The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Chapter Thirty-Eight

WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO THE READING ROOM, PETER and Margaux were gone.

Jo stood in the doorway, staring at the carrel where she’d left the English don, the oilskin package, and Leonard Woolf’s letter. Not even an empty coffee cup remained.

Of course. They had called in Gray to deal with her — to persuade her to let this bizarre adventure go — while they skedaddled with Leonard’s bound volume. They were probably halfway to London by now. Or, Christ — why stop at London? They could be halfway to Fiji. The sky was the limit when you had an unknown Virginia Woolf to sell.

Jo sank down in a chair, a painful knot tightening in her throat. She’d probably be arrested for artifact theft, and she was close to weeping. Not just because Jock’s notebook was gone — but because, despite everything, she had trusted Peter. Admired his authenticity. Mooned about his taste in functional buildings and the way his rolled shirtsleeves graced his wrists. It was so obvious, suddenly, how neatly he’d managed her — whisking her from Sotheby’s to Oxford, where he’d succeeded in passing the first part of the manuscript to Margaux, then trailing around the countryside with her bits and pieces of clues until they culminated in a hole in Leonard Woolf’s back garden. Making her actually believe he wanted to cook for a living.

Why was she always such a jerk?

She’d sacrificed her best career prospect — the White Garden — and a man who’d apparently wanted her, for a wild-goose chase with a charlatan in glasses. Hadn’t she learned anything about men in her long life?

“There you are,” Peter said briskly behind her. “We’ve moved downstairs to the Reference section. Hurry up, Jo — your coffee’s getting cold.”

“FUNNY LEONARD SHOULD WRITE THAT AT THE VERY END of the book,” Margaux was saying. “About turning the page, and so forth. And looking for her in the garden. It’s almost an exact quotation from his journal in the days following Virginia’s death.”

“The part about stupidity and selfishness is what interests me.” Peter’s finger trailed across the page. “That used to be read as Leonard’s admission that he kept Virginia alive against her will — by thwarting her attempts at suicide. But I’m thinking now it might have more to do with the bonds of Apostle friendship.”

“Could do,” Margaux agreed. “But these finds will turn all sorts of academic assumptions on their heads. Makes one positively giddy to read them.”

“Is that why you agreed to call Peter?” Jo asked. “So you could get first crack at the material? Is that what Gray promised you?”

There was a pregnant pause. Jo waited for Peter to defend his ex-wife, but he was merely frowning at Margaux.

“Naturally,” Margaux said crisply. “And as you’re the one who called me this morning, and require my help, I think you should shut up about motives, don’t you?”

“Gray?” Peter said. “How does your bloody client know Margaux, Jo?”

“Former client,” she corrected. “He just fired me.”

“Hell.” Peter grasped her shoulder. “I’m so sorry. Really, Jo — ”

But she was looking at Margaux, who was suddenly far less defiant.

“Peter darling, can you ever forgive me?”

He groaned. “Don’t tell me. You slept with this Westlake moron, didn’t you?”

“Of course not!” Margaux protested, with an attempt at dignity. “But I ran into him at Sotheby’s, and when he understood I knew you, he asked me to… keep him informed. If you got in touch. So I did. But now I’m with you again, I can’t bear to have any secrets from you, sweet.”

She reached impulsively for his hand. “I’ve… missed you so, darling. Truly I have. It hasn’t been the same since we split. Don’t you hate it?”

“I’ve hated a lot of things,” he answered quietly. “But this isn’t the place to talk about them, Margaux.”

“You’re right. Of course.” She gave him a brave smile. “We’ll have loads of time later. What matters now is our find.”

“Our find?” Jo repeated.

“Look,” Peter said patiently. “We haven’t much time. Let’s concentrate on the text, all right? And try to learn what we can from it?”

Neither woman answered.

“Jo?” he said.

“Okay.”

“Margaux?”

She held his gaze for a smoldering moment and then said, “A few things leap out. Little things, but hallmarks of Virginia’s style nonetheless. The quotation from The Wasteland, ‘Come under this red rock,’ would fit, of course; T. S. Eliot was a friend of the Woolfs’ and the Hogarth Press was one of the first to publish him. Then there’s her reference to Westminster, or the men of Westminster; that’s drawn from one of her short stories, about a young woman writer who’s despised by a politician she meets at an evening party. Westminster came to symbolize for Virginia everything she hated about male dominance, convention, the establishment world she regarded as hostile to art — ”

“She refers to Harold Nicolson that way.”

Margaux glanced at Jo. “Of course. He was a man. And a government official. Virginia mistrusted both on principle, even those she regarded as friends. Maynard Keynes would fall into the same categories — he was the ultimate Westminster man.”

“That helps us tie the work to Woolf,” Peter said, “but it tells us nothing more about how or when she might have died.”

“What we’ve got to reckon is the time frame.” Margaux peered at the screen of her Reference computer terminal, all business. “I’ve jotted down key dates. We assume Virginia was alive at Sissinghurst on the first and second of April, correct? Because this little book tells us so. And we know her body was found in the River Ouse on the eighteenth of that month. She was cremated three days later, somewhere on the south coast — Brighton, I think.”

“That was quick,” Jo observed.

“Quick and dirty. Only Leonard was in attendance. The bastard.”

“No Vanessa?” Jo demanded, astonished. “Not even Vita?”

“Not even the odd mourner hired off the street for the sake of appearances,” Margaux retorted. “Leonard informed no one of the funeral arrangements. He could never bear to share Virginia with anybody — and so of course he deprived her of the memorial service she ought to have had, among the people who knew and loved her best. God, how I despise that man.”

“Oh, now, Margaux — ” Peter began.

She turned on him furiously. “Don’t start, Peter! You know how he stifled her genius — lived to control her — and when at last she abandoned him in death — escaping by the only means in her power — he was so angry he got rid of her as quick as a dead cat. Don’t start.”

“Very well.” Peter was looking at Jo. “We can assume Leonard buried her ashes in solitude, too. Along with a few other things.”

“Where exactly was the body found?” Jo asked.

Margaux rolled her eyes in frustration. “Do you know nothing of academic method? One must at least attempt a certain logical order. Try not to interrupt. Try to focus on the dates.” She swept back her hair impatiently and knotted it with a pencil. “From the second to the eighteenth gives us nearly three weeks to play with, which is far too much to be of any use — but I think we can narrow it down. Vita helps.”

“How?”

“She wrote a letter to Harold describing a visit she made to Leonard Woolf, at Monk’s House, on the seventh of April.”

“That would have been…”

“The Monday following this account.” She tapped the slim bound volume. “It’s clear from the tone of Vita’s letter that Virginia was missing again — no longer at Sissinghurst, and nowhere to be found. Vita had driven down to Rodmell to condole with Leonard. Listen — ”

She scrolled through a text pulled up on her screen. “The house full of his flowers and all Virginia’s things lying about as usual.…Her scribbling-block with her writing on it. The window from which one can see the river. I said Leonard, I do not like you being here alone like this. He turned those piercing blue eyes on me and said it’s the only way.… They have been dragging the river but have given up the search.”

“Christ,” Peter murmured. “Must’ve been awkward, that visit. Vita knowing Leonard’s wife had left him, and exactly why, and Leonard knowing that Vita had failed to keep her safe. The guilt in the room!”

“Yes, well, everybody’s lousy with guilt after a suicide,” Margaux said indifferently.

Jo shifted in her chair. “They gave up dragging the river, but all the same the body was found. What happened on the eighteenth?”

“It was rather creepy. Four teenagers from Lewes were having a picnic in a field. They spied a log in the river and decided to throw stones at it. Only it wasn’t a log. It was Virginia.”

Jo closed her eyes. “How far from Rodmell?”

“No distance at all.” Margaux glanced up from her computer screen. “That’s the creepy part. The meadow where the kids were picnicking was below an old Georgian farmhouse called Asheham — a house the Woolfs had lived in and loved. Virginia rented it for years before she lost the lease in 1919, and they bought Monk’s House instead. They used to walk from Asheham to Rodmell across a bridge, at Southease.”

“So when she left Sissinghurst,” Jo suggested, “Virginia could have gone to either place. Home to Monk’s House — or maybe to Asheham. Would she have felt safe, there? Home, but not exactly home?”

“Who owned the house in ’41?” Peter asked.

“A cement firm,” Margaux said, “which took possession in the early thirties and destroyed the surrounding landscape with their quarries. The value of the property declined as a result and Asheham was eventually abandoned, though I’m not sure exactly when. And of course during the war, so many country places were requisitioned — for troop billets, and training, and so on.”

“Men in black cars,” Peter said distinctly.

The back of Jo’s neck prickled. “And now?”

“Oh, the house is gone. Demolished a good ten years ago. But if we could move on from the bloody house — ”

“What you’re saying is that Virginia left Sissinghurst sometime between the second of April and the seventh, when Vita went to see Leonard,” Peter said.

“Exactly. Five days.”

He lifted his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Harold Nicolson’s vaguely menacing letter to Maynard Keynes was dated April fourth. That would be — ”

“The Friday before Vita’s Rodmell visit,” Jo supplied. “Harold would have been at Sissinghurst for the weekend, again.”

“He tells Maynard that Virginia’s his guest, and that he has her notebook,” Peter recited. “So she must still have been with the Nicolsons on Friday the fourth.”

“ — But gone by Monday, when Vita saw Leonard Woolf.”

“Which means Virginia left… when? Saturday? Sunday?”

“Saturday,” Margaux said decisively. “Once she knew Harold wrote to Keynes and tipped her hand, she had to get out immediately. She understood how vicious these people were. Harold wouldn’t believe it, of course, and Vita was always so vague — so lost in her own world… but Virginia knew she had reason to fear them. Burgess and his lot. So she ran. The Nicolsons might have hoped for news of her, Saturday and Sunday — but by Monday, Vita’s off to meet with Leonard.”

Jo considered all this. It fit as neatly as a jigsaw puzzle; but there was something wrong. “Why did they assume she was dead?”

“Sorry?” Margaux said, as though Jo were a half-wit who must be humored.

“Why did Vita condole with Leonard, as you put it? Why drag the river? Virginia had run away before. Why not assume she’d gone to London or Timbuktu? Why act as though she was never coming back?”

“Because they knew it was true,” Peter said quietly. “Think about it, Jo: how would Virginia manage to escape from Vita and Harold Nicolson, who were determined to save her? She must have had an accomplice. Someone who drove her to the train. Or all the way back to Sussex, for that matter. A person who would tell the Nicolsons exactly what happened, in the end — ”

“Jock,” Jo said.