The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf Read online

  “They might have a room at the home farm,” Imogen said. “I could ring. Or there’s a much posher place in Cranbrook called the George. Flat-screen telly, and all that. How long do you reckon you’ll stay?”

  “A few days.”

  “You’ll want to draw up a plan, I expect — consult our records for the past several seasons, take pictures and measurements, and so on?”

  “If you’ll allow me.” Jo peered under the rose arbor at the elaborate mesh of trained Rosa mulliganii canes, intersecting to form a perfect pyramid. “It’s going to be a bear to maintain this garden once we plant it. The Westlakes, of course, have no idea what they’ve asked for. How many people do you employ?”

  “Eight actual gardeners,” Imogen answered. “But that’s National Trust funds, and we cover the entire six acres, not just the White Garden. Vita and Harold — her husband, Harold Nicolson — made do with two. But they also worked the place themselves, of course. Your Mrs. Westlake — ”

  “ — Never gets her hands dirty. These beds must glow like stardust at night. Did the Nicolsons ever see the great ghostly barn owl sweep silently across the pale garden?” Jo asked, ducking from under the arbor.

  Imogen stared at her. It was a quotation from one of Vita’s gardening columns, written ages ago for the Observer, when the White Garden was just an idea in the Nicolsons’ brains. The pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow…

  “I’ve no idea,” she replied. “I’m not often here at night. You’ve read about her, then?”

  “For years. I grew up with Sissinghurst. I think I mentioned my grandfather was from Kent.”

  “Was he a gardener?”

  “Professionally, you mean? Yes. A long time ago. I inherited his green thumb.”

  She held up her hands, which were already stained brown with dirt, and dusted them matter-of-factly on her corduroy jeans.

  And for reasons she could not afterward explain, Imogen Cantwell felt a sudden frisson of fear — as though a serpent, in the form of this mild American woman, had suddenly slithered through Sissinghurst’s garden.

  Chapter Two

  CRANBROOK SAT A FEW MILES DOWN THE A262 FROM Sissinghurst. It was famous for being the smallest town in Kent, for being unreachable by train, and for possessing a windmill — all of which Jo Bellamy learned from a town council flyer over breakfast the next morning. This was a solitary if splendid affair involving silver chafing dishes and broiled pale pink tomatoes, both of which Jo ignored in favor of more humble carbohydrates. Posh, Imogen Cantwell had called the George; but hip was more accurate — it was a place that cried out for French manicures and Manolo spikes. Jo possessed neither. She could not imagine Vita Sackville-West loping along the inn’s half-timbered corridors, as she certainly once had — the Nicolsons set up camp at the George just after buying Sissinghurst in 1930, their newly acquired ruins being uninhabitable for several years. Jo wondered, inevitably, whether her bedroom (repainted a deep mandarin orange) had once been Vita’s — then put the notion firmly out of her mind. Copying Vita’s garden was one thing; copying her life was another.

  Jo’s habit of early rising had marooned her amidst the breakfast buffet at an hour when mere tourists were still snoozing. Without the council flyer or the landscape drawings nestled by her elbow, she might have lost herself in thought, and Jo was avoiding her inner life at the moment. Her cell phone was stationed on the table, yet she had deliberately silenced its ring. Everything about her gentle appearance suggested welcome and pliability, when in truth she was rigid with denial.

  She pushed aside the china plate littered with the crumbs of her scone, and unfurled a sheaf of black-and-white CADD blueprints. Westwind was noted in careful print on the lower-left-hand side of each sheet; and beneath that, Plan for Landscape Development, The Westlake Residence, East Hampton, New York. Stamped on the right were the interlocked B and D of Bellamy Design’s logo, the firm’s Delaware address, and a dated notation with her initials. This was the fourth revision of her original drawings, printed only six days ago, after her tenth meeting with Graydon Westlake and his wife, Alicia — the woman Jo always referred to as her client, when in fact it was not the pretty, whipcord-thin blonde on the shady side of thirty who planned the gardens with Jo, but her husband: Graydon the enigmatic. Graydon, who could shave half an hour from his departure by helicopter in order to run his sensitive, long-fingered hands over the kitchen garden’s walls, an idea of pear trees rising in his mind. Jo had watched those fingers caress the stone, had felt the hooded eyes fix on her bent head, and had shivered.

  She would not think of Graydon.

  He was past fifty. Alicia was his third wife. There were two children from an earlier marriage, already grown. People who knew such things referred to Graydon as a financier, which meant that he had inherited an investment firm founded by his father. As CEO of the privately held, multibillion-dollar international concern, he spent his time tending the fortunes of universities and pension funds, the hopeful college savings of middle-class people he would never meet. Without understanding an iota of his business, Jo recognized Gray’s intelligence, his scrupulous concern for detail, his drive for perfection, his ruthlessness. The force of his personality at times was paralyzing. Alicia seemed to adore him — her well-tended hand hovering always a half-inch above his French-cuffed sleeve, as though for comfort or support — but Jo detected hypocrisy in that air of devotion. She suspected Gray saw it, too. This was one of their complicities: she and Gray, mutually recognizing the truth about Alicia. Didn’t most betrayals begin with a sharing of some kind?

  The house the Westlakes were building in the Hamptons was a Shingle-style sprawl covering more than twenty thousand square feet; and the six flat, farmland acres Jo was charged with turning into a corner of England were also expected to incorporate the aforementioned helipad, a four-thousand-square-foot guest cottage, a pool house designed as a rustic Parthenon, the pool itself, and a caretaker’s quarters. Incidental to her plans were security cameras, decorative lighting, speaker systems for music; a ten-car garage set at a remove from the house but requiring visual and physical linkage with a series of paths, or perhaps, as Graydon had recently suggested, a Federal-style arbor draped with wisteria vines.…

  He assumed wisteria would bloom, of course. He knew nothing about the temperamental plant — what a fickle beast it was to establish, the amount of careful pruning required to coax it into flower, the possible decades before it looked as he expected. This was emblematic, Jo thought, of Graydon’s entire approach to life. People all around him committed seppuku to achieve his heart’s desires, and in reply he gave a charming lift of the lips, a flick of a wave, already on his way elsewhere. Jo’s mouth pursed now, remembering what he’d said about wisteria: But at Princeton it trailed over everything. All the dorms. The lecture halls. Nobody fussed about it —

  That was Gray, she thought: determined to re-create This Side of Paradise in his Long Island backyard.

  The cell phone vibrated. The shudder in her hand turned to a pulse in the blood. She ought to send him directly into voice mail, but —

  “Jo,” he said, intimate in her ear. “Did I wake you?”

  “Hardly.” She heard the crack of adrenaline in her own voice, closed her eyes, and cursed herself. Weak. Susceptible. “I’ve already had breakfast. What can I do for you, Gray?”

  “Tell me about the garden. I like to think of you there.”

  It was uncanny how seductive her client could make those few words sound: Tell me about the garden. He seemed to know that the sight and smell of growing things were for her an aphrodisiac, an almost painful happiness she longed to share. He slipped right through her best defenses, because somehow he had glimpsed her soul all those weeks ago, when they had met in the rain for a hurried cup of coffee over the first draft of the plans, Alicia absent at the London auctions, Gray’s time as always precious and stolen. Lilium regale, he’d said. Rising white in the moonlight. We could drink w
ine in the garden under the stars, with the scent of lilies all around us —

  For that brief moment, his dream included her.

  “Sissinghurst is bittersweet this time of year,” she said now. “Drowsing into sleep. A few shafts of bloom amidst the withering of growth. Space clearing around the fallen places and the angular shape emerging: all the clipped boxwood, the pyramid beneath the roses. The White Garden fading to black.”

  He was silent a moment. “Is it raining?”

  “It is.”

  “So there’s mist in your hair.”

  “Cigarette smoke, actually — I’m in the hotel dining room.” She drew an unsteady breath. “Gray — did you call for a reason?”

  “I wanted to hear your voice,” he said. “I’m in Rio de Janeiro. Tomorrow, Buenos Aires. After that — who knows? Touch something for me this morning, Jo — a last rose. A wet leaf.”

  He hung up before she could answer.

  “Shit,” she whispered into the silence.

  “THIS IS TERENCE,” IMOGEN CANTWELL SAID CRISPLY. “HE’S a National Trust intern, in his final year of fieldwork. We’ve had him the better part of six months. I’ve made him responsible for deadheading the White Garden — it should have been done yesterday, but he pulled a few, Wednesday night, and was bloody well useless. He’ll take you along now.”

  The Head Gardener was not exactly unfriendly as she stood before the Powys Wall, feet planted in much-abused Wellies; but she was as focused as Eisenhower off Utah Beach. Sissinghurst opened to paying visitors at eleven o’clock, and despite the rain, there would soon be hundreds of garden lovers strolling along the stone and grass paths, umbrellas vying for passage between the towering yews. A professional poacher like Jo was a nuisance today, and knew it.

  “I printed a few files,” Imogen added grudgingly, and thrust some damp pages at her. “Plant lists. They go back five years, as long as I’ve been Head. Terence will explain the notation.”

  Terence, who was probably Ter to his friends, was a squat, muscular youth with a lumpen face and a shock of bleached hair. He grinned cheerfully at Jo, pruners dangling from one hand and a tip bag from the other. “You’re from the States, then?”

  “Yes. Just outside Philadelphia.”

  He looked disappointed. “Ever been to L.A.?”

  “Once.”

  “I reckon that’s where I’ll head, when this internship’s done,” he said as he led Jo through the drenched Rose Garden. “Reckon there’s a film star who’d pay a good bit for real English gardening.”

  “Undoubtedly there is. But the climate’s Mediterranean.” Jo ran her eyes over Imogen Cantwell’s lists as she walked, noting the familiar names of cala and lupine, paeonia and iris; the dates certain plants were divided or first put into the ground, with notes for revised schedules in the future; early bulbs and perennial bloomers, June elements, late summer show; fertilization schedules, losses due to frost or disease or poor performance. Sissinghurst was a huge outdoor arena for the entertainment of the masses, with no tolerance for plants that disappointed. Those that failed to live up to hope or reputation were swiftly uprooted and tossed on the compost pile. The White Garden showed evidence of these trials: any number of tested performers held their ground in Imogen’s lists, but perhaps a fifth of the plants were regularly changed out due to poorly sustained bloom, or a tendency to disease, or an unacceptable yellowish cast to their creamy petals.

  Jo stopped short in the midst of the Yew Walk, her brow furrowed. She could feel raw ambition almost crackling off these pages. And something else: a grim denial of all that was imperfect — of the force of nature itself. Was that Imogen Cantwell’s goal? Or the National Trust’s? Sissinghurst had hardly been perfect in its first four decades — the Nicolsons were family gardeners, working on ideas they tossed across the dinner table and jotted down in their daily letters. They were always searching for funds to throw at stone pavers and suppliers of bulbs. They were chronically short of help. Friends gave them cuttings of prized plants, sent hybrid offerings to Vita when her fame as a garden columnist put Sissinghurst on the map. But Jo had read those columns. The garden Vita’s columns described was most beloved when it was most human — when the failures and mistakes cast the glorious triumphs into sharp relief.

  “Question?” Terence called from the entrance to the White Garden.

  “Yes,” Jo replied, as her fingers tidied the errant lists. “What in God’s name is pulling, and how did it make you useless?”

  Terence smirked. “Pulling a pint. Or seven. I was hungover yesterday. Didn’t come in to work at all. I’ll start on the right-hand bit, and leave you a clear field on the left. Just shout if you’ve need.”

  Jo stood for an instant in the gap between the yew, staring out over the White Garden. Cosmos still flowered gamely in the October rain; Artemisia aborescens spilled wildly over stiff boxwood. These, Vita would have loved and understood. But a hidden forest of brushwood stakes, relentless trials, and a war against nature itself? That was uncannily like Gray Westlake. Jo had come here looking for a way to bring the White Garden home — but he’d wanted a public showplace, not an intimate wilderness.

  He’s going to get something else, she thought with amusement. Something unsettling. Unexpected. Beyond the bounds of his control.

  Perhaps they both were.

  With a small sigh of exasperation, she forced Gray aside, dumped her shoulder bag on the White Garden’s uneven brick walkway, and rummaged inside it for her digital camera.

  Chapter Three

  THE CAMERA, A TINY OLYMPUS RESISTANT TO BOTH cold and wet, had been a gift from Jo’s grandfather.

  It was an uncharacteristic one, she thought as the lens hovered a few feet in front of the gray-green spikes of onopordum, the architecture of the thistles coming into prickly focus. Jock loved hand tools, not technology. He’d collected them for years, mostly Burgon & Ball forged in Sheffield, where the company had been making such things for three centuries. Jock’s topiary shears alone were worth hanging as industrial art; and that’s what he’d done with them, hooking them to pegboards in his tractor shed in the Delaware Valley. For a man who’d abandoned gardening as a profession years ago, the shed was painfully revealing — something between a trophy house and a mausoleum. Jock had left the tools — more than a hundred and fifty items — to Jo at his death, two months before.

  His death. The camera wavered before a clump of euphorbia, long past blooming. Even in the privacy of her own mind, she still could not say his suicide, his brutal and inexplicable hanging.

  August, and the peak of the summer season in the Delaware Valley. The riotous bloom of July dwindling now to the hot colors of dahlias and Echinacea and Black-Eyed Susans. She’d been supervising the destruction of a hoary juniper hedge at a historic home in Bucks County when she got the call from Dottie.

  Her grandmother was composed; she delivered the news without weeping; but blank astonishment was behind every word.

  I lived with the man for more than sixty years, and he couldn’t just tell me his plans? Dottie demanded.

  How did a person share that kind of thing, Jo wondered now as she withdrew a measuring tape from her bag and paced off the depth of the massive bed (eighteen feet). How did a man say to the woman he’d loved since the age of twenty, I am going to walk out the kitchen door this morning as I always do around seven-thirty, only today I’m going to take a length of tractor chain and loop it over the beam in the garage?

  Nothing had prepared Dottie for the body swinging from the ceiling, the limpness of the blue hands. Nothing had prepared Jo. She’d left the junipers and the backhoe and the historic house under renovation, and did not return for two weeks.

  THEY HAD ASKED EACH OTHER WHY, OF COURSE. THEY HAD hours to talk after the funeral. Depression? Jo wondered. Dottie had seen no sign of it, although she wasn’t the best at detecting those things. After six decades of marriage she and Jock kept themselves to themselves, they didn’t probe each other’s souls l
ike young people did nowadays. They ate dinner in silence if their minds were heavy and left each other to sort things out. Perhaps she’d been at fault, there. But he’d never asked her for advice, he’d never seemed troubled. Getting older, of course… They both were.…

  Jo called Jock’s doctor and asked whether there’d been a diagnosis. Something out of the ordinary. A death sentence he couldn’t face.

  None, the doctor answered regretfully. He, too, felt obscurely responsible. And in any case, your grandfather was no coward.

  No. Even that final tractor chain demanded courage; self-hanging was not the act of a fearful man.

  She was haunted by him in dreams: perfectly ordinary visits, Jock in mid-conversation across the breakfast table, one of his old plaid shirts rolled to the elbows. She always asked why he had to leave. He smiled at her fondly, told her nothing. He’d killed himself the day after she told him about the biggest gardening coup of her young career: Gray and Alicia Westlake wanted a copy of the White Garden, and she, Jo, was going to Sissinghurst.…

  For reasons she could not explain, Jo was struggling with guilt. As though her news had driven Jock to suicide.

  THEN, ONE MORNING IN SEPTEMBER — MAYBE THREE DAYS after that intimate coffee with Gray, the two of them talking of lilies and moonlight — Dottie appeared in Jo’s office holding a letter.

  “I was going through your grandfather’s things yesterday,” she explained. “I should have done it before, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t the heart for it.”

  She’d started in Jock’s office — just a desk, really, with a stack of catalogs, some tidily paid bills. His Last Will and Testament, which she’d witnessed only six months before, secure in a drawer. She’d moved on to the tractor shed, avoiding the garage and its accusing beam. All the tools were in the tractor shed, Dottie explained, and the Will reminded her she’d need to have them valued. “He left them to you, of course — the hoes and clippers and whatnot. Honestly, Jo, if you want it all carted away I’m happy to get rid of it. Don’t worry about the Will, we know he must’ve been crazy in the end — ”