Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave Read online

  “French wine, of course, imported French wine,” said Paddy Mayall after a pause. “If not exactly Chambertin. I congratulate you on this, by the way, Alec. And the Pouilly-Fuissé earlier, for that matter.” Paddy Mayall cleared his throat. Jemima had the impression he was speaking slightly reluctantly.

  “And so a fourteenth-century Scottish king drank French wine!” Professor Redding sounded even more jovial now that he had at last got the answer to his question. He sipped at the wine in question.

  Paddy Mayall looked in the direction of Dr. Kirkus. His expression was almost apprehensive. Since she said nothing, he cleared his throat again and continued. “Thirteenth-century, by the way, not fourteenth. The ballad may be based on the voyage of a Scottish princess who went to marry the King of Norway in 1281 … Margaret of Scotland … King Eric … a good many of her train did drown on that occasion …” Now Paddy Mayall began to warm to his theme. “People do sometimes think in error that it was her daughter the so-called Maid of Norway. Now she did die on her way back to Scotland—twelve ninety, I think you’ll find—but there was no drowning involved … so that on the whole the evidence does suggest …”

  To her shame Jemima’s attention began to wander away during this little lecture, back to the ever-present anxiety of her speech. So that she missed the immediate preamble to the incident which followed, while witnessing the drama itself. What Jemima saw was the auburn-haired Mrs. Mayall picking up her own glass, full or full enough, of red wine, and throwing the contents across the table at the Professor. His white shirt front—like most of the men present, he was wearing a dinner jacket—suddenly revealed an enormous dark red stain; it looked as if he had been shot in some melodramatic amateur theatrical. Nor did Mrs. Mayall’s accompanying words exactly undo this impression.

  “That’s for your bloody red wine!” she shouted, in an unmistakably genuine Scots accent. Then Marie Mayall scrambled to her feet and half-ran, half-stumbled from the high table and out of the dining hall.

  Professor Redding, mopping his shirt with his handkerchief—which merely ruined the latter without cleaning the former—was left exclaiming in what sounded like genuine amazement, “What did I say? What did I do?”

  Paddy Mayall, his handsome face flushed with embarrassment, got up, sat down again, and began, “Alec, I’m frightfully sorry—” Of those other diners near enough to have taken in what had occurred, Claire Donahue kept repeating “Oh God” in an apparently helpless manner, followed by, “Should I? Should I go after her, do you think?” But she sat still, Jemima noticed, and she noticed also that Paddy Mayall had fixed Claire with an uncommonly determined stare. No, Claire was not to follow.

  It was left to Dr. Kirkus to say with dignity but in a voice of unmistakable reproach, “Alec, how could you? How could you be so tactless? Even cruel. And I thought you were fond of poor Marie.”

  Marie Mayall did not come back. A series of the diners at the high table left the hall during the rest of the meal with, Jemima suspected, the intention of persuading her to return. That might have been arguably less embarrassing than the sight of her empty place, especially since the college servants continued to plonk down portions of food there, before removing them untouched. Unlike the excellent wine, the food was rather tasteless; there was also a remarkable number of courses—or was it just the thought of the speech ahead which made Jemima feel the meal was endless? On the other hand who could tell how Marie Mayall would have behaved if she had chosen to return … Her face during her outburst had exhibited a degree of passion quite surprising in a woman at first sight shy and even withdrawn beneath her curtain of long, loose hair.

  Paddy Mayall was the first to leave the hall, when his wife showed no sign of coming back. He came back a short while later without public comment. But he arched his eyebrows in the direction of Claire, who as Jemima’s sponsor was seated on her left. (Mallow did not necessarily alternate the sexes in its high-table seating plan, considering that to be an old-fashioned formality.) Jemima thought that this time Paddy Mayall was silently commanding Claire to go after his wife, as previously he had adjured her silently to stay. Sure enough, Claire murmured in Jemima’s ear, “Marie’s awfully highly strung, as no doubt you’ve noticed. She’s probably lurking in the Ladies in floods of tears.” And she too left the hall.

  Ten minutes later, Claire returned alone. Professor Redding was the next one to go, and stayed away the longest: his shirt, sopping wet and still pinkish in part, showed signs of a prolonged but clumsy repair job when he came back. There was a little extra buzz of conversation from the students in the body of the hall at his return.

  “Serve him right, the little stoat,” said a student sitting at the table directly below, loud enough for Jemima at least to hear. The wine-throwing incident had certainly not passed unremarked, if its cause was not understood. For one thing, Jemima Shore’s presence at the dinner—a face so familiar from television—concentrated attention upon the high table. Opinions varied, and were hotly argued on both sides, as to whether she looked older/younger/sexier/not so sexy as she did on the box. (Jemima might have been wryly amused to learn that not one single person speculated as to what she might be about to say in her speech.)

  Of Jemima’s immediate neighbours, Dr. Kirkus was the last to depart and the last to come back. She took the opportunity of the brief break before the speeches to stump from the hall, a heavy but dignified figure. Dr. Kirkus was the one to sort out the errant Mrs. Mayall, if anyone could: of all those present, she exuded moral authority. But her mission too was unsuccessful. She simply handed Paddy Mayall a piece of paper.

  “Marie’s gone home,” said Dr. Kirkus. “She left this for you.”

  Jemima watched Paddy Mayall unfold the note and then crumple it: this time he reddened with what looked like anger. Jemima felt Claire’s attention wandering away from her. They were supposed to be discussing the question of depth in television documentaries: it was already a slightly artificial conversation because Jemima was by now beginning to rehearse her speech in her mind. Since she would touch on the same subject, she was reluctant to pre-empt her arguments.

  Paddy Mayall’s mouth framed the words: “Marie’s taken the car.”

  “My God,” exclaimed Claire aloud, interrupting Jemima’s polite response about viewers’ attention-span. “I just hope she’s going to be OK driving.”

  “Had she drunk so much?” Jemima added drily. “I rather thought the famous glass was full.”

  “Normally Marie doesn’t drink, so she drives home. I don’t know about tonight. She was in such an odd state. But it’s a terrible road at the best of times, and in this weather! Dark and very twisty. Miles away from Mallow—they really shouldn’t live so far out, but Marie insisted—” In her nervous state, Claire was beginning to babble.

  There would be a time for all this, Jemima decided, when the great speech was safely accomplished. One way or another it could not be long now.

  How would she start? “Professors, Ladies and Gentlemen”—sudden panic, how many professors were there actually present beyond Professor Redding? She must find out at once. Jemima began to search the seating plan earnestly for academic titles and for the time being forgot about Marie Mayall.

  It was in this manner that she did not learn what it was that had so upset Paddy Mayall’s wife until some time after the dinner was over. Elena Kirkus told her about it as they gathered in the Senior Common room after dinner for coffee and further drinks. Jemima by now felt the unnatural bonhomie of one who has been reprieved from execution—or rather, has been executed and found it did not hurt. Although her speech had been neither the best nor the worst she had ever made—after all that—it was, thank heaven, over. (And she must remember to accept no such nerve-racking invitations from old friends in future, she told herself sternly.)

  “You see, poor Marie actually comes from Dunfermline,” Dr. Kirkus was explaining. “Or more to the point, her father did. He was the man who built up all those stores from scra
tch. What are they called? Dunfermline Macgregor, something like that.” She mentioned the name of a famous Scottish chain. “Money! Yes indeed,” thought Jemima, “there must certainly be plenty of that about in Marie’s family.”

  “You could certainly call him a king in modern terms. In any case, all that was really very close to home, the wine, the drowning and the rest of it. For a clever man, Alec can be remarkably imperceptive.” Dr. Kirkus frowned; Jemima had a sudden vision of what it must be like to present an ill-prepared essay to Dr. Kirkus.

  “The drowning—” Jemima prompted her. With her speech over, she found her curiosity about her fellow diners resurging.

  “It made banner headlines at the time. A guest who drank too much and drowned on his way home. The party was at Marie’s father’s place on or near a river in Scotland. A bridge featured, I know that. Too much was drunk all round, whisky as well as wine, no doubt, but everyone remembered the wine because the young man who drowned had a bottle of wine with him in his car. He had taken it from the house. There was some sort of crash before the drowning, so that there was wine, red wine, everywhere when the police found him. And blood. Mixed.” She paused. “I’m afraid that particular detail sunk into the public consciousness. The blude-red wine, as Alec so unfortunately phrased it.”

  “No wonder she was upset.”

  “Marie’s father was much criticized at the time—and afterwards—for letting the young man go, let alone take a bottle of wine. I think the whole matter preyed on his mind. He died not long afterwards. The position he had built up—all lost as he saw it. Marie inherited everything of course.” Dr. Kirkus sighed.

  “Was he really so much to blame?”

  “Who can tell? Difficult to control the young. We know that all right.” She gestured round her, although there were in fact no students present in the Senior Common Room. “It wasn’t helpful that the young man had been a kind of suitor of Marie’s, I gather, and the old man didn’t like him very much.” Another sigh. “But Alec of all people to bring that up! He is very interested in wine, we all know that; rather boringly so, sometimes, dare I say it? But that was carrying an interest altogether too far. Alec—whom I had seen as Marie’s protector in a way, since his own wife died, or at least supporter. In her not altogether happy situation. I’m sure you understand what I mean.” Dr. Kirkus looked significantly towards Claire and Paddy, now having a conversation in the other corner of the room, which was all too visibly intimate. Claire looked particularly pretty, animated; she had the air of persuading Paddy to something.

  “Marie and Paddy married shortly after her father’s death. He was a postgraduate student up there: that’s his field, Scottish studies of sorts. Too soon perhaps for either of them. It meant that Marie never went on with her own work: a pity, there’s a proper intelligence there. And they really are such different characters. She’s very reserved: that wine-throwing, so public, is quite a new departure. As for Paddy, I’m fond of him, but I’ve come to the conclusion his mind is essentially lightweight.”

  For all the pleasantness of her tone, Dr. Kirkus did not fail to make it clear that the word “lightweight” was, in her vocabulary, one of extreme moral disapproval. Inwardly, Jemima quailed: that kind of judgment took her back all too rapidly to Cambridge and certain dons she had known there. Had her speech been lightweight, she wondered. Could anything to do with television be other than lightweight in the opinion of Dr. Kirkus (who had, by the way, alone among the diners, not congratulated Jemima upon her performance)?

  “I had to reprove Paddy just a little in a review in Literature once—” Elena Kirkus smiled reminiscently; her gentle smile was really more terrifying than her frown, Jemima decided. Dr. Kirkus looked round her. “Alec Redding, now, with all his faults, there’s a first-rate mind. As for your young friend—”

  They were interrupted by Claire herself. “Paddy’s taking my car,” she announced swiftly. “It’s ridiculous for him to get a taxi to go all that way to that remote place at this time of night, even if he could. And of course he must go and see if Marie’s all right. No, don’t be silly, Paddy. How could I possibly need it myself? I’m here with Jemima till dawn, aren’t I, discussing the good old days. Everyone drives my car. Everyone except Alec: he’s too snobbish about cars.”

  “Too knowledgeable maybe: not always the same thing.” It was Dr. Kirkus in her tart way who came to Alec Redding’s defence, as though regretting her earlier attack. The Professor himself remained silent.

  But Claire rattled on regardless, “Oh, go on, Paddy, take it.”

  How elated she was! And Claire’s careless generosity with her possessions reminded Jemima of the vivid girl she had known at Cambridge: there was something voluptuous about such generosity, as though Claire was secretly signalling, “Have me too.” Jemima was to remember that elation further on during the evening when Claire outlined in private a less than happy situation. The words, both sad and sadly familiar, tumbled out.

  “She simply doesn’t understand him, she can’t seem to make an effort—that awful wine-throwing was about the most positive thing I remember Marie doing in public. She’s silent most of the time. No one knows what she’s thinking—” And so on and so on.

  At the same time another picture was emerging, a picture of a large, comfortable country house, way beyond any don’s salary, situated in a picturesque Mallow country village, far from the bustling university town. Here lived a withdrawn and wealthy woman and her good-looking unfaithful husband; and as far as Jemima could make out, there was no real sign of this ménage, happy or unhappy, coming to an end. The ugly—or encouraging—word divorce was not mentioned by Claire at any point, she noted.

  At one point Claire even said, “Sometimes I hate him! I wish he were dead. No, I wish I were dead. It’s just that I hate him for being so weak: he’ll never leave her, her and her lovely money. Oh, forget it, Jemima. I think I’m rather drunk.” She had indeed polished off most of a bottle of red wine, no Chambertin this, but some rougher vintage designed for late drinking when it headed in the general direction of oblivion. Jemima herself had drunk one glass and stopped.

  So it could hardly have been the wine which gave her such disturbed dreams and half-waking reflections; perhaps it was the tension still lingering from her speech on the one hand and an unexpectedly fraught social evening on the other. In particular the lines of the old ballad began to weave through her brain in zany fashion, rearranging themselves in new patterns:

  The Professor held up his blude-red wine

  O who will answer this question of mine?

  Other lines came back to her: the ominous presage to Sir Patrick Spens’s journey when his servant had seen “the new moon with the auld one in her arms.” A doomed expedition; she began to drift again and the lines drifted with her: “the new woman with the old man in her arms … O who will answer this question of mine?”

  When Jemima did wake up to the urgent pleading summons of Claire Donahue, the latter’s ravaged face and desperate cry seemed to come straight out of her threatening dream.

  “He’s dead,” she was saying. “Oh Christ, how shall I bear it? What shall I do? He’s dead—”

  “Of course he’s dead,” muttered Jemima stupidly; she was still within the ballad’s nightmare. “Sir Patrick Spens is dead.” Luckily Claire did not seem to hear her.

  “Paddy,” she was wailing over and over again. “Paddy, oh Paddy.”

  Throughout the day which followed, Jemima saw it as her duty to remain in Mallow: it would hardly be honourable to depart hastily for London in the wake of such a ghastly tragedy. Besides, she could support Claire. The details of Paddy Mayall’s death gradually emerged. None was pleasant. First it transpired that he had crashed his car—Claire’s car—through Mallow’s historic medieval bridge and into the Avon below. The car appeared to have gone out of control, or else he had taken the bridge too fast in the darkness. He had then drowned in the fast-flowing, storm-swollen river—perhaps he had hit his head fir
st and been knocked unconscious—but that was not yet known for certain. All that was bad enough. Worse was to follow in the afternoon.

  “The police,” Claire said in a dull voice, tears temporarily stilled. “The police have been to see me. Because it was my car: the car he was driving, the car that crashed. They think it may have been tampered with, fixed in some way. The brake linings were virtually severed and then—he didn’t get very far, did he?” She was beginning to tremble again. “I don’t understand about cars, but I wasn’t careless about that kind of thing, it had only just come back from the garage. If someone did it on purpose, who on earth would want to kill me?” Claire ended on a piteous note.

  Then she gasped. “Oh my God, are they suggesting I killed Paddy?” She began to weep again. “How could they believe that? How could anyone? He should never have been driving. If only Marie hadn’t run off like that, if only Alec hadn’t got going on the subject of his stupid bloody wine, oh, curse him for it—that started the whole thing off—”

  “Wait a minute.” The haunting images of the night were beginning to re-form in Jemima’s mind, at first in spite of herself, and then in a more purposeful fashion. “O who will answer this question of mine.?” She let the images have their way. She began to see what an answer to the question might be.

  It was Dr. Kirkus to whom she posed it. She found the older woman seated in the college library in front of a large open book; but her attitude indicated mourning rather than reading; her spectacles lay useless beside the book.

  “I was very fond of Paddy.” Her manner was composed as ever. “Lightweight maybe in intelligence, but yet—” She stopped. For once Dr. Kirkus appeared to be at a loss how to go on. Jemima took the opportunity to ask her a question.

  Other questions and other answers would follow. The police would later fill in all the grisly details of the truth in their patient, relentless and admirable manner. But before that process could get under way, Jemima had to put her own question.