How it fascinated me: self-sacrifice, service. Angela wasn’t feeling talkative. It was our second day, we were on our way to Üsküdar, the tram was screeching round a corner, a man got up and gave me his seat – she flashed me a look of irritation.
Üsküdar. Such a beautiful word, the Turkish word, so much softer than Scutari, not just a shield, a husky fullness, but with that strength, that ‘d’, underneath. Scutari where Florence Nightingale nursed. I longed to go there because of my mother. Florence Nightingale, twenty years older, was always a hero for my mother, though to us she seemed fabulously aged, a dragon, and because of Lytton, faintly ridiculous.
Virginia had no idea of the efforts I’d made to get her into Scutari.
Florence Nightingale’s ‘Letter to Cassandra’ was so … bitter. Yes, she was right, women’s talents were wasted, women were imprisoned in the drawing-room, but raw pain does not make good writing. I preferred to use wit. Wit and lightness. Then the men can’t laugh, or pity us.
She naturally left all the details to me. Because it was a barracks – the Istanbul barracks – the Turks didn’t welcome just anybody. You would have thought two respectable English ladies would not be suspected of being spies. But I had to fax a letter explaining our interest, and pages of our passports, and home addresses; even then their fax accepting us had only arrived during breakfast. To all this, she was oblivious. That morning, on the tram to the ferry, she was regal, as if everything came to her by right, and she got a seat, while I did not, and the Turk who gave it stared at her … I suppose Virginia always looked strange.
From the tram to the ferry, in the early morning, skies of pearl and rose, and no-one was on deck but we two and a family (I judged, from the way they herded together) of brutal-looking people in children’s clothes – identical two-piece romper-suits with ‘UKRAINE’ written across their shoulders (‘It’s the name of a country,’ Angela explained, ‘They’re not romper-suits, we call them “tracksuits”.’) They stared at us as if we came from space. The boys had matching blonde stubble on their heads. Why did they wear the name of their country on their shoulders? Strange that this world, so international, was still so eager to declare its loyalties. Or maybe they were ‘terrorists’? Angela was tetchy, so I didn’t ask her.
The barracks was up on the hill. The only way to get there was along a huge road. It felt raw and tremendous, with the narrowest of pavements, not at all like the avenues in New York, no traffic lights or pedestrian crossings, heavy lorries roaring and trembling past us, their burdens shaking at the cords, the wind from their passing flattening our clothes and blowing our words into nothingness. I was deafened, maddened, would we get there alive? Was this terrifying artery the meaning of progress? No room for error. If you stumbled, you died. The drivers were blind, too far above us to see as we midgets scampered along by the traffic, heads down.
At last we turned left. Yes, there was the barracks. Three sentries stared at us, amazed, from their posts fifty yards up an empty road. We had to approach under hostile eyes. ‘Smile,’ said Angela over her shoulder as she preceded me with our documents. My mouth felt dry and dusty from the road but I tried, and to my surprise, a soldier smiled back. Men were definitely smiling at me more. Turkish men must be friendlier.
A soldier – he looked around fifteen, white teeth uneven in his mouth – escorted us into the guardhouse. It was bristling with soldiers, guns at the ready, who took the documents, removed her phone. How would Angela manage without it?
‘Camera, Miss.’
I said ‘I don’t have a camera.’
Angela pretended not to hear, but the soldier asked again and she yielded – ‘But I wanted to photograph the museum!’ ‘No photos.’
‘There are a great many soldiers,’ I whispered.
‘They’re just conscripts, Virginia. Probably students. Everyone has to go in the army.’
‘Pity about the camera.’
‘What’s tragic is – I haven’t got a single picture of you.’
‘I believe it’s all about where you point it?’
‘I pointed it at you, of course!’
‘Well don’t look at me as if it’s my fault.’
‘All I’m saying is, you never come out. Perhaps you’re moving – accidentally, I mean – just at the moment I take the picture?’
‘The poor photographer blames her subjects. Though it’s true I am a reluctant subject.’
‘I might like to have a souvenir. Something I could show my daughter. I am proud to have spent time with you, Virginia.’
Then an officer arrived, middle-aged, slightly jaded, his tired smile saying he had done this before. A saloon car with a uniformed driver swept the three of us through the barracks. ‘This is the north-east tower,’ said the officer. ‘Get out here, please, for Florence Nightingale Museum.’
What had I expected? One hoped to find … her. The actual woman. Florence Nightingale. Something more authentic than Lytton’s sneering picture.
Alas, the museum was not a success. First, a room full of dreadful brown plastic soldiers, most of them not from the Crimean War. Models of guns, men in gaiters, gallant officers ordering charges. Our own officer – plump, balding, intelligent – kept disconsolately trying to please us, so one feigned interest, but it wasn’t easy.
Not destined to appeal to the author of Three Guineas.
‘I actually studied English Literature. I have read Graham Greene, and Great Gatsby. Very good author, your Fitzgerald!’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Our professor said Graham Greene was a spy. Ha, ha!’
‘I definitely prefer Great Gatsby.’
‘Yes, it’s better. Through here is where she lived. Follow me, please. Here are ancient bandages … But I think you English admire him very much, Graham Greene?’
‘No, neither of us like him at all.’
‘This is Florence Nightingale’s sitting room.’
The view from her room was dazzling. What she must have seen every morning, on waking. Wide, wide across the river. Two walls of the room were windows. There was a constant coming and going of boats. She must have seen the injured arrive, on groaning ships from the Crimea.
‘The whole big world. She was part of it, here.’
‘So this was what she fought to leave her family for.’
Escaping the tiny world of visiting cards. The middle-class harem, the prison in the parlour. But what did she escape to? Endless work. The harrow of service. Duty, like Mother.
‘Florence Nightingale taught us modern medicine. Before she came, this was just a – what do you call it? Funeral place.’
‘Cemetery?’
‘She cleaned everything, and looked after everything, and soon, no more people die. We admire her.’
‘My mother admired her, she was expert at sick-rooms. Some women are very good at looking after people. Not me.’ (Yet I was thinking: duty. In a way, my writing was also a duty. I had to do it. It harrowed me.)
‘Not my wife either. Unfortunately. Every morning, I make the breakfast.’
‘Virginia? You cared for me. When I was afraid. You cared for your sister.’
‘Oh, but one knew it would not last forever.’ (Laughs.)
(Yes, I had to write every day, thousands of words: duty, duty. Maybe, now, I was free at last.
Yet I had loved it more than life itself.)
‘I read what people in your village said about you, after you, you know – ’
‘Died.’
‘Yes. Lots of them said that you were kind.’
‘Re-a-lly? I’m sure it’s undeserved …’
All the same, she did not look displeased.
Much bowing and smiling when we parted with the officer, and flattering remarks about English literature, which we were too ignorant to reciprocate. I told him I admired Pamuk, and Shafek, but I have a dreadful feeling I muddled it up and managed to say ‘Shamuk, and Pafek’. At any rate, he looked blank, and said ‘Very nice. Goodbye ladies.’ ‘Thank you, thank you’ – then I muddled through a brief pledge of British friendship for Turkey. It felt like a pound of unwanted sausages. Why must I always try to please?
As we walked away from the Barracks, we swopped notes. Virginia asked why I had been so friendly, and I tried to explain that Turkish intellectuals liked the army because they were seen as modernising, secular. ‘They’re not the same as the government. Nothing is like it is back home.’
‘I understood the old world,’ she said, as we walked. ‘I grew up in it. Most of our friends were conscientious objectors. The army was the enemy. I was in my thirties during the Great War, which made us what we were, perhaps. But of course, I missed so much of the Second. And I’m trying to understand your world, but sometimes I think it’s impossible. I’m just a visitor – a tourist – trying to catch up, but always failing. And without writing, does one really exist? Yet must one always live for writing?’
‘Come on, Virginia, that ferry’s leaving.’