Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘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.’

‘I shouldn’t think that would find much favour with the monks,’ I said lightly.

‘Oh, the thing would have been sculptured long before the Dissolution. There are connections with Catherine of Aragon. Her badge of a pomegranate surmounted by a crown is to be seen here and there, and on the ceiling of the old chapel, which dates back to the later Middle Ages and has a misericord to every stall, there is the badge of Edward the Fourth, a rose and a falcon.’