A Presumption of Death (36 page)

‘We were trying to write it down, dah didit dah dah didit,’ said Charlie, ‘but it was too fast for us. The book said don’t write down dah didits, just listen and learn the shape of the letters, and then you would be able to hear sentences and write those down. But we couldn’t, because it didn’t make sentences.’

‘It would have been in code?’

‘Must of been. So we had to write down the letters and try to break the code later.’

‘I see. So let me have a look at what you’ve got.’ Peter spread out Charlie’s jottings on the piano top, and he and Bunter looked at them together.

‘This is certainly a bit obscure,’ said Peter. But Charlie, having once got launched into his story, was now talking eagerly on.

‘We got another book that said if you wound the aerial round a shoe box or something, and turned it round and round you could find the direction the messages were coming from. When they were loudest, you were pointing straight at them.’

‘So where were they coming from?’

‘From the village. Somewhere by the church,’ said Charlie. ‘It was quite close. That’s why it cut across the National Service.’

The three adults in the room were hanging on his every word. ‘So Sam said, we’d got to crack this code and find out who is sending it. And then it stopped. Suddenly we can get Henry Hall and the BBC dance orchestra all the time, and no dahdidits at all. And we just can’t understand these letters we wrote down. And when the bomb came I was scared, Uncle Peter, and so I’ve told you, whatever Sam says. He’ll be cross,’ added Charlie sorrowfully, ‘and he’s my best friend ever.’

‘When do you reckon it stopped, Charlie?’ asked Harriet.

‘About three weeks ago. We did wonder if it was a black-marketer. About that unlicensed pig. It went away round about then.’

‘Did it, by God?’ said Peter.

‘If I may say so, my lord,’ said Bunter, ‘these letters look odd to me. I think they must be a substitution code – not enough Es for English, and too many Zs.’

‘It’s scrambled German, I think, Bunter,’ said Peter. ‘But I think there’s enough of it to give our wizards a chance at cracking it. However did you have the patience to write down so much of it, Charlie? Weren’t you bored?’

‘It was exciting when we thought it was spies,’ said Charlie. ‘But it was boring too. I didn’t know things could be boring
and
exciting,’ he added plaintively. ‘We took turns.’

‘Look, Charlie, I’m going to have to tell somebody else about this. May I have your permission?’

Charlie nodded. Peter went to the telephone in the hall, leaving the door ajar, and they heard his voice pitched excitedly. ‘Bungo, I think I’ve got something for you. You won’t guess what in a hundred years . . . an intercept. My nephew and his friend. He’s ten. Yes, yes, ten years old. Okay, you’re the boss.’

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:

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

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.