could see each other thinking of it and a nightmarish sort of watching game set in. In a funny kind of way I think they were relieved when I told them what I’d done. They know, of course, that your visit has something to do with our X Adjustment, as Douglas pompously calls it.’
‘So they also know about your X Adjustment?’
‘Only very vaguely, except Douglas. Just that it’s rather special. That couldn’t be helped.’
Alleyn stared out at a clear and uncompromising landscape. ‘It’s a rum go,’ he said, and after a moment: ‘Have you thought carefully about this? Do you realize you’re starting something you may want to stop and – not be able to stop?’
‘I’ve thought about it ad nauseam.’
‘I think I ought to warn you. I’m a bit of state machinery. Any one can start me up but only the state can switch me off.’
‘OK.’
‘Well,’ Alleyn said, ‘you have been warned.’
‘At least,’ said Fabian, ‘I’ll give you a good dinner.’
‘Then you’re my host?’
‘Oh, yes. Didn’t you know? Arthur left Mount Moon to me and Flossie left her money to Douglas. You might say we were joint hosts,’ said Fabian.
III
Mount Moon homestead was eighty years old and that is a great age for a house in the antipodes. It had been built by Arthur Rubrick’s grandfather, from wood transported over the Pass in bullock wagons. Starting as a four-roomed cottage, room after room had been added, at a rate about twice as slow as that achieved by the intrepid Mrs Rubrick of those days in adding child after child to her husband’s quiver. The house bore a dim family resemblance to the Somersetshire seat which Arthur’s grandfather had thankfully relinquished to a less adventurous brother. Victorian gables and the inevitable conservatory, together with lesser family portraits and surplus pieces of furniture traced unmistakably the family’s English origin. The garden had been laid out in a nostalgic mood, at considerable expense, and with a bland disregard for the climate of the plateau. Of the trees old Rubrick had planted, only lombardy poplars, pinus insignis and a few natives had flourished. The tennis lawn, carved out of the tussocky hillside, turned yellow and dusty during summer. The pleached walks of Somerset had been in part realized with hardy ramblers and, where these failed, with clipped hedges of poplar. The dining-room windows looked down upon a queer transformation of what had been originally an essentially English conception of a well-planned garden. But beyond this unconvincing piece of pastiche – what uncompromising vastness! The plateau swam away into an illimitable haze of purple, its boundaries mingled with clouds. Above the cloud, suspended, it seemed, in a tincture of rose, floated the great mountains.
At dinner, that first night, Alleyn witnessed the pageant of nightfall on the plateau. He saw the horn of the Cloud Piercer shine gold and crimson long after the hollows of the lesser Alps, as though a dark wine poured into them, had filled with shadow. He felt the night air of the mountains enter the house and was glad to smell newly-lit wood in the open fireplaces.
He considered once again the inmates of the house.
Seen by candlelight round the dining-room table they seemed, with the exception of the housekeeper-chaperon, extremely young. Terence Lynne, an English girl who had been Florence Rubrick’s secretary, was perhaps the oldest, though her way of dressing her hair may have given him this impression. It swept, close-fitting as a cap, in two black wings from a central parting to a knot at the nape of her neck, giving her the look of a coryphée, an impression that was not contradicted by the extreme, the almost complacent neatness of her dress. This was black, with crisp lawn collar and cuffs. Not quite an evening dress, but he felt that, unlike the two young men, Miss Lynne changed punctiliously every night. Her hands were long and white and it was a shock to learn that since her employer’s death she had returned to Mount Moon as a kind of landgirl, or more accurately, as he was to learn later, a female gardener. Some hint of her former employment still hung about her. She had an air of responsibility and was, he thought, a trifle mousey.
Ursula Harme was an enchanting girl, slim, copper-haired and extremely talkative. On his arrival Alleyn had encountered her stretched out on the tennis lawn wearing a brief white garment and dark glasses. She at once began to speak of England, sketching modish pre-war gaieties and asking him which of the night clubs had survived the blitz. She had been in England with her guardian, she said, when war broke out. Her uncle, now fighting in the Middle East, had urged her to return with Mrs Rubrick to New Zealand, and Mount Moon.
‘I am a New Zealander,’ said Miss Harme, ‘but all my relations – I haven’t any close relations except my uncle – live in England. Aunt Flossie – she wasn’t really an aunt but I called her that – was better than any real relation could have been.’
She was swift in her movements and had the silken air of a girl who is, beyond argument, attractive. Alleyn thought her restless and noticed that though she looked gay and brilliant when she talked her face in repose was watchful. Though, during dinner, she spoke most readily to Douglas Grace, her eyes more often were for Fabian Losse.
The two men were well contrasted. Everything about Fabian Losse, his hollow temples and his nervous hands, his lightly waving hair, was drawn delicately with a sharp pencil. But Captain Grace was a magnificent fellow with a fine moustache, a sleek head and large eyes. His accent was slightly antipodean but his manners were formal. He called Alleyn ‘sir’ each time he spoke to him and was inclined to pin a rather meaningless little laugh on the end of his remarks. He seemed to Alleyn to be an extremely conventional young man.
Mrs Aceworthy, Arthur Rubrick’s elderly cousin who had come to Mount Moon on the death of his wife, was a large sandy woman with an air of uncertain authority and a tendency to bridle. Her manner towards Alleyn was cautious. He thought that she disapproved of his visit and he wondered how much Fabian Losse had told her. She spoke playfully and in inverted commas of ‘my family’, and seemed to show a preference for the two New Zealanders, Douglas Grace and Ursula Harme.
The vast landscape outside darkened and the candles on the dining-room table showed ghostly in the uncurtained window panes. When dinner was over they all moved into a comfortable, conglomerate sort of room hung with faded photographs of past cadets and lit cosily by a kerosene lamp. Mrs Aceworthy, with a vague murmur about ‘having to see to things’ left them with their coffee.
Above the fireplace hung the full-dress portrait of a woman.
It was a formal painting. The bare arms executed with machine-like precision, flowed wirily from shoulders to clasped hands. The dress was of mustard-coloured satin, very décolleté, and this hue was repeated in the brassy highlights of Mrs Rubrick’s incredibly golden coiffure. The painter had dealt remorselessly with a formidable display of jewellery. It was an Academy portrait by an experienced painter but his habit of flattery had met its Waterloo in Florence Rubrick’s face. No trick of understatement could soften that large mouth, closed with difficulty over protuberant teeth, or modify the acquisitive glare of the pale goitrous eyes which evidently had been fixed on the artist’s and therefore appeared, as laymen will say, to ‘follow one about the room’. Upon each of the five persons seated in Arthur Rubrick’s study did his wife Florence seem to fix her arrogant and merciless stare.
There was no other picture in the room. Alleyn looked round for a photograph of Arthur Rubrick but could find none that seemed likely.
The flow of talk, which had run continuously if not quite easily throughout dinner, was now checked. The pauses grew longer and their interruptions more forced.
