Only Joseph: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff

Only Joseph: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff
Sophie Hannah

A story from Sophie Hannah to stir the heart and awaken vital conversations about love.TV scientist Sonia tries to find a new school for her daughter. To escape the obsessional eyes of a class mate, Kitty does a taster day at The Morrow school. But the school is still shaking off rumours after a child fell out of a window. And a pupil accosts Sonia with a file of evidence saying she knows the truth. And it all started with the Wuthering Heights school musical.

Only Joseph

by Sophie Hannah

A short story from the collection

Copyright (#u02841003-6e1c-540a-a8db-a391d9c77917)

Published by The Borough Press

an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

In the compilation and introductory material © Kate Mosse 2018

Only Joseph © Sophie Hannah 2018

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Sally Mundy/Trevillion Images, © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com) petals

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This story is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the works of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008257439

Ebook Edition © August 2018 ISBN: 9780008303280

Version: 2018-07-17

Contents

Cover (#u4908a125-f58d-5d87-8176-3732c07dd9ab)

Title Page (#u4bc8cae6-3d6a-50f4-903f-ace10fce2682)

Copyright

Foreword by Kate Mosse

Only Joseph

Note on the Author

A Note on Emily Brontë

About the Publisher

FOREWORD BY KATE MOSSE (#u02841003-6e1c-540a-a8db-a391d9c77917)

SO, WHAT MAKES Wuthering Heights – published the year before Emily Brontë’s own death – the powerful, enduring, exceptional novel it is? Is it a matter of character and sense of place? Depth of emotion or the beauty of her language? Epic and Gothic? Yes, but also because it is ambitious and uncompromising. Like many others, I have gone back to it in each decade of my life and found it subtly different each time. In my teens, I was swept away by the promise of a love story, though the anger and the violence and the pain were troubling to me. In my twenties, it was the history and the snapshot of social expectations that interested me. In my thirties, when I was starting to write fiction myself, I was gripped by the architecture of the novel – two narrators, two distinct periods of history and storytelling, the complicated switching of voice. In my forties, it was the colour and the texture, the Gothic spirit of place, the characterisation of Nature itself as sentient, violent, to be feared. Now, in my fifties, as well as all this, it is also the understanding of how utterly EB changed the rules of what was acceptable for a woman to write, and how we are all in her debt. This is monumental work, not domestic. This is about the nature of life, love, and the universe, not the details of how women and men live their lives. And Wuthering Heights is exceptional amongst the novels of the period for the absence of any explicit condemnation of Heathcliff’s conduct, or any suggestion that evil might bring its own punishment.

This collection is published to celebrate the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth in 1818. What each story has in common is that, despite their shared moment of inspiration, they are themselves, and their quality stands testament both to our contemporary writers’ skills, and the timelessness of Wuthering Heights. For, though mores and expectations and opportunities alter, wherever we live and whoever we are, the human heart does not change very much. We understand love and hate, jealousy and peace, grief and injustice, because we experience these things too – as writers, as readers, as our individual selves.

ONLY JOSEPH (#u02841003-6e1c-540a-a8db-a391d9c77917)

SOPHIE HANNAH (#u02841003-6e1c-540a-a8db-a391d9c77917)

‘SO YOU’RE ACTUALLY GOING to do it,’ says Rich. ‘You’re taking Kitty for a taster day at a school where a female pupil was murdered.’ He’s using the same tone he used the other day to say, ‘I can’t clean the outside bin, it’s too disgusting. There are maggots in it. I haven’t got the right equipment. It needs a professional.’ While he complained at length, I whipped out my phone and found a local wheelie-bin cleaner and everything was sorted that same day.

This latest complaint is harder to deal with. I doubt I’d find anything online about how to handle taster days at schools with unsolved murders in their recent history, or husbands who don’t like the idea of them.

‘Why do you say “a female pupil”, as if Kitty’s at greater risk because of her sex? There’s no reason to think that’s true.’

‘How do you know? A girl got pushed out of a window, Sonia. To her death. A talented, clever, attractive girl – like Kitty. She was fourteen when she died. That’s how old Kitty’ll be in September. Two years on and still no-one’s got a clue who murdered Lucy Ross. What if the killer’s got a thing for pushing teenage girls out of windows and he’s just waiting for the next suitable victim to come along?’

I want to tell Rich he’s being ridiculous but I can’t, which makes his words more irritating. What he fears is within the bounds of possibility. Just about.

‘If you want me to cancel the taster day, just say so,’ I tell him. ‘Don’t put all the responsibility on me. Say, “On no account will I allow my daughter to go to that school.”’

‘I can’t do that, can I? It’s not only up to me. You say The Morrow’s amazing for performing arts, and their anti-bullying—’

‘God, this is what I can’t stand! Make up your mind: either you’re worried Kitty might get murdered or you aren’t. If you are, you shouldn’t care about the brand new state-of-the-art theatre they’ve just built. Keeping Kitty safe is paramount, right? Dead girls can’t star in musical theatre extravaganzas.’ Careful. Don’t give him the perfect form of expression for a sentiment you don’t want him to express. ‘Look, Rich, I’m not saying it’s ideal. Obviously I’d rather no one had been murdered at The Morrow, but we’ve got to be rational, not hysterical. I mean, we live in London! Think how many people have been murdered here over the years. Probably more than in any other part of the UK, but we don’t go round thinking it’s going to happen to us.’

‘Until we decide to send Kitty to a school where there’s a killer prowling the corridors. And then we do.’

‘What’s the alternative, if we don’t send her to The Morrow?’ I prepare, for at least the twentieth time, to lay out the facts. ‘I’ve contacted every half-decent school within commuting distance. The Morrow’s the only one with a place—’

‘Hey, if they didn’t have a place available for Kitty, they could always create one by pushing another student out of a third floor window,’ Rich quips.

‘They get brilliant results, their music and drama departments are world class and that’s no exaggeration – and music and drama are the only subjects Kitty gives a shit about. And they’ve offered us a bursary, they’re so keen to have her. Rich, Lucy Ross’s murder – and it wasn’t even definitely a murder, remember? It could have been an accident—’

‘No, it couldn’t.’