Here Lies Gloria Mundy

His father had been a gamekeeper before him. They were not Gloucestershire people, but came from Norfolk, and Will never lost that note at the end of a Norfolk sentence which always seems to ask a question. I was reminded of him when I looked out at the hills. Beeches Lawn was just outside Hilcombury, which is not all that far from Nescomb. I thought, as I looked over to the hills, that I would visit Nescomb again, although I knew that, with Will Smith gone, I could never recapture the old magic of his woods and walks, or that of the long lane which led from the stream and the village street up the hill to his cottage, a lane in which the ‘weeds… grow long, lovely and lush’ and the wild flowers proliferate as they please. There was history, too, in that lane. The big, striped, edible snails introduced by the Roman conquerors were still to be found among the weeds and grasses, and the Chedworth villa was not all that far away, and neither were Cirencester and Gloucester.

Meanwhile, my present surroundings were pleasant and peaceful enough. Below me was an immense sweep of lawn. Among trees which, with some bushes between, divided it into two unequal parts, stood an immense lime tree, the largest I have ever seen, and there was a magnificent copper beech at the other end of the garden. Beyond the further part of the lawn, the ground, I thought, might slope down to a little stream, and beyond this again I could see an occasional vehicle making its way along the road to the town.

At the other end of the lawn there were flowerbeds and on my way up to the house, when I had parked my car, I had passed greenhouses, a flourishing kitchen garden and a mighty apple tree laden with fruit. For some reason I have never been able to explain, although the words turned out to be prophetic, I found myself murmuring, as I looked out upon this peaceful and attractive scene:

‘And pleasant is the fairy land

For them that in it dwell,

But aye at end of seven years,

They pay a teind to hell.’

‘Teind’ is a due or a tax, but what, I wondered, had made me think of hell in a place like Beeches Lawn? All I could think of was that the copper beech tree had put the thought of evil into my mind. I would have been about twelve years old, I suppose, when I first came across the Sherlock Holmes stories, and I still think that the twelfth adventure is one of the most spine-tingling tales in the series. That ‘prodigiously stout man with a very smiling face and a great heavy chin which rolled down in fold upon fold’ has always seemed to me a much more sinister and frightening figure than Colonel Lysander Stark or any other of Conan Doyle’s villains.

On the following morning Anthony showed me around. The stables had been converted to garages and the pigsties were empty. I remember he remarked that he was glad to be so near the town as to be virtually part of it, otherwise he might be expected to hunt, ‘and all that sort of time-wasting nonsense, old boy. Anyway, I’m a Londoner and, like the film-star ladies, I am happiest among my books,’ he said, ‘now that I’ve given up rugger.’

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.