The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Nineteen

MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES HAD SPENT THE FEW hours between Gray Westlake’s unexpected call and the man’s appearance in Sotheby’s book department conducting what he called due diligence. This meant an all-out assault on available information: online searches of biographic and financial data, reviews of past auction purchases, quick interrogations of Marcus’s opposite numbers in Wine Sales and European Antiques. By the time Cissy tapped her fingernail against the paneled mahogany door and slid into the room, Marcus had a rough understanding of Gray Westlake’s tastes. He knew that the man was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. He knew Gray was fifty-four years old. He knew that he bought rare cars and speculated in oil futures. He knew that Gray’s first wife liked English antiques, his second American country, and his third, Mid-Century Modern. He knew that Gray drank Bordeaux and California Cabernets, that he was a member of golf clubs all over the world, and that his five homes were scattered, at the moment, on three continents.

About Imogen Cantwell, Marcus Symonds-Jones knew absolutely nothing.

At first, he thought the woman might be Westlake’s bag carrier, but that notion was dismissed as soon as he caught a good look at her. He was surprised and slightly unnerved as he bared his teeth and extended his hand to grasp Gray’s own; if the man had brought a manuscripts expert to his first meeting — and Imogen was just frumpy enough to pass for one — then the American was in deadly earnest.

“Do tell me how I can be of help,” Marcus boomed, as Gray stood before his desk. He would have liked to have sat down himself, but the other man wasn’t bending, and Marcus saw that he was waiting for Imogen Cantwell to take a seat first. She seemed oblivious of this, her gaze fixed malevolently on Marcus; he recoiled as she thrust out a work-hardened finger.

“Was it you that woman talked to? When she brought her stolen goods to market?”

“Sorry?”

“A book expert, she said. At Sotheby’s. Was it you?”

Marcus blinked, his eyes shifting to Gray Westlake’s.

The American smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? Miss Cantwell? Have a seat?”

Grudgingly, Imogen lowered her bulk into one of Marcus’s beloved Bauhaus chairs — white leather and steel, he’d saved for months to buy them before they’d even gone on preview. Everything in his office was deliberately chosen to offset the fusty image of Rare Books and Manuscripts, to scream in the broadest visual accent: HEDGE FUND OPERATORS TAKE NOTE: WORDS ARE HIP, TOO!

He wanted to ask what the fuck these two were talking about, but as they obviously assumed he knew, he sank instead into his chair and made a pretense of stabbing his keyboard. “Right. It’s a pleasure to have you at Sotheby’s again, Mr. Westlake — and to welcome you to Rare Books! I understand you’d like Miss…”

“Cantwell,” Imogen supplied.

“… to sit in on our meeting?”

“I thought her information could be helpful.” There was a hint of amusement in Gray’s eyes that Marcus immediately resented.

“You said something about a Woolf manuscript, is that right? You think you’ve found one, or that perhaps we have one — am I correct? What sort of manuscript, exactly?”

“A bloody great find, which that woman snatched right out from under our noses, that’s what you’ve got,” Imogen Cantwell snarled. She was leaning toward Marcus now, her breasts swaying in her wool jumper. “She brought it here under false pretenses. I’ve come to get it back. It’s as much as my job is worth if The Family finds out it’s gone.”

As Marcus stared at her, understanding broke like dawn over his reeling brain. The Family. A stolen book. A notion it was worth something. Imogen was a servant, obviously. But what in the bloody hell was Gray Westlake doing with her? And why had he forced her on Marcus?

“Mr. Jones,” Gray said — and Marcus felt the familiar fury in his gut at the careless curtailing of his name, he was no mere Jones, no sodding shopkeeper from Wales with a single syllable indistinguishable from all the rest, he had worked hard to come up with Symonds, the perfect hyphenated expression of his aspiration — “it might be easier if I explained. My landscape architect, Jo Bellamy, was at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent this week, where Miss Cantwell is the National Trust Head Gardener.”

“Ah,” Marcus said.

“Jo was observing operations in the garden, at Miss Cantwell’s invitation, with a view to replicating certain aspects of Sissinghurst at my Long Island estate.”

“Jesus,” Imogen interjected. “You’re the one who wants the White Garden? I’d have thought you’d more sense than to buy a fake.”

Gray Westlake ignored her. “Jo tells me she found a notebook in some sort of shed — ”

“And I led her right to it!” Imogen cried.

“She thinks it might have been written by Virginia Woolf. She brought it to London yesterday, to be assessed by your department.”

“ — Which she had no authority to do!” Imogen was working herself into a rage. “I never gave her permission! Wanted to read the book overnight, she said. Because of her precious grandfather. And now she’s gone, and the notebook with her — ”

Marcus stabbed at his speakerphone. “Cissy — did a Miss Jo… Bellamy… an American woman…” — he mouthed at Gray Westlake: Young? Old? — “in her mid-thirties, perhaps… approach the department yesterday?”

“He doesn’t even know his job,” Imogen muttered to Gray. “But you — if Jo’s your architect, you must know where she is, surely?”

“Marcus?” Cissy purred through the speakerphone. “I sent her to Peter. The rest of the department were in conference.”

“Peter,” Marcus spat. “Of course. Still taking coffee in some bloody café, is he?”

“We’ve had a call this morning. Peter’s on sick leave.”

“Sick my arse!” Marcus shouted at the speakerphone. “Give me his mobile!”

“I think,” Gray Westlake said as Cissy disconnected to search her database, “you’ll find that Peter is in Oxford.…”

“IS IT MARGAUX?” JO ASKED.

“No.” Peter thrust his cell phone in his coat pocket. “Work number. Marcus bloody Jones. I won’t answer.”

“Seen all you need to, then?” Glenna held out her hand for the mural photograph. “There’s so much in these files. And so little order! The whole collection should be placed somewhere. University of Sussex, perhaps. With the Woolf papers.”

“But how nice that it’s here. In the house,” Jo said politely. She turned to follow Peter through the doorway when a thought struck her. “Glenna — do you have any photographs of Vanessa Bell? Or anyone else who lived here?”

“Loads.” The guide pulled open another file cabinet and spilled a sheaf of prints over the oak desk.

Her beauty, Jo saw, was bone-deep: as much to do with the deeply modeled sockets of the widespread eyes and the subtle squaring of the chin, that in her sister, Virginia, was elongated to the point of caricature. Vanessa had a luminous glory that must have haunted the men who loved her. In the aging photographs beneath Jo’s hands, her liquid gaze held fated depths, her full lips invited touch. There was power, too, in her air of stillness: She might have been an Archangel, something winged and terrible come to rest. Yet her children huddled gladly within her arms.

“That’s quite an early one of Vanessa with her boys — Julian by her shoulder and Quentin in her lap,” Glenna said. “He passed on just a few years ago.”

“And Julian?”

“Killed driving an ambulance in the Spanish Civil War.”

There had been something, Jo remembered with a faint ribbon of unease in her stomach, about Julian in the notebook. The envy the writer felt when she saw even Vanessa’s grief. Vanessa had lost her son — and Virginia, if Virginia indeed was the writer, had envied her for it. As though anguish were as valuable as love.

Jo sifted through the photographs. Most had stickers on the reverse, with a date and subject noted. Duncan Grant was in many of them. A few showed Clive Bell, with his high forehead and balding pate, his expression of wounded dignity. Quentin grew older under Jo’s fingers. Pictures at Charleston, Jock had said. Tell her pictures at Charleston. The final one was a group photograph: Virginia Woolf the most obvious face among them, a collection of men about her. She was sitting indolently, her long delicate feet extended, in a basket chair on the lawn. Her thin face with its hooked nose and pronounced underbite was suggestive of a horse, where her sister’s had conjured an angel.

Jo glanced at the back of the picture. Virginia and Apostles, 1933. “Glenna — would it be possible to get a copy of this? And the one of the mural?”

“What — right off the machine?”

Jo shrugged. “I know it’s asking a lot.”

“It’s criminal! One doesn’t do that to old photographs. The light’s bad for them.”

“One doesn’t store old photographs in file cabinets, either.”

“Well — ” Glenna looked at the scattered images on the surface of the desk. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt. Just this once. Are you two scholars or something?”

“Yes,” Jo said. Something just about covered the two of them. Gardener and Expert, 2008. Peter was moving restlessly near Charleston’s front door, too polite to remind her he was waiting.

She took the photocopies Glenna gave her. “Here,” she said, handing the woman a twenty-pound note in return. “A donation. For the Charleston Trust. I wish it were more.”

The guide placed it carefully in a strongbox as Jo walked away.