The taxi crawled towards the airport. With luck – and Virginia certainly had luck, coming back from the dead is virtually unheard of! – we might make the plane, despite the coincidence of two horrendous traffic accidents. Both the usual exits from Manhattan were blocked.
Stop, start. Stop, stop.
‘What will happen at my conference?’ Virginia asked.
I pretended not to hear. At moments like this, I couldn’t deal with it. I had specific worries, like her fake passport. Missing our flight, getting arrested.
Wherever we got stuck, that late afternoon, horrors. An old woman vomited by a wall against which a line of carrier bags slumped like drunks. LAST DAYS, said a small forest of signs on a corner. A group of people, eyes half-closed in the sun, faces blank and blissful, were waving to and fro in unison. Their lips opened and shut like happy goldfish. One sign, black on orange, shouted KINGDOM, another one, PRAISE. The believers faced inwards, and pointed upwards.
Virginia said ‘Is that a cult?’
‘Oh – they’re just evangelicals.’
‘Missionaries?’
‘Protestants.’
‘Protestants were never like that in my day.’
‘Well – it’s an anti-hierarchical thing.’ I couldn’t be bothered to explain.
‘Meaning?’ she said. I looked out of the window. ‘Angela, please, I need to understand.’
She knew how to make me feel guilty. Sighing in the heat, I set out once again to explain the madnesses of my world.
‘People seem to want to shake up religion. Go back to the beginning. Be passionate. Radical Christians, radical Muslims, even Buddhists are getting het up. It’s a rebellion against – ’
‘Rationality?’ she interrupted. ‘I hoped you’d be growing more rational.’
She had a way of blaming modernity on me. ‘We seem to be going in the opposite direction.’
The taxi wasn’t moving in any direction. The lanes ahead were chockablock. In an hour and twenty minutes, the gate would close.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I interrupted.’
‘Virginia, I’ll explain later.’
We were in gridlock. The fumes were acrid. I shut the window, and the heat was intense; flies in a box of glass and metal. Manhattan was not so safe after all, so radiantly open, so transparent, with its lattice of streets laid bare to the sky. I was suddenly glad Gerda wasn’t here. Edward had brought her here, when she was little, and they both insisted she’d enjoyed herself, but it wasn’t really a city for children – it felt like a blocked sink.
We had to get out: we couldn’t get out. The traffic was stifling, the noise was thick, like a badly made, scratchy blanket. Being locked in made us vulnerable, as if we could be crushed by a single blow.
New York became a trap. Not right at the core of things after all, not the place where everything important happened, fame, money, publishers.
It made me long for – Istanbul. City of a thousand entrances.
She was talking again. I zoned back in.
‘What will happen at my conference?’ she repeated.
‘You’ll see,’ I said, turning my gaze away from the eagerness in her great orbs. (I had forebodings. What would she make of Bakhtin? Derrida?) ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t call it “my conference”, Virginia. Even though it is, in a way. The organisers won’t understand … I honestly can’t think at the moment, I just want us to catch our plane.’ Oh dear, I was sounding irritable. Perhaps she was traumatised by fear of flying. ‘Are you OK, Virginia?’
I was fine, not grumpy and nervous, like her. Raring to climb the steps of that plane.
All day, my companion had been pale and grim, and snapped at me when the cab was two minutes late, and when I protested, said ‘It’s all right for you.’ She was using that expression a lot, and sighing. Perhaps she found travel stressful.
I’m sure I’d done everything I could to help. Except for leaving my handbag in reception, but they managed to locate it without too much trouble, only then of course I had to tip them again, and Angela looked ‘stressed’ as the moderns say, when they gave me their addresses, one by one, and we exchanged politeness, and the ‘guys’ made me promise to write to them, and she suddenly shouted, out of the blue, ‘The fucking cab will get tired of waiting!’ which certainly cast a pall over proceedings, even though she was soon saying ‘Sorry, sorry’ – it was only the third time I heard her swear, and the first time it had been directed at me. Though now she was being quite lax with the driver, who could surely find an alternative route. ‘Why doesn’t he go faster? Should one suggest it?’
‘What you mean is, “Will you suggest it.” New York cabbies don’t like suggestions.’
That sulky face, like an aged adolescent. I forced myself to sound maternal. ‘Let’s just wait for the future to happen.’
In the early evening, the lights were coming on. As the outlines of buildings blurred into darkness, the solid traffic liquefied, the city was stirring, unlocking itself – it would let us go, we would be on the plane. New York was beautiful again.
We passed the suburbs, lower, smaller, neither of us talking, in this thinning dream. When we stopped at the airport, we heard people shouting, and on the roof of the taxi, a cool rain drummed. I sat there for a second, adrenalin draining, then hurried her out into the night.
Just over our heads, a plane was landing, a graceful, steady-winged, jewel-eyed moth. I imagined young faces pressed against the window, excited by the lights of New York, and we couldn’t wait to get away from it.
At check-in I had a lot of talking to do. Virginia, I claimed, was a much-loved relation who had never flown, and must sit by me. She might have tried to support my story, instead of standing at an angle looking sceptical, but, hot and blustery, I managed it.
Then I had to sweat blood at the passport check. Virginia, however, became glowing and excited. She grew in stature: she was suddenly an actress; held out the passport like a hand of cards in a brilliantly exciting game, laughing ‘Good evening’ in her resonant contralto, while the voice in my head said ‘Oh keep it down, oh don’t draw attention to yourself.’ But in minutes she was through, waving her aces, though the man stared after her, shaking his head, as if she was familiar. He spent much longer frowning over mine.
We ended up seated side by side in the middle section of the plane. I had sacrificed my extra-leg-room seat at the front of the cabin, but was she grateful?
No, she didn’t even notice. I told myself, ‘Don’t expect gratitude.’ She was turning the pages of the in-flight shopping magazine, slow and reverent as a medieval monk.
And then she looked up. Her radiant smile. ‘I’m so excited,’ she said. ‘Thank you. Thank you for everything you have done.’
By the time we took off, the rain had stopped, it was dark outside, but Virginia was buzzing, bolt upright against the seat belt. She left on the reading light above her head, an eye of gold in the darkened cabin.