Virginia Woolf in Manhattan. Maggie Gee

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СКАЧАТЬ Who has more right than me to read her?

      All the senseless ‘No’s of my life jostled and surged in my head as I sat there. Virginia, I thought, Virginia, I crossed an ocean to get close to you. Can’t they let me reach you somehow? I sat there and longed: for her elegant angular writing, her amused, classic face. English! She was English, but these rich Americans had filched her!

      Then the pleasant girl brought me one article, a strange piece Woolf had written for Hearst Magazine and Cosmopolitan in 1938, a carbon copy on thin onion-skin paper, with a few corrections in ink. The title was ‘America which I have never seen interests me most in the cosmopolitan world of today’.

      And at once I was enjoying the dance. ‘Cars drive sixty or seventy abreast,’ she assures us (though she never went there!). ‘While we have shadows that walk behind us, they have a light that dances in front of them, which is the future.’ I was smiling as I read. I’ll take you home to Europe, I silently promised, if I can get to you I’ll slip you in my bag and take you back to Sussex, to Leonard, to Lewes …

      Perhaps I had spoken aloud – ‘I’ll take you back to Leonard, to Lewes’ – for one of the librarians was staring at me fixedly.

      Or not at me. No, behind me.

      I heard, or half-heard, a croaking sound. Half-human. Distressed. Straining. And I turned in my chair. And saw.

      VIRGINIA

      Did I hear ‘Leonard’? Did I say ‘Leonard’? Can I now even

      remember how it was?

      Suddenly from nothing

      was I something again?

      My own voice waking me from too far away –

      hearing my own voice rather deep and tremulous, I thought

      & almost – old –

      (for inside I was still young, a girl, when I died)

      I followed it up

      from the depths of cold watery sleep

      into the warmth of a small dim room I did not know

      a woman breathing as she read, lips half-moving, very serious,

      a sigh a small smile

      She was reading me with such strong desire and I wondered

      ‘Who is she?’

       she has blonde hair but she is not young

       I am on the threshold I’m too tired I don’t know

       a fish jerking it’s me that she’s reading yes, it’s my soul

      it’s me –

      And she reeled me in, hauled me up. A strain like a tooth being pulled.

      ANGELA

      This woman. This strange woman. That was all I thought. Tall and dusty in bedraggled green and grey clothes. A suit. The librarian said, ‘Excuse me. May I help you?’Then closed in on her like a gaoler.

      VIRGINIA

      Stirring and gathering myself too late to go back –

      an ache coming together

      puckering a long fall of satin curtain

      a wavering

      a pulling together not wanting

      to be seen

      exposed

      her eyes, their eyes

      but oh –

      the waking of the light

      in the dark so long lost in my own crushed rib-cage

      weighted with mud and slime though dying was no

      worse than the terror nothing

      is worse than the terror

      Here, I am suddenly here.

      Warm wood. Women. Electric lights. A strange room.

      Two books in my hands. Yes, they’re mine. Hold them close to my body, hide them. Mine.

      And, as if new-born, no fear. Was it over?

      ANGELA

      Almost before I knew what was happening, she was gone. In a pincer movement, two librarians hustled her out of the door. ‘If you don’t have a need for access to original material …’ one was saying, and the strange woman gaped like a fish, while the other librarian intoned, ‘The librarians in the open reading rooms will be happy to help you.’

      The door swung shut. There followed a hubbub of librarian excitement, which is quiet, but the first words I could make out were ‘Who was THAT?’

      And as soon as I heard it as a question, I knew the answer, and made for the door.

      Out on the landing, a gaggle of Japanese tourists with cameras, a big-nosed man in a red woollen hat – but not her. So I ran down the stairs, and there, on the last flight but one, by a seat where a black boy in shades was sleeping, there she stood, yes it was her. A tall angular shape from the back, not going forward, hovering, leaning, like a tall-masted sailing ship. Her white fingers trailing on the balustrade, then touching two books, which she clutched to her ribs, shyly, as if in wonderment.

      My breath caught. I slowed down, and came to her step by step.

      Step

      by

      step.

      I was afraid. I kept walking, I drew abreast.

      I was any fan, any groupie, suddenly. I could see her face. Her great globes of eyes, darting down, away: hunted.

      Perhaps I should have left her. But how could I have let her stumble out on to the streets of Manhattan on her own?

      I had to say: ‘Virginia?’

      VIRGINIA

      She said my name, that first time, as if I belonged to her. They shan’t have me! She said ‘Virginia?’ and I was off like a hare. There were red ropes, I went the wrong way, a man in uniform stopped me & asked to look at ‘those books’, I had two of my own & he looked at me hard and said ‘Ma’am, are these from the library?’ – but I said ‘No’ & rushed on, with her after me. And then –

      ANGELA

      Half of me was laughing, half of me was shivering, nothing like this had ever happened, not to me. But I couldn’t let her go.

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