The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (5 page)

“I’m researching my grandfather,” she said. “He grew up somewhere near Knole House.”

“When?” Mr. Trevelyan inquired.

“He was born in 1924. June sixteenth, actually.”

“In Sevenoaks? Or on the estate itself?”

“I don’t know. He’s dead,” she added, by way of explanation.

“Let’s start with official records. Polling data, parish registry, that sort of thing.” He led Jo toward the card catalogs. “And the name?”

She told him. While Mr. Trevelyan pulled drawers from cabinets, Jo debated whether to broach the subject of police records and an unknown woman’s death nearly seventy years before, the sudden terrible divide that might have fallen between childhood and
going for a soldier
.

“Bellamy?” Mr. Trevelyan repeated. “That’s a very old name. Norman in origin.
Belle Amie.”

Jo smiled to herself. Jock was no aristocrat. If the blood of the conquerors descended in her veins, it was surely from the wrong side of the blanket—a
belle amie
, a beautiful mistress with an illegitimate child.

“Here it is.” The archivist’s finger was poised over a catalog entry. “Quite straightforward. We’ll just fetch the parish records, shall we?”

From the parish records Jo learned enough to fill half an index card. The names of Jock’s parents, Rose and Thomas
Bellamy; the date of Jock’s birth, which she already knew; that of his younger brother, Christopher, called Kip; and a street address in Sevenoaks: 17 Bells Lane. There was also a single date of death for Rose, Thomas, and Kip, in February 1944.

“That would be a bomb, of course,” Mr. Trevelyan observed. “One hit Knole itself that month. Damaged a good bit of the building.”

It was so bald, that date. So quiet, in the records of the parish registry. When what it really recorded was the end of Jock’s known world. He had emigrated to America with Dottie after V-E Day.

“Thomas Bellamy’s profession is noted as gardener,” Trevelyan added. “Nine chances out of ten, he was employed at Knole House. The family gave the place into the National Trust in 1946—with a two-hundred-year lease on the private apartments and complete retention of the park—but in the first half of the century, Knole kept most of Sevenoaks in bread and butter. The garden is five hundred years old, and largish—a full mile of ragstone wall encloses it. They’d have needed a small army of gardeners, I should think. Shall we consult the estate records?”

It was here that Jo came into a kingdom.

The catalog of Knole’s books was astonishingly vast and various: steward’s accounts dating to the fifteenth century; gamekeepers’ records of pheasants bagged and deer killed; workshop accounts of upholsterers and woodsmen and joiners and glaziers; tenants’ accounts; harvest figures; housekeeping and stillroom books; lists of servants, the same local surnames appearing generation after generation. And records of the state visits of kings and queens: Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. James II. Edward VII.

She ignored all of these. Only one group of documents held any interest for her: Knole’s garden archives.

She would have liked to waste an hour scanning the drawings from
Britannia Illustrata
in 1707, or the accounts of George London, royal gardener, who’d supplied fruit trees in 1698; or Thomas Badeslade’s record of the bowling green’s construction, or the third Duke’s pineapple hothouse, or the Orangery that dated from the Regency period. But she had too little time. Another stranger was scheduled to take her numbered seat in less than forty minutes. She was forced to concentrate on the years between 1918 and 1939—England’s Long Weekend between two devastating wars—when Thomas Bellamy, gardener of 17 Bells Lane, had raised his sons.

Skimming the lines of the Head Gardener’s book with her forefinger, Jo stumbled on April 1919.

Took on Harry Leeds, Joe Weston, Tom Bellamy as undergardeners with pay of fifteen shillings per week, Tom to receive eighteen, as he was trained up as a lad here before the war, and his brother Frank lost at Ypres
.

No mention of Jock’s father after that beyond the occasional reference to duties in the herbaceous beds or among the rhododendrons, until September of 1923:

Tom Bellamy raised to Hothouse Overseer, as he has proved himself a steady man enough, and has a child coming
.

And finally, an entry from the spring of 1936 that gave Jo a strange shiver:

Hired Tom Bellamy’s son as jobbing lad this day and set him to work weeding knot garden. A quiet boy enough and no nonsense, John by name but called Jock he bids fair to be strong and canny with his hands though not yet of age to leave school
.

Tom Bellamy’s name disappeared from the accounts after that, until September 1939:

War with Germany declared this day and the Staff can talk of nothing else than soldiering. Tom Bellamy to join up
.

No word of Jock.

Jo’s fingers fluttered nervously over the final days of 1939, and on into the spring of 1940.
Tom Bellamy refused the service due to dicky heart
. Knole’s garden ranks dropped by two-thirds; only the unfit, the old, and the young remained to work the beds and maintain the plantings. Copper sulfate for the roses was impossible to find, due to the demands of munitions factories; the kitchen garden was all anybody cared about now, for the production of desperately needed food.

And then, suddenly, something unexpected:

Hired as jobbing lad this day Tom Bellamy’s son Christopher, called Kip. Jock Bellamy sent over to Mrs. Nicolson, Miss Vita as was, due to shortage of men at Sissinghurst
.

Sissinghurst. Her grandfather had once bent and strained over the very beds she’d photographed in recent days—and she hadn’t known.

Was it possible that
Vita
was the Lady? But no—Jock had distinctly written about the woman’s death. And Vita had survived the war by several decades.

Jo sank back against the unforgiving Searchroom chair, baffled. It made sense that Lady Nicolson, desperate for garden help, would look for it at Knole—Vita made a habit of borrowing from her childhood home. Furniture, pictures, garden urns—and now a teenage boy who
bid fair to be strong and canny with his hands
.

Jo skimmed ahead, hoping against hope for something more—but the Head Gardener’s account ended abruptly in June 1941 with the words:
Called up for service this day, and will report for duty tomorrow at dawn
. Five years of silence were
contained in the single page separating this entry from the next—which was dated September 1946, and written in a stranger’s hand.
Knole House to be given into the National Trust
.

Jo went in search of Mr. Trevelyan.

“Do you keep anything about the Sissinghurst Castle Garden in this archive? From the war years, I mean?”

He straightened from the pile of books he’d been tidying. “No. Particularly
not
the garden. Sissinghurst passed to the Trust in the late sixties, you know—and the Head Gardeners employed by the Nicolsons at the time were retained for decades after. They’d have kept their own records. Probably passed them on to their successors, whoever they are. You might check with the National Trust.”

Jo thanked him, and turned in her numbered seat tag. She felt a pang of guilt. She should have kept to her proper job that morning—should indeed have earned Gray’s money. The answers were with Imogen Cantwell, at Sissinghurst.

“WE’D GIVEN YOU UP,” THE HEAD GARDENER CALLED GENIALLY through the open office door. “Thought you’d had a late lie-in and spa treatment at the George.”

Imogen was bent over her computer, the kind of work she detested, but the obvious task for a day of steady rain. Let Ter and the others slog around in their Wellies while she tended to the business of the Castle gift shop: stocking orders for tea towels and gardening books and potpourri that captured the scent of Vita’s musk roses. A few plants associated with Sissinghurst were sold there as well—stout rosemary shrubs and viola. All of this fell under Imogen Cantwell’s purview. She worked incessantly. She had no family, only a trio of indifferent cats she loved with pathetic ferocity.

“I suppose it’s the jet lag,” the American said vaguely.

Jo Bellamy did look strained for a person who’d slept late. Her skin was pallid, and the hollows of her eyes almost bruised. But something—a barely discernible crackle of excitement—churned beneath the surface, Imogen decided. It was evident in the lower lip she worried surreptitiously with her teeth, in the flutter of her restless hands.

Imogen’s eyes slid to the wall clock hanging near the room’s sole window: nearly half-past two. “Care for a cuppa?” she suggested, and closed her file.

While they waited for the electric kettle to sing, she found mugs and Jo puttered about the small space, pulling books off shelves distractedly, then shoving them back. “You got on with Terence, I gather?” Imogen said. “Went over all those plant lists I gave you?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

Imogen had expected rather more; Ter reported that the American was put off by the discipline of the bedding trials. Had said something about the value of
propagating disorder rather than perfection
. Imogen had muttered to herself when she heard this; Jo sodding Bellamy didn’t need to justify
her
job to the National Trust, thank you very much, she wasn’t charged with bringing immortality to an aging icon.

The kettle sang.

Imogen poured, and handed a mug to Jo.

“I’ve been thinking about the war years,” the American said.

“The war years? You mean—the Second World War?”

“Exactly. What was it like here then?”

Imogen rested her broad bottom against the edge of her desk, puzzled. “I don’t know. Bombs, I think. Kent was a highway for the Luftwaffe, straight across the Channel from Paris. What part of the war do you mean, exactly?”

Jo shrugged. “I know the Nicolsons stayed here for most of it. Or Vita did. Harold was up in London, weekdays. I’ve read the biographies.”

“Right,” Imogen said briskly. “But you’re interested in the garden. Not the family.”

“True.” Jo met her gaze directly. “And the family made the garden. The war should have killed it. How did they manage, with everybody fighting the Germans, and no supplies or anything, and air raids every other minute?”

“I suppose a lot was… put on hold.” Imogen took a gulp of tea. “Your own bit’s an example of that. Vita came up with the idea for the White Garden during the war. But it wasn’t possible to actually
make
the thing for years after. Like you say—no labor, no plants, no money. They were more interested in begging petrol than peonies in those years.”

“Are there any records? From the gardeners—if there were any—who tended Sissinghurst then?”

Imogen frowned; there was a strange glitter to Jo Bellamy’s eyes.
The woman’s on something
, she thought.
She’s barmy
. “I can’t see why it matters! The White Garden didn’t exist.”

“I just need to know.” Jo set down her mug and folded her arms protectively across her chest. “Okay, it has nothing to do with why I’m here. But my grandfather was from Kent—he was in the war.…I’ve started to wonder what
happened
here.”

Imogen sighed, and rubbed the back of her neck with one hand.

“I’m two Heads removed from Pam and Sibylle, who made Sissinghurst what it is. The Mädchen, Vita called them. They spent nearly forty years here after Jack Vass—the only other real gardener Sissinghurst ever had. He started during the war, then joined up and returned to Sissinghurst when the fighting was over. Vass was quite a local sensation—he’d
worked at Cliveden before us, and escaped from a German POW camp or something—but he went Communist, and Vita was scared. So she fired him.”

“There are no records from those years?” Something in Jo had flickered and gone out as Imogen was talking.

“Not much.” She straightened, intrigued despite her growing mistrust. “Look—it’s raining. I’ve done all I can do here. Why don’t we have a rummage through the stores?”

IMOGEN LED JO THROUGH THE RAIN TO THE BRICK-WALLED nursery west of the Rose Garden, where sheds and glasshouses and cold frames and plunge beds were scattered with a haphazard air, as if they had sprung up over successive decades, as indeed they had. Jo had toured the area previously, and she recognized that the crux of Sissinghurst’s success was the range of horticultural techniques Imogen commanded beneath the low-slung roofs of the various sheds. The magnificence of the carefully tended beds—all that most visitors saw of the garden—was inconceivable without the regimented cycles of propagation, potting, cold frame, and division that went on, with only the briefest of pauses in spring planting season, throughout the year.

“This used to be Harold and Vita’s kitchen garden,” Imogen tossed over her shoulder as she bypassed the Cambridge glasshouse and made for a small tool shed. “Dead useful during the war, of course, but neglected once the two of them passed on. Here we are—mind your head—this is a sad excuse for a lumber room, but we’ve been forced to make do.”

It was a ramshackle wooden building, airless and poorly lit, with a strong suggestion of spiders and other unmentionables lurking in the corners. A wall of boxes, staking materials, and pruning ladders rose before them, cheek-by-jowl with
hedge-trimming templates and folded hessian squares. A strong smell of dirt and damp wafted to the nose. Imogen cursed inwardly; surely the place was swept when the boxes were shifted from the old cow barn? But who would expect cleanliness in a tool shed, after all? Not even an American could be so daft.

“This isn’t the
working
tool shed, you understand,” she told Jo. “Just a place for overflow. Now that The Family have gone all gaga over organic farming we’ve been forced to bid for space.”

“Wasn’t there always a farm?”

“Well, yes,” Imogen said, “but it was nothing to do with the Trust. The fields were leased, time out of mind, to the same handful of families. Just lately the whole thing’s shifted—come under the aegis of the Trust—and the new people snatched up the old outbuildings we’d come to think of as ours. The cow barn, for instance.”