The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Sixteen

THE CONNAUGHT’S PRIVATE BUTLER SERVED BREAKFAST in Gray Westlake’s solitary suite that Tuesday morning: coffee, Danish, fresh fruit, steel-cut rolled oats. Gray drank the coffee, which was poured out from a silver service by gloved hands, as he stood near the full-length windows studying the miserable London weather. It was dark at nine a.m. It would be dark again by four-thirty He was familiar enough with the city to have expected this, and in the heat of Buenos Aires two days ago he had yearned for it. Autumn in England. Scotch by the fire. Tweeds and cashmere and the warmth of Jo Bellamy beside him. He had imagined buying her things. Giving her treats. Long dinners with wine and conversation. Touching her constantly, and feeling her hands on his skin.

He’d imagined breakfast differently, too; he hadn’t expected to be alone.

A spitting rain turned the limestone of Mayfair a dingy yellow, and almost everyone hurrying along the sidewalks below was dressed in black or tan. Umbrellas bobbed and cars sent swooshes of dirty water over the pavement. It was unutterably dreary and his solitude was annoying. Gray ignored the discreet click of the butler’s exit, and asked himself for the hundredth time why he had not checked out of the Connaught already.

Because you don’t give up, said a voice in his mind. You wait. For the refusal and the doubt to turn to acceptance.

Acceptance? Is that all he wanted from Jo?

Restlessly, Gray set his cup in the middle of the snow-white tablecloth, frowning at the food he had no desire to eat. He was used to being thwarted. That was a fact of a financier’s life. He was used to calculating odds, and manipulating perceptions, and forcing his desired conclusion through a mix of will and ruthlessness. But he did not know how to win Jo Bellamy. She was utterly unlike the women he knew best — women who might be clever or accomplished or ruthless on their own ground, but who masked that steel with deliberate polish. Women like Alicia, who had been his lawyer before she was his lover and eventually his wife. He understood women who could calculate his net worth, their degree of sexual leverage, and his possible generosity in prenuptial agreements — and make decisions based on self-interest.

Jo was nothing like that. Jo was simple. Frank. Open-hearted. True. She tortured Gray, kept him wakeful at night, as though she were a path into a hidden country of unimaginable happiness that he could choose to follow, or ignore at his cost. Now, standing by the rainy window, he understood that he’d miscalculated. Jo’s path — Jo’s invitation — was hers to extend, not his to take. And she had closed a gate carefully between them, and walked briskly off into the distant trees.…

He could give Jo nothing, Gray thought, that she would ever really need. He could not buy her. Not even with this gift of designing his garden…

He should fire her. She was afraid of that, Gray knew. He’d heard the desire to placate in her voice last night, when she’d called from Oxford.

Oxford. His pulse quickened suddenly, and he thrust his hands in the pockets of his wool pants, fiddling with loose change. Consulting a book expert, she’d said. But Jo would never have found such a person on her own.…

There’d been that call from Sotheby’s yesterday. She’d raced off to meet someone in the Connaught’s car. Who was this joker, Gray thought, that Jo preferred to him?

Half his furniture had been bought at Sotheby’s. On impulse, Gray picked up the phone.

“I’d like to speak to somebody who knows books,” he told the auction house’s central receptionist. And waited for Marcus Symonds-Jones to come on the line.