same thing. How dare you tell me how I’d have felt when you never gave me the chance to find out? Yes, I was in love with Jack, but it was young love and it didn’t ask for very much. It might have grown, of course – I assumed it would at the time – but I would have looked for something more sooner or later. I’m not going to live my whole life according to the options I had when I was nineteen. So don’t think you know what’s best for me, because you don’t.’
‘And when exactly is this sooner or later going to arrive? You were let off the hook in deciding whether or not to commit to Jack, and ever since, you’ve used his death as an excuse not to commit to anyone. Instead, you just throw yourself into your work, living with people who don’t exist and never will.’ He stopped, and turned away, unable to trust himself not to go any further and suspecting that he had already said more than he would be forgiven for.
Josephine let him walk away. Shaken by the truth in his parting shot, she sat down on the cold, stone steps of one of the government buildings that lined the street and watched him stride angrily down Whitehall. He stopped by the Cenotaph, and bent down to pick something up from the foot of the memorial. As he stood there, looking at it, she wondered what was going through his head, and realised sadly that she would never truly know: no matter how hard she tried to put herself in his position, or how strong the instinct for forgiveness and reconciliation, understanding was one of the casualties of the war; even now, there was an unbearable void between those who had fought it and those who had not, a stifling of emotion which was not so different from the deaden- 287
ing of joy that Marta had talked about. How many generations would it last, she wondered? And what would the future have held for Elspeth if those who loved her had not been so crippled by the past? In the distance, Archie replaced whatever he had taken up and walked on towards Derby Gate. Before he could move too far out of reach, she got up and went after him.
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Author’s Note
To write fiction about historic fact is very nearly impermissible.
Gordon Daviot,
Gordon Daviot was one of two pseudonyms created by Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952) during a versatile career as playwright and novelist; the other, Josephine Tey, was taken from her Suffolk great-great-grandmother and did not actually appear until 1936, with the publication of
By 1934, she had written a mystery and two other novels as Daviot, but it was
popularity that films enjoy today: hundreds of Elspeths went thirty or forty times to see it; the cast took part in high-profile publicity stunts; commemorative portrait dolls were produced; and it turned its leading man, John Gielgud, from a brilliant young actor into a celebrity overnight. The beauty of the set and costumes, designed by ‘Motley’ (Margaret and Sophia Harris and Elizabeth Montgomery), was vital to the play’s success, as was Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies’s performance as Anne.
Daviot wrote many other plays –
For an author who wrote several historical plays and novels, Elizabeth Mackintosh took a dim view of mixing fact and fiction –
but she allowed it if the writer stated where the truth could be found, and if invention did not falsify the general picture. Readers wanting to know more about the real people involved in
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Acknowledgements
The book is a tribute to the people whose hard work and achievements created such a special world during the 1930s –
particularly to Sir John Gielgud and Margaret Harris of Motley, both of whom were kind enough to talk to me at length about the theatre of the period, and, of course, to Josephine Tey, whose work is at the heart of the novel.
Many other people have helped – wittingly or unwittingly – and I owe particular thanks to Karolina Sutton, Jennifer Joel, Laura Sampson and ICM for wonderful advice and encouragement; to Claire Wachtel, Jonathan Burnham and Heather Drucker for their passion for the novel; to Peter Mendelsohn, Cindy Achar, Roni Axelrod and Julia Novitch at HarperCollins for their care and vision in its production; to Walter Donohue for his magic at the beginning; to Dr Peter Fordyce and Stewart P. Evans for their expertise in very different areas of unpleasantness; to Richard Reynolds for his enthusiasm and knowledge of detective fiction; to Jane Munro and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for influencing Archie’s taste in art so beautifully; to Helen Grime and Margaret Westwood for their great interest and help with the project; to Josceline Dimbleby for the story of May Gaskell in her book
make a