“Where in the States?” Margaux enthused. “I just got back from New York last week! Still dead tired, of course — conferences are such a body slam, aren’t they, and then we were clubbing until all hours, I’m afraid. I’ve been twined in the sheets ever since, can’t drag myself out of bed — ” A smoldering glance here for Peter.
Jo struggled to find something to say, but I’m from Delaware just didn’t seem appropriate.
“Miss Bellamy’s on rather a short lead today,” Peter supplied. “Expected in Kent this evening. So perhaps we — ”
“Sit down! Sit down! And let me see your treasure. You found it at Sissinghurst, Peter says? Among Vita’s things? I’ve been tearing out my hair ever since I heard! I spent months going through the Sackville-West papers for my last book — Sapphist Writers in Arcadia. I can’t imagine how I missed your notebook.”
“It was among the gardener’s things,” Jo managed.
“Ah. That explains it.” Margaux, from her tone, didn’t do outbuildings.
Jo took a chair; Peter took the couch, and Margaux flung herself down beside him, legs drawn up helter-skelter beneath her. One arm rested lightly on Peter’s shoulder; she was leaning over him like an eager child awaiting a bedtime story. Peter’s frame stiffened and his breathing, Jo noticed, accelerated slightly. The expression she’d come to recognize — polite and apologetic — was replaced with one of almost wooden resolve. How much of Margaux’s behavior was reflexive — the social habit of a mesmerizing woman — and how much was targeted deliberately at Peter? Was Margaux mad about him — or simply enjoying her obvious power over him?
Peter cleared his throat, then nodded at Jo. “If we could see the notebook, Miss Bellamy?”
She took it from her purse and handed it to Margaux. “I may have noticed it when other people didn’t, because it was labeled with my grandfather’s first name. Jock. He worked at Sissinghurst in 1941.”
Margaux turned the notebook over in her hands, studying the binding, and then her immense brown eyes came up to meet Jo’s. “Where’s the label now?”
“In my hotel in Cranbrook.”
“The George?” She didn’t bother to wait for Jo’s answer but opened the notebook and took a sudden deep breath. “Good Lord. It certainly looks like Virginia’s handwriting.” Her gaze moved over the page. “But the dates! Peter — you must know the dates are all wrong.”
“Of course.” He said it calmly and without apology. “That’s why we’re here. The dates raise significant questions — if the writing is absolutely Woolf’s.”
Margaux went still for the space of three seconds. Jo saw the sex-kitten pose die out of her body as swiftly as the sun retreats behind cloud; then she uncurled herself from the sofa and crossed to her desk. She gathered a magnifying lens and a pair of gloves, shifted her laptop to the low table near the sofa, and ignored them both for the next fifteen minutes.
Peter, during the course of Margaux’s examination, visibly relaxed. His rigid limbs eased into the corner of the sofa; one loafered foot crossed over his knee; he even managed a smile and a raised brow for Jo. She was watching the don, however. Margaux was parsing the notebook’s difficult handwriting effortlessly, employing her magnifying lens once in five pages. Every so often, she let out a chortle or gave a distracted nod.
“Where’s the rest?” she demanded when she came to the end. She was studying the two-word phrase Apostles Screed with a faint line between her eyes. “Who’s had a go with the knife?”
“We’re not sure,” Peter said. “There may not be any more.”
Margaux rose restlessly and began to pace. “God, I wish I could smoke.”
“Still off the weed, then?” Peter observed. “Good girl. Stuff was killing you. And it absolutely destroys the palate.”
Jo glanced at her watch; nearly four-fifteen. If she was going to make it back to London by dinner, she’d have to push. “So what do you think? About the notebook? Could Woolf have written it?”
Margaux stood still for an instant, her back to both of them. She was staring out the leaded windows of her rooms, at the blazing autumn of Magdalen’s quad. She looked, Jo thought, like some sort of diva; Brünnhilde in boots, from a modernist staging of Wagner. She was beautiful and terrible and potent and strange. She gathered her long hair into a swift knot. Her hands, Jo noticed, were shaking.
“I can’t give you an opinion. Not absolutely. Not tonight. I’d need more time.”
“But you’re not totally ruling it out,” Peter interjected. “That it could be Woolf, I mean.”
Margaux sank back onto the sofa. This time, she kept her hands to herself and her eyes on the text. “All right. I’ll run through my notes. As you’ve already observed, whoever wrote this knew enough about Virginia’s life and history to be comfortable putting her at Sissinghurst. I presume the writer also knew something about your Jock.” A swift obsidian glance at Jo. “But there are other things. Whole phrases lifted from certain works. The first few lines are almost a direct quote of an unpublished fragment — the bit about characters in books, haunting the minds of those who read them, like ghosts. She cribs ‘Clarissa Dalloway in Bond Street,’ too, when she describes her walk through the London Blitz. And she mentions Lapinova in the snare — that’s from a rather obscure short story about a couple who pretend they’re rabbits, and are fond of each other as rabbits might be, until the husband declares that Lapinova — who stood for the wife — was strangled in a snare. It’s generally interpreted as Woolf’s veiled comment on her marriage. She and Leonard used to pretend they were monkeys, but it’s assumed Leonard wearied of that bit of playacting. The snare can be read as his attempt to strangle her selfhood. Virginia was constantly fighting his control, you know — there’s even a body of theory that regards her as entirely sane, and suggests her ‘madness’ was invented by those around her as a method of stifling her independent genius.”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Is suicide the act of a sound mind?”
“Perhaps. If death represents the ultimate freedom.”
“But she’d had bouts of madness before Woolf ever entered the picture! She’d tried suicide around World War One!”
“It is a woman’s ultimate weapon to fight the social forces limiting her self-expression by withdrawing from that same society — by negating it through noninvolvement. Woolf established that idea as early as 1907 — ”
It was an old argument between them, Jo could see, and it was growing more heated. “We don’t know that she committed suicide,” she interposed. “The notebook doesn’t tell us.”
They both turned to stare at her. Something in Margaux’s face changed. She nodded once, swiftly, and leaned away from Peter. “Bang on. The notebook raises all kinds of questions. Did she leave Leonard, wanting desperately to live? And did he find her? Force her to go back? Driving her, in the end, into that swollen river?”
“Or was she pushed?” Peter said, with a sidelong glance at Jo.
Somewhere, a bell tolled twice, the half-hour.
“Bollocks,” Margaux spat viciously. She rose and moved dismissively toward her desk. “Time for sherry with the department. There’s a visiting French scholar I simply must greet — he may be hired — and then there’s the Yearsley dinner — always such a bore, but an absolute command performance, Peter, you remember. I really must dash.”
“But, Margaux — ”
“I can’t give you an opinion. I need more time. Look — what would be really ideal — what would help us all out — would be if you left this with me for a bit.”
“A bit?” Jo repeated. It was a phrase the English seemed too fond of: elastic and conveniently vague. “I have to get back to London tonight. I have to leave right now. I appreciate your time — ”