Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  It was kind of Llewellyn, she thought with a rush of gratitude, not to have said all that outright. His tact impressed her as fundamentally decent, as optimistic regarding the goodness of other people—knowing what he did about the dates, he could so easily have thrown the notebook in her face on the paving outside Sotheby’s. Instead, he had invited her to tea.

  “My interest is… much more personal,” she stammered. “I don’t really want to go into it. But I promise you it has nothing to do with making money or anything like that. It’s… a family issue.”

  “A family issue.”

  She could tell from his careful expression that he didn’t believe her. “Look, Mr. Llewellyn—maybe Virginia Woolf didn’t write this notebook. Maybe she really did drown the day before it begins. But what if she didn’t go into the water on March twenty-eight? What if she just walked to the local train station and skipped town instead?”

  He smiled faintly. “But her body was pulled out of the River Ouse, Miss Bellamy. It’s one of those unavoidable facts. She tried to kill herself as early as 1913 and she’d been thinking about drowning for a while before she did it—her suicide note was dated several days prior to the twenty-eighth. She even did a test drop, apparently, and came home soaked to the skin. Leonard wasn’t noticing.”

  “Leonard?”

  “The husband. Leonard Woolf. One of the great literary minds of Bloomsbury—all but overshadowed by his wife.”

  “You don’t like her, do you?” Jo said suddenly.

  Llewellyn’s eyes slid away from hers; he looked uncomfortable. “I was forced to eat, drink, and sleep Virginia Woolf for a time, and it rather soured me on her worldview. One becomes impatient. With all the dramatizing. With the idea that writing is akin to madness. Or, perhaps, that being female is a constant state of persecution—” He halted, as though entangled in impossible thoughts. “Sorry.”

  “There’s something fierce about this book,” Jo said. “Something fearless, too—as though she knew death was coming for her, and was determined to outrun it.”

  “But Virginia Woolf didn’t write that book.” He pointed it out gently.

  Jo sat back and stared at Peter Llewellyn. She was not going to move him. He was the Expert, after all; and he had made up his mind, drawing on a wealth of knowledge and expertise of which she could have only the barest idea. And with that recognition, she felt like a foolish child. She was embarrassed—by how naively credulous she had been, how much time she had wasted.

  She set her neatly folded napkin at her place, along with a ten-pound note, and rose from the table.

  “Miss Bellamy!”

  “Yes?”

  He was holding out her money. “Don’t insult me, please.”

  “Consider it a fee for your appraisal.”

  “Now I am insulted.” He thrust back his chair, walked around the table, and took the notebook from her hands. Opening the cover, he tucked the ten-pound note inside, and returned the book gravely.

  Jo held out her hand. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry it was worthless. The notebook, I mean.”

  “Pleasure,” Llewellyn said.

  She wove swiftly away from him, past the delicate little tables, and pushed through Ladurée’s door, almost blinded now by unexpected tears. What was wrong with her? Jet lag? Gray and his assumptions in that suite at the Connaught?

  No—it was bottomless disappointment.

  She had snatched at the shabby little book as though it were a talisman, a gift from beyond the grave that might unlock the secrets her grandfather had refused to tell. Jock’s notebook had given Jo hope: that there was a reason for the suicide she found so inexplicable. When in fact it was just another symbol of all she did not know. And her hope had been squandered. She spent so much time copying other people’s work, it seemed, that she couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake anymore. She wasn’t equipped for the mission Nana had given her; she’d be lucky if she could manage to rip off the White Garden during her last few days in England, and get home with her landscape business intact.

  Oh, God, she thought, missing her grandfather acutely. If only I could talk to Jock. My worst mistakes were never this stupid, when he was there to comfort me.

  She’d come out of the Burlington Arcade onto Jermyn Street, instead of Piccadilly, and for an instant she was confused; but any taxi could get her back to Gray’s hotel. She had only to flag one of the lumbering black cars and be safe. Except that she didn’t want to see Gray right now. Not with this sharp bone of disappointment lodged in her throat. She couldn’t begin to tell him what the notebook meant to her; she couldn’t pretend, either, that it meant nothing at all.

  I should just fly home, she thought despondently, and accept that I’ll never know why Jock gave up on life.

  A glimpse of green in the distance beckoned—a park. At the moment, all Jo wanted was a broad path under the shade of trees; the smell of damp earth; a few pigeons; possibly the sound of water. She had always gone to ground in gardens when her heart was aching.

  And so it was on a bench in Green Park that Peter Llewellyn found her a few minutes later, absorbed in rereading the anonymous notebook.

  “Miss Bellamy.”

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “You looked quite sad when you left the tea shop.” He sat down beside her. “It’s the family issue, isn’t it? I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

  She hesitated, and then thought, Why not? There was something comforting about Peter Llewellyn—something akin to a Father Confessor. “How much of this have you read?”

  “I skimmed a bit. Out of curiosity.”

  “Did you notice the name Jock?”

  “The gardener’s lad?”

  “He was my grandfather.”

  Llewellyn whistled softly.

  “When I found this book, there was a tag tied around it with string. Written on the tag was Jock’s Book.”

  She told him then about the suicide two months before, and the war letter Nana had found. “I don’t know how this book came to have his name on it, or why he left it at Sissinghurst,” she concluded. “I will never know why Jock killed himself. But for a few days, I believed this book might be a clue. Can you understand that learning it’s fake is like learning Jock’s dead, all over again?”

  “Absolutely,” he replied. “You’re coming to terms with a dead end. Which should lead you to the next turning in the maze, shouldn’t it?”

  She studied him dubiously. “What are you trying to say?”

  “At a glance, the notebook itself—paper, binding, and ink—is quite possibly of the Second World War period. Could your grandfather—this Jock—have written it?”

  Jo shook her head. “It’s not his handwriting. Or, for that matter, his level of sophistication. I don’t see him casting himself as a character in a book about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, much less writing it. At seventeen, he wouldn’t have known enough about their relationship or history.”

  “Very well. Did anybody at Sissinghurst—someone familiar with the place, mind—shove you in the right direction? To stumble over this book, I mean?”

  “Imogen,” Jo said suddenly. “The Head Gardener. But she knew nothing about my grandfather—”

  “You never mentioned him?”

  Of course she had. They’d talked specifically about Jock and the war. Even in her initial letter, Jo had referred to her grandfather as a Kentishman. Was it beyond the realm of possibility that Imogen had researched the name before Jo even arrived? Had she found a Bellamy who’d been at Sissinghurst, and constructed the whole packet of lies for her to find?

  “But why?” Jo demanded. “Why would she bother? She doesn’t know me. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Llewellyn smiled faintly. “Are you aware that the National Trust is in financial straits? Too many great houses, too many gardens, not enough funds to keep them staggering along? Perhaps your Imogen has a mania about Sissinghurst—or keeping her job.
”

  “She did say she was worried about the Trust’s priorities,” Jo said. “Funding issues. She seemed to think that the garden at Sissinghurst was suddenly eclipsed by some project with the farms.”

  “Perhaps this woman thought a remarkable find—the sale of your notebook for millions—would put the White Garden in the headlines,” Peter suggested. “For plausibility, she used a complete stranger as errand girl.”

  Jo considered Imogen Cantwell’s potential for dark conspiracy, and failed utterly to believe it. “But what about the letter my grandfather left behind? Or his references to the Lady?”

  “Coincidence?”

  She bristled. “Coincidence! Across six decades and two continents? Surely there must be a better explanation, Mr. Llewellyn.”

  “And you can’t help believing that it’s the one you started with.”

  “Despite the excellent advice of my Book Expert.”

  “You honestly think that Virginia Woolf left her home and her husband of thirty-odd years, hared off to Sissinghurst, and mooned about her marriage in the midst of the Blackout?—Where she simultaneously met your grandfather as a lad and came up with the idea for the White Garden?—Before jumping into the Ouse, regardless?”

  “Maybe she was pushed.”

  Peter Llewellyn laughed. It was an unexpected sound; and it betrayed to Jo that he was less certain than he seemed. “You have the oddest way of stumbling over bombshells, Miss Bellamy. You did the same thing in the tea shop, you know. And I confess you set me to thinking.”

  Jo felt a flutter of hope, and repressed it. “About what?”

  “Your notion that Virginia might have walked to the train station instead of ending it all on the twenty-eighth of March.”

  “You said she’d been trying to drown herself for days, thank you very much.”

  “But that’s irrelevant, in the end.” Llewellyn stabbed distractedly at his glasses. “What counts are the days after the twenty-eighth, not the days before. And nobody can say absolutely where she was afterwards.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It took weeks for Virginia’s body to surface in the Ouse, you see,” Llewellyn continued. “It’s believed she fetched up against a bridge rampart and was pinned below the water. For nearly a month, as I recollect. Well into April, in any case.”

  Jo’s heart accelerated. “So if they didn’t find her body the day she left home, she might have gone into the Ouse at any time.”

  “Exactly. She might have taken your cherished train after all. And landed in Kent, where she met your grandfather.” There was an unwilling note of excitement in the Book Expert’s voice.

  “Did anyone at Sotheby’s study this handwriting?” Jo demanded. “—Somebody who could say definitely whether it’s Woolf’s?”

  Llewellyn took the notebook from Jo’s hand. He peered at the soiled brown cover.

  “You can’t imagine what this process is like, can you? I’d have to formally accept the manuscript with all sorts of papers you’d be required to fill out, proving your ownership of the article in question and your right to request such an analysis. Only you and I both know you don’t own the article in question. The notebook would be entered in our computers. Submitted with forms to the correct departments. It would be catalogued and known. Then Marcus Symonds-bloody-Jones would be all over it. Ringing up his friends in the press, contacting private collectors—universities and libraries all over the world…”

  “Who is Marcus Simmon-Jones?”

  “Symonds,” he corrected. “A perfectly loathsome individual who orders my life and half of Sotheby’s. The point, Miss Bellamy, is that if your notebook’s in the system, it automatically moves right out of your control, do you understand?”

  “Which means?”

  “That if this notebook is indeed what you think—if Woolf wrote it when she was believed to be dead—if she was alive after she left Leonard and came to her end in a different manner than history records—if this journal is not a fake, as I admit I’m beginning to wonder—”

  “Why?”

  He halted in mid-speech and studied her.

  “Because you’re so damnably plausible,” he said at last. “Nobody invents a suicidal Kentish grandpa. Because I want to believe you’re as honest as you seem. Which is the very worst reason to doubt my judgment that I can think of. It’s pathetically subjective. And a Book Expert ought to be objective, always—”

  “Thank you.”

  He nodded brusquely. “As I say—if any of this is remotely true, then you have the find of the century on your hands.”

  “We,” she corrected, springing to her feet. “We have the find of the century. And you don’t want to lose control of that?”

  “Do you?”

  “Not until I know what part Jock played in all of it,” she answered decisively.

  “And if the truth is something you don’t want to hear?—the truth about your grandfather, I mean?”

  “It can’t be worse than what he’s already done. I’ll deal with whatever comes.”

  “Very well.” Llewellyn rose from the park bench and held out the notebook. “If you go back to Kent, you might as well advertise this little item stark naked in Piccadilly Circus. The Family at Sissinghurst will pursue this themselves.”

  He was right. He was absolutely right. The book wasn’t hers. She had no right to it. But she couldn’t just…

  “I can’t just steal this!”

  He glanced at her sidelong as he sauntered back toward the Green Park gate. “I thought somebody’d lent it to you.”

  Twenty-four hours, Imogen had said. No more. I’m jolly well not going to lose my place over you. Imogen would be furious if Jo failed to appear, notebook in hand. She’d wonder. Become suspicious. But should Jo trust Imogen? What if the Head Gardener had deliberately used her?

  “The notebook was lent to me—but only in a manner of speaking.”

  “Good. That’s settled, then. I’ve a car in Sotheby’s garage. We can be off in minutes.”

  “You’re driving me back to Kent?” But what about Gray—the Connaught—all the unanswered questions…

  Llewellyn turned at the edge of Jermyn Street. “I’d rather drive to Oxford, actually. The best Woolf expert in England is there. Will you come with me, Miss Bellamy?”

  Another expert. Who might tell them, once and for all, that the notebook was nonsense. But she would have to risk it; she had to know.

  “I think you’d better call me Jo,” she told him.

  31 March 1941

  Sissinghurst

  “I MUST WRITE SOMETHING IN REPLY,” VITA PROTESTED this morning, when we had taken our tea and bread in the Priest’s House, with its trestle table and painted cupboard, its heavy drapes of velvet. Watery sunshine through the leaded windows, the dourness of Sunday gone like a passing thought. Vita’s Alsatian trotting across the barren steppe of the roses, narrow shoulders slumped in misery. There had been two of them once, hadn’t there? The loneliness of the left-behind.

  “To Vanessa, as well,” she persisted. “Did I mention I’ve also had The News from your sister, in this morning’s post?—You left a note for her, too, I presume?”

  “I hoped she’d comfort Leonard. Tell him he did all he could, always.”

  “Then you lied, dearest. The failure of a marriage is never one person’s fault.”

  “I ought not to have married him.”

  She laughed. “It’s a practice I can’t recommend to those who like having their own way!”

  “Then why did you do it?”

  She moved restlessly towards the window. “Good Lord—only think how Hadji and I live! In our separate spheres. I never go up to London if I can help it, unless it’s to talk about marriage for the BBC. He comes down on the odd week-end and digs the garden; we each have our studies where neither may enter; and the boys take care of themselves. That’s why I’m devoted to Hadji—he has never interfered in my splendid realm, but he adds to it immeasu
rably. Rather like a prime specimen tree set off to advantage by surrounding bed-fellows. What shall I tell them, your helpmeet and sister? That you’re alive and well and breakfasting somewhere near Cranbrook?”

  “You’re lucky, Vita. You haven’t the hatred that spoils relationships. Or the need either.”

  “I’m a cold fish, in other words?”

  Vita, who will sit at my feet and allow me to brush her hair? Vita of the sensual eyes and drooping mouth? “Coldness… that’s a word for me, not you. I’m girlish, Leonard says. Inviolate. Impenetrable. When what he means is cold. Vanessa says it, too.”

  “He tried, I suppose? Early on?”

  I knew what she meant. The maidenhead. Impenetrable. My frantic anxiety those nights in France, the misery of his hands, our honeymoon, my every muscle flexed and fighting him.

  “I was such a coward, a sexual coward. Don’t you see,” I went on, “—what we desire in others is what we lack in ourselves? And end up resenting. Hating. I have hated Vanessa for her children—even when poor Julian was killed, I envied her grief. Leonard—”

  “Was never in love with his wife’s sister.”

  “No. That was my crime. I fell in love with Clive.”

  “Oh, darling—call it wanting, surely? Not love. An hysterical impulse. ‘ I must have what Vanessa has. I must have it.’ Fairly typical of the age, I should think. And of sisters.”

  I worried a bread crumb with my fingernail. Vita was lavish with butter; we never saw it in Rodmell unless Vita sent it; she kept cows. They would be dead soon if the Germans landed, stomachs bloated and hooves sticking straight up into the air. “To cast out and incorporate in a person of the opposite sex all that we miss in ourselves and desire in the universe and detest in humanity is a deep and universal instinct on the part of both men and of women.”

  “You’re quoting somebody.”

  “Myself. I wrote it ages ago.” I unfolded from the table, drifted towards the garden door. “Send whatever you think proper to Vanessa and Leonard. Condolence. Sympathy. Guilt-ridden regret.”

  “You want me to pretend you’re dead?”

  “Maybe I am. Haunting Sissinghurst. A pale shade in a paler garden.”