Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘I suppose she didn’t want anybody to know she was there. She asked me why I had come. I told her I wanted to see a picture,’ Aunt Eglantine had continued. ‘She said that she had taken it upstairs, as people could get into the house and she did not want it stolen. I did not believe her when she declared it was her property, and I looked in all the downstairs rooms to find it, but it wasn’t there. She said that if I wanted to see it I would have to mount the stairs.’

Apparently Aunt Eglantine had decided, very rashly, to do this, but rickety stairs which might have sustained Gloria’s meagre frame proved unequal to the old lady’s much greater weight and she had come crashing down.

‘And Gloria left her lying there,’ said Celia, telling us the story in a voice that trembled. ‘Left her lying there in the hall with a broken leg, and slammed the front door after herself with poor Aunt unable to get any help until Corin found her. I never heard of anything more callous.’

After I had found Aunt Eglantine lying amid the ruins of the staircase and had run back to the house, I had left the front door on the catch so that the ambulance men could get in. After they had removed the old lady to hospital I had gone back to have a look round. The nail on which the picture had hung was still there, and so was the patch on the wall where the picture had shielded the wallpaper from the sun, but the picture itself had disappeared. Whether Gloria really had braved the dangerous staircase and taken the picture upstairs, or whether she had made off with it, there was no way of telling at that juncture.

Anthony sent in his gardener to clear up the mess. ‘Make sure you leave room to get the front door open again,’ he said to the man. ‘Tomorrow I’ll have to hire a truck and get all the muck taken down to the council dump. We can’t deal with it here.’

‘Make a nice bonfire and help me burn a lot of garden rubbish which I got piling up, Mr Wotton, eh, sir?’

‘Oh, all right, then. Leave it until tomorrow and I’ll come and give you a hand.’

‘If I split up the big pieces of wood, sir, I reckon a couple of wheelbarrows would shift it.’

‘Means several journeys. Make it three wheelbarrows,’ I said, ‘if you know where to borrow an extra one.’

‘Thanks, Corin,’ said Anthony. ‘We’ve got two and Coberley will lend me another.’

However, it rained all the next day, so the heap of wood remained in situ, except that the gardener and his son, a lad of about fourteen who, I’m pretty sure, ought to have been in school, split up the woodwork of the staircase into manageable lengths and piled it up in the hall. When Anthony and I went over there in waterproofs and tweed hats, the result looked like an unlighted funeral pyre.

Now that Aunt Eglantine was in hospital, I was the only guest left in the house, so I suggested that it was about time I went, too. Anthony, echoed by Celia, vetoed this.

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘I know you were only invited to stay for a week, but we need you here. Are you tired of our company already?’

‘No, of course not,’ I said, ‘but with all the upsets — well, you know.’

‘What upsets?’ he said. ‘Some ill-natured lout smears grease on stone steps and an unsuspecting woman comes a cropper, but it didn’t happen here and is no business of ours. A silly old lady who ought to have had more sense elects to climb an obviously unsafe staircase and breaks a limb. That didn’t happen here, either. Two young idiots choose an impassable lane in torrential rain, get bogged down, and one of them catches a nasty cold. That didn’t happen here. The one incident which did happen here — deplorable though it was from some aspects — turned out well. It rid us of Gloria Mundy.’

He spoke too soon. We were not rid of Gloria Mundy, not by a long chalk. I found afterwards that I remembered the evening well. The rain had eased off again at Thursday lunchtime, so I had spent the afternoon cruising around in my car. It was pleasant to get out into the countryside after having been confined to the house because of the return of the wet weather. I took the long hill up to Rodborough and then drove across the high, flat, seemingly boundless expanse of the common, had a look at the Long Stone and so on to Minchinhampton, with its seventeenth-century pillared market hall.

From here I went on to Nailsworth, crossed westwards over a prehistoric landscape with a tumulus and a long barrow on it and then swung north to Nympsfield. I had plenty of time in hand, so, instead of going straight back to Beeches Lawn, I turned south again to get a glimpse of Owlpen manor house and then went on to Uley.

I left the car at the roadside, called at a cottage for the key and the candle which were kept there — nobody was in, but the key, the candle and a box of matches were there for the borrowing — then I made my way on foot to the long barrow known locally as Hetty Pegler’s Tump.