Here Lies Gloria Mundy

probably already got you sized up as a lad who can bear watching.’

‘The girl who can bear watching, although not in the insulting sense your reference to me suggests, is Mrs Coberley,’ I said indiscreetly. Anthony chipped in at once, and I knew he was not joking.

‘You keep your eyes to yourself, or there’ll be murder done,’ he said. ‘Coberley ain’t as quiet as he looks; and he’s as possessive as the devil where his lily-and-rose is concerned.’

4

Unbidden Guest

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I woke early next day and went to the window to see the long shadow of the copper beech lying slantwise across the lawn in the morning sun. Nobody else was stirring when I went downstairs except a housemaid busy in the dining-room. She asked whether I would like my breakfast, but I replied that I would wait until the usual hour, whenever that was.

‘The mistress has hers on a tray, sir, and Sandra mostly puts out the dining-room sideboard at nine, sir.’

I decided to take my car for a short run. It would disturb nobody, as it was parked at a considerable distance from the house. As I walked past the flowerbeds and through the kitchen garden to get to it, I felt an urge to look again at the family’s other house, that which had once been the lodging of Anthony’s great-grandfather’s mistress. Just as I reached it I met Coberley coming from the opposite direction. We exchanged greetings.

‘I wondered whether it was possible to go inside,’ I said, indicating the house.

‘Oh, I’ve got a key,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an option on the place. It would make a storehouse for all the junk my little boys collect. Dear me, what rubbish they do bring in, but children are inveterate collectors. The dangerous objects are already in a wooden box in the old house. I intend to start — ’

‘A school museum?’ I suggested.

‘Call it what you like. I’ve offered to buy the house from Wotton and do it up. By the time the parents have paid for it I shall see that there will be enough money left over to enlarge the pavilion in Wotton’s field.’

‘High finance,’ I commented.

‘Oh, one thing works in with another, and I do well with Common Entrance, so the parents are pleased.’ He produced a key and opened the front door. ‘I wouldn’t try the stairs,’ he said. ‘You could break your neck on them.’

‘So they wouldn’t be safe for Great-aunt Eglantine,’ I said lightly.

‘That old monstrosity will bring trouble on herself if she insists on regaling us with extracts from the Hammer of Evil,’ he said seriously. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Those two Dominicans who wrote the Malleus were fair, just and merciful men, considering the times in which they lived. They were also great ecclesiastical lawyers and, I would say, haters of heresy but not of heretics. They genuinely desired to save souls from perdition and only to condemn bodies to those ghastly punishments when everything else had been tried. But that overweight dabbler in the occult is treading on dangerous ground because she is only out for sensationalism and, once you get that bug, you can land up almost anywhere. Those men quite rightly saw witchcraft as the supreme heresy and not only as a religious but as a political danger. She has neither their intellect nor their concern for the human race, but only for her own entertainment and the assertion of her ego. I’m told that in her youth she learnt to toss the caber. No, I don’t believe it, either,’ he said in response to my ejaculation, ‘but I believe that in her day she was a first-class tennis player. I suppose all the muscle has gone to adipose tissue and that she’s taken up this witchcraft stuff to compensate her for losing the plaudits of the crowd.’

‘But there’s nothing in witchcraft,’ I said.

‘Not if you don’t believe in it. All the same, I’ve seen some very strange things in my time. What do you think of the only picture in the place?’ He led the way to a ground-floor room at the back of the house. ‘It belongs to Wotton, of course, but, in any case, I should discard it before I took over the house. It is not an object on which I should desire young boys to speculate.’

The picture hung on a wall opposite the window, so that the light of the emerging day fell full on it. It was the portrait (I guessed that it was a portrait) of a naked girl. She was thin to the point of emaciation, and yet the artist had contrived to give her a sensuousness, almost a voluptuousness, which seemed quite at variance with her meagre, childish body, long thin legs and unformed, skinny arms.

There was nothing in the face, either, of any pretensions to beauty. She was snub-nosed and her eyes were set close together. She had a low forehead and the most striking thing about her was her hair. It fell only to her shoulders, but was of two unimaginably contrasting colours, violently red on the right side of her head, almost coal-black on the other. In one apparently nerveless hand she held a rose between her thumb and first finger. The other hand fell lifelessly down to reach her thigh.

‘Well?’ said Coberley, watching me.

‘She is a witch,’ I said, ‘and the artist was a genius.’

We strolled back to Wotton’s house. I had forgotten my plan to take out my car. I wondered when the portrait had been painted, and whether Celia had ever seen it.

Aunt Eglantine did not appear at breakfast, but everyone else except Celia was there. Dame Beatrice, who took nothing but toast and coffee, sat next to me and proved to have read my biography of Horace Walpole.

‘He was a visitor to a property a few miles from here,’ she said, ‘and recommended it to a friend of his, William Cole. Have you been to Prinknash Abbey?’

‘No. My book concerned itself mostly with his writings after he retired to Strawberry Hill.’

‘You would enjoy Prinknash. The Benedictines have it now, and have built a new and much enlarged abbey. The old building is used as a retreat house, so you can probably get permission to be shown over it, if you are interested. It is a lovely Early Tudor building and the west court is particularly fine. On the outer wall of the east court there is a bas-relief of a young man reputed to be Henry the Eighth.’