Chapter Sixteen
THE CONNAUGHT’S PRIVATE BUTLER SERVED BREAKFAST in Gray Westlake’s solitary suite that Tuesday morning: coffee, Danish, fresh fruit, steel-cut rolled oats. Gray drank the coffee, which was poured out from a silver service by gloved hands, as he stood near the full-length windows studying the miserable London weather. It was dark at nine a.m. It would be dark again by four-thirty He was familiar enough with the city to have expected this, and in the heat of Buenos Aires two days ago he had yearned for it. Autumn in England. Scotch by the fire. Tweeds and cashmere and the warmth of Jo Bellamy beside him. He had imagined buying her things. Giving her treats. Long dinners with wine and conversation. Touching her constantly, and feeling her hands on his skin.
He’d imagined breakfast differently, too; he hadn’t expected to be alone.
A spitting rain turned the limestone of Mayfair a dingy yellow, and almost everyone hurrying along the sidewalks below was dressed in black or tan. Umbrellas bobbed and cars sent swooshes of dirty water over the pavement. It was unutterably dreary and his solitude was annoying. Gray ignored the discreet click of the butler’s exit, and asked himself for the hundredth time why he had not checked out of the Connaught already.
Because you don’t give up, said a voice in his mind. You wait. For the refusal and the doubt to turn to acceptance.
Acceptance? Is that all he wanted from Jo?
Restlessly, Gray set his cup in the middle of the snow-white tablecloth, frowning at the food he had no desire to eat. He was used to being thwarted. That was a fact of a financier’s life. He was used to calculating odds, and manipulating perceptions, and forcing his desired conclusion through a mix of will and ruthlessness. But he did not know how to win Jo Bellamy. She was utterly unlike the women he knew best — women who might be clever or accomplished or ruthless on their own ground, but who masked that steel with deliberate polish. Women like Alicia, who had been his lawyer before she was his lover and eventually his wife. He understood women who could calculate his net worth, their degree of sexual leverage, and his possible generosity in prenuptial agreements — and make decisions based on self-interest.
Jo was nothing like that. Jo was simple. Frank. Open-hearted. True. She tortured Gray, kept him wakeful at night, as though she were a path into a hidden country of unimaginable happiness that he could choose to follow, or ignore at his cost. Now, standing by the rainy window, he understood that he’d miscalculated. Jo’s path — Jo’s invitation — was hers to extend, not his to take. And she had closed a gate carefully between them, and walked briskly off into the distant trees.…
He could give Jo nothing, Gray thought, that she would ever really need. He could not buy her. Not even with this gift of designing his garden…
He should fire her. She was afraid of that, Gray knew. He’d heard the desire to placate in her voice last night, when she’d called from Oxford.
Oxford. His pulse quickened suddenly, and he thrust his hands in the pockets of his wool pants, fiddling with loose change. Consulting a book expert, she’d said. But Jo would never have found such a person on her own.…
There’d been that call from Sotheby’s yesterday. She’d raced off to meet someone in the Connaught’s car. Who was this joker, Gray thought, that Jo preferred to him?
Half his furniture had been bought at Sotheby’s. On impulse, Gray picked up the phone.
“I’d like to speak to somebody who knows books,” he told the auction house’s central receptionist. And waited for Marcus Symonds-Jones to come on the line.
Chapter Seventeen
THEY REACHED THE PLACE CALLED CHARLESTON A few minutes before noon.
“We’ll hope someone’s there,” Peter told her as they slipped down the A27. “It’s not a Trust property, and the hours are a bit odd. But if we can’t get in, that means Margaux is equally stymied. We’ll persuade her to give up the notebook, join forces, and treat us to lunch.”
His irritation with Margaux had evaporated once they left Oxford, as though Jo’s clue somehow absolved the woman of guilt. It was possible, however, that Peter was simply looking forward to a good meal. For a man who was fit and lean, Jo thought, he spent a significant part of his day considering where to dine.
“Food is important to you, isn’t it?” she observed. “Do you cook much?”
“Every chance I get. Love nothing better,” he confided. “I’ve actually called in sick just so I could spend a few hours at a farmer’s market, and the rest of the day in my hole of a kitchen. Margaux and I used to say — ”
He stopped.
“Yes?” Jo prompted.
“Sorry. It’s just that it still catches me unaware — how much I assume we’re together. When clearly we’re not. Force of habit, you see. It’s a sickness. She left me seven months and fourteen days ago, Jo, although who’s counting, really? — and still, I speak of her as though I’m sure of her. As though the future we mapped out together — the farmhouse somewhere in the country, the room-of-one’s-own where she’d write — was still going to happen. When it’s all effing gone and she’s shagging idiots like Ian, you know? My whole life is completely gone.”
“I’m sorry,” Jo said inadequately. “You were hoping you’d… marry her?”
“I bloody well did marry her.” His retort was outraged. “That’s my ex-wife who’s stolen your notebook, Jo Bellamy, and don’t you forget it.”
“Oh, God,” she said, and stopped before she added the inevitable: Why in the hell did I trust you, Peter? Your Woolf expert is just the woman you can’t leave behind. However justified, the words didn’t come. Peter was trying. He was AWOL from work; he would probably be fired. They could both, Jo reflected, be arrested for stealing a treasure from Sissinghurst Castle. What was the equivalent of a federal offense in England, and did it apply to property taken from National Trust houses?
“The notebook mentions Vanessa, remember.” Peter swung sharply off the A27; they were a mile from a village called Firle. “How the writer envied her. Wanted her life. Almost fell for her husband, and so on. It was that bit, really, that convinced me it must be Virginia — I mean, who wouldn’t hate having Vanessa Bell for a sister?”
“Was she that awful?” Jo asked.
Peter sighed. He was suppressing the impulse, possibly, to decry the general ignorance of Americans. “Vanessa was a superstar. Simply gorgeous. The kind of woman that men write poetry about. Everybody was in love with her — except, possibly, the people who knew her best.”
“Like Virginia?”
“Well — being a sister complicates adoration, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m an only child.”
“Ah.” He glanced sideways at her. “Virginia had the opposite problem. Lost in a pack of brats, really. Vanessa was the elder; Thoby, whom your notebook also mentions — ”
“He’s the one who died?”
“A lot of them died. Thoby fell between the two girls in birth order; then there was Adrian, who was younger and never liked his sisters much; and four older half-siblings from each of the parents’ first marriages. Virginia’s mother died when she was thirteen, and then her elder half-sister went, and her father, and finally Thoby — of typhoid, after they’d all been to Turkey together. Enough to drive anybody to suicide, one would think.”
“Ye-es,” Jo said. She was sensitive on the subject. “But given that people were dying like flies all around her — I’m surprised she didn’t cling to Vanessa.”