Free The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron Page A

There’s always Kew!”
    He was nearly out of the café by this time, notebook clutched in his hand; Jo Bellamy looked bewildered, the beginningof alarm on her face. He read the signs—she ought to have got a receipt, what if he absconded with her treasure, which wasn’t even hers —but it was too late to reassure her; she would just have to take Peter Llewellyn, Manuscript Expert, and the hallowed Sotheby’s firm on faith. She would have to wait for his call.
    He ducked into the loo conveniently positioned just off the café corridor, and with relief closed a stall door behind him. That made twice in one morning he’d avoided Symonds-Jones. His need for flight—the revulsion driving him from every room his Department Head entered—could hardly be healthy. But he’d experienced a sudden horror at the thought of Symonds-Jones fingering Jo Bellamy’s notebook. Symonds-Jones’s uncouth vowels pronouncing the elegant little title. Symonds-Jones drawing Jo Bellamy’s impish smile. Absurd . How had things come to such a pass?
    A square of milk glass set into the ceiling—an old-fashioned skylight—cast a grayish halo over Peter’s stall. He stared up into the glow, wondering if he’d gone slightly off the rails during the past few months. It was due to the place, he reckoned. The expectations. The persistent sense of inner failure. And Margaux’s leaving hadn’t helped. He would not think of Margaux, the annoying cow.… He hadn’t been born for this—for the title of Expert. Passing judgment on other people’s passions, other people’s sins, their hoardings and jealousies and impossible dreams. He would have to get out before he was much older.
    But first: the Broadwell collection.
    He slipped the old brown notebook into his breast pocket, flushed the loo for the sake of appearances, and prepared to brave the corridor once more.
    · · ·
    JO BELLAMY WAS ALREADY TRYING ON WOMEN’S DRESS shirts at Thomas Pink’s, Jermyn Street. They looked, she thought, like the sort of thing Gray Westlake would wear. But not his wife. Perhaps his mistress…
    Mistress . What a hideous word.
    She was holding a lavender stripe under her chin when her cell phone rang.

“ARE YOU IN THE GARDEN?” GRAY ASKED.
    Jo nearly dropped the phone. Although barely half an hour had passed since leaving Sotheby’s, she had expected the voice to be Peter Llewellyn’s.
    “No,” she said abruptly. “I’m at Thomas Pink’s. It’s a store.”
    “I know. So you’re in London?”
    “Just for the morning. I took the train up.”
    “You must’ve guessed I’d be here.”
    The lavender-striped shirt slipped from Jo’s hands. Clumsily, she bent to retrieve it. “Gray, you didn’t.”
    “I did. Want me to send a car for you?”
    “No! I mean—where are you, exactly?” She shoved the slim wooden hanger back onto a rack, aware that she soundeddistracted—unwelcoming—actually put out about this delightful surprise. “It’s just that I’m shocked. I never thought you’d really—”
    “I’m at the Connaught,” he interrupted, that faint ripple of amusement in his dark voice. “Don’t move. I’ll find you.”
    She stood there for an instant in the middle of Thomas Pink’s. Panic washed over her. Gray. In London. Which meant —
    He had flown in from Buenos Aires to see her.
    For one wild instant, she wished the call had been from Peter Llewellyn. But that was nonsense. She closed her cell phone with a snap and went out into the street to wait for the car.
    IT WAS A BLACK BENTLEY. PRESUMABLY THE CONNAUGHT owned it, and lent it to people like Gray when they had to fetch their mistresses from London shops. A chauffeur stood by the open rear door; he was better dressed, Jo reflected, than she was.
    “Look at you!”
    Gray swarmed out of the backseat. His hand was at her elbow, his lips brushed her cheek. A current of energy ran up her arm. He looked so good—so alive and intensely exciting—when he ought to have been dead