Here Lies Gloria Mundy

5

Chapter of Accidents

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I had no idea what time it was when Roland and Kay left the house. McMaster and I were still upstairs, working on the brochures. The front door was round a corner and so out of sight of my window, but, in any case, I had no time to look out of it. McMaster had wanted one or two additions to the brochures and there was enough to do to keep us busy until almost teatime.

It had been getting darker all the afternoon, so, by the time we went downstairs, I had had the electric light on for the past hour. The full force of the storm struck the house just as we reached the hall.

We heard afterwards that it was the worst storm for ten years. The sky blackened, the windows rattled, doors thought to be shut flew open, the wind shrieked and tore at the trees and bushes, and then the rain came down and deluged the paths and the lawn.

I have never experienced such rain. It blotted out everything as though the house were surrounded by thick fog. The others all fled to their rooms to make certain that the windows were closed, while Anthony, Celia and the servants made the rest of the rounds. A skylight which had been left open was allowing a spate of water to cascade down the back stairs and for more than five minutes it resisted all attempts to close it.

The cook reported that water was coming in under the back door and part of the guttering gave up the struggle, so that water fell in fountains down one of the outside walls.

‘You shouldn’t have let that witch-girl in,’ pronounced Aunt Eglantine, during the first lull in the storm before its devils’ chorus broke out again. ‘She’s doing all this.’

‘You shouldn’t have chucked your bread into her soup,’ said William Underedge severely. ‘I’m afraid you are a very naughty old lady.“

‘Karen laughed when I did it.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ said Karen. ‘I wouldn’t have thought of laughing. I detest hearty humour. It was Mrs Coberley who laughed.’

‘People laugh from shock mostly,’ said McMaster. ‘Isn’t that so?’

Before anybody could answer, the doorbell pealed and pealed.

‘That’s witchcraft, too,’ said Aunt Eglantine. ‘They always do that when they want to annoy people.’

A maidservant, her cap askew and her shoes soaking wet, announced the return of Kay and Roland. They had decided to take to the byroads, had come to a watersplash which the rain had swollen into a torrent and got their car waterlogged in mid-stream. To complete the disaster, the wind had flung a big branch at them and it had smashed the windscreen.

‘We had to abandon the car and get to a garage,’ said Roland. ‘They won’t touch the job until the water ebbs away, so we hired from them and they brought us back. We’re soaking.’

As this hardly needed saying, Celia sent them off to get a hot bath and she and Anthony lent them clothes, as all their luggage had been left in the boot of their car.

‘I’m very grateful for your offer of a bed for the night,’ said McMaster, when the two drowned rats had gone upstairs, ‘but I think I ought to be off as soon as the storm gives over.’

‘Oh, why?’ asked Celia.

‘Because you’ve offered me Miss Shortwood’s room, and now she’ll be needing it herself.’

‘That’s all right. Kay could have shared with Karen just for one night, but Dame Beatrice has gone, so her room is available. Do stay. But, anyway, it would have been quite easy.’

Kay came downstairs again before Roland reappeared. Over tea, at which the Coberleys were not present as they had been called back to the school before the storm broke, she asked casually, ‘I thought, didn’t I, that Miss Mundy had left? Didn’t she go after the soup incident at lunch? She said she was going, I thought.’

‘Oh, she did go,’ said Celia, without glancing at Aunt Eglantine, who was wiping buttery fingers down the front of a black velvet gown. ‘Yes, she went off in a white-hot rage and I didn’t suggest she should stay.’

‘Witches are gate-crashers,’ said Aunt Eglantine. ‘Nobody wants them. They just invite themselves.’

‘What do you mean about Gloria?’ said Anthony to Kay. ‘Of course she went, and no wonder.’

‘Then I think you may take it that she has come back,’ said Roland, who had just entered the room. ‘Tea? Oh, I say, jolly good!’ He seated himself. ‘She’s in the old house. We saw her at the window.’

‘But she couldn’t get in. Coberley has the only key,’ said Anthony.

‘Witches can get in anywhere,’ said Aunt Eglantine.

‘Well, she can’t sleep there. There is no bed and no heating,’ said Celia. ‘As soon as the rain eases off, somebody had better go and bring her back here. I shall have to find somewhere to bed her down, that’s all.’

‘No. I shall take her to a hotel,’ said Anthony. ‘She is not going to make a nuisance of herself here.’

‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ said McMaster. ‘Kate will expect me. I am very grateful, as I said, for your offer of a bed for tonight but, as the weather already seems to be easing off, there is no reason why you should put me up. I’ll be the one to go.’

‘To make room for Gloria? Perish the thought!’ said Anthony.

‘No, really, you mustn’t go,’ said Celia. ‘Anthony can telephone the hotel and a taxi can take the wretched woman there. They know us. We often go there on Saturday evenings to dine and dance. They will take her in and Anthony can settle the bill later. It’s worth it to make sure that she doesn’t come back here. You ring up your wife and tell her you’re staying, and then after dinner we’ll all settle down and have a cosy time. I’m sure you three old college friends will like to get together and talk over old times in Anthony’s den, and I expect the rest of us can amuse ourselves without you. The rain may ease off, but there is bound to be flooding. We don’t want you bogged down like Roland and Kay.’

‘They should have stuck to the main roads, of course,’ said William Underedge.

‘Thanks for the hindsight,’ said Roland Thornbury angrily.

‘Now, now!’ said Karen. ‘Boys must not be boys in mixed company.’ The maid came in to clear away the tea things, and the various parties dispersed to their rooms except for Anthony and Celia. As I, the last to leave, was passing through the doorway into the hall, I heard him say, ‘The storm has upset people. Well, I had better see about Gloria, I suppose.’

‘I’m sure Roland and Kay are mistaken,’ I said, turning round. ‘Coberley let me into the old house this morning. She couldn’t possibly have got in without the key.’

‘Then I had better ring up the school and find out whether Coberley lent it to her,’ said Anthony. ‘It was not right of him if he did. The house is not yet his property.’

‘Do you mind that he took me in there this morning?’

‘My dear chap, of course not. It is one thing for him to take somebody in with him; quite another for him to lend the key to somebody else, particularly to somebody who turned up out of the blue and wished herself on us the way Gloria did.’

‘I thought you might have been glad to see her,’ said Celia. ‘She must have been pretty sure of her welcome to have chanced her arm like that.’

‘What do you mean? I hate the sight of her.’

I closed the door behind me and left them to it. At the top of the stairs I met McMaster with a towel over his arm.

‘Thank God for what Rupert Brooke called “the benison of hot water”,’ he said. ‘What’s happening about our precious Gloria? I hope those two made a mistake and she isn’t still on the premises.’

‘Anthony is going over to find out.’ I was tempted to tell him that Gloria, however involuntarily, had already managed to create friction between husband and wife, but I thought better of it. It was no business of mine, anyway.

When I went downstairs again, I realised that outwardly Anthony and Celia had patched up their differences. Aunt Eglantine had opted for a tray in her room instead of joining us at table, so the company was depleted in numbers, for the Coberleys had decided to remain at the school.

Anthony had been over to the old house and reported that one of the back windows was smashed and that the portrait which Coberley had shown me had disappeared. He supposed that Gloria had broken in and stolen it. He added, without looking at Celia, that he was not sorry it had gone. Gloria had gone, too. However doubtful Anthony had been about the information which Roland and Kay had given him, the disappearance of the picture, together with the broken window (a feature Coberley would have noticed and commented upon when he had shown me over the house) bore out what Roland had said.

Anthony had hammered on the front door, received no answer, and had then gone round to the back and knocked and shouted. There had been no response, so he had climbed in and found the place empty and the picture gone. This he confided only to Celia and myself while we were having cocktails before dinner.

When dinner was over, the four young people played Scrabble for a bit, but soon drifted off to bed. Aunt Eglantine, who had come down after dinner and had been communing either with herself or with the spirits of Kramer and Sprenger, also gave us little of her company. Celia went off to the ground-floor room she had allocated to her own use, and Anthony, McMaster and I settled down in Anthony’s den on the first floor and, with the assistance of his whisky, relived our youth by adopting Celia’s suggestion and talking over old times.

We broke up at well past midnight. Mopping-up operations seemed to have been completed and the house, except for a faint sound of water dripping from a leaky guttering somewhere, was almost eerily silent.

Breakfast was a silent meal, too. Anthony seemed preoccupied and Celia, who had come downstairs, poured coffee in an absentminded manner. I deduced that their little set-to about Gloria had been resumed, but there had been no sign of any rift at dinner on the previous night. There were no morning papers and when Anthony rang up he was told that the floods had held up deliveries.

Kay came down to say that Roland had a heavy cold. She had been to his room and found him flushed and very irritable. A tray was sent up to him and Celia suggested that somebody had better take his temperature, but Kay said that this was unnecessary, as he was always one to make a fuss if he had so much as a finger-ache. They were going home, anyway, as soon as the garage could bring round Roland’s car, she added. Celia, however, armed herself with a thermometer, but she came downstairs to report that Roland’s temperature was not much above normal. He had eaten his breakfast, would be down for lunch, and he and Kay would leave directly the car came. Hara-kiri had already departed.

Anthony rang up Coberley and he and Marigold came over. He denied having lent Gloria the key to the old house and, in view of the broken window, there was no reason to disbelieve him.

‘I was intrigued to notice the quite uncanny resemblance Miss Mundy’s hair and features bore to those of the girl in the picture,’ he said, ‘and from what I was able to observe of the young lady herself during the short time she was with us — ’

‘Yes, she is hardly a model who would have been chosen by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, to name but one painter who liked his ladies well-covered,’ said Marigold. ‘And now be quiet. To my mind, the picture was obscene, and I am glad the little boys are not to see it.’

‘The Malleus Maleficarum lays down,’ said Aunt Eglantine, who was with us at table again, ‘that the soul can sometimes effect a change in its own body. That herring-gutted little witch is a case in point. What were you saying about Rubens?’

‘Nothing, Aunt dear,’ said Celia. ‘Marigold was only referring to a portrait in the old house, and that is certainly not a Rubens.’

‘He used his wives as his-models, they say. He must have fed them well. They were not witches,’ said Eglantine.

‘We were not talking about Rubens, Auntie dear.’

‘Yes, you were. I heard you. That girl who is too beautiful for her own good mentioned him.’

Marigold laughed and Anthony said, ‘She was only making a comparison.’

‘She interrupted her husband’s description of the witch, so what she said about Rubens must be important to her.’

Everybody abandoned the argument.

Roland and Kay went off in the early afternoon, the Coberleys returned to the school, and, with everybody gone, the house was left to Anthony, Celia, Aunt Eglantine and myself, for William Underedge had insisted on removing himself and the astonishingly quiescent Karen as soon as Roland and Kay had been seen off.

At breakfast on the following morning Anthony and I did not miss Celia and Aunt Eglantine, for both had decided to breakfast upstairs. Celia came down at ten, but, when half-past eleven struck and there was still no sign of her aunt, enquiries were made.

Aunt Eglantine, it appeared, had gone into the kitchen for toast and coffee instead of waiting for her tray, and had carried these up to her room by way of the back stairs and a little later had passed in front of the kitchen window on her way towards the kitchen garden.

‘The silly old thing has gone into the town to shop on her own,’ said a worried Celia, ‘and she’s hopeless at crossing the road.’

‘She won’t need to cross it if she uses the bridge and only goes to the shopping centre,’ said Anthony.

‘But it’s so naughty of her. I promised I would take her in the car.’

‘Not to worry. She’ll be all right. After all, I expect that when she’s at home she goes shopping by herself. She’s reached her seventies without getting herself either arrested or run over, so why should any harm come to her now?’

‘Because she’s supposed to be in our care. If anything happened to her, we’d be held responsible. I wish you would go out in the car and bring her back.’

‘Good Lord, she’s not a small child who has strayed away! She may be a little bit eccentric, but she isn’t a loony.’

‘She’s promised to attend Dame Beatrice’s London clinic’

‘Only because she likes feeling important. Dame Beatrice told us there is nothing wrong with her except this ridiculous obsession with witchcraft, and that can be dealt with, it seems, if she wants to rid herself of it.’

‘If she were your aunt — ’

‘Well, she isn’t, thank heaven!’

‘Of course you hate her because she saw through that beastly little ex-girlfriend of yours!’ Celia flung this at him in a tone I had never thought she could use, then she turned to dash out of the room and ran straight into me.

‘Whoops-a-daisy!’ I said, fielding her.

‘Oh, Corin! You have been listening!’ she exclaimed angrily.

‘No, but, like the woodcutter in Make-Believe, I couldn’t help hearing,’ I explained.

‘Well, don’t you agree with me?’

‘I always agree with the woman I’m talking to. It saves wear and tear on the nervous system.’ Suddenly I thought of Imogen, who had said to me that marriage was not for writers.

‘Well, then! Don’t you think my aunt may be in danger? She isn’t used to traffic,’ Celia went on.

‘All right, I’ll go, if Anthony’s busy. I want to go into the town, anyway,’ I said.

‘Make sure Aunt Eglantine doesn’t come back with a baby elephant or a steam-roller,’ said Anthony. ‘I haven’t house-room for those sort of things. Never did have, even in the good old days.’

‘No, only for that red-black flame of yours!’ said Celia. ‘The good old days indeed!’

‘It was you who asked the blasted girl to stay to lunch!’ He strode up to where we were standing. Celia had extricated herself from my involuntary embrace and had her back to me, but I had gripped her arms from behind and was holding them firmly. The trembling of her body gave me the impression that this was the result of the first real row she had had with Anthony and it was clear that the advent of Gloria, and not the absence of Aunt Eglantine, was the root cause of her agitation. ‘And what do you want?’ Anthony said to me.

‘Only to receive your permission to go into the town and detach Miss Brockworth from any elephants and steam-rollers she may have acquired in the supermarket,’ I said, releasing Celia, who immediately flung herself out of the room. ‘What the hell has got into the two of you?’ I added seriously, as the door closed with a bang. ‘What’s happened to the turtle-dovery?’

He took me by the sleeve and walked me over to the window. The effects of the storm were apparent. Leaves and branches strewed the lawn; there were great pools of water and one or two roof-tiles lay on the broad path.

‘It’s that bitch,’ he said. ‘There’s always trouble when she shows up anywhere. I nearly killed my closest friend once because of her. If you’re really going into the town, you had better go at once. I’ll give Celia a bit of time to cool off, and then I’ll go and make my peace with her. It was rotten of me to joke about Aunt Eglantine. I’m very fond of the old nuisance-value, as a matter of fact.’

‘It’s a pity she’s got this thing about witchcraft, isn’t it? Makes her seem — well — ’ I said delicately.

‘Yes. She was telling me that Gloria is a black witch and Dame Beatrice a white one. She is convinced that Gloria conjured up last night’s storm and got Roland and Kay bogged down because they laughed when Aunt Eglantine lobbed the lump of dough into Gloria’s soup. She’s sure that, if she attends the clinic, Dame Beatrice will preserve her from Gloria’s vengeance. Personally, if I had been Gloria I would have poured what remained of the soup all over the old pest’s topknot.’

‘Better not say so in public. Oh, well, I’ll be off, then.’

But I was not to go quite so soon as I expected. In fact, that morning I was not to go into the town at all. Coberley, who, with the lovely Marigold, was still at the school, rang up to say that he and his wife would not be coming over for lunch, as Marigold had slipped on the front steps of the school house (which meant the headmaster’s private domicile) and had hit her head. He had sent for the doctor, as he thought she had slight concussion and had badly bruised the side of her face.

This news would not have kept me from going to look for Aunt Eglantine and, in any case, I did not receive it until after my return to the house. I went to get my car, but as I walked past the old house I heard cries for help. The front door was closed, but I knew of the broken window at the back, so I shouted, ‘I’m coming,’ and went round there. The whole sash-window pane was out, so I climbed in and went along the passage.

Aunt Eglantine was lying amid the débris of the staircase. It was obvious what had happened. The old fathead, who must have weighed every bit of fourteen stone, had attempted to climb the stairs which Coberley had told me were totally unsafe. They had collapsed when she was halfway up and she had come down with a bang and had broken her left leg.

‘Don’t move,’ I said. ‘I’ll get an ambulance.’

‘Good Lord, whatever next!’ shouted Anthony, when I had blurted out the news. The ambulance removed Aunt Eglantine to hospital and then I heard about Marigold’s accident. Celia had been over to see her after she had returned from accompanying her aunt to the hospital.

‘Marigold does have slight concussion,’ she said, ‘and is to be kept quiet.’

‘Is her face much damaged?’ I asked. It was monstrous that such beauty should be flawed, even temporarily.

‘Well, it does look a bit of a mess,’ Celia admitted. ‘She seems to have scraped it on some rough stonework. It looks to me like a case for plastic surgery. Cranford Coberley is nearly out of his mind. He has threatened to flog every boy in the school if the culprit doesn’t own up.’

‘Own up to what?’ I asked. ‘Surely no boy is suspected of having pushed Mrs Coberley down the front steps? I expect they were simply slippery after all that rain.’

‘It wasn’t that. There’s a covered way up to the front door. Somebody had spread butter on the top two steps, that’s what.’

‘But it’s not all that easy for a boy to get hold of enough butter to spread it over two steps,’ I pointed out.

‘They are allowed to go into the town on Saturday mornings after early prep, and all the little devils have pocket money, I suppose,’ said Anthony. ‘I’m surprised, though, that any of them should have played such a stupid and dangerous trick on the Coberleys. I don’t know what the boys think of him, but I’ve always had the impression that Marigold was very popular with them.’

‘You had better go over there and try to make him see reason. He can’t flog the whole school,’ said Celia. ‘It’s the height of barbarism to flog anybody, in my opinion, and certainly the innocent should not be punished.’

‘How did you leave Aunt Eglantine?’ asked Anthony.

‘As comfortable as can be expected. I’m sorry for the nurses, that’s all.’

‘Did you travel with her in the ambulance?’

‘No, I followed it in my mini. By the way, be sure to keep the garage locked up. I saw two police cars turning into the road which leads to the old convent, so on my way back I drove up there to find out what was happening. A policeman stopped me and said the way was blocked by a burnt-out car.

‘ “Nobody hurt, and no number plates,” he told me. They think it was a stolen car which the thieves had abandoned. I suppose they had removed the number plates to baffle the police.’

‘It would hardly do that. Somebody is sure to report a stolen car, but why burn it?’ I said.

‘Just bloody-mindedness,’ said Anthony.