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

“My interest is… much more personal,” she stammered. “I don’t really want to go into it. But I promise you it has nothing to do with making money or anything like that. It’s… a family issue.”

“A family issue.”

She could tell from his careful expression that he didn’t believe her. “Look, Mr. Llewellyn — maybe Virginia Woolf didn’t write this notebook. Maybe she really did drown the day before it begins. But what if she didn’t go into the water on March twenty-eight? What if she just walked to the local train station and skipped town instead?”

He smiled faintly. “But her body was pulled out of the River Ouse, Miss Bellamy. It’s one of those unavoidable facts. She tried to kill herself as early as 1913 and she’d been thinking about drowning for a while before she did it — her suicide note was dated several days prior to the twenty-eighth. She even did a test drop, apparently, and came home soaked to the skin. Leonard wasn’t noticing.”

“Leonard?”

“The husband. Leonard Woolf. One of the great literary minds of Bloomsbury — all but overshadowed by his wife.”

“You don’t like her, do you?” Jo said suddenly.

Llewellyn’s eyes slid away from hers; he looked uncomfortable. “I was forced to eat, drink, and sleep Virginia Woolf for a time, and it rather soured me on her worldview. One becomes impatient. With all the dramatizing. With the idea that writing is akin to madness. Or, perhaps, that being female is a constant state of persecution — ” He halted, as though entangled in impossible thoughts. “Sorry.”

“There’s something fierce about this book,” Jo said. “Something fearless, too — as though she knew death was coming for her, and was determined to outrun it.”

“But Virginia Woolf didn’t write that book.” He pointed it out gently.

Jo sat back and stared at Peter Llewellyn. She was not going to move him. He was the Expert, after all; and he had made up his mind, drawing on a wealth of knowledge and expertise of which she could have only the barest idea. And with that recognition, she felt like a foolish child. She was embarrassed — by how naively credulous she had been, how much time she had wasted.

She set her neatly folded napkin at her place, along with a ten-pound note, and rose from the table.

“Miss Bellamy!”

“Yes?”

He was holding out her money. “Don’t insult me, please.”

“Consider it a fee for your appraisal.”

“Now I am insulted.” He thrust back his chair, walked around the table, and took the notebook from her hands. Opening the cover, he tucked the ten-pound note inside, and returned the book gravely.

Jo held out her hand. “Thank you for your time. I’m sorry it was worthless. The notebook, I mean.”

“Pleasure,” Llewellyn said.

She wove swiftly away from him, past the delicate little tables, and pushed through Ladurée’s door, almost blinded now by unexpected tears. What was wrong with her? Jet lag? Gray and his assumptions in that suite at the Connaught?

No — it was bottomless disappointment.

She had snatched at the shabby little book as though it were a talisman, a gift from beyond the grave that might unlock the secrets her grandfather had refused to tell. Jock’s notebook had given Jo hope: that there was a reason for the suicide she found so inexplicable. When in fact it was just another symbol of all she did not know. And her hope had been squandered. She spent so much time copying other people’s work, it seemed, that she couldn’t tell the difference between real and fake anymore. She wasn’t equipped for the mission Nana had given her; she’d be lucky if she could manage to rip off the White Garden during her last few days in England, and get home with her landscape business intact.

Oh, God , she thought, missing her grandfather acutely. If only I could talk to Jock. My worst mistakes were never this stupid, when he was there to comfort me .

She’d come out of the Burlington Arcade onto Jermyn Street, instead of Piccadilly, and for an instant she was confused; but any taxi could get her back to Gray’s hotel. She had only to flag one of the lumbering black cars and be safe. Except that she didn’t want to see Gray right now. Not with this sharp bone of disappointment lodged in her throat. She couldn’t begin to tell him what the notebook meant to her; she couldn’t pretend, either, that it meant nothing at all.

I should just fly home , she thought despondently, and accept that I’ll never know why Jock gave up on life .

A glimpse of green in the distance beckoned — a park. At the moment, all Jo wanted was a broad path under the shade of trees; the smell of damp earth; a few pigeons; possibly the sound of water. She had always gone to ground in gardens when her heart was aching.

And so it was on a bench in Green Park that Peter Llewellyn found her a few minutes later, absorbed in rereading the anonymous notebook.

“Miss Bellamy.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“You looked quite sad when you left the tea shop.” He sat down beside her. “It’s the family issue, isn’t it? I wanted to be sure you were all right.”

She hesitated, and then thought, Why not? There was something comforting about Peter Llewellyn — something akin to a Father Confessor. “How much of this have you read?”

“I skimmed a bit. Out of curiosity.”

“Did you notice the name Jock?”

“The gardener’s lad?”

“He was my grandfather.”

Llewellyn whistled softly.

“When I found this book, there was a tag tied around it with string. Written on the tag was Jock’s Book.”

She told him then about the suicide two months before, and the war letter Nana had found. “I don’t know how this book came to have his name on it, or why he left it at Sissinghurst,” she concluded. “I will never know why Jock killed himself. But for a few days, I believed this book might be a clue. Can you understand that learning it’s fake is like learning Jock’s dead, all over again?”

“Absolutely,” he replied. “You’re coming to terms with a dead end. Which should lead you to the next turning in the maze, shouldn’t it?”

She studied him dubiously. “What are you trying to say?”

“At a glance, the notebook itself — paper, binding, and ink — is quite possibly of the Second World War period. Could your grandfather — this Jock — have written it?”

Jo shook her head. “It’s not his handwriting. Or, for that matter, his level of sophistication. I don’t see him casting himself as a character in a book about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, much less writing it. At seventeen, he wouldn’t have known enough about their relationship or history.”

“Very well. Did anybody at Sissinghurst — someone familiar with the place, mind — shove you in the right direction? To stumble over this book, I mean?”

“Imogen,” Jo said suddenly. “The Head Gardener. But she knew nothing about my grandfather — ”

“You never mentioned him?”

Of course she had. They’d talked specifically about Jock and the war. Even in her initial letter, Jo had referred to her grandfather as a Kentishman. Was it beyond the realm of possibility that Imogen had researched the name before Jo even arrived? Had she found a Bellamy who’d been at Sissinghurst, and constructed the whole packet of lies for her to find?

“But why?” Jo demanded. “Why would she bother? She doesn’t know me. It doesn’t make sense.”

Llewellyn smiled faintly. “Are you aware that the National Trust is in financial straits? Too many great houses, too many gardens, not enough funds to keep them staggering along? Perhaps your Imogen has a mania about Sissinghurst — or keeping her job.”