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

intense had suffused that moment that it was unbearable both to those it excluded and to those it included and enclosed. Once in a lifetime would be enough for such a moment.
    Harriet’s reverie was broken as she turned into the home-stretch towards Talboys by finding Polly waiting for her, swinging on the gate. Polly was a pretty child, much more Wimsey than Parker, with her mother’s fair hair and china-blue eyes, and would-be-firm expression, quite unlike her father’s broad-browed, dark-haired appearance. She was teetering on the brink between baby-childhood and child-childhood. And she was a new experience for Harriet, who couldn’t help noticing, although she tried not to, that Charles and Mary’s daughter had a line to her understanding not available to her own sons. Daughters are different, evidently.
    ‘Aunt Harriet, couldn’t you help Charlie with his crystal set? Couldn’t you really?’
    ‘Has it gone wrong again?’ asked Harriet. ‘Bother! Well, I’ll try, but I’m more likely to make it worse than better I’m afraid.’
    ‘He gets so upset,’ offered Polly, ‘and he isn’t any fun when he’s upset. We want to look for mushrooms in the wood, and Sadie says we can’t go unless Charlie will come to look after us, and Charlie . . .’
    ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Harriet.
    It turned out that she couldn’t do anything with the receiver, because it had mysteriously righted itself by the time she got to it. And of course, she realised, if Charlie was tuning in to the Home Service, that could explain why Bredon knew about bomb damage. Should she confiscate the set? What grief she would inflict, if she did such a thing as that. No. Should she try to make sure that Charlie didn’t play the scary bits of news to the younger children? But did they realise what was scary? Could they possibly realise how serious the situation was? Probably it would be more frightening if she tried to prevent them from listening than if she left well alone.
    All the same she tried to offer a bit of moral support. ‘Are you listening to much news, Charlie?’ she asked him.
    ‘Not much,’ he said. ‘Only about once a day.’
    ‘You know we are going to win this war, Charlie, however grim the news might be on a given day.’
    ‘I know,’ he said serenely.
    She had come as near to lying to him as a hair’s breadth, though. The trouble with living with children wasn’t what she had thought it would be. They were on the whole as interesting to her as a group of adults; she wasn’t in the least bored with them, although one could see that if one had no helping hands and could never get an uninterrupted moment for oneself it would be very wearing. But they were liable to present one without any warning at all with acute moral dilemmas, like a fatal cosmic game in which the stake was one’s integrity – not truth or dare, but truth or comfort, like this chat with Charlie; justice for all or protection for the weakest, like the other day when Bredon had retaliated against baby Paul throwing bricks.
    At least she could look forward to the weekend, when the Parker children could present their moral challenges to their own parents for a couple of days.
    Harriet’s visit to Miss Twitterton proved surprising. Miss Twitterton was in the kitchen of her little cottage, carefully weighing out grain into brown paper bags.
    ‘I used to give them more than this each day,’ she said sorrowfully to Harriet, ‘but now the grain is short . . . I don’t know what I shall do, Lady Peter, when they go off laying, unless we can have our egg rations back when that happens. Mrs Ruddle says we should give up keeping them, that the game won’t be worth the candle by the time the Ministry of Food has tied us all up in knots, but I can’t do without my bantams, eggs or no eggs. I’m used to having them, and they’re company for me.’
    ‘I brought you a little bacon to go with some of those eggs,’ said Harriet. ‘Mrs