The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Thirty-Four

“WHY IS THAT SO TERRIBLE?” JO ASKED. “I THOUGHT Churchill and Stalin were buddies.”

“After Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact, they were,” Peter conceded, “but that came in June, when the Nazis attacked Russia. In April, when Virginia’s writing, Stalin was the enemy.”

“And Leonard Woolf was passing information to him?”

“Or trying to. He could have been shot as a traitor. And Virginia with him. The message was in her book.”

“Why would Leonard do such a thing?”

Peter shrugged. “The Woolfs were always to the Left. And a lot of people believed that if you were against Fascism — like the Russians — you were worth helping. That included Stalin.”

“And then there were Leonard’s Apostle friends. Tony and Burgess, the Soviet spies.”

Peter rubbed his eyes wearily. “Virginia mentions the Twenty Committee — there was another name for it. The Double-Cross System. It came from the Roman numeral for twenty — ”

“Double Xs?”

“Yes. It was one of the most successful deceptions of the entire war, and the intelligence service were at pains to keep it secret. Leonard could have done immense damage with those few words in a book — letting Stalin know the Germans were coming might have blown the whole Double-Cross operation.”

“Do you think Blunt got Hitler’s plans out of Jan Ter Braak?”

“He must have. And Blunt — or Burgess — was desperate to get the message to Stalin. There was no Russian embassy in London at the time. France was occupied by the Germans. So they thought of Leonard and the press. They could send the message in a proof somewhere — say, Switzerland? But something went wrong — because Stalin was shocked when Germany invaded. He never saw Operation Barbarossa coming.”

“Virginia,” Jo surmised.

“Or Harold Nicolson.”

“But Blunt and Burgess weren’t exposed as Soviet spies,” Jo pointed out. “At least, not then.”

“Well, they were Apostles, after all. Keynes probably protected them.”

“He persuaded Harold to send him Virginia’s account,” Jo suggested, “and then convinced Leonard to burn it. Only Leonard printed it, first.”

They were silent a moment, considering it all.

“So why did poor Jan Ter Braak shoot himself?” Jo asked.

“Or was shot?” Peter countered meaningfully.

“Keep reading,” she said.

IT IS TO HAROLD NICOLSON’S CREDIT THAT VERY LITTLE ASTOUNDS him. That comes, I suppose, of having been born in Teheran — of being born to a diplomatic family, I mean, in a place that was never England. Harold is quite free of certain hypocrisies regarding our national character — that gentlemen are honourable, that allegiances are always clear. That there is a right way of living, and a wrong.

Harold understands that people lie; that self-deception is the most powerful technique for survival; that we are all riddled with competing loyalties that confuse and divide us. He is, after all, a father — who loves to sleep with young men exactly his sons’ ages. He is a husband — whose wife has never been faithful. He has lived behind the protective screen of prevarication all his days; our world does not tolerate Harold’s complexities.

“Hitler is going to stab Stalin in the back?” he said.

“That’s what Jan claims.”

“And this means, I take it, that Hitler is not going to invade us? Jolly good. Do we know when this delightful event will occur?”

I shook my head. “They’ve been trying to get the date out of Jan. But he doesn’t seem to know. Tony is convinced he’s just pretending to be stupid. They’re going to have to get tougher. That’s what Burgess said.”

Harold glanced at me from under his brows. “You didn’t learn all that from a proof, my dear.”

“No. I’ve been listening to them. The men of Westminster. When they call on Leonard, late at night. Everything those two learn from Jan, they mean to pass on to the Russians.”

“Dear me,” Harold murmured, reaching once more for his pipe. “Did you tell Leonard how you felt, before you ran away?”

“No.”

“Simply wrote your farewell, and bolted?”

“He thinks I killed myself. He told Vita so, in a letter. He thinks it was all to do with me — my madness, not his.”

“Men are often obtuse in that way,” he said neutrally. There was an interval with the pipe, the tobacco pouch, the tamping down of fires. “I wonder if you haven’t blundered into something more significant than you know, Vee. And I’m beginning to regret my susceptibility to the charming Mr. Burgess, more than I can say.…”

The darkness had utterly fallen by this time, and the night was chill. Harold helped me back to the Priest’s House, where Vita was preparing to set out for her sitting room in the South Cottage. The sentinel was posted in Orlando’s tower. There was no drone of engines in the air. The Germans would not, after all, be coming.

Harold said nothing of all we’d discussed before his wife. When she had gone upstairs, however, he gathered his newspaper and a book and his spectacles and turned to me with his endearing — his perpetually gentle — smile.

“Vee, you must write to Leonard. You owe it to him. He can’t have realised how he hurt you. And it’s unfair to let him believe you’ve drowned. You’re all of life to him, you know — ”

Not quite all of life. There will always be a part of Leonard’s mind I cannot enter — the part created and sustained so early in youth by the Apostles.

I did not promise Harold anything. But I slept, for the first time in weeks, without dreaming.

And woke to the news of my death in The Times.