Author's Note: reading about Dorothy L Sayers' friendship with Muriel St Clare Byrne and her partner Marjorie Barber, who are reflected in Harriet's friends Eiluned and Sylvia, I wondered about how it might have felt to be a lesbian woman in the lower middle-class provinces, where bohemian flouting of convention is hard to come by. I've also got quite fond of the character of Charles's sister Dulcie (of whom of course the books say almost nothing after Clouds of Witness, so that even the name is my fabrication) and wanted her to have her own quiet happy ending.
Charles Parker had a long and weary train journey up north through county after county of England. Although his train had left London shortly after lunch, it was past ten o' clock before he arrived in Barrow-in-Furness. He walked mechanically up through the nearly black streets, illuminated only by intermittent and not very clean gas lamps, his feet automatically following the path to his mother's house that he had travelled so many countless times before, and let himself in at the front door.
Lady Mary heard the click of his key from the upstairs bedroom where she sat by the window overlooking the little plot of land so narrow and insubstantial that it would never have occurred to her to call it a garden. She heard the much-missed sound of her husband's voice, strong and gentle, and the cracking and confused voice that was now her mother-in-law's. With a great deal of self-discipline she resisted the desire to run down and throw herself into her husband's arms, as the voices rumbled on in quiet conversation, with Mrs Parker's becoming calmer and softer as it went on. Almost an hour had passed before Mary was roused from the uneasy slumber she had fallen into, despite the discomfort of the hard straight-backed chair, by the sound of Charles coming as quietly as he could up the stairs. He pushed open the door with a quietness that was testament to the many occasions in his professional life when stealth had been de rigeur, and started slightly to see his wife still up and dressed.
"Dearest," he said quietly, "I'd expected to find you asleep. I would have come straight up if I'd-"
Mary rose sleepily, walked over to him and their arms slid neatly around each other in an automatic gesture born of long usage. "Of course I shouldn't have wanted you to come straight up. How did you find her?"
"Well, very much as you described in your letter. Extremely vague one minute and disconcertingly sharp the next. I believe she thought I was my father for quite a lot of the conversation."
"Yes. She quite often thinks Charlie is you. It's so lucky that this has coincided with his deciding he won't be called Peterkin anymore, because he doesn't mind a bit when she calls him Charles. She doesn't seem quite to know what to make of me or Polly half the time; I suppose Polly is much too fair and delicate to resemble a young Dulcie. But I think it was right to bring them. She seems glad when she looks at them."
"How's it been for the kids? And for you, Mary?"
"Oh, well," Mary gestured vaguely to indicate all the difficulties of looking after the children on her own in a house with hardly any room and only the toys they had been able to bring with them on the train, and the pressing need for them to not be too loud or boisterous inside during a period of endless cold rain whilst also trying to be of some practical assistance, "but Jack has been marvellous, he's taken them down to the dockyard every morning and Charlie's simply enraptured by it all. He says he likes submarines even better than aeroplanes now. And Dulcie's friend Mabel has been here an awful lot and helps with them enormously."
"Oh yes. Mabel. They were at school together and as neither of them ever married I suppose it's natural that they're such firm friends. Thank God for it. This will hit Dulcie very hard, when it comes."
"Yes." There was a silence and Charles rested his chin on the top of his wife's head. "Dulcie woke up whilst I was settling mother and we had a brief chat in the kitchen. She told me the doctor said it could be any day now."
Mary held on even tighter to her husband, as though by so doing she could somehow fortify him for what was to come. He leaned back a little and looked down at her.
"She also that you've done nothing but cook and make tea and wash up for a fortnight, when you're not with the children, or caring for mother when Dulcie's been resting."
"Of course. It's a blessing to be able to do something. And I did nursing during the war, remember. I'm not intimidated by bedpans and those sorts of things."
"My darling, darling Mary," was all Charles could say before he kissed her. He was tired from worry and overwork and deeply grieving the loss of his mother, which was already underway and of which death would only be the final step. His grief and relief and his love and gratitude for his wife and all her glorious unlikely virtues jumbled together into a frantic energy and he fell upon her with a wildness more reminiscent of the early days of their marriage than of the familiar tenderness which had characterised their lovemaking in recent months and years. Mary staggered under the force of his passion, and he held her firmly as she returned his kisses with almost as much force. They undressed with urgent abandon and tumbled in a desperate tangle of desire onto the bed.
Afterwards, Mary lay with her head on Charles's chest and she began to weep. With physical release had come a sudden overwhelming cascade of the unacknowledged strains of the past two weeks and her own useless pain in the face of Charles's grief. He stroked her hair and kissed the top of her head but he could not speak.
"I'm so sorry, Charles," she managed at last. "I didn't mean - I should be comforting you, not the other way around."
His voice was barely audible as he replied, "Dearest Mary. Don't you see that you are?"
They were awake long into the night, and when they awoke in the morning Mrs Parker was dead.
In the end the funeral was not a despondent affair. There was a weak sun that day, and Mary was grateful for the light it gave more than the negligible warmth. She sat with Dulcie in the front of the church and Charles was fortified by the sight of his wife's calm beauty, more glacial than ever in her black mourning clothes, as he and his cousins carried the coffin down to the altar. Mrs Parker's life had been long and useful, and she had died in faithfulness. The shock of his mother's death over, Charles had characteristically rolled up his sleeves, physically and metaphorically, and got on with what needed to be done to organise things without thinking much of how he himself felt.
Mary and Dulcie walked quickly through the narrow streets lined with close, dark grey houses, back to the house to get things ready for the friends and family - a small number but far more than the house could comfortably fit - who were coming back for somber sandwiches and sherry as custom required. Having to walk briskly uphill meant that they couldn't look each other in the eye, and it made it easier for Mary to say the things she had been worrying over to her sister-in-law.
"Dulcie, when things have settled down and you've had the chance to think, Charles and I were wondering - that is, we were very much hoping - that you might like to come to London to make your home with us."
Mary and Dulcie had always got on well, and over the past fortnight there had been the camaraderie born of accomplishing together an important task in difficult circumstances. But there was a natural reserve on both sides, and the two had had too little in common to bridge the distance. The advent of the children and Mary's harassed but abiding joy in them had if anything estranged her further from the woman whose own life had been so very different.
"Of course your mother left you the house, and Charles would naturally be more than happy to carry on sending the money that he always has. But we thought perhaps that there wouldn't be so very much for you here now. There's a lovely room - not the spare room you've stayed in before, but a large one on the bottom floor that used to be Charles's before we were married. We could easily make it back into a bedroom and it would be quite private. Not so close to the children, anyway. And there's plenty of space in the sitting room for a lot of your own things, if you'd like that."
Mary was flushing now, and not only from the brisk uphill walk in the cold air. She said the next part quite quickly.
"Charles would have spoken to you, of course, but we - I wanted to do it myself so that you should know how very glad we would both be."
Mary's claims to actively want her slightly stern sister-in-law to live with them were not strictly true. She loved being mistress of the modest domain she had made with Charles and which they had hallowed with love, pain and laughter, and she could not relish the prospect of any interference in the running of things nor in the way she brought up her children. Her heart particularly sank at the idea of any of Dulcie's possessions disrupting the comfortable but careful interior design scheme of the home she loved so well. But she was acutely conscious that had Charles remained unmarried, as he had done for so long, it would have been almost inevitable that his spinster sister come and keep house for him. She sometimes wondered whether Dulcie might have remained unmarried partly in the expectation of that prospect. She accepted that to make the offer was Charles's duty, and therefore naturally also hers, and had resolved to do the thing with as much grace as possible. It had been she who had first suggested it to Charles and she felt that the relief on his weary face then was ample advance payment for any disadvantages that the arrangement might entail.
Dulcie's response, when at last it came, was not what Mary had expected.
"My mother was very fond of you, you know, Mary. She often said it was close to idolatry, the way Charles worships you, and no proper way for a man to love anyone but God. She feared for his soul but she always said that it wasn't your fault he'd lost his wits, and that she couldn't have wished for a better wife for him."
Mary smiled. Her relationship with her mother-in-law, once Mrs Parker's first distrust of somebody so ornamental and so interested in being ornamental had been dispelled, had been one of mutual respect and affection. Mrs Parker had taken great pleasure in responding in detail to Mary's letters with questions about knitting patterns and remedies for teething, and still more in the obvious unending happiness that her son's marriage had brought him.
"But Charles's isn't the only way of love," Dulcie carried on. She walked a little more quickly. "It's very good of you both, but this is my home. I don't want to leave it, not at my time of life. I plan to sell the house and live with my friend Mabel. I've always planned to do that, when the time came. We've planned it for years."
Dulcie wasn't looking at her, but all the same Mary fought hard not to let her face betray her profound relief. "Oh! Well, I can see that you have your friends and relations here, of course. And London is so very far away."
"Yes. And ever since we were sixteen Mabel and I have said we'd live together, when we could." Dulcie added this firmly, and met Mary's eyes briefly as they turned into the street where the Parkers' house stood.
"Oh," said Mary again, slightly uncertainly. "I see." She wondered whether she did. "Is - is that why you never married?" Mary's personal experience was that marriage to a good man was so optimal a state that any woman who seemed to have chosen to avoid it represented a deep mystery. Although, as she often reflected, there were not many men like Charles.
"Well, it's perhaps why I never got anywhere near the stage of ever being asked," Dulcie said, with the first smile Mary had seen on her face in three weeks. Mary nodded.
"After Charles and I started going about together a bit, it became clear to me that I could never stand any man but him to touch me. Even though it seemed at that point as though Charles never would", she said, still not quite sure whether they were talking about the same thing.
"Yes," Dulcie confirmed. "I knew from the age of twelve that I couldn't stand marriage at any price."
"Goodness," Mary said, inadequately. The five years she had waited for Charles paled into insignificance compared to the time Dulcie and Mabel had apparently waited for a time when, both free from any other sorts of obligations, society would smile upon two spinsters making a home together.
She looked at Dulcie at last. "I hope you'll be terribly happy," she said. "And that you'll both visit us in London very often." Dulcie smiled, and they went into the house.
Charles and Mary took the children out for a walk whilst guests were still drinking tea and affectionately telling each other stories about the late Mrs Parker, all of which everyone had already heard before. Charles could see that the reminiscences served a ritualistic purpose, but also that the children were bursting with pent up energy and could hardly be sent out to play football and skip in the garden under the circumstances. He gathered them up and moved over to where Mary was patiently listening to a story his cousin David was telling her for the fourth time. "They've had as much as they can stick. I'll take them for a run down to the playing fields," he murmured into her ear, lingering as always ever so slightly longer than necessary with his hand at her waist. She turned to look at him and he added, "Can you come too? I think Polly wants you." She excused herself graciously from the circle of relations and slipped out with a child holding each hand.
As the children clattered down the pavements, whooping with the silliness of relief, Mary put her arm comfortably through Charles's and asked "Did Polly really want me to come?"
Charles laughed. "She didn't say so. I think she'd have gone for a walk with - who are those animal characters she's so frightened of? Mr Todd and Tommy Brock - if it meant she could get out of that room. But I couldn't see how else to get you out of there." Charles always kept a particular eye on his David, whose admiration for his cousin's wife was a little too warm for Charles's liking, but more importantly, he had felt that perhaps Mary had been kind and helpful enough for one day. "And I wanted you myself."
Mary smiled up at him. "Well, I'm glad to hear it. I was afraid that she had another barrage of theological questions for me. I've only just recovered from having to explain that our bodies don't disappear from the earth when we die and wake up in heaven."
"It's quite a natural conclusion for a child to have drawn. And really it would be a neater arrangement," Charles said, fairly. Where Charlie was practical and apparently robust, Polly was imaginative and easily upset. "She's been very worried about it all. Anyhow, they've both been very good, but it will be easier for Dulcie to clear away without them under her feet. Mabel can help, too - she seems to be staying, still."
"Yes," said Mary, and then she recounted the conversation she and Dulcie had had after the funeral. It was impossible not to see the relief on Charles's face when he learned of his sister's plans, although his affection for her was very genuine, and Mary smiled too.
"Charles, did you know that Dulcie and Mabel were - that they felt like that about each other?" He didn't respond at once, and Mary wondered whether he had understood by the information all that she thought it conveyed, or whether his firm but quite conventional morality would cause him to simply disbelieve it.
"Well, I did rather wonder once or twice. It seems quite a suitable set-up for them." He looked at her and grinned. "Besides, Mary, there are only so many truly exemplary husbands to go around."
Mary laughed and was on the point of making an affectionately cutting reply, quite as though she herself didn't have that exact same thought several times a week, when Polly circled back to them and demanded to be carried. Judging that the request resulted rather from a need for reassurance at an unsettling time than from laziness, Charles swung his small daughter onto his shoulders, and the family carried on, noisily and happily, through the half-light of the dwindling afternoon down towards the playing fields.