The tin bounced at Jo’s feet as the car negotiated a curve. She lifted the oilskin package and held it up in her hands. It was dark umber in color, tied like a parcel with blackened twine. She began to work at the old knots with her fingers. What she needed was a pair of scissors—or her secateurs. But no, she’d left them behind at the hedge. Damn.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Jo,” Peter was saying. “I’m not entirely sure where we’ll be. I owe it to her to discuss—” Another pause, and this time she distinctly heard Margaux’s voice through the receiver, both strident and pleading. “I think you tossed that claim in the rubbish a year ago, along with half the contents of the Islington flat. Now look—I’ll call in the morning. Get some sleep. Night.”
His voice, Jo thought, was a shade gentler on that final word, a caress half remembered. It made her stomach clench.
He snapped the phone shut and exhaled gustily. “Lord. She was put on earth to drive men mad.”
“What did she say?”
I love you, Peter, I miss you, it was all a stupid mistake.…
“She said she was unavoidably delayed in Oxford yesterday morning—”
Boy toy, Jo thought.
“—couldn’t reach us because her mobile was dead, so she just took the notebook into my office. And found that nobody knew where I was.”
“She took the Woolf manuscript to Sotheby’s?” Jo cried, outraged.
“My own particular boss put her through the Inquisition, rather.” Frustration and amusement in Peter’s voice, now. “She thought she’d help by saying I’d been at Oxford. The long and short of it is that Marcus has the notebook, it’s being analyzed by our in-house experts over the weekend, and they’re pursuing the issue of legal ownership as best they can. So you’ve no need to worry any longer. The notebook is safe.”
“Are you out of your mind? I’ve just lost complete control! Your nightmare of a wife handed off my grandfather’s book.”
“… which you filched from a tool shed at Sissinghurst, Jo! It never belonged to you.”
“That’s not the point!”
“Then what is?”
She was so furious with him—his sudden defection into the reasonable world—that for a moment she was speechless. “The point,” she snapped, “is finding out what happened. To Virginia. And Jock.”
“Which we’ve tried to do. Who owns the bloody thing in the end is irrelevant. Sotheby’s might as well establish that as anyone.”
“Given that you work there,” she said with deadly calm.
“Now, what is that supposed to mean?”
“Peter, are you getting some sort of commission for all this?”
“I’m probably losing my job,” he retorted acidly.
“What did that woman want? At two o’clock in the morning?”
“To hear my voice,” he said distinctly. “She was… lonely.”
There was a tense silence. The Triumph left Rodmell behind and picked up Swanborough Hollow—the road north, toward Lewes.
“You never asked about the Ark,” Jo said. “What she found yesterday, or what she did with it—”
Peter cleared his throat uncomfortably. “To be honest, I completely forgot about the thing. It was a shock, actually—her calling like that. In the middle of the bloody night.”
“So much of a shock, in fact, that you wasted the sole opportunity you had to grill the woman! Jesus, Peter—she’s ripped us off twice, and all you do is scold her like a wayward child!”
“Haven’t I just explained that she never meant to steal the damn notebook?”
“If that were true,” Jo retorted, “she wouldn’t have run off to Cambridge. I’m not that stupid, even if you want to be.”
“All right—all right.” Peter lifted his hands from the wheel in exasperation. “Maybe she lied. It’s a habit of Margaux’s. But she’s not all bad, you know. She tried to deal with the notebook honorably by turning it over to my boss. And she’d like to make amends. She’s tumbled to the fact that we’re searching for the rest of the manuscript—and she offered to help.”
Jo grasped the twine securing the oilskin package and pulled.
“We’re not searching anymore, Peter,” she said.
PETER PULLED THE TRIUMPH ONTO THE LEFT-HAND verge of the road and killed the engine. He snapped on his penlight.
“What have we got?” he asked quietly.
The book—for it was a slim bound volume, not a letter or notebook or even torn pages, as they’d expected—had no title stamped on its pale blue cloth cover. But there was a yellowed envelope resting on top of it, with an inky smear of handwritten words.
To the Grave Robbers, it read.
“Do we open it?”
Peter glanced at her. “Well—it is addressed to us. I suspect that’s Leonard’s writing.”
Feeling decidedly guilty, Jo tried to pry up the flap. It parted damply in her hands, not so much torn as disintegrating.
There was a single piece of folded paper inside.
If offered the choice of betraying my friends or betraying my wife, I hope I should have the courage to do neither.
Or perhaps both.
How does one keep faith with anyone in such wretched times? Much less keep faith with all?
I have tried. I have done what Maynard asked, and destroyed the pages of Virginia’s book that caused him such anxiety.
But to honour her whom this writing almost certainly killed, I typeset those pages before I burned them.
And so I have kept both my promises: to bury the truth, and to publish it to the world.
Do with this book what seems best to you.
But know that the unquiet mind of the author lives in it still, and will haunt you.
As she has always haunted me.
Leonard Woolf,
Monk’s House,
30 April 1941
Peter reached for the book—he was, Jo remembered suddenly, an expert in exactly this object, in the typeface and the cloth bindings and the nature of paper.
“Leonard must have hand-set this on a small press they kept at Rodmell,” he said. “The actual Hogarth Press—the company the Woolfs founded in 1917—was moved out of London in 1940 to protect it from being bombed. No jacket—they often got Vanessa to design those, but apparently she wasn’t in on the secret of this. Here’s the colophon, however—the symbol of the Hogarth Press. Vanessa designed that, too.”
He showed Jo the book’s spine; stamped on it in gold was the head of a wolf, in profile. “The text is printed in a serif font, probably some form of Baskerville. Quite common. Leonard loved composing forms—beds of type—but they were only practical for short print runs. Too labor-intensive otherwise. The first thing Hogarth ever hand-published was a pamphlet of two short stories—the Woolfs each wrote one. Virginia’s became quite famous—it’s called ‘A Mark on the Wall.’ They put together the covers themselves, gluing cloth on boards and assembling the books on the dining room table. He must have done this one alone.”
Jo had a sudden vision of a silver head, a narrow profile, an oil lamp behind a blackout shade. The middle of the night. The silence of an abandoned house. The smell of lead on his fingers…
“We’ve got to read this.”
Peter looked at her searchingly. “Aren’t you exhausted?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“It’s a polite way of asking whether you trust me enough—despite Margaux.”
“Ah.” She looked down at her hands. “I guess I trust you… enough. Let’s stop driving for what’s left of the night. Read Leonard’s book. And I’ll turn it over to Sotheby’s as quietly as a lamb in the morning.”
Peter smiled at her faintly. “A lamb. Bollocks. Jo, you don’t know the meaning of the word.”
“I’ve ordered it for dinner numerous times,” she said with dignity.
“All right. But no cheating.” He flicked off the penlight. “No reading until I’ve found us a room.”
>
· · ·
IT WAS NEARLY TWO-THIRTY BY THE TIME THEY ROUSED A night clerk at the White Hart in Lewes, an old coaching inn transformed into a modern hotel, with potted palms near its indoor swimming pool. Jo was tired enough to accept this as merely one part of a hallucinatory night. She was, after all, holding a Peek Freans tin dug up from Virginia Woolf’s grave and yet again she was out of clean underwear; all of this was of a piece, part of the surreal world she’d inhabited since leaving Sissinghurst three days ago.
She decided not to correct the clerk when he referred to them as “Mr. and Mrs. Llewellyn,” although it took her an instant to digest that he had only one room to offer them. She didn’t care. She’d be reading for what remained of the night.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” Peter suggested when they’d closed the door behind them. For all the hotel’s half-timbered charm the room was rather claustrophobic, with a sloping roof and a worn bedspread.
“Whatever,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.”
She found a pouch of Breakfast Brew near the minibar and filled the carafe. Peter tossed his jacket on a chair and began to roll up his sleeves. Why did the sight of him in a loosened dress shirt, even a wrinkled one he’d been wearing for days, affect her so powerfully? The word for Peter, she decided, was debonair. He looked as though he’d been born to hold a glass of gin on the sidelines of a cricket pitch.
He propped the bed pillows against the headboard and stretched out on the mattress. “It’s considered bad form on the Continent to use a bed for anything other than sleeping, did you know? Only Americans sit on them to read. Or hold an intimate conversation. Mention this to a confirmed European and they’ll explain that’s why we invented chairs. But I’ve always thought a bed was the best place to get to know another person. The English have so many defenses, Jo—all we can’t or won’t say. But not when we’re lying down.”
He looked at her then, and she realized he’d taken off his glasses—so she’d be safely out of focus? His eyes were pale green, not gray as she’d thought.
“What can’t you say standing up, Peter?”
“That I’m falling in love with you.”
She stood rooted to the carpet, unable to speak. Nor could she look away from him, from the dreamy green eyes and the faint smile on his lips. She could feel herself go hot, then cold.
Ask yourself how many different ways Peter is using you.
“Make the coffee, Jo.”
She turned blindly and poured the water into the machine, her hands working of themselves.
“Now where’s that book?”
He spoke calmly, as though he hadn’t just dropped a massive stone in the quiet pool of the room, as though the ripples weren’t spreading out to engulf her. But she could see, even from the distance of the minibar, the pulse at the base of his throat throbbing.
“Peter—”
“Ah. Here it is.”
He pulled the cookie tin toward him.
The coffee began to drain into the carafe. Jo waited. “How do you take it?” she asked.
“Would it kill you if I said I’d much rather have good, strong English tea?”
At that, she began to laugh and the knot of tension inside her slipped loose and rolled away. They were friends again instead of possible lovers or enemies and she was able to bring two mugs to the bedside table and stretch out beside him.
“It tastes like liquid cardboard and you’re going to drink it and like it,” she said, taking a scalding sip of the truly lamentable brew. “Open the tin. I can’t wait any longer.”
He lifted the lid. The oilskin packet and Leonard’s letter sat in the bottom.
Peter balanced the book between them, his head close to hers. The room was very quiet, and the clock, Jo noticed, read 2:41 A.M.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” she said.
Tuesday, 1 April 1941
Sissinghurst
NOTES ON THE MAKING OF A WHITE GARDEN:
PART II
HAROLD CAME DOWN FROM LONDON THIS AFTERNOON on purpose to see me.
It was the sort of day that makes one believe it possible some fragile beauty will survive the war, some species of hope. I know in my heart that is a fallacy and a stupid comfort. My mind persists in wishing that the bird spoke truth when it sang of life. But the bird, too, was hoping, hoping—it is the bitterest joke of all, that as the world opens its heart, green shoots leafing, persistent stems rising, the golden beads of pollen streaming in the air—the lid of the box closes, the roof caves in. Earth will stop my mouth.
Vita was up early, at work in her garden with the boy Jock. What is to be done in time of war, in such a place? Weeding. The cutting of hazel from the coppice below the meadow, and the setting of stakes in the herbaceous border. A cool breeze buffets her hair and cheek, which are no longer opulent, no longer the trappings of the harem. The bones of her fingers are knobbed and the skin tough and spotted. She has left off wearing gloves but still sports her jodhpurs, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as she digs. It is healing for her, this plunging of hands into the soil, and perhaps even the boy is healing—his uncomplicated strength, his willingness to lift and carry without comment, his deftness with the spade and pruning knife. Jock whistles as he trundles barrows in the garden. He does not dream of horror at night. In this he reminds me of Julian, who was like a bear in his strength, who went laughing to his death in Spain.
But for myself I think that to make things bloom while the bombs are falling is so much whistling in the dark. I could almost despise Vita for it.
I told her last night about November. The boy falling from the sky. The sprained ankle and the smell of fear and white patches around his mouth where the gag was bound. The men coming in the night in black cars and the boy whimpering as they bundled him into the back. You wouldn’t like it, I said. If it were Ben or Nigel or even Jock. A few days after I’d finished Between the Acts, I said, and the typesetting already begun. The smell of lead on his fingers when he put his hands over my mouth, to stop me screaming.
“Oh, my dear,” she said absently, her eyes on the burgeoning yew, “I should stay out of it all, if I were you. Surely they know best, these people from M15?”
But she must have telegraphed to Harold. There he was this afternoon, fresh from the 3:35 train, wandering up to take tea with us in the Priest’s House, the boy Jock having fetched him from the station.
The spring day had quite faded by that time, and it was chill, with a mist off the moat; I wrapped a sweater of Vita’s about me and hugged myself, the tea incapable of warming.
How to describe Harold Nicolson?
There is the obvious: black bowler hat, excellently tailored suit appropriate to Westminster, but rather worn, now, given the shortages of wartime and funds at home; the soft tissues of the face and the wide, mild eyes; the correct moustache—Harold’s attempt at manliness, I always think, a gesture he shares with Maynard Keynes. There is the weakness about the mouth and the softness of the fingers and the sense of warmth whenever he greets one—Harold cannot hide his easy affection, his interest in everything, though he attempts to do so with his studied wit.
He adores Vita and could not live, I think, without her, and yet she is the most supremely selfish being one could possibly meet; even when he ran for Parliament she politely declined to mount the hustings at his side, she magnificently ignored the gossip regarding their unusual marriage and would not play at the dutiful wife. She has discarded his name and resumed her own. She is steadfastly unfaithful with a variety of lovers, as he generally is with men and boys; and yet not a day passes without their exchange of letters. In their deep loyalty and constant choice of one another’s friendship, Harold and Vita are unassailable. He accepts her narcissism and worries about her drinking; she ignores his perpetual unhappiness at the failure of his career.
And it is a measure of how much he cares for her that he dropped everything at the Ministry of Information this morning
, and came down to Kent the moment she summoned.
“Hallo, darling,” he said as he bent to kiss her cheek. “Hallo, Virginia. You’re looking fit. So happy you could keep Mar company in her castle. She grows quite fidgety with all the regulations. Men posted in the tower. Rations. Been working the garden, Mar?”
Mar is his particular name for Vita; Hadji is hers for Harold.
“Virginia thinks we should plant white flowers,” Vita said, gesturing out the cottage window, “so that the glow might light our way to bed.”
“Then by all means, set Jock to uprooting the roses,” Harold suggested. “Care to take a turn in the garden, Virginia? You might show me what you intend.”
As I guessed poor Harold had come expressly from London to give me a scolding, I felt obliged to rise from my chair and saunter with him into the chill of the falling dusk, the bare rose canes enmeshing us with all the splendour of the trenches. Vita stayed behind. I had an idea of her reaching for her hip flask, and spiking her tea with brandy.
“And so you’ve run off, have you?” Harold took my cold fingers between his own and chafed them gently. “Poor Virginia. Has Leonard been beastly to you?”
I said nothing. I would consent to listen, but not to speak. Not yet. There was too much I feared. The complicity of the men of Westminster.
“You’ve upset everyone terribly, you know. Leonard’s dragging the river. There are parties of men and dogs along the banks.”
This last brought me up short, my hand at my throat. Dogs. Torches. The flickering silhouettes of the search party and the sound of baying on the air. Slavering jaws mouthing the cold flesh—
I retched.
Harold’s arm came briefly to my back; a faint pressure of comfort. “You must write to them. You must explain. It would relieve their minds—”
He strolled onwards, serene and infallible, while I stood like a plinth in the midst of Vita’s garden. He did not look back as he walked, a darker shadow in the deepening dusk, past the Chinese jar and through the gap in the hedge that led to the statue of the Little Virgin.
Stephanie Barron Page 20