A Presumption of Death

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  Returning to the room Peter said, ‘Bungo’s getting the night desk to send a despatch rider to pick this up and take it to Bletchley.’

  ‘Do I have to go to bed now?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘No,’ said Peter, glancing at Harriet for approval. ‘You can hand your stuff over yourself if you would like to. Honour where honour is due.’

  ‘Only it’s Sam’s stuff too,’ said Charlie. ‘It’s my crystal set but Sam did half the work.’

  Harriet said, ‘Bunter, would you step across to Bateson’s farm, and see if Sam’s bedtime can be stretched in a crisis?’

  It would later be one of her favourite recollections of the war years at Talboys: two little boys in flannel pyjamas, swaying on their feet with fatigue, handing over a bundle of paper to a despatch rider who saluted them as he took it. Peter, Harriet noticed, was bursting with pride for Charlie. He took the boy up to bed, and she heard him saying as they crossed the landing, ‘You ought to have a medal for this, Charles. But the secret service don’t get medals in war-time. Obviously. Would you swap a medal after the war for a bicycle now?’

  ‘I’d like the bicycle, please, Uncle Peter, if Sam can have one too.’

  ‘Naturally Sam gets one too. But you are both sworn to secrecy about all this.’

  Two days later Mrs Goodacre came to call. ‘Have you heard the news, my dears?’ she asked. ‘The establishment at Steen Manor is moving out! The village is full of trucks and all the young men are going, we mustn’t ask where, and ours not to reason why. I’m afraid our land-girls will be rather bereft with only local boys to fraternise with. Everyone and everything is rolling away, down to the station cat.’

  ‘Let me get you a cup of tea?’ asked Harriet.

  ‘No, thank you. I can’t stop. What I really came over for was to ask if there were any chance . . . if Lord Peter could possibly play the organ for us for a wedding next Tuesday fortnight.’

  ‘At your own risk,’ said Peter. ‘The piano is my instrument really. But I’ll manage something for you. Miss Twitteron can’t be there?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be there,’ said Mrs Goodacre. ‘She’s the bride!’

  ‘Great heavens!’ exclaimed Harriet. ‘I’m so glad for her! But what a surprise . . .’

  ‘She’s marrying our Polish farmer,’ said Mrs Goodacre. ‘Such a nice man. He’s a widower, we understand, and he knows all about chickens. He’s been helping her, and they’ve been meeting after dark in the lanes, and in the wood; they didn’t want anyone to know until they were ready. They had to sort out their religious views, I understand. But after some discussion Jan decided that Common Prayer was just like home only not in Polish.’

  ‘This is really wonderful,’ said Harriet. ‘I must ask her if she needs help with her wedding dress.’

  ‘I understand she has a suitable skirt and a resplendent new blouse,’ said Mrs Goodacre. ‘We are in quest of something to make a veil. All we could say, Simon and I, was “Well I never!” over and over again.’

  ‘So the sudden removal of Steen Manor would be Charlie’s doing?’ Harriet asked Peter.

  ‘His stuff contained a map reference for it, I understand,’ said Peter. ‘I suppose pseudo-Brinklow found where it was. He might have been sent to find it. He might have been about to light flares to mark it as a target. Either way Charlie’s saved the day, really. Retrieved a blunder, clever little beast. I promised a chocolate cake to go with the bicycles.’

  ‘And what, may I ask, your lordship, will you do if Mrs Trapp’s sugar hoards are exhausted, and you cannot make good a promise of chocolate cake?’

  ‘I shall do what many a worser man has done, and buy some on the black market,’ said Peter.

  ‘I’m very shocked, Peter. Do you actually know a black-marketer who can oblige us with sugar?’

  ‘I shall send Bunter. Ask me not where. With a couple of bottles of very good port to negotiate with.’

  ‘It’s a curious aspect of war,’ said Harriet thoughtfully, ‘how important it makes food. You can have no idea what it did to my feelings when you said you had been hungry.’

  ‘Do you remember once telling me that although almost everything that had happened to you had been awful, you always knew it was just things that were wrong, not everything? That you never thought of wanting to die, only of getting out of the mess?’

  ‘Yes, I remember. That was about Harriet-before-Peter. Harriet-after-Peter hasn’t needed any such stoicism. I’m a different woman now.’

  ‘Well, when I was cold and hungry and more than a bit scared, I remembered what you had said: it was just things that were wrong, not everything, and that I simply had to get out of the mess.’

  Harriet thought for a moment. Then she said, ‘Peter, will they send you abroad again?’

  ‘Abroad? Possibly. Behind enemy lines? No. They’ll find me something at home, I expect.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure. I won’t volunteer again. I don’t trust myself.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true. When old . . . when somebody gave me my papers he said, “You’ve got a wife and children, haven’t you?” and I thought he was feeling sorry for me. But I saw a bit later that he was just feeling worried for the safety of his mission.’

  ‘Are you saying that marriage and fatherhood has made you a coward? Peter, how terrible!’

  ‘Love has made me afraid of death,’ he said. ‘I rather thought it might. Are you surprised?’

  ‘I think I am,’ she said. The whole conversation felt dangerous – she could not see how far she might fall if she missed her footing.

  ‘Everyone’s afraid of death at one level,’ he said. ‘There is an animal fear that kicks in and overrides the will. That’s why people who have thrown themselves in the Thames to drown struggle in the water. People are afraid of dying in painful and protracted ways. I am too, naturally. But I have never before been afraid of being dead.’

  ‘What do you mean, my dear?’ She almost whispered it.

  ‘I used to think the world could get along very well without me. A few tears shed for me, and everything would trolley along much as before. And now . . . understand me, Harriet, I don’t think you couldn’t manage without me, of course you could, but . . .’

  ‘I wouldn’t be trolleying along much as before? Too right, I wouldn’t. Your being dead is the most terrible state of the world I can imagine.’

  ‘And therefore my being dead is a terrible prospect for me. And do you see how this rabbit runs, Harriet? How we are overstating it? No private grief or horror is now the worst thing imaginable. Once one is afraid of being dead one isn’t reliable any more; I mean when that moment of animal fear arrived it would have a collaborator in one’s head. There would be a fatal flaw in one’s moral fibre; a secret voice that said, “My wife and children need me.”’

  ‘We do need you. Terribly. Preferably alive, and here. But most of all we need you to be yourself.’

  ‘And if myself were a poor frightened thing, trying to save its skin no matter what?’

  ‘Do you think I wouldn’t love you in that case? Love is not love which alters where it alteration finds; and, Peter, that would be alteration. Whatever you seem like to yourself in black moments, you do not seem frightened and self-preserving to me.’

  ‘You don’t know what I may have been up to, just recently,’ he said.

  ‘Peter, when you tossed a coin with Bunter to decide who would come home the safer way, which way up did the coin land?’

  He gave her suddenly a guilty-looking grin, an expression uncannily like Bredon’s, caught taking two biscuits at once from the tin.

  ‘God, Harriet, you’re a hard taskmaster,’ he said. ‘You don’t let me get away with much, do you?’

  ‘I know you rather well, by now,’ said Harriet.

  ‘You’ll love and bear me? You will not change, nor falter, nor repent?’

  ‘Certainly not. But I don’t catch the quotation. What is it?’
>
  ‘Shelley,’ said Peter. ‘I was reading it the other night, and it seemed extraordinarily apt for the time.’

  He brought the book from the shelf, found the place, and laid it open on Harriet’s lap. He leaned over her shoulder, his hand resting lightly on hers, and they read it together:

  To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;

  To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;

  To defy Power which seems omnipotent;

  To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates

  From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;

  Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;

  This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

  Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;

  This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory.

  Honoria Lucasta, Dowager Duchess of Denver, to her American friend, Cornelia, wife of Lambert B. Vander-Huysen, of New York.

  Bredon Hall, 6th June, 1940

  Duke’s Denver, Norfolk

  Dear Cornelia,

  Thank you for your kind letter, so full of concern for us. As you will be reading in the papers, the news is dreadful. We have withdrawn from Norway, and now the British Expeditionary Force has pulled out of France. We are all so grateful to have our boys – and a lot of French boys too – back in England, and so proud of all the people in little boats who fetched them home for us, that the mood is nothing like as dark as you might think. There’s even an odd sort of relief. People are saying, ‘Well, we’re on our own now, and it’s up to us, so we must just get on with it.’ Peter says wars are not won by retreats, however glorious, and my daughter Mary says that the hospital trains bringing the wounded back to hospitals in London were a dreadful sight, and she saw the nurses at Bart’s standing in the street crying before going back to the wards. But we all listen to Churchill on the wireless to keep our spirits up.

  Now, you are not to worry about us going hungry (although we shall greatly enjoy the food parcel you have sent when it reaches us), because the rationing is quite fair, and quite sufficient. Of course country people have ways and means, but some of the townspeople are better fed than ever before, and we are managing very well at Denver. I tried out, yesterday, a piece of advice from our Ministry of Food (yes, we have such a thing!) that although the butter ration has to be spread pitifully thin, one will be able to taste the butter better, if one eats the bread upside down – butter side against the tongue. I am nearly sure that it makes a difference! We have so many leaflets of advice about everything from growing cabbage to unpicking and remaking clothes, to joining this and that organisation, to what to do if the Germans land, and how to build air-raid shelters that people get quite cross about the waste of paper; we can’t get wood pulp from Sweden any more, and The Times has slimmed down by pages and pages and is a shadow of its former self.

  Meanwhile, taking an interest in our ragamuffin school (they have the whole west wing) is making Denver quite a socialist. He actually said to me the other day that we would have to put things right after the war in respect of education. ‘If one has it, all should have it,’ he said.

  Would you believe, Cornelia, that I have joined the Auxiliary Fire Service myself, and I take my turn standing on the church tower with a tin hat on? Only it’s so far from the village for people to walk here at night, and we are so close by. The whole thing was arranged that way, of course, at the whim of an eighteenth-century Duke, who wanted his villagers at a respectful distance, and the church handy on a wet Sunday, but the result is I think I should take my turn. Franklin keeps running up and down the tower steps with blankets and Thermos flasks for me, tut-tutting like mad, silly woman. But as I told her, I have Norman blood.

  We are all so heartened at what you tell us about all the organisations in your great country campaigning to persuade the President to come to our aid. Women’s organisations, too; but then you and I both know, dear, that women often see what battle will have to be fought while the men are still marching around the parade ground. Peter doesn’t think that we could possibly win without you; the most we might manage will be to hang on until you get here; to avoid being engulfed ourselves, so that American aid will be possible. It doesn’t seem likely that even the United States could invade Europe across three thousand miles of ocean. So you see, dear, the old country will come in handy as an airfield, and jumping-off base, if only we can hold out long enough. But there will be a terrible battle now that the enemy have all the coastal areas across the Channel, and England is in range for all their fighters and bombers. So we hope it won’t take too long for your gallant band of interventionists to succeed, and shut up Lindbergh and people like him who are telling you to stay at home and not get involved. Such an odd line of thinking for a public hero, I think, although perhaps the poor man was unhinged by having his baby kidnapped in that horrible manner.

  Talking of babies, we have a visit in prospect next weekend from all the grandchildren at Talboys, and I am cutting up a lovely old lace counterpane to make a wedding veil for a friend of Harriet’s. It’s eighteenth century – the counterpane, that is – but be bothered to that, there is a good deal of fun to be had in make do and mend! I really don’t think we appreciated things half so much when we could just go out and buy them. And Franklin tells me that Gone with the Wind has reached Duke’s Denver, and will be showing in the little local cinema next week, which will give us all a treat and take us out of ourselves. So you see, we are keeping cheerful, and getting on with things as best we can. Don’t worry about us, Cornelia, the best thing you can do for us is go and throw eggs at your pacifists!

  My best love to you and Lambert, and, of course, to John and Margaret and Junior.

  Your affectionate old friend,

  Honoria Denver

  PS: Can your food parcel really include home-made jelly? However did you wrap it up?

  Author’s Note

  From November 1939 to January 1940 Dorothy L. Sayers made a series of contributions to the Spectator magazine, consisting of mock letters to and from various members of the Wimsey family, about war-time conditions like blackout, evacuation, rationing, and the need for the public to take personal responsibility: ‘They must not continually ask for leadership – they must lead themselves.’

  These contributions, usually now referred to as ‘The Wimsey Papers’ in effect lay out the characters in the crime novels like pieces on a chess board during the opening moves of a game. They tell us where everyone was. Lord Peter was somewhere abroad, on a secret mission under the direction of the Foreign Office; Bunter was with him; Harriet had taken her own children and those of her sister-in-law to the country, the loathed Helen, Duchess of Denver had joined the Ministry of Instruction and Morale, etc. etc.

  The Wimsey Papers are almost, but not quite, the latest information that Dorothy L Sayers provided about her characters. There is also a short story called ‘Talboys’, contained in the volume ‘Striding Folly’ which shows Peter and Harriet and their children living in their country farmhouse peacefully together, and which must refer to 1942.

  The Wimsey Papers are not fiction, and were not intended to be read in a continuous chunk. Some of them are about details of war-time history that would now require extensive footnotes in explication. But they do afford an authoritative foothold for an account of the Wimsey family in 1940. I have opened this novel with a selection from them, and incorporated insights and information from them in the narrative where I could.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Mr Bruce Hunter and the trustees of Anthony Fleming for entrusting to me the continuation of the lives of Lord Peter, Harriet Vane, and their family and friends.

  I gratefully acknowledge the indispensable help of Dr Barbara Reynolds, president of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society; the friendly assistance of Mr Christopher Dean, chairman of that society; and of Mr P.J.V. Elliot of the Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon. I thank Mr Christopher Reeves and Mr John Lambert for finding for me a copy of Norwegian
Patrol by Gron Edwards; Mr John Turner and Mr John Romain for ensuring that I could understand a pilot’s-eye view of a Spitfire; Mr Christopher Tanous, for arranging a visit to Chicksands; Mr Malcolm Bishop and Ms Edna Robertson for information about dentistry; and Mr Peter Welton, master butcher with a long memory; Ms Carolyn Caughey, and Ms Hope Dellon for their capable editorial advice, and help received as always and in everything from John Rowe Townsend.

  I have been greatly helped and encouraged along the way by the members of the Harriet Vane internet chat-group.

  Finally I would like to thank my parents and grandparents, long after the event, who in my tender years protected me from the times I was living in, and gave me a happy and insouciant early childhood. Reading for this book has engendered in me an immense respect for the courage and sang-froid of those who had to live through those years with adult apprehension of death and danger and adult understanding of what was at stake.

  Permissions

  Lines from Tommy by Rudyard Kipling on page 20 are quoted by kind permission of A.P. Watt Ltd on behalf of the National Trust for Places of Historical Interest or Natural Beauty.

  Song lines on pages 22/3 quoted by kind permission of Johnny Greenbay & the Dancehall Flourishers.

  Extract from The Diaries of Virginia Woolf on page 61 published by Hogarth Press. Used by permission of the executors of the Virginia Woolf Estate and the Random House Group Ltd.

  Lines from ‘Invitation au Festin’ by Aelfrida Tillyard on page 83 from The Garden and the Fire, published 1916 by Heffer, Cambridge.

  Extract from The Tale of Pigling Bland by Beatrix Potter on page 199, Copyright © Frederick Warne & Co., 1913. Reproduced by permission of Frederick Warne & Co.

  Poem XL from A Shropshire Lad on page 299 by permission of the Society of Authors as the literary representatives of the estate of A.E. Housman.