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.
It
