“Not if it’s directed into suitable channels,” pronounced Grace.
“But hers was. Look what she did!” said Ursula.
“She was extraordinarily public-spirited, you know,” Grace agreed. “I must say I took my hat off to her for that. She had a man’s grasp of things.” He squared his shoulders and took a cigar case out of his pocket. “Not that I admire managing women,” he said, sitting down by Miss Lynne, “but Auntie Floss was a bit of a marvel. You’ve got to hand it to her, you know.”
“Apart from her work as an M.P.?” Alleyn suggested.
“Yes, of course,” said Ursula, still watching Fabian Losse. “I don’t know why we’re talking about her, Fabian, unless it’s for Mr. Alleyn’s information.”
“You may say it is,” said Fabian.
“Then I think he ought to know what a splendid sort of person she was.”
Fabian did an unexpected thing. He reached out his long arm and touched her lightly on the cheek. “Go ahead, Ursy,” he said gently. “I’m all for it.”
“Yes,” she cried out, “but you don’t believe.”
“Never mind. Tell Mr. Alleyn.”
“I thought,” said Douglas Grace, “that Mr. Alleyn was here to make an expert investigation. I shouldn’t think our ideas of Aunt Florence are likely to be of much help. He wants facts.”
“But you’ll all talk to him about her,” said Ursula, “and you won’t be fair.”
Alleyn stirred a little in his chair in the shadows. “I should be vey glad if you’d tell me about her, Miss Harme,” he said. “Please do.”
“Yes, Ursy,” said Fabian. “We want you to. Please do.”
She looked brilliantly from one to another of her companions. “But — it seems so queer. It’s months since we spoke of her. I’m not at all good at expressing myself. Are you serious, Fabian? Is it important?”
“I think so.”
“Mr. Alleyn?”
“I think so too. I want to start with the right idea of your guardian. Mrs. Rubrick was your guardian, wasn’t she?”
“Yes.”
“So you must have known her very well.”
“I think I did. Though we didn’t meet until I was thirteen.”
“I should like to hear how that came about.”
Ursula leant forward, resting her bare arms on her knees and clasping her hands. She moved into the region of firelight.
“You see—” she began.
CHAPTER II
ACCORDING TO URSULA
Ursula began haltingly with many pauses but with a certain air of championship. At first, Fabian helped her, making a conversation rather than a solo performance of the business. Douglas Grace, sitting beside Terence Lynne, sometimes spoke to her in a low voice. She had taken up a piece of knitting and the click of her needles lent a domestic note to the scene, a note much at variance with her sleek and burnished appearance. She did not reply to Grace, but once Alleyn saw her mouth flicker in a smile. She had small sharp teeth.
As Ursula grew into her narrative she became less uneasy, less in need of Fabian’s support, until presently she could speak strongly, eager to draw her portrait of Florence Rubrick.
A firm picture took shape. A schoolgirl, bewildered and desolated by news of her mother’s death, sat in the polished chilliness of a head-mistress’s drawing-room. “I’d known ever since the morning. They’d arranged for me to go home by the evening train. They were very kind but they were too tactful, too careful not to say the obvious thing. I didn’t want tact and delicacy, I wanted warmth. Literally, I was shivering. I can hear the sound of the horn now. It was the sort that chimes like bells. She brought it out from England. I saw the car slide past the window, and then I heard her voice in the hall asking for me. It’s years ago but I can see her as clearly as if it was yesterday. She wore a fur cape and smelt lovely and she hugged me and talked loudly and cheerfully and said she was my guardian and had come for me and that she was my mother’s greatest friend and had been with her when it happened. Of course I knew all about her. She was my godmother. But she stayed in England when she married after the last war and when she returned we lived too far away to visit. So I’d never seen her. So I went away with her. My other guardian is an English uncle. He’s a soldier and follows the drum, and he was very glad when Aunt Florence (that’s what I called her) took hold. I stayed with her until it was time to go back to school. She used to come during term and that was marvellous.”
The picture sharpened on a note of adolescent devotion. There had been the year when Auntie Florence returned to England but wrote occasionally and caused sumptuous presents to be sent from London stores. She reappeared when Ursula was sixteen and ready to leave school.
“It was heaven. She took me Home with her. We had a house in London and she brought me out and presented me and everything. It was wizard. She gave a dance for me.” Ursula hesitated. “I met Fabian at that dance, didn’t I, Fabian?”
“It was a great night,” said Fabian. He had settled on the floor; his back was propped against the side of her chair and his thin knees were drawn up to his chin. He had lit a pipe.
“And then,” said Ursula, “it was September 1939 and Uncle Arthur began to say we’d better come out to New Zealand. Auntie Florence wanted us to stay and get war jobs but he kept cabling for her to come.”
Terence Lynne’s composed voice cut across the narrative. “After all,” she said, “he was her husband.”
“Hear, hear!” said Douglas Grace and patted her knee.
“Yes, but she’d have been wonderful in a war job,” said Ursula impatiently. “I always took rather a gloomy view of his insisting like that. I mean, it was a thought selfish. Doing without her would really have been his drop of war work.”
“He’d had three months in a nursing home,” said Miss Lynne without emphasis.
“I know, Terry, but all the same — Well, anyway, soon after Dunkirk he cabled again and out we came. I had rather thought of joining something but she was so depressed about leaving. She said I was too young to be alone and she’d be lost without me, so I came. I loved coming, of course.”
“Of course,” Fabian murmured.
“And there was you to be looked after on the voyage.”
“Yes, I’d staged my collapse by that time. Ursula acted.” Fabian said, turning his head towards Alleyn, “as a kind of buffer between my defencelessness and Flossie’s zeal. Flossie had been a V.A.D. in the last war, and the mysteries had lain fallow in her for twenty years. I owe my reason if not my life to Ursula.”
“You’re not fair,” she said, but with a certain softening of her voice. “You’re ungrateful, Fab.”
“Ungrateful to Flossie for plumping herself down in your affections like an amiable — no, not even an amiable— cuttlefish? But, go on, Ursy.”
“I don’t know how much time Mr. Alleyn has to spare for our reminiscences,” began Douglas Grace, “but I must say I feel deeply sorry for him.”
“I’ve any amount of time,” said Alleyn, “and I’m extremely interested. So you all three arrived in New Zealand in 1940? Is that it, Miss Harme?”
“Yes. We came straight here. After London,” said Ursula gaily, “it did seem rather hearty and primitive but, quite soon after we got here, the member for the district died and they asked her to stand and everything got exciting. That’s when you came in, Terry, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Miss Lynne, clicking her needles. “That’s where I came in.”
“Auntie Floss was marvellous to me,” Ursula continued. “You see, she had no children of her own, so I suppose I was rather special. Anyway she used to say so. You should have seen her at meetings, Mr. Alleyn. She loved being heckled. She was as quick as lightning and absolutely fearless, wasn’t she, Douglas?”