Inspector Alleyn 3-Book Collection 5: Died in the Wool, Final Curtain, Swing Brother Swing

‘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 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.’

II

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 natural and telling.’ She waved her hand and was gone.

The article they wrote was frankly heretical. They had stood side by side in the window and looked over the plateau to the ranges, now a clean thin blue in the mid-morning sunshine.

‘When I look out there,’ Arthur Rubrick had said, ‘it always strikes me as being faintly comic that we should talk of “settling” on the plateau and of “bringing in new country”. All we do is to move over the surface of a few hills. There is nothing new about them. Primal, yes, and almost unblotted by such new things as men and sheep. Essentially back among the earlier unhuman ages.’ He added that perhaps this was the reason why no one had been able to write very well about this country. It had been possible, he said, to write of the human beings moving about parasitically over the skin of the country, but the edge of modern idiom was turned when it was tried against the implacable surface of the plateau. He said that some older and therefore fresher idiom was needed, ‘something that has the hard edge of a spring wind in it, something comparable to the Elizabethan mode.’ From this conversation was born his idea of writing about the plateau in a prose that smacked of Hakluyt’s Voyages. ‘It sounds affected,’ said Terence, ‘but he only did it as a kind of game. I thought it really did give one the sensation of this country. But it was only a game.’

‘A fascinating game,’ said Alleyn. ‘What else did he write?’

Five more essays, she said, that were redrafted many times and never really completed. Very often he wasn’t up to working on them, and Flossie’s odd jobs absorbed his energy when he was well. There were many occasions when he fagged over her speeches and reports, or dragged himself to meetings and parties when he should have been resting. He had a morbid dread of admitting to his wife that he was unwell. ‘It’s so tiresome for her,’ he used to say. ‘She’s too good about it, too kind.’

‘And she was kind,’ Ursula declared. ‘She took endless trouble.’

‘It was the wrong kind of trouble,’ Fabian said. ‘She oozed long-suffering patronage.’

‘I didn’t think so. Nor did he.’

‘Did he, Terry?’ asked Fabian.

‘He was extraordinarily loyal. That’s all he ever said, “It’s too good of her, too kind.” But, of course, it wasn’t much fun being the object of that sort of compassion. And then –’ Terence paused.

‘Then what, Terry?’ said Fabian.

‘Nothing. That’s all.’

‘But it isn’t quite all, is it? Something happened, didn’t it? There was some crisis, wasn’t there? What was he worrying about that last fortnight before she died? He was worried, you know. What was it?’

‘He was feeling ill. He had an idea things were going wrong in the background. Mrs Rubrick obviously was upset. I see now that it was the trouble with Cliff Johns and Markins that had put her in a difficult mood. She didn’t tell him about Cliff and Markins, I’m sure, but she dropped dark hints about ingratitude and disappointment. She was always doing it. She kept saying that she stood alone, that other women in her position had somebody to whom they could turn and that she had nobody. He sat over there in the window, listening, with his hand shading his eyes, just taking it. I could have murdered her.’