As a matter of fact, I was very much younger than Coberley, but let the quotation stand for what it is worth, namely, ‘the desire of the moth for the star; of the night for the morrow’. My desire for Marigold Coberley was not more lustful than that, but, in any case, I would have shared Yeats’s despairing cry, even though my age, as such, was not against me. Besides, beauty such as hers is intimidating and, to me, sacrosanct. I was content to be the courtier in the palace, not a man who thought he had a claim to the throne.
The other two were an engaged couple and seemed pleasant enough young people, although I had the impression that Roland Thornbury, who was vaguely related to Anthony and had expectations from him if Celia had no children, might turn into a domestic tyrant once he was married to the self-effacing Kay Shortwood. I put this opinion to Celia and Anthony after everybody else had gone to bed. Celia gave a short, expressive, derisive laugh.
‘Don’t you believe it, Corin,’ she said. ‘Roland is safely hooked and she’ll play him with guile until she’s got him just where she wants him. After that, it will be the landing-net and the gaff, and goodbye to Roland except as a meal-ticket. She knows very well that at present Roland is Anthony’s heir. However, I am quite young enough to have children. I don’t particularly want them, but it would be rather fun to see Kay Shortwood’s reactions if she knew there was Roland’s supplanter on the way.’
‘I had no idea you could be so vindictive,’ I said, laughing.
‘Oh, there’s a bitch in every woman,’ she responded, ‘and I particularly dislike that mealy-mouthed little gold-digger. However, Roland always wants to bring her with him and they are engaged to be married, so what can we do?’
‘As we appear to be doing, which is to leave Roland to his fate and to the minding of his own business,’ said Anthony.
‘A Daniel come to judgment!’ she quoted ironically. ‘What do you make of Dame Beatrice, Corin?’
‘I rather wondered why she was here. You two — I speak mostly for Anthony — have never mentioned that you were acquainted with her, yet I understand that she’s a celebrity in her own line.’
‘She got me out of an awful mess in the south of France once. That was before Celia and I were married,’ said Anthony. ‘I was accused of murdering a little girl and Dame Beatrice got the case stopped and told the police who the murderer was. I don’t know how she did it, but she did it all right.’
‘Possibly by “the monstrous power of witchcraft”,’ I suggested, ‘or so Celia’s aunt might say.’
‘Talking of witches,’ said Celia, with a chuckle, ‘wasn’t it clever of Dame Beatrice to match herself against Aunt Eglantine and win?’
‘Anybody could do it, I suppose, provided they had read the Malleus and remembered what they’d read,’ said Anthony.
‘I tried reading it once,’ said Celia, ‘if only to be able to keep up sides with Aunt. However, in Montague Summers’s translation from the Latin there are five hundred and sixty-five closely printed pages, so I didn’t stay the course.’
‘That’s your aunt’s strong suit, of course,’ said Anthony. ‘She trades on the fact that nobody she is acquainted with has read the stuff, so that she can pontificate away to her heart’s content without fear of being challenged. Now that she has come up against somebody who knows the text even better than she does, I expect we shall have a bit of peace until Dame Beatrice goes. Unfortunately she’s got to attend a conference in Cheltenham, so she’ll be leaving us before lunch tomorrow.’
‘I could wish to be better acquainted with her,’ I said.
‘I’m not so sure you’re wise, old boy,’ said Anthony. ‘She’s consultant psychiatrist to the Home Office and has probably already got you sized up as a lad who can bear watching.’
‘The girl who can bear watching, although not in the insulting sense your reference to me suggests, is Mrs Coberley,’ I said indiscreetly. Anthony chipped in at once, and I knew he was not joking.
‘You keep your eyes to yourself, or there’ll be murder done,’ he said. ‘Coberley ain’t as quiet as he looks; and he’s as possessive as the devil where his lily-and-rose is concerned.’
4
Unbidden Guest
« ^ »
I woke early next day and went to the window to see the long shadow of the copper beech lying slantwise across the lawn in the morning sun. Nobody else was stirring when I went downstairs except a housemaid busy in the dining-room. She asked whether I would like my breakfast, but I replied that I would wait until the usual hour, whenever that was.
‘The mistress has hers on a tray, sir, and Sandra mostly puts out the dining-room sideboard at nine, sir.’
I decided to take my car for a short run. It would disturb nobody, as it was parked at a considerable distance from the house. As I walked past the flowerbeds and through the kitchen garden to get to it, I felt an urge to look again at the family’s other house, that which had once been the lodging of Anthony’s great-grandfather’s mistress. Just as I reached it I met Coberley coming from the opposite direction. We exchanged greetings.
‘I wondered whether it was possible to go inside,’ I said, indicating the house.
‘Oh, I’ve got a key,’ he said. ‘I’ve got an option on the place. It would make a storehouse for all the junk my little boys collect. Dear me, what rubbish they do bring in, but children are inveterate collectors. The dangerous objects are already in a wooden box in the old house. I intend to start — ’
‘A school museum?’ I suggested.
‘Call it what you like. I’ve offered to buy the house from Wotton and do it up. By the time the parents have paid for it I shall see that there will be enough money left over to enlarge the pavilion in Wotton’s field.’
‘High finance,’ I commented.
‘Oh, one thing works in with another, and I do well with Common Entrance, so the parents are pleased.’ He produced a key and opened the front door. ‘I wouldn’t try the stairs,’ he said. ‘You could break your neck on them.’
‘So they wouldn’t be safe for Great-aunt Eglantine,’ I said lightly.
‘That old monstrosity will bring trouble on herself if she insists on regaling us with extracts from the Hammer of Evil,’ he said seriously. ‘She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Those two Dominicans who wrote the Malleus were fair, just and merciful men, considering the times in which they lived. They were also great ecclesiastical lawyers and, I would say, haters of heresy but not of heretics. They genuinely desired to save souls from perdition and only to condemn bodies to those ghastly punishments when everything else had been tried. But that overweight dabbler in the occult is treading on dangerous ground because she is only out for sensationalism and, once you get that bug, you can land up almost anywhere. Those men quite rightly saw witchcraft as the supreme heresy and not only as a religious but as a political danger. She has neither their intellect nor their concern for the human race, but only for her own entertainment and the assertion of her ego. I’m told that in her youth she learnt to toss the caber. No, I don’t believe it, either,’ he said in response to my ejaculation, ‘but I believe that in her day she was a first-class tennis player. I suppose all the muscle has gone to adipose tissue and that she’s taken up this witchcraft stuff to compensate her for losing the plaudits of the crowd.’
‘But there’s nothing in witchcraft,’ I said.
‘Not if you don’t believe in it. All the same, I’ve seen some very strange things in my time. What do you think of the only picture in the place?’ He led the way to a ground-floor room at the back of the house. ‘It belongs to Wotton, of course, but, in any case, I should discard it before I took over the house. It is not an object on which I should desire young boys to speculate.’