Died in the Wool

CHAPTER V ACCORDING TO TERENCE

The aspect of Terence Lynne that struck Alleyn most forcibly was her composure. He felt quite sure that, more than any of them, she disliked and resented these interminable discussions. Yet she answered his questions composedly. Unlike her companions, she showed no sign of launching into a continuous narrative, and the sense of release which had encouraged them to talk was, he felt certain, absent in Miss Lynne. He had a feeling that unless he was careful he would find himself engaged in something very like a routine police interrogation. This, above all things, he was anxious to avoid. He wanted to retain his position as an onlooker before whom the spoil of an indiscriminate rummage was displayed, leaving him free to sort, reject and set aside. Terence Lynne waited for a specific demand, yet her one contribution up to date had been, in its way, sufficiently startling.

“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 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 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.”

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 intolerable 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, of 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 un-human ages.” He had 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.”

This statement was met by a scandalized hush.

“A commonplace exaggeration,” said Fabian at last. “I’ve used it repeatedly myself in speaking of Flossie. ‘I could have murdered her.’ I suppose she got home with her cracks at Uncle Arthur, didn’t she? Every time a coconut?”

“Yes,” said Terence. “She got home.”

A longer silence followed. Alleyn felt certain that Terence had reached a point in her story where something was to be withheld from her listeners. The suggestion of antagonism, never long absent from her manner, now deepened. She set her lips and, after a quick look into the shadow where he sat, took up her work again with an air of finality.

“Funny,” said Fabian suddenly. “I thought she seemed to be rather come-hither-ish with Uncle Arthur during that last week. There was a hint of skittishness which I found extremely awe-inspring. And, I may say, extremely unusual. You must have noticed it, all of you. What was she up to?”

“Honestly, Fabian darling,” said Ursula, “you are too difficult. At one moment you find fault with Aunt Floss for neglecting Uncle Arthur and at the next you complain because she was nice to him. What should she have done, poor darling, to please you and Terry?”

“How old was she?” Douglas blurted out. “Forty-seven, wasn’t it? Well, I mean to say she was jolly spry for her age, wasn’t she? I mean to say… well, I mean, there it was… I suppose…”

“Let it pass, Douglas,” Fabian said kindly. “We know what you mean. But I can’t think that Florence’s sudden access of playfulness was entirely due to natural or even pathological causes. There seemed to me to be a distinct suggestion of proprietary rights. What I have I hold. The bitch, if you will excuse the usage, Douglas, in the marital manger.”

“It’s entirely inexcusable,” said Ursula, “and so are you, Fab.”

“I don’t mean to show off and be tiresome, darling, I promise you I don’t. You can’t deny that she was different during that last week. As sour as a lemon with all of us and suddenly so, so keen on Uncle Arthur. She watched him too. Indeed she looked at him as if he was some objet d’art that she’d forgotten she possessed until someone else came along and saw that it was — well, rare, and in its way rather beautiful. Wasn’t it like that, Terry?”

“I don’t know. I thought she was horrible, baiting him about his illness. That’s what it amounted to and that’s what I saw.”

“But don’t you agree,” Fabian persisted, “that along with that there was a definite — what shall I call it? — why damn it, she made advances. She was kittenish. She shook her curls and did the little-devil number. Didn’t she, now?”

“I didn’t watch her antics,” said Terence coldly.

“But you did, Terry. You watched. Listen to me, Terry,” said Fabian very earnestly, “don’t get it into your head that I’m an enemy. I’m not. I’m sorry for you and I realize now that I’ve misjudged you. You see I thought you were merely doing your line of oomph with Uncle Arthur out of boredom. I thought you just sat round being a cryptic woman at him to keep your hand in. I know this sounds insufferable but he was so very much older and, well, as I thought, so definitely not your cup of tea. It was perfectly obvious that he was losing his heart to you and I resented what I imagined was merely a bit of practice technique on your part. I don’t suppose you give two tuppenny damns for what I thought, Terry, but I am sorry. All right. Now, when I suggested that we should ask Mr. Alleyn to come, we all agreed that rather than carry on as we were, with this unspeakable business festering in our minds, we would, each of us, risk becoming an object of suspicion. We agreed that none of us suspected any of the other three and, even with the terrifying example of the local detective force to daunt us, we said we didn’t believe that the truth, the whole truth, although it might be unpalatable, could do us any harm. Were we right in that, Mr. Alleyn?”

Alleyn stirred a little in his armchair and joined his long fingers. “It’s a truism to say that if the whole facts of a case are known there can be no miscarriage of justice. It’s very seldom indeed, in homicide investigations, that the police arrive at the whole truth. Sometimes they get enough of the truth to enable them to build up a case and make an arrest. Most often they get a smattering of essential facts, a plethora of inessential facts and a maddening accumulation of lies. If you really do stick to your original plan of thrashing out the whole story here to-night, in this room, you will, I think, bring off a remarkable, indeed a unique performance.”

He saw that they were young enough to be flattered and stimulated by this assurance. “There, now!” said Fabian triumphantly.

“But,” said Alleyn, “I don’t believe for a moment that you will succeed. How long does it take a psychoanalyst to complete his terrifying course of treatment? Months, isn’t it? His aim, as I understand it, is to get to the bottom, to spring-clean completely, to arrive, in fact, at the clinical truths. Aren’t you, Losse, attempting something of that sort? If so, I’m sure you cannot succeed, nor, as a policeman, would I want you to do so. As a policeman, I am not concerned with the whole clinical truth. Faced with it, I should probably find myself unable to make any arrest, ever. I am required only to produce facts. If your discussion of Mrs. Rubrick’s character and that of her husband can throw the smallest ray of light along the path that leads to an unknown murderer who struck her from behind, suffocated her, bound up her body, and concealed it in a wool press, then from the official point of view it will have been valuable. If, at the same time, somewhere along that path there is the trace of an enemy agent, then again from my point of view, as an investigator of espionage in this country, it will have been valuable. If, finally, it relieves the burden of secrecy under which you have all suffered, you, also, may profit by it, though, as you have already seen, the process is painful and may be dangerous.”

“We realize that,” Fabian said.

“Do you fully realize it? You told me at first that there was a complete absence of motive among you. Would you still say so? Look what has come out. Captain Grace was Mrs. Rubrick’s heir. That circumstance, which suggests the most common of all motives, has of course always been recognized by the police and must have occurred to all of you. You, Losse, advanced a theory that you yourself in a condition of amnesia attacked Mrs. Rubrick and killed her. What’s more, as you developed this theme you also revealed a motive, Mrs. Rubrick’s opposition to your engagement to Miss Harme. Now, under this same process of self-revelation, Miss Lynne must also be said to have a motive. Most courageously she has told us that she had formed a deep attachment for the murdered woman’s husband and you, Losse, say that this attachment obviously was returned. The second most common motive appears in both your case and hers. You have said, bravely, that none of you has anything to fear from this discussion. Are you sure you have the right to make this statement? You are using this room as a sort of confessional but I am bound by no priestly rule. What you tell me I shall consider from the practical point of view and may afterwards use in the report I send to your police. I should neglect my duty if, before she goes any further, I didn’t remind Miss Lynne of all the circumstances.” Alleyn paused and rubbed his nose. “That all sounds pompous,” he said. “But there it is. The whole thing’s a departure from the usual procedure. I doubt if any collection of possible suspects had ever before decided to have what Miss Harme has aptly described as a verbal strip-tease, before an investigating officer.” He looked at Terence. “Well, now, Miss Lynne,” he said, “if you don’t want to go on—”

“It’s not because I’m afraid,” she said. “I didn’t do it and any attempt to prove I did would fail. I suppose I ought to be afraid but I’m not. I don’t feel in the least anxious for myself.”

“Very well. Losse has suggested that there is some significance in the change, during the last week of Mrs. Rubrick’s life, in her manner towards her husband. He has suggested that you can explain this change. Is he right?”

She did not answer. Slowly and, as it seemed, reluctantly, she raised her eyes and looked at the portrait of Florence Rubrick.

“Terry!” said Ursula suddenly. “Did she know? Did she find out?”

Fabian gave a sharp ejaculation and Terence turned, not upon Ursula but upon him.

“You idiot, Fabian,” she said. “You unutterable fool.”

The fire had burnt low, and the room was colder and stale with tobacco smoke.

“I give it up,” said Douglas loudly. “I never was any good at riddles and I’m damned if I know half the time what you’re all getting at. For God’s sake let’s have some air in this room.”

He went to the far end of the study, jerked back the curtains, and pushed open a French window. The night air came in, not as a wind, but stilly, with a tang of extreme cleanliness. The moon was up and, across the plateau, fifty miles away, it shone on the Cloud Piercer and his attendant peaks. Alleyn joined Douglas at the window. “If I spoke,” he thought, “my voice would go out towards those mountains and between my moving lips and that distant snow there would be only clear darkness.” He had noticed, on the drive up to Mount Moon, that the flats in front of the homestead were swampy and studded with a few desultory willows. Now, in the moonlight, he caught a glint of water and he heard the cry of wild duck and the beat of wings. Behind him in the room, someone threw wood upon the fire and Alleyn’s shadow flickered across the terrace.

“Need we freeze?” Ursula asked fretfully. Douglas reached out his hand to the French window but before he shut it or drew the curtain a footfall sounded briskly and a man walked along the terrace towards the north side of the house. As he reached the part of the terrace that was lit from the room he was seen to be wearing a neat black suit and a felt hat. It was Markins, returning from his visit to the manager’s cottage. Douglas slammed the French window and pulled the curtain across it.

“And there goes the expert,” he said, “who runs about the place, scot-free, while we sit yammering a lot of highfalutin bilge about the character of the woman he may have killed. I’m going to bed.”

“He’ll bring the drinks in a minute,” said Fabian. “Why not wait and have one?”

“If he’s got wind of this I wouldn’t put it past him to monkey with the decanter.”

“Honestly, Douglas!” Fabian and Ursula said together. “You are—”

“All right, all right,” Douglas said angrily. “I’m a fool. Say no more.” He flung himself down on the sofa again but this time he did not rest his arm along the back behind Terence. Instead he eyed her with an air of discomfort and curiosity.

“So you prefer to leave Miss Harme’s question unanswered,” Alleyn said to Terence.

She had picked up her knitting as if hoping by that gesture to recapture something of her composure. But her hands turned her work over, rolling the scarlet mesh round the white needles and, as aimlessly, spreading it out again across her knees.

“You force me to speak of it,” she said. “All of you. You talk about us all agreeing to this discussion, Fabian. When you and Ursula and Douglas planned it how could I not agree? It’s not my business to refuse. I’m an outsider. I was paid to work for Mrs. Rubrick and now you, Fabian, pay me to work for you in your garden. It’s not my business to refuse.”

“Nonsense, Terry,” said Fabian.

“You’ve never been in my position. You don’t understand. You’re all very kind and informal and treat me, as we say in my class, almost like one of yourselves. Almost, not quite.”

“My dear girl, that’s an insult to me, at least. You know quite enough about my views to realize that any such attitude is revolting to me. ‘Your class.’ How dare you go class-conscious at me, Terry?”

“You’re my boss. You were not too much of a communist to accept Mount Moon when he left it to you.”

“I think,” said Alleyn crisply, “that we might come back to the question which, believe me, Miss Lynne, you are under no compulsion to answer. This is it. Did Mrs. Rubrick, during the last week of her life, become aware of the attachment between you and her husband?”

“And if I don’t answer what will you think? What will you do? Go to Mrs. Aceworthy, who dislikes me intensely, and get some monstrously distorted story that she’s concocted. When he was ill he wanted me to look after him and wouldn’t see her or have her here. She’s never forgiven me. Better you should hear the truth, from me.”

“Very much better,” Alleyn agreed cheerfully. “Let’s have it.”

It would have come as something of an anticlimax if it had not made a little clearer the still nebulous picture of that strange companionship. They had been working together over one of Flossie’s articles, he at the table near the windows and Terence moving between him and the bookcases. She had returned to him with a volume of Hansard and had laid it on the table before him, standing behind him and pressing it open with her hand at the passage he had asked for. He leant forward and the rough tweed of his coat sleeve brushed her forearm. They were motionless. She looked down at him but his face was hidden from her. He stooped. Her free hand moved and rested on his shoulder. She described the scene carefully, with precision, as if these details were important, as if, having undertaken her story, she was resolved to leave nothing unsaid. She was, Alleyn thought, a remarkable young woman. She said it was the first passage of its kind between them and she supposed they were both too much moved by it to hear the door open. Her right hand was still upon him when she turned and saw her employer. He was even slower to move and her left hand remained, weighed down by his, upon the open pages of the book. It was only when she pulled it away that he too turned, and saw his wife.

Florence remained in the doorway. She had a sheaf of papers in her hand and they crackled as her grip tightened on them. “Hers was an expressionless face,” Terence said and Alleyn glanced up at the portrait. “Her teeth showed a little, as usual. Her eyes always looked rather startled, they looked no more so, then. She just stared at us.”

Neither Rubrick nor Terence spoke. Florence said loudly: “I’m in a hurry for those reports,” and turned on her heel. The door slammed behind her. Rubrick said to Terence: “My dear, I hope you can forgive me,” and Terence, sure now that he loved her, and feeling nothing but pleasure in her heart, kissed him lightly and moved away. They returned tranquilly to Flossie’s interminable reports. It was strange, Terence said, how little troubled they both were at that time by Flossie’s entrance. It seemed then to be quite irrelevant, something to be dismissed impatiently, before the certainty of their attachment. They continued with their employment, Terence said, and Alleyn had a picture of the two of them at work there, sometimes exchanging a brief smile, more often turning the pages of Hansard, or making notes of suitable platitudes for Flossie. An odd affair, he thought.

This mood of acceptance sustained them through their morning’s work. At luncheon when the party of six assembled, Terence noticed that her employer was less talkative than usual and she realized that she herself was being closely watched by Flossie. This did not greatly disturb her. She thought vaguely: “I suppose she merely said to herself that it’s not much like me to put my hand on anyone’s shoulder. I suppose she thinks it was a bit of presumption on my part. She’s noticing me as a human being.”

At the end of lunch Flossie suddenly announced that she wanted Terence to work with her all the afternoon. She kept Terence hard at it, taking down letters and typing them. It was a perfectly normal routine and at first Terence noticed nothing unusual in Flossie’s manner. Presently, however, she became conscious that Flossie, from behind the table, across the room, or by the fireplace, was watching her closely. She would deny herself the uncomfortable experience of meeting this scrutiny but sooner or later she would find herself unable to resist and would look up and there, sure enough, would be that gimlet-like stare that contrived to be at once so penetrating and so expressionless. Terence began to feel that she could not support this behaviour and to wish, in acute discomfort, that Florence would speak to, or even upbraid, her. The flood of contentment that had come upon her when she knew that Rubrick loved her now receded and left in its wake a sensation of shame. She began to see herself with Flossie’s eyes as a second-rate little typist who flirted with her employer’s husband. She felt sick and humiliated and was filled with a kind of impatience for the worst to happen. There must be a climax, she thought, or she would never recover from the self-disgust that Flossie’s stare had put upon her. But there was no climax. They plodded on with their work. When at last they had finished and Terence was gathering together her papers, Flossie, as she walked to the door, said over her shoulder “I don’t think Mr. Rubrick’s at all well.” Calling him “Mr. Rubrick,” Terence felt, put her very neatly in her place. “I don’t consider,” Florence added, “that we should bother him just now with our silly old statistics. I am rather worried about him. We’ll just leave him quietly to himself, Miss Lynne. Will you remember that?” And she went out, leaving Terence to draw what conclusions she chose from this pronouncement.

“And it was after that,” Terence said, “almost immediately after — it was the same night, at dinner — when the change you all noticed appeared in her manner towards him. To me it was horrible.”

“She decided, in fact,” said Fabian, “to meet you on your own ground, Terry, and give battle.” He added awkwardly: “That doesn’t seem horrible to me; pitiful, rather, and intensely embarrassing. How like her and how futile.”

“But he was devoted to her,” Ursula protested. And as if she had made a discovery that astonished and shocked her, she cried out: “You cheated, Terry. It happened because you were young. You shouldn’t cheat in that way when you’re young. They’re all alike — men of his age. If you’d gone away he’d have forgotten.”

“No!” said Terence strongly.

To Alleyn’s discomfiture they both turned to him.

“He’d have forgotten,” Ursula repeated. “Wouldn’t he?”

“My dear child,” Alleyn said, intensely conscious of his age, “how can I possibly tell?” But when he thought of Arthur Rubrick, ill, and exhausted by his wife’s public activities, he was inclined to believe that Ursula was partly right. With Terence gone, might not the emotion that Rubrick had felt for her have faded soon into an only half-regretful memory?

“You’re all the same,” Ursula muttered, and Alleyn felt himself classed, disagreeably, with Arthur Rubrick, among the senile romantics. “You go queer.”

“Well, but damn it all,” Fabian protested. “If it comes to that, Flossie’s behaviour was pretty queer too. To flirt with your husband after twenty-five years of married life—”

“That was entirely different,” Ursula flashed at him, “and anyway, Terry, if she did, it was your fault.”

“I didn’t do it,” Terence said, for the first time defending herself. “It happened. And until she came into the room it was right. I knew it was right. I knew it completely with my reason as well as with my emotion. It was as if I had suddenly been brought into focus, as if I was, for the first time, completely Me. It couldn’t possibly be wrong.”

She appealed to Ursula and perhaps, Alleyn thought, to the two young men. She asked them for understanding and succeeded in faintly embarrassing them.

“Yes,” said Ursula uncomfortably, “but how you could! With Uncle Arthur! He was nearly fifty.”

Silence followed this statement. Alleyn, who was forty-seven, realized with amusement that Douglas and Fabian found Ursula’s argument unanswerable.

“I didn’t hurt him, Fabian,” Terence said at last. “I’m certain I didn’t. If he was hurt it was by her. She was atrociously possessive.”

“Because of you,” said Ursula.

“But we couldn’t help it. You talk as if I planned what happened. It came out of a clear sky. It wasn’t of my doing. And there wasn’t a sequel, Ursula. You needn’t think we had surreptitious scenes. We didn’t. We were both of us, I believe, a little happier in our knowledge of each other. That was all.”

“When he was ill,” said Fabian, “did you talk about it, Terry?”

“A little. Just to say we were glad we knew.”

“If he had lived,” said Ursula harshly, “would you have married him?”

“How can I tell?”

“Why shouldn’t you have married? Auntie Florence, who was such a bore to both of you, was out of the way. Wasn’t she?”

“That’s an extraordinary cruel thing to say, Ursula.”

“I agree,” said Douglas and Fabian muttered: “Pipe down, Ursy.”

“No,” said Ursula. “We undertook to finish our thoughts in this discussion. You’re all cruel to her memory. Why should any of us get off? Why not say what you all must have thought: with her death they were free to marry.”

A footfall sounded outside in the hall, accompanied by a faint jingle of glasses. It was Markins with the drinks.