Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

by Antonia Fraser

  Looking at Martha James now, Jemima wondered precisely what kind of turning-point it was that she had reached. Martha was a painter: Jemima recognized the name although she had not heard of her work for some years. Was that the problem? Waning fame? Waning inspiration? Some other kind of distraction? At the Villa Elia it was in any case a camera not a sketch-book which was generally to be found in her hand. And Jemima had happened upon Martha once or twice taking photographs in the maze of paths bordered with rosemary and other odorous shrubs which led among the various cottages. You stopped on a path, turned, and there was the cerulean sea below you, framed by rocks. The views sprang up, fell away, emerged, vanished, in seemingly artless fashion; until you gradually realized that the vistas of the Villa Elia, like everything else to do with it, must have been carefully planned.

  If Martha James was not to be found painting or sketching, another of the guests had recently started to parade a sketch-book. This was an American girl in, say, her early 30s, called Felicity Dalbo but known at her own request by the nickname of “Fizzy.” As Martha might be surprised with her camera, Fizzy could be seen, rather more ostentatiously, placed in the centre of a popular path, with her sketch-book. Fizzy was actually Alice Garland’s greatest fan: if Martha followed Alice about—sometimes—with her eyes and Mrs. Vascoe requested little chats with her, Fizzy was publicly loud in her admiration for everything Alice did or said.

  “This villa! Isn’t it something?” she exclaimed several times a day. “How I wish I could get it all together like Alice—maybe I will when I’ve been here long enough!”

  The results of Fizzy’s artistic labours had a slightly primitive air. The bright blue shutters of the villa, actually folded flat against the white-washed walls, sprang out at you in Fizzy’s water-colour as though with an energy of their own; they were also way out of scale. All the same, Jemima found Fizzy’s various efforts not unpleasing: like Fizzy herself, they conveyed a certain indomitable cheerfulness. Jemima was a good deal more doubtful about Fizzy’s habit of producing her latest sketch—and she worked rapidly—at lunchtime.

  “Go on. Criticize it. You can say whatever you like. I want to learn, dammit,” Fizzy would say, smiling eagerly at one of the other guests. Fizzy, it was clear, was not a professional painter, nor was her turning-point to be supposed to concern “art.” In any case, Fizzy herself had left no doubts on that score.

  “Bad marriage,” she had announced at large to the company at the pre-dinner drink session on the day of her arrival. They were drinking a delicious local white wine called Boutari (with the exception of Martha who always drank water). “Or rather a good marriage to a bad guy. Fizzy Dalbo,’ I said to myself one day, ‘you just don’t have to live with this man any more. The compromises you have been making are just not acceptable for a woman in the eighties. It’s yourself you have to live with. That’s the bottom line. Learn how to do it, why don’t you?’ So here I am.” Fizzy gave a wide smile, displaying her large and even white teeth. It was the beauty of the teeth, thought Jemima, more than anything else, which revealed Fizzy’s transatlantic origins; Fizzy herself had been and possibly still was working for some English publisher in London. And Fizzy’s unsatisfactory husband had, it seemed, been English.

  “Not a reticent character,” had been Martha James’s comment to Jemima, after Fizzy, large tote bag over her shoulder, a fresh glass of Boutari in her hand, had swept off to unpack.

  “It’s so wonderfully tranquil here, isn’t it?” murmured one of the other guests rather nervously after a short silence. Sarah Halliwell was a gentle girl, dressed in a green and gold shirt of Indian design, with thick, shining hair coiled at the moment but which loose could reach to her waist. She obviously had some Indian blood: the mixture of Indian and European had produced in her a lovely delicate bone structure which put even Alice Garland’s physical neatness to shame. But for all her elegance Sarah had a haunted air. To Jemima, she spoke briefly of “a betrayal where I had least expected it. Perhaps with hindsight I should have done so.” She said nothing about what that “betrayal” might have been. “A fresh perspective was certainly necessary in my case,” she ended.

  Jemima forbore to ask any questions. She was after all looking for ideas not material. Were she to decide to include some film of the villa in her planned series (tentatively entitled “Possible Dream? Starting All Over Again”) it would obviously not be this party she dealt with. For one thing, all guests interviewed on television would have to give their permission in advance. But she did note that Sarah spent a lot of her time reading abstruse-looking journals with titles like Classical History and Graeco-Roman World. She also, alone of the party, spoke some modern Greek. For Sarah Halliwell at least, the choice of a Greek island like Corfu for her repose did not seem to be a coincidence. As for Sarah’s comment concerning Fizzy, it was clear to Jemima that what she really meant was: “Is Fizzy going to ruin all our precious tranquillity?”

  So far Martha had not been asked to give an opinion of Fizzy’s work, despite her professional qualifications to do so. Perhaps it was unfortunate, thought Jemima, that Fizzy chose the lunchtime following Martha’s nerve-wracked coffee drinking to do so. The session was as usual held on the terrace, Fizzy with the first Boutari of the day (“I guess I deserve this”) in her hand. The conversation certainly got off to an uncomfortable start. Besides which, there was undoubtedly an element of rivalry or jealousy between Martha and Fizzy over the subject of Alice, all the stronger because it was generally unspoken.

  “Fizzy, that’s my cottage you’ve been painting,” exclaimed Martha abruptly. “Well, I think that’s quite a—” She stopped. The missing word was not going to be a pleasant one. Cheek? Yet once again Martha looked frightened, or at any rate more upset than angry.

  “Why, Martha, don’t be piggy,” and Fizzy gave a good-humoured pat to Martha’s thin brown arm; she touched people a lot, Jemima noticed. Martha moved away immediately; unlike Fizzy, Martha went out of her way to avoid physical contact.

  “Gee, I’m sorry. But you know me, I guess I go everywhere just looking at it all, just loving it all. Nothing personal. I certainly did not mean to invade your space. I really respect your need for privacy. Hey, I’m like that myself We’re all like that here. It’s just that your cottage being on its own. Furthest away from the house and being on that kind of real cliff over the beach. And the cute headland on the other side of the bay. You were out—”

  “How did you know I was out?” But before Fizzy could answer with another long explanation—she really did talk a lot especially when embarrassed—Martha seized Fizzy’s sketch-book and made a rapid and not unkindly assessment. She finished, “For an amateur and I take it a beginner, it’s not at all bad.” Martha even managed a rather strained smile. “I wish I had your freshness, Fizzy.”

  “Fresh Fizzy, fresh perspective—fresh! That’s me all over. Thank you, Martha. Thank you very much. And to show you I mean it I promise I’ll never come and paint near your cottage again, in spite of the glorious view, not even if you beg me. I won’t come near it, not even if you start calling out for help in your lonely cottage in the middle of the night.”

  But Martha merely lit a cigarette—she was the only guest who smoked and made up for it by smoking quite a lot—and moved away. After a while she sat down in the basket chair slightly apart from the others, which commanded the best view, at least from the terrace. The branches of an olive tree, one of the many from which the villa took its name, framed the exit to the pathway which wound down to the beach; the blue, blue sea lay beyond. Pots of plumbago with its bright green leaves and profuse pale blue flowers flanked the exit. Everything at the villa, from cushions to flowers, had some kind of blue theme; chosen perhaps for repose or perhaps to remind you of the ever-present sea below and stretching out to the horizon.

  “My favourite colour—blue,” Alice Garland had announced on Jemima’s arrival.

  “A cold colour, too many blues make a house heartless,” Jemim
a’s chic decorator friend Daisy had once said: but of course that warning judgment could not be true in Greece, on the edge of the sea.

  “Talking of crying out in the night,” said the fourth guest, Mrs. Vascoe, conversationally, “did anyone else hear that owl or cat or dog or whatever it was howling again last night? Down by the beach.” Betsy Vascoe, being the sort of apologetic person who always chose the least comfortable chair in the worst position, Jemima noted, spoke from a basket chair which was rammed up against the lunch table. In her staid summer clothes—she was the only one of them who habitually wore blouses and skirts in the daytime—she had altogether an old-fashioned air. When she said things like “all you young things” nobody, not even Martha, sought to contradict her. “Alice running this place with all her wonderful youthful efficiency”—That was Betsy Vascoe’s frequently heard paean of admiration.

  Now there was a crash of glass as something fell heavily on the marble-flagged terrace. Jemima looked sharply in the direction of Martha. But Martha, still with her back to the company, smoking and looking out to sea, had not moved.

  “I’m so sorry!” exclaimed Mrs. Vascoe, jumping up as if personally responsible for the accident and beginning to dab away at the pool of white wine on the floor with her white shirt-tails. But it was Sarah Halliwell’s glass which had crashed, not hers. At the noise of the crash, Irini, the Greek cook, came springing out of the kitchen and, moving lightly despite her formidable bulk, quickly and expertly cleared it up.

  Alice Garland appeared at the same moment. She had the air of being about to go shooting: she had a basket over her arm and wore a big Greek straw hat which shadowed her face.

  “Hey, Alice,” cried Fizzy, “is there some kind of ghost here which hoots or howls? Betsy heard it last night. Some of us heard it the other night. Bright idea coming up, maybe it’s the ghost of our various pasts trying to stop us making a fresh start. Howling at us.” Fizzy shivered in an exaggerated manner and looked around, as if for applause.

  “Anyone else hear this howling last night?” asked Alice pleasantly. “Jemima? Fizzy? Sarah?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Not last night.” Nobody else said anything.

  “Martha?”

  “I heard nothing last night,” replied Martha James without looking round.

  “So it seems you were the only one disturbed, Betsy,” concluded Alice. “But then, your cottage is closest to the sea. As a matter of fact it’s a bird, you know. A local bird. But to the imaginative”—she smiled in Mrs. Vascoe’s direction—“I suppose it could sound like a woman, an unhappy woman at that.”

  “Oh, Alice, I wasn’t complaining,” said Mrs. Vascoe hastily, “I’m probably quite wrong about the whole thing.”

  A fresh start for Betsy Vascoe should certainly include learning how to stand up for herself, thought Jemima. She understood that Mrs. Vascoe was recently widowed; Jemima guessed her late husband to have been a man of strong character. Betsy Vascoe, otherwise, spent a lot of time studying guide books to Corfu and was the only member of the party who actually ventured to the museum in the town.

  Then Jemima forgot Mrs. Vascoe as she concentrated on wondering why Martha James—so preoccupied with the “wailing” at breakfast—had suddenly denied it at lunch. Besides, Alice Garland was wrong: the closest cottage to the sea was not Mrs. Vascoe’s, it was Martha’s.

  Before Alice could say anything more, reassuring or otherwise, to Betsy, Irini, now laying the table for their usual cold lunch of stuffed vine leaves, taramasalata and salad, said something raucous in Greek.

  Alice frowned.

  “What did she say?” asked Fizzy, and when Alice still frowned, “Sarah?”

  Sarah Halliwell glanced carefully at Irini, who laughed back at her. “She says we are too many women here. We are needing a man. So someone here is calling out for a man in the middle of the night.” Irini nodded vigorously and added something else. “She says she needs a man too.” Irini roared with laughter. So far as could be ascertained, Irini like Mrs. Vascoe was a widow: there was no sign of a husband, and a son, Nikos, helped her with the work of the villa which could not be done by the maid Maria: he also operated the boat. Actually Nikos, despite his youth, was altogether a much less imposing figure than the substantial Irini with her fine strong features and mass of greying black hair.

  “You need a man, Irini my love, you got a man.” The voice—male—was so unexpected, coming as it were out of one of the rosemary bushes on the path, that it seemed to Jemima that all the women on the terrace jumped. Afterwards she would come to revise that opinion: all the women had jumped except one.

  A minute later the head of a man appeared coming up the path from the sea, and a minute after that the man himself. He was tall, almost burly, dressed incongruously in dark grey trousers and a dark grey jacket. His white shirt was, however, open at the neck; there were signs of a tie hanging out of his pocket, its end trailing. His hair was golden brown, very curly, rather long; his complexion was ruddy rather than brown, however, or perhaps that was the effect of sun on his particular kind of rather florid good looks. For he was good-looking, even if at the same time he gave the impression of having gone to seed.

  The man before them was not carrying a suitcase or indeed any kind of bag, but his shoes, leather brogues rather scuffed, were in his hand. He had evidently come off a boat on to the beach below. It was perfectly possible to arrive at the villa like this: in fact it was easier than using the precipitous narrow path down from the village winding its way through olive groves, the journey taking about thirty minutes altogether. Luggage and other supplies were as a result generally brought in by Nikos’s boat from the next-door bay.

  “I suppose Nikos is really the power behind the throne in this place,” Sarah Halliwell had observed thoughtfully on the subject of the handsome silent Greek youth. “Being in charge of the boat and all that; he’s the only one who can come and go as he likes, night and day.”

  “Then Irini is actually on the throne!” answered Alice with a light laugh.

  “Oh, no, Alice, you’re on the throne.” That was Fizzy. Really, thought Jemima, she went too far sometimes.

  Elia Beach itself was not of course private—all beaches in Greece being public by law. But since access to it was in effect only by boat (you would have to know the area well to discover the entrance to the village path) tourists only congregated there in the middle of the day. Very occasionally an intrepid couple slept over amid the pebbles and were noticed by Jemima if she had a pre-breakfast swim.

  At the moment the happy cries of the said tourists could be heard as a background to the strange scene of arrival on the terrace. How different were sounds heard in the bright, shadowless sunlight of the day! Could the cry-by-night have been merely an ecstatic nocturnal tourist? There were some ecstatic ones, and some loud-mouthed ones too (a horde of Italians doing gym on the shore at midday two days previously came to mind). There were some ecstatic sun-bathers too: topless ones, some brown and shapely, pagan nymphs fitting into the Greek landscape; some it had to be said (like Fizzy, who alone of the party sometimes went topless) neither brown nor shapely, who should not have risked the exposure …

  “Kirie William! So you do come,” cried Irini with much enthusiasm, launching herself on the stranger and embracing him with fervour.

  At roughly the same time Alice said, “William!” in a voice which contained not even the pretence of welcome. “What are you doing here?”

  “Like the rest of you, my dear Alice, making a fresh start. And with quite as much reason, I think you’ll agree.” He bowed. “William Gearhart—at all your services.”

  “William”—Alice paused—“William is my husband.”

  In contrast to her chilly tone, William Gearhart’s was positively ebullient. “Do I get some lunch, Irini? No, wait a minute, what I really want is a drink. Don’t worry, I can pay my whack, or rather my whackette. What’s she charging you these days?” he enquired at large, as he pulled at his poc
ket, producing the rest of the tie and a lot of soggy-looking drachmas in rather small denominations. As Irini hastily brought forward bottle and glass, Jemima realized that what William Gearhart’s flushed look really signified was not the beginning of a tan but the end of a drinking bout. Drinks at the airport? In the aeroplane? In the town? In the village? It was not difficult to get a drink in hospitable Corfu.

  It was tempting to regard the arrival of William Gearhart at the Fresh Perspectives “house party” as being annoyingly disruptive: people united in a desire for a quiet life found themselves unwillingly plunged into a more lively situation. But had there not been strains all along, beneath the surface of the party, Jemima wondered. The mysterious cry-by-night—as Fizzy would have it, “our pasts calling out to us”—did that carry with it a warning?

  As she reflected, William was busy greeting Martha James with a special flourish. “Martha James! The famous painter I do believe!” Martha nodded in William’s direction. “The once and future famous painter! A fresh start for Martha James! No more naughty—whoops!” William Gearhart clapped a hand over his mouth.

  “William!” Alice’s rigid self-control sounded as if it might be slipping.

  “It’s all right, it’s all right, I’ve said nothing, now have I? Are you painting anything hereabouts, Martha? I should be most interested to see your latest work. Or are there any old paintings to be seen?” He gave Martha a look which was almost a leer.