His was a curious property in some ways. Within his boundaries were two other dwellings, and these were not estate cottages, but houses in the full sense of the word. One was a beautiful old place which had been the original family dwelling. I, for one, would never have abandoned it. It was stone-built and charming, a typical Cotswold manor house.
“It’s said to be haunted,” he told me, “but the fact is that it became too small to house my great-great-grandfather’s family, so he let it decay. My great-grandfather had it done up and used to keep a woman there. She was supposed to catalogue the library here and help with the household accounts, but rumour, of course, told a different story. My grandfather left the house to rot, but it’s not in such a bad state as all that. I think I shall do it up again and let it as a couple of holiday flats. I would only need to put another bathroom in and, I suppose, another kitchen, but I’m considering an offer from somebody who is willing to buy it as it stands. The only problem is the staircase, which is in a parlous state and dangerous.”
We retraced our steps, took the path round the lawn to a field, crossed this, and came out into a roughly surfaced lane. I noticed that the field boasted a small pavilion.
“Yes,” he said, when I mentioned this, “a prep. school rent the field from me for games. I charge only a peppercorn rent, of course. I like kids and these are very decent little chaps. I have the headmaster to dinner occasionally, so as to maintain the entente cordiale. It works very well. The chap who wants to make me an offer for the old house is this same headmaster. If he comes up with any reasonable figure, I think I shall let him have it. It would save me a lot of trouble and expense as he would do it up to suit himself, because I should sell it as it stands and it would need quite a lot of alteration, I suppose, before I could convert it into flats.”
“It’s a charming old place,” I said. “What is it like inside?”
“Coberley—that’s the headmaster—has the only key at present, as I’ve mislaid mine. I’ll get it off him while you’re here and show you round.”
“Why does he want to buy it?”
“Goodness knows. I suppose the school is expanding. The kids are mostly day boys, but I believe there are a few boarders.”
“Won’t it interfere with your privacy to have youngsters passing your windows on their way to the playing-field?”
“They won’t need to do that. They will go out by the way you brought your car in and then walk along the road. You can get to the playing-field that way, past this next house I’m going to show you.”
This house was a fair way along a lane. It turned out to be a vast, dark, grim-looking place of which the ground-floor windows were barred. Even the front door with its iron-ended bell-pull looked forbidding. It reminded me of the entrance to a gaol.
“It doesn’t belong to the estate,” said Anthony. “We sold it a hundred years ago. A colony of craftsmen have it now, but it used to be a convent for nuns.”
“Poor girls!” I said, looking at the barred windows and the forbidding exterior of the big, dark house.
“Not necessarily, Corin. As Wordsworth put it: ‘Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,
And hermits are contented with their cells, And students with their pensive citadels.’ I think you and I are enough of like mind to agree with him.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “Anyway, it’s peaceful enough here. I thought perhaps I might rough out my next book while I’m with you. You’ll be glad for me to be occupied.” He glanced sideways at me, but said nothing and the bombshell burst early on the following day, the Saturday. There was to be a house-party.
The bad news came when Celia opened her letters and came to the last one.
“Well, that’s everybody,” she said. “Karen has accepted at her leisure, the rude little beast. She always does leave everything to the last minute. I suppose she hopes something more exciting than a visit to us will turn up. She wants to bring somebody called William Underedge with her.”
“Who’s he?” asked Anthony.
“How should I know? The current boyfriend, I suppose.”
“Where will you put him?”
“On a camp bed in one of the attics. It won’t matter where I put him. He’ll sleep with Karen anyway, if I know her.”
“He may be a sort of young Sir Galahad. You never know who Karen is going to pick up.”
“If he is, he won’t mind the camp bed and bumping his head on the beams in the attic, so that’s still all right.”
The guests turned up at intervals during the afternoon and by teatime everybody was with us. The delinquent Karen turned out to be a fresh-looking up-and-coming young miss, not particularly pretty but engaging enough and possessing a certain amount of spontaneous charm, due, I think, to the fact that she took it for granted that everybody she met was going to like her. In so thinking she was probably right. People are apt to take you at your own self-evaluation.
Her escort, whom she had wished upon her hostess at such short notice, was a stocky, swarthy, gravely earnest young man who turned out to be the son of a local mill-owner. I heard him explaining himself apologetically to Celia.
“If I could have trusted her to drive here without smashing herself up,” he said, “I wouldn’t have pushed in on you, you know. I mean, it seems awful cheek when you don’t even know me.”
“We soon shall put that right,” said Celia kindly, “and we are very pleased you could come. Have you known Karen long?”
“Oh, on and off, you know; just on and off. I mean, everybody goes round with a gang these days, don’t they, and she and I are in the same crowd. We sing Bach and five of us play chamber music.”
“Not—surely not Karen?”
“Oh, I weaned her off the disco stuff long ago and now she sings Bach and I’m hoping to get her to take lessons on the cello. She’s got the figure for the cello, I think, although, of course, she’ll never look quite like Suggia, I’m afraid.”
I realised that Celia, whose niece Karen was, was looking at the earnest young man with something not far short of awe, and it occurred to me that William Underedge was an incarnation of one of the great fictional creations of the Master of English Prose. I put it to Celia later.
“The Efficient Baxter personified, wouldn’t you say?”
“Good heavens, no, Corin! I think William Underedge is perfectly sweet.”
“Not even efficient?”
“I just hope he’s efficient enough to make Karen marry him. He would be very good for her, I think. By the way, don’t let my aunt back you into a corner and talk to you about the Malleus Maleficarum. She will, if she gets half a chance.”
There were two extraordinary old ladies in the party. Both had come unescorted and both, I suspected, were quite notably eccentric. This aunt, who was really Celia’s great-aunt, was tall and of intimidating bulk. She wore pince-nez with two gold chains which looped over her ears and dangled safely on to her immense bosom when she discarded the glasses. She spoke in almost a whisper unless she became excited, but then her voice screamed like a particularly indignant seagull or boomed like a bittern heard through an amplifier. This happened chiefly when she was talking on her favourite topic which, as Celia had warned me, was the Malleus Maleficarum of the Dominican priors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in the witchhunting days of 1486 AD.
“Germans, of course,” Aunt Eglantine belted out across the dinner-table, “but, when it comes to sheer thoroughness, there is nobody to beat them.”
Nobody attempted to contest this. I think all shared my hope that, so long as she was permitted to proceed unchecked, in the end she would gallop herself to a standstill. The policy succeeded after a fashion when she had issued what proved to be a final challenge, but it succeeded only with the help of Dame Beatrice, our other old lady.
“What’s more,” went on Miss Eglantine Brockworth, warming to her theme, “it is high time that somebody wrote another Malleus. Witchcraft is rife in the world of today. The po
wers of evil gather strength. Even this house is not free from them. Incubi and succubi are all around us and soon they will be in our midst. They have the power to destroy us.”
“But no operation of witchcraft can have a permanent effect, according to the authorities you have been quoting,” said Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. “I believe the reverend fathers went on to say that a belief that the devil has power to do human bodies any permanent harm does not appear to conform to the teachings of the Church.”
At mention of the Church, everybody gave great attention to the food, and there was the slightly uneasy silence which usually follows the introduction of such a gaffe as to make a reference to religion at any social gathering. That this interval of silence had been brought about deliberately by the reptilian old lady opposite me was manifest the next moment. She looked up, caught my eye, and the ghost of a grin appeared for a fleeting instant on her yellow countenance. At that moment I fell in love with Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.
Celia, as a good hostess, started conversation off again by introducing some innocuous topic—I forget what it was—and we all relaxed. Fortunately Aunt Eglantine (“my name comes not from Shakespeare, but from Chaucer”) elected to retire early, so we were quit of her and the Malleus Maleficarum for the rest of the evening.
Then there were the other guests. The first two who had arrived were the Coberleys. Cranford Coberley was headmaster of the school which rented Anthony’s field, who might also be considering the purchase of the old house, so I took it that the occasional dinner to which my host had referred had developed, this time, into a weekend stay. As the school was so close at hand, I suppose Coberley thought that he could pop back at any moment if an emergency presented itself or an anxious mum turned up to enquire after the health and happiness of little Johnny, as the staff knew where to contact the headmaster. He struck me as a taciturn, colourless man, but perhaps he was more dynamic when he was in harness. From what I know of small boys, he would need to be.
To my mild astonishment, it appeared that he had yoked himself (her second marriage, I learnt later) to a ravishing beauty. Marigold Coberley, slimmer than the Venus of Milo, more golden than Helen of Troy, was the loveliest girl I had ever seen or ever expect to see. It is not possible for me to describe her, except to say, with Yeats, “Oh, that I were young again, and held her in my arms!”
As a matter of fact, I was very much younger than Coberley, but let the quotation stand for what it is worth, namely, “the desire of the moth for the star; of the night for the morrow.” My desire for Marigold Coberley was not more lustful than that, but, in any case, I would have shared Yeats’s despairing cry, even though my age, as such, was not against me. Besides, beauty such as hers is intimidating and, to me, sacrosanct. I was content to be the courtier in the palace, not a man who thought he had a claim to the throne.
The other two were an engaged couple and seemed pleasant enough young people, although I had the impression that Roland Thornbury, who was vaguely related to Anthony and had expectations from him if Celia had no children, might turn into a domestic tyrant once he was married to the self-effacing Kay Shortwood. I put this opinion to Celia and Anthony after everybody else had gone to bed. Celia gave a short, expressive, derisive laugh.
“Don’t you believe it, Corin,” she said. “Roland is safely hooked and she’ll play him with guile until she’s got him just where she wants him. After that, it will be the landing-net and the gaff, and goodbye to Roland except as a meal-ticket. She knows very well that at present Roland is Anthony’s heir. However, I am quite young enough to have children. I don’t particularly want them, but it would be rather fun to see Kay Shortwood’s reactions if she knew there was Roland’s supplanter on the way.”
“I had no idea you could be so vindictive,” I said, laughing.
“Oh, there’s a bitch in every woman,” she responded, “and I particularly dislike that mealy-mouthed little gold-digger. However, Roland always wants to bring her with him and they are engaged to be married, so what can we do?”
“As we appear to be doing, which is to leave Roland to his fate and to the minding of his own business,” said Anthony.
“A Daniel come to judgment!” she quoted ironically. “What do you make of Dame Beatrice, Corin?”
“I rather wondered why she was here. You two—I speak mostly for Anthony—have never mentioned that you were acquainted with her, yet I understand that she’s a celebrity in her own line.”
“She got me out of an awful mess in the south of France once. That was before Celia and I were married,” said Anthony. “I was accused of murdering a little girl and Dame Beatrice got the case stopped and told the police who the murderer was. I don’t know how she did it, but she did it all right.”
“Possibly by ‘the monstrous power of witchcraft,’ ” I suggested, “or so Celia’s aunt might say.”
“Talking of witches,” said Celia, with a chuckle, “wasn’t it clever of Dame Beatrice to match herself against Aunt Eglantine and win?”
“Anybody could do it, I suppose, provided they had read the Malleus and remembered what they’d read,” said Anthony.
“I tried reading it once,” said Celia, “if only to be able to keep up sides with Aunt. However, in Montague Summers’s translation from the Latin there are five hundred and sixty-five closely printed pages, so I didn’t stay the course.”
“That’s your aunt’s strong suit, of course,” said Anthony. “She trades on the fact that nobody she is acquainted with has read the stuff, so that she can pontificate away to her heart’s content without fear of being challenged. Now that she has come up against somebody who knows the text even better than she does, I expect we shall have a bit of peace until Dame Beatrice goes. Unfortunately she’s got to attend a conference in Cheltenham, so she’ll be leaving us before lunch tomorrow.”
“I could wish to be better acquainted with her,” I said.
“I’m not so sure you’re wise, old boy,” said Anthony. “She’s consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office and has 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
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 th
ere 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.”
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 3
