Sorry for the Dead

by Nicola Upson

  “ ‘The women of Britain say go’?” Whittaker gave a mock salute as he quoted the enlistment posters that had begun to appear all over towns and villages. “Nice of you to give us your blessing. I suppose if you had your way, every last man would be on the next boat out. You really do hate us, don’t you?”

  George shrugged. “You’re a necessary evil. Nothing more.” They glared at each other for a moment, and Josephine caught Jeannie’s eye, wondering if it was possible for the atmosphere to get any more uncomfortable. To her surprise, it was George who backed down first. “Anyway, it’s not about men and women,” she said, turning her attention back to Simon Cassidy. “It’s about what’s best for the nation as a whole—and that is most certainly to become more self-sufficient than we are at the moment. We shouldn’t be giving our money to the bloody foreigners for food that we’re perfectly capable of growing ourselves—in war or in peacetime.”

  “Do you agree with that, Mr. Cassidy?” Jeannie asked, more, Josephine suspected, from a desire to dissolve the tension than a genuine interest in the answer.

  Cassidy cleared his throat again. “Well, Miss Hartford-Wroe is correct when she says that we could learn from some of our friends in Europe. Take Belgium, for example …” He launched into a lengthy sermon on imports and exports, and Jeannie muttered an apology under her breath.

  Out of the window, Josephine saw the postman cycle up to the front door, his wheels skidding a little on the gravel as he braked. She noticed the color drain from Peter Whittaker’s face, his quarrel with George temporarily forgotten, and he leapt up to rush into the hallway, arriving at the front door almost before the letters had a chance to clatter to the floor. Harriet came through from the kitchen with more toast and coffee, and she looked questioningly at her cousin as he sorted through the post. “Is it your call-up?” she asked.

  Whittaker shook his head. “Another stay of execution.”

  He grinned at her and left the room, but his bravado didn’t entirely eclipse the panic of a few seconds earlier, and Josephine could only begin to imagine what it must be like to live each day in constant fear of that official envelope. Cassidy got up to help Harriet with the tray, and the smile he gave her was the first time that Josephine had seen his expression change. “How was your class this morning?” Harriet asked, clearing away some of the empty dishes.

  Before Josephine could answer, there was a cursory knock at the door, and a young woman wearing the college uniform handed George a sheaf of papers. “Sorry to interrupt you, Miss H,” she said, “but this is the inventory you asked for.”

  “Ah, good—thank you, Vera.” Josephine looked with interest at the “right-hand woman,” mentally revising the image of someone older and more experienced. Vera was around twenty, with closely cropped fair hair and a lean, wiry figure. She wore her gardening clothes easily, as if she had been born to an outdoor life, but her face—though striking—carried the insecurities of someone who was always waiting to be judged. Josephine wondered if she knew how much she was valued at the college; sometimes women who were as confident in their own abilities as George and Harriet forgot that those who worked for them needed encouragement. The young woman hovered in the doorway, unsure of whether to stay or go, until George solved the problem for her. “This is excellent news,” she said, getting up from the table. “We’re already well ahead of last year. I’ll come out with you now, Vera, and we can check the orders together. There’s just about time before I give the girls their instructions for the day.”

  Vera beamed and followed George outside, and Josephine watched them head toward the gardener’s office, noticing how often the girl glanced over at her employer. Harriet collected George’s half-eaten breakfast and added it to the tray, then disappeared into the kitchen without another word. Through the open doorway, Josephine saw her give the abandoned bacon to the cat, then heard the rest of the food being scraped into the bin. Simon Cassidy excused himself from the table and retreated upstairs with his newspaper, leaving Josephine and Jeannie to finish their breakfast in peace.

  “What time are we all summoned for duty?” Josephine asked, just as the sound of a vigorously rung bell cut through the air.

  Jeannie smiled and pushed her chair back. “Does that answer your question? Come on. Out to the garden, and just pray it’s not your turn to fetch the muck carts.”

  It wasn’t, and Josephine couldn’t help but feel that George was breaking her in gently by putting her in charge of preparing vegetable boxes for the college’s private customers. Lanton and Macdonald—her new disciples—immediately volunteered to help her, and gave her a cheerful smile when their offer was accepted. In fact, everyone seemed to take on the tasks they were assigned with a good grace. Josephine looked round at the twenty young women gathered together on the lawn by the house, notebooks in hand for any special duties, their faces turned as one toward their teacher, and she realized that the lessons they were learning went well beyond the confines of horticulture. The mood that George had established here—and it seemed to come so naturally to her—was very much one of mutual trust and responsibility, and Miss Ingham’s concerns seemed to Josephine more unfounded than ever.

  Eight of the girls, including the Norwood sisters and Charity Lomax, were dispatched under Vera’s supervision to dig a large patch of uncultivated ground beyond the greenhouses. It was Jeannie’s job to sell produce at the Thursday afternoon market in Lewes, and she was given two students to help her with the picking and loading, although Josephine couldn’t remember their names. The rest of the girls were directed to various parts of the walled garden for watering, planting, and pruning, and the air gradually filled with distant young voices as they drifted off and went about their work.

  “Come on, Miss Tey—we’ll show you the ropes,” Lanton offered, and she led the way through the bottom gate to a stone-built lean-to, attached to the garden wall, which doubled as a potting and packing shed. The building was long and low, rich with the pungent smell of earth, and three windows at the front gave it a soft, pleasant light. A wooden bench ran all the way down the window side, scuffed and scarred by the work that had taken place there, and against the back wall stood rack after rack of tools: shovels, forks, rakes, dibbers, sieves, and a multitude of sharp-pronged, peculiarly shaped implements whose purpose was a mystery to Josephine. At the far end, flanked by bunches of wooden canes, several rows of terracotta flowerpots had been laid on their sides like a honeycomb, and watering cans of all sizes hung from the beams, interspersed at regular intervals by oil lamps. Sweet peas stood in a jar by the window, giving off the faint but unmistakable scent of summer, and under the eaves just inside the door there was a house martin’s nest; Josephine ducked her head as the bird flew past to feed its young, apparently unconcerned by the company.

  “Right,” said Macdonald, picking up a file of letters that lay ready on the bench and waving them enthusiastically in the air. “These are the new orders, and this is Vera’s list of all the produce that’s ready for harvest. All we have to do is put the two together, but God help us if we pick a bean that’s too young, or a radish more than we need. All hell will break loose.”

  “Waste and neglect are the enemies of a civilized society,” chimed in Lanton, and Josephine smiled to herself, already sufficiently familiar with George’s oratory to give the impression the credit it deserved.

  “I suppose that goes for time too,” she said, “so you’d better show me where everything is, and we can get started.”

  They did as she asked, and the three of them spent a productive hour collecting all the produce that was needed, finishing with the salad crops, which were grown in cold frames next to the shed. The girls were easy company and had been friends since childhood, traveling to Moira House together from their hometown in Essex, and with ambitions to concentrate on physiotherapy as a career and perhaps start a clinic together. They quizzed Josephine on her own training and the pros and cons of a place at Anstey, and she saw in them the sort of camar
aderie that she had enjoyed with her own school friend, Marjorie, who had been at her side in all but this most recent placement. When everything had been gathered from the different parts of the garden, they laid it all out on the workbench, arranging the fruit and vegetables according to the quantities required by every customer, then took a box each to pack. A companionable silence fell over the shed as they concentrated on their orders, broken only by regular cries from the nest as the young birds scrambled for the latest delivery of food. The windows looked out toward the glasshouses and beyond them the patch of new ground, and Josephine watched the digging as she worked, impressed by the students’ application to their task. Peter Whittaker was sitting on the grass by the wall with a sketchbook in his lap, squinting against the sun as he drew the girls at work, and Josephine noticed how self-consciously most of them behaved whenever he glanced in their direction; even the diligent Vera wasn’t immune to his attention.

  “Not the Little Gem for Mrs. Needingworth,” Macdonald said, catching Josephine’s arm as she reached for a head of lettuce to complete her order. “She can’t bear them. Nothing but a Webb’s Wonder will do.”

  She pointed to another variety, and Josephine corrected her mistake, amused by the familiarity with which the girls talked about their customers, as if they were personal friends rather than women they would never meet. “Is Mr. Whittaker an artist?” she asked, closing the box and taking a new order from the top of the pile.

  “Yes, he is,” said Lanton, seizing quickly on the topic of conversation. “He’s always drawing something or other, and he’s really very good.”

  Macdonald rolled her eyes. “I’m afraid you’ll have to excuse Joyce, Miss Tey. She’s been sweet on Mr. Whittaker ever since he rescued her glove from the pond and told her to call him Peter. Now there’s simply no saving her.”

  “Mags!” Lanton blushed and glared good-naturedly at her friend. “Just ignore her, Miss Tey. She hasn’t got an artistic bone in her body, so she judges everyone by her own standards, which are straight out of the gutter. I’m not sweet on him—nothing of the sort. That wouldn’t be right. He’s Miss Barker’s cousin.”

  “Hmm. So he says …”

  Macdonald left the remark dangling provocatively in the air. The girls seemed to have completely forgotten that Josephine was a teacher, and she couldn’t decide whether to take that as a compliment or a strike against her authority. “What do you mean?” she asked, too curious to care.

  “Just that they seem very close for cousins. Very protective of each other, if you know what I mean.”

  “Nonsense!” Lanton sighed wearily and looked to Josephine for support. “There must be fifteen years at least between them, don’t you think, Miss Tey? And anyway, if Miss Barker is interested in anyone, it’s that chap from the Ministry. He’s far closer to her age, and I saw him take her flowers the other day.”

  “Well, if that isn’t coals to Newcastle, I don’t know what is,” Macdonald said dismissively. “He’s such a creep, Joyce. And anyway, Norwood says he’s married, although how she knows that I’ve no idea. But either way, I doubt that someone like Miss Barker would look twice at him. She’s got too much sense. What do you think, Miss Tey?”

  Josephine was just remembering Simon Cassidy’s smile at breakfast that morning, but she was saved from coming down on either side of the argument by the sight of George emerging from the largest of the glass houses with a face as black as thunder. “Look out—Miss H is on the warpath again,” Macdonald said, and then, when George reappeared a few minutes later with the bell, added, “What did I tell you? Someone’s for it.”

  “What does that mean?” Josephine asked, as the clanging cut through the air, angry and relentless.

  “Like Mags just said, one of us is in trouble,” Joyce explained, “and if it’s to do with the glass house, it’s bound to be serious.” She took off her gloves and brushed the soil from her tunic. “Every week, one of us is put in charge of ventilating the greenhouse and watering all the plants.”

  “Twice a day, morning and night,” Macdonald continued. “It’s supposed to teach us responsibility, because a lot of the college’s most precious plants are there—expensive fruits and flowers, seedlings coming on for the new season, all that sort of thing.”

  “It’s ridiculous,” Lanton admitted, “but even though I know it’s not me this time, I still feel guilty.”

  “And I can’t afford another fine,” Mags groaned. “Why did this have to happen?” She caught Josephine’s bemused expression and explained. “When one of us does something that causes the college to lose money, we all have to pay a token fine, even if it wasn’t our fault. Miss H is a great believer in collective responsibility, so everyone suffers. I don’t mind telling you, I’ll happily dole out the punishment on her behalf when we find out who it is this time. It’s just not fair when everyone’s skint, and we so wanted to go and see The Tramp on our afternoon off.”

  The bell continued to ring, and Josephine noticed that all the girls were dropping their tools and hurrying toward the glass house. She led her charges out to join them, falling in with the circle that had gathered round to receive its reproof. Everyone seemed nervous, and she caught Jeannie’s eye; for once, there was no mischief or sparkle in the face that looked back at her. George stood silently by the glass house door, waiting for the last girl to arrive, breathless, from the furthest parts of the garden, and Josephine couldn’t help but feel that missing out on Charlie Chaplin’s latest film was the least of anyone’s worries; criminal misdemeanors must have been met with less fury and recrimination than were currently evident on the principal’s face. “Who was in charge of closing the ventilators last night?” she demanded, her voice low and even. Nobody answered, and Josephine noticed how much younger the girls suddenly looked, like children about to be scolded by an angry parent; even the worldly-wise Miss Lomax had temporarily lost her composure. “I’ll ask you one more time,” George said, “and I would advise you not to make things worse by compounding negligence with deceit. Who should have been on duty in the glass house last night?”

  There was a movement to Josephine’s right as someone—she didn’t see who—gave Dorothy Norwood an accusing shove in the back. Reluctantly, the girl raised her hand. “It was my turn, Miss H, but I swapped with Betty because I wasn’t feeling well. She said she’d do my shift for me.”

  “Liar!” Betty shouted, and the outrage on her face was either genuine or one of the most gifted performances that Josephine had ever seen. “I don’t know what she’s talking about, Miss H. She didn’t ask me to do anything of the sort.”

  The twins stared at each other, and the hostility between them was palpable, although Dorothy had the self-control necessary to use it to her advantage. “I swear I’m telling the truth,” she said without even raising her voice. “Betty must have forgotten that she’d agreed to take over for me.” She looked at George and smiled, and Josephine was reminded of her grandmother’s cat, who always seemed to be asleep on a cushion when a dead bird was discovered in the house. “Either that, or she never had any intention of helping me at all and only said she would to get me into trouble.”

  “You bloody bitch!” Betty launched herself at her sister, but Vera Simms stepped forward quickly to intervene. “You’ve been doing this ever since we were little,” Betty shouted, red in the face and struggling to free herself. “Well, you might have fooled our parents with your butter-wouldn’t-melt act, but you won’t get away with it this time.”

  The unfolding family drama was threatening to overshadow the breach of college rules, and Josephine realized that she still had no idea what sin had actually been committed. George held up her hand in a bid to regain control of the situation, and both girls fell silent, waiting for her judgment. “Dorothy, I’m surprised at you. Your conduct here so far has been exemplary, but even if you are telling the truth about last night, you had no business to ask anyone to do your duties for you. If you were feeling unwell, you should have
come to me or to Miss Barker, and we would have appointed someone to take over the work for you. And Betty, we only have your word to counteract your sister’s, and I’m sorry to say that your word has not always proved trustworthy in the past. As for your language and behavior just now, that is not what I’ve come to expect from a Moira House student, and you’ve left me no choice but to report the incident in its entirety to Miss Ingham. Now, you will both come to my office at the end of the day, when I’ve had a chance to consider how best to deal with you.”

  The Norwood sisters nodded in unison—the only time as far as Josephine could see that they had ever been in agreement—and George addressed the group as a whole. “I neither want nor can afford to see a repeat of last night’s carelessness,” she said gravely. “Because nobody closed the windows, the rain has destroyed some of our most precious plants—months of work and a significant part of the college’s potential income.” She reached inside the glass house and took out a trug of soaking wet bulbs. “These have been drying out across the summer, ready to plant for the new season. We have a reputation for the quality of our cut flowers, and these should have made us upward of a hundred pounds. As it is, they’re worthless—completely ruined and only good for the compost.” She paused, and the ensuing silence was excruciatingly uncomfortable. “All acts of indifference or forgetfulness when they affect the welfare of our plants must be punished, and I’m appealing now to your sense of duty. I shouldn’t have to remind you that the men in your families are away fighting, and—in some cases—making the ultimate sacrifice. The least you can do is live up to the new responsibilities that you have been given in their absence, and prove yourselves worthy of the trust your country is placing in you.”