Here Lies Gloria Mundy

When dinner was over, the four young people played Scrabble for a bit, but soon drifted off to bed. Aunt Eglantine, who had come down after dinner and had been communing either with herself or with the spirits of Kramer and Sprenger, also gave us little of her company. Celia went off to the ground-floor room she had allocated to her own use, and Anthony, McMaster and I settled down in Anthony’s den on the first floor and, with the assistance of his whisky, relived our youth by adopting Celia’s suggestion and talking over old times.

We broke up at well past midnight. Mopping-up operations seemed to have been completed and the house, except for a faint sound of water dripping from a leaky guttering somewhere, was almost eerily silent.

Breakfast was a silent meal, too. Anthony seemed preoccupied and Celia, who had come downstairs, poured coffee in an absentminded manner. I deduced that their little set-to about Gloria had been resumed, but there had been no sign of any rift at dinner on the previous night. There were no morning papers and when Anthony rang up he was told that the floods had held up deliveries.

Kay came down to say that Roland had a heavy cold. She had been to his room and found him flushed and very irritable. A tray was sent up to him and Celia suggested that somebody had better take his temperature, but Kay said that this was unnecessary, as he was always one to make a fuss if he had so much as a finger-ache. They were going home, anyway, as soon as the garage could bring round Roland’s car, she added. Celia, however, armed herself with a thermometer, but she came downstairs to report that Roland’s temperature was not much above normal. He had eaten his breakfast, would be down for lunch, and he and Kay would leave directly the car came. Hara-kiri had already departed.

Anthony rang up Coberley and he and Marigold came over. He denied having lent Gloria the key to the old house and, in view of the broken window, there was no reason to disbelieve him.

‘I was intrigued to notice the quite uncanny resemblance Miss Mundy’s hair and features bore to those of the girl in the picture,’ he said, ‘and from what I was able to observe of the young lady herself during the short time she was with us — ’

‘Yes, she is hardly a model who would have been chosen by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, to name but one painter who liked his ladies well-covered,’ said Marigold. ‘And now be quiet. To my mind, the picture was obscene, and I am glad the little boys are not to see it.’

‘The Malleus Maleficarum lays down,’ said Aunt Eglantine, who was with us at table again, ‘that the soul can sometimes effect a change in its own body. That herring-gutted little witch is a case in point. What were you saying about Rubens?’

‘Nothing, Aunt dear,’ said Celia. ‘Marigold was only referring to a portrait in the old house, and that is certainly not a Rubens.’

‘He used his wives as his-models, they say. He must have fed them well. They were not witches,’ said Eglantine.

‘We were not talking about Rubens, Auntie dear.’

‘Yes, you were. I heard you. That girl who is too beautiful for her own good mentioned him.’

Marigold laughed and Anthony said, ‘She was only making a comparison.’

‘She interrupted her husband’s description of the witch, so what she said about Rubens must be important to her.’

Everybody abandoned the argument.

Roland and Kay went off in the early afternoon, the Coberleys returned to the school, and, with everybody gone, the house was left to Anthony, Celia, Aunt Eglantine and myself, for William Underedge had insisted on removing himself and the astonishingly quiescent Karen as soon as Roland and Kay had been seen off.

At breakfast on the following morning Anthony and I did not miss Celia and Aunt Eglantine, for both had decided to breakfast upstairs. Celia came down at ten, but, when half-past eleven struck and there was still no sign of her aunt, enquiries were made.

Aunt Eglantine, it appeared, had gone into the kitchen for toast and coffee instead of waiting for her tray, and had carried these up to her room by way of the back stairs and a little later had passed in front of the kitchen window on her way towards the kitchen garden.

‘The silly old thing has gone into the town to shop on her own,’ said a worried Celia, ‘and she’s hopeless at crossing the road.’

‘She won’t need to cross it if she uses the bridge and only goes to the shopping centre,’ said Anthony.

‘But it’s so naughty of her. I promised I would take her in the car.’

‘Not to worry. She’ll be all right. After all, I expect that when she’s at home she goes shopping by herself. She’s reached her seventies without getting herself either arrested or run over, so why should any harm come to her now?’

‘Because she’s supposed to be in our care. If anything happened to her, we’d be held responsible. I wish you would go out in the car and bring her back.’

‘Good Lord, she’s not a small child who has strayed away! She may be a little bit eccentric, but she isn’t a loony.’

‘She’s promised to attend Dame Beatrice’s London clinic’

‘Only because she likes feeling important. Dame Beatrice told us there is nothing wrong with her except this ridiculous obsession with witchcraft, and that can be dealt with, it seems, if she wants to rid herself of it.’

‘If she were your aunt — ’

‘Well, she isn’t, thank heaven!’

‘Of course you hate her because she saw through that beastly little ex-girlfriend of yours!’ Celia flung this at him in a tone I had never thought she could use, then she turned to dash out of the room and ran straight into me.

‘Whoops-a-daisy!’ I said, fielding her.

‘Oh, Corin! You have been listening!’ she exclaimed angrily.