The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (10 page)

“I wish you could see the tips of the daffodils poking through the soil,” she murmured. “I bought scads of them at auction last fall. Also a magnolia, quite a lovely thing, but very slow growing. Hadji says I’m foolish. The whole place could be a ruin in weeks. But I must plant, don’t you see? I must continue to believe that things will grow. Spring comes, regardless of the Luftwaffe. Or whether I live or die.”

“The earth takes in our bones—and gives back the magnolia.”

We picked our way through the beds near the Priest’s House, where she and Harold take their meals. Roses, of course, everywhere—a nightmarish landscape in this season and the dark. Stiff, brutal canes like barbed wire. Leafless. I thought of trenches. The dead. Earth torn by shrapnel. Thorns. Crucifixions
—

“No light,” I said, my words thick. Panic in my throat. The man falling through darkness
.

“Hadji painted all our torches blue last autumn, when we cared about the blackout. So now I dispense with light altogether. Like a cat. And I’ve walked this path from dinner to bed countless times in the dark. Look!”

She seized my wrist and held me there. I lifted my gaze from the trenches and the sick barbs of stillborn roses, and saw it
.

The great ghostly barn owl, drifting overhead. White as a wraith, silent as Nemesis
.

“Isn’t he
gorgeous
,” Vita whispered
.

The Home Guard had missed this pair of wings. We kept the visitation to ourselves. And absurdly, I felt my heart lift. Sweeping through the air—Life! Life! Life!—impervious to despair. Its pale shade a taunt to the Luftwaffe
.

“It glows,” I said
.

“Doesn’t it just!”

I glanced around. “You should have white flowers here. Nothing else. They’d rise in the dark like fairy lamps, lighting your way to bed.”

“Lilium regale,” she said. “Hadji loves them. Only not here—I thought perhaps in the Lion’s Pond. Vass drained it.”

“The Lion’s Pond gets no sun.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s what Hadji said! Have you been writing to my husband?”

Harold and I, in mutual sympathy? No. He is a man, after all, and their instinct is mastery
—

“White clematis. White lavender, white agapanthus, white double-primroses. White anemones…”

Lists, again. How they comfort her
.

I wanted to tell her she would never do it, with this constant maddening threat of war. She could not buy plants or the petrol to fetch them or the labour to thrust them into the earth, but the idea of all this whiteness was vital to her—a cleansing impulse, a need for clarity. Light in the darkness. How obvious it seems, how clumsy, how necessary
.

“Is Vass still here?”

She shook her head. “Called up and gone the next day. But I have
a boy—a good, sensible, Knole-bred boy, sent over for the duration. You met him yesterday.”

The tall, silent one standing with his cap in his hands at the Staplehurst station. “Jock?”

“My faithful terrier. He worries about me, did you know?”

“He’ll be off to war one day, too.”

“Not if I can prevent it.” Her voice was tight with suppressed anger. Fear for her own boys. Ben flying low over batteries, skirting the radar. The horrible deaths we witnessed in the last war. Trenches. Barbed wire. The trenches are flooded and our feet are rotting. How the water calls to me with babbling Death
—

“His hands are too fine,” Vita said. “There’s suffering in them.”

In all our hands
.

We did not speak until we reached the South Cottage
.

PETER LLEWELLYN STOOD WAITING OUTSIDE THE auction-house entrance. The change in his expression when Jo pulled up in the borrowed Bentley—there were mini Connaught flags flying from the headlamps, as though she were a Head of State—was comical to behold.

“Shall we take tea?” he asked once the chauffeur had evicted her to the paving and resumed his privileged post behind the wheel.

“Sure. I could use a little caffeine. I’m not used to wine in the middle of the day.”

“That’s rather reassuring, in the circumstances. That you
aren’t
a habitual drinker, I mean. Walk or taxi?”

She’d expected Sotheby’s café again. “Let’s walk.”

They set off down New Bond Street, Jo conscious of a sudden shyness. It had been an unsettling day. And there was all
of London around her—this extraordinary city—the strangeness of the man beside her, kind as he was; the unexpectedness of Gray, waiting for her in an empty hotel suite.

“Do you like macaroons?” Llewellyn asked unexpectedly.

“Very much.”

“Smashing. We’ll have lots, shall we?”

She smiled, then noticed how he ducked his head as though from a physical blow; Americans, she recalled, were accused of smiling too much. She would have to curb her impulse in the future.

“You mentioned you were done with my notebook,” she ventured.

“I did.” He walked swiftly, with his blond head slightly bowed; a slim figure, unconsciously graceful. He might almost have been striding along alone—except that she was aware of him almost imperceptibly shepherding her through the crowd. “Miss Bellamy, would you describe yourself as a person of
integrity?”

“Does my tea depend on it?”

He grimaced. “I’m feeling rather as though I’ve gone out on a limb. I don’t suppose you understand me.”

“You want to know if I’m honest.” She tried to think objectively. “I have a great deal of integrity about my work—getting it right, for myself and the people who hire me. I would
like
to think I treat the people I love with honesty. But…” She hesitated, aware of conflict in her soul, Gray hovering over her. “I’m not perfect. I make mistakes. All the time.”

“Which is in itself the most honest thing you could say. Thank you.”

They dashed through traffic in Piccadilly and then into the Burlington Arcade. He was leading her to a place called Ladurée, a bright shining birdcage of a room filled with pastel-colored
French pastries, melt-in-the-mouth macaroons for which Paris was famous.

“Opened recently,” Llewellyn murmured. “We’re not too sure about it. Londoners, I mean. Suspicious of anything too French. I got over that, myself, years ago.”

They chose a plateful of exotic flavors from the rows of coat-button–size confections and sat down at a tiny table, their knees almost touching, to wait for a pot of tea. When it came, Jo closed her eyes and allowed the bergamot fragrance of Earl Grey to drift to her nostrils. “I should bring some of this home to my grandmother. She loves British tea.”

“Masterpiece Theatre
fan?”

“Military nurse. She was stationed here for years during the war. Never got over it.”

“Ah!” His expression, which had been curiously concentrated when he looked at Jo, suddenly relaxed. “That’s all right, then. I suppose she gave you this?”

He had drawn the notebook out of his coat pocket and held it before her like a flag.

“Nana? How could she? I found it at Sissinghurst!”

“So you said.” Llewellyn lifted the teapot carefully and refilled his cup. “Only, you see, it doesn’t work. I wish it did, because you’ve said you’re honest and I like you, Miss Bellamy. I’d hoped we could deal frankly with one another.”

Jo felt her face suffuse with heat. Carefully, she set down her half-finished macaroon and wiped her fingers on her napkin. “I don’t lie, Mr. Llewellyn. What about the notebook
doesn’t work?”

“It doesn’t square with the evidence, I’m afraid. The historic record of Woolf’s life.” He took a sip of tea. “Whoever wrote this went to a great deal of trouble—the notebook itself is authentically of the period, the ink is probably prewar,
although we’d have to verify that chemically; the language is similar to the sort of stuff Woolf wrote to
be just
plausible—”

“Then why—”

“Indeed, certain phrases and passages might almost have been lifted straight from her work—and probably were,” he added hurriedly. “Then there’s the references to Lady Nicolson and her family, their shared past, Woolf’s novel
Orlando
, which is dedicated to Vita—and so on and so forth.”

“So what’s—”

“It’s clearly a forgery, I’m afraid.”

“Why?”

“You honestly don’t know? You never noticed?”

Jo frowned.

“Open to the first page, Miss Bellamy, and read out the date.”

She did as she was told.

“Twenty-nine March 1941,”
she read, “
Sissinghurst
. What’s so wrong about that?”

Llewellyn leaned across the table. His gray eyes were studying her with something like pity. He had not touched his macaroons.

“Do you know when Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse?”

Jo shook her head.

“The day
before
your notebook starts—March twenty-eight, 1941.”

30 March 1941
Sissinghurst

SHE WOKE ME THIS MORNING WITH SUCH AN EXPRESSION of worry that at first I thought I had offended her, from staying abed so late into the morning. I had been drowning in sleep for hours—down, down, into the depths of this feather bed, its curtains pulled close, like a Tudor princess sacrificed to policy—never in recent memory have I slept so sound. The voices in my head banished sleep, a constant argument overheard on the Tube, a BBC broadcast perpetually in the background, an intimate whisper of invective and abuse. I could not write for their clamour in my ears
—

“He has written to me,” she said. “There—you may see the letter. It’s quite dreadful, darling.”

I knew the hand. I did not have to take it to see who it was—why
my Vita was agitated so dreadfully. L. is a terrible scold. With the best intentions in the world—the preservation of genius—he will drive one to the edge of insanity, and observe as one falls over. Waiting with his net. Waiting with his snare
.

I am never so much L.’s own, as when I am mad
.

It is the kind of mastery he craves; all our friends, cooing with sympathy:
You have preserved for the world her genius what would she have done without you we should never have known Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse!
And I, dutiful child, nod swiftly and say to them all: I have been so very happy with L. So good to me, always
.

“I won’t read it,” I said, thrusting back the covers. I fancied I saw him folded up quietly in a corner of the room, thin knees tucked in, watching me. He was smiling; there was intent behind his eyes, some devilment. “I shall simply pack my things and go. You won’t betray me?”

“Darling, you don’t understand.” Vita sank down onto the bed, the letter slack in her fingers. “He has told everyone you’re dead. That you killed yourself. He intends to send the information to
The Times
. Apparently they’re dragging for your body, back at Rodmell…”

My body
.

The chuckling brown water, inviting me. Seducing me. Dragging at my thighs. And but for the bird singing
Vita!
I might have plunged in
.

“What did you write,” she said, “in that letter you left him?”

“Merely that I could not go on. That I felt I was going mad again. That he would be better without me—able to work. That no one had been kinder.”

Vita snorted. “He took it as Farewell—when you simply meant farewell. How you’ve made him wretched, darling. Should you like me to telephone from the village?”

· · ·

“SO YOU SEE,” PETER LLEWELLYN WAS SAYING APOLOGETICALLY “it’s quite impossible. She was drowned the day
before
the journal begins.”

“All right,” Jo admitted, “I never focused on the dates. I didn’t buy a biography of Woolf in a bookstore and check when she killed herself. It never occurred to me. My interest in this is secondary—”