Died in the Wool (14 page)

‘Here at least,' Alleyn said, ‘are two completely opposed views. Losse, if I remember him, said Mrs Rubrick was as clever as a bagful of monkeys. You disagree, Miss Lynne?'

‘She had a few tricks,' said Terence. ‘She could talk.'

‘To her electors?'

‘Yes, to them. She had the knack. Her speeches sounded rather effective. They didn't read well.'

‘I always thought you wrote them for her, Terry,' said Fabian with a grin.

‘If I'd done that they would have read well and sounded dull. I haven't the knack.'

‘But wasn't it pretty hot to know what they'd like?' asked Douglas.

‘She used to listen to people on the wireless and then adapt the phrases.'

‘By golly, so she did!' cried Fabian delightedly. ‘Do you remember, Ursy, the clarion call in the speech on rehabilitation? “We shall settle them on the good ground, in the fallow fields, in the workshops and in the hills. We shall never abandon them!” Good Lord, she had got a nerve.'

‘It was utterly unconscious!' Ursy declaimed. ‘An instinctive echo.'

‘Was it!' said Terence Lynne quietly.

‘You're unfair, Terry.'

‘I don't think so. She had a very good memory for other people's ideas. But she couldn't reason very well and she used to make the most painful floaters over finance: She hadn't got the dimmest notion of how her rehabilitation scheme would work out financially.'

‘Uncle Arthur helped in that department,' said Fabian.

‘Of course he did.'

‘He played an active part in her public life?' asked Alleyn.

‘I told you,' she said. ‘I think it killed him. People talked about the shock of her death, but he was worn out before she died. I tried to stop it happening but it was no good. Night after night we would sit up working on the notes she handed over to him. She gave him no credit for that.'

She spoke rapidly and with more colour in her voice. Hallo! Alleyn thought, she's off.

‘His own work died of it, too,' she said.

‘What on earth do you mean, Terry?' asked Fabian. ‘What work?'

‘His essays. He'd started a group of six essays on the pastoral element in Elizabethan poetry. Before that, he wrote a descriptive poem treating the plateau in the Elizabethan mode. That was the best thing he did, we thought. He wrote very lucidly.'

‘Terry,' said Fabian, ‘you bewilder me with these revelations. I knew his taste in reading, of course. It was surprisingly austere. But—essays? I wonder why he never told me.'

‘He was sensitive about them. He didn't want to talk about them until they were complete. They were really very good.'

‘I should have liked to know,' said Fabian gently. ‘I wish he had felt he could tell me.'

‘I suppose he had to have a hobby,' said Douglas. ‘He couldn't play games, of course. There's nothing much in that, just doing a bit of writing, I mean.'

‘ “Scribble, scribble, scribble, Mr Gibbon,”' Alleyn muttered. Terence and Fabian looked quickly at him and Fabian grinned.

‘They were never finished,' said Terence. ‘I tried to help by taking down at his dictation and then by typing, but he got so tired and there were always other things.'

‘Terry,' said Fabian suddenly, ‘have I by any chance done you rather a bloody injustice?'

Alleyn saw the oval shape of Terence's face lift attentively. It was the colour of a Staffordshire shepherdess, a cool cream. The brows and eyes were dark accents, the mouth a firm red brush stroke. It was an enigmatic face, a mask framed neatly in its sleek cap of black hair.

She said, ‘I tried very hard not to complicate things.'

‘I'm sorry,' said Fabian. She raised her hands a little way and let them fall into her lap.

‘It doesn't matter,' she said, ‘in the very least. It's all over. I didn't altogether succeed.'

‘You people!' Fabian said, bending a look of tenderness and pain upon Ursula. ‘You rather make for complications.'

‘We people?' she said. ‘Terry and me?'

‘Both of you, it seems,' he agreed.

Douglas suddenly raised his cry of, ‘I don't know what all this is about.'

‘It doesn't matter,' Terence repeated. ‘It's over.'

‘Poor Terry,' said Fabian, but it seemed that Miss Lynne did not respond easily to sympathy. She took up her work again and the needles clicked.

‘Poor Terry,' Douglas echoed playfully, obtusely, and sat beside her again, laying his big muscular hand on her knee.

‘Where are the essays?' Fabian asked.

‘I've got them.'

‘I'd like to read them, Terry. May I?'

‘No,' she said coldly.

‘Isn't that rather churlish?'

‘I'm sorry. He gave them to me.'

‘I always thought,' said Douglas out of a clear sky, ‘that they were an ideal couple. Awfully fond of each other. Uncle Arthur thought she was the cat's whiskers. Always telling people how marvellous she was.' He slapped Terence's knee. ‘Wasn't he?' he persisted.

‘Yes.'

‘Yes,' said Ursula. ‘He was. He admired her tremendously. You can't deny that, Fabian.'

‘I don't deny it. It's incredible, but true. He thought a great deal of her.'

‘For the things he hadn't got,' said Terence. ‘Vitality. Initiative. Drive. Popularity. Nerve.'

‘You're prejudiced,' Ursy said fiercely, ‘you and Fabian. It's not fair. She was kind, kind and warm and generous. She was never petty or spiteful and how you, both of you, who owed her so much—'

‘I owed her nothing whatever,' said Terence. ‘I did my job well. She was lucky to have me. I admit she was kind in the way that vain people are kind. She knew how kind she was. She was quite kind.'

‘And generous?'

‘Yes. Quite.'

‘And unsuspicious?'

‘Yes,' Terence agreed after a pause. ‘I suppose so.'

‘Then I think it's poor Florence Rubrick,' said Ursula ‘I do indeed, Terry.'

‘I won't take that,' Terence said, and for the first time Alleyn heard a note of anger in her voice. ‘She was too stupid to know, to notice how fortunate she was…might have been…She didn't even look after her proprietary rights. She was like an absentee landlord.'

‘But she didn't ask you to poach on the estates.'

‘What are you two arguing about?' demanded the punctual Douglas. ‘What's it all in aid of?'

‘Nothing,' said Fabian. ‘There's no argument. Let it go.'

‘But it was you who organized this striptease act, Fabian,' Ursula pointed out. ‘The rest of us have had to do our stuff. Why should Terry get off?'

She looked at Terence and frowned. She was a lovely creature, Alleyn thought. Her hair shone in copper tendrils along the nape of her neck. Her eyes were wide and lively, her mouth vivid. She had something of the quality of a Victorian portrait in crayons, a resemblance that was heightened by the extreme delicacy and freshness of her complexion and by the slender grace of her long neck and her elegant hands. She displayed too, something of the waywardness and conscious poise of such a type. These qualities lent her a dignity that was at variance with her modern habit of speech. She looked, Alleyn thought, as though she knew she would inevitably command attention and that much would be forgiven her. She was obstinate, he thought, but he doubted if obstinacy alone was responsible for her persistent defence of Florence Rubrick. He had been watching her closely and, as though she felt his gaze upon her and even caught the tenor of his thoughts, she threw him a brilliant glance and ran impulsively to Terence.

‘Terry,' she said, ‘am I unfair? I don't want to be unfair but there's no one else but me to speak for her.'

Without looking at him she held out her hand to Fabian, and immediately he was beside her, holding it.

‘You're not allowed to snub me, Fabian, or talk over my head or go intellectual at me. I loved her. She was my friend. I can't stand off and look at her and analyse her faults. And when all of you do this, I have to fight for her.'

‘I know,' said Fabian, holding her by the hand. ‘It's all right. I know.'

‘But I don't want to fight with Terry. Terry, I don't want to fight with you, do you hear? I'd rather, after all, that you didn't tell us. I'd rather go on liking you.'

‘You won't get me to believe,' said Douglas, ‘that Terry's done anything wrong, and I tell you straight, Fabian, that I don't much like the way you're handling this. If you're suggesting that Terry's got anything to be ashamed about—'

‘Be quiet!'

Terence was on her feet. She had spoken violently, as if prompted by some unbearable sense of irritation. ‘You're talking like a fool, Douglas. “Ashamed” or “not ashamed,” what has that got to do with it? I don't want your championship and, Ursula, I promise you I don't give a damn whether you think you're being fair or unfair or whether, as you put it, you're prepared to “go on liking me”. You make too many assumptions. To have dragooned me into going so far and then to talk magnanimously about letting me off! You've all made up your minds, haven't you, that I loved him? Very well, then, it's perfectly true. If Mr Alleyn is to hear the whole story, at least let me tell it, plainly and, if it's not too fantastic a notion, with a little dignity.'

It was strange, Alleyn thought, that Terence Lynne, who from the beginning had resented the discussion and all that it implied, should suddenly yield, as the others had yielded, to this urge for self-revelation. As she developed her story, speaking steadily and with a kind of ruthlessness, he regretted more and more that he could form no clear picture in his mind of Florence Rubrick's husband; of how he looked, or how wide a physical disparity there had been between Arthur Rubrick and this girl who must have been twenty years his junior.

Terence had been five years in New Zealand. Equipped with a knowledge of shorthand and typing and six letters of recommendation, including one from the High Commissioner in London to Flossie herself, she had sought her fortune in the antipodes. Flossie immediately engaged her, and she settled down to life at Mount Moon interspersed with frequent visits to Flossie's
pied-à-terre
near Parliament Buildings in Wellington. She must, Alleyn thought have been lonely in her quiet, contained way, separated by half the world from her own country, her lot fallen among strangers. Fabian and Ursula, he supposed, had already formed an alliance in the ship, Douglas Grace had not yet returned from the Middle East, and she had obviously felt little respect or liking for her employer. Yes, she must have been lonely. And then Flossie began to send her on errands to her husband. ‘Those statistics on revaluation, Miss Lynne, I want something I can quote. Something comparative. You might just go over the notes with my husband. Nothing elaborate, tell him. Something that will score a point.' And Arthur Rubrick and Terence Lynne would work together in the study. She found she could lighten his task by fetching books from the shelves and by taking notes at his dictation. Alleyn formed a picture of this exquisitely neat girl moving quietly about the room or sitting at the desk while the figure in the armchair dictated, a little breathlessly, the verbal bullets that Flossie was to fire at her political opponents. As they grew to know each other well, she found that, with a pointer or two from Arthur Rubrick, she was able to build up most of the statistical ammunition required by her employer. She had a respect for the right phrase and for the just fall of good words, each in its true place, and so, she found, had he. They had a little sober fun together, concocting paragraphs for Flossie, but they never heard themselves quoted. ‘She used to peck over the notes like a magpie,' Terence said, ‘and then rehash them with lots of repetition so that she would be provided with opportunities to thump with her right fist on the palm of her left hand. “In 1938,” she would shout, beating time with her fist, “in 1938, mark you, in 1938 the revenue from such properties amounted to three and a quarter million. To three and a quarter million. Three and a quarter million pounds, Mr Speaker, was the sum realized…” And she was quite right. It went down much better than our austerely balanced phrases would have done if ever she'd been fool enough to use them. They only appeared when she handed in notes of her speeches for publication. She kept them specially for that purpose. They looked well in print.'

It had been through this turning of phrases that Flossie's husband and her secretary came to understand each other more thoroughly. Flossie was asked by a weekly journal to contribute an article on the theme of women workers in the back country. She was flattered, said Terence, but a bit uneasy. She came into the study and talked a good deal about the beauty of women's work in the home. She said she thought the cocky-farmer's wife led a supremely beautiful existence because it was devoted to the basic fundamentals (she occasionally coined such phrases) of life. ‘A noble life,' Flossie said, ringing for Markins, ‘they also serve—' But the quotation faltered before the picture of any cocky-farmer's wife, whose working-day is fourteen hours long and comparable only to that of a man under a sentence of hard labour. ‘Look up something appropriate, Miss Lynne. Arthur darling, you'll help her. I want to stress the sanctity of women's work in the high country. Unaided, alone. You might say matriarchal,' she threw at them as Markins came in with the cup of patent food she took at eleven o'clock. Flossie sipped it and walked up and down the room throwing out unrelated words: ‘True sphere…splendour…heritage…fitting mate.' She was called to the telephone but found time to pause in the door and say, ‘Away you go, both of you. Quotations, remember, but not too highbrow, Arthur darling. Something sweet and nature and telling.' She waved her hand and was gone.