The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Seven

PETER LLEWELLYN WAS HALFWAY THROUGH HIS PAIN au chocolat that morning when she walked into the café.

He was late for the Group Meeting. He should have forgone his breakfast entirely; but he had no desire to listen to his Director, Marcus Symonds-Jones, summarize the results of a recent sale. He liked eating his pain au chocolat at his usual table in the house café, with a pot of Assam; and why provide Marcus with another opportunity to demonstrate Enlightened Management? Marcus was one of the new breed of directors at Sotheby’s UK; he had suffered through a four-day training course in New York last summer, and consequently assured his subordinates that they were All On One Team, Although Competition Among Equals was Quite in Order. Marcus had perfect teeth, which Peter found suspect. He hewed to an extreme of Savile Row tailoring, but affected a proletarian accent. Peter judged him false from shell to core. Marcus was a rousing success at Sotheby’s, however; and the slight suspicion that he, Peter, was simply jealous of Marcus’s ease, made him vaguely uncomfortable, as when he’d once disturbed a fellow seventh-former wanking off in a neighboring stall. Peter averted his eyes from Marcus when the two came into contact; the Results meeting would be sheer torture, Peter twiddling a pencil between his thumbs as Marcus spoke roundly of Better Than Projected Earnings. Far wiser to finish his breakfast and get on with the appraisal of the Broadwell collection.

Later he grew accustomed to the tentative expression Jo Bellamy wore whenever she was far from a garden; but that morning, as she hesitated in the café doorway, Peter took in the corduroy jeans, the mud-spattered Merrells, and the tied-back hair and concluded that an American tourist had lost her way between the Oxford Street tube station and Thomas Pink’s on Jermyn. Sotheby’s clients tended to dress for New Bond Street; they were careful to betray their ability to meet their financial obligations, before they breached the doors of the auction house. Whereas this woman’s appearance suggested she was in search of cab fare home.

As Peter sank his teeth into his final bite of pain au chocolat, however, the stranger met his eyes and smiled. His throat constricted from sheer surprise, and he gagged. Spluttering, he half rose from his table as she hurried toward him.

“Mr. Llewellyn? Are you okay?”

“Fine,” Peter gasped, peering at her through his glasses. “But I’m afraid I don’t… that is, I’m not sure — ”

“They told me I’d find you here,” she said. “Table in the corner, pastry and tea, blond hair and glasses. I’m Jo Bellamy. Would you have a moment to talk?”

Peter cleared his throat, released the death grip he’d fastened on his napkin, and gestured toward the opposite seat. “Do sit down. Cissy sent you, I suppose?”

“Cissy?”

“Department coordinator.” He sketched vaguely at his necktie. “Pearls. Twin set.”

“How did you know?”

“The rest of the Department will be in a meeting. I’m playing truant.”

“I see.” She smiled again as she pulled out her chair, and absurdly, Peter’s heart raced. He ought to have drawn the chair for her. But perhaps Americans ignored such things. And he was too late, in any case.

“How may I help, Miss…?”

“Bellamy.” She slid a large leather shoulder bag to the floor. “I don’t really know. I’ve never done this before. I’m not… good at things like auction houses.” She glanced around the café apprehensively, as though an alarm might go off; the tentative look was back again.

“You’re at a breakfast table, not a preview,” he said dryly.

“Right.” She drew a breath. “I found something. Something that might be important. Only I don’t know. And it’s not even mine. In fact, I stole it.”

Peter’s eyebrows soared. It was not unknown for the more audacious of fences to approach the house with suspect goods; it was not unknown for fakes — art, jewelry, anything of value — to be passed off as original. But such tactics were rarely shouted out loud.

“Sorry?” he said.

“I’m not explaining this right.” She blushed and slid a hand over her hair, as though it helped her to think. “Cissy said you were a Manuscript Expert.”

“That’s a job title here,” Peter explained. “It means I sell rare books. In your country, they’d probably call us Specialists.”

“Fine.” She dismissed job titles. “But can you figure out the identity of an author from just the handwriting? If the manuscript’s unsigned, I mean? And how would we do that? — Identify it as Virginia Woolf’s, say? — Or rule her out entirely?”

“Hang on.” Peter raised his thin hands above the table. “What in bloody hell are you on about?”

“This,” she replied, and withdrew a shabby notebook from her bag.

Peter did not immediately take it. Woolf. She had said Virginia Woolf.

“We could, in time, do all manner of things,” he said cautiously. “But what exactly are you requesting? A valuation? Manuscript analysis? Sale to the highest bidder?”

“Not that,” she said, alarmed. “I told you — this isn’t even mine.”

“Then any request for service should properly come from the owner. We’d require certain information, obviously, before we could entertain — ”

“But I don’t have information. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got to find out if it was her. And I’m running out of time — ”

Peter sat back in his café chair and glared at her. “Miss Bellamy, you’re not making a good deal of sense.”

“I found this notebook at Sissinghurst,” she said wearily. “And I think it was written by Virginia Woolf.”

She set the shabby volume on the white tablecloth between them.

Peter opened his mouth, closed it again. He adjusted his glasses. Then he skimmed the notebook cover with his fingers as lightly as though it were the face of a child.

“One doesn’t just find things in National Trust houses,” he told her quietly. “Not after they’ve been open to the public for forty years.”

“It was in a tool shed with some stuff of the gardeners.”

“So?”

“The gardeners’ books weren’t turned over to the Trust per se. They were passed down. To the current head.”

Peter frowned at her suddenly. “To whom does this belong? The gardener? The Nicolson family?”

“It should belong to whoever wrote it, right? Or if… she’s dead… then, to whomever she gave the book…”

“Are you attached to Sissinghurst in an official capacity, Miss Bellamy?”

“Not at all.” There it was — the smile, impish and uncontrolled — and the worry drained immediately from her face. “I’m a gardener myself. But visiting, from the States. I should never have seen this.”

“Then why — ”

“It’s a long story. Please.” She pushed the notebook toward him. “Could you just… look at it?”

He did not immediately answer her. Lifting his glasses slightly from the bridge of his nose, he peered intently at the binding. Cheap, medium-brown cotton over boards, the leaves glued rather than sewn. Size, roughly five inches by eight. A school copybook, perhaps of the last century. He lifted the cover, searching for a manufacturer’s imprint: Gould & Tennyson, Liverpool. He had been avoiding the handwriting itself, on the title page, from fear of disappointment —

Notes on the Making of a White Garden.

It might just be Woolf’s, at first glance: the looping, hurried script, certain of the letters elided. It would have to be studied, of course. Compared with known samples. Analyzed —

He glanced at Jo Bellamy, who was looking from the notebook to his face with the eagerness of a puppy.

“Why Woolf?” he demanded. “Merely because she knew Lady Nicolson?”

“Because of the writing,” the American replied.

Peter snorted. “Are you going to tell me it’s haunting and lyrical?”

She shook her head. “It’s… insane, actually. Very difficult to understand, in places. I’m not even sure if it’s fiction or a diary.”

“Rather like most of Virginia Woolf, now that you mention it.”

“Exactly!”

They grinned at each other; then Peter’s smile faded.

Marcus Symonds-Jones was looming in all his sartorial glory in the café doorway. He wore his most sympathetic and sensitive look, the one reserved for particularly splendid clients; beside him stood Julian Browne, solicitor for the Broadwell family. Whose priceless collection of bound volumes Peter was supposed to be cataloging.

“Look,” he told the American as he rose hurriedly, “can you leave this with me for a bit? I’m afraid I’ve got several pressing engagements this morning, and it won’t be possible to — ”

“What do you mean by ‘a bit’?” she countered. “I’ve only got a few hours. I’m returning to Kent this afternoon.”

“Fine.” Peter’s napkin drifted to the floor beside his chair; out of the corner of his eye, he could just make out Marcus and the Broadwell nightmare being led to a table at the far end of the room. The doorway was cleared for escape. “You’ve a mobile number, yes? You’ll leave it with Cissy? Know some shops to look into? The V&A, perhaps? Or — you’re a gardener! There’s always Kew!”

He was nearly out of the café by this time, notebook clutched in his hand; Jo Bellamy looked bewildered, the beginning of alarm on her face. He read the signs — she ought to have got a receipt, what if he absconded with her treasure, which wasn’t even hers — but it was too late to reassure her; she would just have to take Peter Llewellyn, Manuscript Expert, and the hallowed Sotheby’s firm on faith. She would have to wait for his call.

He ducked into the loo conveniently positioned just off the café corridor, and with relief closed a stall door behind him. That made twice in one morning he’d avoided Symonds-Jones. His need for flight — the revulsion driving him from every room his Department Head entered — could hardly be healthy. But he’d experienced a sudden horror at the thought of Symonds-Jones fingering Jo Bellamy’s notebook. Symonds-Jones’s uncouth vowels pronouncing the elegant little title. Symonds-Jones drawing Jo Bellamy’s impish smile. Absurd. How had things come to such a pass?

A square of milk glass set into the ceiling — an old-fashioned skylight — cast a grayish halo over Peter’s stall. He stared up into the glow, wondering if he’d gone slightly off the rails during the past few months. It was due to the place, he reckoned. The expectations. The persistent sense of inner failure. And Margaux’s leaving hadn’t helped. He would not think of Margaux, the annoying cow.… He hadn’t been born for this — for the title of Expert. Passing judgment on other people’s passions, other people’s sins, their hoardings and jealousies and impossible dreams. He would have to get out before he was much older.

But first: the Broadwell collection.

He slipped the old brown notebook into his breast pocket, flushed the loo for the sake of appearances, and prepared to brave the corridor once more.

JO BELLAMY WAS ALREADY TRYING ON WOMEN’S DRESS shirts at Thomas Pink’s, Jermyn Street. They looked, she thought, like the sort of thing Gray Westlake would wear. But not his wife. Perhaps his mistress…

Mistress. What a hideous word.

She was holding a lavender stripe under her chin when her cell phone rang.