Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave

by Antonia Fraser

  It was with the helpful air of one smoothing over a difficult situation that Fizzy said rather breathlessly, “I guess I’m the only working artist around here, and I’d just love to get some fresh perspective on that—”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Gearhart, we’ve met before, as you may remember. Sarah Halliwell from the Graeco-Roman Institute.” Except that she had virtually interrupted Fizzy, Sarah sounded not only gentle as ever but absolutely composed.

  “The beautiful and brilliant Miss Halliwell! How could I forget you, or anything about you? Now why I wonder are you here? But I mustn’t be a tease. She won’t like it. My dear wife. My good wife Alice. Alice Garland as we must call her.” He sat down rather heavily and gazed with some surprise at the glass before him, now empty.

  “Can I stay?” he asked, rather pleadingly. “I have to talk to you, Alice. About business matters. You know what I mean.” He counted the guests. “There must be an empty cottage if you don’t want me in the house.”

  “You can stay.” But Jemima got the distinct impression that Alice was agreeing more to stop her husband talking further than for any more hospitable reason. Her pretty face had certainly formed into a formidable frown at the mention of the word “business.”

  “Thanks,” William said. “Actually I don’t want any lunch. And I don’t want any dinner either. Just sleep. And later maybe a swim. I’ll see you all tomorrow morning. And I’ll be very, very good.”

  After William Gearhart had lumbered away—to the cottage next to Jemima’s—Alice took a deep breath and faced them. The smile she wore had the air of being etched upon her features.

  “How can I explain? And you were supposed to be having peace. William was, is my husband, that is we’re separated not divorced. I took the name Garland instead of Gearhart—for business purposes. Yes, William does need a fresh perspective. You see he once owned a gallery for selling antiquities. There was some trouble. I won’t go into it. Some of them weren’t quite what they seemed to be. Fakes in short. Some of them turned out to have reached England, unlawfully, by a rather odd route. I won’t go into that either. There was a case. William was acquitted. But of course his reputation! And at the same time our marriage broke up. It didn’t—how can I put it? It didn’t survive the strain of something like that. The gallery had to close. He’s had a hard time.” She paused. “And so in a way have I. I’ve tried very hard to build up Fresh Perspectives in some ways as a kind of therapy—but I’m not asking for your pity.”

  Unexpectedly Mrs. Vascoe was the first to speak after Alice finished.

  “Thank you for being so frank, my dear. You know how much we all admire what you’re doing here. And I’m sure we can all sympathize with someone who has gone through a hard time. In our different ways, so have we.”

  “How true,” murmured Sarah. She touched her brow with her handkerchief. “It is hot, isn’t it? I don’t think I want any lunch after all. I’ll go back to my cottage and lie down for a while.”

  As she departed, Fizzy gazed after the gracefully swaying figure vanishing among the rosemary bushes. “So she knew him.” Fizzy sounded puzzled, ruminative, as though working something out. Only Martha said nothing at all about Alice Garland’s form of personal statement. But the haggard look, the look of fear so striking on her face at breakfast time, had returned.

  In bed in her cottage, Jemima could not easily get to sleep. A light breeze generally sprang up with the darkness to alleviate the close heat of the day, and there was always the ceaseless noise of the cicadas to soothe her. Tonight the cicadas sounded almost too loud for sleep; dropping off for a brief moment, she decided they were trying to tell her something, but awake once more, she knew that to be mere fancy. All the same, even her favourite lullaby of the sea pounding the shore below was more disturbing than restful tonight.

  Somewhere—one of the other cottages or was it up at the house?—a shutter banged heavily. They were all supposed to fasten their shutters at night to prevent this very thing happening. Someone had forgotten. More banging, was that what was disturbing her? Jemima decided to ignore it and pulled the pillow firmly over her head.

  Dinner had been a subdued affair for all Irini’s delicious lamb roasted in the Greek manner—no William Gearhart and no Sarah either for that matter; the latter, like William, had remained secluded since the pre-lunch scene on the terrace. Jemima thought again about William Gearhart’s arrival and Fizzy’s remark, gazing after Sarah’s retreating back: “So she knew him.” She thought about Martha James: “I heard the woman wailing.” A local bird? A bird called cry-by-night? She began to drift once more towards sleep.

  Either the banging shutter or some other noise woke Jemima; this time she knew from her clock that she had been asleep for some time. Feeling that she had awoken at the end of the noise, whatever it was, Jemima jumped up and looked out of her bedroom window in the direction of the sea. Her view of the shore, either from her bedroom or from her small sitting-room, was obscured by some of the olive trees.

  Was that someone down there on the shore or merely the shadow of a rock? It was impossible to be certain at this distance. The beach was predominantly pebbled, but the headlands on either side had left a deposit of fallen rocks and stones, some of them quite large. A flickering light or the flashing of fishing lights out to sea? (Irini told them that Nikos regularly went night fishing, like the other men living round about.) Was that a boat? But from inside her cottage Jemima could not see the little stone pier running into the sea where Nikos usually kept his boat fastened.

  Rather gingerly, she stepped out on to her little terrace. Someone wailing below, a cat, a dog, a bird—or sheer imagination in the shadowy, post-midnight world, the so-called dead hour of the night?

  The soft, warm darkness was quite opaque. The stars over their heads at dinner had been brilliant and numerous in the lofty black bowl of the sky. Mrs. Vascoe—her shyness was rapidly evaporating—had given them a lesson in how to name them: “Follow the line of the Plough, it’s quite easy after that.” Now the stars were all gone. The promising half-moon which Jemima had observed behind racing clouds was also no longer to be seen. Only the cicadas kept up their ceaseless chatter, and far below the sea rushed relentlessly to and fro on the beach.

  Up at the house, Jemima was surprised to notice that the terrace light—generally left burning—had been switched off. Equally surprising, the lights of Fizzy’s cottage were burning, not just the bedroom light but the light of the small sitting-room as well.

  And the banging, yes, the banging was coming from the direction of Fizzy’s cottage.

  After a moment, surprise gave way to a reluctant but undeniable feeling of alarm. Jemima took a look round towards the other cottages, William Gearhart’s was quite dark; she expected that; she had seen no lights there at any point during the evening, either when it began to get dark before dinner or later on her return. A fresh start meant sleeping it off: yes indeed! As far as Jemima was aware, Gearhart had been comatose since he lumbered away before lunch.

  The small light over Sarah Halliwell’s terrace was still burning but the rest of the cottage was plunged in darkness; that too was to be expected; Sarah always slept with the terrace light burning, unlike Jemima who feared for the insect life the light might attract.

  “There are other things to fear beyond insects,” Sarah had murmured. “As a matter of fact, I don’t like the dark very much, if you want to know. Childish, I dare say.”

  Jemima could only glimpse the roof of Mrs. Vascoe’s cottage, or where she imagined it to be; no pool of light there, however. Martha James’s cottage in its isolated position could not be seen at all.

  Fizzy’s words came back to her: “If you cry out for help in the middle of the night …” It was an uncomfortable realization under the circumstances that Martha’s cries for help would not indeed be heard. By the rest of the guests, that is, if they were safely installed in their own cottages. Why was she thinking about Martha? It was Fizzy’s cottage which shou
ld be occupying her thoughts.

  Was she to investigate? The correct answer was: yes. Otherwise the restlessness might continue till dawn, with the addition of a faint, nagging guilt, not that she seriously thought anything was wrong, all the same … Yes, she would investigate. Once the decision had been reached, the taking along of a torch seemed a good practical plan, unfanciful and thus reassuring. She hardly wanted to cause her own incident by falling off one of the steep paths into the shrubby bushes, let alone down a cliff. Jemima located her torch, remembered that the battery was low and that she had forgotten to do anything about it, put on her flip-flops, pulled her cotton robe closely round her and set off.

  Halfway down the path to Fizzy’s cottage, the torch petered out. Jemima sighed. On the one hand she could return (but she had still not switched on her own terrace light because of the insects). On the other hand the lights of Fizzy’s cottage beckoned—even if she would not quite have put it like that. She decided to go on.

  There was no more wailing from the beach, no other sound but the occasional bang of the vagabond shutter ahead and the persistent susurration of the cicadas. Her strongest sensation at this point was in fact of smell: the rich scent of rosemary, oregano and sage as she brushed through the Mediterranean night.

  Jemima reached Fizzy’s cottage and peered through the open French windows. The little sitting-room with its simple blue and white furnishings was demonstrably empty. No one could have hidden behind that white cane chair or sofa, let alone beneath the spartan white cane tables, two or three of them, all smothered in Fizzy’s books.

  Should she go further? The shutter banged again; she realized that the sound was at the back and that it must be a bedroom shutter. That decided her. Jemima, useless torch still in hand, advanced. The bedroom, like a sitting-room (and like Jemima’s own cottage), was virtually bare; certainly no one was hiding in there. Jemima saw twin beds, both empty, one with its blue cotton cover rumpled, the other untouched. She saw—

  At that moment, the door behind slammed and all the lights in the cottage went out. Fumbling desperately in the darkness for the switch, Jemima found to her horror that she was grasping flesh, wet, clammy flesh, somewhere directly behind her. She screamed.

  The light was switched on as suddenly as it had been extinguished. She was not touching flesh exactly, or not flesh unattached. What she was touching was a human hand.

  “Why, Jemima Shore, I do declare!” exclaimed Fizzy in a palpable exaggeration of her usual drawl. “What the heck are you doing here?” She continued more briskly. “I saw someone going in. I guess I thought—I didn’t know—”

  “Where were you?” Fear and surprise had made Jemima angry; unreasonably so. Fizzy after all had a perfect right to come and go as she pleased in her own cottage. She added more politely by way of an explanation, “Your shutter was making rather a racket.”

  “Gee, I’m sorry.” Fizzy looked down at herself. She was wearing a towelling robe, damp, and as it appeared not much else. “I’ve been treating myself to a late swim. I love to do that.” She looked round the cottage. “I have some coffee in that thermos. Irini let me have it, she knows I’m a nocturnal animal. And I’ve an idea for a moonlight water-colour. Now how does one get to do that, do you suppose? Any ideas? Maybe Martha will advise. In the meantime, coffee?”

  Jemima hesitated. “No, no, I’ve been enough trouble. Besides which, coffee keeps me awake. I won’t stay.” It was a decision she was to regret. Even at the time, she felt a pang at seeing how dashed Fizzy looked at the rejection of her offer.

  Fizzy muttered something: “I’m not lonesome exactly but I do like to talk, nights. Have done ever since I was a kid.” She was visibly disconsolate; Jemima had a touching vision of the kind of little girl Fizzy must have been, liking to “talk, nights” and maybe not getting all that many takers even then.

  All the same, Jemima turned to go. Fizzy’s last words reached her when her back was already set to the cottage. “And there’s something special I’d like to talk to you about. But I guess the morning will do.” It was too late to return: Jemima contented herself with a friendly wave of the defunct torch. Her last sight of the American girl was as she sketched a friendly salute back, still in her towelling robe, standing on her own terrace.

  It was only after Jemima reached her own cottage that she realized she had not questioned Fizzy about the wailing on the beach. Had she heard it? She must have heard it if she had indeed been swimming. And if the wailing had existed in the first place.

  Ah well, Jemima would make an opportunity to ask Fizzy about it first thing in the morning.

  But Jemima never did make an opportunity to ask Fizzy about the subject in the morning. Because next morning at breakfast the whole scene was dominated by the discovery of the body; the sodden body lying on the beach at the edge of the water like a piece of abandoned wreckage, moving slowly from time to time with the sway of the sea, a dark and melancholy shape in the pristine sunshine of the bright new day.

  The body, turning in the water at the edge of the sea, was first discovered by Irini’s son Nikos, returning from one of his mysterious night-fishing expeditions.

  Thank heaven, thought Jemima Shore, he had been there to do so. Otherwise one of the guests at the Villa Elia, taking an early-morning swim, might have happened upon it. For that respite at least they should all be devoutly thankful. It was illogical, the fact of death being as terrible and tragic whoever first stumbled upon the pathetic water-logged corpse. But in the circumstances Jemima was still grateful that it had not been anyone actually staying at the villa. They all needed to remain as calm and rational as possible if any sense was to be made of the whole horrifying business. To say nothing of when the local police arrived …

  Quite early, Nikos had been heard calling from the beach to his mother up at the villa. It was a sound that for an instant gave Jemima a curious flash of recognition. Cry-by-night? Could that be the odd wailing noise which had disturbed Martha James and maybe awakened her too in the hours of darkness? Then the appalled expression of Sarah Halliwell swept these thoughts temporarily aside.

  Sarah, who alone among the guests understood modern Greek, was listening to the shouts from the shore.

  “He’s saying—it’s a body! Someone’s in the water! He’s saying—Kiria? No, I don’t believe it!” Sarah swayed slightly and gripped one of the big terracotta pots at the edge of the terrace for support.

  “Alice! He’s telling his mother that it’s Alice lying down there. There are injuries—her head. Something about the rocks!”

  But it was the weeping, the terrible weeping and the stream of passionate but incomprehensible Greek lamentation from Irini, that brought it home to them all that Alice Garland was actually dead.

  Irini raised her fists and looked up at the sky: the unclouded blue, the famous blue sky of Corfu, blue, Alice Garland’s favourite colour, the theme of the Villa Elia, seemed to mock her. Too much blue in a house making for a heartless atmosphere, as Jemima’s decorator friend Daisy had told her. Jemima had seen Alice herself as ruthless maybe in business, heartless perhaps in her private life (although she had greeted her disgraced husband’s unexpected arrival with some generosity, pleading for his temporary acceptance in her little speech). Now Alice Garland was no longer in a position to be either ruthless or forgiving; only in a certain literal sense was she also heartless, for at some point in the small hours of the night, her heart had stopped beating.

  “Little Alice!” began Fizzy in a voice of almost childish bewilderment; her heavy features crumpled and Jemima had the impression she was about to cry. “Why, no, you’ve gotta be joking.” The words were in themselves ludicrous; yet at the same time what was happening, the macabre scene on the shore below them, was still so incredible to them all that it did cross Jemima’s mind that maybe some hideous kind of practical joke was being played.

  The arrival of William Gearhart on the terrace at this moment brought her back to a sense of reality—unwelc
ome reality. Irini, cries temporarily abandoned, was heading towards the path, apron askew, arms still outstretched. So far as Jemima knew, none of them had seen William since lunchtime the day before. Certainly she had not, and as for the others, that was something that could be checked, if not at the present moment.

  William looked urbane and rested. The face was still rather flushed, perhaps, but the impression given this morning was of the flush of health, not the unhealthily ruddy hue of too much drink too often consumed. William was wearing a clean white tennis shirt and dark blue swimming trunks, despite the fact that he had arrived with no luggage: the shirt was slightly strained over his broad chest. Stock supplies at the villa? His own clothes left over from happier (and slimmer) times?

  “Good morning, all.” He not only looked, he sounded urbane. “I’m all ready for a fresh start this morning, a very fresh start except for the heat. My God, I’d forgotten the sheer delicious aroma of all those shrubs we planted—sage? I’m hopeless about names—as you make your way up the path. Fresh coffee now requested for a fresh start. Irini–” He stopped. “What’s going on here? Irini, that’s a hell of a racket. You all look as if someone had just died.” The words faltered as he took in the shocked expression on Sarah’s face.

  Irini halted in mid-flight and grabbed William’s hand.

  “Kirie”–and she jabbered at him in Greek with gestures towards the shore. Someone had joined Nikos down there, another man, presumably Greek. Together they were lifting the body from the pebbles where Nikos had originally laid it and were heading, slowly, for the villa path.

  “You poor thing!” said Mrs. Vascoe swiftly, before anyone else could interrupt. “I’m afraid this is going to be a terrible shock to you. But you see, we think there’s been some kind of accident. Your wife—”

  “Alice! No, I don’t believe it.” They were the words which Sarah Halliwell had spoken only a short while before. But William Gearhart, unlike Sarah, did not sway and needed no terracotta pot to support him. Nor was his voice low and gentle.