The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (26 page)

Her lip curled. “Too bloody well right.”

“—Even with the people who gave it to you: Jo, and your ex-husband.”

For once, she had no answer.

“What do you think they’re doing, right now? Why haven’t they come back to London?”

“Why do you care so much?”

Gray eased back in his seat, his fingers still caressing the
stem of his martini glass. “I understand your hesitation to be frank with
me
—after all, we only met ten hours ago—but I confess I’m surprised that you’re lying to Marcus. He could cut off your access to the material completely. Should he learn of it.”

“I’m not lying!” Her voice had risen; she was leaning so far over the table toward him, she was nearly prone. In other circumstances, he would have enjoyed this view of her cleavage. In this case, he kept his eyes steadily on her face and held a finger to his lips. A warning.
Steady
.

She glanced sidelong, then raised herself upright. “I took the effing notebook Monday night and told Peter I’d give it back in the morning. Only I decided to go to Cambridge instead.”

“Why?”

“You saw that there are pages missing from the back?”

“Maybe Woolf didn’t like what she wrote.”

“I doubt it. I think someone else edited that manuscript for her. There’s a tantalizing phrase scribbled on the inside of the back cover. Peter saw it, too, I’m sure he did—a sort of envoi. A
clue
. In any case, I thought it possible the rest of the manuscript was hidden for a reason. And that it might be found.”

“At Cambridge?”

“Cambridge was supposed to tell me where to look. But I’m not as good at solving puzzles as Peter is—making abstruse connections. I’m better at emotional analysis.”

Abstruse connections
. Gray’s pulse had suddenly accelerated.
Peter Llewellyn was hunting for the rest of the notebook. And Jo with him
.

“It’s frustrating to see the possibilities and lack the technique,” Margaux was saying. “Honestly, I was ready to chuck the whole thing in the River Cam when Marcus called.”

“But you decided instead to make the best of a… partial… situation.”

“Exactly.” She placed her hands on the table, fingers linked. “I don’t want cash, Gray. I’m not in it for a payoff. This isn’t about greed.”

“Of
a financial
kind.”

“It’s about access,” she pushed on, ignoring his gibe. “I want exclusive rights to this new material—no sharing, for the first time in my entire career. Marcus has the power to stipulate my terms—
you
have the power to grant them.”

Gray frowned. “Limit access to information? That’s profoundly un-American. I’m not sure I can agree.”

“You already signed a paper to that effect this morning.”

“Paper, as we’ve seen, can be torn in half.”

Margaux’s teeth worried at her lower lip. “Tell me you’ve never closed communications about a deal you’ve decided to make. A fund you intend to set up. A client whose millions you’ve decided to squander. I won’t believe you.”

“But in those cases I control the deal. It’s a closed system, like playing tug-of-war with both ends of the rope. You, unfortunately, have got only one.”

She stared at him. “Now we come to it.
Your terms
. What is it you want, Mr. Graydon Westlake? How much body and soul do I have to sell?”

“I want you to drink this martini,” he replied, sliding it across the table toward her. “And then I want you to call your ex-husband.”

PETER AND JO WALKED BACK TO THE ABERGAVENNY Arms feeling as though every eye in the small village of Rodmell was upon them. Jo succeeded in looking over her shoulder only once; Lucy was not, as she’d feared, posted in Monk’s House’s front door staring balefully after them.

“I’d make a lousy criminal.”

“It’s all in the practice,” Peter said impatiently. “I’m sure you’d take to it, with time. Look at Anthony Blunt, for God’s sake. Right there in the Monk’s House display case, innocent as a lamb. Nobody suspected
him.”

“Who’s Anthony Blunt?” Jo demanded, bewildered.

“An Apostle to end all Apostles. And one of the Cambridge Five.”

“I thought there were twelve.”

“No, no—the Cambridge
Five,”
Peter insisted, as though
repeating the phrase might make it comprehensible. “Surely you’ve heard of them?”

“I know the Jackson Five, but…”

“Oh,
Christ
. Burgess and Maclean? Ring a bell?”

“I’m sorry. Were they theater people?”

“They were
spies,”
he said with immense patience. “Double agents. In the pay of the Soviets. For most of the Cold War. Kim Philby? Heard of him? I won’t even ask about John Cairncross.”

“Philby sounds familiar,” Jo offered tentatively. “But isn’t he American?”

Peter sighed. “Look—Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in the early fifties. They’d been up at Cambridge together, and Burgess was an Apostle. He was also one of the more flamboyant sons of King’s. Part of a group of Golden Youth that cut their political teeth in the age of Fascism, and the Spanish Civil War—”

“Like Vanessa’s son. Julian Bell.”

“Exactly.”
Peter stopped short in the middle of The Street. “Guy Burgess was elected to the Apostles the same year as Julian, in fact. Anthony Blunt probably nominated him—Blunt was a few years older and fairly influential in the Apostles at the time. He took up with Julian Bell through the Society, which accounts for Blunt’s appearance in that photograph we just saw.”

“A bunch of Apostles.”

“In the heart of Bloomsbury. What the Bells and the Woolfs appear to have missed, however, is that Blunt and Guy Burgess were systematically selling out Establishment Britain from about 1936 onwards. Along with Kim Philby, another prominent Cambridge man, and Maclean and Cairncross. The five, taken together, were the crown jewels of Soviet foreign intelligence.”

“Julian Bell was a
spy?”
Jo was feeling rather deflated, as though the peaceful world she’d glimpsed at Charleston had been lifted, turned upside down, and shaken vigorously—causing several dead spiders to drop out.

“He didn’t live long enough. But if the Spanish war had spared him—? Who’s to say? They were a group of young men who valued friendship
almost
more than politics. E. M. Forster—who you’ll remember was an Apostle—is famous for saying:
If I were forced to choose between betraying my friends and betraying my country, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

Jo reached inside her purse and drew out the photocopy of the group snap, as Peter called it. She was familiar enough with the faces by this time. Leonard Woolf’s narrow, ascetic profile; Keynes’s balding pate and dark mustache; Julian’s jovial, bearlike figure; his father’s urbane expanse of forehead. And there was Blunt: composed, grave, almost insolent as he stared at the camera. The most inscrutable of the bunch. “Was he an economist, like Keynes?”

“Not at all. Art historian. Aesthete. Director of the Courtauld and surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures. The old guard at Sotheby’s used to consult him frequently when authenticating paintings—until Margaret Thatcher exposed him as a Soviet spy. There was a fearful row when that happened. A lot of long knives came out and all Blunt’s old friends disavowed him. He was stripped of his knighthood, and died not long after.”

“But he wasn’t shot, or anything.”

“No,” Peter agreed, smiling faintly. “He lost his good name—and in Blunt’s world, that was worse than a firing squad. Look, it’s going on half-four and you probably want your tea, but we ought to run down to Lewes before the shops close. It’s only a few miles back up the road, but you never know—they might lock up early. Can you manage without food for a bit?”

“What are we buying?”

“A shovel, two pairs of gloves, a stout bag, and a smallish torch,” he said, guiding her to his car. “Oh, and possibly a room for the night. It won’t do to linger in Rodmell once we’re done digging.”

Digging
.

Jo halted by the Triumph’s passenger door. “Are we really going to exhume Virginia Woolf’s ashes?”

“I shouldn’t think there’s many to be found, after sixty-eight years,” Peter said dispassionately. “But I know what you mean. Disturbing sacred ground, and so on. That’s why Leonard buried whatever spooked Maynard Keynes at the same time he buried Virginia. He expected the place never to be disturbed.”

IN LEWES, THEY FOUND EVERYTHING THEY NEEDED AT A store called Bunce’s.

“Doing the autumn tidy this weekend, are we?” the clerk asked as Peter offered his credit card.

“We’re putting in bulbs,” Jo supplied.

“You’re late. Mine were in a good three weeks ago.”

“Ah,” Peter said. “We’ll just have to hope for the best, then, shan’t we?”

Feeling chastened, they stowed their gear awkwardly in the Triumph—Jo would be cradling the iron head of the shovel in her lap during the brief return to Rodmell—and walked back up the High Street in search of a pub.

“I’m getting bloody well tired of these soulless meals,” Peter muttered.

“I’m not even hungry,” Jo said.

“Rubbish!”

“I’m a little nervous. And it’s turned cold.”

He steered her immediately into a small café—perhaps ten tables, only three of them occupied—that glowed warmly with candlelight; logs burned in an open hearth.

“What you need,” he declared firmly, “is a restorative soup. Something creamy, like crab bisque. We’re quite close to the sea here, you know. And then a good steak and a green salad. Warm bread. All strictly comfort food, washed down with red wine. Cheese to follow.”

It was a simple meal, but a thoroughly delicious one; and Peter was right: She
did
feel her borderline panic recede as the comfort rolled in. She pushed all thought of their midnight errand from her mind and listened to Peter talk, which was something he had begun to do, she noticed—he was easy enough in her company now that he didn’t edit what he said.

“I’ve been thinking about your idea—Peter’s Place. It’d have to be named something else entirely, of course, and God knows where we’d put it—but there would be a few fundamentals. Locally sustainable produce, for one. Organic if possible. Local beef and poultry, naturally raised. And a limited menu—say, six entrées on any given night, but all of them
exquisite
. Inspired food that takes the best of several culinary traditions and fuses them well.”

“I’d eat there,” Jo said. “What would it look like?”

He stared off into space for a moment. “I love the texture of old buildings. By that I mean all that’s authentic about them.”

There it was again—the connoisseur in Peter, his instinct for what was true. It was the quality Jo trusted most.

“Serviceable buildings that had a utility once,” he continued. “A group of oast houses, for instance, or an ancient barn. I’d like bare timbers and stone floors and a
really massive
hearth people could sit in with their wineglasses. Rustic, relaxed, but absolutely top drawer. Know what I mean?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Ideally, there’d be a working potager in the back.”

“Peter.” Jo set down her wineglass. “I just designed the most
fabulous
potager for Gray. An entire walled acre, divided into quadrants—espaliered fruit trees, seasonally rotated heirloom and organic vegetables, everything from five types of beet to eleven types of lettuce. It’s going to be the most magnificent symphony of color and texture and flavor imaginable—”

“Gray being your abandoned client?”

Jo screwed up her face. “Yes.”

“And what’s the bugger going to do with so much veg, then? Feed an orphanage?”

Despite herself, she burst out laughing. “I don’t think he has any concept of how much food he’s going to produce. And knowing Gray, he’ll only live in the Hamptons about eight weeks a year. He owns five houses.”

“So he’s bought the
look
of a potager,” Peter said thoughtfully, “and will probably toss most of the stuff back on the compost pile to rot. I should set up Peter’s Place directly on the far side of his garden wall. And hire you to garden for me.”

He looked at her then, and Jo flushed. But she only raised her glass and said, “To Peter’s Place. Wherever it may be.”

It was eleven before they noticed that the fire had fallen to embers, and they were the only ones left in the café.

MONK’S HOUSE WAS COMPLETELY DARK WHEN THEY rolled slowly past its flint wall and turned toward the churchyard beyond. Lucy might be at the pub, or she might be asleep.
Which?
Jo thought, her panic returning.

“The principal thing,” Peter said, as he pulled the Triumph into the deserted school car park and killed the engine, “is to use the torch as little as possible. Can you see in the dark?”

“Usually. But this is pitch black.”

True country night was wrapped around Rodmell. If there were stars somewhere above, their light was masked by a bank of cloud and the heavy weight of the Downs looming on the horizon.

“The easiest possible course is also the most exposed,” Peter said. “That’s to walk back round to the front and nip over the flint wall. Then we can simply amble along the side of the house to the back garden.”