‘You were good friends in those days?’
‘Yes. I thought so. You can imagine what it was like for me, coming here. She gave me books and bought new records for the gramophone and there was always the piano. She used to talk a lot about music; terrible stuff, of course, bogus and soulful, but I lapped it up. She began teaching me to “speak nicely” too. Dad and my mother used to sling off at me for it, but Mum half-liked it all the same. Mum used to buck at Women’s Institute meetings about the interest Mrs Rubrick took in me. Even Dad, for all his views, was a bit tickled at first. Parental vanity. They never saw how socially unsound the whole thing was; that I was just a sort of highbrow hobby and that every penny she spent on me was so much purchase money. Dad must have known, of course, but I suppose Mum talked him out of it.’
‘How did you feel about it?’
‘What do you think? It seemed to me that everything I wanted was inside this house. I’d have lived here if I could. But she was very clever. Only one hour every other day, so that the gilt never wore off the gingerbread. She never forced me to do anything too long. I never tired of anything. I can see now what a lot of self-restraint she must have used because by nature she was a slave-driver.’ He paused, tracing back his memories. ‘Gosh!’ he said suddenly, ‘what a nasty little bit of work I must have been.’
‘Why?’
‘Sucking up to her. Wallowing in second-rate ideas about second-rate music. Telling her what Tchaikowsky made me feel like and slobbering out “Chanson Triste” on the Bechstein with plenty of soul and wrong notes. Kidding myself as well as her that I didn’t like the Donkey Serenade.’
‘At the age of ten?’ Alleyn murmured incredulously.
‘Up to thirteen. I used to write poems, too, all about nature and high ideals. “We must be nothing weak, valleys and hills are ours, from the last lone rocky peak to where the rata flowers.” I set that one to music: “Tiddely tum te tum. Tiddely tum te-te” and wrote it all out and gave it to her for Christmas with a lovely picture in water colour under the dedication. Gosh, I was awful.’
‘Well,’ said Alleyn peaceably, ‘you certainly seem to have been a full-sized enfant prodigé. At thirteen you went to boarding-school, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. At her expense. I was hell-bent on it, of course.’
‘Was it a success?’ Alleyn asked, and to his surprise Cliff said: ‘Not bad. I don’t approve of the system, of course. Education ought to be the business of the state; not of a lot of desiccated failures whose real object is to bolster up class consciousness. The teaching on the whole was merely comic, but there were one or two exceptions.’ He saw Alleyn raise an eyebrow and reddened. ‘I suppose you’re thinking I’m an insufferable young puppy, aren’t you?’
‘I’m merely reminding myself rather strenuously that you are probably giving me an honest answer and that you are not yet eighteen. But do go on. Why, after all, was it not so bad?’
‘There were things they couldn’t spoil. I was bullied at first, of course, and miserable. It’s so bracing for one, being made to feel suicidal at the age of thirteen. But I turned out to be a slow bowler and naturally that saved me. I got a bit of kudos at school concerts and I developed a turn for writing mildly indecent limericks. That helped. And I went to a good man for music. I am grateful to her for that. Honestly grateful. He made music clear for me. He taught me what music is about. And I did make some real friends. People I could talk to,’ said Cliff with relish. The phrase carried Alleyn back thirty years to a dark study and the sound of bells. ‘In our way,’ he told himself, ‘we were just another clutch of little egoists.’
‘While you were still at school,’ he said, ‘Mrs Rubrick went to England, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. That was when it happened.’
‘When what happened?’
The story developed slowly. Before Florence Rubrick left for England, she visited young Cliff at his school, bearing down on him, Alleyn thought, as, a few years earlier, she had borne down on Ursula Harme. With less success, however. She seemed, in the extraordinarily critical eyes of a schoolboy, to make every possible gaffe. She spoke too loudly. She tipped too lavishly and in the wrong direction. She asked to be introduced to Cliff’s seniors and talked about him, in front of his contemporaries, to his house-master. Worst of all she insisted on an interview with his music teacher, a fastidious and austere man, at whom she talked dreadfully about playing with soul and the works of Mendelssohn. Cliff became morbidly sensitive about her patronage, and imagined that those boys in his house who came from the plateau laughed about them both behind his back. He had committed, he felt, the appalling crime of being different. He had a private interview with Flossie, who spoke in an embarrassing manner about his forthcoming confirmation and even, with a formidable use of botanical parallels, of his approaching adolescence. In the course of this interview, she told him that her great sorrow was the tragedy of having been denied (she almost suggested it was by Arthur Rubrick) a son. She took his face between her sharp large hands and looked at it until it turned purple. She then reminded him of all that she had done for him; kindly, breezily, but unmistakably, and said she knew that he would repay her just as much as if he really were her own son. ‘We’re real pals, aren’t we?’ she said. ‘Real chums. Cobbers?’ His blood ran cold.
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 1940, 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