“From a chap in a pub in Bristol.”
“It’s difficult to get them authenticated,” said McMaster, “when they’re only given you by word of mouth. I got a beauty in East Anglia once, but the chap couldn’t name the church. It was:
“Poor Dimity Ann,
Her tooken one can
Too many, so her vomit,
And that done it.”
“Well,” McMaster concluded, “see you when you’ve gloated over your Sheila.” He pointed to one of the figures carved on the uprights of the doorway. “Talking of sheilas,” he said, “I wish that fellow didn’t remind me of Gloria Mundy.”
“Gloria mundi, according to the learned professor who tried to teach me Latin,” I said.
“No,” said McMaster, “I don’t mean the glory of the world. I mean a girl I used to date until I found out what a little tramp she was and ditched her. She used to wear a cap like that one, and a sort of ridged and ruckled sweater to try to hide how thin she was. His chain mail reminds me of it. She also used to knot a long silk scarf thing round her waist to keep her pants up because she really hadn’t any hips to hang them on to, and the ends of the scarf used to hang down in front in just the way that chap’s seem to do.”
“I suppose she carried a sword over her shoulder, too,” I said ironically.
“No,” he replied seriously, “not a sword, but whenever it was sunny she carried a parasol and used to slant it over her shoulder in just that way. She was partly redheaded, you see, so she burnt to an unbecoming brick-red and then began to peel if she allowed Phoebus Apollo to take any liberties with her complexion. Oh, well, never mind Gloria. Come with me for a drink when you’ve finished with the church. I’ll be somewhere around the grounds. I have a proposition to put to you and I’ve got a pub in Hereford which I think you’ll like.”
“You’ve got a pub? You’re a Mine Host?”
“No. I’m on the board of directors of a chain of hotels and the one in Hereford belongs to our group. We have a number of places which are meant to attract tourists, particularly foreign tourists. We have others for commercial travellers and to accommodate coach parties and bodies attending conferences and the Rotary people and all that sort of thing, but, so far as you are concerned, I am not including these. What we want is an updating of our brochures for our top-class tourist hotels. It’s a sort of sub-editing job for you, really. A lot of the information—golf courses, stately homes and castles, old churches and cathedrals, areas of unspoilt natural beauty, facilities for fishing, pony-trekking, access to riding-stables, all that—is already printed in our booklets, but the information is several years out of date. You would have to check all the various items, especially the routes, and make any additions and alterations you thought necessary, bearing in mind that the readers will be on holiday and bent on enjoying themselves in various ways which may or may not be your idea of pleasure.”
“How long is all this supposed to take? I mean, how many hotels are there and where are they situated?”
“There is nothing further north than Yorkshire. We’ve got a couple there, one in Norfolk, a couple in Worcestershire, one in Suffolk, one in Dorset, two in Devon, two in Cornwall, two in Sussex, one in Kent, and this one in Hereford. You can lump some of them together, I should think. Everybody has a car nowadays and a hundred miles means nothing. We can give you until the end of November to send us the stuff so that the printers can get it out for next season. Oh, a photograph for each brochure would be nice. That’s a pretty good camera you’ve got. You will live free at the hotels, get a generous petrol allowance and a certain amount of credit at the hotel bars, and, of course, your pay.” He told me what this would be and added, “I had thought of going up to town this afternoon to ask a newspaper editor I know whether he could put me on to anybody for this job, but I would far rather have you.”
We met again twenty minutes later, when I had examined the rest of the church and he, I suppose, had searched for a headstone to add to his collection. The church was small and, in any case, I was able to purchase two descriptions of it, with some excellent drawings and photographs, when I had been inside the building. Hardie expressed appreciation of the churchyard, but had not been able to add to his gallery of epitaphs.
“Some of these graves are those of children,” he said, “and that depresses me. Did you get any joy out of your sheila-ma-gig?”
“I couldn’t even identify her,” I said. He sighed and then laughed.
“Damned if I’m sure whether I could identify Gloria herself nowadays,” he said, “and I should class her as the queen of the sheila-ma-gigs.”
“A rather rude lady?” I asked, quoting my own words.
“A damned dangerous one, anyway,” he said. “If you’re ready, let’s go.”
The hotel was all that he had claimed for one of his “specials” and gave me some idea of the kind of work he expected me to do. It was outside the town, had its own golf course of nine holes, and the gardens went down in three broad terraces to an immense lawn. Beyond this there was a reed-fringed lake with water-fowl and a smaller pond with water-lilies and goldfish.
The public rooms were high-ceilinged and grand and before lunch he was able to show me a suite of rooms upstairs which the manager told him would not be tenanted until the weekend.
“Kept for visits from royalty or one of the Arab oil-nabobs,” McMaster said. Then he asked me how much time I would need to consider his offer.
“I don’t need any time at all,” I replied. “I’d admire to take it on, as our American cousins used to say.”
“Oh, that’s good, Corin. When can you start?” he asked. “It will take you quite a bit of time, you know, and we must have the stuff by November.”
“I can start as soon as ever you like. Is it all right if I get a book out of my experiences? They should be rather productive of copy.”
“So long as you don’t libel us or any of the hotel residents, go ahead, but bear in mind that at these particular hotels we get VIPs and other sensitive plants. Well, what about some lunch? After that, perhaps you’ll spare time while I give you a fuller briefing and get you to sign on the dotted line, and all that sort of rot.”
Over lunch he told me more about the girl he had called Gloria. I began it because I asked him whether he was married.
“Lord, yes, for three years now,” he said. “One reason I had to ditch Gloria was that I’d met Kate. Mind you, I was warned against Gloria by Wotton. You remember Wotton, of course. Front-row forward and capable of even more dirty work in the scrum than most front-row forwards, but a nicer fellow off the field you’d never meet. He had had a brief spell with Gloria himself. Met her on a Mediterranean cruise, I believe. My word, those shipping companies will have something to answer for in the great hereafter! Of course he came to his senses when all the boat-deck-by-moonlight stuff was over and they were back in England, but Gloria, I fancy, was very difficult to dislodge.”
“So he off-loaded her on to you?”
“Not exactly. She picked me up at a night-club. She soon decided I was a better bet than Wotton. This was before he came into the property, of course. She wasn’t really the type for either of us. I have never seen a girl so thin.”
“What did you have against her, apart from the lack of robustness in her component parts?” I asked. “Was it because you knew she had had an affair with Wotton?”
“No, I’m broadminded about that sort of thing. It was over. That was all that mattered. I soon found though, that she was dashed expensive. I wouldn’t have minded that so much, although she was stretching me to the limits of the salary I was getting in those days, but then I found out that she was double-crossing me with an Italian artist fellow and subsidising him out of my money and by selling the jewellery I’d given her. When I remonstrated with her and we had a row, she had the neck to threaten me with breach of promise if I didn’t shut up and continue to play ball. Well, I was pretty sure the case wouldn’t succeed, but I knew that, if she brought it, it w
ould queer my pitch with my father, who had promised to take me into partnership; also there was Kate, so I stalled, and then the artist chap committed suicide, poor devil, and there was a fair amount of stink with Gloria mixed up in it. She disappeared out of my life for a time, and I was thankful.”
“Only for a time?”
“Oh, yes. When the suicide became old hat, and things simmered down, she bobbed up again, but by that time I’d got married to Kate. When Gloria knew this, she threatened to write to Kate with details of the night-club pick-up and its aftermath. I told her Kate knew already—although, of course, she didn’t—and I said that if Kate received even one dirty letter I would strangle Gloria. I tracked her down and I went so far as to give her a short demonstration of what I would do to her. That really frightened her off. I think she believed I meant what I said, and I reckon I would have meant it, too, if she had attempted to muck up my marriage.”
“When we were looking at that church doorway, you told me she was partly a redhead. What did you mean by that?”
“Oh, apart from her extreme emaciation—although she ate like a starving wolf when I took her out—she had one very unusual feature. She was auburn-haired on one side of her head and coal-black on the other.”
“Dyed, to create an effect?”
“No. Before I rumbled that she was playing me up, I used to help her wash her hair. The colours were genuine enough. She told me one of her ancestors had been burnt as a witch and that all the female descendants had had half their hair red and the other half black ever since. I could well believe the witchcraft story. The way Gloria could charm the money out of my pockets was witchcraft enough for me. I nearly went to the money sharks, I was so desperate, but came to my senses and made a clean breast of things to the family lawyer. He subbed up on the strength of my expectations—he had drawn up my father’s will—and I married Kate.”
“So you haven’t heard from Gloria again?”
“No, and, until I saw that fellow carved on that doorway, I’ve never even thought of her since I threatened to kill her. Not that I now retain any really hard feelings towards her. The Lord who made the little green apples also made the little gold-diggers, I suppose. I’d like to know why the artist chap committed suicide, though. She must have led him the devil of a dance.”
“Artists, like women, are kittle cattle,” I said. “There’s no accounting for them.” We finished lunch, and in the lounge he drafted out a simple form of contract for me to sign and I promised to begin work on the hotel brochures as soon as I had arranged my own affairs. I had booked a room for that night in a hotel at Tewkesbury but, before I went there after I had left him, I decided to pay another visit to Kilpeck church.
The early summer evening was still light enough to allow me to distinguish the figures and carvings on the south door. I stood in front of it and apostrophised the swordbearer in the Phrygian cap.
“Well, Gloria, old fellow, you’ve done me proud today,” I said. Of course, the evening was drawing in, so I could not see his features all that well, but I could have sworn that, as I spoke, the Celtic warrior winked at me and grinned.
3
Beeches Lawn
It had been agreed that McMaster would send a complete set of brochures to my home address so that I could be armed and well-prepared, so to speak, for my mission. I decided to accept his tip of lumping some of the hotels together, as it was unlikely that tourists who had spent a week or a fortnight in, for instance, Norfolk, would then go and stay in Suffolk, or that those who had stayed at one of his hotels in Yorkshire would then go and spend time and money in the other.
When I had prepared my way by making notes and studying guidebooks, the month of May was almost at its end, but careful planning convinced me that, with any luck, I could finish the job by the end of October at the latest. I decided to start with Yorkshire, work southwards to Norfolk, Suffolk, Kent, and Sussex, then take in Worcestershire and Herefordshire and finish up with Cornwall, Devon, and Dorset.
The whole thing took even less time than I had allowed. Some of the brochures needed little alteration, although I made fresh road-plans where there were alternative or new routes, referring for these to the very latest motoring atlas, and I took great trouble to select and photograph what I thought would be an attractive frontispiece for each little book.
I enjoyed the work, was fairly lucky with the weather, and by mid-September I was able to send in most of the amended brochures. The hotels at which I had been staying were all much of a muchness, however, in spite of their comfort and luxury, and, after more than three months of them, I was very pleased to receive an invitation to stay for a week with my old friend Anthony Wotton at his ancestral home in the Cotswolds. As for the red-and-black-haired, skeletal Gloria, I had forgotten all about her.
“I have told Celia about you and she has read one of your novels and is looking forward to meeting you,” wrote Anthony.
He had been a bachelor when I had heard from him last. I assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that Celia was his wife. I could not imagine him married. However, I need have had no qualms on Anthony’s behalf. Celia was a charming woman of about his own age and she made me welcome as though she was sincerely pleased to see me.
“I don’t know why you haven’t been here before,” she said. I explained that I had often visited Anthony at his London flat before old Mr. Wotton died and his son inherited the estate, but had never been invited to Beeches Lawn before.
“No, his father and Anthony didn’t get on,” she said when she was showing me the room I was to have. “Anthony thought he might will this place away from him, but he didn’t, and I think they were reconciled towards the end. Fortunately”—she smiled—“the old gentleman took to me and approved of the marriage.”
“He could hardly help it,” I said, looking appreciatively at her. She laughed, told me when to come down for cocktails, and left me to unpack, bathe, and change. I went to the window, a deep bay which gave good views of the garden and the hills, and looked out. I have always loved the Cotswolds ever since, as a boy, I used to stay with a gamekeeper at Nescomb and learnt country lore from him. He was a wonderful naturalist and could recognise every wild plant that grew. He showed me where the badgers had made their sett under a bank in the woods and where the various birds built their nests. He showed me where there was a fox’s den and where to see the now almost extinct red squirrels before those tree-rats, the grey squirrels, took over. He taught me how to shoot, how to recognise every tree in the woods which surrounded his cottage, how to stack wood for the Cotswold winter, how to cook over a wood fire, and how to make cunning flies for fishing by using the feathers of jays. He showed me a green woodpecker, taught me how to handle ferrets, and took me to see a grave he revered. It was not in the churchyard, where he himself is buried, but by the side of a woodland ride along which the young owner of the place, before it was sold to become a public school, loved to ride his horse and where he had asked to be laid so that he could dream he was riding there again. The gamekeeper’s name was Will Smith and he lived in a stone-built cottage about a mile from the village. I think I liked him better than any man I have ever known.
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.”
Here Lies Gloria Mundy (Mrs. Bradley) Page 2