Here Lies Gloria Mundy

‘Yes,’ he said, when I mentioned this, ‘a prep school rent the field from me for games. I charge only a peppercorn rent, of course. I like kids and these are very decent little chaps. I have the headmaster to dinner occasionally, so as to maintain the entente cordiale. It works very well. The chap who wants to make me an offer for the old house is this same headmaster. If he comes up with any reasonable figure, I think I shall let him have it. It would save me a lot of trouble and expense as he would do it up to suit himself, because I should sell it as it stands and it would need quite a lot of alteration, I suppose, before I could convert it into flats.’

‘It’s a charming old place,’ I said. ‘What is it like inside?’

‘Coberley — that’s the headmaster — has the only key at present, as I’ve mislaid mine. I’ll get it off him while you’re here and show you round.’

‘Why does he want to buy it?’

‘Goodness knows. I suppose the school is expanding. The kids are mostly day boys, but I believe there are a few boarders.’

‘Won’t it interfere with your privacy to have youngsters passing your windows on their way to the playing field?’

‘They won’t need to do that. They will go out by the way you brought your car in and then walk along the road. You can get to the playing field that way, past this next house I’m going to show you.’

This house was a fair way along a lane. It turned out to be a vast, dark, grim-looking place of which the ground-floor windows were barred. Even the front door with its iron-ended bell-pull looked forbidding. It reminded me of the entrance to a gaol.

‘It doesn’t belong to the estate,’ said Anthony. ‘We sold it a hundred years ago. A colony of craftsmen have it now, but it used to be a convent for nuns.’

‘Poor girls!’ I said, looking at the barred windows and the forbidding exterior of the big, dark house.

‘Not necessarily, Corin. As Wordsworth put it:

‘ “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room,

And hermits are contented with their cells,

And students with their pensive citadels.”

‘I think you and I are enough of like mind to agree with him.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s peaceful enough here. I thought perhaps I might rough out my next book while I’m with you. You’ll be glad for me to be occupied.’ He glanced sideways at me, but said nothing and the bombshell burst early on the following day, the Saturday. There was to be a house-party.

The bad news came when Celia opened her letters and came to the last one.

‘Well, that’s everybody,’ she said. ‘Karen has accepted at her leisure, the rude little beast. She always does leave everything to the last minute. I suppose she hopes something more exciting than a visit to us will turn up. She wants to bring somebody called William Underedge with her.’

‘Who’s he?’ asked Anthony.

‘How should I know? The current boyfriend, I suppose.’

‘Where will you put him?’

‘On a camp bed in one of the attics. It won’t matter where I put him. He’ll sleep with Karen anyway, if I know her.’

‘He may be a sort of young Sir Galahad. You never know who Karen is going to pick up.’

‘If he is, he won’t mind the camp bed and bumping his head on the beams in the attic, so that’s still all right.’

The guests turned up at intervals during the afternoon and by tea-time everybody was with us. The delinquent Karen turned out to be a fresh-looking up-and-coming young miss, not particularly pretty but engaging enough and possessing a certain amount of spontaneous charm, due, I think, to the fact that she took it for granted that everybody she met was going to like her. In so thinking she was probably right. People are apt to take you at your own self-evaluation.

Her escort, whom she had wished upon her hostess at such short notice, was a stocky, swarthy, gravely earnest young man who turned out to be the son of a local mill-owner. I heard him explaining himself apologetically to Celia.

‘If I could have trusted her to drive here without smashing herself up,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t have pushed in on you, you know. I mean, it seems awful cheek when you don’t even know me.’

‘We soon shall put that right,’ said Celia kindly, ‘and we are very pleased you could come. Have you known Karen long?’

‘Oh, on and off, you know; just on and off. I mean, everybody goes round with a gang these days, don’t they, and she and I are in the same crowd. We sing Bach and five of us play chamber music.’

‘Not — surely not Karen?’

‘Oh, I weaned her off the disco stuff long ago and now she sings Bach and I’m hoping to get her to take lessons on the cello. She’s got the figure for the cello, I think, although, of course, she’ll never look quite like Suggia, I’m afraid.’

I realised that Celia, whose niece Karen was, was looking at the earnest young man with something not far short of awe, and it occurred to me that William Underedge was an incarnation of one of the great fictional creations of the Master of English Prose. I put it to Celia later.

‘The Efficient Baxter personified, wouldn’t you say?’