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.
Chapter Thirty-Six
“SO WHAT HAPPENED TO HER, PETER?”
They had come to the end of the slim bound volume. It was one hour before dawn, and the coffee was tepid and bitter.
“God knows.” He closed the book gently, his fingers lingering on the cloth cover. “Poor Leonard. Whatever he did — or whatever she thought he did — he felt her death acutely.”
“Egotistical of him,” Jo said. “Disgustingly full of himself.”
Peter looked at her keenly. “I didn’t mean… I wasn’t referring to…”
“To me or my guilt? Of course you weren’t. I’ll stop trying to be the center of Leonard’s drama as well as my own.” It was a bitter little speech, and Peter really didn’t deserve it. “Ignore me, Peter — this is just my nasty way of telling you you’re right. Leonard was no more responsible for Virginia’s choices than I am for Jock’s death, but each of us chose to wallow in guilt. There’s a certain amount of victimhood in that. I can see it more clearly in someone other than myself.”
“It’s the normal response,” Peter attempted. “You’d be less than human if you didn’t feel regret about Jock’s suicide.”
“Regret!” She closed her eyes briefly; the lids were grainy as sandpaper. “This whole tortured trail’s awash in it! Vanessa, painting her mural of Virgin and Apostle. Vita and her White Garden. Leonard and his bound volume. They were all struggling with guilt. Begging for forgiveness. So which of them killed her?”
“To answer that, we need to know what she did after she wrote her last word.”
“Went looking for my grandfather,” Jo said.
“And gave him Notes on the Making of a White Garden?”
“Maybe.” She slid off the bed, her body stiff from lying too long in the same position. “That would explain the label on the notebook. And Jock, being a kid with nobody to turn to, passed it on to Harold Nicolson — who tore out half the pages.”
“That works,” Peter said. “We know Harold got the manuscript somehow, because he told Keynes as much. By the time he wrote that letter, he’d probably seen the Cambridge death notice in the paper, and didn’t like the implications.”
“Jan Ter Braak.”
“Yes. It’s the turncoat spy’s suicide — or murder — that seems to have put the wind up everybody, wouldn’t you say?”
“Dead because he didn’t know the date of Hitler’s Russian invasion.” Jo scrabbled her hair into a pathetic ponytail, her fingers working as she spoke. “Virginia gives the book to Jock — who gives it to Harold — ”
“ — but somehow the dangerous bits end up in Leonard Woolf’s hands. Because we know he printed and then burned them.”
“Why in heaven’s name would Harold Nicolson betray Virginia?”
“Because she was dead,” Peter answered flatly.
He didn’t have to add: How or why, we’ll never know.
“I can’t accept it, Peter. We’ve come too far. If only we had more information — a sense of where all these people were, in the days after the notebook ends. If there was someone who knew more about Virginia and her friends — where they might have converged — ”
His expression stopped her.
“What?” she demanded.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “You’re conjuring Margaux. And whatever she pinched from the Ark. Aren’t you?”
SHE ASKED THEM TO MEET HER IN OXFORD’S BODLEIAN Library by nine A.M. Thursday morning.
“I don’t trust her,” Jo insisted. “She doesn’t help for free. There’s an agenda behind all this, Peter.”
“You don’t know her. She’s anxious to make amends.”