For the first time I felt this writer who came from the future was pleased with me. Pleased with the real Virginia, not the dead Virginia she knew from the writing.
I was not my everyday self in my novels, because they rarely allowed me to be funny.
In life I was always hooting with laughter, people were ridiculous, life was absurd. And so was I, and Nessa, and Leonard, and all my loves, Lytton, Ottoline, Roger, old Ethel Smyth like a charging shire-horse …
Of course I was myself in my diaries, but they were my secret, and never published. By now they are destroyed – I asked Leonard to do it. He would never reveal me to the eyes of others.
The diaries were the place where I laughed, and examined myself, and found myself and others wanting. And learned my craft. Most days I wrote something. Except when the shadow came upon me, and even then, I tried to track it, tried to record my fight to stay sane. Hundreds of thousands of words I wrote.
Was it a waste, since no-one ever saw them? There in the diaries, I captured my world. The texture of the hours and minutes: the shining lawns between day and darkness.
Sadness brushes me – lost, forever.
Would I re-read it if I could?
No, no time, I am a new person. When I’m less tired, I will write all this newness (I’ve tried, as it happens, a couple of times, and I don’t want to upset Angela by complaining, but the pens she bought from that huckster are useless.)
‘We’re changing our hotel,’ Angela announced. ‘You have no need to economise, and I’m only at the Waddington by accident. I suggest a little place called the Wordsmiths Hotel. Though I’ve only got four days left in New York.’
She only had four days left in New York!
I thought, what will happen after she’s gone? Will she take me with her? Where is she going? What will happen about the money?
Wherever she goes, I must go.