and hold me under the green tangled water — but a voice in my head still whispered Leonard, a woman’s voice said how can I leave you?
Leonard, Leonard. Yes, again. Leonard my love. I can’t leave you.
But it was too late for him to save me. Or my dear sister who was so patient, with her stooping head and steady eyes.
Yes, it was true. I left him behind. I loved my husband but I left him behind, & slipped through the door where none can follow.
11
Two o’clock in the afternoon, though several lifetimes have slipped away. Two fragile organisms, blown together. Dandelion clocks on a dirty bedstead. Angela, Virginia.
She was washed downriver like a broken doll. He had to identify her three weeks later. Children thought she was a log in the water. They stoned it, hard, to make it sink. The happy bird-calls of adolescents. Then one boy realised it was a body.
Down in the street, the cold is beginning a slow fight-back against the spring heat-wave. The dark, repressed, pauses, alerted. Soon it will be able to creep back into the gullies. Then it will climb up the buildings again.
Angela looks around her and shivers. ‘Mrs Woolf, are you all right?’
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.
