Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  Tom Bellamy’s name disappeared from the accounts after that, until September 1939:

  War with Germany declared this day and the Staff can talk of nothing else than soldiering. Tom Bellamy to join up.

  No word of Jock.

  Jo’s fingers fluttered nervously over the final days of 1939, and on into the spring of 1940. Tom Bellamy refused the service due to dicky heart. Knole’s garden ranks dropped by two-thirds; only the unfit, the old, and the young remained to work the beds and maintain the plantings. Copper sulfate for the roses was impossible to find, due to the demands of munitions factories; the kitchen garden was all anybody cared about now, for the production of desperately needed food.

  And then, suddenly, something unexpected:

  Hired as jobbing lad this day Tom Bellamy’s son Christopher, called Kip. Jock Bellamy sent over to Mrs. Nicolson, Miss Vita as was, due to shortage of men at Sissinghurst.

  Sissinghurst. Her grandfather had once bent and strained over the very beds she’d photographed in recent days—and she hadn’t known.

  Was it possible that Vita was the Lady? But no—Jock had distinctly written about the woman’s death. And Vita had survived the war by several decades.

  Jo sank back against the unforgiving Searchroom chair, baffled. It made sense that Lady Nicolson, desperate for garden help, would look for it at Knole—Vita made a habit of borrowing from her childhood home. Furniture, pictures, garden urns—and now a teenage boy who bid fair to be strong and canny with his hands.

  Jo skimmed ahead, hoping against hope for something more—but the Head Gardener’s account ended abruptly in June 1941 with the words: Called up for service this day, and will report for duty tomorrow at dawn. Five years of silence were contained in the single page separating this entry from the next—which was dated September 1946, and written in a stranger’s hand. Knole House to be given into the National Trust.

  Jo went in search of Mr. Trevelyan.

  “Do you keep anything about the Sissinghurst Castle Garden in this archive? From the war years, I mean?”

  He straightened from the pile of books he’d been tidying. “No. Particularly not the garden. Sissinghurst passed to the Trust in the late sixties, you know—and the Head Gardeners employed by the Nicolsons at the time were retained for decades after. They’d have kept their own records. Probably passed them on to their successors, whoever they are. You might check with the National Trust.”

  Jo thanked him, and turned in her numbered seat tag. She felt a pang of guilt. She should have kept to her proper job that morning—should indeed have earned Gray’s money. The answers were with Imogen Cantwell, at Sissinghurst.

  “WE’D GIVEN YOU UP,” THE HEAD GARDENER CALLED GENIALLY through the open office door. “Thought you’d had a late lie-in and spa treatment at the George.”

  Imogen was bent over her computer, the kind of work she detested, but the obvious task for a day of steady rain. Let Ter and the others slog around in their Wellies while she tended to the business of the Castle gift shop: stocking orders for tea towels and gardening books and potpourri that captured the scent of Vita’s musk roses. A few plants associated with Sissinghurst were sold there as well—stout rosemary shrubs and viola. All of this fell under Imogen Cantwell’s purview. She worked incessantly. She had no family, only a trio of indifferent cats she loved with pathetic ferocity.

  “I suppose it’s the jet lag,” the American said vaguely.

  Jo Bellamy did look strained for a person who’d slept late. Her skin was pallid, and the hollows of her eyes almost bruised. But something—a barely discernible crackle of excitement—churned beneath the surface, Imogen decided. It was evident in the lower lip she worried surreptitiously with her teeth, in the flutter of her restless hands.

  Imogen’s eyes slid to the wall clock hanging near the room’s sole window: nearly half-past two. “Care for a cuppa?” she suggested, and closed her file.

  While they waited for the electric kettle to sing, she found mugs and Jo puttered about the small space, pulling books off shelves distractedly, then shoving them back. “You got on with Terence, I gather?” Imogen said. “Went over all those plant lists I gave you?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  Imogen had expected rather more; Ter reported that the American was put off by the discipline of the bedding trials. Had said something about the value of propagating disorder rather than perfection. Imogen had muttered to herself when she heard this; Jo sodding Bellamy didn’t need to justify her job to the National Trust, thank you very much, she wasn’t charged with bringing immortality to an aging icon.

  The kettle sang.

  Imogen poured, and handed a mug to Jo.

  “I’ve been thinking about the war years,” the American said.

  “The war years? You mean—the Second World War?”

  “Exactly. What was it like here then?”

  Imogen rested her broad bottom against the edge of her desk, puzzled. “I don’t know. Bombs, I think. Kent was a highway for the Luftwaffe, straight across the Channel from Paris. What part of the war do you mean, exactly?”

  Jo shrugged. “I know the Nicolsons stayed here for most of it. Or Vita did. Harold was up in London, weekdays. I’ve read the biographies.”

  “Right,” Imogen said briskly. “But you’re interested in the garden. Not the family.”

  “True.” Jo met her gaze directly. “And the family made the garden. The war should have killed it. How did they manage, with everybody fighting the Germans, and no supplies or anything, and air raids every other minute?”

  “I suppose a lot was… put on hold.” Imogen took a gulp of tea. “Your own bit’s an example of that. Vita came up with the idea for the White Garden during the war. But it wasn’t possible to actually make the thing for years after. Like you say—no labor, no plants, no money. They were more interested in begging petrol than peonies in those years.”

  “Are there any records? From the gardeners—if there were any—who tended Sissinghurst then?”

  Imogen frowned; there was a strange glitter to Jo Bellamy’s eyes. The woman’s on something, she thought. She’s barmy. “I can’t see why it matters! The White Garden didn’t exist.”

  “I just need to know.” Jo set down her mug and folded her arms protectively across her chest. “Okay, it has nothing to do with why I’m here. But my grandfather was from Kent—he was in the war.…I’ve started to wonder what happened here.”

  Imogen sighed, and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.

  “I’m two Heads removed from Pam and Sibylle, who made Sissinghurst what it is. The Mädchen, Vita called them. They spent nearly forty years here after Jack Vass—the only other real gardener Sissinghurst ever had. He started during the war, then joined up and returned to Sissinghurst when the fighting was over. Vass was quite a local sensation—he’d worked at Cliveden before us, and escaped from a German POW camp or something—but he went Communist, and Vita was scared. So she fired him.”

  “There are no records from those years?” Something in Jo had flickered and gone out as Imogen was talking.

  “Not much.” She straightened, intrigued despite her growing mistrust. “Look—it’s raining. I’ve done all I can do here. Why don’t we have a rummage through the stores?”

  IMOGEN LED JO THROUGH THE RAIN TO THE BRICK-WALLED nursery west of the Rose Garden, where sheds and glasshouses and cold frames and plunge beds were scattered with a haphazard air, as if they had sprung up over successive decades, as indeed they had. Jo had toured the area previously, and she recognized that the crux of Sissinghurst’s success was the range of horticultural techniques Imogen commanded beneath the low-slung roofs of the various sheds. The magnificence of the carefully tended beds—all that most visitors saw of the garden—was inconceivable without the regimented cycles of propagation, potting, cold frame, and division that went on, with only the briefest of pauses in spring planting season, throughout the year.

  “This used to be Harold
and Vita’s kitchen garden,” Imogen tossed over her shoulder as she bypassed the Cambridge glasshouse and made for a small tool shed. “Dead useful during the war, of course, but neglected once the two of them passed on. Here we are—mind your head—this is a sad excuse for a lumber room, but we’ve been forced to make do.”

  It was a ramshackle wooden building, airless and poorly lit, with a strong suggestion of spiders and other unmentionables lurking in the corners. A wall of boxes, staking materials, and pruning ladders rose before them, cheek-by-jowl with hedge-trimming templates and folded hessian squares. A strong smell of dirt and damp wafted to the nose. Imogen cursed inwardly; surely the place was swept when the boxes were shifted from the old cow barn? But who would expect cleanliness in a tool shed, after all? Not even an American could be so daft.

  “This isn’t the working tool shed, you understand,” she told Jo. “Just a place for overflow. Now that The Family have gone all gaga over organic farming we’ve been forced to bid for space.”

  “Wasn’t there always a farm?”

  “Well, yes,” Imogen said, “but it was nothing to do with the Trust. The fields were leased, time out of mind, to the same handful of families. Just lately the whole thing’s shifted—come under the aegis of the Trust—and the new people snatched up the old outbuildings we’d come to think of as ours. The cow barn, for instance.”

  Jo glanced around the shed, eyes narrowed against the dusk. “Didn’t Vita keep cows?”

  “She kept any number of things that couldn’t be sustained.” Imogen’s tone was grudging. “Sheep. Hop fields. The Trust have seen their way clear to pigs.”

  “You’re not enthusiastic.”

  “Pigs, I ask you! Did they give any thought to how all this clutter looks from the garden? Much less smells? Sissinghurst is a cultural gem! With the odor of cow dung wafting over the Rose Garden!”

  “I take it the project is recent?”

  Imogen glowered with resentment. “Oh, it’s new all right. That’s why everybody’s so keen! We’re a test case for the National bloody Trust. We’re to prove whether an integrated landscape in balance between cultivation and pleasure can be a self-sustaining prospect. And without spraying, no less. There was even a BBC special on the telly, waxing lyric about Vita’s feeling for the land, when she was the first person to crow about the pleasures of killing weeds with a healthy tot of DDT. Camera crews trudging through the muck down by Hammer Brook and swooning over the frog spawn. Try juggling all that internal politics with hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and see where it puts you.”

  “Thigh-high in manure,” Jo said, with pardonable amusement. “But you’re not responsible for the farm?”

  “No,” Imogen admitted. “I’ve nothing to do with it, really. There’s a separate head, separate staff, separate… world, really… it’s just—” She paused, searching for the right words. “I get the concept. I do. Grow the food here that we sell to the people who visit. But the visitors come because of the garden. Not the pigs. You know what I mean? I just hope the Trust don’t lose sight of that.”

  “It’s not like they value the garden less because they’ve undertaken organic farming, is it?” Jo asked mildly. “Doesn’t the farm just add to the whole picture?”

  “At some cost,” Imogen retorted tartly. “You understand that Trust houses are forced to support themselves? That we’re not all the recipients of boundless government largesse? Here at Sissinghurst we’ve a fixed pool of income—mainly derived from ticket sales to the garden—that’s expected to pay all our salaries and the Castle maintenance and all the expense of keeping the horticultural show going—and we’ve been lucky to earn a surplus over the years. What if the hedges suddenly die or all the glasshouses fall in? Now it’s my funds that’re being tapped for the farm project. I wish The Family had never come up with the idea. You don’t have to deal with resident families at your historic houses in the States, do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Yes, well—it’s a peculiarly English privilege to hand your house over to the Inland Revenue as satisfaction against taxes, and live there to the nth generation regardless. But we didn’t come here to talk about my job—it was the old books you were wanting. We’ve crates and crates of them here.”

  She tugged at a chain and a single bulb blossomed into yellowish light. “Pam and Sibylle—the Mädchen—inherited the gardener’s books when they came, and kept scrupulous records themselves. I’ve never had time to go through the lot—though I’ve wanted to, of course. You might find something from the war.”

  Together they lifted a box at random. Its flaps were taped shut, and neatly penned in black was a date: 1963–65. “Too late,” Imogen murmured, and they retrieved a second one. 1979–81. A third: 1985–87. A fourth: 1991–93.

  “When did Pam and Sibylle arrive at Sissinghurst?”

  “Nineteen fifty-nine,” Imogen answered tersely. “People like to say Vita made the garden, and that’s technically true; but those of us who work here know that without Pam and Sibylle, it wouldn’t exist. Not in its present form. Ah—this may offer something.”

  The box was smaller, older, shabbier than the rest; a box made not of paper, but of wood. A crate, in fact, reinforced at the corners with rusted strips of metal and a lid that had warped from age and weather. A paper label was affixed to its surface with peeling tape; the black ink was blurred. Miscellaneous.

  Jo knelt on the dirty floor and pried at the lid with her fingernails. It splintered under her hands.

  Inside was a heap of what looked like notebooks, some of them bound in leather that was parched and crumbling. She lifted one into the light and carefully turned the pages.

  “Vita’s garden diary, from 1938.”

  “Really?” Imogen was suddenly interested. “That should be properly locked away. Most of her originals are kept in archival conditions. I wonder if The Family know?”

  “You’d better take it.”

  “Care to look through it first?”

  Jo shook her head. “I’m interested in 1940 and after.”

  “Vass came over from Cliveden in ’40.” Imogen flipped through the garden book idly. “Before that, they employed an assortment of locals. That would be why Vita wrote this—she was very much in charge of the garden in 1938.”

  “Here’s something.” Jo withdrew a slim little notebook with a bound edge—the sort of copybook a schoolboy might use. Someone had tied string around it, like a parcel. A neat label was affixed to the string.

  “Jack’s Book,” Imogen read aloud. “That would be Vass, then.”

  “No,” Jo replied. Her voice was almost a whisper. “It says Jock, not Jack.”

  Imogen stared at her. Before she could speak, Jo had slipped the string from the slight volume.

  “What’re you doing?”

  Jo held up an open page for inspection: cloudy furls of ink, the paper yellowed with age. “Is that Vita’s writing?”

  Notes on the Making of a White Garden, it said. And there was a date—29 March 1941.

  “No.” Imogen crouched down to have a better look. “It’s not. Don’t think it’s Harold’s either, although I’d have to check. Probably Jack Vass, like I said. Distinctive handwriting, anyway—not just the copperplate people learnt in those days. Is it signed?”

  Jo flipped through the pages. There looked to be at least fifty, close-written in the same furled and tentative script: much crossing out and editing of certain lines, a leaf torn straight from the binding here and there. And every few pages, another date.

  “A little over a week,” Jo mused, “in the spring of 1941. Not a garden book, but something else. A diary?”

  Imogen was suddenly conscious of the passage of time; of the darkness beginning to fall beyond the door of the shed; of the staff who’d be finishing elsewhere in the garden, and looking for her.

  “Take it with you,” she urged. “Have a go tonight, back at the George. You can return it in the morning.”

&nbs
p; “Thanks,” Jo said—and slipped swiftly toward the door, as though afraid Imogen would change her mind. An odd woman, Imogen thought again; if she wasn’t on something, she ought to be.

  29 March 1941

  Sissinghurst

  NOTES ON THE MAKING OF A WHITE GARDEN

  WHEN A BODY DIES THE GHOST IT IS SAID SOMETIMES haunts us. But when a book is read, and shut up and put away, what happens to that ghost? The life we have known solely through words, may yet haunt the mind; it jumbles with our days, becomes something else entirely, unrecognisable.

  It would be an achievement, she thought, to be unrecognisable.

  It began as the desire for escape—from her husband and the smears of lead on his fingers. From the boiled cabbage smell of the kitchen. From the perpetual fear of the creeping water spreading like infantry across the meadows, creeping up to the house under cover of night. The ruin of the smashed dykes, the water no one could contain. She had never felt safe when the water was rising.

  Escape, then, from the dead pages and winter. Put on the old furs, limp as stoats piled carelessly by the gamekeeper’s back door—her husband was notoriously mean with his money, he never allowed her to buy anything new, she had to beg for her fare to London sometimes. For weeks, now, in anticipation of freedom, she had been careful with her shillings and pence; she had gone the length of selling ration tickets in the village.

  Pull on the stout Wellingtons, smelling of rubber tyres, of war fare and aeroplanes. Take up the walking stick; you might hit him if he comes after you. Hurry, hurry, he’s working still before lunch, Hurry up it’s time, leave the note with your shaking fingers he will look first above the mantel. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.… Run from the hanks of wool, sewage-coloured, in the knitting basket beside the chair—