Стефани Баррон - The White Garden - A Novel of Virginia Woolf

“No,” she said abruptly. “I’m at Thomas Pink’s. It’s a store.”

“I know. So you’re in London?”

“Just for the morning. I took the train up.”

“You must’ve guessed I’d be here.”

The lavender-striped shirt slipped from Jo’s hands. Clumsily, she bent to retrieve it. “Gray, you didn’t.”

“I did. Want me to send a car for you?”

“No! I mean — where are you, exactly?” She shoved the slim wooden hanger back onto a rack, aware that she sounded distracted — unwelcoming — actually put out about this delightful surprise. “It’s just that I’m shocked. I never thought you’d really — ”

“I’m at the Connaught,” he interrupted, that faint ripple of amusement in his dark voice. “Don’t move. I’ll find you.”

She stood there for an instant in the middle of Thomas Pink’s. Panic washed over her. Gray. In London. Which meant —

He had flown in from Buenos Aires to see her.

For one wild instant, she wished the call had been from Peter Llewellyn. But that was nonsense. She closed her cell phone with a snap and went out into the street to wait for the car.

IT WAS A BLACK BENTLEY. PRESUMABLY THE CONNAUGHT owned it, and lent it to people like Gray when they had to fetch their mistresses from London shops. A chauffeur stood by the open rear door; he was better dressed, Jo reflected, than she was.

“Look at you!”

Gray swarmed out of the backseat. His hand was at her elbow, his lips brushed her cheek. A current of energy ran up her arm. He looked so good — so alive and intensely exciting — when he ought to have been dead tired. How long was the flight from B.A., anyway? But she was forgetting. He owned a jet. One of those things with plush seating and Porthault sheets. He might as well have been sleeping in his own bed at home.

With Alicia , said a voice in her mind.

A slight pressure in the small of her back; he was sweeping her toward the car. It was inexorable. It was unnecessary for her to make a decision; everything had been determined for her. That’s how life with Gray was.

Her cell phone vibrated gently in her hip pocket. She ignored it, and got into the car.

“SO WHY DID YOU LEAVE YOUR CASTLE?” HE DEMANDED, once the butler had poured them each a drink and left them alone in the suite. It might have housed ten; Gray had taken it indefinitely. It was possible he’d be there for a week; possible he’d leave tomorrow. Jo sensed that his decision depended upon her.

“Do you really want to know?”

“I don’t ask idle questions.”

That was true. It was one reason he haunted her — words were rarely wasted around Gray. But they had talked only of gardens for so long; talked of possible paradises, their words a foil for deeper things. They had been groping toward each other, Jo realized, in all those months of planning walls and beds and flowers for different seasons — walking the Long Island acres in the rain, they had been imagining an Eden, their own private landscape. Talking about her grandfather, now — that was different. Jock was reality. How would Gray regard a man who’d fixed tractors for a living?

“I found an unsigned notebook I think was written by Virginia Woolf,” she told him. “I brought it to London to be analyzed.”

“That’s bizarre.” He took a sip of wine, studied her over the rim of the glass. “People don’t just find lost Woolfs. She’s a known quantity. Was it in an antiques shop?”

“A tool shed at Sissinghurst.”

“That’s even weirder. And you think it’s a Woolf because…?”

“Because I’m a hopeless romantic,” she replied unexpectedly.

Gray set down his glass. He leaned toward her, his arm reaching along the back of the sofa to caress her shoulder. “Liar. You’ve never worn pink in your life.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“You wear brown and green and deep russet red,” he went on, ignoring her question. “You know where snakes live, and lichen grows. You’re a mushroom hunter and a witch of possibility. You make things bloom, Jo. You’re utterly without shit or pretense and that is why I’m falling in love with you.”

“Gray — you’re not — ”

“I am,” he said. No laughter in his face now; no heavy-lidded desire. Only something like pain; and that, Jo thought, was terrifying. She did not want to cause Gray pain.

“Don’t,” he suggested, as she looked at him confusedly, “mention Alicia.” And then he pulled her close and kissed her.

It was inevitable, Jo thought, from the moment she’d taken Gray’s call in the middle of shopping; or perhaps it had been inevitable from the day they’d had coffee alone together, and she’d found him finishing her thoughts before she’d spoken them. As his mouth searched hers in the London suite, she could see the next few hours unroll like a predictable pageant: the intensity of lovemaking (his breathing was already faster as his hand slid over her shoulder), the dining table wheeled into the disheveled room by the discreet and wooden waiters; the champagne, the bathrobes, the steaming tub for two. It would be shocking and exhilarating and more dangerous than anything she’d ever done. And then she would awake the next morning and know that she had destroyed something important — not Gray’s marriage, that was his own problem — but something harder to describe. Her self-possession?

What happened to business owners who slept with their clients? What was more important — Bellamy Design, or Gray Westlake?

His fingers tugged at the elastic gripping her hair, loosened her neat ponytail, sent brown strands cascading over her shoulders. For an instant, his eyes studied her, and Jo felt a surge flow upward from her heart: half fear, half desire. Then her lips quirked suddenly in a smile. She couldn’t help it.

“Do you always seduce your hired help, Gray?”

“What?”

“Is it noblesse oblige?” she mused. “Something rooted in your earliest ancestors — boinking the serving girl on the back staircase?”

“Jo, don’t,” he said quietly. “You’ve never been hired help. You’re my true north.”

But she had begun to question herself, and there were too many interesting answers for a mindless plunge into passion. “Gray,” she said briskly, “I’d like some time to think.”

“Shit.”

He let her go, his face a mix of puzzlement and frustration. Very few women, Jo imagined, were immune to the sort of triple-barreled assault Gray Westlake could bring: All that charm. All that power. All that money . She knew she was foolish. She’d probably lose Gray as a client anyway — so why not lose her heart?

Her cell phone vibrated again.

She reached for it, hair sliding into her eyes. Her blouse had come undone and her shoes were scattered. She discovered she was impatient with it all.

“Miss Bellamy?” said a cautious British voice in her ear. “Peter Llewellyn here. I’ve finished with your notebook.”

She glanced at Gray; he was raking his fingers through his dark hair, that look of pain in his eyes again.

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

WE WALKED IN THE GARDEN AFTER DINNER, QUITE late, the Priest’s House lowering behind us, no flicker of fire or golden lamp escaping its heavy blackout shades. Vita still talks of bombing runs. She has no idea why I’ve ceased to fear the Germans .

“Do you see him?” she whispered. She was wrapped up in her sables, her nose emerging from the sumptuous collar like a ship’s prow. “He” was a member of the Home Guard, posted nightly in the height of her tower. A spotter. A lookout for the sudden flower of parachutes over the hop fields; for Nazi troop planes vomiting men. How perfect, I thought, as I squinted up at Mr. Home Guard, the band on his arm, the inverted pie-plate of his hat. How perfect that Vita’s tower should have its sentry posted once more. The tower and Orlando have been waiting for the enemy all these long years since Elizabeth; waiting for conquest, and night watches, and the Defence of the Realm .