A Presumption of Death (16 page)

One hundred and twenty-one words. She looked, rapidly. Yes, there was no number higher than 121 in the cipher. She began to decrypt it:

78 17 38 104 75 – uhrsl

3 91 87 106 49 – atbwi

114 17 83 49 10 – shpif

She looked at the result in despair. However she shuffled these letters, however she ran them together to re-divide them into words, they didn’t make sense. This wasn’t, after all, the key? Or the coding method wasn’t what Bungo had described? Should she ask him for help? Wait – he had said, hadn’t he? you used the first or the last or the second or third letter, etc. What if the letter being used was not after all the first of the word? What about the last? She tried again.

78 17 38 104 75 – tesee

3 91 87 106 49 – ttdwn

This wasn’t coming out any better. She stared angrily at the jumble. The only set of letters that looked at all like the shape of a word was that one: tesee. Of course there was no certainty that the numbers were the actual words; they had been re-arranged in groups of five throughout. She was about to move on when a thought struck her: she could think of one common five-letter word in the English language which ended in double e – three. Could she have transcribed the second and the third letters wrongly? She looked again and it jumped out at her: the last letter of word 17 was e, but the first letter was h; the last letter of word 38 was s, but the first letter was r – presto! She had the word ‘three’ using a combination of first and last letters, and she saw at once that the first letters were in the first and the last letters were in the second and last stanza.

She began to work with furious concentration: ‘three and eight if possible’. Well, it clearly wasn’t possible for that to be a coincidence – she had cracked it. ‘If not H should read letter in top right bureau drawer. Three blind mice.’

Whatever was that doing? Oh, of course, the Wimsey Arms, three mice courant. That was the end of the message then, and it would move on to the beginning. In fifteen minutes she had it.

Mission accomplished. Proposal accepted. Danger now great. Will come home by plans three and eight if possible. If not H to read letter in top right bureau drawer. Three blind mice.

She wrote it out carefully, as legibly as her energetic handwriting would permit, and carried it downstairs to find Bungo. He was sitting in the drawing-room with a tea tray on a table in front of him, and a large piece of Mrs Trapp’s cake on a little Royal Derby plate. ‘He came to the party, and ate just as heartily as if he’d been really invited, Harriet thought; but why be so hard on him? She must try not to shoot the messenger. She held the paper out to him.

He jumped up and took it, and scanned it rapidly. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said.

‘Is it very bad?’ she asked him.

‘Well, they’re coming home separately,’ he answered. ‘Look, may I check this?’

‘It was a private thing,’ she said obstinately. ‘You’ll have to trust me.’ He hesitated and she said, ‘If Peter can trust me for his life, surely you can.’

He folded the paper into his breast pocket, and said, ‘Well, I’d better rush. Plans three and eight will need initiating.’

‘Of course. Do you need a lift to the station at Paggleford?’

‘I have my driver waiting in the lane,’ he said. ‘I’ll let you know if I can. If there’s anything. Thank you for tea. Oh, and – look, don’t worry too much. Old Wimbles has a habit of survival.’ And he was gone.

Harriet went slowly upstairs again, and moved as if hypnotised to the little dressing-room which contained Peter’s bureau. A large, handsomely veneered thing with a flap-down writing surface, and numerous drawers and secret drawers. She had never opened it, nor ever looked at anything of his that he kept shut away. But with a sense of trespass she opened it now. It was not locked. Her hand moved as if of itself to the top right drawer. It contained a letter in an envelope of thick laid paper, sealed with his distinctive dark red sealing wax, pressed with the signet ring he wore on the third finger of his right hand. He was not wearing the ring now; it was there in the drawer. Harriet took the letter, and went to sit quietly in the window seat holding it. Turning it over she saw it was addressed to:
Harriet, after my death, or presumed death
.

At once the urge to open it, the human curiosity, the aching need for words from him which must have been what led to this, to her having it in her hand, abruptly and totally left her. ‘I will presume no such thing,’ she said, aloud. ‘And this is not addressed to me. Because I am not who I would be after his death. I am not his widow, I am his wife.’ And with that thought came a kind of muted astonishment. She was Peter’s wife, she who had fought him off for so long, who had led him a pretty dance for all those years; what she would give now for even an hour or two of all that wasted time, in which she could have been with him, and would not! She could have settled, though it would have been on the wrong terms, and with that her mind jumped to the perilous state of the world. The country she was sitting in now, late, with the one lamp lighted in the room, and the owl hooting somewhere outside, this fortress built by nature for herself, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England could likewise settle, though it would be on the wrong terms. There wasn’t any doubt, really, about the need for the right terms, and so she should not harbour regrets.

And with wry amusement she remembered how appalling to her in prospect had been the wealth and privilege of being Peter’s wife, how she had withstood it, stiff-necked, how she might well have run off with him and seized their happiness at once if he had been a pauper, or any sort of under-dog, and how brief in the event had been the enjoyment of wealth and comfort, how swiftly the war was levelling everyone, casting down the mighty so that not even crowns and coronets got you more than four ounces of butter a week, and a large house with space and air meant you got strangers billeted on you, and an end of peace and privacy. She should have known it would be fool’s gold, all that status and luxury, so very much not what she was born for. She couldn’t blame life for taking her down a peg. And she didn’t mind, not
really
. The only thing she minded about all this was being parted from Peter, and fearing for his safety. Fearing for the safety of the children . . .

When he comes home, she thought, putting his letter unopened back in the bureau drawer, I shall never complain about any hardship. And it occurred to her then that her life had prepared her for the endurance of a fairly rough existence, for all the make do and mend going on round her, even for barely sufficient amounts to eat. It was Peter who would find the going tough. Peter who was used to the goose-feather bed . . . and then the thought corrected itself. Peter had taken with astonishing calm the disastrous first night in this very house, when the grates were cold, he had to wash under a cold pump, there had been only a scratch supper. What had that incredible man called Bungo just told her: ‘Wimbles has a habit of survival’? That would apply, presumably, in peace as well as war. She slipped Peter’s ring on to her own finger, closed the bureau, switched off the lamp in the dressing-room and went to her solitary bed.

John Milton,
Paradise Lost
, 1667

Everyone was being enjoined not to travel: ‘Is your journey really necessary?’ enquired government posters. And people were being told that visiting their displaced children wasn’t necessary, or not very often. But Harriet had a message from Mr Murbles, the family solicitor, asking her to call at her earliest convenience, so she intended to ignore the posters, dreamed up by someone in the Ministry of Instruction and Morale, if not Helen then someone just like her. There were a number of small errands that she could do on the same trip: several books she needed, a little work-box that Mrs Trapp had left in the housekeeper’s room in the London house, and would be glad to have again, and she had arranged to have lunch with her old friend Eiluned Price. She was looking forward to the trip, she thought. And yet she wasn’t quite. It was one thing to have got used to the absence of her husband at Talboys. Experiencing his absence in the London house would be another thing. So she had hedged the visit to the house all about with Eiluned and Hatchard’s, in case it pained her.

She noticed with a sort of detached interest that these days she had to manage her emotions as though they were a dog that might bite, or a turbulent child. She used to have to do that, long ago, before she married Peter. She had had a lot of practice in a troubled life. But marriage had left her unaccustomed to it, and she was relearning something. No doubt she would manage London. She loved London as only those brought up in a village can love it, taking nothing about it for granted. She was getting a very early train from Great Paggleham.

The train was packed with men and women in uniform, or with the ubiquitous armbands – WAS, HDV, WRVS, ARW – which stood in for uniform. Kit-bags and gas-mask cases in the luggage racks loomed dangerously above people’s heads. The windows were dirty, and the modestly beautiful Hertfordshire landscape rolled past unseen. A shower of rain washed the glass enough for Harriet to see Hackney Marshes as the train approached Liverpool Street. Harriet thought she should leave taxis for those with urgent business, so she thrust her way through the crowd and got on a bus to the solicitor’s office.

The bus too was crowded, and the windows were covered in a mesh of scrim with only a little diamond left in the middle to help you peer out and see where you were. Harriet peered. She saw the sandbagged shop-fronts, the queues at bakers’ shops, the air-raid wardens’ posts that had sprung up on every corner, the window glass crisscrossed with tape, or boarded up. The city had a sombre and businesslike air, bracing itself for the ordeal to come. Her bus swung round Piccadilly Circus, round the swathed plinth minus its Eros, and up Regent Street, past the Café Royal. A crowd of ball-gowned girls and men in evening dress were emerging on the pavement, blinking at the bright morning.

‘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.