Joanna Staveley

Joanna Staveley is a nurse and the wife of Guy Staveley, the doctor on Combe Island. Vividly sociable and comfortable in her own sexuality, she can put a room at ease; in private, however, her marriage rests on terms she stated plainly from its beginning. Through her, the novel sets public confidence and practical care beside a more complicated intimacy: Guy loves her devotedly, while Joanna’s affection does not take the romantic form he wants.

Identity and Life on Combe Island

Joanna’s presence on the island is periodic rather than continuous. When she returns, she seems to resume island life as if she had never left. Her appearances are marked by deliberate presentation: at dinner she wears a pale greenish-gold silk trouser suit, and on another occasion her blonde hair is bound back with a blue silk scarf and she wears jeans and an open denim jacket. These descriptions make her striking to those around her, but she is not only an object of attention. Her confidence and directness shape how she participates in the island’s social and practical life.

Her nursing work continues when she is away. She tells Guy that she has worked part-time in the accident and emergency department at St. Jude’s, where she encounters drunks, people taking drugs, and patients with head injuries. She is sharply critical of administrators who recruit doctors and nurses from countries that need them more. Her remarks reveal a social conscience that has limits, as she jokes, but also a clear sense of the pressures borne by staff and the inequities of medical recruitment.

Marriage to Guy Staveley

Guy has been in love with Joanna since they first met, and after twenty years of marriage he remains certain that there will never be another woman for him. Her feelings are different. Before they left together for the registry office, Joanna told him, “I love you, Guy, and I think I shall go on loving you, but I’m not in love.” She described having been in love as torment and humiliation, and said she was choosing a quiet life with someone she respected, liked, and wanted to spend her life with. The marriage is therefore neither a concealed romance nor simply a sham: it is a durable partnership whose emotional terms are unequal.

That difference is most painful to Guy when Joanna is away. Stormy nights in their London flat intensify his sense of deprivation, and he wonders about the people she mentions—Tim, Maxie, and Kurt—without daring to ask whom she sees or whether someone shares her bed. The narrative establishes his fear and uncertainty, not an answer about Joanna’s relationships. When she is back on Combe Island, the contrast is stark: the storm becomes a reassuring sign of the comfort within Dolphin Cottage, and Guy feels grateful for her generous sexuality. After lovemaking, she covers herself with a careful modesty he finds endearing. His tenderness coexists with his awareness that her return does not erase the terms she set at the start of their marriage.

Care and Social Presence

At a pre-dinner gathering, Joanna works to keep conversation moving with Mark Yelland and Guy, drawing on shared academic connections between the two men. Her social ease matters to Rupert Maycroft, who dreads the work of hosting and worries that the evening will fail. Joanna’s ability to engage others thus functions as more than personal charm: she helps sustain the communal rituals of a small island where residents and visitors share rooms, meals, and news.

Her care is practical rather than sentimental. After spending time with Miranda Oliver, she returns to the others saying Miranda did not really want her there and that the two women scarcely know one another. Joanna has left Miranda two sleeping pills and advised her to take them with a warm milky drink. When told that Miranda does not want to leave her cottage, Joanna explains that Dennis Tremlett will stay there; Miranda will sleep in her father’s bed and Dennis in hers. She does not pretend to a closeness that is absent, but she takes steps to ensure Miranda will not be alone.

Joanna also has a defined place in the island’s medical arrangements. When Adam Dalgliesh’s investigative party meets the residents, she introduces herself before anyone else can do so and describes her contribution beside Guy’s work: “Guy deals with illness, I provide sticking plasters, laxatives and placebos.” The lightly comic formulation presents her as the less authoritative partner in medicine, but it also asserts a useful role of her own; the surgery is on the same floor as the sickroom, and she invites the investigators to seek help there.

The Investigation and Her Account

Joanna is directly connected to the handling of Nathan Oliver’s blood sample. Guy asks about the commotion at the harbour, where Dan Padgett dropped the sample overboard. Joanna says Oliver is due to give another sample at nine the next morning. She expects him to be punctual or to telephone if he cancels, despite his dislike of needles, and remarks that she is good at finding a vein on the first attempt. The lost sample therefore creates a further practical task for her as a professional, not just a point of island gossip.

After Oliver’s death, Joanna gives Kate Miskin a detailed account of her movements. She says she and Guy attended dinner, stayed for coffee in the library, returned to Dolphin Cottage, and remained together until going to bed shortly before eleven. They breakfasted together there; Joanna then went to the surgery to wait for Oliver’s nine o’clock appointment. When he had not arrived by nine-twenty, she began calling around to find out what had delayed him. She did not join the search, while Guy did, and she says she learned what had happened only when he returned to tell her.

Her account is precise, but Joanna does not present it as beyond scrutiny. She observes that it would hardly differ from her husband’s and adds that they had plenty of time to fabricate an alibi before the investigators arrived. The remark shows awareness of the distinction between a matching story and a trustworthy one; it does not, by itself, establish that the account is false. At the scene, she also makes a pointed distinction between suicide and assisted suicide, suggesting that Oliver needed no assistance. Her wit and bluntness resist the solemnity of the investigation without changing the fact that she is answering questions about a death on the island.

Narrative Significance

Joanna is characterized through contrasts that do not resolve into a single role. She is conspicuously feminine in others’ descriptions, yet her work, political opinions, and matter-of-fact caretaking give her an identity beyond the attention she attracts. She can be playful with Guy, frank about the distance between them, and considerate toward Miranda without claiming intimacy. The same directness shapes her investigative interview: she supplies a chronology and openly acknowledges how an alibi might be manufactured. In a community where people’s private arrangements are often difficult to know, Joanna’s candour clarifies the terms of her marriage while leaving the limits of what others can know about her intact.