The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

by Стефани Баррон

  “I want Grandpa’s tools.”

  It was in the shed that Dottie noticed the envelope, sitting in a wheelbarrow, in plain sight, as though Jock meant to mail it and simply forgot in all the bustle of hanging himself. “In the Event of My Death, he’d written in the lower corner,” she sputtered. “I mean, really, Jo — ”

  She’d expected a suicide note. Instead, what she got was a postcard from the past.

  “It was one of those things they carried, in the war,” Dottie told Jo, “ — in case their bodies were found. The soldiers wanted something sent back, as a kind of farewell.”

  It was dated Somewhere near Brindisi, September 1943. And addressed to Jock’s mother.

  Dear Mum and Dad and young Kip, If you are reading this, it is because old Jerry has done for me at last, never mind how, it’s all the same in the end. I want you to know that I don’t fear Death — that whatever happens, I will be all right, because it’s a relief to think of lying in the long grass as much as I like, and no marching just because Captain tells me to. I have seen a lot of Death, starting with that lady back home, and I know that what is left behind is like stubble in the fields after harvest time, the ends of things that have been used up, with the best of ’em put back into the earth.

  Jo glanced around at Vita’s dying garden. The rain had thrown a sheet of ground fog between her camera and the last of the argyranthemums; the effect was unutterably lonely. The ends of things that have been used up. Is that how Jock viewed his life, in his last days? How could she have failed to notice such despair?

  She stopped before a slim statue of a figure, somberly robed, more religious than classical. She glanced at her map of the White Garden; this must be the Little Virgin, the face almost obscured by the branches of a weeping pear tree. It was the sort of thing that could be adapted for the Westlake garden, with a modernist sculpture — possibly even an abstract one — something that gestured toward the original without copying it slavishly. Jo positioned the Virgin in her viewfinder and took several shots, then noted the height and breadth of the weeping pear. Flowering quince or a tree-form wisteria might do just as well — there were several varieties available in the States.

  The drizzle was turning to rain, so she slipped the camera back in its case and straightened over her bulging shoulder bag, aware that Terence had moved out of view on the far side of the box parterre. It was almost impossible to imagine the glory of this place on a sunny July day; a raw chill had seeped into the White Garden. She shivered.

  I cannot go without telling you why I ran that day, Jock’s letter had continued.

  I lied about my age, Mum, and nearly killed you with it. I hope Kip never does the same. War comes soon enough by the front door without hustling it in at the back. But I could not bear what happened, nor explain it neither, and going for a soldier seemed best. If I am dead, I hope you will believe and honour my word: I never did nothing for the Lady but what she asked. Before God, I tried to help her, though I only harmed in the end. I will see her huge eyes before me however long or short I may live, but my soul is easy: I was not a bad boy, Mum, only unlucky.

  Hoping as I have not brought shame or worry upon you and all the home folk at Knole, and sending you my dearest love, even in death — I remain,

  Jock Bellamy

  Jo had stared at her grandfather’s familiar writing, unwilling to hand the letter back to Dottie. There must be something more than this — some reason —

  “Beneath the envelope,” Dottie was saying, “he left a slip of paper. Probably torn off the pad he kept in his shirt pocket, you know the one…”

  A three-by-five block of steno sheets, useful for jotting reminders. And lists. They both loved lists.

  She took the scrap of paper from Dottie’s hand and read: Tell her pictures at Charleston.

  South Carolina? Jock had never been there in his life. Jo shook her head in frustration. “So who’s this lady he wrote about?”

  “No idea.” Dottie sniffed.

  “Oh, come on, Nana — you knew Jock better than anybody alive!”

  “I didn’t know he’d kill himself that day!” She made it sound like an accusation.

  “No one could have known.”

  “I should have.”

  There was no answer to this.

  “But you two must have met around the time Jock wrote this letter,” Jo attempted, as she folded the sheets and held them out to her grandmother. “In Italy.”

  “He never mentioned its existence,” Dottie replied stiffly. “And he never mentioned me.”

  This, Jo thought, was part of the trouble: Dottie felt betrayed. Jock’s suicide was insult enough, a wrenching-out of Dottie’s heart, as inexplicable as it was ugly; but this… She was completely absent from the farewell he’d written, so long ago, to his parents. The unknown lady had taken his wife’s place.

  “He was in some sort of trouble, wasn’t he?” Jo asked thoughtfully. “He talks about running. As though it were a matter for the law.”

  “He used to tell everybody he’d joined up young — only seventeen, that spring of 1941 — because he couldn’t be tending roses when the fate of Britain was at stake. He never said he was wanted by the Law.”

  “But this sounds like…”

  “He had no choice. I know. That’s why I came.”

  Jo had stared at her grandmother that day in her office, sharply uneasy. She knew nothing whatever about Jock’s war — only that he’d lost his entire family while serving in Italy, to a German bomb. It was all so long ago. It had nothing to do with the sad end in the garage. What did Dottie expect Jo to do?

  “You could find out something,” Dottie persisted. “In their records. While you’re there in Kent. He mentions Knole, Jo. The great estate. That’s where he grew up.”

  Vita Sackville-West had grown up at Knole, too. It was the ancestral home of the Dukes of Dorset, built before the reign of Henry VIII — a fifteenth-century house the size of a small village. Less than an hour from the garden in which Jo was now standing. But she hadn’t found the courage, yet, to visit Knole. Or ask questions about an unknown woman’s death, nearly seventy years before. She was afraid of what she might learn: That Jock hanged himself rather than face his granddaughter, after her trip to Kent.

  “What if I learn the truth, Nana?” she’d asked gently. “And you don’t like it?”

  “Jock left this letter for a reason,” Dottie insisted. “He’s dead, for a reason. I want to know what it is, Jo. I want to know what it is.”

  Chapter Four

  FRIDAY’S RAIN WAS A CONFIRMED TORRENT BY breakfast Saturday morning. The October world beyond the leaded windows was depressingly gray. Jo had slept badly. Little things bothered her: the gurgle of water in Cranbrook’s gutters, the wet dripping from every Tudor eave. And so she allowed herself a third cup of coffee while she thought about Nana and Jock and death of various kinds. She took stock of her situation. She made lists.

  Lists were a staple of Jo’s life. They made her feel purposeful and competent, and they were usually written in red ink. Several were floating around her leather shoulder bag already — Lilium regale or substitute white Casablancas?; paeonia Cheddar Delight; discuss staking, need for team of real gardeners not hired labor, read one — but this morning’s list was a compilation of unknowns.

  She wrote: 1941?

  That was the year Jock had lied about his age and run away to war.

  She wrote: Police records, Sevenoaks?

  Knole House sat on the eastern edge of Sevenoaks, in the part of Kent known as the North Downs. Simply pulling up before the gates of Knole, however, would not guarantee Jo answers. Did anybody — serving class or lord — still live there? Or was the vast sprawl of Kentish stone in its thousand-acre deer park just a National Trust mausoleum? And why assume Jock’s brush with the Lady had happened there?

  She had no idea what her grandfather’s life was like in 1941. He had said so little about his own childhood; it was as though only th
e present existed for Jock. Jo knew vague and impersonal things about England during the war: Luftwaffe bombing raids over Kent, hop fields burning, children sent away by train. Rations and petrol shortage, cooking pots hammered into airplane propellers. Was seventeen still considered school-age in time of war? Or had Jock been sent out to work while the men were fighting?

  She wrote: Ask Nana, family friends.

  Jo’s eyes rested on the dripping iron hitching post beyond the breakfast-room window. It was shaped like a horse’s head, and might perhaps have been antique. Even this irritated her; a bit of Merrie Olde England intended for the tourist trade. She set down her red pen.

  She ought to find Imogen Cantwell this morning and spend an hour in Sissinghurst’s greenhouses, studying the biennials raised from cuttings and seed. She ought to discuss boxwood clones. Hedge-trimming schedules.

  She ought to earn Gray’s money.

  Instead, she pushed back her chair and went to look for the concierge.

  “Local archives?” he repeated, frowning. “Birth and death records? That sort of thing? You’ll want the Centre for Kentish Studies. It’s only a few miles up Tonbridge Road, in Maidstone.”

  When her phone vibrated a few seconds later, fresh with a call from Buenos Aires, she let Gray slip into voice mail.

  WE ADVISE VISITORS TO BOOK A SEAT IN ADVANCE TO AVOID disappointment.

  Jo had found the careful British warning posted on the Centre’s website after breakfast, and dutifully called ahead. There were rafts of people eager to troll through microfilm of seventeenth-century parish registers and polling data from 1869, or so she was told; particularly the Americans on holiday.

  “Think they’re related to the Queen,” sniffed the staff member to Jo, “though most of ‘em are Irish and Polish or whatnot.”

  She bought a County Archives Readers’ Network ticket, and was given a plastic tag emblazoned with the number of her reserved seat. The Searchroom, as it was called, was like a researchers’ holding pen. At the far end of the space were shelves of archive catalogs — a series of color-coded ring binders divided by subject: green for family and estate records; red for the court reports of the Quarter Sessions. There were also numerous card indexes for parishes, personal names, and miscellany going back ten centuries. Eleven kilometres of data in our archive centre, the website boasted; but most of those facts were inaccessible by computer. She would have to pinpoint the sources she needed to consult — write their catalog numbers on a slip of paper — offer this to an archivist — and wait a quarter of an hour for the volumes to be fetched. She had no idea where to start. She nearly called Nana then and there to announce defeat.

  “Can I be of service?”

  He was short and slim and mild-eyed; a dark-haired cipher of a man with a neat name tag pinned to his blue dress shirt. MR. TREVELYAN, it said. Such a self-effacing soul would never put ROGER or IAN or HAL on his breast. He would always be Mr. Trevelyan. This, to Jo, was reassuring: she had found authority in a sea of doubt.

  “I’m researching my grandfather,” she said. “He grew up somewhere near Knole House.”

  “When?” Mr. Trevelyan inquired.

  “He was born in 1924. June sixteenth, actually.”

  “In Sevenoaks? Or on the estate itself?”

  “I don’t know. He’s dead,” she added, by way of explanation.

  “Let’s start with official records. Polling data, parish registry, that sort of thing.” He led Jo toward the card catalogs. “And the name?”

  She told him. While Mr. Trevelyan pulled drawers from cabinets, Jo debated whether to broach the subject of police records and an unknown woman’s death nearly seventy years before, the sudden terrible divide that might have fallen between childhood and going for a soldier.

  “Bellamy?” Mr. Trevelyan repeated. “That’s a very old name. Norman in origin. Belle Amie.”

  Jo smiled to herself. Jock was no aristocrat. If the blood of the conquerors descended in her veins, it was surely from the wrong side of the blanket — a belle amie, a beautiful mistress with an illegitimate child.

  “Here it is.” The archivist’s finger was poised over a catalog entry. “Quite straightforward. We’ll just fetch the parish records, shall we?”

  From the parish records Jo learned enough to fill half an index card. The names of Jock’s parents, Rose and Thomas Bellamy; the date of Jock’s birth, which she already knew; that of his younger brother, Christopher, called Kip; and a street address in Sevenoaks: 17 Bells Lane. There was also a single date of death for Rose, Thomas, and Kip, in February 1944.

  “That would be a bomb, of course,” Mr. Trevelyan observed. “One hit Knole itself that month. Damaged a good bit of the building.”

  It was so bald, that date. So quiet, in the records of the parish registry. When what it really recorded was the end of Jock’s known world. He had emigrated to America with Dottie after V-E Day.

  “Thomas Bellamy’s profession is noted as gardener,” Trevelyan added. “Nine chances out of ten, he was employed at Knole House. The family gave the place into the National Trust in 1946 — with a two-hundred-year lease on the private apartments and complete retention of the park — but in the first half of the century, Knole kept most of Sevenoaks in bread and butter. The garden is five hundred years old, and largish — a full mile of ragstone wall encloses it. They’d have needed a small army of gardeners, I should think. Shall we consult the estate records?”

  It was here that Jo came into a kingdom.

  The catalog of Knole’s books was astonishingly vast and various: steward’s accounts dating to the fifteenth century; gamekeepers’ records of pheasants bagged and deer killed; workshop accounts of upholsterers and woodsmen and joiners and glaziers; tenants’ accounts; harvest figures; housekeeping and stillroom books; lists of servants, the same local surnames appearing generation after generation. And records of the state visits of kings and queens: Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. James II. Edward VII.

  She ignored all of these. Only one group of documents held any interest for her: Knole’s garden archives.

  She would have liked to waste an hour scanning the drawings from Britannia Illustrata in 1707, or the accounts of George London, royal gardener, who’d supplied fruit trees in 1698; or Thomas Badeslade’s record of the bowling green’s construction, or the third Duke’s pineapple hothouse, or the Orangery that dated from the Regency period. But she had too little time. Another stranger was scheduled to take her numbered seat in less than forty minutes. She was forced to concentrate on the years between 1918 and 1939 — England’s Long Weekend between two devastating wars — when Thomas Bellamy, gardener of 17 Bells Lane, had raised his sons.

  War with Germany declared this day and the Staff can talk of nothing else than soldiering. Tom Bellamy to join up.

  No word of Jock.

  Jo’s fingers fluttered nervously over the final days of 1939, and on into the spring of 1940. Tom Bellamy refused the service due to dicky heart. Knole’s garden ranks dropped by two-thirds; only the unfit, the old, and the young remained to work the beds and maintain the plantings. Copper sulfate for the roses was impossible to find, due to the demands of munitions factories; the kitchen garden was all anybody cared about now, for the production of desperately needed food.

  Sissinghurst. Her grandfather had once bent and strained over the very beds she’d photographed in recent days — and she hadn’t known.

  Was it possible that Vita was the Lady? But no — Jock had distinctly written about the woman’s death. And Vita had survived the war by several decades.

  Jo sank back against the unforgiving Searchroom chair, baffled. It made sense that Lady Nicolson, desperate for garden help, would look for it at Knole — Vita made a habit of borrowing from her childhood home. Furniture, pictures, garden urns — and now a teenage boy who bid fair to be strong and canny with his hands.

  Jo skimmed ahead, hoping against hope for something more — but the Head Gardener’s account ended abruptly in June
1941 with the words: Called up for service this day, and will report for duty tomorrow at dawn. Five years of silence were contained in the single page separating this entry from the next — which was dated September 1946, and written in a stranger’s hand. Knole House to be given into the National Trust.

  Jo went in search of Mr. Trevelyan.

  “Do you keep anything about the Sissinghurst Castle Garden in this archive? From the war years, I mean?”

  He straightened from the pile of books he’d been tidying. “No. Particularly not the garden. Sissinghurst passed to the Trust in the late sixties, you know — and the Head Gardeners employed by the Nicolsons at the time were retained for decades after. They’d have kept their own records. Probably passed them on to their successors, whoever they are. You might check with the National Trust.”

  Jo thanked him, and turned in her numbered seat tag. She felt a pang of guilt. She should have kept to her proper job that morning — should indeed have earned Gray’s money. The answers were with Imogen Cantwell, at Sissinghurst.

  “WE’D GIVEN YOU UP,” THE HEAD GARDENER CALLED GENIALLY through the open office door. “Thought you’d had a late lie-in and spa treatment at the George.”

  Imogen was bent over her computer, the kind of work she detested, but the obvious task for a day of steady rain. Let Ter and the others slog around in their Wellies while she tended to the business of the Castle gift shop: stocking orders for tea towels and gardening books and potpourri that captured the scent of Vita’s musk roses. A few plants associated with Sissinghurst were sold there as well — stout rosemary shrubs and viola. All of this fell under Imogen Cantwell’s purview. She worked incessantly. She had no family, only a trio of indifferent cats she loved with pathetic ferocity.