The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (16 page)

THEY REACHED THE PLACE CALLED CHARLESTON A few minutes before noon.

“We’ll hope someone’s there,” Peter told her as they slipped down the A27. “It’s not a Trust property, and the hours are a bit odd. But if
we
can’t get in, that means Margaux is equally stymied. We’ll persuade her to give up the notebook, join forces, and treat us to lunch.”

His irritation with Margaux had evaporated once they left Oxford, as though Jo’s clue somehow absolved the woman of guilt. It was possible, however, that Peter was simply looking forward to a good meal. For a man who was fit and lean, Jo thought, he spent a significant part of his day considering where to dine.

“Food is important to you, isn’t it?” she observed. “Do you cook much?”

“Every chance I get. Love nothing better,” he confided. “I’ve actually
called in sick
just so I could spend a few hours at a farmer’s market, and the rest of the day in my hole of a kitchen. Margaux and I used to say—”

He stopped.

“Yes?” Jo prompted.

“Sorry. It’s just that it still catches me unaware—how much I
assume
we’re together. When clearly we’re not. Force of habit, you see. It’s a
sickness
. She left me seven months and fourteen days ago, Jo, although who’s counting, really?—and still, I speak of her as though I’m sure of her. As though the future we mapped out together—the farmhouse somewhere in the country, the room-of-one’s-own where she’d write—was still going to happen. When it’s all effing
gone
and she’s shagging idiots like Ian, you know? My whole life is
completely
gone.”

“I’m sorry,” Jo said inadequately. “You were hoping you’d… marry her?”

“I bloody well
did
marry her.” His retort was outraged. “That’s my ex-wife who’s stolen your notebook, Jo Bellamy, and don’t you forget it.”

“Oh, God,” she said, and stopped before she added the inevitable:
Why in the hell did I trust you, Peter? Your Woolf expert is just the woman you can’t leave behind
. However justified, the words didn’t come. Peter was trying. He was AWOL from work; he would probably be fired. They could both, Jo reflected, be arrested for stealing a treasure from Sissinghurst Castle. What was the equivalent of a federal offense in England, and did it apply to property taken from National Trust houses?

“The notebook mentions Vanessa, remember.” Peter swung sharply off the A27; they were a mile from a village called Firle. “How the writer envied her. Wanted her life. Almost fell for her husband, and so on. It was that bit, really, that
convinced me it must be Virginia—I mean, who
wouldn’t
hate having Vanessa Bell for a sister?”

“Was she that awful?” Jo asked.

Peter sighed. He was suppressing the impulse, possibly, to decry the general ignorance of Americans. “Vanessa was a superstar. Simply gorgeous. The kind of woman that men write poetry about. Everybody was in love with her—except, possibly, the people who knew her best.”

“Like Virginia?”

“Well—being a sister complicates adoration, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child.”

“Ah.” He glanced sideways at her. “Virginia had the opposite problem. Lost in a pack of brats, really. Vanessa was the elder; Thoby, whom your notebook also mentions—”

“He’s the one who died?”

“A lot of them died. Thoby fell between the two girls in birth order; then there was Adrian, who was younger and never liked his sisters much; and four older half-siblings from each of the parents’ first marriages. Virginia’s mother died when she was thirteen, and then her elder half-sister went, and her father, and finally Thoby—of typhoid, after they’d all been to Turkey together. Enough to drive anybody to suicide, one would think.”

“Ye-es,” Jo said. She was sensitive on the subject. “But given that people were dying like flies all around her—I’m surprised she didn’t cling to Vanessa.”

“Oh, I daresay she did.” Peter was peering anxiously through the Triumph’s windscreen, searching for the Charleston sign. “They wrote and visited and generally lived in each other’s pockets throughout their lives. But Virginia was always going mad, d’you see, and needing rest cures and attempting suicide—”

“So the River—what did you call it?”

“—Ouse. It’s not far from here, by the way.”

“—the plunge in the Ouse,
whenever
it happened, wasn’t a complete surprise?”

“Lord, no! There were bouts of overdosing, and so on, for years and years. Everybody who knew Woolf expected her to end it, one day. Although women, it seems, take several tries to kill themselves; it’s men who bring vigor to the first attempt.”

Jock
, Jo thought. Had he given much thought to his last, terrible act? Agonized over it? Considered asking for help? Or simply walked out into the garage—

“But Vanessa”—Peter slowed the car and dived into a gravel opening in the surrounding brush—“was more of a brick. Fell in love with her painter friend Duncan Grant, and set up shop here at Charleston with utter disregard for the conventionalities. Her husband, Clive, visited the family between mistresses. Vanessa raised kids by both men in one rather unusual household and proceeded to paint every bare surface she could get her hands on.”

“Sounds nuts in a different way.”

“Maybe.” His voice was wistful. “Devilish attractive, for all that. Everyone visited her—Maynard Keynes and E. M. Forster and Vita Sackville-West and Roger Fry and Lytton Strachey, Some of them even bought houses in the neighborhood; it was a sort of Bloomsbury-in-Exile. Virginia and Leonard Woolf could walk over—Monk’s House is only a matter of miles from here.”

“That’s Woolf’s place?”

“Yes. In Rodmell. Perhaps we’ll stop, if we’ve time.”

“She
didn’t
walk over, though, did she? At the end? She ran to Vita, not her sister.”

“Perhaps Charleston was too close. To Leonard. Perhaps she thought Vanessa would send her back.”

The Triumph jolted over the rutted road, demonstrating the limits of its suspension system.

“Did Virginia ruin her sister’s marriage?” Jo could not help thinking of these tangled relationships in terms of herself.
Gray
. The shadow of adultery.

“Clive Bell didn’t need a push to wander—he was a womanizer par excellence,” Peter said disparagingly. “What Virginia craved was not her sister’s husband, but her
sanity
. She wanted Vanessa’s self-possession. Her earth-mother warmth. Christ, she wanted her
children
. Leonard decided early on that Virginia shouldn’t have kids—he was convinced they’d drive her mad.”

“So Vanessa had everything? And Virginia nothing?”

“It could look that way, yes. To Virginia, certainly. She was the sort to feel plaintive about her wants.”

“I don’t think any two people could have been happier than we were,”
Jo murmured. “She wrote that, to Leonard Woolf.”

“But it reads as ironic in your notebook, doesn’t it? That’s the lie she left behind her, for kindness. Ah—here we are,” he said, as Charleston came into view.

AT FIRST, THE HOUSE DIDN’T IMPRESS HER AS ANYTHING much. She had recently been walking the grounds of a fifteenth-century castle, after all.

Charleston was a solid, rectangular place of no particular age or style, with broadly sloping tile roofs, lapped all around by fields, the smoky suggestion of the Downs rising beyond. The buff-colored walls were built of a mixture of brick and flint, and the word
shabby
came to mind. The windows were massive eyes punched in the front façade, fringed with faded vines. There was a pond, edged with what Jo suspected were weeds, and a willow tree drooping over it. Hovering on the far
bank she glimpsed something—a woman? Staring at them?—and clutched Peter’s arm.

“She’s going to throw herself in!”

“It’s just a statue, Jo.” He studied it with narrowed eyes. “Creepy, though, isn’t it? Like an unquiet ghost.”

Only one other car sat in the gravel lot.

“Margaux?” Jo whispered—although the car was obviously empty.

Peter shook his head. “She’s probably been and gone.”

“But why would she even
come
here? She never knew Jock or what he wrote when he died.
Pictures at Charleston
is nowhere in the notebook—”

“The mention of Vanessa might have been enough. Something made her snatch the book and run.”

Peter waited for her to precede him through the blue-painted gate that led from the car park to the front door. Standing before the entrance, they both hesitated. A bird called. Jo shivered. She couldn’t shake the sense that someone was watching her—the ghost by the pond, perhaps.

“Do we look for pictures of Virginia?” she asked.

“I don’t think there
are
many, really—she hated sitting for her portrait.” Peter smoothed his blond hair away from his spectacles. “Shall we just start with the first room and go on to the second? Something is bound to strike you.”

“Okay,” she said uncertainly.

BUT AS SHE HAD EXPECTED, NOTHING REALLY DID. EXCEPT the obvious thing that struck everyone who walked through Charleston’s front door—how extraordinary the house, in every detail, actually was.

The rooms were a jumble of the rare and the mundane, of walls stained with damp, of curtains and fabrics faded by the
sun. There were fantastic objects—carnival masks, seashells, ceramic zebras—and ordinary ones, like fraying rugs. Some of the ceilings were low, and the light dim. Floorboards creaked underfoot. A faint tang of mold laced the air, and the scent of flowers, and possibly charcoal. It was a house that did not feel like a museum; but it felt, Jo thought, like the house of old people who were dying or dead. That saddened her. It must have been a vivid place when Vanessa lived there—because almost every wall was flamboyantly painted, with rounded nudes, or enormous flowers, or the figure of a dog. Tables and lamps and mantelpieces were painted, screens were positioned as trompe l’oeil doors.

She turned in place, her eyes sweeping the canvases that lined many of the walls, wondering how on earth they would find what Jock intended her to find—could they
lift
the paintings from their hooks, and feel with hopeless fingers for notebook pages stashed behind them? Or had Jock meant something was
hidden
in the vibrant images swirling all over the furniture? Peter was chatting in his correct English way to the guide who took their entrance fee and pressed a brochure upon them; he was asking whether she’d noticed his friend earlier that morning—a tallish woman, long dark hair? She had not. The guide was moon-faced; she wore a wool skirt and sweater against the chill of the house. She was obviously going to hover at their elbows as they walked through the rooms. Lifting a picture frame would be an impossible violation.

They drifted from Clive Bell’s green and yellow study—books on teetering, makeshift shelves; an odd sort of stone hearth like piled slates, jutting from the fireplace—to the black and silver dining room, where the inky wallpaper was stenciled by Bloomsbury hands. More paintings here: still lifes, a man fingering a piano, a painted fire screen, but none of them could be Jock’s hidden clue. They seemed a world apart from
the White Garden, from the fevered words of the Lady’s notebook so briefly in Jo’s hands; and doubt scrabbled at her mind. Vanessa Bell may have been the center of Bloomsbury, but what could she possibly have to do with the death of an elderly man in Delaware? Jo began to feel impatient. Peter had dragged them both on a wild-goose chase. It was something to see the tubes of paint and the stacked canvases in Duncan Grant’s burlap-colored studio, to hear Peter discussing with the guide certain elements of Post-Impressionist paintings, the influence of Picasso, the legacy of Cézanne; but she longed suddenly to be outside in the open air, with dirt beneath her fingers, where things made sense.

They were mounting the stairs. A series of bedrooms. Clive’s, with its painted bed and riotous textiles. The green bathroom, with a sprawling Duncan Grant nude on the tub enclosure. More paintings on the walls—none of Virginia. Duncan’s room. Portraits of Vanessa: As a young woman. As a middle-aged woman, in a batlike gray cloak, hunched at her easel. Then regal as a queen on a throne, her hair gray and her eyes forbidding.

Abruptly, they came to the spare bedroom. Or what looked like a spare bedroom.

“This is Maynard Keynes’s Room,” the guide announced, in what was obviously a memorized spiel. “John Maynard Keynes, the brilliant architect of the economic theory that bears his name,
Keynesian Economics
, was a great friend of Vanessa and Clive Bell. He was often at Charleston, and the family set aside this room for his use, although other family members certainly slept here. Baron Keynes later purchased Tilton House, not far from here.”

It was a low-ceilinged room, with a single narrow bed covered in what looked like Indian cottons. There was a bookcase and several paintings, one of which Jo found vaguely
troubling—two male nudes, sprawled on a brown bank, toweling their ribs after swimming. It might have been painted by Seurat; it reminded her somehow of crucifixion.

“The Bathers,”
Peter observed. “That’s one of Grant’s? He was quite close to Keynes, I believe?”

“Yes,” the guide said primly, and closed her lips.

“Grant was gay,” Peter explained for Jo’s benefit, “regardless of his relationship with Vanessa. Most of male Bloomsbury slept with him. Including Keynes.”

“I see,” Jo managed. It was clear the guide had no intention of adding to Bloomsbury gossip, and would have liked them to move on; but still Jo lingered by the doorway. The room was somehow restful. It was so
white
. It murmured of sleep…

White. The walls were completely white.

“Peter,” she said suddenly. “Don’t you think it’s weird? How
unpainted
this room is?”

He turned back and stood for an instant in the doorway, staring at the pristine walls. “Yes.
Very
weird. In a house where everything is daubed, a white wall screams for notice. I wonder…”