‘Strewth!’ said a man sitting beside Harriet. ‘Don’t they know there’s a war on?’
‘That lot don’t know they’re born!’ said the bus conductor, swaying on his feet as the bus swept round the curve of the Quadrant.
‘Ah, don’t be mean,’ said the woman sitting beside Harriet. ‘Let ’em have fun while they can. They’ll learn soon enough.’
Harriet got off the bus full of amazement. Since when did Londoners talk to each other on the buses?
The business with Murbles was quickly accomplished. He needed her signature on some documents, acting as Peter’s proxy. Harriet went from his office to Hatchard’s, chose books for herself and for the children and arranged to have them sent up to Hertfordshire. She stood amazed on the pavement outside Hatchard’s, while the horse-drawn delivery van of a famous hatter trotted past, at first sight everything about it just as usual: immaculate varnish, immaculately turned-out matching greys between the shafts, superbly turned-out liveried coachmen; the only thing that had changed was that they were wearing tin hats instead of toppers. Harriet laughed. And then she walked along to present herself at a little café in Mayfair where she had arranged to meet Eiluned.
‘Goodness, Harriet!’ said Eiluned, as she sat down. ‘You’ll get lynched walking round London dressed like that!’
‘Like what?’ said Harriet, who was wearing her practical country tweeds.
‘No uniform? No armband? Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
‘I’m not sure about it. It has a sort of theatrical quality – yes, that’s just it – it’s like a school play, with everyone very serious about making it work, and the illusion not quite achieved.’
‘The Midsummer Night’s Dream with the gym mistress playing Theseus, because everyone else is too short?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘Well, London is a stage set, all right, but I’m not sure I like the prospect of curtains up,’ said Eiluned.
‘Do you have to stay? With all the masterpieces in the National Gallery going off to Wales, it must be much safer there. You could go home.’
‘I’m training as an ambulance driver,’ said Eiluned. ‘And doing a bit of first-aid training.’
‘Good for you. How are all of your crowd doing?’
‘Scattered to the four winds. Sylvia has gone to America. Joan – did you know Joan? – has taken over her studio. She’s doing posters for the war effort: “Dig for Victory”, and “Be like Dad, Keep Mum”, all very Soviet. Now, tell me. Is England alive and well and living in Hertfordshire?’
‘More or less,’ said Harriet. She launched into an account of life in Paggleham, complete with murder.
‘It’s just as well we’re tough, Harry, isn’t it?’ Eiluned remarked as they were finishing their meal. ‘The “little women” act that used to make you and me look like the odd ones out has gone quite out of fashion. Suddenly it’s quite the thing to wear mannish clothes and be able to do things. It’ll be a terrible shock to the men when they get home – and they might be home sooner than we bargained for!’
‘Things look pretty ominous, don’t they?’ Harriet agreed. ‘But I would give my eye-teeth to be a shock to Peter, if he would be shocked, that is.’
‘Oh, Peter!’ said Eiluned. ‘He’s so intuitive he’s an honorary woman!’
‘That idea really might shock him,’ said Harriet, smiling.
And now she would have to go to the house, and fetch Mrs Trapp’s work-box, and just see that all was well. She walked slowly on sunlit pavements towards Audley Square, full of home thoughts. The house looked blankly at her, with all its windows shuttered. She mounted the steps. Was the key always so stiff in the door? She blinked at the gloomy hallway, coming in from the bright street. The console tables in the hall were all covered in dust-sheets. She mounted the uncarpeted stairs to the drawing-room, and found it likewise wrapped in shrouds. Dusty pillow-cases cocooned the chandeliers, dusty calico covered sofas and chairs, the pictures were draped in lengths of sacking, the carpets rolled up and stacked against the walls. The closed and barred window shutters let in cracks of light in which specks of dust hovered like tiny stars.
It all looked so strange and unexpected that at least Harriet was spared the hard kick of nostalgia that she had feared. The very idea that this house in all its unswathed glory could have been hers lacked plausibility now the Prince had gone from her life. So, likewise of course, had anything like glass slippers and golden gowns.
‘Pumpkin time,’ Harriet told herself. She found Mrs Trapp’s work-box quite easily because it was exactly where Mrs Trapp had said it would be, in the left-hand bottom drawer of the kitchen dresser, along with tea-towels and glass-cloths. It was a charming little thing in Winchester work, a present from the Dowager Duchess to mark Mrs Trapp’s twenty-fifth year of service at Denver. But finding the books she wanted was a challenge, since the bookcases in her study were sheeted too. She had to remember where things were, lift the sheet, wriggle under it, and find the book with her nose almost against the spines, squinting at the titles. It turned out that her visual memory for where a book was was pretty good, and she had nearly finished assembling the little pile and putting them in the string bag in which they were to go to Talboys when the sirens began to sound an air-raid warning.
Hell, thought Harriet, what do I do now? She hadn’t a clue what to do. Where was the nearest street shelter? There was nobody to ask. Should she go out into the open and look for one? She opened the shutters a crack and looked out. The street was deserted, there was no such thing as a hurrying crowd she could join. She found that she had decided to stay put and take the risks. But she would concede to Hitler this far, that she would descend the servants’ stair and sit out the raid in the basement. Once down there she looked ruefully through the garden door towards the little mews cottage that had been done up so recently, and with such goodwill as married quarters for Bunter and his new wife. The Bunters had a baby now, which was being cared for by Hope’s parents, while Hope herself had been recruited for some kind of war work connected with photography, so the mews cottage too was shuttered and silent.
Harriet felt a gust of anger. How dare anyone so threaten and disrupt other people’s lives? How monstrous the situation was! Then sadness engulfed her, and she settled quietly in Mrs Trapp’s armchair beside the cold kitchen range, with a book in her hand to pass the time. A lot of time passed. She hadn’t heard the all-clear, and she was obviously going to miss the train home if it didn’t go soon. Would there be another train tonight? The timetables had become skimpy and unreliable. But she wouldn’t be able to get a taxi in the middle of an air-raid surely, and she didn’t know if the buses kept running. The truth is she had lost her familiarity with London, as the city had changed rapidly. Perhaps she should just walk the two miles or so to Liverpool Street station? That seemed unattractive in an air-raid. She had a recent letter from Peter’s Uncle Paul in her handbag, to remind her that London was dangerous territory. Poor prurient, querulous Uncle Paul, displaced from his beloved France, and living in chilly London. She got the letter out, and looked it over again.
. . . I lunched last week at the House of Lords with your brother-in-law Gerald and his wife. Since she is in the Ministry of Instruction and Morale – Dieu sait pourquoi! – I suggested to her that some attempt should be made by that body to instruct the urban population in the science of walking in the dark. Needless to say, I got no satisfaction. (I do not suppose that any man has ever got satisfaction out of Helen, least of all her husband. As I warned him thirty years ago, she has neither the figure nor the temperament.) On this occasion she replied that the Ministry saw no need to issue propaganda; the public was accepting the blackout well, and the spirit of the nation was excellent. I replied that I was not concerned for its spirit but for its body and brain, of which the one was being mutilated and the other neglected – my objection was not to the blackout (which provides a refreshing relief from the vulgarity which normally disfigures
the streets of the metropolis), but only to accidents. I added that the spirit of any nation, however good, was liable to be depressed by an expectation of death which at present stood higher in Great Britain than on the Western Front . . .
She had been warned! And she felt hungry; not surprising since it was now more than seven hours since lunch with Eiluned. She opened the pantry door, a thing which as mistress of this house she had never done, and saw, as she would have expected, nearly bare, remorselessly orderly shelves, stripped of all perishable foods. All she could find was two tins of sardines, a jar of Shippam’s meat paste, a packet of Quaker oats and a tin of treacle. Hunger withered on the bough like blasted fruit. And, of course, with the electricity turned off and the range cold there would be no means of heating porridge. Harriet returned to her chair and fell asleep.
She woke, cold and stiff, at nine o’clock. Could she have slept through the all-clear? Surely not. She decided to run off the stiffness by trotting up and down the house, and set off two steps at a time ascending the elegantly curving stairs. Right at the top of the house there was a little sash window lighting the top landing, left unshuttered because it was only an attic floor. Harriet, slightly breathless, stooped to look out. London lay before her bathed in the cool moonlight, perfectly though faintly clear in every lovely and unlovely detail. Chimneys and fire-escapes, and roofs and spires; dark treetops rising in the parks, the church tower of St James’s, the slightly improper exoticism of the Italianate tower of Westminster Cathedral rising above the rooftops beyond the park. And the moon had it all to itself, without a single street light or window light, and drew it all in silver highlight and blue shadow. Overhead she heard a droning sound, and from some little way off a pair of searchlight beams sprang suddenly upright and began to tilt and sweep the sky. When they intersected a soft-edged diamond of double brightness was briefly painted and erased. How naked and vulnerable London lay in view; one might think the moon was a traitor, in league with the enemy.
Harriet felt dizzy, and realised that she was now light-headed with hunger; she must eat the oats dry if need be, or wet and raw, but she must eat something. And then as she descended the stairs on this quest she saw a chink of light showing at a window of the mews house beyond the garden – someone was there!
She moved swiftly. The key to the mews cottage was taken from the hook behind the garden door, the three bolts were swiftly drawn, and she went softly and quickly down the garden, under the apple tree standing like a Japanese print in the papery light, and opened the door to the other house. The stairs up to the living-room were in darkness, but there was light under the door on her right, between hall and kitchen. She listened to unbroken silence. Very gently and quietly she opened the door. What had she expected? Looters? Squatters? Certainly not what she saw by the light of three candles on the table. It was Bunter, slumped forward in a kitchen chair, his head on his arms. Bunter fast asleep. Bunter fast asleep, wearing filthy clothes, and with a three-day beard.
She could not have been more astonished had he been the angel Gabriel in mufti. She could not have been more pleased to see him had he been the dove with an olive branch returning to the ark. Although she had not made a sound some sixth sense suddenly woke him; he leaped to his feet, backed away into a corner, and pointed a revolver at her.
‘Bunter, it’s me,’ she said.
‘My lady?’ He was blinking at her in the dim light as though she were as unlikely an apparition as he was himself.
‘Where is Peter?’ she asked him, her heart pounding.
‘I don’t know, my lady. We had to go separate ways. I had thought . . .’ He thought better of what he was going to say. He was swaying on his feet. She understood his silenced sentence all too well, but this was an emergency.
With a blissful sense of turning the tables, Harriet took charge. This was the only time in her life when she was remotely likely to be more on the ball than he was.
‘When did you last eat?’ she asked him.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘It was in Holland, I think.’
‘Can you manage the stairs?’
‘I think so, my lady.’
‘Then get up there and get those clothes off. I’ll bring some hot water, and find something to eat.’
He hesitated. He too, she saw, exhausted and disorientated as he was, realised that the natural order of things was inverted.
‘That’s an order, Bunter,’ she said crisply, and he went.
Thank the lord they had put a sensible kitchen in here. Harriet found the gas and turned it on, and lit all the burners on the enamel New World cooker. Then she found the water main under the sink and turned that on too, filled all the three largest pans she could find and put them to heat. Then she tackled the electricity. Either the supply was down or all the fuses were blown. She brought the Quaker oats and the treacle from the other kitchen, and made up a pan of porridge. She ate three spoonfuls of it rapidly herself, to deal with her own light head. It tasted impossibly bland, like baby food. Then she filled a ewer with hot water, took one of the candles, and went in search of the intended beneficiary.
He hadn’t got far. He had put out some clean clothes on the bed, he had taken off the filthy overcoat, and then fallen asleep again in the bedroom chair. Beneath the overcoat he was wearing workmen’s dungarees blackened with motor oil, as though he had been disguised as a mechanic. Harriet contemplated him, seeing him in the light of a problem for the first time since she had known him. A natural deep reticence, a due respect inhibited her. Then common sense and kindness took over. She hauled him to his feet by the straps on his overalls, and helped him undress. It was like putting Bredon to bed, only on a larger scale. The little boy, just like the grown man, could sleep through the process standing. She finished by pushing him over on to the bed, sponging his face and hands, and pulling the coverlet over him. She would have fed him the porridge spoon by spoon if he had not been so deeply asleep. As it was she ate it ravenously herself, found herself a bare mattress in the spare room, and fell deeply and swiftly asleep.
The all-clear woke her. The light of morning was streaming through the uncurtained windows of the little room, glowing pink on the sloping ceiling above her head. She looked at her watch. Five o’clock. She felt scruffy herself now, having slept in her clothes. Through the open door of the main bedroom she saw Bunter still asleep, and she descended to the kitchen, and returned quietly to her own mothballed house. There she picked up the telephone, more than half expecting to find it had been disconnected ‘for the duration’, like so many of the conveniences of life, but the operator answered. Harriet asked to be connected to Mrs Bunter, and woke her with the good news. Hope was overjoyed, and would come at once. Harriet made just one more call, to Mrs Trapp at Talboys, to explain why she hadn’t returned the previous evening, and put any worry to rest.
Then she contemplated turning on the water, finding the gas main, trying for the minimum necessities in her own house, and thought it would be too much trouble. On the other hand if she went across to Bunter’s house, she might wake him before nature would have done, which seemed unkind, or make a third when his wife arrived, which seemed tactless. She felt far too scruffy and underfed to make the journey home as she was. So she remembered the privilege of wealth – she had never entirely got the hang of it – and went to have a bath and breakfast at the Ritz.
When at nine in the morning she returned to Audley Square to pick up that string bag of books, and get over to Liverpool Street for the train home, she was confronted with the astonishing sight of the old Bunter restored to her: Bunter immaculately turned out, scrubbed and shaved and kempt, and clearly lying in wait for her to open the front door.
‘Good morning, my lady,’ this incredible apparition said to her. ‘I trust you slept well?’
‘Thank you, Bunter, yes,’ she said, ‘if less soundly than you.’ Did the ghost of a blush appear on Bunter’s imperturbable countenance? She noticed with a pang of affection for him that, a
lthough spruced up, he looked haggard and exhausted, and older than before.
‘I am very afraid, my lady,’ he said, ‘that I perpetrated an indiscretion last night, which I hope you will be kind enough to overlook, indeed put right out of your mind in the circumstances.’
Perhaps the ghost of a blush was now appearing on her own face. While she wondered what to say, he added, ‘I think when you were kind enough to ask me when I last ate, I replied by giving you not the hour of the meal in question, but the location in which it had been consumed. That was officially secret information.’
‘Oh, of course, Bunter. I’ve forgotten it already. I won’t mention it to anyone. The entire family have been consoling themselves with the thought that you and Lord Peter were together. You have a reputation for being able to get him out of a hole.’
‘Thank you, my lady. That was a very different war. This one has asked of us considerably less digging, and considerably more cunning.’
‘I imagine I am not allowed to ask you about the circumstances in which you and Lord Peter went separate ways.’
‘Better not, my lady. But I would like you to know that I left him on an order from him, which I would much rather not have obeyed.’
‘I believe you.’
‘There were two ways home, my lady, of which one was safer than the other. He sent me by the safer one. I now believe that he practised deception on me, my lady, but I did not think of that in the heat of the moment. There were only a few minutes in which to decide.’
A Presumption of Death Page 13