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?”
“She certainly could handle them,” agreed Grace. “She was up to her neck in it when I got back. I remember one meeting some woman shouted out: ‘Do you think it’s right for you to have cocktails and champagne when I can’t afford to give my kiddies eggs?’ Aunt Floss came back at her in a flash: ‘I’ll give you a dozen eggs for every alcoholic drink I’ve consumed.’ ”
“Because,” Ursula explained, “she didn’t drink, ever, and most of the people knew and clapped, and Aunt Florence said at once: ‘That wasn’t fair, was it? You didn’t know about my humdrum habits.’ And she said: ‘If things are as bad as that you should apply to my Relief Supply Service. We send plenty of eggs in from Mount Moon.’ ” Ursula’s voice ran down on a note of uncertainty. Douglas Grace cut in with his loud laugh. “And that woman shouted, ‘I’d rather be without eggs,’ and Aunt Floss said: ‘Just as well perhaps while I’m on my soap-box.’ And they roared with laughter.”
“Parry and riposte,” muttered Fabian. “Parry and riposte!”
“It was damned quick of her, Fabian,” said Douglas Grace.
“And the kids continued eggless.”
“That wasn’t Aunt Florence’s fault,” said Ursula.
“All right, darling. My sympathies are with the woman but let it pass. I must say,” Fabian added, “that in a sort of a way I rather enjoyed Floss’s electioneering campaign.”
“You don’t understand the people in this country,” said Grace. “We like it straight from the shoulder and Aunt Floss gave it to us that way. She had them eating out of her hand, didn’t she, Terry?”
“She was very popular,” said Terence Lynne.
“Did her husband take an active part in her public life?” asked Alleyn.
“It practically killed him,” said Miss Lynne, clicking her needles.
There was a flabbergasted silence and she continued sedately: “He went for long drives and sat on platforms and fagged about from one meeting to another. This house was never quiet. What with Red Cross and Women’s Institute and E.P.S. and political parties, it was never quiet. Even this room, which was supposed to be his, was invaded.”
“She was always looking after him,” Ursula protested. “That’s unfair, Terry. She looked after him marvellously.”
“It was like being minded by a hurricane.”
Fabian and Douglas laughed. “You’re disloyal and cruel,” Ursula flashed out at them. “I’m ashamed of you. To make her into a figure of fun! How you can when you, each of you, owed her so much.”
Douglas Grace at one began to protest that this was unfair, that nobody could have been fonder of his aunt than he was, that he used to pull her leg when she was alive and that she liked it. He was flustered and affronted, and the others listened to him in an uncomfortable silence. “If we’ve got to talk about her,” Douglas said hotly, “for God’s sake let’s be honest. We were all fond of her, weren’t we?” Fabian hunched up his shoulders but said nothing. “We all took a pretty solid knock when she was murdered, didn’t we? We all agreed that Fabian should ask Mr. Alleyn to come? All right. If we’ve got to hold a post-mortem on her character, which, personally, seems to me to be a waste of time, I suppose we’re meant to say what we think.”
“Certainly,” said Fabian. “Unburden the bosom, work off the inhibitions. But it’s Ursy’s innings at the moment, isn’t it?”
“You interrupted her, Fab.”
“Did I? I’m sorry, Ursy,” said Fabian gently. He slewed round, put his chin on the arm of her chair and looked up comically at her.
“I’m ashamed of you,” she said uncertainly.
“Please go on. You’d got roughly to 1941 with Flossie in the full flush of her parliamentary career, you know. Here we were, Mr. Alleyn. Douglas, recovered from his wound but passed unfit for further service, going the rounds of a kind of superior Shepherd’s Calendar. Terry, building up Flossie’s prestige with copious shorthand notes and cross-references. Ursula—” He broke off for a moment. “Ursula provided enchantment,” he said lightly, “and I comedy. I fell off horses and collapsed at high altitudes, and fainted into sheep-dips. Perhaps these antics brought me en rapport with my unfortunate uncle, who, at the same time, was fighting his own endocarditic battle. Carry on, Ursy.”
“Carry on with what? What’s the good of my trying to give my picture of her when you all — when you all—” Her voice wavered for a moment. “All right,” she said more firmly. “The idea is that we each give our own account of the whole thing, isn’t it? The same account that I’ve bleated out at dictation speed to that monumental bore from the detective’s office. All right.”