Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘Ah,’ said the other old man, ‘certainly, sir. Come along while I look at my list. I can’t promise you a table to yourself. Our tables are for six or eight persons, and our lunches are popular, sir, very popular.’

‘That’s all right. I’m a writer. I like company,’ I told him. ‘One listens and learns.’

‘We used to get the lawyers,’ he said, preceding me along the narrow path, ‘but not now. They’ve moved the assizes to Bigsey. A pity, sir. Oh, dear! The stories those lawyers could tell! Quite hair-raising, some of them. Other times it was as much as I could do to keep a straight face as a young waiter. Very hilarious, sir, lawyers, and very improper at times. Worse than doctors, I’d say. Will you mount the steps first, sir? I shall be slower than you. The gentleman you saw me with is the owner of this hotel. He misses the lawyers sadly.’

As we walked through the long lounge with its trophies, he went on, ‘A writer, did you say, sir? We have a lady of your calling lunching here for the next fortnight. Dinner, too, so I have managed to squeeze in a little table for her, as our regulars are mostly gentlemen, but there would be room for two if she gave permission.’

He accepted a large book from the formidable barmaid, scanned the day’s entries and asked me my name. He inscribed it and said, ‘One o’clock, sir, please, and your place reserved only until one-fifteen. We are popular, you see.’ I picked up my sherry, which the barmaid had covered with a clean beermat and turned to see a young woman standing behind me. ‘This is the lady writer. Mr Stratford, miss. Miss Parkstone, sir,’ said the waiter.

‘Good Lord!’ I said. ‘Imogen!’

‘Good gracious me!’ said the girl. ‘William, put Mr Stratford at my table if he is staying for lunch.’

‘What will you drink?’ I asked.

‘My usual, please, Mabel.’

‘If you like to upset your liver, it’s no business of mine,’ said the barmaid. ‘This gentleman had more sense.’ She juggled with bottles and a shaker. We took our drinks into the lounge and seated ourselves in armchairs beneath a particularly fine set of antlers.

‘So it was you,’ I said. ‘How came you to be serving in a dress shop — viz., to wit, Trends?’

‘To get material for a book, of course. I got the idea from P.G. Wodehouse. Do you remember Rosie M. Banks?’

‘Oh, the female novelist who worked as a waitress in a gentlemen’s club to get material for Mervyn Keene, Clubman?’

‘Exactly. Well, it struck me as such a good idea that I thought I would try it.’

‘Monica Dickens tried it, and with signal success. This place rather brings Dickens to mind, don’t you think? Of course, Monica’s accounts of her experiences were autobiographical.’

‘Don’t deviate. What’s all this about Trends? What were you doing among the ladies’ dresses? I didn’t know you were married.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Oho!’

‘And not “Oho” either. I am now an amateur detective. I was merely sleuthing at Trends. I was looking for traces of Gloria Mundy.’

‘That woman whose body was found in the ashes of a bonfire? How on earth did you get mixed up in that awful business?’

‘Never mind that for the moment. It’s a long story and it will keep. Let’s talk about you. I nearly dropped dead when the woman at the post-office at Culvert Green had a forwarding address for Parkstone. I thought coincidence was playing even more of a joke than usual.’

‘I called myself Domremy at Trends, but I thought I had better come clean in the hotel register and at the post-office.’

‘Just as well to avoid unnecessary complications.’ I looked at her as the autumn sun brightened that otherwise depressing room and made gold lights in her fine-spun, dark-brown hair.

‘Why aren’t you pale and interesting?’ I demanded. ‘I was told that you had a whiter-than-white face, black hair, and cats’ eyes like green glass when you were at Trends.’

‘They were thinking of somebody else. Anyway, Trends wasn’t the only stint I did in subservience to my art. I’ve worked in old-clothes shops in the East End, in men’s outfitters in the suburbs, in so-called salons in the provinces where they put one silk scarf and one Italian sweater in the window and sell trousers nobody would be seen dead in. I have even worked at an Irish draper’s where the bar behind the shop was a lot bigger than the shop itself and far better patronised. That was over in the Republic. Besides all that, I’ve worked in Kensington High Street, in Oxford Street and (by virtue of knowing the management) in the clothing section of a Marks and Sparks. You name it, I’ve done it, so far as the sales side of the rag trade is concerned.’

‘God bless my soul!’

‘Keep on asking and perhaps He will.’

‘It seems a lot of trouble to have gone to for a single book. That’s what I meant,’ I said.