The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Twenty-Five

“HERE.” PETER SHIFTED HIS CHAIR AROUND SO THAT Jo could view the computer screen. “That’s our boy. Jan Willem Ter Braak. Found shot to death in an air raid shelter here in Cambridge, of all places, on the first of April, 1941.”

Peter had accessed the online archives of The Times while they waited for Indian curry at an Internet café. He was drinking beer, while Jo opted for white Burgundy; the smell of roast chicken and yams was making her mouth water.

She focused on the death notice; it was extremely brief. Dutchman Apparent Suicide, ran the headline. The body had been discovered on the morning of April 1, 1941, with a gun beside it. Jan Willem Ter Braak was described as a Dutch refugee resident in England since the British evacuation of Dunkirk. No other details of the death were mentioned. Anyone with information regarding Ter Braak, the paper suggested, should inquire at the Cambridge police station.

“Not very useful, is it?” Peter observed.

“An air raid shelter! Weird place to commit suicide. How’d he know it’d be empty? — We have to assume it was empty, right? The article doesn’t mention any witnesses.”

“It doesn’t mention much at all.”

A waiter set down a plate of flatbreads, topped up Jo’s water glass, and left a trail of wet spots over the plastic table. She tore into a pappadam; steam burst from the center.

Peter was at his keyboard again. “Here’s a Wikipedia entry on the same fellow.”

“He’s that famous?”

“He wasn’t Dutch at all. He was a German agent named Engelbertus Fukken.”

“No wonder he preferred Jan. So you’re saying he was a Nazi spy?”

“Rather. The article says Ter Braak parachuted into England six months or so before he killed himself. He took rooms in Cambridge, claiming to be a Dutch national evacuated with British forces from Dunkirk.”

“But why kill himself if he was supposed to spy? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Apparently he ran out of money at the end of March ’41 and couldn’t stick it.”

“Because he was broke?” Jo frowned. “I’m sorry, but that doesn’t seem very James Bondish to me. Couldn’t he have robbed a bank?”

“Maybe he was afraid he’d be caught. And forced to betray the Reich. So he took the gentleman’s way out.”

“In an air raid shelter. That was unusually empty.”

Peter seemed determined to ignore her contempt. “Here’s something odd. Ter Braak went missing from his boarding-house on the twenty-ninth of March.”

“The same day our journal begins.”

Peter looked at her. “But the body wasn’t found for three days.”

“It can’t have been lying in the shelter all that time,” Jo said decisively. “So Jan was somewhere else. And he definitely didn’t shoot himself. He was kidnapped, killed, and finally dumped in that shelter April first.”

Peter gazed at her pityingly. “Is it American, this need for drama? You never accept the obvious solution, do you? It’s all conspiracy, in your mind. The national disease, where you come from.”

“That’s unfair.” Jo took a bite of warm bread. There was a photograph in the Wikipedia file, grainy and indistinct. Ter Braak was curled like a question mark on what looked like a tiled floor, clumps of dirt or perhaps concrete lying around him. His hair was dark. His face was visible in profile, left cheek uppermost; blood trailed over his mouth, to pool on the tile beneath him. He wore a trench coat and what Jo guessed might be a fedora hat, still perched near his head. Gloves. Black leather shoes. Pin-striped wool trousers. It seemed incongruous, all this bundled clothing, this need to protect against a cold that was now eternal. The gun lay on the tile almost too correctly, at a right angle to the limp hand.

Her mouthful of bread was suddenly difficult to swallow; she could not look at the body of this dead stranger without remembering Jock. She coughed, turned away, and felt Peter’s hand rest lightly on her hair.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she managed. “But don’t let that stop you. Why would the Nazis send this guy to Cambridge, anyway?”

“No idea.” Peter was studying her frankly, a question in his eyes. “I suppose the university was of interest to the Reich — there’s the Cavendish Laboratory, where some of the early atomic-bomb research went on.”

“It all sounds fishy,” Jo declared. She was determined to focus on Ter Braak, not the memory of Jock’s dead face. “We’re not getting the whole story.”

“Agreed. This entry says that the details of the suicide, and the fact that Ter Braak was a German agent, were suppressed until after the war — the government didn’t want to admit they’d let a spy run loose for so long. I imagine what few facts we’re reading are the ones they chose to publish.”

“Exactly. It’s an official version. And I’m not saying that just because I’m American. We know from Harold Nicolson’s letter that this… suicide was somehow linked to Virginia. And to J. M. Keynes. And to his Cambridge friends.”

“Has it occurred to you,” Peter broke in, “that you have a major problem with suicide? You shove it straight out of your mind, like a child who can’t bear to look under her bed.”

She glared at him, open-mouthed. “Damn straight I do!”

“But that’s just foolish. Look — ” He leaned toward her, elbows draped anyhow on the restaurant table. “You seem to find your grandfather’s death a personal challenge, a glove thrown smack in your face. When it’s nothing like that. Sometimes ending one’s life is just a decision. A final moment of chosen closure. It’s about self-control, autonomy. I’ve always regarded Woolf’s drowning in that vein — she was a middle-aged woman who fancied she could see the future, and it wasn’t the one she wanted. Sure, the act leaves unspeakable pain in its wake. But that doesn’t mean you caused it. Why are you clutching so tightly to this notion you failed Jock Bellamy?”

“Because…” She swallowed, shrugged hopelessly. “I should have stopped him. I should have seen how unhappy he was.”

“Was he unhappy for a long time?”

“Not that I could tell. I was clueless enough to think he was fine. But then I told him — ” She glanced away, her eyes filling with tears. “I told him, back in August, that I’d been hired to copy the White Garden. I was incredibly pumped about the job, you know? I mean, this was probably the biggest coup of my career. I’ve only been in business for myself for three years, and Gray’s a huge client, huge. So I called up Jock and said I was flying to England to visit Sissinghurst in a couple months’ time. He’d always been the guy who celebrated most for me, when things went well. He said all the right things. He was pleased and excited for me.”

“And?” Peter prodded, when she didn’t continue.

“But I never saw him again. He hanged himself the next day.”

There it was: The truth she’d never spoken aloud.

“I see.” Peter’s fingers stabbed at his hair. “So you feel responsible. I get it. But I’m telling you, Jo: Let this one go. Jock was, what, eighty?”

“Eighty-four.”

“There you are, then. He’d had his innings. He knew what he was about, that day in the garage. He didn’t ask your permission, yeah — but neither did he shower anyone with blame. He made his choice.”

“And left me to deal with it.”

“You’re being incredibly egotistical, you know.”

“What?”

“Thinking it all revolves around you. That you’re the center of Jock’s drama. I’d wager otherwise, my darling.”

“I am not egotistical!” she cried, outraged.

“Disgustingly full of yourself. He killed himself because of me. I reckon you’re wrong. Perhaps he couldn’t face whatever he’d left behind at Sissinghurst — but that may have far more to do with Virginia Woolf than it will ever have to do with Jo Bellamy.”

At his words, all the vehemence suddenly died out of Jo’s heart. She’d been about to argue passionately that Peter was wrong — that this guilt was completely hers to own, thank you very much, and no reasonable speech of his was going to change her mind. But he was right. Jock had made his choice. And she’d been operating for days, now, on the assumption that it had something to do with Sissinghurst’s Lady.

“So how do we find what’s missing from Ter Braak’s story?” she asked wearily.

Plates of fragrant curry materialized under their noses. Peter took a deliberate draft of beer, set down his glass, and looked at Jo. Had he actually called her “my darling”?

“I say we go dig up whatever Keynes buried in Rodmell that April,” he told her.