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

I retched.

Harold’s arm came briefly to my back; a faint pressure of comfort. “You must write to them. You must explain . It would relieve their minds — ”

He strolled onwards, serene and infallible, while I stood like a plinth in the midst of Vita’s garden. He did not look back as he walked, a darker shadow in the deepening dusk, past the Chinese jar and through the gap in the hedge that led to the statue of the Little Virgin.

I knew that spot well. Beyond the garden gate and several feet below its level; beyond the sight of the Priest’s House windows. We could be private, there. I could tell him what he asked to know.

I took my courage in my hands and followed him.

“I LOVE THIS OLD LADY,” HAROLD SAID, STROKING the statue. “Vita would say I prefer Dionysius, but she’s wrong. The Little Virgin’s my pet.”

“How did she come here?”

“A fellow named Tomas Rosandic carved her for us out of wood. But I had the original cast in lead, some years ago — wood never lasts.” He glanced around. “I’m not happy with her here. The drop in grade means her legs are all but invisible from the gate — and that seems a shame, doesn’t it? A statue should serve to focus the eye, draw the viewer along an axis. This is all wrong.”

“She belongs in the White Garden — when you make it.”

“Have you seen Delos? Vita’s Attic Wilderness?” He took my hand, and tucked it under his arm. “It’s even more hopeless now there’s nobody to cultivate chaos. Let’s stroll, shall we?”

The footing was very bad, and I clung to him. The night, and this familiar stranger; my heart beat quicker. Harold was silent.

“How are things at the Ministry?” I asked.

“Funny you should ask,” he murmured. “Only a writer of novels could understand — I’ve become a vehicle for falsities and lies and hopeful declarations. I am never so full of bile as when forced to censor an upright journalist, before his truth terrifies half the kingdom.”

“Hypocrisy,” I said.

“Oh, yes — much more than I found in all my years with the Foreign Office. But perhaps I was simply callow, then, and unaware.”

“No.” I uttered the word as though I spat bullets. “People want lies, now. Like children before bed. Do even you grow to love lying, Harold?”

He stopped by a great chunk of rock — one of the ruins of Sissinghurst scattered about the ground Vita calls Delos — and stared at me soberly. “I hate it. But I’ve found lies are indispensable in wartime. What about you?”

“I left Leonard because of a lie. Or several. They beget each other, you know.”

He sat down on a flat plane of the rock and patted it gently. “Tell me all about it, old thing.”

“LAST NOVEMBER,” I BEGAN, “A YOUNG MAN FELL OUT OF the sky.”

Harold’s eyelids flickered. “One of ours, or one of theirs?”

I hardly knew how to answer the question. It suggested a world of absolutes, where I’d never lived.

“He was certainly German, if that’s what you mean. But he claimed to be Dutch. He fell into one of the meadows near the river at half-past three in the morning, on a night of no moon. He told us his name was Jan. Jan Willem Ter Braak. I had just finished my book the day before. I couldn’t sleep and I heard the dog barking.”

How to explain to Harold that whenever the words left me, I was empty as a husk lying on the threshing-room floor? Empty as a woman whose birth has aborted? Impossible to sleep in such a state. Impossible not to hate oneself, knowing the words had spilled irretrievably, that there was no taking them back, that Leonard would force me to print when the thing was dreadful — paltry words, lifeless, without art, shaming? I wanted to burn my book, I wanted to drown it.

“Between the Acts?” Harold said easily. “Leonard says it’s as good as The Waves.”

“Leonard lies.”

I could not look at him, beside me on the rock. Come under the shadow of this red rock .

Harold fumbled for something in his pocket; a pipe. Then the match flaring, the comfort of tobacco smoke. “So a German parachuted into your back garden. What then?”

“The dog found him. Baying and whining in the middle of the night. He’d sprained his ankle, you see, and was stumbling. Leonard went out after the dog.”

Harold puffed on his pipe. “What did Leonard do?”

“Jan tried to run and the pain made him faint. Leonard tied his hands and feet and left the dog to guard him. Then Leonard locked me inside the house and got on his bicycle and rode into Lewes, where there’s a telephone.”

“And a constable?”

“He didn’t wake the constable.”

“No?”

“He rang up his friends.” I looked at Harold now. “You know some of them. In government. Cambridge people.”

He smiled. “My poor darling, you make them sound like Nazis.”

I refused to notice this. “One of them is Guy Burgess.”

“Delightful fellow. Works at the BBC. Radio interviews.”

“You’ve slept with him, haven’t you,” I said, “so of course you think he’s grand.”

Harold drew his pipe deliberately from his mouth. “Did Vita tell you that?”

“No. Guy did.”

“I see.” He was still serene, without affront; there is no one more truly the gentleman than Harold Nicolson. “I shall have to beg the little sod to be more discreet. Was he the person Leonard rang?”

“Leonard put through a call to Maynard, who lives in Tilton — not far from Rodmell, as the crow flies. Maynard rang the other two in London. They share a flat. I couldn’t think why they’d be wanted — Tony’s an art critic and Guy a drunk — but eventually I understood. Tony Blunt’s with military intelligence. He does something with German agents. And Leonard knew Jan was no Dutchman.”

Think what the local bobby would do if he got his hands on the poor bugger , Leonard had said. They all remember Dunkirk. Probably kill him by morning. Better to ring someone sensible and make sure the fool survives .

“They came direct from London, in two black cars, and bundled Jan in the back. He was conscious by that time, and he tried to fight them, but it was no good.”

Harold rapped his pipe against the rock, scattering the tobacco. “Disturbing, admittedly — but I have yet to detect Leonard in a lie.”

“That came later.” I hugged my sweater close. “There were bombers, you see, in waves overhead during the autumn, and talk of Germans coming. Invasion . My brother gave us morphia so we might kill ourselves, and Leonard hid it in a drawer. And then the planes stopped, Harold. They stopped . At first I felt relief, but then I began to listen to things the others said when they came. Your Burgess. And Tony.”

“Leonard’s Apostles. I’m only a poor Oxford man, but what is it they say — ‘If forced to choose between betraying my friends, and betraying my country… ’”

“Yes!” Perhaps Harold would understand, after all. “They came at night, after the curfew. They had special police passes, extra petrol. They talked to Leonard about Jan.”

“The fellow was still alive?”

“He was being… controlled.” I looked at him desperately. “They set him free, on a very long leash. He was sent to Cambridge, where Maynard might watch him, with money and his radio set, and ordered what to tell the Germans.”

“ — Which were lies.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds bloody brilliant to me.”

“It was.” My fingers twisted together, as though the bones were twigs I could break. “It was inspired , Harold. And Jan isn’t the only one. There’s a whole group involved — the Twenty Committee. Tony says every German agent dropped into England has been turned. The alternative to cooperation is death, of course.”