The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Fifteen

“I’M SURE SHE’LL CALL,” PETER SAID FOR THE THIRD time, “once she realizes she missed us.”

“Missed us!” Jo stared at him incredulously. They were walking in the direction of Peter’s old Triumph, which he’d left near the canal. “Ditched us, you mean. Lied to us, too. Margaux knew that notebook was written by Woolf — and she stole it, Peter. Put us off with all this garbage about further analysis, then lit out alone for God knows where.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken.” Peter stopped dead and whipped out his cell phone. “I’ll just try her mobile, shall I?”

“Try away,” Jo muttered. She was suddenly aflame with impatience and frustration. She’d abandoned Gray — wasted time better spent on the White Garden — and embarked on a wild-goose chase across the Thames Valley. She’d wanted to make sense of Jock’s suicide. She’d been hopelessly stupid.

“No answer,” Peter said miserably. “Quite unlike her. Usually picks up on the first ring.”

“Right. But she can tell from her cell that you’re the one calling, so she’s letting you go straight into voice mail. And don’t say I’m sure you’re mistaken.” Jo strode on furiously toward the bottle-green Triumph. “I’m not mistaken. You’re willfully blind.”

“You’re angry.”

“Of course I’m angry!” She whirled and nearly stepped on his toes. “I’ve lost something priceless. Something important to me personally, as well as to the literary world. Never mind that it also belongs to Sissinghurst…”

“I understand. But you don’t know Margaux. She wouldn’t just…”

“ — Run off with somebody else’s property?”

“Not with a treasure of this magnitude. She has her scruples.”

Jo rolled her eyes in disbelief. “You’re telling me that woman’s never left you standing on a curb before, Peter, while she pursued something more interesting? I don’t believe you. I’ve met the Boy Toy.”

“There’s no call for personal attacks.”

He drew his keys from his pocket and shoved them viciously into the Triumph’s door.

Jo felt her face flush. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business how often your friend’s betrayed you. But that notebook is, Peter. We’ve got to get it back.”

He held open the left-hand passenger door silently.

“You’ve got to get it back,” she persisted. “You know Margaux. I don’t. Where do you think she’s gone?”

“Any one of a number of places. To verify a hunch, perhaps. Cross-check her sources…”

“Sell to the highest bidder?”

Peter’s eyes blazed. “Not that. Not yet. The fame of discovery is more Margaux’s line. She’d want the coup, you see. The headlines. The thirty-second spot on Sky News.”

“So is she talking to the London press right now?”

“I reckon that’s premature. She’s not hasty, Margaux. More of a calculating intelligence. She’d want to be absolutely certain before she went public with this. The cost to her career would be enormous if she got it wrong, do y’see? And if she talks to the press — she’ll have to tell them how the notebook was found. There are complications attendant upon that.”

Complications.

Sissinghurst. The Family. Jo.

“Is it possible,” she began, feeling her way, “that Margaux’s searching for… something to authenticate the notebook? Something that makes the authorship unequivocal?”

“ — Like the other half, you mean?”

They stared at each other. The missing pages, Jo thought, her heart beginning to pound.

“Somebody cut those pages from the binding for a reason,” Peter persisted. “Perhaps they bore a signature.”

“ — Or the facts of Woolf’s death?”

Almost involuntarily, he reached for his cell phone.

Jo erupted in fury. “She’s not going to pick up, Peter! She must be miles away by now. Are you planning to stand here in Jericho until she parades across your television screen? Or are you going to figure out where she’s gone?”

“All right,” he retorted, his palm slamming the Triumph’s window frame. “I understand the problem, thank you very much. Now would you get into the bloody car?”

Jo got in.

IMOGEN CANTWELL LISTENED TO JO’S MESSAGE TWICE, stabbing hard at the answering machine’s buttons to rewind and play, before heading out into the garden that Tuesday morning. Sotheby’s, she’d said, and Oxford. Imogen felt a sharp thrust of anxiety that bordered on panic: This was all spiraling out of control. Jo’s absence was beginning to look like theft — and she, Imogen, was responsible.

Terence was the first of her staff she encountered near the Powys Wall; he was clutching secateurs and hazel stakes, and was clearly bound for the Rose Garden. Sissinghurst closed for the season in five days, and Imogen felt a slight stab of nostalgia; Terence would not be returning when the garden reopened to the public in March. His internship was nearly done. Imogen had no great love for Terence, but she felt rather like a mother bird pushing her nestling into flight, all the same.

“Morning,” he called cheerfully. “Just going to kick a few.” Which meant he would be shoving his booted foot at the existing rose stakes, elaborate architectural affairs known as “benders” over which the long canes of Vita’s old roses were trained in a circular fashion. If the benders snapped under the force of Terence’s kick, they would be replaced with fresh; if they survived, they would endure the wet and sun of another season. Terence loved kicking benders; it was a bit of garden hooliganism, of a sort other men reserved for rival soccer fans.

Imogen doubted there were benders in Los Angeles. Poor Ter would be lost.

“Is the American coming today?” he called after her. He rather liked Jo Bellamy. They’d probably pulled a pint or two when Imogen wasn’t looking.

“Gone up to London,” she tossed back, and hurried on toward South Cottage before he could ask why.

When the garden closed, Imogen thought, The Family would be much more in evidence. Sissinghurst was completely theirs during Closed months. And it was possible, Imogen thought, that the loss of the anonymous notebook might be discovered. That questions would be asked. That she would be blamed.

The Cottage Garden’s four stalwart yews rose up before her eyes, quartering the center of the space — which Vita had called her “sunset garden.” It was the boldest of Sissinghurst’s rooms, all fiery orange and yellow and red, a vivid charge to the spirit. This late in the season the colors were dying out, of course — the deep rhomboid beds were the province of a few dahlias, Bishop of Llandaff and Yellow Hammer and the tangerine East Court. The tubers required overwintering in the nursery; in a few days she would dig them up, dust them with antifungal powder, and store them in dry containers labeled with their names. Just looking at the flagging plants, Imogen felt an unaccustomed weariness.

She pulled out her secateurs and began to deadhead the flowers. Tomorrow was Wednesday. A Closed Day. So she might treat herself to a bit of liberty this afternoon. She might, with complete justification, take her small Austin out of the garage and test the open carriageway. Her snipping blades hovered near the throat of a spent dahlia as she considered the prospect. Time was running out. She needed to find Jo Bellamy and the missing notebook — replace it in the miscellaneous box in the tool shed before The Family noticed it was gone. Or, better yet, present it casually as a discovery of her own. I was shifting the garden books for better storage. I thought this might be of interest. It couldn’t be a Woolf, could it? Do you think it’s possible that Virginia inspired the White Garden?…

Jo Bellamy be damned, Imogen thought, as her anvil hit her blade. What had she ever cared for Sissinghurst or its people, anyway? Imogen had been too trusting. She’d believed the woman was a gardener — that they understood each other. Valued the same things. She’d even told Jo about her funding worries and the woman ought to have understood what the discovery of an unknown Woolf might mean to Sissinghurst. Now Imogen felt betrayed. There was nothing for it, she decided as she lopped off an entire dahlia stem; she would have to drive up to London right now.

“TELL ME HOW YOUR GRANDFATHER DIED,” PETER SAID, AS the Triumph slid onto the M40.

And so Jo told him, as she had never been able to tell Gray, about the tractor chain and the garage beam. The look of gasping horror on Jock’s face when she’d viewed his body in the morgue and the swollen blue mass of his beloved hands. The sixty-five-year-old letter positioned carefully in a wheelbarrow. The hedge she’d left half-destroyed and the front loader abandoned for weeks. She told Peter how much she’d loved Jock Bellamy, how much she’d learned from him, how solitary she felt without her grandfather’s guidance. She even told Peter her deepest, private fear: That her trip to Kent had precipitated Jock’s death.

He did not say, as she expected, That’s ridiculous, Jo. He did not try to comfort her with the idea that Jock must have been ill.

“Of course you feel responsible,” he said. “That’s the problem with suicide. Everyone who loved the man feels they caused his death — simply by not preventing it.”

The Triumph chugged on toward London.

“He never told your gran he’d met Virginia Woolf? Never gave a hint of the notebook’s existence?”

“Never,” she replied.

“And he left nothing but that old letter from the war?”

“Not a thing. At least — ”

“What?”

She hesitated. The phrase was meaningless. She’d almost forgotten it herself. “A line on a scrap of paper my grandmother found.”

“A quotation? Bit of poetry? Do not go gentle into that good night, that sort of thing?”

“It was nonsense, really. Five words. It may have had nothing to do with his death, even. Tell her pictures at Charleston, it said. When I doubt he’d ever been to South Carolina in his life — ”

“Pictures at Charleston?” Peter had suddenly jammed on his brakes; the Triumph squealed, and behind them, an outraged driver tooted his horn.

“Yes. It makes no sense. What pictures? Why Charleston?”

Peter was rapidly downshifting the car and skittering across the M40’s lanes. “Don’t you see?”

“No,” Jo retorted, bewildered. “Are you out of gas?”

“I’m headed in completely the wrong direction,” he snapped, “because, God help us, you never thought to share your only clue. It’s near Lewes, I think. Sussex, anyway. We can find the house when we get down there.”

“What house?”

“Charleston. It was practically our Virginia’s second home. Belonged to her sister, Vanessa Bell. Famous painter. The heart and soul of Bloomsbury. Surely you’ve heard of Vanessa Bell?”

Jo shook her head.

“But you’re familiar with Bloomsbury? As an historical fact, I mean?”

“I’ve heard the term,” she said cautiously.

“Christ,” Peter muttered. “The colossal ignorance of Americans.… All right. A brief summary of the principal achievements in British art and writing in the first three decades of the twentieth century: That would be Bloomsbury. Your Vita is regarded as a member. So was Virginia Woolf. And her sister, Vanessa. And most of the men they took up with — artists, writers, philosophers, the odd civil servant. The men were friends from their days in Cambridge, and they all lived and worked and shagged in the part of London called Bloomsbury. Near the British Museum — it’s mostly the University of London now. Radicals, free-thinkers, passionate homosexuals — the lot. The twentieth century wouldn’t be the same without them.”

“So by pictures,” Jo broke in, “Jock meant paintings? But when would he have seen them?”

“That’s what he wanted you to find out. Tell her pictures at Charleston. Your grandfather’s Last Will and Testament.”

“You think this is important?”

“Of course.” Peter tossed her a map. “Charleston is never an accident. Find the Brighton–Eastbourne Road, would you? And pray that Margaux hasn’t pillaged the place before us.”