Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  The Cottage Garden’s four stalwart yews rose up before her eyes, quartering the center of the space—which Vita had called her “sunset garden.” It was the boldest of Sissinghurst’s rooms, all fiery orange and yellow and red, a vivid charge to the spirit. This late in the season the colors were dying out, of course—the deep rhomboid beds were the province of a few dahlias, Bishop of Llandaff and Yellow Hammer and the tangerine East Court. The tubers required overwintering in the nursery; in a few days she would dig them up, dust them with antifungal powder, and store them in dry containers labeled with their names. Just looking at the flagging plants, Imogen felt an unaccustomed weariness.

  She pulled out her secateurs and began to deadhead the flowers. Tomorrow was Wednesday. A Closed Day. So she might treat herself to a bit of liberty this afternoon. She might, with complete justification, take her small Austin out of the garage and test the open carriageway. Her snipping blades hovered near the throat of a spent dahlia as she considered the prospect. Time was running out. She needed to find Jo Bellamy and the missing notebook—replace it in the miscellaneous box in the tool shed before The Family noticed it was gone. Or, better yet, present it casually as a discovery of her own. I was shifting the garden books for better storage. I thought this might be of interest. It couldn’t be a Woolf, could it? Do you think it’s possible that Virginia inspired the White Garden?…

  Jo Bellamy be damned, Imogen thought, as her anvil hit her blade. What had she ever cared for Sissinghurst or its people, anyway? Imogen had been too trusting. She’d believed the woman was a gardener—that they understood each other. Valued the same things. She’d even told Jo about her funding worries and the woman ought to have understood what the discovery of an unknown Woolf might mean to Sissinghurst. Now Imogen felt betrayed. There was nothing for it, she decided as she lopped off an entire dahlia stem; she would have to drive up to London right now.

  “TELL ME HOW YOUR GRANDFATHER DIED,” PETER SAID, AS the Triumph slid onto the M40.

  And so Jo told him, as she had never been able to tell Gray, about the tractor chain and the garage beam. The look of gasping horror on Jock’s face when she’d viewed his body in the morgue and the swollen blue mass of his beloved hands. The sixty-five-year-old letter positioned carefully in a wheelbarrow. The hedge she’d left half-destroyed and the front loader abandoned for weeks. She told Peter how much she’d loved Jock Bellamy, how much she’d learned from him, how solitary she felt without her grandfather’s guidance. She even told Peter her deepest, private fear: That her trip to Kent had precipitated Jock’s death.

  He did not say, as she expected, That’s ridiculous, Jo. He did not try to comfort her with the idea that Jock must have been ill.

  “Of course you feel responsible,” he said. “That’s the problem with suicide. Everyone who loved the man feels they caused his death—simply by not preventing it.”

  The Triumph chugged on toward London.

  “He never told your gran he’d met Virginia Woolf? Never gave a hint of the notebook’s existence?”

  “Never,” she replied.

  “And he left nothing but that old letter from the war?”

  “Not a thing. At least—”

  “What?”

  She hesitated. The phrase was meaningless. She’d almost forgotten it herself. “A line on a scrap of paper my grandmother found.”

  “A quotation? Bit of poetry? Do not go gentle into that good night, that sort of thing?”

  “It was nonsense, really. Five words. It may have had nothing to do with his death, even. Tell her pictures at Charleston, it said. When I doubt he’d ever been to South Carolina in his life—”

  “Pictures at Charleston?” Peter had suddenly jammed on his brakes; the Triumph squealed, and behind them, an outraged driver tooted his horn.

  “Yes. It makes no sense. What pictures? Why Charleston?”

  Peter was rapidly downshifting the car and skittering across the M40’s lanes. “Don’t you see?”

  “No,” Jo retorted, bewildered. “Are you out of gas?”

  “I’m headed in completely the wrong direction,” he snapped, “because, God help us, you never thought to share your only clue. It’s near Lewes, I think. Sussex, anyway. We can find the house when we get down there.”

  “What house?”

  “Charleston. It was practically our Virginia’s second home. Belonged to her sister, Vanessa Bell. Famous painter. The heart and soul of Bloomsbury. Surely you’ve heard of Vanessa Bell?”

  Jo shook her head.

  “But you’re familiar with Bloomsbury? As an historical fact, I mean?”

  “I’ve heard the term,” she said cautiously.

  “Christ,” Peter muttered. “The colossal ignorance of Americans.… All right. A brief summary of the principal achievements in British art and writing in the first three decades of the twentieth century: That would be Bloomsbury. Your Vita is regarded as a member. So was Virginia Woolf. And her sister, Vanessa. And most of the men they took up with—artists, writers, philosophers, the odd civil servant. The men were friends from their days in Cambridge, and they all lived and worked and shagged in the part of London called Bloomsbury. Near the British Museum—it’s mostly the University of London now. Radicals, free-thinkers, passionate homosexuals—the lot. The twentieth century wouldn’t be the same without them.”

  “So by pictures,” Jo broke in, “Jock meant paintings? But when would he have seen them?”

  “That’s what he wanted you to find out. Tell her pictures at Charleston. Your grandfather’s Last Will and Testament.”

  “You think this is important?”

  “Of course.” Peter tossed her a map. “Charleston is never an accident. Find the Brighton–Eastbourne Road, would you? And pray that Margaux hasn’t pillaged the place before us.”

  THE CONNAUGHT’S PRIVATE BUTLER SERVED BREAKFAST in Gray Westlake’s solitary suite that Tuesday morning: coffee, Danish, fresh fruit, steel-cut rolled oats. Gray drank the coffee, which was poured out from a silver service by gloved hands, as he stood near the full-length windows studying the miserable London weather. It was dark at nine A.M. It would be dark again by four-thirty He was familiar enough with the city to have expected this, and in the heat of Buenos Aires two days ago he had yearned for it. Autumn in England. Scotch by the fire. Tweeds and cashmere and the warmth of Jo Bellamy beside him. He had imagined buying her things. Giving her treats. Long dinners with wine and conversation. Touching her constantly, and feeling her hands on his skin.

  He’d imagined breakfast differently, too; he hadn’t expected to be alone.

  A spitting rain turned the limestone of Mayfair a dingy yellow, and almost everyone hurrying along the sidewalks below was dressed in black or tan. Umbrellas bobbed and cars sent swooshes of dirty water over the pavement. It was unutterably dreary and his solitude was annoying. Gray ignored the discreet click of the butler’s exit, and asked himself for the hundredth time why he had not checked out of the Connaught already.

  Because you don’t give up, said a voice in his mind. You wait. For the refusal and the doubt to turn to acceptance.

  Acceptance? Is that all he wanted from Jo?

  Restlessly, Gray set his cup in the middle of the snow-white tablecloth, frowning at the food he had no desire to eat. He was used to being thwarted. That was a fact of a financier’s life. He was used to calculating odds, and manipulating perceptions, and forcing his desired conclusion through a mix of will and ruthlessness. But he did not know how to win Jo Bellamy. She was utterly unlike the women he knew best—women who might be clever or accomplished or ruthless on their own ground, but who masked that steel with deliberate polish. Women like Alicia, who had been his lawyer before she was his lover and eventually his wife. He understood women who could calculate his net worth, their degree of sexual leverage, and his possible generosity in prenuptial agreements—and make decisions based on self-interest.

  Jo was nothing like that. Jo was simple. Frank. Open-hearted. T
rue. She tortured Gray, kept him wakeful at night, as though she were a path into a hidden country of unimaginable happiness that he could choose to follow, or ignore at his cost. Now, standing by the rainy window, he understood that he’d miscalculated. Jo’s path—Jo’s invitation—was hers to extend, not his to take. And she had closed a gate carefully between them, and walked briskly off into the distant trees.…

  He could give Jo nothing, Gray thought, that she would ever really need. He could not buy her. Not even with this gift of designing his garden…

  He should fire her. She was afraid of that, Gray knew. He’d heard the desire to placate in her voice last night, when she’d called from Oxford.

  Oxford. His pulse quickened suddenly, and he thrust his hands in the pockets of his wool pants, fiddling with loose change. Consulting a book expert, she’d said. But Jo would never have found such a person on her own.…

  There’d been that call from Sotheby’s yesterday. She’d raced off to meet someone in the Connaught’s car. Who was this joker, Gray thought, that Jo preferred to him?

  Half his furniture had been bought at Sotheby’s. On impulse, Gray picked up the phone.

  “I’d like to speak to somebody who knows books,” he told the auction house’s central receptionist. And waited for Marcus Symonds-Jones to come on the line.

  THEY REACHED THE PLACE CALLED CHARLESTON A few minutes before noon.

  “We’ll hope someone’s there,” Peter told her as they slipped down the A27. “It’s not a Trust property, and the hours are a bit odd. But if we can’t get in, that means Margaux is equally stymied. We’ll persuade her to give up the notebook, join forces, and treat us to lunch.”

  His irritation with Margaux had evaporated once they left Oxford, as though Jo’s clue somehow absolved the woman of guilt. It was possible, however, that Peter was simply looking forward to a good meal. For a man who was fit and lean, Jo thought, he spent a significant part of his day considering where to dine.

  “Food is important to you, isn’t it?” she observed. “Do you cook much?”

  “Every chance I get. Love nothing better,” he confided. “I’ve actually called in sick just so I could spend a few hours at a farmer’s market, and the rest of the day in my hole of a kitchen. Margaux and I used to say—”

  He stopped.

  “Yes?” Jo prompted.

  “Sorry. It’s just that it still catches me unaware—how much I assume we’re together. When clearly we’re not. Force of habit, you see. It’s a sickness. She left me seven months and fourteen days ago, Jo, although who’s counting, really?—and still, I speak of her as though I’m sure of her. As though the future we mapped out together—the farmhouse somewhere in the country, the room-of-one’s-own where she’d write—was still going to happen. When it’s all effing gone and she’s shagging idiots like Ian, you know? My whole life is completely gone.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jo said inadequately. “You were hoping you’d… marry her?”

  “I bloody well did marry her.” His retort was outraged. “That’s my ex-wife who’s stolen your notebook, Jo Bellamy, and don’t you forget it.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, and stopped before she added the inevitable: Why in the hell did I trust you, Peter? Your Woolf expert is just the woman you can’t leave behind. However justified, the words didn’t come. Peter was trying. He was AWOL from work; he would probably be fired. They could both, Jo reflected, be arrested for stealing a treasure from Sissinghurst Castle. What was the equivalent of a federal offense in England, and did it apply to property taken from National Trust houses?

  “The notebook mentions Vanessa, remember.” Peter swung sharply off the A27; they were a mile from a village called Firle. “How the writer envied her. Wanted her life. Almost fell for her husband, and so on. It was that bit, really, that convinced me it must be Virginia—I mean, who wouldn’t hate having Vanessa Bell for a sister?”

  “Was she that awful?” Jo asked.

  Peter sighed. He was suppressing the impulse, possibly, to decry the general ignorance of Americans. “Vanessa was a superstar. Simply gorgeous. The kind of woman that men write poetry about. Everybody was in love with her—except, possibly, the people who knew her best.”

  “Like Virginia?”

  “Well—being a sister complicates adoration, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child.”

  “Ah.” He glanced sideways at her. “Virginia had the opposite problem. Lost in a pack of brats, really. Vanessa was the elder; Thoby, whom your notebook also mentions—”

  “He’s the one who died?”

  “A lot of them died. Thoby fell between the two girls in birth order; then there was Adrian, who was younger and never liked his sisters much; and four older half-siblings from each of the parents’ first marriages. Virginia’s mother died when she was thirteen, and then her elder half-sister went, and her father, and finally Thoby—of typhoid, after they’d all been to Turkey together. Enough to drive anybody to suicide, one would think.”

  “Ye-es,” Jo said. She was sensitive on the subject. “But given that people were dying like flies all around her—I’m surprised she didn’t cling to Vanessa.”

  “Oh, I daresay she did.” Peter was peering anxiously through the Triumph’s windscreen, searching for the Charleston sign. “They wrote and visited and generally lived in each other’s pockets throughout their lives. But Virginia was always going mad, d’you see, and needing rest cures and attempting suicide—”

  “So the River—what did you call it?”

  “—Ouse. It’s not far from here, by the way.”

  “—the plunge in the Ouse, whenever it happened, wasn’t a complete surprise?”

  “Lord, no! There were bouts of overdosing, and so on, for years and years. Everybody who knew Woolf expected her to end it, one day. Although women, it seems, take several tries to kill themselves; it’s men who bring vigor to the first attempt.”

  Jock, Jo thought. Had he given much thought to his last, terrible act? Agonized over it? Considered asking for help? Or simply walked out into the garage—

  “But Vanessa”—Peter slowed the car and dived into a gravel opening in the surrounding brush—“was more of a brick. Fell in love with her painter friend Duncan Grant, and set up shop here at Charleston with utter disregard for the conventionalities. Her husband, Clive, visited the family between mistresses. Vanessa raised kids by both men in one rather unusual household and proceeded to paint every bare surface she could get her hands on.”

  “Sounds nuts in a different way.”

  “Maybe.” His voice was wistful. “Devilish attractive, for all that. Everyone visited her—Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West and Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, Some of them even bought houses in the neighborhood; it was a sort of Bloomsbury-in-Exile. Virginia and Leonard Woolf could walk over—Monk’s House is only a matter of miles from here.”

  “That’s Woolf’s place?”

  “Yes. In Rodmell. Perhaps we’ll stop, if we’ve time.”

  “She didn’t walk over, though, did she? At the end? She ran to Vita, not her sister.”

  “Perhaps Charleston was too close. To Leonard. Perhaps she thought Vanessa would send her back.”

  The Triumph jolted over the rutted road, demonstrating the limits of its suspension system.

  “Did Virginia ruin her sister’s marriage?” Jo could not help thinking of these tangled relationships in terms of herself. Gray. The shadow of adultery.

  “Clive Bell didn’t need a push to wander—he was a womanizer par excellence,” Peter said disparagingly. “What Virginia craved was not her sister’s husband, but her sanity. She wanted Vanessa’s self-possession. Her earth-mother warmth. Christ, she wanted her children. Leonard decided early on that Virginia shouldn’t have kids—he was convinced they’d drive her mad.”

  “So Vanessa had everything? And Virginia nothing?”

  “It could look that way, yes. To Virgi
nia, certainly. She was the sort to feel plaintive about her wants.”

  “I don’t think any two people could have been happier than we were,” Jo murmured. “She wrote that, to Leonard Woolf.”

  “But it reads as ironic in your notebook, doesn’t it? That’s the lie she left behind her, for kindness. Ah—here we are,” he said, as Charleston came into view.

  AT FIRST, THE HOUSE DIDN’T IMPRESS HER AS ANYTHING much. She had recently been walking the grounds of a fifteenth-century castle, after all.

  Charleston was a solid, rectangular place of no particular age or style, with broadly sloping tile roofs, lapped all around by fields, the smoky suggestion of the Downs rising beyond. The buff-colored walls were built of a mixture of brick and flint, and the word shabby came to mind. The windows were massive eyes punched in the front façade, fringed with faded vines. There was a pond, edged with what Jo suspected were weeds, and a willow tree drooping over it. Hovering on the far bank she glimpsed something—a woman? Staring at them?—and clutched Peter’s arm.

  “She’s going to throw herself in!”

  “It’s just a statue, Jo.” He studied it with narrowed eyes. “Creepy, though, isn’t it? Like an unquiet ghost.”

  Only one other car sat in the gravel lot.

  “Margaux?” Jo whispered—although the car was obviously empty.

  Peter shook his head. “She’s probably been and gone.”

  “But why would she even come here? She never knew Jock or what he wrote when he died. Pictures at Charleston is nowhere in the notebook—”

  “The mention of Vanessa might have been enough. Something made her snatch the book and run.”

  Peter waited for her to precede him through the blue-painted gate that led from the car park to the front door. Standing before the entrance, they both hesitated. A bird called. Jo shivered. She couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching her—the ghost by the pond, perhaps.