She wrote him long letters from England and brought him back a marvellous gramophone and a great many records. He was now fifteen. The unpleasant memory of their last meeting had been thrust away at the back of his mind. He had found his feet at school and worked hard at his music. At first his encounters with his patron after her return from England were happy enough. Alleyn gathered that he talked about himself and that Flossie listened.
In the last term of 1941 Cliff formed a friendship with an English boy who had been evacuated to New Zealand by his parents; evidently communistic intellectuals. Their son, delicate, vehement and sardonic, seemed to Cliff extraordinarily mature, a man among children. He devoured everything his friend had to say, became an enthusiastic Leftist, argued with his masters and thought himself, Alleyn suspected, a good deal more of a bombshell than they did. He and his friend gathered round them an ardently iconoclastic group all of whom decided to fight “without prejudice” against fascism, reserving the right to revolt when the war was over. The friend, it seemed, had always been of this mind “but,” said Cliff ingenuously, “of course it made a big difference when Russia came in. I suppose,” he added, “you are horrified.”
“Do you?” said Alleyn. “Then I mustn’t disappoint you. The thing is, was Mrs. Rubrick horrified?”
“I’ll say she was! That was when the awful row happened. It started first of all with us trying to enlist. This chap and I suddenly felt we couldn’t stick it just hanging on at school and — well, anyway, that’s what we did. We were turned down, of course. The episode was very sourly received by all hands. That was at the end of 1941. I came home for the Christmas holidays. By that time I realized pretty thoroughly how hopelessly wrong it was for me to play at being a little gentleman at her expense. I realized that if I couldn’t get as my right, equally with other chaps, the things she’d given me, then I shouldn’t take them at all. I was admitting the right of one class to patronize another. They were short of men all over the high-country and I felt that if I couldn’t get into the army I’d better work on the place.”
He paused, and with a very shamefaced air muttered: “I’m not trying to make out a flattering case for myself. It wasn’t as if I was army-minded. I loathed the prospect. Muddle, boredom, idiotic routine and then carnage. It was just — well, I did honestly feel I ought to.”
“Right,” said Alleyn. “I take the point.”
“She didn’t. She’d got it all taped out. I was to go Home to the Royal College of Music. At her expense. She was delighted when they said I’d never pass fit. When I tried to explain she treated me like a silly kid. Then, when I stuck to it, she accused me of ingratitude. She had no right,” said Cliff passionately. “Nobody has the right to take a kid of ten and teach him to accept everything without knowing what it means and then use that generosity as a weapon against him. She’d always talked about the right of artists to be free. Free! She’d got vested interests in me and she meant to use them. It was horrible.”
“What was the upshot of the discussion?”
Cliff had turned in his chair. His face was dark against the glare of the plateau and it was by the posture of his body and the tilt of his head that Alleyn first realized he was staring at the portrait of Florence Rubrick.
“She sat just like that,” he said. “Her hands were like that and her mouth — not quite shut. She hadn’t got much expression, ever, and you couldn’t believe, looking at her, that she could say the things she said. What everything had cost and how she’d thought I was fond of her. I couldn’t stand it. I walked out.”
“When was this?”
“The night I got home for the summer holidays. I didn’t see her again until — until—”
“We’re back at the broken bottle of whiskey, aren’t we?”
Cliff was silent.
“Come,” said Alleyn, “you’ve been very frank up to now. Why do you jib at this one point?”
Cliff shuffled his feet and began mumbling. “All very well, but how do I know… not a free agent… Gestapo methods… Taken down and used against you…”
“Nonsense,” said Alleyn. “I’ve taken nothing down and I’ve no witness. Don’t let’s go over all that again. If you won’t tell me what you were doing with the whisky, you won’t, but really you can’t blame Sub-Inspector Jackson for taking a gloomy view of your reticence. Let’s get back to the bare bones of fact. You were in the dairy-cum-cellar with the bottle in your hand. Markins looked through the window, you dropped the bottle, he haled you into the kitchen. Mrs. Duck fetched Mrs. Rubrick. There was a scene in the middle of which she dismissed Mrs. Duck and Markins. We have their several accounts of the scene up to the point when they left. I should now like to have yours of the whole affair.”
Cliff stared at the portrait. Alleyn saw him wet his lips and a moment later, give the uncanny little half yawn of nervous expectancy. Alleyn was familiar with this grimace. He had seen it made by prisoners awaiting sentence and by men under suspicion when the investigating officer carried the interrogration towards danger point.
“Will it help,” he said, “if I tell you this? Anything that is not relevant to my inquiry will not appear in any subsequent report. I can give you my word, if you’ll take it, that I’ll never repeat or use such statements if, in fact, they are irrelevant.” He waited for a moment. “Well,” he said at last, “what about this scene with Mrs. Rubrick in the kitchen? Was it so very bad?”
“You’ve been told what they heard. The other two. It was bad enough then. Before they went. Almost as if she was glad to be able to go for me. It’s as real now as if it had happened last night. Only it’s a queer kind of reality. Like the memory of a nightmare.”
“Have you ever spoken to anybody about it?”
“Never.”
“Then bring the monster out into the light of day and let’s have a look at it.”
He saw that Cliff half welcomed, half resisted this insistence.
“After all,” Alleyn said, “was it so terrible?”
“Not terrible exactly,” Cliff said. “Disgusting.”
“Well?”
“I suppose I had a kind of respect for her. Partly bogus, I know that. An acceptance of the feudal idea. But partly genuine too. Partly based on the honest gratitude I’d have felt for her if she hadn’t demanded gratitude. I don’t know. I only know it made me feel sick to see her lips shake and to hear her voice tremble. There was a master at school who used to get like that before he caned us. He got the sack. She seemed to be acting, too. Acting the lady of the house who controlled herself before the servants. It’d have been better if she’d yelled at me. When they’d gone, she did — once. When I said I wasn’t stealing it. Then she sort of took hold of herself and dropped back into a whisper. All the same, even then, in a way, I thought she was putting it on. Acting. Really it was almost as if she enjoyed herself. That was what was so particularly beastly.”