A Presumption of Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, Jill Paton Walsh Page B

with my aunt by marriage, I would have been taken for a ride myself.’
    ‘But it’s funny how often, when the murder victim is a woman, it turns out to have been mostly her fault. She was too cold, or too enticing, or flirtatious or chilly, but somehow . . .’
    ‘She is made out to deserve her fate. I see what you mean. It’s very unfair to the fairer sex. And the dead can’t defend themselves. Just the same, take care.’
    ‘I might rather say the same to you. If fighter pilots can take care.’
    ‘I can take care that if I go down I’ll take one of the bastards with me. You can be sure of that.’
    ‘Come back alive. Or you’ll break your father’s heart.’
    ‘Not really. It’s not me he’s so sold on, it’s an heir. Now if I would break your heart, that would be an inducement.’
    ‘Jerry, don’t you ever stop fooling? Of course I would grieve for you, deeply; but I’d rather have you living, and giving me cheek.’
    ‘Alive or dead, I’m breaking my father’s heart, you know,’ he said, suddenly sombre. ‘If I inherit the title and the land and all that, I shall sell it all at once, and set myself up in a nice bachelor flat in West One.’
    ‘So you think now. You might surprise yourself.’
    ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, flushing slightly, and looking at his watch. ‘Kiss me goodbye?’
    Harriet kissed him on both cheeks, and watched him run away, swinging his case into the passenger seat of his sports car, and roaring off down the drive.
    ‘Oh, Jerry,’ she said softly to herself, sighing.
    Three
     
     
     
     
     
    We’re being led to the altar this spring: its flowers
    will I suppose nod and yellow and redden the garden
    with the bombs falling – oh, it’s a queer sense of
    suspense being led up to the spring of 1940.
    Virginia Woolf, Diary , 8 th February, 1940
    Harriet spent Tuesday morning at the Vicarage, helping Mrs Goodacre. The Vicarage was even more crowded than Talboys, since the Goodacres had taken in an assorted crew of refugees, ranging from three Czechs of Jewish descent to a Polish chicken-farmer who was trying to enlist in the air force or the army and lying robustly about his age. The Pole was busy in the kitchen when Harriet arrived, expertly plucking a fowl and putting the feathers in a sack.
    ‘Jan is very good at cooking,’ Mrs Goodacre told her visitor. ‘Although he would rather be fighting, if we would let him.’
    ‘How old I look?’ Jan asked Harriet.
    She contemplated him. His round and friendly face was not heavily lined, except on smile lines, but his hair was greying.
    ‘Forty?’ she guessed. ‘Forty-five?’
    ‘Is fifty,’ he said sorrowfully. ‘They say no good for army. Less good even for air force.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Harriet, as though she had herself formulated the policy. ‘But surely they will find you something else to do. Some sort of war work.’
    ‘Farm work is all,’ he said.
    ‘Cheer up,’ said Harriet. ‘Food is a munition of war, they keep telling us.’
    The vicar’s wife had undertaken the contentious task of billeting officer for Paggleham, and was organising visits of inspection to every family that had taken in evacuees. Many of them had been taken home again by their London families, for a variety of reasons. Now Mrs Goodacre needed an up-to-date survey of who had still got their evacuees, who had now got spare rooms, who was willing and who would be difficult when the next wave of displaced mothers and children had to be accommodated. It was all too clear that any German advance across northern France would bring bomber bases ever nearer English targets, and as soon as the long feared and awaited attacks on cities began, it was very likely that the evacuees would be back in the countryside in large numbers.
    Mrs Goodacre settled down with Harriet at her kitchen table, and sorted out a bunch of cards from her index of families and addresses. She gave Harriet nine cards to direct her part of the task.