Here Lies Gloria Mundy

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?’

‘Rest in peace. Wotton doesn’t think so. She is to be dealt with tonight. She threatened to haunt him. We can’t allow that.’

‘Surely you don’t believe that sort of rubbish?’ I said.

‘I don’t altogether disbelieve it. Anyway, I have everything ready, but we need your help.’

‘To do what?’

‘Well, never mind that now. We’ll discuss it when the others turn up.’

‘Others? But they are here, Anthony and the rest.’

‘Anthony is bringing a young, tough chap named William Underedge. You and I met him at Beeches Lawn on the day the storm set in. There really ought to be six of us, but the fewer who know of this business the better. What shall we carve on the headstone?’

‘You are at your old game of collecting epitaphs, then. Not in the best of taste on the present occasion, I would have thought,’ I said with grave disapproval.

He took no notice. He took me along to his dining-room. There was food laid out and wine on the table.

‘I’ve given the servants the evening off,’ he said. Then he added, ‘I’m serious, Corin, and your guess is perfectly correct. Don’t you know some rhyme or other about six pall-bearers? Sit down and let’s tuck in. We shall need our strength for this night’s work.’

‘Aren’t we going to wait for the others?’

‘No. They will have something on the road. Spout away.’

I told him that I thought I could oblige him with a couple of verses. I recited,

‘ “Tell me, thou bonny bird,

When shall I marry me?

When six braw gentlemen

Kirkward shall carry ye.” ’

He had brought a notebook to the table, but he did not use it. He wrote the lines on the table-cloth which I now realised had been Gloria’s winding-sheet.

‘Any more?’ he asked. ‘You said a couple.’

‘The only other one I can think of concerns a man. It won’t do for Gloria.’

‘Perhaps it will do for me myself later on.’

‘Hardie,’ I said, ‘did you really love that girl?’

‘Difficult to remember. I suppose I must have done. But come! Your epitaph, for your question needs some excuse.’

‘A very nice derangement of Shakespeare! All right, but I shall alter it a bit from the original. It’s really a cowboy song, but, as you are a Scot, here goes:

‘ “Find six lusty clansmen to carry me kirkward,

And six sonsie lassies to greet on my pall,

And on my black coffin strew handfuls of heather

To deaden the sound of the sods as they fall.” ’

‘I wish there could have been six of us,’ said McMaster, ‘but she is only a lightweight, so perhaps we can manage.’

‘There are six of us,’ I said, and there we all were.

Anthony said to McMaster, ‘Is everything ready?’

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I cut and sharpened the stake of holly this morning and there is a box. It will be lighter to carry than the coffin. Besides, we mustn’t risk damaging that. The other funeral is to be tomorrow and everything must be in order, because you are a churchwarden.’

Then we were back in the hearse. I had no idea where we were going. Anthony and Hardie had carried out a long narrow box with a fitted lid and I knew it had come from the room which had been a chapel. The box was put on to the back seat of Anthony’s car. William Underedge squatted on the floor to keep the box from sliding off the seat and Hardie and I took the lead in the hearse with Coberley and the gardener sitting on the empty coffin.

It was when we got to Cirencester, with its unmistakable church porch, that I began to have some idea of what our destination was to be. As we headed for Cheltenham, Hardie said, ‘Belas Knap is what we want. You’ll have to guide me. In fact, you’d better drive.’

‘Pull up,’ said William Underedge, who suddenly appeared beside me. ‘I want to change places. For one thing I’m stiff and cramped and for another I expect I know the route better than you do in the dark.’ So they changed over and for the last few miles of the drive William and I were in charge of all that remained of Gloria Mundy, for she was in the coffin again.

Our progress was slower once we were on the byroads, but the journey was finished at last. We waited for Anthony to pull in behind us and then he and McMaster lifted, not the coffin, after all, but the long box, out of Anthony’s car and we began the steep climb up the shoulder of Cleeve Cloud. The moon had risen and the cold night was clear.

Anthony and Hardie carried the box, occasionally relieved by William and myself. Coberley and the gardener followed behind with spade and pickaxe. We slipped and stumbled. I thought of the cowpats and hoped I would not measure my length among them. Hardie swore now and then, but Anthony and William plodded on. I thought of some caving I had done in Derbyshire, and of how I was once lost in the Sahara. I have explored caverns in the Carpathians and I have visited the Callanish stones at midnight on Midsummer Eve, but I have never made so extraordinary a journey as on the long and difficult ascent of Cleeve Cloud in my dream. For every step we took upwards we seemed to slip back two.

The moon, bereft nowadays of all its mystery, gazed blandly down on us and then suddenly above us loomed the great mass of Belas Knap. As we reached the skyline, the wind, from which we had been sheltered on our side of the hill, struck us with its full force and we had to hold on to the box to prevent it from blowing away, for I knew that, even with Gloria inside it again, it weighed no more than a piece of paper.

We were now standing in front of the false portal with its two upright blocks of stone, with their lintel top. The massive boulder which appeared to be the door only served to conceal the fact that an entrance did not exist on this, the highest and widest part of the mound. The openings were all in the sides. (Here my dream played no tricks.)

The wind dropped and the bearers laid the box down. Hardie removed the lid. The body was covered by a folded sheet. Hardie took this out, spread it on the ground and then he and Anthony took up the frail corpse and laid it carefully on to the sheet. In the moonlight the meagre features looked grey and disquietingly old. The red hair seemed to have lost its colour, but the black locks lay like soot against the grey face. Clumsily, and yet with tenderness, Hardie, who was still on his knees, bent forward and stroked the hair back a little. Then he stood up and said, ‘Well, this is it.’ He took from his pocket a short piece of sharpened stick. William shone his torch on it and I saw that it had been freshly cut from a living plant and was bleeding.

‘You’ll want a piece of stone,’ said Anthony, ‘to bash it in.’

‘No. I’ve brought a mallet. Make a quicker and better job,’ said William. I now noticed that he had a hessian bag slung over his shoulder. ‘There ought to be crossroads,’ he muttered.

‘You or me?’ asked Hardie of Anthony.

‘You,’ said Anthony. He knelt and carefully pulled up the ridged sweater and uncovered the pitiful little breasts. Hardie knelt on the other side of the body, placed the sharpened end of the short stake over the heart and struck the holly branch one sharp blow. There was silence. The two men remained where they were. Then Anthony said, ‘Goodbye, Gloria. Don’t come back, there’s a good girl.’ McMaster pulled down the sweater, but I saw that it had turned into the Kilpeck warrior’s byrnie of leather and chain mail.

‘We ought to put her in with the others, you know,’ said Anthony.

I took the torch and made my way round the side of the limestone-built, turf-covered burial place and entered the first of the chambers. It was a short passage rounded out at the end. It was bitterly cold in there and I imagined it still had the smell of death on it from the corpses which had lain in it four thousand years before. When I got back to the others, Gloria was back in her box and the others were sitting on the lid. They rose, we formed up like bearers, three on either side of the box, and bore it towards the passage I had entered.

‘This is number thirty-seven,’ said William Underedge. ‘Make her welcome. She is very cold.’

I struggled out of my dream and found that all my bed-coverings were on the floor and also that a sashcord had parted and the window was wide open.

I went to visit Aunt Eglantine on my way back to my flat next day. ‘I want you to buy me a doll,’ she said. I laughed and told her that a Teddy bear would be more companionable and more cuddly. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I fancy a doll. A rag doll would be best, but I doubt whether they make such things nowadays.’

‘I saw something I think might be what you mean,’ I told her, ‘but it was in the shop called Trends and ruinously expensive, I expect.’

‘Well, what’s money to you, when I’m going to leave you a million pounds?’ she retorted. ‘You must do as I ask, or I shall never sleep peacefully again. That girl killed herself, didn’t she?’

‘I’m afraid so, yes.’

‘Then she must not be allowed to walk. They do, you know, if precautions are not taken. This is what I want you to do.’

So I bought the doll — it was, as I had anticipated, extremely expensive — and took it to Aunt Eglantine. On the bed was a tangle of wool, some of it black, some of it orange.

‘Look here,’ I said, ‘you don’t want to dabble in this kind of thing. Chaucer’s Madame Eglantine would never have dreamed of such heathen goings-on.’

‘Witchcraft must be met with witchcraft,’ said the old lady. ‘I hope you cut the holly and did not buy it.’

‘Anthony had a tree in his garden.’

‘You will have to glue this wool on to the doll’s head when I’ve teased it out a bit more.’ I sat silent while her old fingers pulled at and fluffed up the wool. Then she told me what I was to do with the doll, but after my dream, which had been detailed and extraordinarily vivid, I could not face Belas Knap again. I took the box containing the holly-pierced doll to Uley. I did not ask for the key to the long barrow, for the last thing I wanted was to advertise my presence in the neighbourhood on this occasion. I put the box, with the orange-and-black-haired doll in it, under my arm. Then I got out of the car and walked alongside the big field to Hetty Pegler’s Tump. I laid the box down on Hetty Pegler’s whale-like side and extracted the doll. Then I wondered whether Aunt Eg had intended me to use the box as a coffin (a curious tie-up here with my dream), but, as I doubted whether Neolithic man had concerned himself with coffins, I slung the box and then its lid over the rounded hump of the long barrow and laid the parti-colour-haired doll on the miry ground, wedged up against the wooden door of the burial mound. I knew I should have to lie to Miss Eglantine, but, even if I had had a key to the place, nothing on earth would have induced me to open up and put the pierced body of Gloria Mundy’s representative inside that ghost-haunted long barrow.

I trusted that rain and the Cotswold snow would soon do their worst to the doll, and so render it an unacceptable object for any innocent child to pick up and cherish.

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[scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]

[A 3S Release— v1, html]

[November 24, 2006]