“She belongs in the White Garden — when you make it.”
“Have you seen Delos? Vita’s Attic Wilderness?” He took my hand, and tucked it under his arm. “It’s even more hopeless now there’s nobody to cultivate chaos. Let’s stroll, shall we?”
The footing was very bad, and I clung to him. The night, and this familiar stranger; my heart beat quicker. Harold was silent.
“How are things at the Ministry?” I asked.
“Funny you should ask,” he murmured. “Only a writer of novels could understand — I’ve become a vehicle for falsities and lies and hopeful declarations. I am never so full of bile as when forced to censor an upright journalist, before his truth terrifies half the kingdom.”
“Hypocrisy,” I said.
“Oh, yes — much more than I found in all my years with the Foreign Office. But perhaps I was simply callow, then, and unaware.”
“No.” I uttered the word as though I spat bullets. “People want lies, now. Like children before bed. Do even you grow to love lying, Harold?”
He stopped by a great chunk of rock — one of the ruins of Sissinghurst scattered about the ground Vita calls Delos — and stared at me soberly. “I hate it. But I’ve found lies are indispensable in wartime. What about you?”
“I left Leonard because of a lie. Or several. They beget each other, you know.”
He sat down on a flat plane of the rock and patted it gently. “Tell me all about it, old thing.”
“LAST NOVEMBER,” I BEGAN, “A YOUNG MAN FELL OUT OF the sky.”
Harold’s eyelids flickered. “One of ours, or one of theirs?”
I hardly knew how to answer the question. It suggested a world of absolutes, where I’d never lived.
“He was certainly German, if that’s what you mean. But he claimed to be Dutch. He fell into one of the meadows near the river at half-past three in the morning, on a night of no moon. He told us his name was Jan. Jan Willem Ter Braak. I had just finished my book the day before. I couldn’t sleep and I heard the dog barking.”
How to explain to Harold that whenever the words left me, I was empty as a husk lying on the threshing-room floor? Empty as a woman whose birth has aborted? Impossible to sleep in such a state. Impossible not to hate oneself, knowing the words had spilled irretrievably, that there was no taking them back, that Leonard would force me to print when the thing was dreadful — paltry words, lifeless, without art, shaming? I wanted to burn my book, I wanted to drown it.
“Between the Acts?” Harold said easily. “Leonard says it’s as good as The Waves.”
“Leonard lies.”
I could not look at him, beside me on the rock. Come under the shadow of this red rock.
Harold fumbled for something in his pocket; a pipe. Then the match flaring, the comfort of tobacco smoke. “So a German parachuted into your back garden. What then?”
“The dog found him. Baying and whining in the middle of the night. He’d sprained his ankle, you see, and was stumbling. Leonard went out after the dog.”
Harold puffed on his pipe. “What did Leonard do?”
“Jan tried to run and the pain made him faint. Leonard tied his hands and feet and left the dog to guard him. Then Leonard locked me inside the house and got on his bicycle and rode into Lewes, where there’s a telephone.”
“And a constable?”
“He didn’t wake the constable.”
“No?”
“He rang up his friends.” I looked at Harold now. “You know some of them. In government. Cambridge people.”
He smiled. “My poor darling, you make them sound like Nazis.”
I refused to notice this. “One of them is Guy Burgess.”
“Delightful fellow. Works at the BBC. Radio interviews.”
“You’ve slept with him, haven’t you,” I said, “so of course you think he’s grand.”
Harold drew his pipe deliberately from his mouth. “Did Vita tell you that?”
“No. Guy did.”
“I see.” He was still serene, without affront; there is no one more truly the gentleman than Harold Nicolson. “I shall have to beg the little sod to be more discreet. Was he the person Leonard rang?”
“Leonard put through a call to Maynard, who lives in Tilton — not far from Rodmell, as the crow flies. Maynard rang the other two in London. They share a flat. I couldn’t think why they’d be wanted — Tony’s an art critic and Guy a drunk — but eventually I understood. Tony Blunt’s with military intelligence. He does something with German agents. And Leonard knew Jan was no Dutchman.”
Think what the local bobby would do if he got his hands on the poor bugger, Leonard had said. They all remember Dunkirk. Probably kill him by morning. Better to ring someone sensible and make sure the fool survives.
“They came direct from London, in two black cars, and bundled Jan in the back. He was conscious by that time, and he tried to fight them, but it was no good.”
Harold rapped his pipe against the rock, scattering the tobacco. “Disturbing, admittedly — but I have yet to detect Leonard in a lie.”
“That came later.” I hugged my sweater close. “There were bombers, you see, in waves overhead during the autumn, and talk of Germans coming. Invasion. My brother gave us morphia so we might kill ourselves, and Leonard hid it in a drawer. And then the planes stopped, Harold. They stopped. At first I felt relief, but then I began to listen to things the others said when they came. Your Burgess. And Tony.”
“Leonard’s Apostles. I’m only a poor Oxford man, but what is it they say — ‘If forced to choose between betraying my friends, and betraying my country… ’”
“Yes!” Perhaps Harold would understand, after all. “They came at night, after the curfew. They had special police passes, extra petrol. They talked to Leonard about Jan.”
“The fellow was still alive?”
“He was being… controlled.” I looked at him desperately. “They set him free, on a very long leash. He was sent to Cambridge, where Maynard might watch him, with money and his radio set, and ordered what to tell the Germans.”
“ — Which were lies.”
“Yes.”
“Sounds bloody brilliant to me.”
“It was.” My fingers twisted together, as though the bones were twigs I could break. “It was inspired, Harold. And Jan isn’t the only one. There’s a whole group involved — the Twenty Committee. Tony says every German agent dropped into England has been turned. The alternative to cooperation is death, of course.”
“Virginia,” Harold said gently. “We’re at war with Hitler. Death is always the alternative. Tony and the others are simply doing their jobs. Why has this upset you so?”
I rose from my red rock and began to pace the wilderness of Delos. Weeds snatching at my ankles. While Vita drank her sherry in the Priest’s House, a bramble grew steadily to surround Sleeping Beauty’s castle. She would be walled up alive, soon.
“Because of the proofs. Leonard set the type for my book, Harold. All through the winter he was composing formes on the hand press. He hadn’t really used it in years — but he said it was a distraction for him. From the war.”
“Probably was.”
“He gave me one set of proofs to correct. He kept another. But I mislaid mine, once, when Leonard was out — I found his set and started to read. He had changed the text in places, Harold. He had put in other words. Do you understand what I mean?”
“I’m afraid — ”
The book is excellent. The finest you’ve written. Of course we’re going to publish. But you must devote yourself to your proofs, Virginia. You must read and read them.…While he hid his poisonous screed in the forest of words.
“A sentence here, a sentence there,” I persisted. “Tony Blunt told him what to say, and Guy would deliver it. My book was to be the handmaiden, Harold. My proofs. Passed to someone else. Who’d know exactly how to read them.”
Harold stared at me. No longer the aesthete in the garden, but a man of W
estminster. “Are you trying to tell me Leonard is a spy?”
“He lies.” I whispered it.
“What did he print?”
I closed my eyes and repeated from memory.
“Special for Stalin: Hitler to invade Russia.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
“WHY IS THAT SO TERRIBLE?” JO ASKED. “I THOUGHT Churchill and Stalin were buddies.”
“After Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact, they were,” Peter conceded, “but that came in June, when the Nazis attacked Russia. In April, when Virginia’s writing, Stalin was the enemy.”
“And Leonard Woolf was passing information to him?”
“Or trying to. He could have been shot as a traitor. And Virginia with him. The message was in her book.”
“Why would Leonard do such a thing?”
Peter shrugged. “The Woolfs were always to the Left. And a lot of people believed that if you were against Fascism — like the Russians — you were worth helping. That included Stalin.”
“And then there were Leonard’s Apostle friends. Tony and Burgess, the Soviet spies.”
Peter rubbed his eyes wearily. “Virginia mentions the Twenty Committee — there was another name for it. The Double-Cross System. It came from the Roman numeral for twenty — ”
“Double Xs?”
“Yes. It was one of the most successful deceptions of the entire war, and the intelligence service were at pains to keep it secret. Leonard could have done immense damage with those few words in a book — letting Stalin know the Germans were coming might have blown the whole Double-Cross operation.”
“Do you think Blunt got Hitler’s plans out of Jan Ter Braak?”
“He must have. And Blunt — or Burgess — was desperate to get the message to Stalin. There was no Russian embassy in London at the time. France was occupied by the Germans. So they thought of Leonard and the press. They could send the message in a proof somewhere — say, Switzerland? But something went wrong — because Stalin was shocked when Germany invaded. He never saw Operation Barbarossa coming.”
“Virginia,” Jo surmised.
“Or Harold Nicolson.”
“But Blunt and Burgess weren’t exposed as Soviet spies,” Jo pointed out. “At least, not then.”
“Well, they were Apostles, after all. Keynes probably protected them.”
“He persuaded Harold to send him Virginia’s account,” Jo suggested, “and then convinced Leonard to burn it. Only Leonard printed it, first.”
They were silent a moment, considering it all.
“So why did poor Jan Ter Braak shoot himself?” Jo asked.
“Or was shot?” Peter countered meaningfully.
“Keep reading,” she said.
IT IS TO HAROLD NICOLSON’S CREDIT THAT VERY LITTLE ASTOUNDS him. That comes, I suppose, of having been born in Teheran — of being born to a diplomatic family, I mean, in a place that was never England. Harold is quite free of certain hypocrisies regarding our national character — that gentlemen are honourable, that allegiances are always clear. That there is a right way of living, and a wrong.
Harold understands that people lie; that self-deception is the most powerful technique for survival; that we are all riddled with competing loyalties that confuse and divide us. He is, after all, a father — who loves to sleep with young men exactly his sons’ ages. He is a husband — whose wife has never been faithful. He has lived behind the protective screen of prevarication all his days; our world does not tolerate Harold’s complexities.
“Hitler is going to stab Stalin in the back?” he said.
“That’s what Jan claims.”
“And this means, I take it, that Hitler is not going to invade us? Jolly good. Do we know when this delightful event will occur?”
I shook my head. “They’ve been trying to get the date out of Jan. But he doesn’t seem to know. Tony is convinced he’s just pretending to be stupid. They’re going to have to get tougher. That’s what Burgess said.”
Harold glanced at me from under his brows. “You didn’t learn all that from a proof, my dear.”
“No. I’ve been listening to them. The men of Westminster. When they call on Leonard, late at night. Everything those two learn from Jan, they mean to pass on to the Russians.”
“Dear me,” Harold murmured, reaching once more for his pipe. “Did you tell Leonard how you felt, before you ran away?”
“No.”
“Simply wrote your farewell, and bolted?”
“He thinks I killed myself. He told Vita so, in a letter. He thinks it was all to do with me — my madness, not his.”
“Men are often obtuse in that way,” he said neutrally. There was an interval with the pipe, the tobacco pouch, the tamping down of fires. “I wonder if you haven’t blundered into something more significant than you know, Vee. And I’m beginning to regret my susceptibility to the charming Mr. Burgess, more than I can say.…”
The darkness had utterly fallen by this time, and the night was chill. Harold helped me back to the Priest’s House, where Vita was preparing to set out for her sitting room in the South Cottage. The sentinel was posted in Orlando’s tower. There was no drone of engines in the air. The Germans would not, after all, be coming.
Harold said nothing of all we’d discussed before his wife. When she had gone upstairs, however, he gathered his newspaper and a book and his spectacles and turned to me with his endearing — his perpetually gentle — smile.
“Vee, you must write to Leonard. You owe it to him. He can’t have realised how he hurt you. And it’s unfair to let him believe you’ve drowned. You’re all of life to him, you know — ”
Not quite all of life. There will always be a part of Leonard’s mind I cannot enter — the part created and sustained so early in youth by the Apostles.
I did not promise Harold anything. But I slept, for the first time in weeks, without dreaming.
And woke to the news of my death in The Times.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Wednesday, 2 April 1941
Sissinghurst
IT WAS VITA WHO SAW THE PAPER FIRST.
She purchased the afternoon edition when she dropped Harold for his London train. I am sure that she is heartily wishing I were on it, too — Vita loathes the invasion of friends, however much she feels her isolation when they are gone. And she is worried about my future — I see it in her looks — although I am sure Harold told her little of our conversation. Vita assumes I have left Leonard because I could no longer bear to live with him. She asks nothing further; and for once, I am grateful for her easy assumptions.
I met Harold this morning as I walked amongst the limes; he was dressed in his Saturday clothes, as he calls them, being most often at Sissinghurst at the week-end. He could not resist the call of the damp spring earth, although fully intending to return to the Ministry in a matter of hours; he knelt on the concrete pavers in tweeds quite bagged at the knees, turning the earth around the thin shoots of spring bulbs.
“My life’s work,” he said, when he saw me. “The Lime Walk. Vita never comes here, with her spade and her notions; this is my bit of earth. I carved it out of nothing, you know. A necessary axis to connect the Nuttery with the Kitchen Garden. I’m forever attempting to bring Platonic order to Vita’s wilderness; and I’m forever frustrated. Sissinghurst is magnificent, but obtuse. It resists all attempts to contain it.”
I studied him narrowly: loam on his fingers, light in his eye. This is what he’s fighting to save — a bed of earth on an April morning. “Vita’s endless columns about the making of gardens,” I observed, “are so much bosh, aren’t they? You’re the real genius of Sissinghurst. You’ve plotted every line.”
“I did a few sketches when we bought the place,” he conceded unwillingly, “but Mar is better at colour and flourish — the place would be a sad bore if left in my hands. Well — one has only to look at this!” He gestured dismissively towards the marching limes. “No labour, no time, no funds because of thi
s bloody war… but if the fighting ends one day, I’ll turn it into a demi-Eden. Anemones in profusion. Tulips. Primroses. Have you thought what is to be done?”
“To your Lime Walk?”
“No. With Leonard and the others.”
I shifted from foot to foot.
“Here is what I propose,” he said briskly. “I shall write to Maynard — he’ll nip the foolishness in the bud. Whatever his friends have got up to, Maynard is a sensible man.”
My heart froze. He could have no idea of the midnight talks, the single bulb behind the blackout shade. The thread of spittle on Blunt’s lips. The German boy bundled into the black car.
“Sense,” I choked.
“You’ve known Maynard all your life!”
“He is Westminster. Baron Tilton.”
“Vee — ”
The hysteria closing my throat. I shook my head, emphatic, mute. The smell of lead on Leonard’s fingers. The taste of it when I screamed.
“This is war we’re talking of,” Harold urged. “Treason. Violence.”
There was sun on the heavy pavers, and the good green smell of earth rising in the air. The draught of a tomb. Harold’s fingers on my arm.
“Have you breakfasted, Vee?”
I shook my head again. Food. Revolting.
The boy Jock’s face, hovering like a ghost’s beyond the bacchante statue.
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.
The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf Page 21