Inside, of course, I was young as ever, but I evidently looked old to Angela. Thinking of Ahmet, I peered in the mirror. My hair, which had once looked straggly and grey, had a glow to it, yes, the brown glow of honey, my eyes were bright, and there again, my cheeks – surely they were pinker? And they were not hollow. They were oval, with roses. I ran my hands down the sides of my body. I wasn’t fat; I wasn’t thin. I was tall, wasn’t I? Could I be – ‘striking’? In fact, I had become what Leonard, with a wry smile, sometimes said of a passing stranger: ‘a fine figure of a woman’.
It helped to explain the way Ahmet looked at me. But maybe all old women imagined that. Maybe he was just a professional flirt, and I was a fool, and Angela was right.
Suddenly, I heard her voice through the wall. Of course, she had gone off to practise her paper – her ‘plenary’, as she kept calling it. Why did she have to be so self-important? –
That was unkind. One didn’t want to be spiteful. Angela had done her best for me, and slowly, I’d become fond of her. Despite her brassy air, she was vulnerable. She cared a lot about her little talk. Probably because I would be listening; she definitely wanted my approval. We had never really spoken about my work. I moved closer to the wall to listen for a moment.
‘… elitist, snobbish … self-indulgent … art for art’s sake …’
A small, cold moment of doubt. But it was obviously not me she was talking about. She must be comparing me to, say, Katherine Mansfield.
‘… stultifying … ivory tower … not relevant to today’s … if ever …’
No, she was a fan of mine. She had told me so. It couldn’t be –
It couldn’t be – could it – that she hated me?
‘… undeserved preeminence … Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse …’
Yes, she was talking about me.
Of course, she had always hated me.
‘… bloodless … anaemic … breath of real life …’
She had brought me back to life to give me pain.
There was a shudder in my bones, my heart. My stomach clenched tight against my ribcage.
I could not stay there, in that stupid modern room, alone with the menacing ‘television’ screen, its great blank eye peering down from the wall, laughing at me, staring at me, as I reeled from the spite hissing through the plaster.
(I had thought we were friends! Didn’t she like me? My heart beat loudly. I was very afraid. For who in the world would stick up for me? Who in the world would be on my side?)
No, there was no-one. I was quite alone. No Leonard to comfort me, no Nessa to listen gravely, no Ethel to huff and puff on my behalf.
I went numbly to the wardrobe. Yes, something else. My brain started playing an old song, loudly, something by – what was her name, Greta Keller, that trembling alto with the giant bosom, ‘So little time, my dear, and so much to do / So little time to make your dreams come true …’
Yes, there was a feeling of the day speeding up, I was changing, swiftly, so was Angela, the stage-set slipped and slid around me. I stared at the tiny keyhole in the wardrobe, a detail snipped from a Dodgson fantasy that at any moment might come to an end. My second chance at life on this planet, it had been so vivid, I had been so happy, but –
she hated me she wanted to destroy me
Suddenly I knew I must be dreaming, that terrible sense of things fading, thinning, of scrabbling to hold the scenery together, to keep out the darkness nibbling at the edges …
Her voice, inexorable, through the wall: ‘… daughter of privilege … patronage …’