Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  The writing broke off. Or trailed away, perhaps, was more accurate. The whole passage was difficult to read—Jo had to study each word, search for context, and still the writing made no sense. She had expected something forthright, something about Sissinghurst and Jock that would explain her grandfather’s suicide.

  Carefully, she set the old copybook on her knees and turned a yellowed page. She had bolted her dinner in the George’s bar and retreated immediately to her room so that she could open this book. It had seemed wrong, somehow, to leaf through it as she ate her meat pie and the locals pulled their pints. But now, propped up against the pillows, she felt the thin wedge of disappointment. What was all this? Should she skip ahead—look for the word Jock again, somewhere in the middle?

  If it had not been for the bird singing, she might have gone into the water that day. She had been looking for stones to weight her pockets, something heavy, she might have slid them into her Wellingtons. What was it? A thrush? Nondescript, English, like the flooded meadows. Brown as dyke water. Life! it sang. She could not quite meet its sharp black eye. Had the bird flown, leaving her to Fate with an indifferent wing, she would have set her foot upon the muddy bank and closed her eyes.

  The bird did not fly.

  Life! it sang. Vita!

  She gave herself up to the pure liquid sound, so different from the metal drone of aeroplane engines. A great peace descended. It filled up the meadows like clear water. She did not hear the warring voices, accusing, arguing. She did not smell the smears of lead on his fingers. Her sagging flesh. The hopeless despair, heavy as coffins.

  Yes, she thought. I shall go to Vita.

  And she tumbled the stones from her pocket.

  In her bedroom at the George, Jo Bellamy held the fragile notebook directly under the circle of her bedside lamp. The faded chocolate ink—had she read it clearly? The name was certainly Vita. Written with a sharp stab in the initial V, the T rakishly crossed. The book, and its writer, had found their way to Sissinghurst; and not for the first time, it seemed.

  Jo smoothed the crinkled page.

  Haste, haste, to the village station. Trudge through the muddy meadows, the path submerged. Tempting, the river always tempting—Swing your stick the bird has flown. Cowering near a platform pillar, hat pulled low. This is no time to smile at the station master, he cares not a snap for your kindness, the entire village thinks you mad. He will read the note when you fail to appear for luncheon. He will come hunting. Lapinova in the snare.

  To London, first. The ruins of Mecklenburgh Square. I should like to touch the stones. An ordinary death, a death like anyone else’s, it might have been an accident, there was nothing we could do for the lady, sir, she was blown to bits packing books in the cellar—

  The Lady.

  The simple words pulled Jo’s mind from the text and back to Jock: what was it he had written in his wartime letter? Something about the poor lady’s huge eyes, how he’d tried to help her, but had only made things worse. “Lady” was a common-enough word; the two references might have nothing to do with each other. But she needed to reread Jock’s letter; it was tucked into her suitcase.

  The train pulls in with a failing sigh. She mounts the steps of the second-class carriage. The station master is busy with an Important Person, a man for Westminster, all black leather cases, he sees nothing of her treacherous escape. She is mad in any case, the whole town knows. The mad are so difficult except when they write. She takes her seat in the compartment, a seat near the window, her gaze fixed on the countryside. If the bomb fell now and took the train no one could blame her. The station falls back, the speed mounts like a horse between her thighs. He has not looked for her. He has not run screaming behind the train, his right arm raised.

  Another ghost, shut up and shelved…

  “But a ghost from a book?” Jo murmured, frowning. “Or the ghost of someone real?”

  She had no idea. The fragments of strange script swirling across the fragile pages might be an attempt at fiction. Or they might be an account of something else. A woman who felt hunted to the point of drowning herself; a woman who escaped in fear. To Sissinghurst?

  She flipped to the back of the notebook and felt her stomach plummet.

  A chunk of paper had been torn from the spine, wrenched out, it appeared, by a dull knife or a vicious hand. Scrawled on the inside of the back cover were the words Apostles Screed. But that was wrong; surely the term was Apostles Creed?

  The story she’d only just started, had no ending.

  The cell phone lying under the circle of light shuddered visibly, skittered on the tabletop, demanded Jo’s attention.

  “Good evening, Mr. Westlake,” she said, with deliberate lightness. As though the formal address could recast their relationship. As though it were still possible to be just a gardener and her potentate.

  “It’s morning where I am. Where are you?”

  “In my room.”

  “Then I’m not distracting you from work. Good.” He paused. “What would you do, Jo, if I showed up on your doorstep?”

  “You mean… here?” She sat up straighter against the pillows, reached unconsciously to tidy her hair, as though he could see her. “In Kent?”

  “Or London. Or the middle of the Atlantic, if you happened to be there.”

  “Is Alicia flying over for another auction?”

  “Alicia’s at Canyon Ranch. For the next ten days.”

  Jo gripped the phone spasmodically. There were several possible meanings behind the careful words. “But you’re in Argentina.”

  “For the next few hours. Then… who knows?”

  She could almost see him, in that half-remembered, half-imagined way the mind supplies: a wing of dark hair, peppered silver; white cuffs rolled back to reveal his forearms, tanned from sailing. But no—it was morning in Buenos Aires. He’d have his jacket on. A tie, Windsor-knotted. The cell phone resting against his crisp collar…

  “You want to see the garden?” She was stalling, and knew it.

  “I want to see you.”

  Gray was extremely good at dropping sentences like bombs. Assessing the damage.

  “What are you saying?”

  He laughed.

  That quickly, she could see the quirk of the lips, the amusement reserved for himself alone. The essential unreachability of the man.

  “You think I know? What am I saying? That if I rang your English bell—”

  “—You wonder whether I’d… open the door?”

  “Exactly.”

  Jo’s gaze drifted over the half-timbered walls, the deep orange of the plaster. It was not a restful room, this hip outpost at the George. Her mind was full of an unknown woman, a hunted creature gone to ground. The impulse to tell Gray what she’d been doing—the research, the notebook she’d found in a dusty cupboard, her grandfather’s suicide—was strong. But she couldn’t. The world of water and singing birds, train rides to nowhere, had nothing to do with Gray. They’d never talked about her, Jo. She’d never told him anything real. They didn’t know each other at all. They shared a spark—a sexual frisson of recognition, completely wordless. Gray liked it that way.

  Did she?

  If she let him in, when he knocked at her door?

  Sex. Entanglement. Deception.

  And all the possibility of Gray’s world. Power. Privilege. Being wanted—

  What was she afraid of? Walking in too deep. The water closing over my head—

  “Jo,” he whispered. “Where am I flying tomorrow?”

  “Let me sleep on it,” she said.

  ON SUNDAYS, THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE GARDEN their church would wander through Sissinghurst’s gates and spend the morning in communion with nature. Imogen Cantwell understood the impulse—the essential piety of the place, particularly on a morning like this, when the rain was done and the October world glowed with color. Her feelings were bittersweet: Sissinghurst was open to the public only another week, and then the massive show she had been s
ustaining for half a year would be over. Between November and March the castle and its grounds slumbered in winter cold, a private kingdom restored to The Family.

  Imogen put in four hours of labor before the opening at eleven o’clock. Three of her staff were set to trimming the massive Irish yews that flanked the Top Courtyard paving; two others were busy at the Powys Wall in the Rose Garden, where the crowning glory of the curving brick, five Perle d’Azur clematis vines, were ruthlessly cut back in preparation for winter. Imogen herself ventured over to Delos, a disconcerting bit of ground west of the White Garden. It had never come together to Imogen’s satisfaction, in Vita’s day or hers. Vita had thought of it as an Attic Ruin, a place where saxifrages and aubrietias ran wild among massive fragments of masonry, like a windswept terrace on a Greek isle; but most of the rock bits had been carted off by the Nicolson boys in their youth, and the original maze of wandering paths had been tidied over the decades. It was an outer wing of the garden, frequented most often by people who loved Sissinghurst well and had long since surfeited on the stagier parts; these were the sort of visitors who were sometimes discovered long after closing, absorbed in a book amidst Delos’s teal-blue bromeliads. This morning, Imogen found Jo Bellamy there.

  The American was standing stock-still in the middle of the curving brick path that bisected the Aegean wilderness, and a book did indeed droop from her hands. Oast houses loomed behind her, but there were no hops any longer at Sissinghurst, to scent the air with beer. Jo was studying the rear of the White Garden, or what could be glimpsed of it through a gap in the hedge; taking notes, Imogen surmised. She ought to be nearly finished poaching on other people’s grounds.

  “Hullo,” Imogen called as she swung into view from the Top Courtyard. “Conjuring the Ghost of Gardens Past, are we?”

  The American started slightly. “How did you know?”

  “You’ve gone all unfocused about the eyes. Rather like the psychic my batty sister-in-law consults about her children’s future. Are you planning to stay on through Visitor Hours? See how the garden bears up under the strain of all those dragging feet?”

  Jo smiled faintly. “I’ve been wondering about that. The grass paths. They must get worn down.”

  “Special blend of seed,” Imogen confided, “and strenuous mowing schedules. We only cut midweek, during Closed Days—gives the turf time to regroup before the weekend onslaught. But you won’t have to worry about that. Yours is a private client. A game preserve.”

  “Yes,” Jo murmured.

  “Today’s almost the last of it, you know.” Imogen stabbed the end of her grubbing hoe into a hillock of hellebores. “We shut down next weekend until mid-March, barring the odd festive note at Christmas. I must say I’m looking forward to the peace and quiet—time to concentrate on the real business of gardening. Get into the greenhouses and the cold frames. Propagate. What about you? Heading back to the States?”

  “Next Sunday.” Jo stepped toward her. “Can I ask you something, Imogen?”

  “Course.”

  “Did Vita’s friends stay here at the castle? For weeks at a time?”

  Jo’s eyes had gone from unfocused to probing. Imogen wrinkled her brow and glanced away. “Lord! I don’t know. She had scads of friends, I should think. Vita was known for collecting people—but you’ll have read that, in the biographies.”

  “Is there any way to find out?—Who might have been here during a particular time frame, I mean?”

  “Jo,” Imogen said with a sigh, “she died in 1962. Why do you want to know? It has nothing whatsoever to do with the White Garden, surely?”

  By way of answer, Jo held out the book she’d been reading. Imogen saw that it was the slim notebook they’d unearthed from the tool shed the day before. “It has no ending.”

  “Vass’s book?”

  “Not Vass. Someone else. A woman. Read this section,” Jo urged. “I want to know what you think. Whether I’m out of my mind or…just read it. Please.”

  29 March 1941

  Sissinghurst

  London, as it happens, was a mistake.

  Big Ben was striking as she stepped into the street. Something solemn in the deliberate swing of the strokes; the murmur of wheels; the shuffle of footsteps. There is much more to be said about us than that we walk the streets of Westminster; but she had loved London in the old days, loved it far more than walking in the country. Her London was gone as brutally as childhood—

  Mecklenburgh Square, a jumble of brick and Portland cement. Book bindings scattered like dead leaves. Somebody’s old pot resting on a broken pediment. One pigskin glove, lavender-coloured. The airraid klaxon. The shouts of men in pompous uniforms. Whistles! The granite bulk of Queen Victoria, sandbagged in her chair. The klaxon sounding again and the breathless descent of crowds, flowing like rats into the Underground. She hugged her elbows to her chest as the earth shook around her.

  “It was the same with me,” Vita said later, when they were tucked up in the sitting room. “There was a filthy run last autumn, the whole world coming to an end and Hadji gone in London. I lay under the bed with the dogs until the bombs stopped falling. Shook for days afterwards. You oughtn’t to have gone, truly. One only thinks one can go back. But it is impossible, isn’t it? We go only forward.”

  We go only forward.

  The words made her shiver again, now that she was alone in the delicious feather bed, the curtains drawn round. Ben’s bedroom, it was, and determinedly mannish; he was attached to the Gunners at Rochester, while Nigel had gone into the Grenadier Guards. Vita worried constantly despite her brisk talk of her brave boys, sound as a bell, doing their bit. She grew anxious by week-end for Harold’s arrival, although some Fridays he never got away from the Ministry at all. Aloof as Vita always was, careless of the people she desperately loved—unkind to them even—she’d opened her arms wide for this unexpected visit. Sent a boy to Staplehurst when she got the wire—a lad named Jock, peering through the dusk for this old woman.

  He took my stick—I had no bag, it was an embarrassment to me, something that ought to require explanation—but the boy asked for none. Helped me up into Vita’s pony trap, the petrol or perhaps the sumptuous car too precious to trust to a schoolboy. Became my saviour, though he can’t have known it. A simple boy, dark and serious, with sensitive hands managing the reins.

  Vita was quite alone. Gave me sherry, then more of it. Patted the dogs and fed the fire while she let down the blackout shades. “Now then,” she said. “What’s it all about?” Both of us warm, free of care, snug as Ali Baba in his cave. I took still more sherry. “Life,” I said. “Singing life.”

  “So I gathered, from your wire.”

  I telegraphed from London. Wrote of the treacherous river, the persistent bird. No time to wait for Vita’s answer; the train was leaving. But she had not failed me. The boy, Jock, standing in the station’s gloom.

  “Now then,” she said again, and sat at my feet.

  How old we both are! All those years ago, when I first loved her, Vita scared me a little with her riches. Young and ripe as a sheaf of corn. Or a bunch of grapes—that was how I thought of her—the aristocratic mouth, the heavy breasts, the fat pearls she looped about her neck. Her need for love, her pursuit of it despite her children and the demands of public life. Her lordship of the manor. She was like a goddess in those days, Junoesque, heavy and omnipotent with lightning at her command. And now? As spare and wizened as an old strip of saddle leather.

  “It was the lead poisoning,” she says with her usual carelessness. A bout of illness several years back, something to do with lead in the cider-press; I remember it now. Vita propped up in bed, surrounded by gardening catalogues. Illness stripped the flesh from her bones. Her cheeks are riven with vertical lines, her fingers crabbed from digging. I know the truth: we have both of us been worn down to bones. The loss of too much love, the loss of our singing lives.

  “What do you mean to do,” she asked me quietly, “now you’ve really l
eft him?”

  “Live,” I said.

  IMOGEN CANTWELL LOOKED UP FROM THE PAGES INTO JO’S anxious face. “Devilish hard to read, isn’t it? She could have tried for neater handwriting. But I thought it was a garden book—a diary of some sort.”

  “So did I.”

  “Why would Vass have kept this?”

  “He didn’t.” Jo reached for the notebook as though she couldn’t help herself, couldn’t leave it in Imogen’s hands a moment longer. “The boy she writes about—Jock—that was my grandfather’s name. He would have been seventeen. Sent over from Knole, where he grew up, to work here during the war.”

  “Ah.” Imogen leaned on the handle of her grubbing hoe and studied Jo frankly. “A personal interest, is it? That’s why you’re so keen to see our records from the forties. It’s not about the White Garden at all.”

  “It may be. Remember the title of this.”

  “Title?” Imogen frowned. Notes on the Making of a White Garden. “You think it’s… some sort of fiction? But the writer mentions Vita. That’s real enough.”

  “Yes. And she’s careful never to mention her own name at all. Who would have been close enough to Vita Sackville-West in 1941 to arrive at Sissinghurst on the strength of a telegram, and be immediately welcome?”

  “A lover, you mean? Vita took them in scores. Mostly women, though the odd man does come up.”

  Jo turned the book in her hands. “Only one of them could write like this.”

  Imogen stared at her, thinking. Like everybody who’d made Sissinghurst their world, she’d learned a lot about The Family along the way. It was impossible to sustain Vita’s garden without knowing about Vita herself. She was everywhere: in the roses, the heavy Bagatelle vases that dotted the landscape, the looming shadow of the tower. Imogen had read the biographies. Lord, she’d even read Vita’s poetry, which almost nobody bothered with now. What was Jo saying? A lover of Vita’s, who’d had the ability to write?

  “We should tell The Family,” she decided. “This might be valuable. If it really is…”