Serving Virginia. It was endless! I’d spent what seemed like hours on the phone trying to get Virginia a passport. Some proof of identity was bound to be needed once I was no longer on the scene to help her. She might decide to go back to Europe; in the long run she would need a bank account. I’d been dealing with the UK Borders Agency. When I saw the forms, I wanted to laugh. ‘Free for those born before 1928’ – if only we could reveal her real birth-date! ‘Purpose of your visit to the USA.’ I put ‘Tourist’. She was a tourist – a time tourist. I said (with truth) that her old passport was lost.
But no, the agency could not be appeased. They required documentary evidence that she existed. Stubbornly, blindly, the bureaucrats refused to believe in Virginia’s reality.
I wanted to go through the proper channels. But when I told Virginia, she arched her brows, and her eyes danced, and she said: ‘I think I will talk to my friends in the lobby. And one friend in particular. How much are we prepared to spend?’
(She has picked up the habit of sitting in the lobby and – what I can only call holding court. It seems they can’t get enough of her. Whereas I have had a basinful.)
Two days later she was laughing on the landing. I opened my door to see what was up. She was brandishing a red UK passport. ‘Look at this, it is REMARKABLE! I could leave tomorrow for Samarkand!’
I opened it. It was astoundingly good. Not a crease in the plastic over the photo. Virginia’s face, skilfully tinted. She said ‘They took the photo off the internet.’
‘Yes, Virginia. That’s all very well. But what will happen to the person who owned it? How did your friend get hold of this?’
‘Obviously it’s stolen, Angela. And then they adjusted some trifling details. One regrets the necessity, but there we are. You weren’t getting anywhere by being straitlaced.’
At least she had identification, of a kind. I went back to writing the list of things we could do together in my last few days.
(I’d asked her to jot down what she wanted to do, but nothing appeared on the piece of paper I put in front of her in the lobby, probably because she never stopped talking.)
‘She’s a riot,’ the oldest porter said to me as I stood waiting while she fetched her bag.
Yes, she could easily cause a riot.
Here is the plan I made for her.
1. Find Bloomsbury painters in New York galleries
2. Buy V.’s books from New York bookstores
3. Another walk in Central Park?
4. A drink in the Algonquin Hotel, where Dorothy Parker and her circle met
5. SEE STATUE OF LIBERTY
The sixth item only exists in my head.
6. Sort out what happens to V. after I go. Who can I find to look after her?
This question has become more urgent since Virginia started going out on her own. She’s been back to Bloomingdale’s and bought more clothes. I hypothesise that they were very expensive. A coat, yellow cashmere, the colour of sunlight. She sits in the lobby in various outfits, coral silk, turquoise shantung, topped this morning by a navy cartwheel straw hat of staggering dimensions.
I bought a hat. It’s almost a poem. A cloud-dark disk like a storm at sea. With a dotted veil like small bees blowing. Very satisfactory, yes.
10 AM in the lobby. We were meeting for items 1 and 2 on our list.
And there she was in her extravagant hat, perched like a blue and gold bird-of-paradise landed here from far away. She must have seen me raise my eyebrows. I didn’t mean to, but I never got used to her. At once she looked defensive, suddenly elderly, beak thrusting forward, awkward, anxious.
‘Virginia!’ I hope my tone wasn’t chiding. ‘I thought we were doing museums and bookshops this morning?’
‘I hope so.’
‘You seem to have dressed for a wedding.’
‘The hat is not appropriate?’
‘You look beautiful. Of course you do – ’ (she straightened up, she expanded, blossomed) – but, well, things have changed since the 1930s.’
‘When one went to galleries, one tried to look smart. We tried to look smart,’ she corrected herself. ‘But possibly I’m overdressed?’
And instantly she was deflated, her spine crumpled, the hat looked silly, her long white hands began kneading each other, her eyes crawled nervously across the floor.
Of course I didn’t want to upset her. ‘I would be proud to go out with you’ (I meant it) ‘and all the bookshops would be impressed, but we did think we’d go to Central Park afterwards, and Central Park is very windy, famously windy in fact – ’
‘It ain’t – ’ (laconic interruption from her friend in the lobby, but fortunately she did not hear it) ’your girlfriend just don’t get the hat, Ginny – ’
‘ – so I suggest, we come back after the park and pick up the hat before we go to the Algonquin. There it’ll be just perfect.’
‘Yeah, the Algonquin’s kinda elegant,’ her pal behind the counter added.
So that was decided, and off we went. But the hat came with us. She stood beside me, waiting for the taxi on the narrow pavement. The angle meant I couldn’t see her face, but out in the sun I couldn’t deny it: the indigo hat was a glorious presence, a dark pavlova full of air and light, poised on a long-necked porcelain cake-plate.
‘Virginia, we’re going to have fun.’