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

There was no one posted in Sussex that night last November. No one but the dog to sound the alarm when the white silk flowered overhead .

Vita wanted to smoke; I could see the fingers of her right hand twitching where they grasped her left elbow. But she was no fool. Not for worlds would she allow the glowing fag to summon the Luftwaffe .

“There were incendiary bombs in the neighbouring field,” she whispered. “Machine gun bullets down by Hadji’s lake. Long Barn was hit, did you know that? All those children — ”

They have sent the children out of London to havens like Long Barn. The place I loved her first, and best. Bombed, like all the best houses — Tavistock Square, Mecklenburgh .

Here is a partial list of the things Vita needs for survival: Boots. Breeches. Jerseys. Shirts. Stockings. Sables.

How like her to put the boots and breeches well before the furs. If the Germans land, she is under orders to load everything into her Buick and get out of Kent. But these are Harold’s orders, who is still marooned in London. What else should she take? A Thermos, of course. Hot water bottles. Cigarettes and lighters and matches. Harold’s books. Her manuscript of Grand Canyon . Her bedroom slippers and a wooden statue of a saint she calls Barbara .

And then there is her bare bodkin, the poison Harold found somewhere. She will kill herself if Mr. Home Guard fails her, and the Germans reach Sissinghurst unannounced .

I am struck, as she talks, by the efficiency of her plans: Orlando at bay. She recruits for the Women’s Land Army. She stockpiles straw to make beds for refugees. She agrees to serve as Ambulance Driver for the surrounding countryside, in the aforementioned Buick, which will naturally preclude loading it with sables and turning west. She will never leave Sissinghurst, which makes her resort to the bare bodkin all the more likely. Her lists — the act of making them — are all the salvation she needs .

Whereas I abandoned my life, my clamorous, inchoate mind, without the slightest useful provision. The river, my poison. Stones in my pockets instead of a torch. My furs on my back. I fled the way a child runs from home, expecting to be retrieved and scolded at any moment .

Only Vita never scolds .

She coddles me like a schoolgirl. Murmurs incantations as we stand in the inky garden. She is talking, I realise, of what she cannot save: this place, the future. Those things she cannot list. This watch-tower under the clouded night, the garden she dreamt from the ruins. She will never abandon Sissinghurst, even at the point of the sword. Her survival depends, in the end, on the Germans giving up .

“I wish you could see the tips of the daffodils poking through the soil,” she murmured. “I bought scads of them at auction last fall. Also a magnolia, quite a lovely thing, but very slow growing. Hadji says I’m foolish. The whole place could be a ruin in weeks. But I must plant, don’t you see? I must continue to believe that things will grow. Spring comes, regardless of the Luftwaffe. Or whether I live or die.”

“The earth takes in our bones — and gives back the magnolia.”

We picked our way through the beds near the Priest’s House, where she and Harold take their meals. Roses, of course, everywhere — a nightmarish landscape in this season and the dark. Stiff, brutal canes like barbed wire. Leafless. I thought of trenches. The dead. Earth torn by shrapnel. Thorns. Crucifixions —

“No light,” I said, my words thick. Panic in my throat. The man falling through darkness .

“Hadji painted all our torches blue last autumn, when we cared about the blackout. So now I dispense with light altogether. Like a cat. And I’ve walked this path from dinner to bed countless times in the dark. Look!”

She seized my wrist and held me there. I lifted my gaze from the trenches and the sick barbs of stillborn roses, and saw it .

The great ghostly barn owl, drifting overhead. White as a wraith, silent as Nemesis .

“Isn’t he gorgeous ,” Vita whispered .

The Home Guard had missed this pair of wings. We kept the visitation to ourselves. And absurdly, I felt my heart lift. Sweeping through the air — Life! Life! Life! — impervious to despair. Its pale shade a taunt to the Luftwaffe .

“It glows,” I said .

“Doesn’t it just!”

I glanced around. “You should have white flowers here. Nothing else. They’d rise in the dark like fairy lamps, lighting your way to bed.”

“Lilium regale,” she said. “Hadji loves them. Only not here — I thought perhaps in the Lion’s Pond. Vass drained it.”

“The Lion’s Pond gets no sun.”

Her eyes narrowed. “That’s what Hadji said! Have you been writing to my husband?”

Harold and I, in mutual sympathy? No. He is a man, after all, and their instinct is mastery —

“White clematis. White lavender, white agapanthus, white double-primroses. White anemones…”

Lists, again. How they comfort her .

I wanted to tell her she would never do it, with this constant maddening threat of war. She could not buy plants or the petrol to fetch them or the labour to thrust them into the earth, but the idea of all this whiteness was vital to her — a cleansing impulse, a need for clarity. Light in the darkness. How obvious it seems, how clumsy, how necessary .

“Is Vass still here?”

She shook her head. “Called up and gone the next day. But I have a boy — a good, sensible, Knole-bred boy, sent over for the duration. You met him yesterday.”

The tall, silent one standing with his cap in his hands at the Staplehurst station. “Jock?”

“My faithful terrier. He worries about me, did you know?”

“He’ll be off to war one day, too.”

“Not if I can prevent it.” Her voice was tight with suppressed anger. Fear for her own boys. Ben flying low over batteries, skirting the radar. The horrible deaths we witnessed in the last war. Trenches. Barbed wire. The trenches are flooded and our feet are rotting. How the water calls to me with babbling Death —

“His hands are too fine,” Vita said. “There’s suffering in them.”

In all our hands .

We did not speak until we reached the South Cottage .

PETER LLEWELLYN STOOD WAITING OUTSIDE THE auction-house entrance. The change in his expression when Jo pulled up in the borrowed Bentley — there were mini Connaught flags flying from the headlamps, as though she were a Head of State — was comical to behold.

“Shall we take tea?” he asked once the chauffeur had evicted her to the paving and resumed his privileged post behind the wheel.

“Sure. I could use a little caffeine. I’m not used to wine in the middle of the day.”

“That’s rather reassuring, in the circumstances. That you aren’t a habitual drinker, I mean. Walk or taxi?”

She’d expected Sotheby’s café again. “Let’s walk.”

They set off down New Bond Street, Jo conscious of a sudden shyness. It had been an unsettling day. And there was all of London around her — this extraordinary city — the strangeness of the man beside her, kind as he was; the unexpectedness of Gray, waiting for her in an empty hotel suite.

“Do you like macaroons?” Llewellyn asked unexpectedly.

“Very much.”

“Smashing. We’ll have lots, shall we?”

She smiled, then noticed how he ducked his head as though from a physical blow; Americans, she recalled, were accused of smiling too much. She would have to curb her impulse in the future.