Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  Nothing had prepared Dottie for the body swinging from the ceiling, the limpness of the blue hands. Nothing had prepared Jo. She’d left the junipers and the backhoe and the historic house under renovation, and did not return for two weeks.

  THEY HAD ASKED EACH OTHER WHY, OF COURSE. THEY HAD hours to talk after the funeral. Depression? Jo wondered. Dottie had seen no sign of it, although she wasn’t the best at detecting those things. After six decades of marriage she and Jock kept themselves to themselves, they didn’t probe each other’s souls like young people did nowadays. They ate dinner in silence if their minds were heavy and left each other to sort things out. Perhaps she’d been at fault, there. But he’d never asked her for advice, he’d never seemed troubled. Getting older, of course… They both were.…

  Jo called Jock’s doctor and asked whether there’d been a diagnosis. Something out of the ordinary. A death sentence he couldn’t face.

  None, the doctor answered regretfully. He, too, felt obscurely responsible. And in any case, your grandfather was no coward.

  No. Even that final tractor chain demanded courage; self-hanging was not the act of a fearful man.

  She was haunted by him in dreams: perfectly ordinary visits, Jock in mid-conversation across the breakfast table, one of his old plaid shirts rolled to the elbows. She always asked why he had to leave. He smiled at her fondly, told her nothing. He’d killed himself the day after she told him about the biggest gardening coup of her young career: Gray and Alicia Westlake wanted a copy of the White Garden, and she, Jo, was going to Sissinghurst.…

  For reasons she could not explain, Jo was struggling with guilt. As though her news had driven Jock to suicide.

  THEN, ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER—MAYBE THREE DAYS after that intimate coffee with Gray, the two of them talking of lilies and moonlight—Dottie appeared in Jo’s office holding a letter.

  “I was going through your grandfather’s things yesterday,” she explained. “I should have done it before, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t the heart for it.”

  She’d started in Jock’s office—just a desk, really, with a stack of catalogs, some tidily paid bills. His Last Will and Testament, which she’d witnessed only six months before, secure in a drawer. She’d moved on to the tractor shed, avoiding the garage and its accusing beam. All the tools were in the tractor shed, Dottie explained, and the Will reminded her she’d need to have them valued. “He left them to you, of course—the hoes and clippers and whatnot. Honestly, Jo, if you want it all carted away I’m happy to get rid of it. Don’t worry about the Will, we know he must’ve been crazy in the end—”

  “I want Grandpa’s tools.”

  It was in the shed that Dottie noticed the envelope, sitting in a wheelbarrow, in plain sight, as though Jock meant to mail it and simply forgot in all the bustle of hanging himself. “In the Event of My Death, he’d written in the lower corner,” she sputtered. “I mean, really, Jo—”

  She’d expected a suicide note. Instead, what she got was a postcard from the past.

  “It was one of those things they carried, in the war,” Dottie told Jo, “—in case their bodies were found. The soldiers wanted something sent back, as a kind of farewell.”

  It was dated Somewhere near Brindisi, September 1943. And addressed to Jock’s mother.

  Dear Mum and Dad and young Kip, If you are reading this, it is because old Jerry has done for me at last, never mind how, it’s all the same in the end. I want you to know that I don’t fear Death—that whatever happens, I will be all right, because it’s a relief to think of lying in the long grass as much as I like, and no marching just because Captain tells me to. I have seen a lot of Death, starting with that lady back home, and I know that what is left behind is like stubble in the fields after harvest time, the ends of things that have been used up, with the best of ’em put back into the earth.

  Jo glanced around at Vita’s dying garden. The rain had thrown a sheet of ground fog between her camera and the last of the argyranthemums; the effect was unutterably lonely. The ends of things that have been used up. Is that how Jock viewed his life, in his last days? How could she have failed to notice such despair?

  She stopped before a slim statue of a figure, somberly robed, more religious than classical. She glanced at her map of the White Garden; this must be the Little Virgin, the face almost obscured by the branches of a weeping pear tree. It was the sort of thing that could be adapted for the Westlake garden, with a modernist sculpture—possibly even an abstract one—something that gestured toward the original without copying it slavishly. Jo positioned the Virgin in her viewfinder and took several shots, then noted the height and breadth of the weeping pear. Flowering quince or a tree-form wisteria might do just as well—there were several varieties available in the States.

  The drizzle was turning to rain, so she slipped the camera back in its case and straightened over her bulging shoulder bag, aware that Terence had moved out of view on the far side of the box parterre. It was almost impossible to imagine the glory of this place on a sunny July day; a raw chill had seeped into the White Garden. She shivered.

  I cannot go without telling you why I ran that day, Jock’s letter had continued.

  I lied about my age, Mum, and nearly killed you with it. I hope Kip never does the same. War comes soon enough by the front door without hustling it in at the back. But I could not bear what happened, nor explain it neither, and going for a soldier seemed best. If I am dead, I hope you will believe and honour my word: I never did nothing for the Lady but what she asked. Before God, I tried to help her, though I only harmed in the end. I will see her huge eyes before me however long or short I may live, but my soul is easy: I was not a bad boy, Mum, only unlucky.

  Hoping as I have not brought shame or worry upon you and all the home folk at Knole, and sending you my dearest love, even in death—I remain,

  Jock Bellamy

  Jo had stared at her grandfather’s familiar writing, unwilling to hand the letter back to Dottie. There must be something more than this—some reason—

  “Beneath the envelope,” Dottie was saying, “he left a slip of paper. Probably torn off the pad he kept in his shirt pocket, you know the one…”

  A three-by-five block of steno sheets, useful for jotting reminders. And lists. They both loved lists.

  She took the scrap of paper from Dottie’s hand and read: Tell her pictures at Charleston.

  South Carolina? Jock had never been there in his life. Jo shook her head in frustration. “So who’s this lady he wrote about?”

  “No idea.” Dottie sniffed.

  “Oh, come on, Nana—you knew Jock better than anybody alive!”

  “I didn’t know he’d kill himself that day!” She made it sound like an accusation.

  “No one could have known.”

  “I should have.”

  There was no answer to this.

  “But you two must have met around the time Jock wrote this letter,” Jo attempted, as she folded the sheets and held them out to her grandmother. “In Italy.”

  “He never mentioned its existence,” Dottie replied stiffly. “And he never mentioned me.”

  This, Jo thought, was part of the trouble: Dottie felt betrayed. Jock’s suicide was insult enough, a wrenching-out of Dottie’s heart, as inexplicable as it was ugly; but this… She was completely absent from the farewell he’d written, so long ago, to his parents. The unknown lady had taken his wife’s place.

  “He was in some sort of trouble, wasn’t he?” Jo asked thoughtfully. “He talks about running. As though it were a matter for the law.”

  “He used to tell everybody he’d joined up young—only seventeen, that spring of 1941—because he couldn’t be tending roses when the fate of Britain was at stake. He never said he was wanted by the Law.”

  “But this sounds like…”

  “He had no choice. I know. That’s why I came.”

  Jo had stared at her grandmother that day in her office, sharply uneasy. She
knew nothing whatever about Jock’s war—only that he’d lost his entire family while serving in Italy, to a German bomb. It was all so long ago. It had nothing to do with the sad end in the garage. What did Dottie expect Jo to do?

  “You could find out something,” Dottie persisted. “In their records. While you’re there in Kent. He mentions Knole, Jo. The great estate. That’s where he grew up.”

  Vita Sackville-West had grown up at Knole, too. It was the ancestral home of the Dukes of Dorset, built before the reign of Henry VIII—a fifteenth-century house the size of a small village. Less than an hour from the garden in which Jo was now standing. But she hadn’t found the courage, yet, to visit Knole. Or ask questions about an unknown woman’s death, nearly seventy years before. She was afraid of what she might learn: That Jock hanged himself rather than face his granddaughter, after her trip to Kent.

  “What if I learn the truth, Nana?” she’d asked gently. “And you don’t like it?”

  “Jock left this letter for a reason,” Dottie insisted. “He’s dead, for a reason. I want to know what it is, Jo. I want to know what it is.”

  FRIDAY’S RAIN WAS A CONFIRMED TORRENT BY breakfast Saturday morning. The October world beyond the leaded windows was depressingly gray. Jo had slept badly. Little things bothered her: the gurgle of water in Cranbrook’s gutters, the wet dripping from every Tudor eave. And so she allowed herself a third cup of coffee while she thought about Nana and Jock and death of various kinds. She took stock of her situation. She made lists.

  Lists were a staple of Jo’s life. They made her feel purposeful and competent, and they were usually written in red ink. Several were floating around her leather shoulder bag already—Lilium regale or substitute white Casablancas?; paeonia Cheddar Delight; discuss staking, need for team of real gardeners not hired labor, read one—but this morning’s list was a compilation of unknowns.

  She wrote: 1941?

  That was the year Jock had lied about his age and run away to war.

  She wrote: Police records, Sevenoaks?

  Knole House sat on the eastern edge of Sevenoaks, in the part of Kent known as the North Downs. Simply pulling up before the gates of Knole, however, would not guarantee Jo answers. Did anybody—serving class or lord—still live there? Or was the vast sprawl of Kentish stone in its thousand-acre deer park just a National Trust mausoleum? And why assume Jock’s brush with the Lady had happened there?

  She had no idea what her grandfather’s life was like in 1941. He had said so little about his own childhood; it was as though only the present existed for Jock. Jo knew vague and impersonal things about England during the war: Luftwaffe bombing raids over Kent, hop fields burning, children sent away by train. Rations and petrol shortage, cooking pots hammered into airplane propellers. Was seventeen still considered school-age in time of war? Or had Jock been sent out to work while the men were fighting?

  She wrote: Ask Nana, family friends.

  Jo’s eyes rested on the dripping iron hitching post beyond the breakfast-room window. It was shaped like a horse’s head, and might perhaps have been antique. Even this irritated her; a bit of Merrie Olde England intended for the tourist trade. She set down her red pen.

  She ought to find Imogen Cantwell this morning and spend an hour in Sissinghurst’s greenhouses, studying the biennials raised from cuttings and seed. She ought to discuss boxwood clones. Hedge-trimming schedules.

  She ought to earn Gray’s money.

  Instead, she pushed back her chair and went to look for the concierge.

  “Local archives?” he repeated, frowning. “Birth and death records? That sort of thing? You’ll want the Centre for Kentish Studies. It’s only a few miles up Tonbridge Road, in Maidstone.”

  When her phone vibrated a few seconds later, fresh with a call from Buenos Aires, she let Gray slip into voice mail.

  WE ADVISE VISITORS TO BOOK A SEAT IN ADVANCE TO AVOID disappointment.

  Jo had found the careful British warning posted on the Centre’s website after breakfast, and dutifully called ahead. There were rafts of people eager to troll through microfilm of seventeenth-century parish registers and polling data from 1869, or so she was told; particularly the Americans on holiday.

  “Think they’re related to the Queen,” sniffed the staff member to Jo, “though most of ‘em are Irish and Polish or whatnot.”

  She bought a County Archives Readers’ Network ticket, and was given a plastic tag emblazoned with the number of her reserved seat. The Searchroom, as it was called, was like a researchers’ holding pen. At the far end of the space were shelves of archive catalogs—a series of color-coded ring binders divided by subject: green for family and estate records; red for the court reports of the Quarter Sessions. There were also numerous card indexes for parishes, personal names, and miscellany going back ten centuries. Eleven kilometres of data in our archive centre, the website boasted; but most of those facts were inaccessible by computer. She would have to pinpoint the sources she needed to consult—write their catalog numbers on a slip of paper—offer this to an archivist—and wait a quarter of an hour for the volumes to be fetched. She had no idea where to start. She nearly called Nana then and there to announce defeat.

  “Can I be of service?”

  He was short and slim and mild-eyed; a dark-haired cipher of a man with a neat name tag pinned to his blue dress shirt. MR. TREVELYAN, it said. Such a self-effacing soul would never put ROGER or IAN or HAL on his breast. He would always be Mr. Trevelyan. This, to Jo, was reassuring: she had found authority in a sea of doubt.

  “I’m researching my grandfather,” she said. “He grew up somewhere near Knole House.”

  “When?” Mr. Trevelyan inquired.

  “He was born in 1924. June sixteenth, actually.”

  “In Sevenoaks? Or on the estate itself?”

  “I don’t know. He’s dead,” she added, by way of explanation.

  “Let’s start with official records. Polling data, parish registry, that sort of thing.” He led Jo toward the card catalogs. “And the name?”

  She told him. While Mr. Trevelyan pulled drawers from cabinets, Jo debated whether to broach the subject of police records and an unknown woman’s death nearly seventy years before, the sudden terrible divide that might have fallen between childhood and going for a soldier.

  “Bellamy?” Mr. Trevelyan repeated. “That’s a very old name. Norman in origin. Belle Amie.”

  Jo smiled to herself. Jock was no aristocrat. If the blood of the conquerors descended in her veins, it was surely from the wrong side of the blanket—a belle amie, a beautiful mistress with an illegitimate child.

  “Here it is.” The archivist’s finger was poised over a catalog entry. “Quite straightforward. We’ll just fetch the parish records, shall we?”

  From the parish records Jo learned enough to fill half an index card. The names of Jock’s parents, Rose and Thomas Bellamy; the date of Jock’s birth, which she already knew; that of his younger brother, Christopher, called Kip; and a street address in Sevenoaks: 17 Bells Lane. There was also a single date of death for Rose, Thomas, and Kip, in February 1944.

  “That would be a bomb, of course,” Mr. Trevelyan observed. “One hit Knole itself that month. Damaged a good bit of the building.”

  It was so bald, that date. So quiet, in the records of the parish registry. When what it really recorded was the end of Jock’s known world. He had emigrated to America with Dottie after V-E Day.

  “Thomas Bellamy’s profession is noted as gardener,” Trevelyan added. “Nine chances out of ten, he was employed at Knole House. The family gave the place into the National Trust in 1946—with a two-hundred-year lease on the private apartments and complete retention of the park—but in the first half of the century, Knole kept most of Sevenoaks in bread and butter. The garden is five hundred years old, and largish—a full mile of ragstone wall encloses it. They’d have needed a small army of gardeners, I should think. Shall we consult the estate records?”

 
; It was here that Jo came into a kingdom.

  The catalog of Knole’s books was astonishingly vast and various: steward’s accounts dating to the fifteenth century; gamekeepers’ records of pheasants bagged and deer killed; workshop accounts of upholsterers and woodsmen and joiners and glaziers; tenants’ accounts; harvest figures; housekeeping and stillroom books; lists of servants, the same local surnames appearing generation after generation. And records of the state visits of kings and queens: Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. James II. Edward VII.

  She ignored all of these. Only one group of documents held any interest for her: Knole’s garden archives.

  She would have liked to waste an hour scanning the drawings from Britannia Illustrata in 1707, or the accounts of George London, royal gardener, who’d supplied fruit trees in 1698; or Thomas Badeslade’s record of the bowling green’s construction, or the third Duke’s pineapple hothouse, or the Orangery that dated from the Regency period. But she had too little time. Another stranger was scheduled to take her numbered seat in less than forty minutes. She was forced to concentrate on the years between 1918 and 1939—England’s Long Weekend between two devastating wars—when Thomas Bellamy, gardener of 17 Bells Lane, had raised his sons.

  Skimming the lines of the Head Gardener’s book with her forefinger, Jo stumbled on April 1919.

  Took on Harry Leeds, Joe Weston, Tom Bellamy as undergardeners with pay of fifteen shillings per week, Tom to receive eighteen, as he was trained up as a lad here before the war, and his brother Frank lost at Ypres.

  No mention of Jock’s father after that beyond the occasional reference to duties in the herbaceous beds or among the rhododendrons, until September of 1923:

  Tom Bellamy raised to Hothouse Overseer, as he has proved himself a steady man enough, and has a child coming.

  And finally, an entry from the spring of 1936 that gave Jo a strange shiver:

  Hired Tom Bellamy’s son as jobbing lad this day and set him to work weeding knot garden. A quiet boy enough and no nonsense, John by name but called Jock he bids fair to be strong and canny with his hands though not yet of age to leave school.