Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

by Antonia Fraser

  This is your graveyard in the sun

  Where my people have toiled since time begun …

  An extraordinarily loud noise on the corrugated metal roof above her head recalled her, trembling, to her senses. The racket had been quite immense: almost as if there had been an explosion or at least a missile fired at the chalet. The thought of a missile made her realize that it had in fact been a missile: it must have been a coconut which had fallen in such a startling fashion on the corrugated roof. Guests were officially warned by the hotel against sitting too close under the palm trees, whose innocuous-looking fronds could suddenly dispense their heavily lethal nuts. “COCONUTS CAN CAUSE INJURY” ran the printed notice.

  “That kind of blow on my head would certainly have caused injury,” thought Jemima, “if not death.”

  Injury, if not death. And the Archer Tomb: my only wife.

  At that moment, straight on cue, the sun struck low through the bending fronds to the east and on to her shutters. And Jemima Shore realized not only why it had been done but how it had been done. Who of them all had been responsible for consigning Miss Izzy Archer to the graveyard in the sun.

  The scene by the Archer Tomb a few hours later had that same strange mixture of English tradition and Bo’lander exoticism which had intrigued Jemima on her first visit to it. Only this time she had another deeper, sadder purpose than sheer tourism. Traditional English hymns were sung at the service but outside a steel band was playing: at Miss Izzy’s request. She had asked for a proper Bo’lander funeral as one who had been born—and now died—on the island.

  As for clothes, the Bo’landers, attending in large numbers, were by and large dressed with that extreme formality, dark suits, white shirts, ties, dark dresses, dark straw hats, even white gloves, which Jemima had observed in churchgoers of a Sunday and in the Bo’lander children, all of them neatly uniformed, on their way to school. No Bow Island T-shirts were to be seen, although many of the highly coloured intricate and lavish wreaths used the familiar shape of the island’s logo. The size of the crowd was undoubtedly a genuine mark of respect: whatever the disappointments of the will to their government, to the Bo’landers generally Miss Izzy Archer had been part of their heritage: the great, great, great … granddaughter of old Sir Valentine (“he be your Daddy and he be mine”).

  Tina Archer wore a black scarf wound round her head which almost totally concealed her bandage. Joseph Archer, standing far apart from her and not looking in her direction, looked both elegant and formal in his office clothes, a respectable member of the government. The Harrisons stood together, Coralie with her head mainly bowed; Greg’s defiant aspect, head lifted proudly in the air, was clearly intended to give the lie to any suggestions that he had not been on the best of terms with the dead woman, whose body was even now being lowered into the family tomb.

  As the coffin—so small and thus so touching in its reminder of Miss Izzy’s tiny size—finally vanished from view, there was a sigh from the mourners. Miss Izzy Archer was gone. They began to sing again: a hymn, but with the steel band gently, rhythmically echoing the tune in the background.

  Jemima Shore moved discreetly in the crowd and stood by the side of the tall man.

  “You’ll never be able to trust her,” she said in a low deliberate voice. “She’s managed you before, she’ll manage you again. It’ll be someone else who will be doing the dirty work next time. On you. You’ll never be able to trust her, will you? Once a murderess, always a murderess. You may wish one day you’d finished her off.”

  The tall man looked down at her. Then he looked across at Tina Archer with one quick, savagely doubting look. A look towards Tina Archer Harrison, Tina his only wife.

  “Why, you—” For a moment Jemima thought that Greg Harrison would actually strike her down, there at the graveside, as he had struck down old Miss Izzy, and—if only on pretence—struck down Tina herself.

  “Greg, darling.” It was Coralie Harrison’s pathetic protesting murmur. “What are you saying to him? Explain to me,” she demanded of Jemima in a voice as low as her own. But the explanations—for Coralie Harrison and the rest of Bow Island—the explanations of the conspiracy of Tina Archer and Greg Harrison were only just beginning.

  The rest was up to the police who with their patient work of investigation would first amplify, then press and finally conclude the case. In the course of their investigations, the conspirators would fall apart: this time for real. To the police would fall the unpleasant duty of disentangling the new lies of Tina Archer: she would now swear that her memory had just returned, that it had been Greg who had half-killed her that night, that she had absolutely nothing to do with it … And Greg Harrison would denounce Tina in return, this time with genuine ferocity: “Her plan, her plan all along. She managed everything. I should never have listened to her.”

  Before she left Bow Island, Jemima Shore went to say goodbye to Joseph Archer, once again formally, in his Bowtown office. She did not think another tryst on the sands, night or day, would be appropriate. There were many casualties of the Archer tragedy beyond Miss Izzy herself. Poor Coralie Harrison for example, genuinely innocent, was one: she had been convinced that her brother, for all the notorious strength of his temper, would never batter down Miss Izzy to benefit his ex-wife, the woman he detested. Coralie, like the rest of Bow Island, was unaware of the whole deep plot by which Greg and Tina would publicly display their hostility, advertise their divorce and all along plan to kill Miss Izzy once the new will was signed. Greg, officially hating his ex-wife (as he had so ostentatiously made clear to Jemima that first morning by the sunny grave), would not be suspected; as for Tina, suffering such obvious injuries (carefully planned not to be too damaging), she could only arouse sympathy.

  Another small casualty, much less important, was the romance which might, just might have developed between Joseph Archer and Jemima Shore. Now in his steamingly hot office with its perpetually moving fan, they talked of quite other things than the new moon and new wishes.

  “You must be happy now: you’ll get your museum,” said Jemima.

  “But that’s not at all the way I wanted it to happen,” he replied quickly. Then Joseph added, “But you know, Jemima, there has been justice done. Miss Izzy did really want us to have that National Museum, in her heart of hearts. I’d have talked her round to good sense again. If she’d lived.”

  “That’s why he—they—acted when they did. They didn’t dare wait, given Miss Izzy’s respect for you,” suggested Jemima. “One question, Joseph.” She stopped, but her curiosity got the better of her. There was one thing she had to know before she left.

  “Ask me whatever you like.” Joseph smiled: there was a glimmer there of the handsome fisherman who had welcomed her to Bow Island, the cheerful dancing partner.

  “The Archer Tomb and all that. Tina being descended from Sir Valentine’s lawful second marriage. That was true?”

  “Oh, that. Yes, it’s true. Maybe. But it’s not important to most of us here. You know something, Jemima, I too am descended from that well-known second marriage. Maybe. And a few others. Maybe. Lucie Anne had two children, don’t forget, and Bo’landers have large families. It was important to Tina Archer: not to me. That’s not what I want. That’s all past. Miss Izzy was the last of the Archers so far as I’m concerned. Let her lie in her tomb.”

  “What do you want—for yourself? Or for Bow Island, if you prefer?”

  Joseph smiled again, this time in his most friendly fashion. “Come back to Bow Island one day, Jemima. Make another programme about us, our history and all that, and I’ll tell you then.”

  “I might just do that,” said Jemima Shore, Investigator.

  Isabel said afterwards that we were really getting too old for that sort of thing; which remains perhaps the best verdict on the whole sad affair. Unless you take the line—as my wife did—that the moon was to blame.

  They’ve never found out who did it: just some ugly little incident among a lot of drun
ken campers. Since clearly none of us was involved, they let us all go and back we all came to England. Not immediately: that would have looked odd since we’d rented an expensive villa, but a little sooner than planned. You could hardly blame us for cutting short our holiday by a few days. A death on the beach below, police crawling all over the place, Greek police what’s more: not that we put it like that to the charming young woman in the villa rental office, given that she was a Greek. In any case she was most understanding. Especially as we showed no signs of asking for a reduction in the rent.

  Obviously none of us four was involved; how could we be involved, up on that great big villa on the rock? How could a smart villa party of well-off married people from London be involved with some little scrubber camping down below? Different worlds. Utterly different worlds. Quite soon, the police took that line too.

  The world of the campers below was not only a different world, but a pretty horrible one to boot. Crowds—there must have been nearly fifty of them down there—and squalor naturally, since there was no sanitation beyond the natural shade of the olive trees, those graceful trees whose leaves had flickered so exquisitely in the sunlight on the day we arrived, when the beach was still empty.

  “Do you realize that apart from anything else, apart from the noise—ye gods, the noise, we hardly slept a wink last night, did we, Isabel?—do you realize that it’s illegal?” That was Nick. Isabel nodded vigorously; she always agreed strongly with everything that Nick said in public. (In private, since the villa walls were not entirely soundproof, we were aware that matters were somewhat different.) But my wife, Dinah, did murmur to me afterwards in that light voice of hers—the one she uses for her really snaky remarks—that it was wonderful to have Nick standing up for the law here on the tiny island of Bexi, it really must be the effect of the sun, since back on the great big island of Britain, Nick sometimes took rather a different line about the law …

  But I had better begin at the beginning. No, not at the very beginning, not from our very first business enterprise; suffice it to say that the four of us, Dinah and myself, Nick and Isabel, had become close enough over the years to take villas together in sunny foreign parts over a considerable span of time. The Algarve, Italy, Greece (Corfu followed by Paxos), all these have produced comfortable villas, more or less, and happy holidays, of which the same could probably be said. And frankly a holiday which is more or less happy is way above most holidays you take: which is, I think, why we all persevered with the arrangement.

  Did I mention that something else unites us? Beyond the same line of work and living nowadays in the same part of London. We’re all childless, or effectively childless. Nick did have a son by his first marriage, I believe, but either the mother kept him to herself or Isabel dumped him—the story varies—at all events he never figures in our lives. As for ourselves, we’ve certainly never wanted children. We’re enough for each other, always have been. I look after Dinah, she looks after me, as we’re fond of saying. So that at the age when our contemporaries are spending all their time worrying over their ungrateful 20-year-olds—and a good deal of their money rescuing them from this, that and the other, also without getting much thanks—we four have the luxury of our time to ourselves. And our money, too, come to think of it.

  Douceur de vivre: that’s our motto (and yes, it does sound much better in French, but then we four are, I fancy, rather more enlightened in our enjoyment of luxury than the average couples who toast “the sweet life”).

  This year we decided to experiment with a lesser island and go to Bexi. An island paradise, said the brochure. And so I suppose it was—in a way. Much less spoilt than Corfu and much nearer to a decent airport than Paxos. Villa Aglaia was pretty near paradise too. At first. Even my wife, who generally finds something to say about the washing arrangements or lack of them, approved the separate showers for each double bedroom, to say nothing of a water supply which actually did not run out. (Remembering that time outside Portofino!) Then the view was so extraordinary, right there on the cliffs; we would look towards Albania at night, and watch the moon rise. A thin crescent the night we arrived—amusing to be drinking retsina again, once the duty-free champagne ran out—but rapidly growing.

  The moon: yes. Perhaps after all Dinah was right and the moon was to blame. In so far as anyone else was to blame. Certainly the moon appears to have been to blame for what started to happen on the beach. When the first campers appeared—one large grey tent under the olives and one girl who slept under an old boat—we even thought them quite picturesque; the girl anyway. “The local Samantha Fox” my wife dubbed her on one occasion, since she certainly had the most fantastic figure, the sort you could photograph for Page Three, as we could not help noticing since she seldom wore anything but a bikini bottom.

  But “Samantha Fox” wasn’t quite right since Brigitte—that was actually her name—happened to be brown all over, having an amazing tan apart from having an amazing figure. As a matter of fact, I chatted to her quite a bit, in early mornings when no one else was around, and she was really very polite and friendly. Just a kid working her way around Europe as a waitress, taking a holiday on this beach in between. German probably—or was she Swedish? She had this special feeling about St. Peter’s, Rome, I remember, the square at St. Peter’s; she was absolutely determined to see the square. We had quite long talks about it.

  Not when the others were around, however. Then, I have to say, the conversation was on a very different level. Well, we were on holiday. There was one famous occasion when Brigitte, topless, wobbled so perilously near Nick, sunbathing on the stones, on her way to the sea, that my wife and I both involuntarily looked towards Isabel.

  The fact is that Isabel, who does sometimes bathe topless (but always discreetly up at the villa), does have the most lovely slim figure, everyone agrees about that. But if Isabel has a fault, it’s the fact that, good-looking woman as she is, Isabel is absolutely totally flat-chested. Perhaps that explains why I’ve never really fancied her, and perhaps that explains again why we’ve all holidayed so happily together. Be that as it may, on this occasion Isabel merely smiled in her most tranquil manner and murmured something like, “That she should be so lucky.” Later, in their bedroom, however, I can tell you that it was rather a less tranquil story. What a tigress! That serene, smiling woman. Still the end of it sounded rather satisfactory; at least from Nick’s point of view, and I assume Isabel’s as well.

  All the time, the moon was getting stronger at night; I should say bigger, but was it the increasing strength of the moonlight rather than the size of the moon itself which was so unsettling? Could you believe moonlight could be so white? Even when the moon was only half-full. That strange cold ancient light illuminating the sea which washed the rocks beneath us, the sea stretching out to the Albanian coast in a vast series of black and silver eddies with that broad flare-path in their centre. We took to sitting later and later on the terrace with our wine—a light Greek wine, for after dinner.

  “So light, it’s like drinking water,” said Nick jovially on our second night. But of course it wasn’t quite like drinking water, particularly not in the quantities in which we consumed it. Perhaps it was all that wine late at night which made us so unsettled. They were odd, quirky, even slightly sinister, those sessions we had on the terrace. (Yet hadn’t we drunk wine in the Algarve? And Italy? And Paxos only the year before? The result being mere pleasure, relaxation …) Most unsettling of all, after we finally left the terrace, my wife and I had to lie, silent and sleepless, in our bedroom, hot behind the shutters, and listen to Isabel, the tigress of the night, who was growing more and more ferocious in the room alongside ours. Was that the wine? The wine coupled with the moonlight (I noticed they did not close their shutters)? Or was it the noises coming from the beach?

  For the waxing moon brought campers, more and more campers. And given its provocative light, bathing the beach in its brightness like a too well-lit stage where there had been nothing but discree
t blackness before, we could hardly ignore their presence. There was—I can see it now, and my wife can see it too—a feeling of working towards some kind of climax, long before we heard the news about the party.

  Besides, one or two fires began to flicker down below: those fires so dangerous to a wooden island depending on its olive groves, which was in fact the official reason for the banning of campers on Bexi. When we went down to swim in the early morning, we would find the black shells of night fires among the stones. There would also be cans of coke and beer and wine bottles abandoned. And other even more distasteful signs of what had taken place on the beach the night before. Signs of “safe sex” perhaps, but as my wife observed, wrinkling her nose (I hastily removed one of these signs from her favourite path into the water, burying it under a big cairn of pebbles), “Safe sex is all very well, but what about a beautiful beach?”

  Oddly enough, Brigitte very much kept to herself apart from it all. She was friendly enough with the campers—she was a friendly girl, as I’ve said—but she never joined in with them at their various unpleasant goings-on. I know that, because I used to watch her sometimes from the look-out up above, watch her gazing out to sea, smoking the odd cigarette. What was she thinking about? St. Peter’s square, Rome, perhaps. Something like that. But I kept all that to myself, just as I never mentioned our morning conversations before the campers came.

  At least the Villa Aglaia remained airy and remote from the squalor: in the daytime, when the campers were asleep or away in the little town of Bexi, so long as you did not go down to the beach or visit the look-out, you could cut yourself off from the squalor altogether. My wife cut branches of myrtle from the bushes which lined the steep (but short) path from the villa to the beach and put them everywhere in vases in the big rooms. But as the noise grew in proportion to the number of campers, I asked my wife not to cut back any more of the myrtle: for the bushes did at least conceal the path to the villa. What if the campers, drunk—or drugged, I put nothing past them—all decided to surge up the path in the small hours?