by Ngaio Marsh
“I shall speak to Ursula,” she said.
This announcement filled him with dismay. He lost his head and implored her to wait until he had seen the doctor. “You see,” he told Alleyn, “I knew so well what would happen. Ursy, of course, doesn’t agree with me, but the truth is that for her Flossie was a purely symbolic figure. You’ve heard what Flossie did for Ursy. When Ursy was thirteen years old, and completely desolate, Flossie came along like a plain but comforting goddess and snatched her up into a system of pink clouds. She still sees her as the beneficent super-mother. Flossie had a complete success with Ursula. She caught her young. She loaded her down with a sense of gratitude and gingered her up with inoculations of heroine-worship. Flossie was, as people say, everything to Ursula. She combined the roles of adored form-mistress, queen-mother and lover.”
“I never heard such utter tripe,” said Ursula, quite undisconcerted by this analysis. “All this talk of queen-mothers! Do pipe down, darling.”
“I mean it,” Fabian persisted. “Instead of having a good healthy giggle about some frightful youth or mooning over a talkie idol or turning violently Anglo-Catholic, which is the correct behaviour in female adolescence, you converted all these normal impulses into a blind devotion to Flossie.
“Shut up, do. We’ve had it all out a dozen times.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if it had passed off in the normal way, but it became a fixation.”
“She was marvellous to me. I owed everything to her. I was decently grateful. And I loved her. I’d have been a monster if I didn’t. You and your fixations!”
“Would you believe it,” said Fabian, angrily addressing himself to Alleyn, “this silly girl, although she says she loves me, won’t marry me, not because I’m a bad bargain physically, which I admit, but simply because Flossie, who’s dead, screwed some sort of undertaking out of her that she’d give me up.”
“I promised to wait two years and I’m going to keep my promise.”
“There!” cried Fabian triumphantly. “A promise under duress if ever there was one. Imagine the interview. All the emotional jiggery-pokery that she’d tried on me and then some. ‘Darling little Ursy, if I’d had a baby of my own she couldn’t have been dearer. Poor old Floosie knows best. You’re making me so unhappy.’ Faugh!” said Fabian violently. “It’s enough to make you sick.”
“I didn’t think anybody ever said ‘Faugh’ in real life,” Ursula observed. “Only Hamlet: ‘And smelt so. Faugh!’ ”
“That was ‘Puh!’ ” said Alleyn mildly.
“Well, there you have it,” said Fabian after a pause. “Ursy went off the day after our respective scenes with Flossie. The Red Cross people rang up to know if she could do her sixty-hours hospital duty. I’ve always considered that Flossie arranged it. Ursula wrote to me from the hospital and that was the first I knew about this outrageous promise. And, by the way, Flossie didn’t commute the sentence into two years’ probation until afterwards. At first she exacted a straight-out pledge that Ursy would give me up altogether. The alteration was due, I fancy, to my uncle.”
“You confided in him?” Alleyn asked.
“He found out for himself. He was extraordinarily perceptive. He seemed to me,” said Fabian, “to resemble some instrument. He would catch and echo in himself, delicately, the coarser sounds made by other people. I suppose his ill health made for a contemplative habit of mind. At all events he achieved it. He was very quiet always. One would sometimes almost forget he was in the room, and then one would look up and meet his eye and know that he had been with one all the time; perhaps critically, perhaps sympathetically. That didn’t matter. He was a good companion. It was like that over this affair with Ursy. Apparently he had known all the time that I was in love with her. He asked me to come and see him while he was having his afternoon rest. It was the first time, I believe, that he’d ever asked me a direct question. He said: ‘Has it reached a climax, then, between you and that child?’ You know, he was fond of you, Ursy. He said, once, that since Flossie was not transparent he could hardly expect that you would notice him.”
“I liked him very much,” said Ursula defensively, “he was just so quiet that somehow one didn’t notice him.”
“I told him the whole story. It was one of his bad days. He was breathing short and I was afraid I’d tire him but he made me go on. When I’d finished he asked me what we were going to do if the doctor didn’t give me a clean bill. I said I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter much because Flossie was going to take a stand about it and I was afraid of her influence over Ursy. He said he believed that might be overcome. I thought then that perhaps he meant to tackle Flossie. I still think that he may have been responsible for her suddenly commuting the life sentence into a mere two years, but of course her row with Douglas over Markins may have had something to do with it. You were never quite the same hot favourite after that, were you, Douglas?”
“Not quite,” Douglas agreed sadly.
“Perhaps it was a bit of both,” Fabian continued. “But I fancy Uncle Arthur did tackle her. Before I left him he said with that wheezy little laugh of his: ‘It takes a strong man to be a weak husband. Matrimonially speaking a condition of perpetual apology is difficult to sustain. I’ve failed signally in the role.’ I think I know what he meant, don’t you, Terry?”
“I?” said Terence. “Why do you ask me?”
“Because, unlike Ursy, you were not blinded by Flossie’s splendours. You must have been able to look at them both objectively.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, but so quietly that perhaps only Alleyn heard her.
“And he must have been attached to you, you know, because when he became so ill you were the one he wanted to see.”
As if answering some implied criticism in this Douglas said: “I don’t know what we’d have done without Terry all through that time. She was marvellous.”
“I know,” said Fabian, still looking at her. “You see, Terry, I’ve often thought that of all of us you’re best equipped to look at the whole thing in perspective. Or are you?”
“I wasn’t a relation,” said Terence, “if that’s what you mean. I was an outsider, a paid employee.”
“Put it that way if you like. What I meant was that in your case there were no emotional complications.” He waited, and then, with a precise repetition of his former inflection, he added: “Or were there?”
“How could there be? I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m no good at this kind of thing.”
“Not much in our line, is it, Terry?” said Douglas, instantly forming an alliance. “When it comes to all this messing about and holding post-mortems and wondering what everybody was thinking about everybody else, you and I are out of the picture, aren’t we?”
“All right,” said Fabian, “let’s put it to the authority. What do you say, Mr. Alleyn? Is this admittedly ragged discussion a complete waste of time? Does it leave you precisely where you were with the police files? Or has it, if only in the remotest degree, helped you along the path towards a solution?”
“It’s of interest,” Alleyn replied. “It’s given me something that no amount of poring over the files could have produced.”
“And my third question?” Fabian persisted.
“I can’t answer it,” Alleyn rejoined gravely. “But I do hope, very much, that you’ll carry on with the discussion.”
“There you are, Terry,” said Fabian, “it’s up to you, you see.”
“To do what?”
“To carry forward the theme to be sure. To tell us where we were wrong and why. To give us, without prejudice, your portrait of Flossie Rubrick.”
Again Fabian looked up at the painting. “You said you thought that blank affair up there was like her. Why?”
Without glancing at the portrait, Miss Lynne said: “It’s a stupid-looking face in the picture. In my opinion that’s what she was. A stupid woman.”
CHAPTER V
ACCORDING TO TERENCE
“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 Melds, in the workshops and in the hills. We shall never abandon them!’ Good Lord, she had got a nerve.”
“It was utterly unconscious!” Ursy declared. “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. Hullo, 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 stoutly. “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 strip-tease 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 o
f 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 analyze 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 intolerable 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 companionship 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.”