Sorry for the Dead

by Nicola Upson

  Josephine did as she was told, at a loss to guess what the talisman might be. She removed the covering and stared in disbelief at the pale stone sculpture beneath, a bust of a woman’s head that glistened brilliantly in the harsh stage lighting. “Is this really what I think it is?” she asked.

  “If you mean is it a genuine Gaudier-Brzeska, then yes,” Keynes said, winking at his wife.

  The economist was a shrewd collector of art—the first time that Josephine had visited his office, she’d fallen in love with a Cezanne on the wall by his desk—but still the gesture astonished her. She knelt down to be level with the woman’s face and put her hand on the cool stone, feeling the contrast between its rough and polished surfaces. “I don’t know what to say. It’s absolutely exquisite.”

  Keynes smiled, pleased by her reaction. “Well, we want to do everything we can to make this one a success,” he said, squeezing Loppy’s hand. “I know it’s not exactly like the piece you describe in the play—more abstract, I suspect, than what you had in mind …”

  “It’s perfect,” Josephine said, interrupting him. “I don’t know how you managed it, but I couldn’t be more thrilled that you did.”

  “A generous donation from the wine cellars at King’s to a friend of mine did the trick. That, and two tickets to the opening night. Apparently, he’s a fan of yours. He tells me he saw Richard of Bordeaux fourteen times.”

  “Then he must come as my guest and let me buy him dinner. It’s the least I can do.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be delighted.”

  “I don’t know—we go to all this trouble to make every scene sparkle, and what thanks do we get? Upstaged by a bit of bloody stone. When was the last time you bought us dinner?”

  Josephine turned and smiled at Ronnie as the Motleys struggled in with a pile of costumes. “The night before last, if my memory serves me correctly,” she said. “But pull something like this out of the bag and I’ll gladly do it again.”

  “It is stunning,” Lettice said, dropping the clothes onto a chair to take a closer look. “What a tragedy that he died so young.”

  “Let’s just hope that Loppy doesn’t get carried away in the heat of the moment and smash the wrong sculpture,” Ronnie said. “That really would be a showstopper.”

  Keynes laughed and turned back to Josephine. “Do you mind if I stay and watch for a while?”

  “Of course not. You can keep an eye on our new prop. I’m already worried about the insurance, or does the wine cellar solve that problem too?”

  A bell rang in the wings before he could answer, and the stage manager called the company to order. “Five minutes, ladies and gentleman. Opening positions, please.”

  Loppy hurried off to change for her first scene, and Josephine followed Keynes and the Motley sisters into the front stalls. The theater itself was far more beautiful than anyone might have guessed from the modest entrances—simple and elegant, with rich, unadorned wood and pale paintwork. Already, in rehearsals, Josephine had come to appreciate the unique intimacy between the stage and auditorium, and she could hardly wait to see it in action with a full house. She chose a seat in the middle of a row halfway back and watched as two members of the stage crew lifted the sculpture carefully onto a plinth for the opening scene, set in a London gallery. It looked magnificent, and if the seamless first act was anything to go by, Keynes’s lucky charm was beginning to work its magic.

  She had just finished giving notes to the cast when she noticed Marta slipping quietly into the back of the stalls. “This is a nice surprise,” Josephine said. “You can’t have finished the first draft already?”

  “I’ve barely started it. Nothing was going right, so I went out for cigarettes and bought a couple of newspapers.”

  “And the next thing you knew it was lunchtime?”

  “Something like that, yes, but I’m pleased I went. There’s an article in the Daily Mirror that you really need to see.”

  “Can’t it wait until tonight? We’ve only just got underway with the run-through, and I …”

  “No, Josephine, it can’t. I wouldn’t disturb you unless it was important. Who is Elizabeth Banks?”

  Josephine stared at her, unsettled by her tone of voice. “I’ve no idea,” she said. “Why? Should I know her?”

  “Probably. She’s saying you killed her sister. Well—you’re on the list of suspects.”

  “What?” Josephine laughed, then realized that Marta was serious. “I don’t understand. What on earth are you talking about? I’ve never met anyone called Banks.”

  “Banks is her married name. At the time in question, she was called Norwood. Betty Norwood.” Josephine sat down, feeling suddenly faint. “Her sister was called Dorothy,” Marta added, “and she died at a farmhouse in Surrey during the war.”

  “Sussex, not Surrey. The farmhouse was in Sussex.”

  “So you were there? She’s not lying?”

  “Not about that, no. It was the end of my first term at Anstey, and I had a placement at a school called Moira House in Eastbourne. They sent some of their girls to a nearby farmhouse to learn horticulture and help with the war effort, and I was one of the chaperones. It was my job to keep them fit and look after their moral welfare, as the principal put it, even though I wasn’t much older than they were.” She smiled ruefully. “As you’ve probably read, it wasn’t exactly a glittering start to my teaching career, but Dorothy’s death was an accident. It was a terrible thing to happen, and Betty was devastated by it—we all were—but it was nobody’s fault. Is that what this woman’s saying? That my negligence killed her sister?”

  “That’s not exactly what she’s saying …”

  Josephine snatched the newspaper from Marta’s hands and unfolded the double page spread, which pictured a glamorous blonde woman next to the headline “Real Life School for Scandal: a Mirror exclusive by Faith Hope.” A little further down, tucked among a group of smaller photographs in the bottom right-hand corner, she was horrified to see her own face looking back at her. “I don’t understand. This was all so long ago.”

  “God knows why she’s waited until now to dredge it up.” Marta was about to go on, but Josephine stopped her.

  “Just be quiet for a minute,” she said, hating the panic in her own voice but unable to do anything about it. “Let me read it first.”

  She turned to fetch her glasses, frustrated by the lack of light in the auditorium, but Marta caught her arm. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have sprung this on you here, but I was so surprised that I didn’t really think. Can’t you take a break, and we’ll talk about it somewhere more private? I’m sure there’s a simple explanation, but you won’t be able to concentrate on the play until you know what this says.”

  Josephine hesitated, but she knew that Marta was right. “I suppose we could stop for lunch now. They’ll have to reset for the next scene, so we might as well combine the two.”

  “Good idea. Go and fix it. I’ll take the paper and meet you outside.”

  By the time Josephine had made the arrangements and refused Lettice’s offer of a bite to eat in the restaurant upstairs, her imagination had created so many terrible scenarios that she was almost relieved to confront the reality of the article. She found Marta on a bench outside the church and gratefully accepted a cigarette. “Sorry I snapped at you,” she said. “It was just such a shock. I haven’t thought back to those days for years, and I never dreamt that anyone would make something of what happened. I suppose that is bad of me—to dismiss a girl’s death so easily just because she wasn’t someone I was close to or particularly liked.”

  “Perhaps, but we all do that. It doesn’t give anyone an excuse to make sensational accusations.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Josephine asked, picking up the paper at the page that Marta had left open for her.

  “Oh, it’s cleverly written—all suggestion and implication, and nothing that a very expensive lawyer hasn’t been through with a fine-tooth comb, so I doubt you’ll be able
to sue the bitch. It’s what people make of it that counts, though, and I’m afraid I have no faith in the intelligence or generosity of the British public—not the ones who buy a rag like that, anyway.” It would have been churlish to point out the irony of Marta’s last comment, and in any case Josephine appreciated her loyalty. “Read it first; then we’ll talk about what to do.”

  Guessing now that the quote the Express was after had nothing to do with her play, Josephine skimmed the opening paragraph, which was a master class in selective reporting. The gossip columnist wrote:

  When the actress Elizabeth Banks walks on stage each night in Lillian Hellman’s scandalous play of deviant love, she carries her own ghosts with her. Avid theatergoers will remember that The Children’s Hour caused a sensation when it was originally produced on Broadway back in 1934, with its depiction of a young girl who claims that two of her schoolmistresses are guilty of sharing an abnormal attachment. At the time, no leading lady would touch a role that might justifiably tarnish her career—and there were fears that the police would close the play as soon as the curtain rose.

  “ ‘A scandalous play of deviant love,’ ” Marta muttered, looking over Josephine’s shoulder. “And no mention of the fact that the young schoolgirl is eventually exposed as a lying little minx. Who the hell does Faith Hope think she is, making moral judgments on the rest of us? Pay her twenty-five pounds a week and suddenly she’s Jesus.”

  Josephine sighed. “Call me selfish, but right now I’m far more worried about the rest of the article. I’m sure Lillian Hellman can look after herself.”

  “Yes, of course. Sorry. I won’t interrupt again.”

  She lit another cigarette, and Josephine turned back to the story.

  When Miss Banks welcomed me into her colorful, feminine dressing room at the Gate Theater Studio to discuss her new role, I had no inkling of the revelation she was about to share—and neither did she. Only when the intense emotions of the drama began to overwhelm her did she admit that they had a highly personal resonance, and one that she could no longer ignore. Twenty-three years ago, almost to the day, her twin sister died at the age of sixteen—just hours after making a similar accusation!

  “We were always so close,” Miss Banks recalled, fighting back her tears. “When she died, a part of me died with her, and I never believed it was an accident—Dorothy was so clever and so careful. But no one took me seriously, and in the end I stopped trying to be heard. I suppose I was afraid that something similar would happen to me.” The actress, who plays the character of Martha Dobie in the London revival of The Children’s Hour, which opened last week, went on to confide that she sees her new role as a gift from fate, a second chance to do the right thing. “My opening lines in the play are ‘What happened to her?’ And the first time I said them out loud in front of an audience, I felt a shiver down my spine. It was as if Dorothy was standing right next to me, reminding me of my debt to her memory. I owe her the truth, and it’s my intention to prove what really happened all those years ago. Perhaps then we can both find some peace.”

  “Miss Banks refuses to be drawn on whether or not she suspects anyone in particular of the crime, saying only that there were a number of people staying in the house at the time, all of whom were present when her sister died; intriguingly, she adds that “some of them obviously had secrets.” The tragedy took place at a farmhouse in East Sussex, which was run as a celebrated horticultural college and smallholding by Georgina Hartford-Wroe and her close friend, Harriet Barker. The two women—who also operated a lodging house on the premises—had recently been entrusted with the charge of schoolgirls keen to study garden design and the management of the land. After Dorothy Norwood’s death, and other accusations of impropriety that remained unproven at the time, Miss Hartford-Wroe and her companion were forced to close their disgraced establishment and move away from the area.

  In more recent years, the farmhouse (which is situated just a few miles outside the pretty and historic town of Lewes) has enjoyed a different sort of notoriety as home to a number of prominent artists and members of the Bloomsbury group. But the mystery that surrounds the summer of 1915 grows deeper by the day—and its shadows continue to haunt Miss Banks in all their tragic fascination whenever she speaks those poignant opening lines: “What happened to her? She was perfectly well a few hours ago.”

  “Is it accurate?” Marta asked, when Josephine had finished reading.

  “Broadly speaking, yes. The only thing I could argue with is the sprinkling of melodrama. Dorothy’s death happened days after she made those accusations, not hours. But that’s a minor detail compared to everything else, and I suppose people would think me pedantic to point it out.”

  “It’s important, though. It undermines the idea that one was a direct result of the other.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  “And these dangerous accusations—they were about the women who ran the place, presumably?”

  Josephine nodded. “Amongst other things. There was a lot of unpleasantness flying around, and not just inside the house. Farmers didn’t like women playing on the land, and their wives didn’t like women playing with the farmers. It was very early in the war, and resentment hadn’t quite been trounced by grief.”

  “What happened to the two of them after they were forced to leave? The article doesn’t say.”

  “I’ve no idea—we were all hauled back to Eastbourne. There was no way that the principal of Moira House was going to allow its girls or its reputation to be touched by the scandal any more than they had been already.” She glanced down at the newspaper again, looking this time at the photograph of Georgina Hartford-Wroe, a woman she had once admired. She was pictured outside in the garden, giving the day’s orders to one of her students, and there was something in the eagerness on the young girl’s face that brought the sadness of that summer back to Josephine in a way that all the Mirror’s sensationalizing never could; it had all been so hopeful, she thought, so new and exciting.

  At the end of the article, there was a collection of photographs, including her own, grouped together under the loaded question “Who else was there?” She scanned the faces, but there was no image of Harriet Barker, and Josephine remembered how she had always shunned the limelight, even though her contribution to the work of the college had been just as great as her friend’s. Someone in the Mirror’s art department had diligently tracked down the Moira House school photograph for 1915, but the newspaper had stopped short of identifying individual pupils, and Josephine’s memory couldn’t do any better; the girls were virtually indistinguishable in their school hats and uniforms—and anyway, as she had said to Marta, it was all so long ago. Dorothy Norwood’s photograph was curiously absent from a story that was allegedly about keeping her memory alive; as far as Josephine could recall, the relationship between the two sisters had always been an unsettling mixture of dependence and rivalry, and she wondered if the latter had lingered; now that the limelight was quite literally hers, perhaps the actress in Elizabeth Banks refused to be upstaged by her long-dead twin.

  Her eyes fell on the final picture. Jeanette Sellwood had been a teacher at Moira House and the other chaperone to the girls. Like Josephine—whose recently taken photograph was the one she used in theater programs and anything else to do with her writing—Jeannie was shown as an older woman, but she had hardly changed at all in the intervening years. Her long, auburn hair was more styled, her face a little fuller, but still she had that wry smile and those dancing eyes that always seemed to want to know more than anyone could tell her. The picture was so familiar that it was easy to imagine her now, poring over the same page at home or at work, floored by this abrupt resurrection of half-buried memories. Suddenly, with an urgency that took her completely by surprise, Josephine longed to know what Jeannie had done with her life.

  “I bet the box office at the Gate has never been busier,” she said, casting the paper aside with a heavy sigh. “It’s the best publicity a play could
ask for. I wish I’d thought of it.” She looked at Marta in despair. “What on earth am I going to do? Thousands of people will see this, and there’s no opportunity to answer back because it’s all so slyly done. They might have avoided actually using the word suspects, but that’s exactly what this little collection of photographs is. The whole nation will be playing Poirot over their evening cocoa, and I’ll be odds-on favorite.”

  “Josephine, that’s not true.”

  “Of course it is. Listen to this.” She picked up the paper again and read the caption beneath her photograph. “ ‘The former teacher was present when Dorothy Norwood died and has since gone on to become one of our best-known writers of detective stories, whose most recent novel was filmed by none other than Mr. Alfred Hitchcock! Could her flair for fictional crime be inspired by more than just a rich imagination?’ ” And I see I’m the only one with a special footnote. I suppose I should be flattered.”

  “Why not use that to your advantage?” Marta suggested. “Any editor would happily print your side of the story if you wanted to write it.”

  “And fan the flames even higher than they are already? That would just make things worse. As it is, I don’t believe for one moment that this will end here. All that nonsense about guests in the house having a secret—that’s just license to speculate. People are bound to pick it up and start snooping around, and God knows what rubbish they’ll print when that happens. What on earth will my family think, Marta? Or my publisher? Or my neighbors in Inverness?” She stopped before the list became too horrendous to contemplate. “You know I’m right. This is just the Mirror’s opening gambit. They’re fishing for people to come forward and stir up more trouble, and if that happens, there’ll be a new revelation in the papers every day.”

  “You should talk to Archie about it. You know he’d want to help, and if you’ve got a friend at Scotland Yard, you might as well call on him.”