The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (9 page)

A square of milk glass set into the ceiling—an old-fashioned skylight—cast a grayish halo over Peter’s stall. He stared up into the glow, wondering if he’d gone slightly off the rails during the past few months. It was due to the place, he reckoned. The expectations. The persistent sense of inner failure. And Margaux’s leaving hadn’t helped. He would
not
think of Margaux, the annoying cow.… He hadn’t been born for this—for the title of Expert. Passing judgment on other people’s passions, other people’s sins, their hoardings and jealousies and impossible dreams. He would have to get out before he was much older.

But first: the Broadwell collection.

He slipped the old brown notebook into his breast pocket, flushed the loo for the sake of appearances, and prepared to brave the corridor once more.

· · ·

JO BELLAMY WAS ALREADY TRYING ON WOMEN’S DRESS shirts at Thomas Pink’s, Jermyn Street. They looked, she thought, like the sort of thing Gray Westlake would wear. But not his wife. Perhaps his mistress…

Mistress
. What a hideous word.

She was holding a lavender stripe under her chin when her cell phone rang.

“ARE YOU IN THE GARDEN?” GRAY ASKED.

Jo nearly dropped the phone. Although barely half an hour had passed since leaving Sotheby’s, she had expected the voice to be Peter Llewellyn’s.

“No,” she said abruptly. “I’m at Thomas Pink’s. It’s a store.”

“I know. So you’re in London?”

“Just for the morning. I took the train up.”

“You must’ve guessed I’d be here.”

The lavender-striped shirt slipped from Jo’s hands. Clumsily, she bent to retrieve it. “Gray, you
didn’t.”

“I did. Want me to send a car for you?”

“No! I mean—where are you, exactly?” She shoved the slim wooden hanger back onto a rack, aware that she sounded
distracted—unwelcoming—actually put out about this delightful surprise. “It’s just that I’m shocked. I never thought you’d really—”

“I’m at the Connaught,” he interrupted, that faint ripple of amusement in his dark voice. “Don’t move. I’ll find you.”

She stood there for an instant in the middle of Thomas Pink’s. Panic washed over her.
Gray. In London. Which meant
—

He had flown in from Buenos Aires to see her.

For one wild instant, she wished the call
had
been from Peter Llewellyn. But that was nonsense. She closed her cell phone with a snap and went out into the street to wait for the car.

IT WAS A BLACK BENTLEY. PRESUMABLY THE CONNAUGHT owned it, and lent it to people like Gray when they had to fetch their mistresses from London shops. A chauffeur stood by the open rear door; he was better dressed, Jo reflected, than she was.

“Look at you!”

Gray swarmed out of the backseat. His hand was at her elbow, his lips brushed her cheek. A current of energy ran up her arm. He looked so good—so alive and intensely exciting—when he ought to have been dead tired. How long was the flight from B.A., anyway? But she was forgetting. He owned a jet. One of those things with plush seating and Porthault sheets. He might as well have been sleeping in his own bed at home.

With Alicia
, said a voice in her mind.

A slight pressure in the small of her back; he was sweeping her toward the car. It was inexorable. It was unnecessary for her to make a decision; everything had been determined for her. That’s how life with Gray was.

Her cell phone vibrated gently in her hip pocket. She ignored it, and got into the car.

“SO WHY DID YOU LEAVE YOUR CASTLE?” HE DEMANDED, once the butler had poured them each a drink and left them alone in the suite. It might have housed ten; Gray had taken it indefinitely. It was possible he’d be there for a week; possible he’d leave tomorrow. Jo sensed that his decision depended upon her.

“Do you really want to know?”

“I don’t ask idle questions.”

That was true. It was one reason he haunted her—words were rarely wasted around Gray. But they had talked only of gardens for so long; talked of possible paradises, their words a foil for deeper things. They had been groping toward each other, Jo realized, in all those months of planning walls and beds and flowers for different seasons—walking the Long Island acres in the rain, they had been imagining an Eden, their own private landscape. Talking about her grandfather, now—that was different. Jock was reality. How would Gray regard a man who’d fixed tractors for a living?

“I found an unsigned notebook I think was written by Virginia Woolf,” she told him. “I brought it to London to be analyzed.”

“That’s bizarre.” He took a sip of wine, studied her over the rim of the glass. “People don’t just find lost Woolfs. She’s a known quantity. Was it in an antiques shop?”

“A tool shed at Sissinghurst.”

“That’s even weirder. And you think it’s a Woolf because…?”

“Because I’m a hopeless romantic,” she replied unexpectedly.

Gray set down his glass. He leaned toward her, his arm reaching along the back of the sofa to caress her shoulder. “Liar. You’ve never worn pink in your life.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“You wear brown and green and deep russet red,” he went on, ignoring her question. “You know where snakes live, and lichen grows. You’re a mushroom hunter and a witch of possibility. You make things bloom, Jo. You’re utterly without shit or pretense and
that
is why I’m falling in love with you.”

“Gray—you’re not—”

“I am,” he said. No laughter in his face now; no heavy-lidded desire. Only something like pain; and that, Jo thought, was terrifying. She did not want to cause Gray pain.

“Don’t,” he suggested, as she looked at him confusedly, “mention Alicia.” And then he pulled her close and kissed her.

It was inevitable, Jo thought, from the moment she’d taken Gray’s call in the middle of shopping; or perhaps it had been inevitable from the day they’d had coffee alone together, and she’d found him finishing her thoughts before she’d spoken them. As his mouth searched hers in the London suite, she could see the next few hours unroll like a predictable pageant: the intensity of lovemaking (his breathing was already faster as his hand slid over her shoulder), the dining table wheeled into the disheveled room by the discreet and wooden waiters; the champagne, the bathrobes, the steaming tub for two. It would be shocking and exhilarating and more dangerous than anything she’d ever done. And then she would awake the next morning and know that she had destroyed something important—not Gray’s marriage, that was his own problem—but something harder to describe. Her self-possession?

What happened to business owners who slept with their clients? What was more important—Bellamy Design, or Gray Westlake?

His fingers tugged at the elastic gripping her hair, loosened her neat ponytail, sent brown strands cascading over her shoulders. For an instant, his eyes studied her, and Jo felt a surge flow upward from her heart: half fear, half desire. Then her lips quirked suddenly in a smile. She couldn’t help it.

“Do you always seduce your hired help, Gray?”

“What?”

“Is it noblesse oblige?” she mused. “Something rooted in your earliest ancestors—boinking the serving girl on the back staircase?”

“Jo,
don’t,”
he said quietly. “You’ve never been hired help. You’re my true north.”

But she
had
begun to question herself, and there were too many interesting answers for a mindless plunge into passion. “Gray,” she said briskly, “I’d like some time to think.”

“Shit.”

He let her go, his face a mix of puzzlement and frustration. Very few women, Jo imagined, were immune to the sort of triple-barreled assault Gray Westlake could bring: All that charm. All that power. All that
money
. She knew she was foolish. She’d probably lose Gray as a client anyway—so why not lose her heart?

Her cell phone vibrated again.

She reached for it, hair sliding into her eyes. Her blouse had come undone and her shoes were scattered. She discovered she was impatient with it all.

“Miss Bellamy?” said a cautious British voice in her ear. “Peter Llewellyn here. I’ve finished with your notebook.”

She glanced at Gray; he was raking his fingers through his dark hair, that look of pain in his eyes again.

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

29 March 1941
Sissinghurst

WE WALKED IN THE GARDEN AFTER DINNER, QUITE late, the Priest’s House lowering behind us, no flicker of fire or golden lamp escaping its heavy blackout shades. Vita still talks of bombing runs. She has no idea why I’ve ceased to fear the Germans
.

“Do you see him?” she whispered. She was wrapped up in her sables, her nose emerging from the sumptuous collar like a ship’s prow. “He” was a member of the Home Guard, posted nightly in the height of her tower. A spotter. A lookout for the sudden flower of parachutes over the hop fields; for Nazi troop planes vomiting men. How perfect, I thought, as I squinted up at Mr. Home Guard, the band on his arm, the inverted pie-plate of his hat. How perfect that Vita’s tower should have its sentry posted once more. The tower and
Orlando have been waiting for the enemy all these long years since Elizabeth; waiting for conquest, and night watches, and the Defence of the Realm
.

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
.