The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (13 page)

“Burgundies,” he added gloomily. “And, of course, your subscription-only Cabernets. Can’t say I blame them. There’s nothing like a smashing glass of red.”

The Book Expert, Jo gathered, was unhappy. And she suspected the woman named Margaux was partly to blame.

Not that Peter would admit it. He was too careful, still, for confidences. But Jo sensed an uneasiness whenever the English professor’s name came up, as though Peter were two-stepping around a land mine.
Margaux Strand
. Literature don, Magdalen College. He’d known her for years, ever since they were at school together.

“First-rate in her field, Margaux is,” he said with forced enthusiasm. “A Feminist interpreter, of course. Edits a journal on Women’s Fiction. An acknowledged Woolf expert.” They were cruising toward the Oxford skyline, Peter pointing out the dome of the Radcliffe Camera. “Margaux will tell us whether
we’ve got something explosive in your notebook—or just a bomb.”

SHE’D PREPARED HERSELF FOR GRANDEUR—THAT WAS IMPLICIT in the idea of Oxford—but the quiet beauty of Magdalen took her completely by surprise. The college was at the end of the High Street, rising from a park that flanked the River Cherwell; a narrow bridge of Cotswold stone spanned the water, and punts lined the grassy bank. Somewhere, a bell tolled the half-hour; Jo’s watch read three-thirty. She stood by the slow-moving brown water in the still October air, mentally improving the landscape with plant substitutions of her own design, while Peter Llewellyn stabbed at his cell phone; a pair of students in their twenties strolled across Magdalen Bridge, their flutey English voices drifting toward Jo. She almost pinched herself. What was she doing there?

“Margaux says we’re to come up.” Peter thrust his phone back in his coat pocket. His face was rather pale, Jo thought. “Her stair’s just across the quad.”

Chrysanthemums blazed in a central bed. A group of kids, undergraduates probably, strolled beneath the Gothic arches in black gowns. A bicycle whirred by. Gray’s set face, that look of pain. He would order his jet back to New York tomorrow. It was probably better that way. But what about his garden? Would he fire her? Refuse to reimburse all her expenses? Why had she decided to stay at the George? Was there an equivalent of a Motel 6 in England?

“Through here,” Peter said briskly, heaving open a massive oak door to reveal a set of stone steps. “Third entryway on the left.”

· · ·

MARGAUX STRAND SURPRISED HER. JO HAD FORMED AN image of a tidy but plain woman, with brown hair rather like her own; a no-nonsense girl who dealt in ideas, not things. But Margaux was what Peter would have called
smashing
. She rose from her desk like Venus from the half-shell, sinuous and tall. Her hair was jet black and fell in waves; her lips were full and red; her eyes were liquid pools. When she smiled, it was as though a curtain had parted on a wondrous world. Jo stared at her, astounded; Peter reached for his necktie.

“Peter,
darling,”
Margaux breathed, and slid around her desk to greet them.

She wore a simple sheath that fell to her toned thighs, and black Chanel boots that rose above the knee. Involuntarily, Jo took a step back, wanting the support of the wall behind her. The woman was going to kiss Peter. Not just on the cheek—but a full-body snog, fingers in his hair, curves leaning into his frame. “Gorgeous,” Margaux murmured. “You always smell so delicious. Like saddle-soap and foxed pages. Isn’t he
delicious?”

She threw Jo a complicitous smile, as though they both understood Peter was catnip to women, and reached out one long-fingered hand. “Tell me all about yourself. I’m so
thrilled
to meet you.”

“Margaux—Professor Strand, I should say—” Peter stuttered, his face flaming. “May I introduce Miss Jo Bellamy. From the United States. She’s a client, as I mentioned on the phone.”

“Where in the States?” Margaux enthused. “I just got back from New York last week! Still
dead tired
, of course—conferences are such a
body slam
, aren’t they, and then we were clubbing until all hours, I’m afraid. I’ve been twined in the sheets ever since, can’t
drag
myself out of bed—” A smoldering glance here for Peter.

Jo struggled to find something to say, but
I’m from Delaware
just didn’t seem appropriate.

“Miss Bellamy’s on rather a short lead today,” Peter supplied. “Expected in Kent this evening. So perhaps we—”

“Sit down! Sit down! And let me see your treasure. You found it at Sissinghurst, Peter says? Among Vita’s things? I’ve been tearing out my hair ever since I heard! I spent
months
going through the Sackville-West papers for my last book—
Sapphist Writers in Arcadia
. I can’t imagine how I missed your notebook.”

“It was among the gardener’s things,” Jo managed.

“Ah. That explains it.” Margaux, from her tone, didn’t do outbuildings.

Jo took a chair; Peter took the couch, and Margaux flung herself down beside him, legs drawn up helter-skelter beneath her. One arm rested lightly on Peter’s shoulder; she was leaning over him like an eager child awaiting a bedtime story. Peter’s frame stiffened and his breathing, Jo noticed, accelerated slightly. The expression she’d come to recognize—polite and apologetic—was replaced with one of almost wooden resolve. How much of Margaux’s behavior was reflexive—the social habit of a mesmerizing woman—and how much was targeted deliberately at Peter? Was Margaux mad about him—or simply enjoying her obvious power over him?

Peter cleared his throat, then nodded at Jo. “If we could see the notebook, Miss Bellamy?”

She took it from her purse and handed it to Margaux. “I may have noticed it when other people didn’t, because it was labeled with my grandfather’s first name. Jock. He worked at Sissinghurst in 1941.”

Margaux turned the notebook over in her hands, studying the binding, and then her immense brown eyes came up to meet Jo’s. “Where’s the label now?”

“In my hotel in Cranbrook.”

“The George?” She didn’t bother to wait for Jo’s answer but opened the notebook and took a sudden deep breath. “Good Lord. It certainly
looks
like Virginia’s handwriting.” Her gaze moved over the page. “But the dates! Peter—you
must know
the dates are all wrong.”

“Of course.” He said it calmly and without apology. “That’s why we’re here. The dates raise significant questions—if the writing is absolutely Woolf’s.”

Margaux went still for the space of three seconds. Jo saw the sex-kitten pose die out of her body as swiftly as the sun retreats behind cloud; then she uncurled herself from the sofa and crossed to her desk. She gathered a magnifying lens and a pair of gloves, shifted her laptop to the low table near the sofa, and ignored them both for the next fifteen minutes.

Peter, during the course of Margaux’s examination, visibly relaxed. His rigid limbs eased into the corner of the sofa; one loafered foot crossed over his knee; he even managed a smile and a raised brow for Jo. She was watching the don, however. Margaux was parsing the notebook’s difficult handwriting effortlessly, employing her magnifying lens once in five pages. Every so often, she let out a chortle or gave a distracted nod.

“Where’s the rest?” she demanded when she came to the end. She was studying the two-word phrase
Apostles Screed
with a faint line between her eyes. “Who’s had a go with the knife?”

“We’re not sure,” Peter said. “There may not be any more.”

Margaux rose restlessly and began to pace. “God, I wish I could smoke.”

“Still off the weed, then?” Peter observed. “Good girl. Stuff was killing you. And it absolutely destroys the palate.”

Jo glanced at her watch; nearly four-fifteen. If she was going to make it back to London by dinner, she’d have to push.
“So what do you think? About the notebook? Could Woolf have written it?”

Margaux stood still for an instant, her back to both of them. She was staring out the leaded windows of her rooms, at the blazing autumn of Magdalen’s quad. She looked, Jo thought, like some sort of diva; Brünnhilde in boots, from a modernist staging of Wagner. She was beautiful and terrible and potent and strange. She gathered her long hair into a swift knot. Her hands, Jo noticed, were shaking.

“I can’t give you an opinion. Not absolutely. Not tonight. I’d need more time.”

“But you’re not totally ruling it out,” Peter interjected. “That it could be Woolf, I mean.”

Margaux sank back onto the sofa. This time, she kept her hands to herself and her eyes on the text. “All right. I’ll run through my notes. As you’ve already observed,
whoever
wrote this knew enough about Virginia’s life and history to be comfortable putting her at Sissinghurst. I presume the writer also knew something about your Jock.” A swift obsidian glance at Jo. “But there are other things. Whole phrases lifted from certain works. The first few lines are almost a direct quote of an unpublished fragment—the bit about characters in books, haunting the minds of those who read them, like ghosts. She cribs ‘Clarissa Dalloway in Bond Street,’ too, when she describes her walk through the London Blitz. And she mentions
Lapinova in the snare
—that’s from a rather obscure short story about a couple who pretend they’re rabbits, and are fond of each other as rabbits might be, until the husband declares that Lapinova—who stood for the wife—was strangled in a snare. It’s generally interpreted as Woolf’s veiled comment on her marriage. She and Leonard used to pretend they were monkeys, but it’s assumed Leonard wearied of that bit of
playacting. The snare can be read as his attempt to strangle her selfhood. Virginia was constantly fighting his control, you know—there’s even a body of theory that regards her as entirely sane, and suggests her ‘madness’ was invented by those around her as a method of stifling her independent genius.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Is suicide the act of a sound mind?”

“Perhaps. If death represents the ultimate freedom.”

“But she’d had bouts of madness before Woolf ever entered the picture! She’d tried suicide around World War One!”

“It is a woman’s ultimate weapon to fight the social forces limiting her self-expression by withdrawing from that same society—by negating it through noninvolvement. Woolf established that idea as early as 1907—”

It was an old argument between them, Jo could see, and it was growing more heated. “We don’t know that she committed suicide,” she interposed. “The notebook doesn’t tell us.”

They both turned to stare at her. Something in Margaux’s face changed. She nodded once, swiftly, and leaned away from Peter. “Bang on. The notebook raises all kinds of questions. Did she leave Leonard, wanting desperately to live? And did he find her? Force her to go back? Driving her, in the end, into that swollen river?”

“Or was she pushed?” Peter said, with a sidelong glance at Jo.

Somewhere, a bell tolled twice, the half-hour.

“Bollocks,” Margaux spat viciously. She rose and moved dismissively toward her desk. “Time for sherry with the department. There’s a visiting French scholar I simply
must
greet—he may be hired—and then there’s the Yearsley dinner—always such a bore, but an
absolute
command performance, Peter, you remember. I really must dash.”

“But, Margaux—”

“I can’t give you an opinion. I need more time. Look—what would be
really ideal
—what would help us all out—would be if you left this with me for a bit.”

“A bit?” Jo repeated. It was a phrase the English seemed too fond of: elastic and conveniently vague. “I have to get back to London tonight. I have to leave right now. I appreciate your time—”

Margaux was ignoring her, her liquid gaze fixed imploringly on Peter’s face. “If it’s
honestly
a Woolf, the stuff in this notebook will set the entire field of Modern English on its ears, Peter, you know that—”

“Naturally! That’s why I brought it to you!”

“And I’m
immensely
grateful.” She wrapped herself around him again suddenly, her lips lingering on his.
“Delicious
. So you’ll leave it with me? Just for tonight? I’ll look it over once more in the wee hours and hand it
straight back
to you in the morning, with my best possible judgment?”

“Margaux—”

“Smashing,” she breathed.

So that was where Peter’d picked up the habit.

Margaux stroked her long fingers through his hair, patted his head like a good puppy. “Meet me at the Queen, eight o’clock tomorrow. Café au lait. We’ll talk. It will
be just
like the old days. I’ll bring the notebook.”

Without pausing for a no, she slipped the small brown binding into a Hermès tote idling by her desk, waggled her fingers at Jo, and gave Peter one last caressing look. “Until tomorrow, then. You’ll let yourselves out?”

“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU DID THAT,” JO SAID BLUNTLY AS THEY crossed the Magdalen quad a few minutes later. “My plans
didn’t include Oxford tonight, Peter. I’ve got no time. There’s a client of mine waiting in London—”

“Is that the bloke who tried to get you drunk in the middle of the morning?”

She stopped short and glared at him. “Is that any of your business?”

“Staying at the Connaught? Sending cars for his gardener? Buying a complete replica of the White Garden? I already loathe him.”

“I don’t see why! You’ve never met Gray.”

“Oh, yes, I have. He’s the sort who buys futures in Burgundy, my dear, merely so he can display the exorbitant labels in his climate-controlled
cave.”

“That’s not the point,” she retorted hotly. “The point is that he sent me here—I’m traveling on his nickel. My time is Gray’s own. And it doesn’t include an overnight in Oxford. I’m supposed to have dinner with him.”

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you contacted me.” Peter’s tone was unexpectedly savage. He was walking fast, now, toward the car park, where he’d left his old Triumph, his eyes on the ground and his interest in Jo absolutely zero. “You don’t open Pandora’s box in order to slam shut the lid. It doesn’t work that way.”