The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (29 page)

He adores Vita and could not live, I think, without her, and yet she is the most supremely selfish being one could possibly meet; even when he ran for Parliament she politely declined to mount the hustings at his side, she magnificently ignored the gossip regarding their unusual marriage and would not play at the dutiful wife. She has discarded his name and resumed her own. She is steadfastly unfaithful with a variety of lovers, as he generally is with men and boys; and yet not a day passes without their exchange of letters. In their deep loyalty and constant choice of one another’s friendship, Harold and Vita are unassailable. He accepts her narcissism and worries about her drinking; she ignores his perpetual unhappiness at the failure of his career.

And it is a measure of how much he cares for her that he dropped everything at the Ministry of Information this morning, and came down to Kent the moment she summoned.

“Hallo, darling,” he said as he bent to kiss her cheek. “Hallo, Virginia. You’re looking fit. So happy you could keep Mar company in her castle. She grows quite fidgety with all the regulations. Men posted in the tower.
Rations
. Been working the garden, Mar?”

Mar is his particular name for Vita; Hadji is hers for Harold.

“Virginia thinks we should plant white flowers,” Vita said, gesturing out the cottage window, “so that the glow might light our way to bed.”

“Then by all means, set Jock to uprooting the roses,” Harold suggested. “Care to take a turn in the garden, Virginia? You might show me what you intend.”

As I guessed poor Harold had come expressly from London to give me a scolding, I felt obliged to rise from my chair and saunter with him into the chill of the falling dusk, the bare rose canes enmeshing us with all the splendour of the trenches. Vita stayed behind. I had an idea of her reaching for her hip flask, and spiking her tea with brandy.

“And so you’ve run off, have you?” Harold took my cold fingers between his own and chafed them gently. “Poor Virginia. Has Leonard been beastly to you?”

I said nothing. I would consent to listen, but not to speak. Not yet. There was too much I feared. The complicity of the men of Westminster.

“You’ve upset everyone terribly, you know. Leonard’s dragging the river. There are parties of men and dogs along the banks.”

This last brought me up short, my hand at my throat.
Dogs
. Torches. The flickering silhouettes of the search party and the sound of baying on the air. Slavering jaws mouthing the cold flesh—

I retched.

Harold’s arm came briefly to my back; a faint pressure of comfort. “You must write to them. You must
explain
. It would relieve their minds—”

He strolled onwards, serene and infallible, while I stood like a plinth in the midst of Vita’s garden. He did not look back as he walked, a darker shadow in the deepening dusk, past the Chinese jar and through the gap in the hedge that led to the statue of the Little Virgin.

I knew that spot well. Beyond the garden gate and several feet below its level; beyond the sight of the Priest’s House windows. We could be private, there. I could tell him what he asked to know.

I took my courage in my hands and followed him.

1 April 1941
Sissinghurst

“I LOVE THIS OLD LADY,” HAROLD SAID, STROKING the statue. “Vita would say I prefer Dionysius, but she’s wrong. The Little Virgin’s my pet.”

“How did she come here?”

“A fellow named Tomas Rosandic carved her for us out of wood. But I had the original cast in lead, some years ago—wood never lasts.” He glanced around. “I’m not happy with her here. The drop in grade means her legs are all but invisible from the gate—and that seems a shame, doesn’t it? A statue should serve to focus the eye, draw the viewer along an axis. This is all wrong.”

“She belongs in the White Garden—when you make it.”

“Have you seen Delos? Vita’s Attic Wilderness?” He took my hand, and tucked it under his arm. “It’s even more hopeless now there’s nobody to cultivate chaos. Let’s stroll, shall we?”

The footing was very bad, and I clung to him. The night, and this familiar stranger; my heart beat quicker. Harold was silent.

“How are things at the Ministry?” I asked.

“Funny you should ask,” he murmured. “Only a writer of novels could understand—I’ve become a vehicle for falsities and lies and hopeful declarations. I am never so full of bile as when forced to censor an upright journalist, before his truth terrifies half the kingdom.”

“Hypocrisy,” I said.

“Oh, yes—much more than I found in all my years with the Foreign Office. But perhaps I was simply callow, then, and unaware.”

“No.” I uttered the word as though I spat bullets. “People want lies, now. Like children before bed. Do even
you
grow to love lying, Harold?”

He stopped by a great chunk of rock—one of the ruins of Sissinghurst scattered about the ground Vita calls Delos—and stared at me soberly. “I hate it. But I’ve found lies are indispensable in wartime. What about you?”

“I left Leonard because of a lie. Or several. They beget each other, you know.”

He sat down on a flat plane of the rock and patted it gently. “Tell me all about it, old thing.”

“LAST NOVEMBER,” I BEGAN, “A YOUNG MAN FELL OUT OF the sky.”

Harold’s eyelids flickered. “One of ours, or one of theirs?”

I hardly knew how to answer the question. It suggested a world of absolutes, where I’d never lived.

“He was certainly German, if that’s what you mean. But he claimed to be Dutch. He fell into one of the meadows near the river at half-past three in the morning, on a night of no moon. He told us his name was Jan. Jan Willem Ter Braak. I had just finished my book the day before. I couldn’t sleep and I heard the dog barking.”

How to explain to Harold that whenever the words left me, I was empty as a husk lying on the threshing-room floor? Empty as a woman whose birth has aborted? Impossible to sleep in such a state. Impossible not to hate oneself, knowing the words had spilled irretrievably, that there was no taking them back, that Leonard would
force me to print
when the thing was dreadful—paltry words, lifeless, without art,
shaming?
I wanted to burn my book, I wanted to drown it.

“Between the Acts?”
Harold said easily. “Leonard says it’s as good as
The Waves.”

“Leonard lies.”

I could not look at him, beside me on the rock.
Come under the shadow of this red rock
.

Harold fumbled for something in his pocket; a pipe. Then the match flaring, the comfort of tobacco smoke. “So a German parachuted into your back garden. What then?”

“The dog found him. Baying and whining in the middle of the night. He’d sprained his ankle, you see, and was stumbling. Leonard went out after the dog.”

Harold puffed on his pipe. “What did Leonard do?”

“Jan tried to run and the pain made him faint. Leonard tied his hands and feet and left the dog to guard him. Then Leonard locked me inside the house and got on his bicycle and rode into Lewes, where there’s a telephone.”

“And a constable?”

“He didn’t wake the constable.”

“No?”

“He rang up his friends.” I looked at Harold now. “You know some of them. In government.
Cambridge
people.”

He smiled. “My poor darling, you make them sound like Nazis.”

I refused to notice this. “One of them is Guy Burgess.”

“Delightful fellow. Works at the BBC. Radio interviews.”

“You’ve slept with him, haven’t you,” I said, “so of course you think he’s grand.”

Harold drew his pipe deliberately from his mouth. “Did Vita tell you that?”

“No. Guy did.”

“I see.” He was still serene, without affront; there is no one more truly the gentleman than Harold Nicolson. “I shall have to beg the little sod to be more discreet. Was he the person Leonard rang?”

“Leonard put through a call to Maynard, who lives in Tilton—not far from Rodmell, as the crow flies. Maynard rang the other two in London. They share a flat. I couldn’t think why they’d be wanted—Tony’s an art critic and Guy a drunk—but eventually I understood. Tony Blunt’s with military intelligence. He does something with German agents. And Leonard knew Jan was no Dutchman.”

Think what the local bobby would do if he got his hands on the poor bugger
, Leonard had said.
They all remember Dunkirk. Probably kill him by morning. Better to ring someone sensible and make sure the fool survives
.

“They came direct from London, in two black cars, and bundled Jan in the back. He was conscious by that time, and he tried to fight them, but it was no good.”

Harold rapped his pipe against the rock, scattering the
tobacco. “Disturbing, admittedly—but I have yet to detect Leonard in a lie.”

“That came later.” I hugged my sweater close. “There were bombers, you see, in waves overhead during the autumn, and talk of Germans coming.
Invasion
. My brother gave us morphia so we might kill ourselves, and Leonard hid it in a drawer. And then the planes stopped, Harold.
They stopped
. At first I felt relief, but then I began to listen to things the others said when they came. Your Burgess. And Tony.”

“Leonard’s Apostles. I’m only a poor Oxford man, but what is it they say—‘If forced to choose between betraying my friends, and betraying my country… ’”

“Yes!” Perhaps Harold would understand, after all. “They came at night, after the curfew. They had special police passes, extra petrol. They talked to Leonard about Jan.”

“The fellow was still alive?”

“He was being… controlled.” I looked at him desperately. “They set him free, on a very long leash. He was sent to Cambridge, where Maynard might watch him, with money and his radio set, and ordered what to tell the Germans.”

“—Which were lies.”

“Yes.”

“Sounds bloody brilliant to me.”

“It was.” My fingers twisted together, as though the bones were twigs I could break. “It was
inspired
, Harold. And Jan isn’t the only one. There’s a whole group involved—the Twenty Committee. Tony says every German agent dropped into England has been turned. The alternative to cooperation is death, of course.”

“Virginia,” Harold said gently. “We’re at war with Hitler. Death is
always
the alternative. Tony and the others are simply doing their jobs. Why has this upset you so?”

I rose from my red rock and began to pace the wilderness of Delos. Weeds snatching at my ankles. While Vita drank her sherry in the Priest’s House, a bramble grew steadily to surround Sleeping Beauty’s castle. She would be walled up alive, soon.

“Because of the proofs. Leonard set the type for my book, Harold. All through the winter he was composing formes on the hand press. He hadn’t really used it in years—but he said it was a distraction for him. From the war.”

“Probably was.”

“He gave me one set of proofs to correct. He kept another. But I mislaid mine, once, when Leonard was out—I found his set and started to read. He had changed the text in places, Harold.
He had put in other words
. Do you understand what I mean?”

“I’m afraid—”

The book is excellent. The finest you’ve written. Of course we’re going to publish. But you must devote yourself to your proofs, Virginia. You must read and read them.…
While he hid his poisonous screed in the forest of words.

“A sentence here, a sentence there,” I persisted. “Tony Blunt told him what to say, and Guy would deliver it. My book was to be the handmaiden, Harold.
My proofs
. Passed to someone else. Who’d know exactly how to read them.”

Harold stared at me. No longer the aesthete in the garden, but a man of Westminster. “Are you trying to tell me Leonard is a spy?”

“He lies.” I whispered it.

“What did he print?”

I closed my eyes and repeated from memory.

“Special for Stalin: Hitler to invade Russia.”

“WHY IS THAT SO TERRIBLE?” JO ASKED. “I THOUGHT Churchill and Stalin were buddies.”