The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (6 page)

Jo glanced around the shed, eyes narrowed against the dusk. “Didn’t Vita keep cows?”

“She kept any number of things that couldn’t be sustained.” Imogen’s tone was grudging. “Sheep. Hop fields. The Trust have seen their way clear to pigs.”

“You’re not enthusiastic.”

“Pigs, I ask you! Did they give any
thought
to how all this clutter
looks
from the garden? Much less smells? Sissinghurst is a cultural gem! With the odor of cow dung wafting over the Rose Garden!”

“I take it the project is recent?”

Imogen glowered with resentment. “Oh, it’s
new
all right. That’s why everybody’s so keen! We’re a test case for the National bloody Trust. We’re to prove whether
an integrated landscape in balance between cultivation and pleasure can be a self-sustaining prospect
. And without spraying, no less. There
was even a BBC special on the telly, waxing lyric about Vita’s feeling for the land, when she was the first person to crow about the pleasures of killing weeds with a healthy tot of DDT. Camera crews trudging through the muck down by Hammer Brook and swooning over the frog spawn. Try juggling all
that
internal politics with hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, and see where it puts you.”

“Thigh-high in manure,” Jo said, with pardonable amusement. “But you’re not responsible for the farm?”

“No,” Imogen admitted. “I’ve nothing to do with it, really. There’s a separate head, separate staff, separate…
world
, really… it’s just—” She paused, searching for the right words. “I get the concept. I
do
. Grow the food here that we sell to the people who visit. But the visitors come
because of the garden
. Not the pigs. You know what I mean? I just hope the Trust don’t lose sight of that.”

“It’s not like they value the garden less because they’ve undertaken organic farming, is it?” Jo asked mildly. “Doesn’t the farm just add to the whole picture?”

“At some cost,” Imogen retorted tartly. “You understand that Trust houses are forced to support themselves? That we’re not all the recipients of boundless government largesse? Here at Sissinghurst we’ve a fixed pool of income—mainly derived from ticket sales to the garden—that’s expected to pay all our salaries
and
the Castle maintenance
and
all the expense of keeping the horticultural show going—and we’ve been lucky to earn a
surplus
over the years. What if the hedges suddenly die or all the glasshouses fall in? Now it’s my funds that’re being tapped for the
farm
project. I wish The Family had never come up with the idea. You don’t have to deal with resident families at your historic houses in the States, do you?”

“Not at all.”

“Yes, well—it’s a peculiarly English privilege to hand your
house over to the Inland Revenue as satisfaction against taxes, and live there to the nth generation regardless. But we didn’t come here to talk about my job—it was the old books you were wanting. We’ve crates and crates of them here.”

She tugged at a chain and a single bulb blossomed into yellowish light. “Pam and Sibylle—the Mädchen—inherited the gardener’s books when they came, and kept scrupulous records themselves. I’ve never had time to go through the lot—though I’ve
wanted
to, of course. You might find something from the war.”

Together they lifted a box at random. Its flaps were taped shut, and neatly penned in black was a date:
1963–65
. “Too late,” Imogen murmured, and they retrieved a second one.
1979–81
. A third:
1985–87
. A fourth:
1991–93
.

“When did Pam and Sibylle arrive at Sissinghurst?”

“Nineteen fifty-nine,” Imogen answered tersely. “People like to say Vita made the garden, and that’s technically true; but those of us who work here know that without Pam and Sibylle, it wouldn’t exist. Not in its present form. Ah—this may offer something.”

The box was smaller, older, shabbier than the rest; a box made not of paper, but of wood. A crate, in fact, reinforced at the corners with rusted strips of metal and a lid that had warped from age and weather. A paper label was affixed to its surface with peeling tape; the black ink was blurred.
Miscellaneous
.

Jo knelt on the dirty floor and pried at the lid with her fingernails. It splintered under her hands.

Inside was a heap of what looked like notebooks, some of them bound in leather that was parched and crumbling. She lifted one into the light and carefully turned the pages.

“Vita’s garden diary, from 1938.”

“Really?” Imogen was suddenly interested. “That should
be properly locked away. Most of her originals are kept in archival conditions. I wonder if The Family know?”

“You’d better take it.”

“Care to look through it first?”

Jo shook her head. “I’m interested in 1940 and after.”

“Vass came over from Cliveden in ’40.” Imogen flipped through the garden book idly. “Before that, they employed an assortment of locals. That would be why Vita wrote this—she was very much in charge of the garden in 1938.”

“Here’s something.” Jo withdrew a slim little notebook with a bound edge—the sort of copybook a schoolboy might use. Someone had tied string around it, like a parcel. A neat label was affixed to the string.

“Jack’s Book,”
Imogen read aloud. “That would be Vass, then.”

“No,” Jo replied. Her voice was almost a whisper. “It says
Jock
, not Jack.”

Imogen stared at her. Before she could speak, Jo had slipped the string from the slight volume.

“What’re you doing?”

Jo held up an open page for inspection: cloudy furls of ink, the paper yellowed with age. “Is that Vita’s writing?”

Notes on the Making of a White Garden
, it said. And there was a date—
29 March 1941
.

“No.” Imogen crouched down to have a better look. “It’s not. Don’t think it’s Harold’s either, although I’d have to check. Probably Jack Vass, like I said. Distinctive handwriting, anyway—not just the copperplate people learnt in those days. Is it signed?”

Jo flipped through the pages. There looked to be at least fifty, close-written in the same furled and tentative script: much crossing out and editing of certain lines, a leaf torn
straight from the binding here and there. And every few pages, another date.

“A little over a week,” Jo mused, “in the spring of 1941. Not a garden book, but something else. A
diary?”

Imogen was suddenly conscious of the passage of time; of the darkness beginning to fall beyond the door of the shed; of the staff who’d be finishing elsewhere in the garden, and looking for her.

“Take it with you,” she urged. “Have a go tonight, back at the George. You can return it in the morning.”

“Thanks,” Jo said—and slipped swiftly toward the door, as though afraid Imogen would change her mind. An odd woman, Imogen thought again; if she wasn’t on something, she ought to be.

29 March 1941
Sissinghurst

NOTES ON THE MAKING OF A WHITE GARDEN

WHEN A BODY DIES THE GHOST IT IS SAID SOMETIMES haunts us. But when a book is read, and shut up and put away, what happens to that ghost? The life we have known solely through words, may yet haunt the mind; it jumbles with our days, becomes something else entirely, unrecognisable
.

It would be an achievement, she thought, to be unrecognisable
.

It began as the desire for escape—from her husband and the smears of lead on his fingers. From the boiled cabbage smell of the kitchen. From the perpetual fear of the creeping water spreading like infantry across the meadows, creeping up to the house under cover of night. The ruin of the smashed dykes, the water no one could contain. She had never felt safe when the water was rising
.

Escape, then, from the dead pages and winter. Put on the old furs, limp as stoats piled carelessly by the gamekeeper’s back door—her husband was notoriously mean with his money, he never allowed her to buy anything new, she had to beg for her fare to London sometimes. For weeks, now, in anticipation of freedom, she had been careful with her shillings and pence; she had gone the length of selling ration tickets in the village
.

Pull on the stout Wellingtons, smelling of rubber tyres, of war fare and aeroplanes. Take up the walking stick; you might hit him if he comes after you. Hurry, hurry, he’s working still before lunch, Hurry up it’s time, leave the note with your shaking fingers he will look first above the mantel. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.… Run from the hanks of wool, sewage-coloured, in the knitting basket beside the chair
—

The writing broke off. Or trailed away, perhaps, was more accurate. The whole passage was difficult to read—Jo had to study each word, search for context, and still the writing made no sense. She had expected something forthright, something about Sissinghurst and Jock that would explain her grandfather’s suicide.

Carefully, she set the old copybook on her knees and turned a yellowed page. She had bolted her dinner in the George’s bar and retreated immediately to her room so that she could open this book. It had seemed wrong, somehow, to leaf through it as she ate her meat pie and the locals pulled their pints. But now, propped up against the pillows, she felt the thin wedge of disappointment. What
was
all this? Should she skip ahead—look for the word
Jock
again, somewhere in the middle?

If it had not been for the bird singing, she might have gone into the water that day. She had been looking for stones to weight her
pockets, something heavy, she might have slid them into her Wellingtons. What was it? A thrush? Nondescript, English, like the flooded meadows. Brown as dyke water. Life! it sang. She could not quite meet its sharp black eye. Had the bird flown, leaving her to Fate with an indifferent wing, she would have set her foot upon the muddy bank and closed her eyes
.

The bird did not fly
.

Life! it sang. Vita!

She gave herself up to the pure liquid sound, so different from the metal drone of aeroplane engines. A great peace descended. It filled up the meadows like clear water. She did not hear the warring voices, accusing, arguing. She did not smell the smears of lead on his fingers. Her sagging flesh. The hopeless despair, heavy as coffins
.

Yes, she thought. I shall go to Vita
.

And she tumbled the stones from her pocket
.

In her bedroom at the George, Jo Bellamy held the fragile notebook directly under the circle of her bedside lamp. The faded chocolate ink—had she read it clearly? The name was certainly Vita. Written with a sharp stab in the initial
V
, the
T
rakishly crossed. The book, and its writer, had found their way to Sissinghurst; and not for the first time, it seemed.

Jo smoothed the crinkled page.

Haste, haste, to the village station. Trudge through the muddy meadows, the path submerged. Tempting, the river always tempting—Swing your stick the bird has flown. Cowering near a platform pillar, hat pulled low. This is no time to smile at the station master, he cares not a snap for your kindness, the entire village thinks you mad. He will read the note when you fail to appear for luncheon. He will come hunting. Lapinova in the snare
.

To London, first. The ruins of Mecklenburgh Square. I should
like to touch the stones. An ordinary death, a death like anyone else’s, it might have been an accident, there was nothing we could do for the lady, sir, she was blown to bits packing books in the cellar
—

The Lady.

The simple words pulled Jo’s mind from the text and back to Jock: what was it he had written in his wartime letter? Something about the poor lady’s huge eyes, how he’d tried to help her, but had only made things worse. “Lady” was a common-enough word; the two references might have nothing to do with each other. But she needed to reread Jock’s letter; it was tucked into her suitcase.

The train pulls in with a failing sigh. She mounts the steps of the second-class carriage. The station master is busy with an Important Person, a man for Westminster, all black leather cases, he sees nothing of her treacherous escape. She is mad in any case, the whole town knows. The mad are so difficult except when they write. She takes her seat in the compartment, a seat near the window, her gaze fixed on the countryside. If the bomb fell now and took the train no one could blame her. The station falls back, the speed mounts like a horse between her thighs. He has not looked for her. He has not run screaming behind the train, his right arm raised
.

Another ghost, shut up and shelved…

“But a ghost from a book?” Jo murmured, frowning. “Or the ghost of someone real?”

She had no idea. The fragments of strange script swirling across the fragile pages might be an attempt at fiction. Or they might be an account of something else. A woman who felt hunted to the point of drowning herself; a woman who escaped in fear. To Sissinghurst?