Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  “Exactly.” Peter stopped short in the middle of The Street. “Guy Burgess was elected to the Apostles the same year as Julian, in fact. Anthony Blunt probably nominated him—Blunt was a few years older and fairly influential in the Apostles at the time. He took up with Julian Bell through the Society, which accounts for Blunt’s appearance in that photograph we just saw.”

  “A bunch of Apostles.”

  “In the heart of Bloomsbury. What the Bells and the Woolfs appear to have missed, however, is that Blunt and Guy Burgess were systematically selling out Establishment Britain from about 1936 onwards. Along with Kim Philby, another prominent Cambridge man, and Maclean and Cairncross. The five, taken together, were the crown jewels of Soviet foreign intelligence.”

  “Julian Bell was a spy?” Jo was feeling rather deflated, as though the peaceful world she’d glimpsed at Charleston had been lifted, turned upside down, and shaken vigorously—causing several dead spiders to drop out.

  “He didn’t live long enough. But if the Spanish war had spared him—? Who’s to say? They were a group of young men who valued friendship almost more than politics. E. M. Forster—who you’ll remember was an Apostle—is famous for saying: If I were forced to choose between betraying my friends and betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

  Jo reached inside her purse and drew out the photocopy of the group snap, as Peter called it. She was familiar enough with the faces by this time. Leonard Woolf’s narrow, ascetic profile; Keynes’s balding pate and dark mustache; Julian’s jovial, bearlike figure; his father’s urbane expanse of forehead. And there was Blunt: composed, grave, almost insolent as he stared at the camera. The most inscrutable of the bunch. “Was he an economist, like Keynes?”

  “Not at all. Art historian. Aesthete. Director of the Courtauld and surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. The old guard at Sotheby’s used to consult him frequently when authenticating paintings—until Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a Soviet spy. There was a fearful row when that happened. A lot of long knives came out and all Blunt’s old friends disavowed him. He was stripped of his knighthood, and died not long after.”

  “But he wasn’t shot, or anything.”

  “No,” Peter agreed, smiling faintly. “He lost his good name—and in Blunt’s world, that was worse than a firing squad. Look, it’s going on half-four and you probably want your tea, but we ought to run down to Lewes before the shops close. It’s only a few miles back up the road, but you never know—they might lock up early. Can you manage without food for a bit?”

  “What are we buying?”

  “A shovel, two pairs of gloves, a stout bag, and a smallish torch,” he said, guiding her to his car. “Oh, and possibly a room for the night. It won’t do to linger in Rodmell once we’re done digging.”

  Digging.

  Jo halted by the Triumph’s passenger door. “Are we really going to exhume Virginia Woolf’s ashes?”

  “I shouldn’t think there’s many to be found, after sixty-eight years,” Peter said dispassionately. “But I know what you mean. Disturbing sacred ground, and so on. That’s why Leonard buried whatever spooked Maynard Keynes at the same time he buried Virginia. He expected the place never to be disturbed.”

  IN LEWES, THEY FOUND EVERYTHING THEY NEEDED AT A store called Bunce’s.

  “Doing the autumn tidy this weekend, are we?” the clerk asked as Peter offered his credit card.

  “We’re putting in bulbs,” Jo supplied.

  “You’re late. Mine were in a good three weeks ago.”

  “Ah,” Peter said. “We’ll just have to hope for the best, then, shan’t we?”

  Feeling chastened, they stowed their gear awkwardly in the Triumph—Jo would be cradling the iron head of the shovel in her lap during the brief return to Rodmell—and walked back up the High Street in search of a pub.

  “I’m getting bloody well tired of these soulless meals,” Peter muttered.

  “I’m not even hungry,” Jo said.

  “Rubbish!”

  “I’m a little nervous. And it’s turned cold.”

  He steered her immediately into a small café—perhaps ten tables, only three of them occupied—that glowed warmly with candlelight; logs burned in an open hearth.

  “What you need,” he declared firmly, “is a restorative soup. Something creamy, like crab bisque. We’re quite close to the sea here, you know. And then a good steak and a green salad. Warm bread. All strictly comfort food, washed down with red wine. Cheese to follow.”

  It was a simple meal, but a thoroughly delicious one; and Peter was right: She did feel her borderline panic recede as the comfort rolled in. She pushed all thought of their midnight errand from her mind and listened to Peter talk, which was something he had begun to do, she noticed—he was easy enough in her company now that he didn’t edit what he said.

  “I’ve been thinking about your idea—Peter’s Place. It’d have to be named something else entirely, of course, and God knows where we’d put it—but there would be a few fundamentals. Locally sustainable produce, for one. Organic if possible. Local beef and poultry, naturally raised. And a limited menu—say, six entrées on any given night, but all of them exquisite. Inspired food that takes the best of several culinary traditions and fuses them well.”

  “I’d eat there,” Jo said. “What would it look like?”

  He stared off into space for a moment. “I love the texture of old buildings. By that I mean all that’s authentic about them.”

  There it was again—the connoisseur in Peter, his instinct for what was true. It was the quality Jo trusted most.

  “Serviceable buildings that had a utility once,” he continued. “A group of oast houses, for instance, or an ancient barn. I’d like bare timbers and stone floors and a really massive hearth people could sit in with their wineglasses. Rustic, relaxed, but absolutely top drawer. Know what I mean?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Ideally, there’d be a working potager in the back.”

  “Peter.” Jo set down her wineglass. “I just designed the most fabulous potager for Gray. An entire walled acre, divided into quadrants—espaliered fruit trees, seasonally rotated heirloom and organic vegetables, everything from five types of beet to eleven types of lettuce. It’s going to be the most magnificent symphony of color and texture and flavor imaginable—”

  “Gray being your abandoned client?”

  Jo screwed up her face. “Yes.”

  “And what’s the bugger going to do with so much veg, then? Feed an orphanage?”

  Despite herself, she burst out laughing. “I don’t think he has any concept of how much food he’s going to produce. And knowing Gray, he’ll only live in the Hamptons about eight weeks a year. He owns five houses.”

  “So he’s bought the look of a potager,” Peter said thoughtfully, “and will probably toss most of the stuff back on the compost pile to rot. I should set up Peter’s Place directly on the far side of his garden wall. And hire you to garden for me.”

  He looked at her then, and Jo flushed. But she only raised her glass and said, “To Peter’s Place. Wherever it may be.”

  It was eleven before they noticed that the fire had fallen to embers, and they were the only ones left in the café.

  MONK’S HOUSE WAS COMPLETELY DARK WHEN THEY rolled slowly past its flint wall and turned toward the churchyard beyond. Lucy might be at the pub, or she might be asleep. Which? Jo thought, her panic returning.

  “The principal thing,” Peter said, as he pulled the Triumph into the deserted school car park and killed the engine, “is to use the torch as little as possible. Can you see in the dark?”

  “Usually. But this is pitch black.”

  True country night was wrapped around Rodmell. If there were stars somewhere above, their light was masked by a bank of cloud and the heavy weight of the Downs looming on the horizon.

  “The easiest possible course is also the most exposed,” Peter said. “That’s to walk
back round to the front and nip over the flint wall. Then we can simply amble along the side of the house to the back garden.”

  “Somebody’ll see us,” Jo argued. “Can’t we just cross the field and cut through the hedge? You said the two elm trees once stood there.”

  “I did,” Peter agreed, “but have you ever tried to cut through a hedge?”

  “I do it all the time.”

  He frowned at her. “What are you talking about?”

  Jo reached for her purse and scrabbled in its depths. “While you were inspecting shovels, I bought a pair of secateurs. Autumn’s the time to prune, you know. I’ll do a passable job. It won’t hurt the hedge.”

  “Smashing,” Peter said. “I’ll get the shovel.”

  IT TOOK JO TWELVE MINUTES TO CARVE A BREAK IN THE soaring wall that divided field from garden. She chose a spot roughly around where Peter thought he remembered having once seen the marker to Virginia’s memory. So late in October, the yew was brittle: she was glad of the gloves, for the sharp evergreen would undoubtedly have drawn blood. She held back the tough stems and motioned silently to Peter. He swam through and she followed.

  He had dropped to his knees on the far side of the hedge, and was probing the ground blindly with his fingers. She crouched down and followed him. They were like two rats, she thought, scuttling along in the dark, the shovel trailing between them. But they had not yet used the flashlight.

  Suddenly, Peter stiffened, then to her astonishment rolled like a log against the base of the hedge, his gloved hands covering his blond hair. The unmistakable sound of swearing came to Jo’s ears; she flattened herself against the yew, heart pounding so loudly it had to be audible to the girl who was now standing outside the rear gate where they’d first encountered her that morning, trying to shove her unwilling key into the old lock.

  Lucy. She’d probably walked to the Abergavenny Arms; it couldn’t be more than half a mile away. But had she drunk enough to be blind to two bodies lying half-exposed in the darkness of the hedge?

  The lock turned and the gate swung open, creaking on its hinges. Lucy staggered up the walk, and Jo—who was so far under the yew it was sticking painfully into her neck—watched her make her determined way toward the rear gate into the walled garden that surrounded Monk’s House. Then she stopped short and turned. For an instant, she seemed to stare right at Jo, breathless and paralyzed on the ground.

  A tiny orange light flared; Lucy, lighting a cigarette. She took a greedy draft of smoke and lingered by the garden wall, staring up at the chilly sky.

  Go through the gate, Jo urged. Go inside. For Chrissake, you must be freezing. But maybe smoking wasn’t allowed in National Trust properties. Another burden Lucy had to bear, when staying at Monk’s House. There was no sign of life from Peter; had he seen the girl, motionless but for the pendulum of her right arm, lifting predictably to her lips?

  Suddenly, Lucy dropped the butt and ground it beneath her heel. She lifted the iron hasp on the gate and swung through it, securing it behind her. Perhaps a minute later the house door slammed and a light bloomed in the window.

  Jo exhaled.

  “You all right?” Peter whispered from somewhere ahead of her.

  “I’m scared to death,” she hissed. “Do we leave?”

  His answer was drowned by a sudden swell of sound coming from Monk’s House—a cacophonic blare of music played at deafening volume. Jo could just make out a sporadic clapping as Lucy kept poor time to the music; and then a snatch of the girl’s voice, lifted in off-key song.

  “Blimey,” Peter whispered. He had crawled up next to Jo. “She’s having her own little rave, right there in the caretaker’s apartment. Look at her!”

  And, in fact, craning to spy over the wall, Jo could just see the twirling form passing before one window, then the next; lost to everything but the metal frenzy.

  “Right.” Peter reached forward with his fingers again, searching the ground. “Let’s find this bloody marker, shall we?”

  AGAINST YOU I WILL FLING MYSELF, UNVANQUISHED AND UN-yielding, O Death!

  Brave words, Jo thought, as she read the few lines illuminated by Peter’s penlight. But what had the woman who’d written them, so long ago, felt as the water closed over her head, filled her mouth and lungs, cut her off from the sunlight and the bird singing triumphantly, Life, life, life?

  How had Virginia come to the river, in the end?

  Peter switched off the light and reached for the shovel. “Let’s hope it’s not too far down,” he said.

  It was a slow and careful business. Peter’s plan, formulated on the fly, was to dig first at one side of the marker to avoid disturbing it too much; he would then angle under it and probe for several feet beneath. Jo kept watch alternately on the growing mound of dirt and the solitary party going on inside Monk’s House, which after seventeen minutes had begun to turn maudlin. Lucy had substituted torch songs for head-bangers, most of them by female artists, and was singing emotionally and wretchedly at the top of her lungs. How much had the girl drunk?

  “Jo,” Peter said.

  He lifted the shovel slantwise from the earth and then thrust it back in again. She heard a faint metallic clang.

  “Shit,” she said. “Do you think it’s a… cremation urn or something?”

  “Dunno.” He dragged a cautious bit of soil from the hole. “I’ll just… feel for it, shall I?”

  Peter’s arm disappeared up to his shoulder.

  “Doesn’t feel like an urn. Feels like a… a sort of box. Flattish and long.” He grunted slightly with exertion, then pulled the object out of the ground.

  For an instant, Jo thought he was holding a book.

  “What is it?”

  Peter rubbed at the clods of earth with his garden glove. “A Peek Freans biscuit tin. Probably prewar. They stopped making them in 1939—couldn’t spare the metal.” He sat down beside her, removed his gloves, and reached for the penlight. A narrow beam played over the tin’s surface.

  “Peter—it’s shaped like a book!”

  “Yes—they were rather elaborate in those days, a marketing ploy on the part of the biscuit makers. Quite collectible now. Sold at auction, in fact. This one’s gone a bit wonky, however—probably all the damp in the ground.” He attempted to pry off the lid and failed. “Corrosion.”

  “Let me.” Jo tore off her gloves. Her fingernails were never long—that was impractical for a gardener—but her fingertips were more delicate than Peter’s. She found an edge and applied pressure. The lid moved.

  Peter played the beam along the edge. “Here. Use the edge of the shovel. Like a lever—”

  Together, they pried off the tin’s cover.

  Inside was what looked like a rubber bag.

  “Oilskin, I think,” Peter said, and lifted it out. “Jo—you ought to open this.”

  “What if it’s ashes?” she whispered.

  He shook his head. “It’s not. I can feel it.”

  Whatever it was, however, would have to wait. Lucy had suddenly stopped singing.

  THE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON, BUT MONK’S HOUSE WAS utterly silent. It was as though, Jo thought, Lucy and her tunes had been taken out by a neutron bomb.

  “She’s coming into the garden,” Peter breathed, as the back door creaked open. “As long as she stays in the walled bit, we’re fine; but let’s hope she hasn’t forgot something in the car.”

  “Do we run?”

  “I hate leaving that mound of dirt.”

  This was so unexpected—and so entirely like Peter’s sense of responsibility—that Jo nearly snorted with laughter. She caught herself, however, and tried to avoid breathing.

  What could Lucy be doing? Impossible to see from their position. Gazing at the starless sky? Talking on her cell phone? But no, there was still no sound, and Jo imagined the girl was an emphatic talker. Then the scent of burning tobacco drifted across the garden wall, and Jo sighed inwardly. A bedtime smoke. Lucy definitely had a habit.

  They
waited wordlessly while the cigarette burned down. Then they heard the house door open and groan closed, and watched as one by one, the lights were extinguished.

  Peter made fast work of filling the hole he’d dug. Then they went through the hedge a final time, and positively ran to the Triumph parked in the schoolyard, Jo clutching the Peek Freans tin to her chest. She was laughing with hysterical relief and Peter had just turned the ignition, when his cell phone rang.

  “BLOODY HELL,” HE SAID AS HE STARED AT THE NUMBER glowing green in the darkness. “Margaux.”

  “Pick up!” Jo hissed. “No, better yet—let me.” She wrenched the phone from his hand, stabbed a button, and shouted, “Where’s my notebook, bitch?”

  “You might ask yourself instead,” said a cool voice in her ear, “how many different ways Peter is using you. Could I speak to him, please?”

  Scowling, Jo handed off the phone.

  “Right, hello, sorry about that,” Peter said.

  Sorry? When Margaux had deliberately screwed them and left without a word? Jo glared at him sidelong. And what did Margaux mean about Peter using her? That he wasn’t really interested in the Woolf manuscript? Or… that he didn’t believe it was real?

  “… not asleep, actually, I’m behind the wheel. Yes. Driving. Where are you?”

  There was a pause. Peter shifted into reverse and the Triumph wheeled backward, turning toward the Abergavenny Arms. “You what?” he spluttered. The car swerved and Jo clutched at the swing strap. The ancient biscuit tin slipped off her lap and burst open.

  “Well, that’s bloody well put the cat among the pigeons, hasn’t it? And you actually thought it was a good idea? I’ll be fired, darling, if I’m not arrested—”

  Darling.

  Jo tried to remember that she had no claim on Peter. Of a romantic kind. He was just a nice guy who was helping her out. By handing her precious manuscript to his ex-wife, who promptly stole it… He’d landed Jo in a very difficult position with Sissinghurst.…Why had he decided it was okay to drop everything and leave London? Had he been forced to get out of town quick, and she’d provided an excuse?