The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Thirty-Five

IT WAS VITA WHO SAW THE PAPER FIRST.

She purchased the afternoon edition when she dropped Harold for his London train. I am sure that she is heartily wishing I were on it, too — Vita loathes the invasion of friends, however much she feels her isolation when they are gone. And she is worried about my future — I see it in her looks — although I am sure Harold told her little of our conversation. Vita assumes I have left Leonard because I could no longer bear to live with him. She asks nothing further; and for once, I am grateful for her easy assumptions.

I met Harold this morning as I walked amongst the limes; he was dressed in his Saturday clothes, as he calls them, being most often at Sissinghurst at the week-end. He could not resist the call of the damp spring earth, although fully intending to return to the Ministry in a matter of hours; he knelt on the concrete pavers in tweeds quite bagged at the knees, turning the earth around the thin shoots of spring bulbs.

“My life’s work,” he said, when he saw me. “The Lime Walk. Vita never comes here, with her spade and her notions; this is my bit of earth. I carved it out of nothing, you know. A necessary axis to connect the Nuttery with the Kitchen Garden. I’m forever attempting to bring Platonic order to Vita’s wilderness; and I’m forever frustrated. Sissinghurst is magnificent, but obtuse. It resists all attempts to contain it.”

I studied him narrowly: loam on his fingers, light in his eye. This is what he’s fighting to save — a bed of earth on an April morning. “Vita’s endless columns about the making of gardens,” I observed, “are so much bosh, aren’t they? You’re the real genius of Sissinghurst. You’ve plotted every line.”

“I did a few sketches when we bought the place,” he conceded unwillingly, “but Mar is better at colour and flourish — the place would be a sad bore if left in my hands. Well — one has only to look at this!” He gestured dismissively towards the marching limes. “No labour, no time, no funds because of this bloody war… but if the fighting ends one day, I’ll turn it into a demi-Eden. Anemones in profusion. Tulips. Primroses. Have you thought what is to be done?”

“To your Lime Walk?”

“No. With Leonard and the others.”

I shifted from foot to foot.

“Here is what I propose,” he said briskly. “I shall write to Maynard — he’ll nip the foolishness in the bud. Whatever his friends have got up to, Maynard is a sensible man.”

My heart froze. He could have no idea of the midnight talks, the single bulb behind the blackout shade. The thread of spittle on Blunt’s lips. The German boy bundled into the black car.

“Sense,” I choked.

“You’ve known Maynard all your life!”

“He is Westminster. Baron Tilton.”

“Vee — ”

The hysteria closing my throat. I shook my head, emphatic, mute. The smell of lead on Leonard’s fingers. The taste of it when I screamed.

“This is war we’re talking of,” Harold urged. “Treason. Violence.”

There was sun on the heavy pavers, and the good green smell of earth rising in the air. The draught of a tomb. Harold’s fingers on my arm.

“Have you breakfasted, Vee?”

I shook my head again. Food. Revolting.

The boy Jock’s face, hovering like a ghost’s beyond the bacchante statue.

HAROLD LEFT FOR LONDON A FEW HOURS LATER.

While the house was empty, I sat down in the cheerless library and compiled my notes. On the Making of a White Garden. A pure space, serene. Life, life, life!

“HOW INCONGRUOUS,” VITA MURMURED OVER TEA IN THE Priest’s Cottage as the dusk fell, “to be having buttered toast with Virginia, whilst reading Virginia’s obituary.…”

She passed me the section of paper.

There were two notices, one a simple statement of death so abrupt and painful that I could almost hear Leonard’s pen scratch as he wrote to George Dawson, the editor; and the other a more fulsome celebration of my literary genius, drawn up by a member of The Times staff.

I put my hand to my throat.

“Poor Leonard,” Vita said. “Only think what this will bring down on his head! Letters of condolence from every person who ever met or loved you, and more from those who never did.”

I was strangely calm now, the flood of words having left me, the notebook tied with its neat label. “He might have had the decency to find a body.”

“P’raps he has. There are always a few lying about, in wartime.” Vita leaned over my shoulder to read the obituary. “They think rather a lot of Mrs. Dalloway, don’t they? And dear Lord, they’ve thrown in Orlando, with a gibe at me. But I would imagine Leonard’s still dragging the river. It’s tidal, isn’t it?”

“Yes. The current is cruelly strong.” Water, tugging like a toddler at my clinging skirts. The insistent bird.

“In her letter to me, Vanessa wrote that she hoped the Ouse would carry you out to sea — because you loved it so.”

“The Waves meeting the waves. How like her. It’s the picture of death she contemplates; not the stench.”

“What shall you do?”

I might have said: I have done it. Instead I told her: “Compose a letter to The Times disputing their judgement of my work — and suggesting they verify their facts before publication.”

“I meant about Leonard. And your sister.”

I folded the paper and rose from the table. “Please thank Mrs. Staples for the butter. The apotheosis of ordinary bread, don’t you think? Especially in these oleo times.”

“I do,” Vita said. “But you cannot hide in my tower forever, dearest. I won’t let you.”

AND NOW IT IS FINISHED. DINNER EATEN, THE FIRE BURNED low, the last measure of the world taken before the blackout goes down. I have seen what I should not in a small column of The Times. Another suicide, meaningless in Cambridge. He disappeared the day after I ran.

I was right to fear them, the men of Westminster, in their Apostolic hats.

I wait for the light to vanish behind Vita’s door. Then go in search of Jock, who sleeps above the stables.

(CONCLUDING NOTE BY LEONARD WOOLF:)

I know that V. will not come across the garden from the Lodge, and yet I look in that direction for her.

I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door.

I know that this is her final page, and yet I turn it over.

There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness.