Prostration
Wimseyfic. A sequel to Jam (though before Fluff).
"Take me dancing, Peter!" said Harriet.
"Why this sudden desire for frivolity?" he asked. "Do you by chance have a new frock to show me?"
"How did you guess," she replied, smiling.
They were sitting on Harriet’s squashy old sofa, her feet in his lap, drinking tea. Peter had returned from the visit to his mother, and he had called to see her on her invitation.
His face lit up as she emerged from the bedroom in the new garment. It had cost her some effort to gather the coupons, but the result had been very satisfying. While not the precise shade of the Wilvercombe frock, it was very close. She twirled around to give him a better view.
“Darling, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea to see you dance in that frock.”
“Idiot,” said Harriet, as she pulled him to his feet, charmed that he remembered, and pleased that the frock had had the desired effect.
Later as they revolved smoothly to the strains of 'Round Midnight she whispered in his ear that she loved him, and his arms tightened around her.
***
Harriet was busy that summer. Her publisher, anticipating an end to paper shortages, was anxious to have a new Harriet Vane title to announce for an expanded print run in the autumn. The new book was set in Yorkshire, and she was out of Town a good deal while researching it.
She encouraged Peter to join her on some of these trips, but he always found some excuse. She did not press him, as she suspected him of wanting to spare her any embarrassment attendant upon travelling together, unmarried. They had not discussed marriage, but it was understood that they would have to wait for some months for his death certificate to be rescinded.
By now, Peter was living in the Piccadilly flat, alone but for a daily cleaning service. He seemed to deal smoothly with the basics of independent life, for which Harriet was thankful. She remembered her own struggles in the year after her imprisonment, and understood the effort that it took.
This effort was complicated by the legal and financial tangle he found himself in. Forty percent of his estate had been eaten up by death duties, and not having been formally a member of the armed forces at the time of his supposed death, these monies were forfeit. The remainder had been divided between Lord Saint-George, and a trust for his great-nephews. In a few short years Saint-George appeared to have dissipated most of his portion. Peter was distressed at the financial implications for his great-nephews of unwinding the trust, but navigated his way between guilt and a feeling that he could not possibly be a worse steward than his nephew.
Meanwhile, although still officially a non-person, he was being fought over by various different branches of military intelligence all of whom wanted the benefit of his expertise as an investigator and a former POW in preparing for proposed trials for war crimes in Germany. Harriet knew he was anxious to get back to work, but she anticipated that the work itself would be upsetting, and she worried that the government mandarins did not have Peter's best interests at heart.
There were other cross currents too, about which he did not confide in Harriet. From the tenor of his dreams, she suspected that these were linked to the outfit that had sent him to Dieppe, and something that had happened there. But he never mentioned this in his waking hours.
When she was in Town, they saw each other frequently. Peter was an entertaining dinner companion, seeing the humour in his anomalous position, and making her laugh with tales of Kafkaesque red tape. He put himself at her disposal for trips to the theatre, the cinema, and dancing. He frequently accompanied her back to Mecklenburgh Square after these outings, and they savoured lazy Sunday mornings in bed with the newspapers. Harriet went so far as to ask him to bring his own dressing-gown, so he would stop robbing hers. Ever the considerate gentleman, he immediately complied.
These quiet moments above all seemed to satisfy a hunger that he had for normality. But as the summer wore on, Harriet had the increasing impression that Peter was like an elastic band that was being stretched every day further towards breaking point. Usually infinitely considerate in bed, he was now more and more frequently possessed by fits of exigent and exhausting passion, which alarmed her not only by their reckless abandonment, but by being apparently automatic, and almost impersonal. She welcomed these episodes to some extent, because instead of dreaming, he would sleep afterwards as though stunned. But with each of these, she found him more firmly entrenched behind some kind of protective fortification, and herself becoming less and less a person to him.
Harriet wondered unhappily whether she had made a mistake in rekindling the relationship. Being preposterously fond of a person did not mean that one was good for him, or indeed the reverse. Clearly the man needed medical help, but she worried that it would wound his fragile pride terribly if she were to say this to him. She wrote to Peter's mother for counsel. The Duchess's reply, ranging over a variety of subjects, was not very satisfying. It amounted to saying "Let him find his own way out," which did not seem to Harriet like a very proactive response to a mind clearly traumatized by war. But from day to day, she postponed speaking up, hoping against hope that things would get better.
One evening, Peter did not turn up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment. Accustomed to his scrupulous punctuality, her stomach tightened with worry. She used the restaurant telephone to dial his flat, but the bell rang on and on without an answer. With a feeling of foreboding, she took a taxi to Piccadilly.
As she entered the building, she could hear the strains of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony wafting down the stairs. She galloped up, taking the stairs two at a time. The front door of the flat was ajar and the music blasted from inside. She followed it to the library. In the light falling from the open door, she could see Peter hunched up on the sofa in the darkness, head in his hands, rocking back and forth. She moved quickly to lift the needle from the gramophone record, and in the sudden stillness, sat down beside him and put her arms around him. Though the night was warm, he shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering.
"Peter, dearest" she said softly, "Did something happen?"
He looked at her, eyes wide and staring, and shook his head mutely, continuing to rock. She put her hand to his forehead. He had a temperature. With a feeling of rising panic, she wondered what to do.
In her mind's eye, she could see Bunter opening the door of the flat and taking charge of a shivering Peter with smooth confidence. Should she call Bunter? No. Too much history there. What about a doctor? That was probably what he needed, but whom? Peter had mentioned an army psychiatrist, but she did not really feel competent to deal with Military Intelligence. What about Peter's mother? Too far away, and not really competent to deal with this current crisis. Then she remembered that Peter had mentioned his sister had picked him up from the transit camp. That was it. Lady Mary was married to Deputy Commissioner Parker, formerly Chief Inspector Parker, who had investigated the case in which Harriet had been accused of murder. It should be straightforward to run the Deputy Commissioner down through Scotland Yard.
After she had helped Peter to bed, and tucked him up with a hot water bottle and an aspirin, she reached for the telephone. She found it an effort to keep her voice steady.
"Deputy Commissioner Parker? This is Harriet Vane speaking."
Parker sounded surprised, but polite. "Miss Vane, this is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?"
Harriet wasn't sure whether Peter had confided in his sister and brother-in-law about his current relations with her, but she didn't waste time with unnecessary explanations.
"It's about Peter Wimsey. I found him at his flat. He's taken a turn and seems really quite ill. I wasn’t sure whether to call a doctor. I thought I should tell his family, but I wasn't sure who to call... "
"You did well to call me," said Parker reassuringly. "I'll tell Mary, and we'll be there straight away."
She waited for them in the vestibule, so the bell would not disturb Peter.
“Oh, thank you for coming!” she said in relief as they mounted the stairs. Lady Mary was a pleasant, brisk sort of woman in her late forties, with a surprisingly strong family resemblance to her brother. She greeted Harriet while her husband hovered tentatively in the background. He was grayer than Harriet remembered, with thinning hair, and a moustache that drooped even more, giving his face a mournful look. His gaze however was warm and pleasant, and he too held out his hand.
Harriet motioned them to come inside.
“He’s in bed now,” she said, “He seems better, but perhaps you would care to check on him?” Lady Mary looked briefly back at her husband, then followed Harriet to the bedroom. Peter was curled in a ball on his side, trembling from time to time, but asleep. Lady Mary looked at him with affection and felt for his temperature. The fever seemed to have abated. She twitched the coverlet back over him where it had been tossed back, switched off the light, and they tiptoed out.
Back in the library, Parker was pacing around. He paused when his wife touched his arm.
“I don’t think he needs a doctor right away, but we need to talk.” said Lady Mary. She looked at Harriet with an experienced eye. “Let me make us some tea - I think you could use something after the shock.”
When the tea came, Harriet drank it thirstily, remembering suddenly that she had had no dinner. Thus fortified, she gave a brief explanation of what had happened. Husband and wife looked at each other. Clearly this was not unexpected.
"We've been afraid of this," said Lady Mary. "Peter... had a breakdown after the last war."
"He mentioned something like that," said Harriet.
"Interesting." said Lady Mary. "It's not something that he talks about much. Anyhow, it lasted about eighteen months. I don't mean he went out of his mind or anything, and he was always perfectly sweet about it. Only he was dreadfully afraid to go to sleep, and he couldn't make a decision or give an order... According to Mother, it used to happen again from time to time at the conclusion of a case, but that man of his, Bunter, always dealt with it. So when he first got back from Germany, we weren't at all sure that he should be living alone. But he refused to stay in the CRU, and he couldn't stand it at Duke's Denver with the family."
"Can't blame him there," muttered Parker under his breath.
"We've tried to keep an eye on him, but he always seems to be busy." Lady Mary looked at Harriet appraisingly. "You... Have you been seeing much of him these days?"
Harriet saw no point in making any pretense about it.
"He hasn't been completely alone. We are lovers, and I really thought when he was free to marry, we would do so. But..." Here she stalled and drew breath, her piercing feeling of responsibility for the current crisis like physical pain. "I have been thinking for some time that he needs medical help, maybe a psychiatrist, and I can't forgive myself for not having suggested it before this."
Mary got up and put her arm around Harriet, who to her embarrassment, found her eyes welling up. "It's not your fault. Peter has always been like this. It's that absurd pretence that one hasn't got any weaknesses, so silly, because we all have, only our father never would hear of it... I agree about the psychiatrist. But I'm not really sure that shock therapy or something like that would be good for him."
Parker cleared his throat diffidently. "Some of the men on the Force are recently discharged from the Army. I think they could help us identify the right person."
***
"My dear girl, I am most abjectly sorry," said Peter sheepishly.
He was sitting up in bed eating tea and muffins. Harriet perched on the side of the bed.
"From your appetite, I deduce that the patient is feeling better."
"Yes, rather," he said, with his mouth full of muffin.
She took a deep breath, and took his hand in hers. "I don't think you can go on like this, Peter. I don't think we can go on like this. And I would like us to go on."
He looked down at the coverlet and picked at it.
"I've made an appointment for you with a Dr Wilson at the Tavistock Clinic. I spoke with him at length. He seems like a reasonable sort of man. Very engaging on the topic of his research. You'd like him, I think. He can see you tomorrow morning.... Only if you want to, of course," she added.
"I hate behaving like this."
"I know. Then face the facts, and state a conclusion. Bring a scholar's mind to the problem and have done with it."
He looked up at her and managed the familiar sidelong smile.
"I believe you're quite right. Though I have a strong suspicion that I am being managed. If I weren't so full of muffin, I would object to it."
"Don't be an ass, Peter," said Harriet.
"Take me dancing, Peter!" said Harriet.
"Why this sudden desire for frivolity?" he asked. "Do you by chance have a new frock to show me?"
"How did you guess," she replied, smiling.
They were sitting on Harriet’s squashy old sofa, her feet in his lap, drinking tea. Peter had returned from the visit to his mother, and he had called to see her on her invitation.
His face lit up as she emerged from the bedroom in the new garment. It had cost her some effort to gather the coupons, but the result had been very satisfying. While not the precise shade of the Wilvercombe frock, it was very close. She twirled around to give him a better view.
“Darling, I would dance the sun and moon into the sea to see you dance in that frock.”
“Idiot,” said Harriet, as she pulled him to his feet, charmed that he remembered, and pleased that the frock had had the desired effect.
Later as they revolved smoothly to the strains of 'Round Midnight she whispered in his ear that she loved him, and his arms tightened around her.
***
Harriet was busy that summer. Her publisher, anticipating an end to paper shortages, was anxious to have a new Harriet Vane title to announce for an expanded print run in the autumn. The new book was set in Yorkshire, and she was out of Town a good deal while researching it.
She encouraged Peter to join her on some of these trips, but he always found some excuse. She did not press him, as she suspected him of wanting to spare her any embarrassment attendant upon travelling together, unmarried. They had not discussed marriage, but it was understood that they would have to wait for some months for his death certificate to be rescinded.
By now, Peter was living in the Piccadilly flat, alone but for a daily cleaning service. He seemed to deal smoothly with the basics of independent life, for which Harriet was thankful. She remembered her own struggles in the year after her imprisonment, and understood the effort that it took.
This effort was complicated by the legal and financial tangle he found himself in. Forty percent of his estate had been eaten up by death duties, and not having been formally a member of the armed forces at the time of his supposed death, these monies were forfeit. The remainder had been divided between Lord Saint-George, and a trust for his great-nephews. In a few short years Saint-George appeared to have dissipated most of his portion. Peter was distressed at the financial implications for his great-nephews of unwinding the trust, but navigated his way between guilt and a feeling that he could not possibly be a worse steward than his nephew.
Meanwhile, although still officially a non-person, he was being fought over by various different branches of military intelligence all of whom wanted the benefit of his expertise as an investigator and a former POW in preparing for proposed trials for war crimes in Germany. Harriet knew he was anxious to get back to work, but she anticipated that the work itself would be upsetting, and she worried that the government mandarins did not have Peter's best interests at heart.
There were other cross currents too, about which he did not confide in Harriet. From the tenor of his dreams, she suspected that these were linked to the outfit that had sent him to Dieppe, and something that had happened there. But he never mentioned this in his waking hours.
When she was in Town, they saw each other frequently. Peter was an entertaining dinner companion, seeing the humour in his anomalous position, and making her laugh with tales of Kafkaesque red tape. He put himself at her disposal for trips to the theatre, the cinema, and dancing. He frequently accompanied her back to Mecklenburgh Square after these outings, and they savoured lazy Sunday mornings in bed with the newspapers. Harriet went so far as to ask him to bring his own dressing-gown, so he would stop robbing hers. Ever the considerate gentleman, he immediately complied.
These quiet moments above all seemed to satisfy a hunger that he had for normality. But as the summer wore on, Harriet had the increasing impression that Peter was like an elastic band that was being stretched every day further towards breaking point. Usually infinitely considerate in bed, he was now more and more frequently possessed by fits of exigent and exhausting passion, which alarmed her not only by their reckless abandonment, but by being apparently automatic, and almost impersonal. She welcomed these episodes to some extent, because instead of dreaming, he would sleep afterwards as though stunned. But with each of these, she found him more firmly entrenched behind some kind of protective fortification, and herself becoming less and less a person to him.
Harriet wondered unhappily whether she had made a mistake in rekindling the relationship. Being preposterously fond of a person did not mean that one was good for him, or indeed the reverse. Clearly the man needed medical help, but she worried that it would wound his fragile pride terribly if she were to say this to him. She wrote to Peter's mother for counsel. The Duchess's reply, ranging over a variety of subjects, was not very satisfying. It amounted to saying "Let him find his own way out," which did not seem to Harriet like a very proactive response to a mind clearly traumatized by war. But from day to day, she postponed speaking up, hoping against hope that things would get better.
One evening, Peter did not turn up to keep a previously-made dinner appointment. Accustomed to his scrupulous punctuality, her stomach tightened with worry. She used the restaurant telephone to dial his flat, but the bell rang on and on without an answer. With a feeling of foreboding, she took a taxi to Piccadilly.
As she entered the building, she could hear the strains of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony wafting down the stairs. She galloped up, taking the stairs two at a time. The front door of the flat was ajar and the music blasted from inside. She followed it to the library. In the light falling from the open door, she could see Peter hunched up on the sofa in the darkness, head in his hands, rocking back and forth. She moved quickly to lift the needle from the gramophone record, and in the sudden stillness, sat down beside him and put her arms around him. Though the night was warm, he shivered uncontrollably, teeth chattering.
"Peter, dearest" she said softly, "Did something happen?"
He looked at her, eyes wide and staring, and shook his head mutely, continuing to rock. She put her hand to his forehead. He had a temperature. With a feeling of rising panic, she wondered what to do.
In her mind's eye, she could see Bunter opening the door of the flat and taking charge of a shivering Peter with smooth confidence. Should she call Bunter? No. Too much history there. What about a doctor? That was probably what he needed, but whom? Peter had mentioned an army psychiatrist, but she did not really feel competent to deal with Military Intelligence. What about Peter's mother? Too far away, and not really competent to deal with this current crisis. Then she remembered that Peter had mentioned his sister had picked him up from the transit camp. That was it. Lady Mary was married to Deputy Commissioner Parker, formerly Chief Inspector Parker, who had investigated the case in which Harriet had been accused of murder. It should be straightforward to run the Deputy Commissioner down through Scotland Yard.
After she had helped Peter to bed, and tucked him up with a hot water bottle and an aspirin, she reached for the telephone. She found it an effort to keep her voice steady.
"Deputy Commissioner Parker? This is Harriet Vane speaking."
Parker sounded surprised, but polite. "Miss Vane, this is an unexpected pleasure. What can I do for you?"
Harriet wasn't sure whether Peter had confided in his sister and brother-in-law about his current relations with her, but she didn't waste time with unnecessary explanations.
"It's about Peter Wimsey. I found him at his flat. He's taken a turn and seems really quite ill. I wasn’t sure whether to call a doctor. I thought I should tell his family, but I wasn't sure who to call... "
"You did well to call me," said Parker reassuringly. "I'll tell Mary, and we'll be there straight away."
She waited for them in the vestibule, so the bell would not disturb Peter.
“Oh, thank you for coming!” she said in relief as they mounted the stairs. Lady Mary was a pleasant, brisk sort of woman in her late forties, with a surprisingly strong family resemblance to her brother. She greeted Harriet while her husband hovered tentatively in the background. He was grayer than Harriet remembered, with thinning hair, and a moustache that drooped even more, giving his face a mournful look. His gaze however was warm and pleasant, and he too held out his hand.
Harriet motioned them to come inside.
“He’s in bed now,” she said, “He seems better, but perhaps you would care to check on him?” Lady Mary looked briefly back at her husband, then followed Harriet to the bedroom. Peter was curled in a ball on his side, trembling from time to time, but asleep. Lady Mary looked at him with affection and felt for his temperature. The fever seemed to have abated. She twitched the coverlet back over him where it had been tossed back, switched off the light, and they tiptoed out.
Back in the library, Parker was pacing around. He paused when his wife touched his arm.
“I don’t think he needs a doctor right away, but we need to talk.” said Lady Mary. She looked at Harriet with an experienced eye. “Let me make us some tea - I think you could use something after the shock.”
When the tea came, Harriet drank it thirstily, remembering suddenly that she had had no dinner. Thus fortified, she gave a brief explanation of what had happened. Husband and wife looked at each other. Clearly this was not unexpected.
"We've been afraid of this," said Lady Mary. "Peter... had a breakdown after the last war."
"He mentioned something like that," said Harriet.
"Interesting." said Lady Mary. "It's not something that he talks about much. Anyhow, it lasted about eighteen months. I don't mean he went out of his mind or anything, and he was always perfectly sweet about it. Only he was dreadfully afraid to go to sleep, and he couldn't make a decision or give an order... According to Mother, it used to happen again from time to time at the conclusion of a case, but that man of his, Bunter, always dealt with it. So when he first got back from Germany, we weren't at all sure that he should be living alone. But he refused to stay in the CRU, and he couldn't stand it at Duke's Denver with the family."
"Can't blame him there," muttered Parker under his breath.
"We've tried to keep an eye on him, but he always seems to be busy." Lady Mary looked at Harriet appraisingly. "You... Have you been seeing much of him these days?"
Harriet saw no point in making any pretense about it.
"He hasn't been completely alone. We are lovers, and I really thought when he was free to marry, we would do so. But..." Here she stalled and drew breath, her piercing feeling of responsibility for the current crisis like physical pain. "I have been thinking for some time that he needs medical help, maybe a psychiatrist, and I can't forgive myself for not having suggested it before this."
Mary got up and put her arm around Harriet, who to her embarrassment, found her eyes welling up. "It's not your fault. Peter has always been like this. It's that absurd pretence that one hasn't got any weaknesses, so silly, because we all have, only our father never would hear of it... I agree about the psychiatrist. But I'm not really sure that shock therapy or something like that would be good for him."
Parker cleared his throat diffidently. "Some of the men on the Force are recently discharged from the Army. I think they could help us identify the right person."
***
"My dear girl, I am most abjectly sorry," said Peter sheepishly.
He was sitting up in bed eating tea and muffins. Harriet perched on the side of the bed.
"From your appetite, I deduce that the patient is feeling better."
"Yes, rather," he said, with his mouth full of muffin.
She took a deep breath, and took his hand in hers. "I don't think you can go on like this, Peter. I don't think we can go on like this. And I would like us to go on."
He looked down at the coverlet and picked at it.
"I've made an appointment for you with a Dr Wilson at the Tavistock Clinic. I spoke with him at length. He seems like a reasonable sort of man. Very engaging on the topic of his research. You'd like him, I think. He can see you tomorrow morning.... Only if you want to, of course," she added.
"I hate behaving like this."
"I know. Then face the facts, and state a conclusion. Bring a scholar's mind to the problem and have done with it."
He looked up at her and managed the familiar sidelong smile.
"I believe you're quite right. Though I have a strong suspicion that I am being managed. If I weren't so full of muffin, I would object to it."
"Don't be an ass, Peter," said Harriet.