The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (27 page)

“Somebody’ll see us,” Jo argued. “Can’t we just cross the field and cut through the hedge? You said the two elm trees once stood there.”

“I did,” Peter agreed, “but have you ever tried to cut through a hedge?”

“I do it all the time.”

He frowned at her. “What
are
you talking about?”

Jo reached for her purse and scrabbled in its depths. “While you were inspecting shovels, I bought a pair of secateurs. Autumn’s the time to prune, you know. I’ll do a passable job. It won’t hurt the hedge.”

“Smashing,” Peter said. “I’ll get the shovel.”

IT TOOK JO TWELVE MINUTES TO CARVE A BREAK IN THE soaring wall that divided field from garden. She chose a spot roughly around where Peter thought he remembered having once seen the marker to Virginia’s memory. So late in October, the yew was brittle: she was glad of the gloves, for the sharp evergreen would undoubtedly have drawn blood. She held back the tough stems and motioned silently to Peter. He swam through and she followed.

He had dropped to his knees on the far side of the hedge, and was probing the ground blindly with his fingers. She
crouched down and followed him. They were like two rats, she thought, scuttling along in the dark, the shovel trailing between them. But they had not yet used the flashlight.

Suddenly, Peter stiffened, then to her astonishment rolled like a log against the base of the hedge, his gloved hands covering his blond hair. The unmistakable sound of swearing came to Jo’s ears; she flattened herself against the yew, heart pounding so loudly it had to be audible to the girl who was now standing outside the rear gate where they’d first encountered her that morning, trying to shove her unwilling key into the old lock.

Lucy
. She’d probably walked to the Abergavenny Arms; it couldn’t be more than half a mile away. But had she drunk enough to be blind to two bodies lying half-exposed in the darkness of the hedge?

The lock turned and the gate swung open, creaking on its hinges. Lucy staggered up the walk, and Jo—who was so far under the yew it was sticking painfully into her neck—watched her make her determined way toward the rear gate into the walled garden that surrounded Monk’s House. Then she stopped short and turned. For an instant, she seemed to stare right at Jo, breathless and paralyzed on the ground.

A tiny orange light flared; Lucy, lighting a cigarette. She took a greedy draft of smoke and lingered by the garden wall, staring up at the chilly sky.

Go through the gate
, Jo urged.
Go inside. For Chrissake, you must be freezing
. But maybe smoking wasn’t allowed in National Trust properties. Another burden Lucy had to bear, when staying at Monk’s House. There was no sign of life from Peter; had he seen the girl, motionless but for the pendulum of her right arm, lifting predictably to her lips?

Suddenly, Lucy dropped the butt and ground it beneath her heel. She lifted the iron hasp on the gate and swung
through it, securing it behind her. Perhaps a minute later the house door slammed and a light bloomed in the window.

Jo exhaled.

“You all right?” Peter whispered from somewhere ahead of her.

“I’m scared to death,” she hissed. “Do we leave?”

His answer was drowned by a sudden swell of sound coming from Monk’s House—a cacophonic blare of music played at deafening volume. Jo could just make out a sporadic clapping as Lucy kept poor time to the music; and then a snatch of the girl’s voice, lifted in off-key song.

“Blimey,” Peter whispered. He had crawled up next to Jo. “She’s having her own little rave, right there in the caretaker’s apartment. Look at her!”

And, in fact, craning to spy over the wall, Jo could just see the twirling form passing before one window, then the next; lost to everything but the metal frenzy.

“Right.” Peter reached forward with his fingers again, searching the ground. “Let’s find this bloody marker, shall we?”

AGAINST YOU I WILL FLING MYSELF, UNVANQUISHED AND UN-yielding, O Death!

Brave words, Jo thought, as she read the few lines illuminated by Peter’s penlight. But what had the woman who’d written them, so long ago, felt as the water closed over her head, filled her mouth and lungs, cut her off from the sunlight and the bird singing triumphantly,
Life, life, life?

How had Virginia come to the river, in the end?

Peter switched off the light and reached for the shovel. “Let’s hope it’s not too far down,” he said.

It was a slow and careful business. Peter’s plan, formulated on the fly, was to dig first at one side of the marker to avoid disturbing it too much; he would then angle under it and probe for several feet beneath. Jo kept watch alternately on the growing mound of dirt and the solitary party going on inside Monk’s House, which after seventeen minutes had begun to turn maudlin. Lucy had substituted torch songs for head-bangers, most of them by female artists, and was singing emotionally and wretchedly at the top of her lungs. How much
had
the girl drunk?

“Jo,” Peter said.

He lifted the shovel slantwise from the earth and then thrust it back in again. She heard a faint metallic clang.

“Shit,” she said. “Do you think it’s a… cremation urn or something?”

“Dunno.” He dragged a cautious bit of soil from the hole. “I’ll just… feel for it, shall I?”

Peter’s arm disappeared up to his shoulder.

“Doesn’t feel like an urn. Feels like a… a sort of box. Flattish and long.” He grunted slightly with exertion, then pulled the object out of the ground.

For an instant, Jo thought he was holding a book.

“What is it?”

Peter rubbed at the clods of earth with his garden glove. “A Peek Freans biscuit tin. Probably prewar. They stopped making them in 1939—couldn’t spare the metal.” He sat down beside her, removed his gloves, and reached for the penlight. A narrow beam played over the tin’s surface.

“Peter—it’s shaped like a book!”

“Yes—they were rather elaborate in those days, a marketing ploy on the part of the biscuit makers. Quite collectible now. Sold at auction, in fact. This one’s gone a bit wonky,
however—probably all the damp in the ground.” He attempted to pry off the lid and failed. “Corrosion.”

“Let me.” Jo tore off her gloves. Her fingernails were never long—that was impractical for a gardener—but her fingertips were more delicate than Peter’s. She found an edge and applied pressure. The lid moved.

Peter played the beam along the edge. “Here. Use the edge of the shovel. Like a lever—”

Together, they pried off the tin’s cover.

Inside was what looked like a rubber bag.

“Oilskin, I think,” Peter said, and lifted it out. “Jo—you ought to open this.”

“What if it’s ashes?” she whispered.

He shook his head. “It’s not. I
can feel
it.”

Whatever it was, however, would have to wait. Lucy had suddenly stopped singing.

THE LIGHTS WERE STILL ON, BUT MONK’S HOUSE WAS utterly silent. It was as though, Jo thought, Lucy and her tunes had been taken out by a neutron bomb.

“She’s coming into the garden,” Peter breathed, as the back door creaked open. “As long as she stays in the walled bit, we’re fine; but let’s hope she hasn’t forgot something in the car.”

“Do we run?”

“I hate leaving that mound of dirt.”

This was so unexpected—and so entirely like Peter’s sense of responsibility—that Jo nearly snorted with laughter. She caught herself, however, and tried to avoid breathing.

What could Lucy be doing? Impossible to see from their position. Gazing at the starless sky? Talking on her cell phone? But no, there was still no sound, and Jo imagined the girl was
an emphatic talker. Then the scent of burning tobacco drifted across the garden wall, and Jo sighed inwardly. A bedtime smoke. Lucy definitely had a habit.

They waited wordlessly while the cigarette burned down. Then they heard the house door open and groan closed, and watched as one by one, the lights were extinguished.

Peter made fast work of filling the hole he’d dug. Then they went through the hedge a final time, and positively ran to the Triumph parked in the schoolyard, Jo clutching the Peek Freans tin to her chest. She was laughing with hysterical relief and Peter had just turned the ignition, when his cell phone rang.

“BLOODY
HELL,”
HE SAID AS HE STARED AT THE NUMBER glowing green in the darkness. “Margaux.”

“Pick up!” Jo hissed. “No, better yet—let me.” She wrenched the phone from his hand, stabbed a button, and shouted, “Where’s my notebook, bitch?”

“You might ask yourself instead,” said a cool voice in her ear, “how many different ways Peter is using you. Could I speak to him, please?”

Scowling, Jo handed off the phone.

“Right, hello, sorry about that,” Peter said.

Sorry?
When Margaux had deliberately screwed them and left without a word? Jo glared at him sidelong. And what did Margaux mean about Peter
using
her? That he wasn’t really interested in the Woolf manuscript? Or… that he didn’t believe it was
real?

“…
not asleep, actually, I’m behind the wheel. Yes.
Driving
. Where are you?”

There was a pause. Peter shifted into reverse and the Triumph wheeled backward, turning toward the Abergavenny
Arms. “You
what?”
he spluttered. The car swerved and Jo clutched at the swing strap. The ancient biscuit tin slipped off her lap and burst open.

“Well, that’s bloody well put the cat among the pigeons, hasn’t it? And you actually thought it was a
good idea?
I’ll be fired, darling, if I’m not arrested—”

Darling
.

Jo tried to remember that she had no claim on Peter. Of a romantic kind. He was just a nice guy who was helping her out. By handing her precious manuscript to his ex-wife, who promptly stole it… He’d landed Jo in a very difficult position with Sissinghurst.…Why had he decided it was okay to drop everything and leave London? Had he been
forced
to get out of town quick, and she’d provided an excuse?

The tin bounced at Jo’s feet as the car negotiated a curve. She lifted the oilskin package and held it up in her hands. It was dark umber in color, tied like a parcel with blackened twine. She began to work at the old knots with her fingers. What she needed was a pair of scissors—or her secateurs. But no, she’d left them behind at the hedge.
Damn
.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to talk to Jo,” Peter was saying. “I’m not entirely sure where we’ll be. I owe it to her to discuss—” Another pause, and this time she distinctly heard Margaux’s voice through the receiver, both strident and pleading. “I think you tossed that claim in the rubbish a year ago, along with half the contents of the Islington flat. Now look—I’ll call in the morning. Get some sleep.
Night.”

His voice, Jo thought, was a shade gentler on that final word, a caress half remembered. It made her stomach clench.

He snapped the phone shut and exhaled gustily.
“Lord
. She was put on earth to drive men mad.”

“What did she say?”

I love you, Peter, I miss you, it was all a stupid mistake.…

“She said she was unavoidably delayed in Oxford yesterday morning—”

Boy toy
, Jo thought.

“—couldn’t reach us because her mobile was dead, so she just took the notebook into my office. And found that nobody knew where I was.”

“She took the Woolf manuscript to Sotheby’s?”
Jo cried, outraged.

“My own particular boss put her through the Inquisition, rather.” Frustration and amusement in Peter’s voice, now. “She thought she’d help by saying I’d been at Oxford. The long and short of it is that Marcus has the notebook, it’s being analyzed by our in-house experts over the weekend, and they’re pursuing the issue of legal ownership as best they can. So you’ve no need to worry any longer. The notebook is safe.”

“Are you out of your mind? I’ve just lost complete control! Your nightmare of a wife handed off my grandfather’s book.”

“… which you
filched
from a tool shed at Sissinghurst, Jo! It never
belonged
to you.”

“That’s not the point!”

“Then what
is?”

She was so furious with him—his sudden defection into the reasonable world—that for a moment she was speechless. “The point,” she snapped, “is finding out what happened. To Virginia. And Jock.”

“Which we’ve tried to do. Who
owns
the bloody thing in the end is irrelevant. Sotheby’s might as well establish that as anyone.”

“Given that you work there,” she said with deadly calm.

“Now, what is
that
supposed to mean?”

“Peter, are you getting some sort of
commission
for all this?”

“I’m probably losing my job,” he retorted acidly.

“What did that woman want? At two o’clock in the morning?”

“To hear my voice,” he said distinctly. “She was… lonely.”

There was a tense silence. The Triumph left Rodmell behind and picked up Swanborough Hollow—the road north, toward Lewes.