Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

by Antonia Fraser

  He began to shout, or perhaps rave might have been a better word. In his own way, William was almost as incomprehensible as Irini had been, or at least for the first few rapid sentences which he shouted at them. Then the words, to his appalled hearers—Fizzy, Sarah, Mrs. Vascoe and Jemima—did begin to make a certain grisly sense.

  “Martha James!” was his recurrent theme. “Martha, Martha James! Why did you come here? Why didn’t you leave her alone? Fatal Martha James! Fatal, fatal, fatal!” he shouted, his face getting redder by the minute; gone was the urbane new-that-morning-man entirely. “Unlucky to me. Unlucky to her. Martha James, where are you? Where are you lurking—? I know you, Martha James, fatal woman, where are you? Come out of your cottage.” And on and on and on in a terrible stream of invective which on grounds of loudness alone could have been heard surely on the other side of the bay.

  All the time the sombre little procession, body now wrapped round with some kind of dark towel or blanket or tarpaulin, could be seen winding its way up the path to the villa.

  It was, oddly enough, William’s mention of the word cottage, rather than his repeated vituperative evocation of her name, which called to everyone’s attention the fact that Martha James was not actually present.

  “She always came late for breakfast, she’s always the last to come,” said Sarah Halliwell when it was evident that for the time being William had worn himself to silence. She only put into words what the company as a whole was thinking.

  “Then Martha doesn’t know!” exclaimed Fizzy. “Maybe I should go and tell her. I’d love to do something to help,” she muttered pathetically. “This is gonna be such a shock: this terrible accident.”

  “Accident! Was it an accident?” To the general horror, William began to shout once more.

  “Of course it was, dear Mr. Garland, Mr. Gearhart, rather.” Mrs. Vascoe interposed her calming little voice. “A tragic accident, if your poor wife is indeed dead. As, alas, seems all too likely. What else could it be”—she quivered for a moment—“but an accident?”

  “We shall see, I suppose.” But William was subsiding once more; he spoke sombrely rather than with his previous rage.

  “I’ll get Martha then,” put in Fizzy swiftly.

  It was not necessary. Before Fizzy could move, Martha appeared on the terrace. Jemima noted that she was holding a lighted cigarette in her hand although she did not generally smoke before breakfast. One moment later, Nikos and his companion with their shrouded burden reached the crest of the path.

  They all realized at once from the look of her that there was no need to tell Martha anything. She must have watched the procession coming up the path. Her face, like Irini’s, was already streaked with tears. Before the mesmerized eyes of the assembled company—even William still mercifully silent—Martha sank on her knees beside Alice’s body where it had been laid, and bowed her fair head down upon it. Even more shocking was the way she burrowed in the dark covering to produce one white moist hand and some strands of long wet hair.

  Martha James proceeded to kiss the hand of the dead girl with passionate abandonment as the tears flowed freely down her cheeks. “My Alice! Little Alice!” After a while she stayed silent and simply bowed herself once more over the corpse.

  “Did she mean that to you too?” Fizzy spoke with a sort of awe. “But I guess we all loved her,” she added generously.

  Then Jemima looked at Martha, looked at her again with new eyes: saw the straight, fairish hair hanging down her back, framing the curiously wizened face with its unexpected crop of lines fanning out beneath the deepening tan; Martha’s girlish hair-style and Martha’s girlish slimness. Girlish from a distance, that is. Yes. But Martha James was not the girl, that was Alice Garland. Jemima looked away from Martha down to Alice’s prostrate form, the pale wet mermaid hair now falling free from its covering in strands; she imagined the pale face beneath.

  Martha and Alice: “My Alice! Little Alice!” She thought of William’s uncontrolled railing against Martha, as yet imperfectly understood. Might that hatred have its true origin in the most primitive kind of jealousy and dislike?

  Jemima stepped forward and touched Martha on the shoulder.

  “I think I understand,” was all she said. Then, putting her arm protectively round Martha’s shoulder, Jemima helped her to her feet and away from the body of the dead girl. She decided to say nothing further for the time being.

  “Well, I don’t understand.” Fizzy’s voice was loud, indignant, her expression, again childlike, a mixture of misery and crossness. “I don’t understand at all. We’re talking about an accident, aren’t we? Of course we are. But how did she die? I want to know that. Are we getting the doctor? I’ve got a lot of questions to ask.” She glared about her; her lip trembled.

  “My dear Fizzy.” Mrs. Vascoe spoke gently. “We all know what you mean, I’m sure. We’ve all got a lot of questions to ask. And for that matter, I expect one or two questions will be asked of us. In the meantime, surely we must all be as cooperative and self-controlled as possible.” Mrs. Vascoe put an unmistakable emphasis on the last words.

  Sarah nodded strongly. So did William. It was clear that he did not consider the words could possibly apply to him.

  There was no telephone at the Villa Elia. Telephones were hard to get in Corfu it seemed (and precarious when they were installed). Jemima remembered with a pang how Alice had spoken merrily on the subject: “One of the many good points of the villa. When you come to film it, you’ll find it so peaceful without a telephone. Not really very awkward once you adjust to it. For urgent calls, you just go up to the village and chance your luck. Now that really is a time-wasting experience. Most people decide to make their fresh start without the benefit of the telephone.”

  You might have thought, however, that a telephone would be sadly missed in the present unhappy circumstances. But Irini’s force of character and organizational abilities, with Nikos as her aide, and Nikos’s friend as his aide, proved able to cope with, under the circumstances, surprising dispatch. Alice’s body was taken to a small room on the ground floor, a bare, cell-like little place, but that seemed right enough. Irini had ceased her keening now that she had something—in fact a great deal—to do.

  A doctor arrived, Greek but English-speaking, accompanied by a man who appeared to be the local policeman.

  From the doctor it was learned what they perfectly well knew already, but he insisted on pronouncing the news officially—that Alice Garland was dead. But they also learned—the assembled company was once more on the terrace—that Alice had died not from drowning, but from a blow or blows on the side of the head. From a stone? A rock? How many blows? The doctor, having given them this news, was not inclined to elaborate upon it.

  In short, and this was the key-point of his announcement: Alice Garland had been dead before she entered the water.

  “She fell? Yes, maybe she has fallen. Maybe a big rock has fallen on her. The rocks do fall in this bay. They are loose a bit, do you know. Then she fell in the water. But I think she was dead, then. Already dead, I do not think she did drown. We shall know more.” He paused diplomatically. He means, Jemima supposed, after the autopsy; but he is too delicate to conjure up such a distressing image in our minds.

  The policeman spoke limited English, and so that the tenor of his remarks could be clearly understood Sarah Halliwell translated them. The message, although given at some length, causing Sarah to pause once or twice and hesitate for the right official word, was in essence a simple one.

  None of the guests was free to leave the villa until further formalities—further questioning was another way of putting it—had taken place.

  “He wants our passports, I think: to look at them,” murmured Sarah with a shade of embarrassment. “And he also wants to know the answer to two questions immediately. I’m not sure—I’d better just pass them on.”

  “Go on, for God’s sake! Tell us what he’s saying! Don’t start holding things back at this stage.
” William Gearhart had been trying to follow the conversation with obvious impatience. It was clear that unlike Alice (who had spoken excellent modern Greek) William knew very little of the language.

  “First of all,” said Sarah in a stronger voice, sounding defiant, “he wants to know who is now in charge of this party at the Villa Elia.”

  There was a silence which nobody seemed inclined to break.

  “And the second question?” inquired William harshly.

  “He wants to know who is the next of kin of the unfortunate lady. As he describes her, Alice.”

  “I can answer both of those questions. Together.” William exuded a deep breath. “I am, was, am, Alice’s lawful husband. She had not so far as I know changed her will, in spite of our—separation. So I inherit the villa. The same goes for her next of kin. I’m still her husband. Legally, which is what counts. So, QED, I’m still her next of kin.”

  “Nonsense,” rapped out Martha James sharply. “That’s absolute nonsense, William. Alice had changed her will. I know that for a fact. You won’t inherit the villa, and Alice, as you know, had at the moment of her death nothing much else to leave.”

  “And I suppose you will inherit it? Is that what you’re trying to say?” William’s tone was sarcastic rather than serious.

  “Exactly.” Martha dragged on her cigarette. “Quite appropriate, don’t you think? In view of everything.”

  “But how could that be?” cried Fizzy in great agitation. “You? You meant nothing to her. You were just her business partner. You were handling those antiques with her. I know all about it. Nikos was shipping them out for her, with the help of some other friends. She wanted to build it up. She lost a lot of money when you”—she looked angrily at William—“let her down. People were always letting her down. But she was into helping people—like Nikos for example!” Fizzy turned back to Martha. “You were just an old friend, down on your luck, she was helping you to make a fresh start.”

  “An old friend!” Martha bent her sardonic gaze on the American girl; Fizzy, alone of them all, had attempted some kind of adjustment of her dress to indicate grief or at least mourning: she had wrapped a scrubby black scarf round her head; the effect was to recall the seventies’ protests against the Vietnam War rather than bereavement in the eighties. All the same, Jemima thought that it revealed a tenderness in Fizzy which so far no one else, not William, the self-styled bereaved husband, nor Martha, had attempted to exhibit.

  “An old friend!” repeated Martha. “Yes, you could put it like that.”

  “I don’t want to speak out of turn,” Mrs. Vascoe began with the habitual note of apology in her voice and ended more briskly. “This is all very distasteful under the circumstances. But perhaps you should know now, as you don’t seem to be aware—in short, poor Alice and I were partners. We’d gone into partnership over Fresh Perspectives. The villa, the whole business. I’d been thinking about doing something useful since Harry died; he would have wanted me to do something useful, I know he would. Alice and I discussed it. She needed the capital. You know about that, Mr. Gearhart. That was my fresh start, it is my fresh start.” She gazed firmly round. “If anyone is in control here now, and I don’t want to obtrude too much of course, but I really think, Martha, Mr. Gearhart, it must be”—she paused as if struggling against the apology trying to return to her voice—“well, me.”

  “This is not distasteful, as you put it, it’s horrible!” burst out Fizzy. “Poor little Alice, hardly cold yet.” She shuddered. “We don’t even know how she died, and we’re quarrelling over business. Didn’t you care for her at all?”

  “It must be obvious even to you, Fizzy, that some of us cared for her a great deal,” Martha countered.

  It was suddenly unbearably hot and the happy cries from the far side of the bay—the tourists had come with the noonday sun—were increasingly obtrusive to the tense group on the terrace above.

  “How like Alice! Even now we’re all quarrelling over her. I told you it was a mistake.” Surprisingly this bitter exclamation came from Sarah Halliwell. What was more, it was to William Gearhart that she turned as she said it.

  “You mean: I shouldn’t have come? I had to come. You know that I had to see you.”

  “Hey! Are you guys serious? Is this some kind of love scene you’re gonna play out?” Fizzy was now more truculent than bewildered. Jemima, feeling herself to be the outsider in this increasingly murky discussion, judged it the moment to intervene.

  “Shouldn’t we all step back from this a little?” she queried in her most reasonable voice, the one she kept in reserve for battling interviewees in her investigative television series. “We’ve all had a shock, a number of shocks as a matter of fact. Obviously this wasn’t just a normal Fresh Perspective house party, to put it mildly. You two, Sarah and William, obviously know each other; Martha was a close and old friend”—she emphasized the word deliberately without looking at the painter—“of Alice. Fizzy, you were a new, newish friend?”

  Fizzy nodded strongly.

  “Mrs. Vascoe, you were her partner, new, newish partner?”

  Mrs. Vascoe inclined her head.

  “What is quite obvious to me,” went on Jemima, “if rather too late in the day, is that Alice Garland wasn’t content for me to make up my own mind about the value or otherwise of Fresh Perspectives. She was sufficiently keen on my using some film of it for television to ensure that my visit was in a sense rigged. Mrs. Vascoe, you would talk about your late husband.” Jemima smiled nicely in her direction. “Fizzy, you would talk about your bad marriage.” Another smile, polite, not quite so nice. “Sarah, I’m not sure about you. You mentioned a personal betrayal, perhaps you really were here getting a fresh perspective on things. Yet you clearly know Alice’s estranged husband well.”

  But Sarah Halliwell chose neither to confirm nor to deny what Jemima had said.

  It was William Gearhart who burst out, with something of a return to his original intemperate manner, “Of course we know each other. And there was a betrayal, a highly personal betrayal But the betrayer was Alice, not me. I’d like to make that absolutely clear. Alice used her knowledge in the gallery, quoted her, got her name involved. When I went up the spout, Sarah lost her job.”

  “William,” broke in Sarah, “do we have to have all this out again? And in public? It’s nothing to do with poor Alice’s death. She offered me the trip to make up, I suppose. She was generous, she could be generous. And yes, Jemima, you’re right. Alice did ask us all along to make up a convincing party for you, even though our reasons for a fresh start were, speaking of myself, perfectly genuine ones.”

  “Nothing to do with Alice’s death?” hissed Fizzy. “That’s for the police to say, I think. How do we know it was an accident? You were out and about last night, Sarah Halliwell. I saw you all right when I took my dip. I saw the light in your cottage, saw it come on, you were there moving about. Who’s to say you didn’t go up to the house, lure poor little Alice down to the shore …” She broke off, even Fizzy aware that she might, just might, be going too far.

  “I have no intention of denying that I left my cottage last night.” Sarah spoke proudly. “As a matter of fact, I visited William’s cottage. I reasoned with him. I tried to persuade him to leave in the morning. There was nothing to be gained from being here. The past was the past: there was nothing more either of us could do about it. Right, William?”

  “Perfectly right. Why not add that we spent the night together? That we made love, if you prefer to put it that way. So unless Fizzy is going to accuse us both of lying, and both of murdering Alice, I think this delightful young woman must really accept—”

  “Are you patronizing me? I don’t buy that,” Fizzy threatened him. But the word “murder,” mentioned for the first time, cast a new and frightful shadow on all of them.

  It was the re-emergence of Irini, weeping once more now that there was temporarily no need for her executive qualities and expostulating in Greek—the word Nik
os could be heard repeatedly—which put an end to the whole distressing scene.

  “Poor Irini, and still more poor Nikos,” sighed Sarah at the end of it all. “Nikos is wondering what is going to happen to him, or rather what is going to happen to the business.”

  Mrs. Vascoe smiled eagerly. “Oh, please, do assure them, Sarah, I wish I knew some Greek, I’ve been boning up, but I don’t know enough yet to say something as important as this. So you must assure them on my behalf that of course the business will go on, of course Irini won’t lose her job! Hardly. She’s the mainstay. As for Nikos, I’m not quite clear exactly what he does, but whatever arrangement Alice had made with him, I’ll surely honour that. Harry taught me to have everything very clear from the start, and I certainly mean to get everything clear from now on—”

  Sarah was looking at her with some embarrassment; then she silently raised an eyebrow in William’s direction. He nodded.

  “Mrs. Vascoe, this is going to be quite embarrassing, I fear. But the business which Irini is worrying about, Nikos’s business with Alice, is the one Fizzy mentioned to you. Rather too blithely, I’m afraid, under the circumstances. We have reason to believe that Alice was shipping out certain antiquities—vases—using Nikos.” She stopped.

  “Now you listen here”—Fizzy, belligerent once more. “Alice may no longer be here to protect herself, but that’s no reason why the whole of this should be dumped on her. What about you, Martha? It was your idea: Alice told me that. There were some odd things going on up at your cottage, I know it. Some restoring, painting up. I took a look one day. Jemima, I wanted to talk to you about that, last night. You went away.”

  Irini said something very fierce in Greek to Sarah and threw her hands up in the air once more. Then she stalked off the terrace back in the direction of the kitchen.

  “What did she say, Sarah?” asked Mrs. Vascoe. “I don’t know what to think. What would Harry think? Is it true?”