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

“She did say she was worried about the Trust’s priorities,” Jo said. “Funding issues. She seemed to think that the garden at Sissinghurst was suddenly eclipsed by some project with the farms.”

“Perhaps this woman thought a remarkable find — the sale of your notebook for millions — would put the White Garden in the headlines,” Peter suggested. “For plausibility, she used a complete stranger as errand girl.”

Jo considered Imogen Cantwell’s potential for dark conspiracy, and failed utterly to believe it. “But what about the letter my grandfather left behind? Or his references to the Lady?”

“Coincidence?”

She bristled. “Coincidence! Across six decades and two continents? Surely there must be a better explanation, Mr. Llewellyn.”

“And you can’t help believing that it’s the one you started with.”

“Despite the excellent advice of my Book Expert.”

“You honestly think that Virginia Woolf left her home and her husband of thirty-odd years, hared off to Sissinghurst, and mooned about her marriage in the midst of the Blackout? — Where she simultaneously met your grandfather as a lad and came up with the idea for the White Garden? — Before jumping into the Ouse, regardless?”

“Maybe she was pushed.”

Peter Llewellyn laughed. It was an unexpected sound; and it betrayed to Jo that he was less certain than he seemed. “You have the oddest way of stumbling over bombshells, Miss Bellamy. You did the same thing in the tea shop, you know. And I confess you set me to thinking.”

Jo felt a flutter of hope, and repressed it. “About what?”

“Your notion that Virginia might have walked to the train station instead of ending it all on the twenty-eighth of March.”

“You said she’d been trying to drown herself for days, thank you very much.”

“But that’s irrelevant, in the end.” Llewellyn stabbed distractedly at his glasses. “What counts are the days after the twenty-eighth, not the days before. And nobody can say absolutely where she was afterwards.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It took weeks for Virginia’s body to surface in the Ouse, you see,” Llewellyn continued. “It’s believed she fetched up against a bridge rampart and was pinned below the water. For nearly a month, as I recollect. Well into April, in any case.”

Jo’s heart accelerated. “So if they didn’t find her body the day she left home, she might have gone into the Ouse at any time.”

“Exactly. She might have taken your cherished train after all. And landed in Kent, where she met your grandfather.” There was an unwilling note of excitement in the Book Expert’s voice.

“Did anyone at Sotheby’s study this handwriting?” Jo demanded. “ — Somebody who could say definitely whether it’s Woolf’s?”

Llewellyn took the notebook from Jo’s hand. He peered at the soiled brown cover.

“You can’t imagine what this process is like, can you? I’d have to formally accept the manuscript with all sorts of papers you’d be required to fill out, proving your ownership of the article in question and your right to request such an analysis. Only you and I both know you don’t own the article in question. The notebook would be entered in our computers. Submitted with forms to the correct departments. It would be catalogued and known . Then Marcus Symonds-bloody-Jones would be all over it. Ringing up his friends in the press, contacting private collectors — universities and libraries all over the world…”

“Who is Marcus Simmon-Jones?”

“Symonds,” he corrected. “A perfectly loathsome individual who orders my life and half of Sotheby’s. The point, Miss Bellamy, is that if your notebook’s in the system , it automatically moves right out of your control , do you understand?”

“Which means?”

“That if this notebook is indeed what you think — if Woolf wrote it when she was believed to be dead — if she was alive after she left Leonard and came to her end in a different manner than history records — if this journal is not a fake , as I admit I’m beginning to wonder — ”

“Why?”

He halted in mid-speech and studied her.

“Because you’re so damnably plausible,” he said at last. “Nobody invents a suicidal Kentish grandpa. Because I want to believe you’re as honest as you seem. Which is the very worst reason to doubt my judgment that I can think of. It’s pathetically subjective. And a Book Expert ought to be objective , always — ”

“Thank you.”

He nodded brusquely. “As I say — if any of this is remotely true, then you have the find of the century on your hands.”

“We,” she corrected, springing to her feet. “We have the find of the century. And you don’t want to lose control of that?”

“Do you?”

“Not until I know what part Jock played in all of it,” she answered decisively.

“And if the truth is something you don’t want to hear? — the truth about your grandfather, I mean?”

“It can’t be worse than what he’s already done. I’ll deal with whatever comes.”

“Very well.” Llewellyn rose from the park bench and held out the notebook. “If you go back to Kent, you might as well advertise this little item stark naked in Piccadilly Circus. The Family at Sissinghurst will pursue this themselves.”

He was right. He was absolutely right. The book wasn’t hers. She had no right to it. But she couldn’t just…

“I can’t just steal this!”

He glanced at her sidelong as he sauntered back toward the Green Park gate. “I thought somebody’d lent it to you.”

Twenty-four hours , Imogen had said. No more. I’m jolly well not going to lose my place over you . Imogen would be furious if Jo failed to appear, notebook in hand. She’d wonder. Become suspicious. But should Jo trust Imogen? What if the Head Gardener had deliberately used her?

“The notebook was lent to me — but only in a manner of speaking.”

“Good. That’s settled, then. I’ve a car in Sotheby’s garage. We can be off in minutes.”

“You’re driving me back to Kent?” But what about Gray — the Connaught — all the unanswered questions…

Llewellyn turned at the edge of Jermyn Street. “I’d rather drive to Oxford, actually. The best Woolf expert in England is there. Will you come with me, Miss Bellamy?”

Another expert. Who might tell them, once and for all, that the notebook was nonsense. But she would have to risk it; she had to know.

“I think you’d better call me Jo,” she told him.

“I MUST WRITE SOMETHING IN REPLY,” VITA PROTESTED this morning, when we had taken our tea and bread in the Priest’s House, with its trestle table and painted cupboard, its heavy drapes of velvet. Watery sunshine through the leaded windows, the dourness of Sunday gone like a passing thought. Vita’s Alsatian trotting across the barren steppe of the roses, narrow shoulders slumped in misery. There had been two of them once, hadn’t there? The loneliness of the left-behind .

“To Vanessa, as well,” she persisted. “Did I mention I’ve also had The News from your sister, in this morning’s post? — You left a note for her, too, I presume?”

“I hoped she’d comfort Leonard. Tell him he did all he could, always.”

“Then you lied, dearest. The failure of a marriage is never one person’s fault.”

“I ought not to have married him.”