Ursula slipped down to the warm dry grass and leant her cheek against her guardian’s knee. Her guardian’s vigorous fingers caressed rather thoroughly the hair which Ursula had been at some expense to have set on a three days’ visit down-country.
“Let’s make a plan,” said Aunt Florence.
It was a phrase Ursula loved. It was the prelude to adventure. It didn’t matter that the plan was concerned with nothing more exciting than a party in the wool-shed which would be attended by back-countrymen and their women-kind dressed unhappily in co-operative store clothes and by a sprinkling of such run holders as had enough enthusiasm and petrol to bring them many miles to Mount Moon. Aunt Florence invested it all in a pink cloud of anticipation. Even Douglas became enthusiastic and, leaning over the back of Flossie’s chair, began to make suggestions. Why not a dance? he asked, looking at Terence Lynne. Florence agreed. There would be a dance. Old Jimmy Wyke and his brothers, who played accordions, must practise together and take turn about with the radio-gramophone.
“You ought to take that old piano over from the annex,” said Arthur Rubrick in his tired breathless voice, “and get young Cliff Johns to join forces with the others. He’s extraordinarily good. Play anything. Listen to him, now.”
It was an unfortunate suggestion, and Ursula felt the caressing fingers stiffen. As she recalled this moment, fifteen months later, for Alleyn, he heard her story recede backwards, into the past, and this quality, he realized, would be characteristic of all the stories he was to hear. They would dive backwards from the moment on the lawn into the events that foreshadowed it.
Ursula said she knew that Aunt Florence had been too thoughtful to worry Uncle Arthur with the downfall of young Cliff Johns. It was a story of the basest sort of ingratitude. Young Cliff, son of the manager, Tommy Johns, had been an unusual child. He had thrown his parents into a state of confusion and dubiousness by his early manifestations of aesthetic preferences, screaming and plugging his ears with his fists when his mother sang, yet listening with complacency for long periods to certain instrumental programs on the wireless. He had taken a similar line over pictures and books. When he grew older and was collected in a lorry every morning and taken to a minute pink-painted state school out on the plateau, he developed a talent for writing florid compositions, which changed their style with each new book he read, and much too fast for the comprehension of his teacher. His passion for music grew precociously and the schoolmistress wrote to his parents saying that his talent was exceptional. Her letter had an air of nervous enthusiasm. The boy, she said bravely, was phenomenal. He was, on the other hand, bad at arithmetic and games and made no attempt to conceal his indifference to both.
Aunt Florence, hearing of this, took an interest in young Cliff, explaining to his reluctant parents that they were face to face with The Artistic Temperament.
“Now, Mrs. Johns,” she said cheerfully, “you mustn’t bully that boy of yours simply because he’s different. He wants special handling and lots of sympathy. I’ve got my eye on him.”
Soon after that she began to ask Cliff to the big house. She gave him books and a gramophone with carefully chosen records and she won him completely. When he was thirteen years old she told his bewildered parents that she wanted to send him to the nearest equivalent in this country of an English Public School. Tommy Johns raised passionate objections. He was an ardent trades-unionist, a working manager and a bit of a communist. But his wife, persuaded by Flossie, overruled him, and Cliff went off to boarding-school with sons of the six run holders scattered over the plateau.
His devotion to Florence, Ursula said, appeared to continue. In the holidays he spent a great deal of them with her and, having taken music lessons at her expense, played to her on the Bechstein in the drawing-room. At this point in Ursula’s narrative, Fabian gave a short laugh.
“He plays very well,” Ursula said. “Or does he?”
“Astonishingly well,” Fabian agreed, and she said quickly: “She was very fond of music, Fab.”
“Like Douglas,” Fabian murmured, “she knew what she liked, but unlike Douglas she wouldn’t own up to it.”
“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Ursula grandly and went on with her narrative.
Young Cliff continued at school when Florence went to England. He had full use of the Bechstein in the drawing-room during the holidays. She returned to find him a big boy but otherwise, it seemed, still docile under her patronage. But when he came home for his summer holidays at the end of 1941, he was changed, not, Ursula said emphatically, for the better. He had had trouble with his eyes and the school oculist had told him that he would never be accepted for active service. He had immediately broken bounds and attempted to enlist. On being turned down he wrote to Florence saying that he wanted to leave school and, if possible, do a job of war work on the sheep run until he was old enough to get into the army, if only in a C3 capacity. He was now sixteen. This letter was a bomb-shell for Flossie. She planned a university career, followed, if the war ended soon enough, by a move to London and the Royal College of Music. She went to the manager’s cottage with the letter in her hand, only to find that Tommy Johns also had heard from his son and was delighted. “We’re going to need men on the land as we’ve never needed them before, Mrs. Rubrick. I’m very very pleased young Cliff looks at it that way. If you’ll excuse me for saying so, I thought this posh education he’s been getting would make a class-conscious snob of the boy, but, from what he tells me of his ideas, I see it’s worked out different.” For young Cliff, it appeared, was now a communist. Nothing could have been further removed from Flossie’s plans.
When he appeared she could make no impression on him. He seemed to think that she alone would sympathize with his change of heart and plans and would support him. He couldn’t understand her disappointment or, as he continued in his attitude, her mounting anger. He grew dogmatic and stubborn. The woman of forty-seven and the boy of sixteen quarrelled bitterly and strangely. It was a cruel thing for him to do, Ursula said, cruel and stupid. Aunt Florence was the most patriotic soul alive. Look at her war work. It wasn’t as though he were old enough or fit for the army. The least he could do was to complete the education she had so generously planned and, in part, given him.
After their quarrel they no longer met. Cliff went out with the high-country musterers and continued in their company when they came in from the mountains behind droning mobs of sheep. He became very friendly with Albie Black, the roustabout. There was a rickety old piano in the bunk-house annex and in the evenings Cliff played it for the men. Their voices, singing “Waltzing Matilda” and strangely Victorian ballads, would drift across the yards and paddocks and reach the lawn where Flossie sat with her assembled forces every night after dinner. But on the night she disappeared his mate had gone to the dance and Cliff played, alone in the annex, strange music for that inarticulate old instrument.
“Listen to him, now,” said Arthur Rubrick. “Remarkable chap, that boy. You wouldn’t believe that old hurdy-gurdy over there had as much music in it. Extraordinary. Sounds like a professional.”
“Yes,” Fabian agreed after a pause. “It’s remarkable.” Ursula wished they wouldn’t talk about Cliff. It would have been better to have told Uncle Arthur about the episode of the previous night, she thought, and let him deal with Cliff. Aunt Florence shouldn’t have to cope with everything and this had hurt her so deeply.