Here Lies Gloria Mundy

She named some of the substances. All of them, I knew, contained hydrocyanic acid, more commonly known as prussic acid. There would have been pesticides such as rat poison, wasp-killer and a fumigatory for trees and fruit. Which she had used she did not say. The letter ended:

I have read somewhere that certain natives kill themselves on the doorstep of an enemy so that their ghost will haunt him. I bear you no malice, but I will haunt that bitch of a woman you married until she kills herself to get rid of me. She looked at me as though I was scum. Even that Coberley woman only laughed when the soup went over me. I can forgive her for that, but I won’t stand being treated like dirt by that wife of yours.

I handed back the letter. He gave it to Rouse without showing it to Celia.

‘I must ring up Hara-kiri,’ he said, when the inspector had gone. ‘I don’t want him to hear about this from the newspapers. I wonder, Corin, whether you would do it for me? You’ll do it better than I would, because you are in no way involved.’

‘I’ll ring him up from my flat, then,’ I said. ‘Now that you are out of trouble, I think the two of you are better on your own.’

The fact was that I was anxious to get away. There was nothing useful that I could do by staying and I was superstitious enough not to want the Wottons’ bad luck to attach itself to me.

Back in my flat, I had a dream I shall not forget. I am well aware that nothing is so boring as having to listen to an account of someone else’s dreams, but, because of Aunt Eglantine’s strange and bizarre request later, this dream of mine still seems of peculiar significance. It began when I dreamed I received a ‘Tag Map’ from Hara-kiri.

19

A Kind of Pilgrimage

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In my dream I was not only mystified; I was alarmed. A ‘Tag Map’ went back to our college days. It was a code which meant ‘Time all good men aid party’ and one was in honour bound (by an initiation oath taken in the Junior Common Room) to honour it. I remembered the row at Pontyprydd after the rugger match there and wondered in what fresh trouble and harassment Hara-kiri intended to involve me.

At first the dream was unco-ordinated and chaotic. I found myself outside his house, but it had changed. Instead of the modern homestead which he had built in the Sussex countryside, it was a replica, on a smaller scale, of the second of the Cornish hotels I had visited. There was the same mixture of architectural styles, from the mediaeval to the early Georgian, there was the grim gatehouse, and there was the tall turret with the little room at the top where I had slept. I found myself up there again and below me were the coast and the rocks and a tiny cove which had not been there before.

Hardie came into the room. I knew it was he, although some of the time I thought he was Anthony. He invited me to look over the house and took me into a room which I seemed to recognise, although in fact I had never been inside it. It was beautifully decorated and furnished and over the mantelpiece was Ruben’s Adoration of the Magi which, in my dream, I knew to be the original, but it turned into the naked figure of Gloria Mundy and Aunt Eglantine laughed and said, ‘The quickness of the hand deceives the eye,’ before she turned into Hara-kiri again.

He said, ‘She’s in the room which used to be the chapel.’

‘Aunt Eglantine?’ I asked. However, it turned out to be Gloria, as I might have guessed. I thought of Kate and asked where she was.

He said, ‘I have divorced her. Didn’t I tell you? This is to be purely a stag party.’

‘But I’m not going to be married for a good many weeks,’ I said. ‘What are the candles for?’

‘A lyke-wake dirge. If you want to see Gloria, she is on the bed.’

I could see that we were now in a chapel. The windows were small and gave an ecclesiastical appearance to the room and the candles, six of them, were the only form of lighting. The only furniture was a four-poster bed on which lay a coffin with no lid. There in it lay Gloria, her black and red hair neatly arranged, her unprepossessing little face looking rather like that of Kay. There was a cat-like smile on her lips and her predatory hands were clasped together on her breast.

As I looked down on her I knew that one of the candles had gone out. I straightened up and lighted it with a snap of my fingers, but the little room went dark and I found myself in the courtyard in front of the house. Instead of Hardie’s big car there was a hearse and behind it a smaller car with four men in it. I could not see their faces, but I knew that they were William Underedge, Cranford Coberley, Anthony and Anthony’s gardener.

‘We had to bring Platt,’ said Hara-kiri, ‘because we need an experienced man to do the digging.’ At that I knew we were going to bury Gloria.

‘Requiescat in pace,’ I said under my breath.

McMaster either heard the words or guessed them correctly, for he said, ‘Yes, but will she?’

‘Will she what?’