‘Morning, Virginia,’ I croaked. ‘Would you like me to run a bath for you? A nice hot bath, you know, before breakfast?’
VIRGINIA
She talked to me as if I were a child. Quite soon I found she was obsessed with bathing. She seemed to do it nearly every day! Perhaps she perspired more than normal.
Ignoring her was the best policy.
ANGELA
She turned, briefly, from her brown study. ‘The towers,’ she said. ‘So beautiful.’
She breakfasted quite docilely on toast, staring round the room at the other guests and for the most part ignoring me, but once she had finished, she became impatient. We got back to the room and she went to the cupboard and without a by-your-leave, started to put on my blue coat. My blue coat. The coat I loved.
‘Virginia, I’m not ready yet. Also, you won’t need the coat today. It’s not that cold. I will put it back for you.’
I needed to do a little research before we set out to make ourselves rich. I switched on my laptop. The room was so small I had been forced to put it on the dressing table. Writing is the space where we try to escape our real-life names, our familiar faces – but here I was forced to stare in the mirror.
That day, however, it was an advantage. I used the mirror to keep an eye on Virginia.
(What if she suddenly tried to climb out of the window? I had only just got her, I mustn’t lose her – though part of me already longed to be free. The physical presence of the twentieth-century’s greatest female literary icon, with her faint sour smell of earth and pondweed, wasn’t so easy to get used to.)
I could see her sifting through my things, lifting and fingering my possessions. Death seemed to have removed her inhibitions. I understood, but it made me feel anxious. Would she judge me by my reading matter? Eminent Victorians would make the grade, but what would she think of my bedtime reading, snatched up at the airport to help me sleep? The OK! Special on Jordan’s surgery, ‘Step-by-step: How Jordan Remade her Body?’ I supposed she would scarcely understand it. But no, she was leafing through it fascinated, chuckling from time to time. ‘Do you like pornography?’ she asked. ‘In my day, one would have hidden it.’
‘It’s not pornography, Virginia.’
She waved a photo at me triumphantly: Jordan’s gigantic, conical breasts.
‘No, Virginia, it’s normal. Women just make their breasts bigger.’
‘Women make their breasts bigger? What do you mean? Have you made your breasts bigger?’ She came round to stare at my chest, avid.
‘No, Virginia, certainly not, I really can’t explain this now.’
My life had become her research project, a kind of reverse archaeological dig. I tried to ignore her and get on with my mission.
Now she had dropped OK! on the floor and was stood transfixed by the window again, staring out at the bright buildings, their white cliffs pitted with thousands of windows. Her wattled neck smoothed out like a heron’s as she peered over at the street below. Then she hunched her chin upon her chest and squeezed her forehead against the glass. Urgent, anxious, inquisitive; a monkey, now, pressed against the bars. She was full of new, restless life, making sounds, low hungry murmurs.
I googled ‘rare books Manhattan’.
But there she was, peering over my shoulder, her shadow darkening the screen. ‘What kind of typewriter is that?’ she asked. ‘May I?’
Before I could stop her she was pressing the keys, her heavy arms displacing mine, that cloying odour of weeds again, pale lizard fingers slow and clumsy – I tried to remember, had she always written longhand? Yes, but she had typeset for the Hogarth Press. She was supposed to be good at that. The comfort of metal letters in rows.
The text in Google was gibberish. Maybe Leonard corrected everything. She threw her arms up in frustration, long heavy wings of an albatross.
‘These keys don’t work. Where is the paper?’
‘There is no paper, Virginia.’
‘How can it work without paper?’
She looked at me, stubbornly uncomprehending, then pounced on the tiny hotel pad which lay by the TV remote control. ‘This is the paper. But where does it go?’
‘It doesn’t. Writers don’t write on paper.’
‘There cannot be a world without paper.’
‘Well there is still paper, but’ – I tapped the machine – ‘not here.’
We stared at each other across chasms of time. ‘I promise I will explain later.’
But she sat there on the bed, directly behind me, watching every move with distrustful eyes, as I clicked on the website of Goldstein & Sons. Rare books, Madison Avenue. Pictures of a book-filled gallery came up.
‘So the film you are watching is connected to the keyboard?’
‘It isn’t a film, Virginia.’
‘We had cinema, you know, in our day. Leonard and I were fond of films. I am perfectly acquainted with cinema.’
‘Virginia, it isn’t cinema.’
‘It’s this stick that makes those pictures, is it not?’And before I could stop her she had snatched the TV remote control that lay by the pad and was pressing buttons at random.
And then the yellow room became bedlam, for the TV suddenly blasted out full volume, and it was the news from Afghanistan, a deafening stutter of machine-gun bullets, the dead booms of bombs exploding, buildings black against crackling orange, and she made a choking, inchoate noise and in her panic must have pressed again, for now we were watching a black-and-white Second World War film, and planes were whining down overhead, a swarm of planes with Nazi markings, and I heard a howl, she was actually howling. I wrestled the controller away from her, and the room was quiet as death again, except for the traffic and her breath, tearing.
‘Virginia? Are you all right?’
She crouched in a corner by the door, a tangled, darkened, thing from the river, her elbows raised to protect her head. It took twenty minutes to comfort her.
I had to explain it, bit by bit. I showed her the TV, I showed her the remote, but I saw she couldn’t take it in. I went to the bathroom, leaving her alone, and came back to find her peering round the back of the laptop, her hand exploring the reverse of the screen.
‘Virginia, what are you looking for?’
‘The opening for paper to come through.’
‘I said, no paper.’ I had to distract her. ‘But look, we’ll do an internet search on you.’
I typed ‘Virginia Woolf’, and then showed her the figures – 5,900,000 hits.
‘That means nearly 6 million references to you. And look, those are just some of the pictures.’ I showed her a jewel-like line of images.
She stared away into the middle distance, her eyes sharp and then unfocused. ‘So really, this is a kind of book? And this keyboard is to search the index?’
‘In a way,’ I said. ‘Look, it shuts like a book.’ And I made to close the lid, but her hand stopped me.
‘Leonard,’ she said. ‘Is he in your book? Will you type “Leonard Woolf” into the index?’
I did. ‘One million three hundred and eighty thousand hits’, I said. ‘That means, nearly one and a half million references. And look, there are the pictures again.’ A line of bright