants. I hadn’t wanted him to go. There were a series of explosive rows before he went. I told him, if he was leaving me, he needn’t bother coming back.

I hadn’t expected to be alone. But who wants to be with the wrong person? I knew my life was about to get better.

And so I paused before pushing onward. A dark smudge on the event horizon. Something brief as a fin surfacing.

(Because reading Virginia Woolf isn’t simple. I love her, but parts of her make me shiver. And sometimes – yes – she creeps into my head, a pale bony version of the woman she was, and she’s pointing to places I’ve never been, tunnelling away from air and sunshine. Although of course she can be very funny.)

In that instant the universe split, and I was sucked into this particular story.

There she was, white, in front of me.

‘Virginia?’ I sighed, a second time.