The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (30 page)

“After
Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact, they were,” Peter conceded, “but that came in June, when the Nazis attacked Russia. In April, when Virginia’s writing, Stalin was the enemy.”

“And Leonard Woolf was passing information to him?”

“Or trying to. He could have been shot as a traitor. And Virginia with him. The message was in her book.”

“Why would Leonard do such a thing?”

Peter shrugged. “The Woolfs were always to the Left. And a lot of people believed that if you were against Fascism—like the Russians—you were worth helping. That included Stalin.”

“And then there were Leonard’s Apostle friends. Tony and Burgess, the Soviet spies.”

Peter rubbed his eyes wearily. “Virginia mentions the Twenty Committee—there was another name for it. The Double-Cross System. It came from the Roman numeral for twenty—”

“Double
X
s?”

“Yes. It was one of the most successful deceptions of the entire war, and the intelligence service were at pains to keep it secret. Leonard could have done immense damage with those few words in a book—letting Stalin know the Germans were coming might have blown the whole Double-Cross operation.”

“Do you think Blunt got Hitler’s plans out of Jan Ter Braak?”

“He must have. And Blunt—or Burgess—was desperate to get the message to Stalin. There was no Russian embassy in London at the time. France was occupied by the Germans. So they thought of Leonard and the press. They could
send
the message in a proof somewhere—say, Switzerland? But something went wrong—because Stalin was shocked when Germany invaded. He never saw Operation Barbarossa coming.”

“Virginia,” Jo surmised.

“Or Harold Nicolson.”

“But Blunt and Burgess weren’t exposed as Soviet spies,” Jo pointed out. “At least, not then.”

“Well, they
were
Apostles, after all. Keynes probably protected them.”

“He persuaded Harold to send him Virginia’s account,” Jo suggested, “and then convinced Leonard to burn it. Only Leonard printed it, first.”

They were silent a moment, considering it all.

“So why did poor Jan Ter Braak shoot himself?” Jo asked.

“Or
was shot?”
Peter countered meaningfully.

“Keep reading,” she said.

· · ·

IT IS TO HAROLD NICOLSON’S CREDIT THAT VERY LITTLE ASTOUNDS him. That comes, I suppose, of having been born in Teheran—of being born to a diplomatic family, I mean, in a place that was never England. Harold is quite free of certain hypocrisies regarding our national character—that gentlemen are honourable, that allegiances are always clear. That there is a right way of living, and a wrong.

Harold understands that people lie; that self-deception is the most powerful technique for survival; that we are all riddled with competing loyalties that confuse and divide us. He is, after all, a father—who loves to sleep with young men exactly his sons’ ages. He is a husband—whose wife has never been faithful. He has lived behind the protective screen of prevarication all his days; our world does not tolerate Harold’s complexities.

“Hitler is going to stab Stalin in the back?” he said.

“That’s what Jan claims.”

“And this means, I take it, that Hitler is
not
going to invade us? Jolly good. Do we know when this delightful event will occur?”

I shook my head. “They’ve been trying to get the date out of Jan. But he doesn’t seem to know. Tony is convinced he’s just pretending to be stupid.
They’re going to have to get tougher
. That’s what Burgess said.”

Harold glanced at me from under his brows. “You didn’t learn all that from a proof, my dear.”

“No. I’ve been listening to them. The men of Westminster. When they call on Leonard, late at night. Everything those two learn from Jan, they mean to pass on to the Russians.”

“Dear me,” Harold murmured, reaching once more for his pipe. “Did you tell Leonard how you felt, before you ran away?”

“No.”

“Simply wrote your farewell, and bolted?”

“He thinks I killed myself. He told Vita so, in a letter. He thinks it was all to do with me—my madness, not his.”

“Men are often obtuse in that way,” he said neutrally. There was an interval with the pipe, the tobacco pouch, the tamping down of fires. “I wonder if you haven’t blundered into something more significant than you know, Vee. And I’m beginning to regret my susceptibility to the charming Mr. Burgess, more than I can say.…”

The darkness had utterly fallen by this time, and the night was chill. Harold helped me back to the Priest’s House, where Vita was preparing to set out for her sitting room in the South Cottage. The sentinel was posted in Orlando’s tower. There was no drone of engines in the air. The Germans would not, after all, be coming.

Harold said nothing of all we’d discussed before his wife. When she had gone upstairs, however, he gathered his newspaper and a book and his spectacles and turned to me with his endearing—his perpetually gentle—smile.

“Vee, you must write to Leonard. You owe it to him. He can’t have realised how he hurt you. And it’s unfair to let him believe you’ve drowned. You’re all of life to him, you know—”

Not quite
all
of life. There will always be a part of Leonard’s mind I cannot enter—the part created and sustained so early in youth by the Apostles.

I did not promise Harold anything. But I slept, for the first time in weeks, without dreaming.

And woke to the news of my death in
The Times
.

Wednesday, 2 April 1941
Sissinghurst

IT WAS VITA WHO SAW THE PAPER FIRST.

She purchased the afternoon edition when she dropped Harold for his London train. I am sure that she is heartily wishing I were on it, too—Vita loathes the invasion of friends, however much she feels her isolation when they are gone. And she is worried about my future—I see it in her looks—although I am sure Harold told her little of our conversation. Vita assumes I have left Leonard because I could no longer bear to live with him. She asks nothing further; and for once, I am grateful for her easy assumptions.

I met Harold this morning as I walked amongst the limes; he was dressed in his Saturday clothes, as he calls them, being
most often at Sissinghurst at the week-end. He could not resist the call of the damp spring earth, although fully intending to return to the Ministry in a matter of hours; he knelt on the concrete pavers in tweeds quite bagged at the knees, turning the earth around the thin shoots of spring bulbs.

“My life’s work,” he said, when he saw me. “The Lime Walk. Vita never comes here, with her spade and her notions; this is
my
bit of earth. I carved it out of nothing, you know. A necessary axis to connect the Nuttery with the Kitchen Garden. I’m forever attempting to bring Platonic order to Vita’s wilderness; and I’m forever frustrated. Sissinghurst is magnificent, but obtuse. It resists all attempts to contain it.”

I studied him narrowly: loam on his fingers, light in his eye. This is what he’s fighting to save—a bed of earth on an April morning. “Vita’s endless columns about the making of gardens,” I observed, “are so much bosh, aren’t they? You’re the real genius of Sissinghurst. You’ve plotted every line.”

“I did a few sketches when we bought the place,” he conceded unwillingly, “but Mar is better at colour and flourish—the place would be a sad bore if left in my hands. Well—one has only to look at this!” He gestured dismissively towards the marching limes. “No labour, no time, no funds because of this bloody war… but if the fighting ends one day, I’ll turn it into a demi-Eden. Anemones in profusion. Tulips. Primroses. Have you thought what is to be done?”

“To your Lime Walk?”

“No. With Leonard and the others.”

I shifted from foot to foot.

“Here is what I propose,” he said briskly. “I shall write to Maynard—he’ll nip the foolishness in the bud. Whatever his friends have got up to, Maynard is a sensible man.”

My heart froze. He could have no idea of the midnight talks, the single bulb behind the blackout shade. The thread of
spittle on Blunt’s lips. The German boy bundled into the black car.

“Sense,” I choked.

“You’ve known Maynard all your life!”

“He is Westminster.
Baron
Tilton.”

“Vee—”

The hysteria closing my throat. I shook my head, emphatic, mute. The smell of lead on Leonard’s fingers. The taste of it when I screamed.

“This is war we’re talking of,” Harold urged.
“Treason
. Violence.”

There was sun on the heavy pavers, and the good green smell of earth rising in the air. The draught of a tomb. Harold’s fingers on my arm.

“Have you breakfasted, Vee?”

I shook my head again.
Food
. Revolting.

The boy Jock’s face, hovering like a ghost’s beyond the bacchante statue.

HAROLD LEFT FOR LONDON A FEW HOURS LATER.

While the house was empty, I sat down in the cheerless library and compiled my notes.
On the Making of a White Garden
. A pure space, serene.
Life, life, life!

“HOW INCONGRUOUS,” VITA MURMURED OVER TEA IN THE Priest’s Cottage as the dusk fell, “to be having buttered toast with Virginia, whilst reading Virginia’s obituary.…”

She passed me the section of paper.

There were two notices, one a simple statement of death so abrupt and painful that I could almost hear Leonard’s pen scratch as he wrote to George Dawson, the editor; and the
other a more fulsome celebration of my literary genius, drawn up by a member of
The Times
staff.

I put my hand to my throat.

“Poor Leonard,” Vita said. “Only think what this will bring down on his head! Letters of condolence from every person who ever met or loved you, and more from those who never did.”

I was strangely calm now, the flood of words having left me, the notebook tied with its neat label. “He might have had the decency to find a body.”

“P’raps he has. There are always a few lying about, in wartime.” Vita leaned over my shoulder to read the obituary. “They think rather a lot of
Mrs. Dalloway
, don’t they? And dear Lord, they’ve thrown in
Orlando
, with a gibe at me. But I would imagine Leonard’s still dragging the river. It’s tidal, isn’t it?”

“Yes. The current is cruelly strong.” Water, tugging like a toddler at my clinging skirts. The insistent bird.

“In her letter to me, Vanessa wrote that she hoped the Ouse would carry you out to sea—because you loved it so.”

“The Waves
meeting the waves. How like her. It’s the picture of death she contemplates; not the stench.”

“What shall you do?”

I might have said:
I have done it
. Instead I told her: “Compose a letter to
The Times
disputing their judgement of my work—and suggesting they verify their facts before publication.”

“I meant about Leonard. And your sister.”

I folded the paper and rose from the table. “Please thank Mrs. Staples for the butter. The apotheosis of ordinary bread, don’t you think? Especially in these oleo times.”

“I do,” Vita said. “But you cannot hide in my tower forever, dearest. I won’t let you.”

· · ·

AND NOW IT IS FINISHED. DINNER EATEN, THE FIRE BURNED low, the last measure of the world taken before the blackout goes down. I have seen what I should not in a small column of
The Times
. Another suicide, meaningless in Cambridge. He disappeared the day after I ran.

I was right to fear them, the men of Westminster, in their Apostolic hats.

I wait for the light to vanish behind Vita’s door. Then go in search of Jock, who sleeps above the stables.

(CONCLUDING NOTE BY LEONARD WOOLF:)

I know that V. will not come across the garden from the Lodge, and yet I look in that direction for her
.

I know that she is drowned and yet I listen for her to come in at the door
.

I know that this is her final page, and yet I turn it over
.

There is no limit to one’s stupidity and selfishness
.