Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

by Antonia Fraser

  If she recovered, of course. But the latest cautious bulletin from Claudette via the niece-who-was-a-nurse, confirmed by a few other loquacious people on the island, was that Tina Archer was recovering. Slowly. The police had already been able to interview her. In a few days time she would be able to leave the hospital. She was determined, quite determined, to attend Miss Izzy’s funeral, which would be held, naturally enough, in that little English-looking church with its incongruous tropical vegetation overlooking the sunny grave. For Miss Izzy had long ago made clear her own determination to be buried in the Archer Tomb, along with Governor Sir Valentine and “his only wife Isabella.”

  “As the last of the Archers. But she had to get permission since it’s a national monument. And of course the government couldn’t do enough for her. So they gave it. Then. Ironic, isn’t it?” The speaker making absolutely no attempt to conceal her own disgust was Coralie Harrison. “And now we learn that she wasn’t the last of the Archers. Not even officially. And we shall have the so-called Miss Tina Archer as chief mourner. And while the Bo’lander government desperately looks for ways to get round the will and grab the house for their precious museum, nobody quite has the bad taste to go ahead and say: no, no burial in the Archer Tomb for naughty old Miss Izzy. Since she hasn’t after all left the people of Bow Island a penny.”

  “It should be an interesting occasion,” Jemima interrupted. She was sitting with Coralie Harrison under the conical thatched roof of the hotel’s beach bar. This was where she first danced, then sat out with Joseph Archer on the night of the new moon—the night Miss Izzy had been killed. Now the sea sparkled under the sun as though there were crystals scattered on its surface; today there were no waves at all and the happy water-skiers crossed and re-crossed the wide bay with its palm-fringed shore. Enormous brown pelicans perched on some stakes which indicated where rocks lay. Every now and then one would take off like an unwieldy aeroplane and fly slowly and inquisitively over the heads of the swimmers. It was a tranquil, even an idyllic scene. But somewhere in the distant peninsula lay Archer Plantation House, not only shuttered but now, she imagined, also sealed up by the police.

  Coralie Harrison had sauntered up to the bar from the beach. She traversed the few yards with seeming casualness. All Bo’landers frequently exercised their right to promenade along the sands unchecked (as in most Caribbean islands, no one owned any portion of the beach in Bow Island, even outside the most stately mansion like Archer Plantation House—except the people). Jemima however was in no doubt that this was a planned visit. She had not forgotten that first meeting, and Coralie’s tentative approach to her, interrupted by Greg’s peremptory cry.

  It was the day after the inquest on Miss Izzy’s death. Her body had been released by the police and the funeral would soon follow. Jemima admitted to herself that she was interested enough in the whole Archer family—in its various branches—to want to attend it, quite apart from the tenderness for the old lady herself, based on that brief meeting. To Megalith Television, in a telex from Bowtown, she had spoken merely of tying up a few loose ends resulting from the cancellation of her programme.

  There had been an open verdict at the inquest. Tina Archer’s evidence in the shape of a sworn statement had not really contributed much which was not known or suspected already. She had been asleep upstairs in one of the many fairly derelict bedrooms kept ostensibly ready for guests. The bedroom chosen for her by Miss Izzy had however not faced on to the sea; the chintz curtains in this back room, bearing some dated rosy pattern from a remote era, were not quite so bleached and tattered as elsewhere, since they had been protected from the sun and salt.

  Miss Izzy had gone to bed in good spirits, reassured by the fact that Tina Archer was going to spend the night. She had drunk several more rum punches and had offered to have Henry fetch some of her father’s celebrated champagne from the cellar. As a matter of fact Miss Izzy often made this offer after a few draughts of punch; she was reminded by Tina that Henry was away and the subject was dropped.

  Tina Archer in her statement said that she had no clue as to what might have woken the old lady and induced her to descend the stairs; it was right out of character in her own opinion. Miss Isabella Archer was a lady of independent mind but notoriously frightened of the dark, hence Tina’s presence at the house in the first place. As to her own recollection of the attack, Tina had so far managed to dredge very few of the details from her memory: the blow to the back of the head had—whether temporarily or permanently—expunged all the immediate circumstances from her consciousness. She had a vague idea that there had been a bright light, but even that was rather confused and might be part of the blow she had suffered. Basically Tina Archer could remember nothing between going to bed in the tattered rose-patterned four-poster and waking up in hospital.

  Coralie’s lip trembled. She bowed her head and sipped at her long drink through a straw: both Coralie and Jemima were drinking some exotic mixture of fruit juice—alcohol-free—invented by Matthew the barman (not a relation of Claudette’s for once, being from Antigua). There was a wonderful soft breeze coming in from the sea and Coralie was dressed in a loose flowered cotton dress: but she looked hot and angry. “Tina schemed for everything all her life and now she’s got it. That’s what I wanted to warn you about that morning in the churchyard—don’t trust Tina Archer, I wanted to say. Now it’s too late: she’s got it all. When she was married to Greg I tried to like her, Jemima, honestly I did. Little Tina Archer, so cute and yet so clever, but always trouble—”

  “Joseph Archer feels rather the same way about her, I gather.” Was it her imagination or did Coralie’s face soften slightly at the sound of Joseph’s name?

  “Does he now? I’m glad. He fancied her too once upon a time, long ago. Well, she is quite pretty.” Their eyes met. “Not all that pretty, but if you like the type—” Jemima and Coralie both laughed. The fact was that Coralie Harrison was quite appealing—if you liked her type—but Tina Archer was ravishing by any standards. All the time Jemima was wondering exactly what it was that Coralie, beneath the complaints, had come to say.

  “Greg absolutely loathes her now, of course,” Coralie continued, firmly. “Especially since he heard the news about the will. When we met you that morning up at the church he’d just been told. Hence, well, I’m sorry, but he was very rude, wasn’t he? I wanted to apologize for that, explain.”

  “More hostile than rude.” But Jemima had begun to work out the timing. “You mean, your brother knew about the will before Miss Izzy was killed?” she exclaimed.

  “Oh yes. Someone from Eddy Thompson’s office told Greg: Daisy Marlow maybe, he takes her out. Of course we all knew it was on the cards, except we hoped Joseph had argued Miss Izzy out of it. And he would have argued her out of it—given time. That museum is everything to Joseph.”

  “Your brother and Miss Izzy—that wasn’t an easy relationship, I gather?” Jemima thought she was using her gentlest and most persuasive interviewer’s voice.

  But Coralie countered with something like defiance. “You sound like the police!”

  “Why, have they—?”

  “Well of course they have.” Coralie answered the question even before Jemima had completed it. “Everyone knows that Greg absolutely hated Miss Izzy, blamed her for breaking up his marriage, for taking little Tina and giving her ideas.”

  “Wasn’t it rather the other way round? Tina delving into the family records for the museum and then my programme. You said she was such a schemer.” Jemima wondered if she was beginning to see some kind of pattern in all this.

  “Oh, I know she was a schemer! But did Greg? He did not. Not then. He was besotted with Tina at the time, so he had to blame the old lady. They had a frightful row … very publicly. He went round to the house one night, went in by the sea, shouted at her. Hazel and Henry heard, so then everyone knew. That was when Tina told him she was going to get a divorce, throw in her lot with Miss Izzy for the future. I’m afraid my brother is
rather an extreme person and his temper is certainly extreme. He made threats—”

  “But the police don’t think—” Jemima stopped. It was clear what she meant.

  Coralie swung her legs off the bar stool. Jemima handed her the huge straw bag with the Archer logo on it which she slung over her shoulder in proper Bo’lander fashion.

  “How pretty,” Jemima commented politely.

  “I sell them at the hotel on the North Point. For a living.” The remark sounded pointed. “No,” Coralie went on rapidly before Jemima could say anything more on that subject, “no, of course the police don’t think, as you put it. Greg Harrison might have assaulted Tina all right, but Greg Harrison kill Miss Izzy when he knew perfectly well that by so doing he was handing his ex-wife a fortune? No way. Not even the Bo’lander police would believe that.”

  Coralie Harrison sauntered off down the beach, swinging the bag which she sold “for a living.” She was singing that familiar and celebrated calypso under her breath. This time Jemima Shore could swear the words ran: “This is my graveyard in the sun.”

  That night Jemima Shore found Joseph Archer again on the beach under the stars. But the moon had waxed since their first encounter. Now it was beginning to cast a silver pathway on the waters of the night. Nor was this meeting unplanned as that first one had been. Joseph had sent her a message that he would be free and they had agreed to meet down by the bar—and the moon and the sea.

  “What do you say I’ll take you on a night drive round our island, Jemima?”

  “No, let’s be proper Bo’landers and walk along the sands.” She wanted to be alone with him, not driving past the rows of lighted tourist hotels, listening to the eternal beat of the steel bands. Jemima felt reckless enough not to care how Joseph himself would interpret this change of plan.

  They walked for some time along the edge of the sea in silence except for the gentle lap of the waves. After a while Jemima took off her sandals and splashed through the warm receding waters, and a little while after that Joseph Archer took her hand and led her back on to the sand. The waves grew conspicuously rougher as they rounded the point of the first wide bay. They stood for a moment together, Joseph and Jemima, he with his arm companionably round her waist.

  “Jemima, even without that new moon, I’m going to wish—” Then Joseph stiffened. He dropped the encircling arm, grabbed her shoulder and swung her round.

  “Jesus, oh sweet Jesus, do you see that?”

  The force of his gesture made her wince. For a moment she was distracted by the flickering moonlit swathe on the dark surface of the water: there were multitudinous white—silver—horses out beyond the land where high waves were breaking over an outcrop of rocks. She thought Joseph was pointing out to sea. Then Jemima saw the lights.

  “The Archer house!” she cried. “I thought it was shut up.” It seemed that all the lights of the house were streaming out across the promontory on which it lay. Such was the illumination that you might have supposed some great ball was in progress, a thousand candles lit as in the days of Governor Archer. More sombrely Jemima realized that was how the plantation house must have looked on the night of Miss Izzy’s death: Tina Archer and others had born witness to the old lady’s insistence on never leaving her house in darkness. The night her murderer had come in from the sea: that was how the house had looked to him.

  “Come on,” said Joseph Archer. The moment of lightness—or loving perhaps? but now she would never know—had utterly vanished. He sounded both grim and determined. “Let’s go.”

  “To the police?”

  “No, to the house. I need to know what’s happening there.”

  As they walked rapidly, half-ran along the sands, Joseph Archer said only one thing further. “This house should have been ours.” Ours: the people of Bow Island.

  His relentlessness on the subject of the museum struck Jemima anew since her conversation with Coralie Harrison. What would a man—or a woman for that matter—do for an inheritance? And there was more than one kind of inheritance. Wasn’t a national heritage as important to some people as a personal inheritance to others? Joseph Archer was above all a patriotic Bo’lander. And he had not known of the change of will on the morning after Miss Izzy’s death. She herself had evidence of that. Might a man like Joseph Archer, a man who had already risen in his own world by sheer determination, decide to take the law into his own hands? In order to secure the museum for his people while there was still time?

  And yet … Joseph Archer to kill the kind old lady who had befriended him as a boy? Batter her to death? That was what the murderer had done … As he strode along, so tall in the moonlight, Joseph was suddenly a complete and thus menacing enigma to Jemima.

  They had reached the promontory, had scrambled up the rocks and had got as far as the first terrace when all the lights in the house went out. It was as though a switch had been thrown. Only the cold eerie glow of the moon over the sea behind them remained to illuminate the bushes, once trimmed, now wildly overgrown, and the sagging balustrades.

  But Joseph did not check. He strode on, tugging at Jemima where necessary, helping her up the flights of stone steps, some of them deeply cracked and uneven. In the darkness, Jemima could just discern that the windows of the drawing-room were still open. There had to be someone in there, someone lurking perhaps behind the ragged red brocade curtains which had once been stained by Miss Izzy’s blood.

  Joseph, still holding Jemima’s hand, pulled her through the centre window.

  There was a short cry like a suppressed scream and then a low sound as if someone was laughing at them there in the dark. An instant later, all the lights were snapped on at once.

  It was Tina Archer standing before them at the door, her hand on the switch. She wore a white bandage which covered the back of her head like a turban. And she was not laughing, she was sobbing.

  “Oh, it’s you, Jo-seph and Miss Je-mi-ma Shore.” For the first time Jemima was aware of the sing-song Bo’lander note in Tina’s voice. “I was so fright-ened.”

  “Are you all right, Tina?” asked Jemima hastily, to cover the fact that she had been quite severely frightened herself. The atmosphere of angry tension between the two people in the room, so different in looks, yet both of them, as it happened, called Archer, was almost palpable. She felt she was in honour bound to try and relieve it. “Are you all alone?” she asked.

  “The police said I could come.” Tina ignored the question. “They have finished with everything here. And besides—” Her terrified sobs had vanished. There was something deliberately provocative about Tina as she moved towards them. “Why ever not?” To neither of them did she need to elaborate: the words “since it’s all mine” hung in the air.

  Joseph spoke for the first time since they had entered the room. “I want to look at the house,” he said harshly.

  “Jo-seph Archer, you get out of here. Back where you came from, back to your off-ice and that’s not a great fine house.” There was something almost viperish about Tina as she flung the words at him. Then she addressed Jemima placatingly, in something more like her usual sweet manner. “I’m sorry, but you see, we’ve not been friends since way back. And besides you gave me such a shock.”

  “We were once: friends.” Joseph swung on his heel. “I’ll see you at the funeral, Miss Tina Archer.” He managed to make the words sound extraordinarily threatening. For a moment Jemima wondered: whose funeral?

  That night it seemed to Jemima Shore that she hardly slept, although the fact that the threads of broken, half-remembered dreams disturbed her and made her yet more restless indicated that she must actually have fallen into some kind of doze in the hour before dawn. The light was still grey when she looked out of her shutters. The tops of the tall palms were bending: there was quite a wind.

  Back on her bed, Jemima tried to recall just what she had been dreaming. There had been some pattern to it all: she knew there had. She wished rather angrily that light would suddenly break through into
her sleepy mind as the sun was shortly due to break through the eastern fringe of palms on the hotel estate. No gentle, slow-developing, rosy-fingered dawn for the Caribbean: one brilliant low ray was a herald of what was to come, and then almost immediately hot relentless sunshine for the rest of the day. She needed that kind of instant clarity herself.

  Hostility: that was part of it all, the nature of hostility. The hostility for example between Joseph and Tina Archer the night before, so virulent and public—with herself as the public—that it might almost have been managed for effect.

  Then the management of things: Tina Archer, always managing, always a schemer as Coralie Harrison had said (and Joseph Archer too). That brought her to the other couple in this odd four-pointed drama: the Harrisons, brother and sister, or rather half-brother and sister: a point made by Tina to correct Miss Izzy.

  More hostility: Greg who had once loved Tina and now loathed her. Joseph who had once also (perhaps) loved Tina. Coralie who had once perhaps (very much perhaps, this one) loved Joseph and certainly loathed Tina. Cute and clever little Tina Archer, the Archer Tomb, the carved figures of Sir Valentine and his wife, the inscription, “his only wife Isabella, daughter of …” She was beginning to float back again into sleep, as the four figures, all Bo’landers, all sharing some kind of common past, began to dance in her imagination to a calypso whose wording too was confused: