The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf (17 page)

A cord across the doorway barred entrance. Birdlike, Peter peered over it, his gaze fixed on the whitewashed walls.

“It wasn’t always plain,” the guide said. These four words were the first unscripted ones she’d managed. She looked almost appalled.

Peter turned slightly, one shoulder propped against the doorframe. He did not quite look at her; but something about his silence must have been encouraging.

“There was a mural,” the guide added. “Of a religious nature. Quite out of the common way, for Charleston. They weren’t religious people.”

“No,” Peter agreed.

Jo felt her heartbeat quicken. She was waiting, with a sense of suspense, for the important thing she knew was coming.

The guide folded her arms protectively beneath her breasts. “Mrs. Bell whitewashed the walls the year Maynard Keynes died.”

“When was that?” Peter asked easily.

“Nineteen forty-six.”

“Ah. So it was. Just after the war. Keynes saves the economies of the Western World with the notion of deficit spending, and goes home to Tilton to die.” He nodded casually at the sterile walls. “Sad, that so much valuable art should be lost.”

“She was always painting over things. We’ve found pictures inside of pictures. Canvases reused. Nobody knows how much there might have been.”

Pictures inside of pictures
. Jo almost said:
Were any of them of Virginia?
But something about Peter’s face—a careful, listening quality—stopped her.

“There’s a photograph on file,” the guide offered. “Of the mural, I mean. If you’d like to see it.”

“How enchanting,” Peter enthused. “We’d
love
to.”

CITIES MADE IMOGEN CANTWELL UNCOMFORTABLE—the excessive traffic, the narrowness of certain streets, the confusing directional signs. A bare fifteen minutes into the heart of London she was cursing foully at the windscreen, which was spattered with the first drops of rain. The fact that she had forgotten to prepay the central London congestion charge, and would now owe a late fee in addition to the usual eight-pound toll, infuriated her further; she ought to have taken the train in from Kent. It was
idiotic
that she had chosen to drive. The miscalculation betrayed her country manners, her lack of sophistication, her general backwardness. It also further eroded her faltering self-confidence.

So that by Tuesday afternoon as she stood in front of Cissy, doorkeeper of Sotheby’s Books and Manuscripts department, Imogen was flushed with self-loathing. Broad-hipped, in khaki
trousers and a cotton jumper, her grizzled hair lank with rain, she seethed before the reception desk, while Cissy made a show of studying her computer screen.

“Have you an appointment?”

“No. I have
not.”

“Then I’m afraid you must schedule, madam. The Experts are all booked—”

Cissy’s languid drawl; her Sloane Ranger hair, carefully blonded every three weeks; her suggestion of being merely on loan to Sotheby’s in the odd interval between modeling gigs—all infuriated Imogen. She leaned heavily over the reception desk, her breath coming in rapid snorts through her nose. “I’m here on a matter of some urgency, love. You people have nicked something that doesn’t belong to you. And I want it back. You can turn me away now if you like—but it’ll be a police matter before long.”

A faint crease appeared between Cissy’s perfect brows. She stared coldly at Imogen, then extended one polished talon to her phone. “If you’ll sit down, madam, I’ll inquire.”

“Right,”
Imogen boomed. “Inquire away, love. And tell them it’s about the Woolf notebook you’re sitting on, the lot of you.” She cast a defiant look around the paneled waiting area, the row of comfortable seats dotted with well-heeled clients. None of them was sodden with rain. None looked ill at ease. One actually rose, as though to offer her a chair: a dark-haired man of middle height and wordless authority.

“Did you say
Woolf
notebook? As in, Virginia Woolf?” he asked.

“That’s right.” Imogen eyed him dubiously. “Could be priceless. And I’ve reason to believe it’s here.”

“Or perhaps in Oxford.”

“
Ox
ford?”

The man smiled at her disarmingly; she realized, with
sharp misgiving, that like Jo Bellamy he was American. He turned to the blonde at Reception. “It’s all right, Cissy. I’ll just bring Miss…?”

“Cantwell.”

“… in with me.”

“Very well.” Cissy dimpled at him, and cradled her phone. “Marcus would be
delighted
to see you now, Mr. Westlake.”

THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MURAL PAINTED ON THE WALLS of Maynard Keynes’s bedroom was obviously quite old.

The Charleston House guide—who informed them that her name was Glenna, that she lived nearby in Firle and had taken the job half-time during the winter months, now that her youngest was at school—led them to a small office area crammed with heavy oak furniture that might once have belonged to the Bell family.

“We’re a private trust,” she explained, “sustained by publications, charity, and various Bell grandchildren. So we make do. Most of the funds go towards repairs, of course, and the maintenance of the garden, or recovery of paintings by artists associated with the house. So many canvases were sold—once English Post-Impressionism fell out of fashion, Vanessa and Duncan were rather hard up. They had to work to live.”

“Don’t we all,” Peter muttered. And Jo realized, with a small jolt of awareness, that she was unlike the rest of the world in this—she lived to work. She loved nothing so much as planning, digging, and establishing a garden—even if, in the end, it was handed over to clients.

She stood next to Peter in the office doorway. There was only one available chair, and both of them were too conscious of the other to take it. Glenna pulled open file cabinet drawers
and flipped through manila folders, edging photographs into the light just long enough to determine they were not the one she sought. Then she slammed the drawer with a decisive
click
and handed an eight-by-eleven print to Peter.

“Here it is. Not in the best condition, unfortunately, but it gives you an idea.”

Together, they bent their heads over it.

A black-and-white image, slightly grainy as old photographs often are. The print was cracked and stained with age; one corner was dog-eared and another was missing entirely. A few words were scrawled in the white margin at the base; Jo could not make them out.

“What is the title?” Peter asked.

“Virgin and Apostle,”
Glenna replied. “As I say—a religious subject, really quite unusual for Mrs. Bell, but then again it’s hardly an ordinary depiction, is it?”

Surreal
would be a better word, Jo decided—complete with Magritte’s bowler hat. One was lying in the foreground, as though it had just rolled off the head of the dark-haired man who was crouched at the base of a statue. He was seen in profile: brown-eyed, middle-aged, with a mustache and a pleading expression reminiscent of a bloodhound’s. A rectangular briefcase stood at his left knee. Papers were scattered in the grass.

“Maynard Keynes?” Peter suggested.

“Possibly,” said the guide. “Or possibly not. The quality of the photograph makes it difficult to say.”

The man in the suit was venerating—or pleading with—a fluid feminine shape, all draperies and delicate ankles. Her arms were joined over the breast in what might have been prayer. Her head was unveiled, and suggested a Greek goddess; her hair was drawn back in a classical knot at the nape; her face was an ovoid blank.

“Virgin, Virginia.” Jo said it for Peter, but it was Glenna who answered her.

“I doubt very much this is a portrait of Mrs. Woolf, if that’s what you’re suggesting. One of the grandchildren would surely have identified her.”

“Although she
hated sitting for her portrait,”
Jo murmured. “When was this painted, I wonder?”

Peter turned the print over and glanced at the back side. “No date.”

“We’ve talked of doing a bit of research,” Glenna offered, “but with funds so short, and the mural
not
a priority—”

“What did Vanessa mean by calling Keynes the Apostle?” Jo asked. “Was he particularly devout?”

Peter frowned. “There’s no mystery about
that
, surely. Keynes
was
an Apostle. A Cambridge Apostle. He practically reformed the Society in his own image, I believe, during his days there.”

“But we can’t be sure this is a portrait of Keynes,” Glenna interjected.

There were times, Jo thought, with a surge of irritation, when she understood too well the force of Winston Churchill’s adage—that the English and Americans were one people divided by a common language. What in hell were the Cambridge Apostles? Peter referred to them as though they were as familiar as Christ’s. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Maynard… But the repetition of that single word—
Apostle
—had reminded her of the Lady’s notebook, at least.

“Apostles Screed,” Jo exclaimed. “It was written in the back of the notebook, right where the pages were torn out. Does that have to do with Cambridge, too?”

Peter’s gaze was still fixed on the print of the mural, but he wasn’t really looking at it anymore. He was chasing a rapid
succession of thoughts Jo could track in the expressions that crossed his face.

“Screed.
Screed
—that could mean one of several things. Conversazione. The Ark, perhaps, or the Memoir Club,” he muttered.

Jo snorted and rolled her eyes.

“No wonder Margaux’s not here,” he persisted. “We’ve gone in
completely
the wrong direction, haven’t we?”

“Are you saying we should be in Cambridge?”

But at that moment, Peter’s cell phone rang.

MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES HAD SPENT THE FEW hours between Gray Westlake’s unexpected call and the man’s appearance in Sotheby’s book department conducting what he called due diligence. This meant an all-out assault on available information: online searches of biographic and financial data, reviews of past auction purchases, quick interrogations of Marcus’s opposite numbers in Wine Sales and European Antiques. By the time Cissy tapped her fingernail against the paneled mahogany door and slid into the room, Marcus had a rough understanding of Gray Westlake’s tastes. He knew that the man was worth somewhere in the neighborhood of half a billion dollars. He knew Gray was fifty-four years old. He knew that he bought rare cars and speculated in oil futures. He knew that Gray’s first wife liked English antiques, his second American country, and his third, Mid-Century Modern. He
knew that Gray drank Bordeaux and California Cabernets, that he was a member of golf clubs all over the world, and that his five homes were scattered, at the moment, on three continents.

About Imogen Cantwell, Marcus Symonds-Jones knew absolutely nothing.

At first, he thought the woman might be Westlake’s bag carrier, but that notion was dismissed as soon as he caught a good look at her. He was surprised and slightly unnerved as he bared his teeth and extended his hand to grasp Gray’s own; if the man had brought a manuscripts expert to his first meeting—and Imogen was just frumpy enough to pass for one—then the American was in deadly earnest.

“Do tell me how I can be of
help,”
Marcus boomed, as Gray stood before his desk. He would have liked to have sat down himself, but the other man wasn’t bending, and Marcus saw that he was waiting for Imogen Cantwell to take a seat first. She seemed oblivious of this, her gaze fixed malevolently on Marcus; he recoiled as she thrust out a work-hardened finger.

“Was it
you
that woman talked to? When she brought her stolen goods to market?”

“Sorry?”

“A book expert, she said. At Sotheby’s. Was it you?”

Marcus blinked, his eyes shifting to Gray Westlake’s.

The American smiled. “Let’s sit down, shall we? Miss Cantwell? Have a seat?”

Grudgingly, Imogen lowered her bulk into one of Marcus’s beloved Bauhaus chairs—white leather and steel, he’d saved for months to buy them before they’d even gone on preview. Everything in his office was deliberately chosen to offset the fusty image of Rare Books and Manuscripts, to scream in the broadest visual accent:
HEDGE FUND OPERATORS TAKE NOTE: WORDS ARE HIP, TOO!