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?’
‘Good heavens, no, Corin! I think William Underedge is perfectly sweet.’
‘Not even efficient?’
‘I just hope he’s efficient enough to make Karen marry him. He would be very good for her, I think. By the way, don’t let my aunt back you into a corner and talk to you about the Malleus Maleficarum. She will, if she gets half a chance.’
There were two extraordinary old ladies in the party. Both had come unescorted and both, I suspected, were quite notably eccentric. This aunt, who was really Celia’s great-aunt, was tall and of intimidating bulk. She wore pince-nez with two gold chains which looped over her ears and dangled safely on to her immense bosom when she discarded the glasses. She spoke in almost a whisper unless she became excited, but then her voice screamed like a particularly indignant seagull or boomed like a bittern heard through an amplifier. This happened chiefly when she was talking on her favourite topic which, as Celia had warned me, was the Malleus Maleficarum of the Dominican priors Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger, published in the witchhunting days of 1486 AD.
‘Germans, of course,’ Aunt Eglantine belted out across the dinner-table, ‘but, when it comes to sheer thoroughness, there is nobody to beat them.’
Nobody attempted to contest this. I think all shared my hope that, so long as she was permitted to proceed unchecked, in the end she would gallop herself to a standstill. The policy succeeded after a fashion when she had issued what proved to be a final challenge, but it succeeded only with the help of Dame Beatrice, our other old lady.
‘What’s more,’ went on Miss Eglantine Brockworth, warming to her theme, ‘it is high time that somebody wrote another Malleus. Witchcraft is rife in the world of today. The powers of evil gather strength. Even this house is not free from them. Incubi and succubi are all around us and soon they will be in our midst. They have the power to destroy us.’
‘But no operation of witchcraft can have a permanent effect, according to the authorities you have been quoting,’ said Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. ‘I believe the reverend fathers went on to say that a belief that the devil has power to do human bodies any permanent harm does not appear to conform to the teachings of the Church.’
At mention of the Church, everybody gave great attention to the food, and there was the slightly uneasy silence which usually follows the introduction of such a gaffe as to make a reference to religion at any social gathering. That this interval of silence had been brought about deliberately by the reptilian old lady opposite me was manifest the next moment. She looked up, caught my eye, and the ghost of a grin appeared for a fleeting instant on her yellow countenance. At that moment I fell in love with Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley.
Celia, as a good hostess, started conversation off again by introducing some innocuous topic — I forget what it was — and we all relaxed. Fortunately Aunt Eglantine (‘my name comes not from Shakespeare, but from Chaucer’) elected to retire early, so we were quit of her and the Malleus Maleficarum for the rest of the evening.
Then there were the other guests. The first two who had arrived were the Coberleys. Cranford Coberley was headmaster of the school which rented Anthony’s field, who might also be considering the purchase of the old house, so I took it that the occasional dinner to which my host had referred had developed, this time, into a weekend stay. As the school was so close at hand, I suppose Coberley thought that he could pop back at any moment if an emergency presented itself or an anxious mum turned up to enquire after the health and happiness of little Johnny, as the staff knew where to contact the headmaster. He struck me as a taciturn, colourless man, but perhaps he was more dynamic when he was in harness. From what I know of small boys, he would need to be.
To my mild astonishment, it appeared that he had yoked himself (her second marriage, I learnt later) to a ravishing beauty. Marigold Coberley, slimmer than the Venus of Milo, more golden than Helen of Troy, was the loveliest girl I had ever seen or ever expect to see. It is not possible for me to describe her, except to say, with Yeats, ‘Oh, that I were young again, and held her in my arms!’