Stephanie Barron

by The White Garden (v5)

  HAROLD LEFT FOR LONDON A FEW HOURS LATER.

  While the house was empty, I sat down in the cheerless library and compiled my notes. On the Making of a White Garden. A pure space, serene. Life, life, life!

  “HOW INCONGRUOUS,” VITA MURMURED OVER TEA IN THE Priest’s Cottage as the dusk fell, “to be having buttered toast with Virginia, whilst reading Virginia’s obituary.…”

  She passed me the section of paper.

  There were two notices, one a simple statement of death so abrupt and painful that I could almost hear Leonard’s pen scratch as he wrote to George Dawson, the editor; and the other a more fulsome celebration of my literary genius, drawn up by a member of The Times staff.

  I put my hand to my throat.

  “Poor Leonard,” Vita said. “Only think what this will bring down on his head! Letters of condolence from every person who ever met or loved you, and more from those who never did.”

  I was strangely calm now, the flood of words having left me, the notebook tied with its neat label. “He might have had the decency to find a body.”

  “P’raps he has. There are always a few lying about, in wartime.” Vita leaned over my shoulder to read the obituary. “They think rather a lot of Mrs. Dalloway, don’t they? And dear Lord, they’ve thrown in Orlando, with a gibe at me. But I would imagine Leonard’s still dragging the river. It’s tidal, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. The current is cruelly strong.” Water, tugging like a toddler at my clinging skirts. The insistent bird.

  “In her letter to me, Vanessa wrote that she hoped the Ouse would carry you out to sea—because you loved it so.”

  “The Waves meeting the waves. How like her. It’s the picture of death she contemplates; not the stench.”

  “What shall you do?”

  I might have said: I have done it. Instead I told her: “Compose a letter to The Times disputing their judgement of my work—and suggesting they verify their facts before publication.”

  “I meant about Leonard. And your sister.”

  I folded the paper and rose from the table. “Please thank Mrs. Staples for the butter. The apotheosis of ordinary bread, don’t you think? Especially in these oleo times.”

  “I do,” Vita said. “But you cannot hide in my tower forever, dearest. I won’t let you.”

  · · ·

  AND NOW IT IS FINISHED. DINNER EATEN, THE FIRE BURNED low, the last measure of the world taken before the blackout goes down. I have seen what I should not in a small column of The Times. Another suicide, meaningless in Cambridge. He disappeared the day after I ran.

  I was right to fear them, the men of Westminster, in their Apostolic hats.

  I wait for the light to vanish behind Vita’s door. Then go in search of Jock, who sleeps above the stables.

  (CONCLUDING NOTE BY LEONARD WOOLF:)

  I know that V. will not come across the garden from the Lodge, and yet I look in that direction for her.

  I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door.

  I know that this is her final page, and yet I turn it over.

  There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness.

  “SO WHAT HAPPENED TO HER, PETER?”

  They had come to the end of the slim bound volume. It was one hour before dawn, and the coffee was tepid and bitter.

  “God knows.” He closed the book gently, his fingers lingering on the cloth cover. “Poor Leonard. Whatever he did—or whatever she thought he did—he felt her death acutely.”

  “Egotistical of him,” Jo said. “Disgustingly full of himself.”

  Peter looked at her keenly. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t referring to…”

  “To me or my guilt? Of course you weren’t. I’ll stop trying to be the center of Leonard’s drama as well as my own.” It was a bitter little speech, and Peter really didn’t deserve it. “Ignore me, Peter—this is just my nasty way of telling you you’re right. Leonard was no more responsible for Virginia’s choices than I am for Jock’s death, but each of us chose to wallow in guilt. There’s a certain amount of victimhood in that. I can see it more clearly in someone other than myself.”

  “It’s the normal response,” Peter attempted. “You’d be less than human if you didn’t feel regret about Jock’s suicide.”

  “Regret!” She closed her eyes briefly; the lids were grainy as sandpaper. “This whole tortured trail’s awash in it! Vanessa, painting her mural of Virgin and Apostle. Vita and her White Garden. Leonard and his bound volume. They were all struggling with guilt. Begging for forgiveness. So which of them killed her?”

  “To answer that, we need to know what she did after she wrote her last word.”

  “Went looking for my grandfather,” Jo said.

  “And gave him Notes on the Making of a White Garden?”

  “Maybe.” She slid off the bed, her body stiff from lying too long in the same position. “That would explain the label on the notebook. And Jock, being a kid with nobody to turn to, passed it on to Harold Nicolson—who tore out half the pages.”

  “That works,” Peter said. “We know Harold got the manuscript somehow, because he told Keynes as much. By the time he wrote that letter, he’d probably seen the Cambridge death notice in the paper, and didn’t like the implications.”

  “Jan Ter Braak.”

  “Yes. It’s the turncoat spy’s suicide—or murder—that seems to have put the wind up everybody, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Dead because he didn’t know the date of Hitler’s Russian invasion.” Jo scrabbled her hair into a pathetic ponytail, her fingers working as she spoke. “Virginia gives the book to Jock—who gives it to Harold—”

  “—but somehow the dangerous bits end up in Leonard Woolf’s hands. Because we know he printed and then burned them.”

  “Why in heaven’s name would Harold Nicolson betray Virginia?”

  “Because she was dead,” Peter answered flatly.

  He didn’t have to add: How or why, we’ll never know.

  “I can’t accept it, Peter. We’ve come too far. If only we had more information—a sense of where all these people were, in the days after the notebook ends. If there was someone who knew more about Virginia and her friends—where they might have converged—”

  His expression stopped her.

  “What?” she demanded.

  “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “You’re conjuring Margaux. And whatever she pinched from the Ark. Aren’t you?”

  SHE ASKED THEM TO MEET HER IN OXFORD’S BODLEIAN Library by nine A.M. Thursday morning.

  “I don’t trust her,” Jo insisted. “She doesn’t help for free. There’s an agenda behind all this, Peter.”

  “You don’t know her. She’s anxious to make amends.”

  “She’s anxious to make a buck!”

  “Give her a chance. Please.”

  “If she doesn’t show,” Jo muttered as the Triumph chugged out of Lewes, “we’ll head for London. We’ll confront this boss of yours.”

  “She’ll show.”

  Last night’s ease had deserted Peter; he was tense and brusque. But then, Jo reasoned, he was no longer lying on a bed. He’d warned her about the limits of English openness. And how easily Margaux could manipulate him.

  What, Jo thought again, do you want out of all this, Peter Llewellyn?

  “Whatever Margaux’s faults,” he attempted, “she’s a sound scholar. And that’s what we chiefly need at the moment.”

  He was too far away from her by that time to be told she couldn’t believe him, either.

  THE BODLEY, AS PETER CASUALLY CALLED IT, WAS ACTUALLY several libraries housed in magnificent buildings in the heart of Oxford, all joined by footpaths and even underground tunnels; most of the vast book collections, he explained to Jo, were stored beneath the city streets and ancient squares. These were also mostly barred to cars—and so Peter had abandoned the Triumph at a park-and-ride lot on the edge of town, and hopped a shuttle with Jo. As a result, they walked the
last few hundred yards, and she was treated to the breathtaking sight of the morning sun gilding the spires of Oxford above her.

  There was the New Bodleian, the Clarendon Building, the Old Bodleian—which included something called Duke Humfrey’s that Jo thought sounded like it should offer ales on tap—and the Radcliffe Camera. This last turned out to have nothing to do with photography, camera being the ancient Greek word for vaulted chamber. It was a roundish building of golden stone topped with a dome that Jo realized was vaguely familiar; she’d probably seen it in movies.

  “Margaux will be in the New Bodleian,” Peter said. “Which is actually pretty old—1940, I think. She likes the ethernet in the Reading Room there.”

  And it goes so well with her outfit, Jo thought waspishly.

  They were trudging up Catte Street, just past Radcliffe Square, and he pointed to the most distant of the library buildings, done in what he called “ziggurat style.” It sat on the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road; Jo noted, with a degree of relief that suggested she’d already been in England too long, that the King’s Arms pub was directly across the way.

  Peter led her up the main staircase toward the back of the building, where a wall of windows flooded the quiet carrels with gray Oxford light. So early in the day, the Reading Room was nearly empty—except for the black-haired woman seated before her laptop in the far corner of the room.

  “Peter darling!” She gathered him up like a lost schoolboy and kissed him lingeringly on the lips. “Don’t you look like you just rolled off somebody’s sofa! I’ve never seen you so rumpled! Did you sleep in a dustbin?”

  Jo stiffened as Margaux brushed back Peter’s hair. He was far too passive, she thought, in the face of this onslaught; he should be backing away, including her, making at least an attempt at resisting his ex-wife’s charm—but no. He was gazing at Margaux as though Jo had faded into the mist, as though even the library itself had dissolved. And then the don’s gaze slid over to meet Jo’s. In quite a different tone she said, “You brought the rest of the notebook?”

  “We did,” Jo replied brusquely. “Although I have no desire to let you see it. Given what happened last time.”

  “Sorry.” Margaux released Peter and sank down once more in her chair. “I can’t possibly help, you know, if I’m not in possession of all the material.”

  “Funny,” Jo said. “That’s just what we were thinking in the bowels of the Wren two days ago. Before I so much as offer a peek at the rest of the notebook, Margaux, how about telling us what you stole from the Ark?”

  For the first time in their brief acquaintance, Margaux Strand was thrown off balance. She had no idea, Jo guessed, that they’d penetrated Hamish’s defenses and followed her into the Apostles’ lair.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The boxes for 1940 and ’41,” Peter said patiently. “Empty, Margaux. A bare half-hour, perhaps, after you’d been and gone. Hamish tells us there was a row with the Wren porter.”

  She shrugged, unable to meet Peter’s eyes. “He confiscated the papers, actually. I don’t know how he came to realize I had anything but lipstick in my purse. Demanded to search my bag after I’d gone through the metal detector—though no bells went off. Outrageous, really.”

  “Maybe your name pops up on the porter’s file whenever you enter a Cambridge library,” Jo suggested. “Margaux Strand, Sneak Thief.”

  “Peter,” the don said icily, “I don’t have to take this shit, you know.”

  “Of course you don’t.” He leaned toward her fondly. “But you will. Because you want to be involved, don’t you? You want the access?”

  She stared at him, frowning.

  “What did the porter take?” he persisted.

  “Oh, very well. It’s nothing of any importance, really.” Margaux shrugged. “After I’d nearly sold my soul to an imbecilic junior Fellow at King’s, too. He got me down into that sewer line they call an Ark, and shut the two of us into the room—and all that was left in those boxes was a typewritten note from Maynard Keynes.”

  Jo glanced at Peter, her excitement rising. “What did it say?”

  “It is hereby noted that the Cambridge Conversazione Society, otherwise known as the Apostles, suspended all meetings for the academic year 1940, the membership being engaged in activities better suited to the defence of the realm,” Margaux recited. “A bloody great dead end. The same thing was in the box for ’41 as well. I knew there was something important about the Apostles—that phrase in the back of Woolf’s manuscript could only mean Cambridge—but I hadn’t the first idea how to sort it out. So I pocketed the papers and hoped I’d find someone who’d be willing to look at them.”

  “And only succeeded in having yourself blacklisted from the Wren,” Peter mused. “Poor Margaux.”

  “Poor Margaux!” Jo cried. “You actually believe her?”

  He nodded distractedly. “It’s entirely typical. I told you she was no good at puzzles.”

  But supremely adept, Jo raged without saying it, at managing you. Are you right about all this? Or has she got some missing piece of Ark information tucked tidily in her brassiere?

  “Fair’s fair,” Margaux told them. “I told you what I found. Now it’s time to show me your treasure.”

  She was holding out her hand. It was a beautiful hand, utterly unlike Jo’s earth-roughened one, with long, slender fingers and French-manicured nails.

  There was a pause. Peter stared at Jo quizzically, offering no quarter, no refuge. Slowly, she reached into her shoulder bag and withdrew the oilskin package.

  Margaux’s nose wrinkled. “Christ, you really did rob a grave, didn’t you?”

  “I prefer to think of it as digging a hole in the garden,” Jo said; and was rewarded with one of Peter’s rare smiles.

  “Draw up some chairs,” Margaux ordered. “I want to read this before we talk.”

  “You sit, Jo,” Peter said. “I’ll get us some coffee.”

  AND AS HE SWUNG OUT OF THE READING ROOM, WITH precision timing, Gray Westlake walked in.

  “GOT A MINUTE?” HE ASKED.

  “Gray…” Jo rose. “What are you doing here?”

  “Let’s take a walk.”

  Her eyes strayed to Margaux. The don was smiling to herself, fiercely intent upon Leonard Woolf’s letter, which she’d found tucked into the book and had removed from its envelope. Jo wasn’t fooled by appearances; the letter didn’t take that long to read. She found it interesting that Margaux was utterly indifferent to Gray. Almost as though she knew who he was—and had expected him to be there.

  “I’m not comfortable leaving my stuff,” she told him.

  “Then bring it with you.” He turned on his heel and made for the Reading Room door.

  It was impossible for Jo to wrench the bound volume out of Margaux’s hands, now that she had it before her on the desk. And Peter was coming back…

  Peter. Had he deliberately exited as Gray walked in? Was everybody in on this little meeting?

  “How do you know Gray Westlake?” she demanded suddenly.

  Margaux looked at her with cat’s eyes that revealed nothing. “I would call it more of an acquaintance, actually. Of very recent formation.”

  Jo felt a spurt of anger; who the hell did Gray think he was, using Peter’s ex-wife to spy on her? Never mind how they’d met—what did Gray think he was doing, walking into the New Bodleian as though he owned the place, and demanding she follow him?

  He had paused in the doorway and was staring at her grimly.

  “You leave this room,” she snarled at Margaux, “and so help me God I’ll track you down and rip your head off, got it? Tell Peter I’ll be back in five.”

  “Cheers,” Margaux replied, already engrossed in the bound volume.

  GRAY TOOK HER BY THE ARM AND LED HER BRISKLY DOWN the stairs she’d just ascended.

  “I’m not leaving,” she said through her teeth. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  He did
not reply, did not even look at her, but hustled her out of the New Bodleian door. It was there she succeeded in shaking him off, and stood rooted on the steps, glaring at him.

  “This is ridiculous. You came all the way from London to drag me back against my will?”

  “I came to talk to you. Since you’re incapable of picking up your phone.”

  “I ran out of battery. I haven’t got my charger.”

  “You’ve run out of a lot more than that, Jo. My patience, for instance. And time. You’re completely out of time.”

  “Gray—”

  “I sent you here to work on plans for my garden.”

  “Which I’ve done. And I told you the past few days were my own. A personal matter, having to do with my grandfather’s death. But you seem to have difficulty separating my life from yours.”

  “The two have been pretty tangled lately,” he retorted with a harsh laugh.

  “Did you pay that woman to track us down?”

  His expression changed—from aggressive to careful.

  “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “Oh, right. You just guessed I’d be in Oxford, at the Bodleian, this morning.”

  “Actually,” he said evenly, “it was your friend Peter who called in to Sotheby’s and told them where you were. I gather he’s getting pretty tired of this jaunt all over England. Have you completely lost your mind, Jo, asking a complete stranger to run your errands for you?”

  The words fell on her ears like shards of ice. Stinging. Unexpected. Unstoppable.

  Peter. She’d had no idea what a pain in the ass she’d been. What a burden. When he’d probably been trying to get back to Margaux for days—

  “Do you realize that but for me,” Gray continued tensely, “you’d have every cop in Great Britain trailing you right now?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That little prank you pulled, Jo. At Sissinghurst. When you were in my employ. Stealing from a National Trust house! Jesus—Imogen Cantwell is ready to start World War Three! If I hadn’t bought her off during a delicate round of negotiation, she’d have gone to the police.”