Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Maggie Gee

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 thumbnails like the ones of her.

      ‘Why are they so small?’ she said. ‘I must see him!’

      Three of the six thumbnails showed them together. The first one I clicked on was a wedding photograph, sepia. She was so different! A full-bodied woman with a fresh, round face, looking slightly too hot, febrile, female, in an elaborate, patterned, ankle-length dress. A deep soft flounce over the bosom, and a wide-brimmed hat laden with flowers. But under the half-veil across the forehead, two large, naked, pale-lashed eyes gazed off to the side away from Leonard, a narrow youth with thin sloping shoulders and a full, melancholy mouth like hers. He did not look like a jubilant bridegroom. I call him a youth, but he did not look young. I had never realised he had jet-black hair – in the photos I knew, he looked grey and dusty. Virginia was larger and heavier than him! Such a weight of worry he was taking on … yet everyone said he was deeply in love. And there was her mouth – that sensual mouth, hard to attach to someone virginal.

      And because I had read the biographies, which told us more than anyone should know about another human being unless they are their parent, sibling, child, I knew what years were to follow the wedding – descents into madness, violence, depression. Her new husband struggling to cope.

      (She was also saner than anyone. The cool intelligence of most of the Diaries. Pages bubbling with happiness.)

      Virginia gave a small ‘Oh’ of longing. Old, she reached out, and touched the screen, the space where they were alive and young, illuminated in my machine, the time capsule I took for granted.

      They looked so alive, but they were unresponsive, the sepia couple who long ago were totally taken up by their moment.

      She pressed the screen and I pulled her back.

      ‘Will it move?’ she said. ‘Can you make us move?’

      ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s not like that. It’s what it is. It can’t be changed.’

      ‘I wondered … if it could be changed.’

      She wasn’t just talking about the image. She knew too well what lay in their future.

      I said, as gently as I could, ‘Would you like to look at the other photos?’

      Leonard alone. He was forty years older. His long thin face engraved with lines. Those eyes, intelligent, used to sorrow, deep-set under strong grey eyebrows. And the mouth still full, a young man’s mouth – a foreign face, not an English face, that was my instinctive judgement. But that was how Bloomsbury thought of him: ‘Virginia’s marrying the Jew.’ Both a joke and not a joke.

      ‘Mongoose,’ she said, almost inaudible.

      This time I refrained from showing knowledge. What would she have thought if I answered ‘Mandril’? His name for her. His beloved baboon.

      I knew too much, we knew too much. Their secret bestiary of names.

      ‘It’s enough,’ she said, and turned away. ‘Perhaps you would save that page number?’ Her back was rigid, her voice formal.

      ‘Mrs Woolf, it would be an honour.’ I didn’t correct her idea of the computer. ‘I can find it for you whenever you want.’

      ‘Please,’ СКАЧАТЬ