Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Size Isn’t Everything. What About His Prospects?

  Sherwyn has at least just finished his first novel in the face of financial and personal problems which would have defeated a lesser man. The manuscript has been typed up by the girlfriend with whom he cohabits, but now sits waiting attention in a neat pile of other rivalrous works on the shelf behind Sir Jeremy Ripple’s elegant Arts & Crafts rosewood desk. And there it has stayed unread for a full three weeks. Though Ripple & Co does not itself publish fiction, Sir Jeremy is a power in the profession (not yet described as an industry, and very much the preserve of amateur literary gentlemen) and his recommendation will go far. He has promised to recommend the novel – should he like it sufficiently – to Herbert Jenkins, an excellent publisher of popular novels.

  But Sir Jeremy, to Sherwyn’s rage and indignation, has not so far bothered to turn the pages, read and respond. Sherwyn does not suffer from literary self doubt – egoistical, vain little dwarf, as his enemies refer to him, those enemies being the husbands or lovers of girls he has seduced away. (In the rather louche literary and artistic circles Sherwyn likes to frequent, news of sexual prowess soon gets about.) It’s just that a wait of a full three weeks for a mere recommendation seems out of order. A genius deserves better from the boss who is lucky enough to employ him. Too busy for three whole weeks? Poppycock! No. The boss, for all his affectation of proletarian sympathies, is at heart just another unscrupulous old man, the kind who let the Great War happen, filched what glory and profit from it he could, and now hopes to make money from a growing anti-war sentiment. Sherwyn doesn’t trust him further than he could throw him. Which wouldn’t be far: Sherwyn being short and Sir Jeremy being tall and well set up. But Sherwyn might ask his friend Mungo to do it. Mungo works in the office down the corridor, and is an Oxford rugger Blue.

  Sherwyn’s Better Self

  Sherwyn has met Vivvie on occasion, mostly in connection with The Short History of the Georgians, an Outline. It was at Sir Jeremy’s suggestion that Vivien, who according to her father has artistic talents (though Sherwyn doubts it – in his experience female artists are a good-looking lot: he lives with one; he should know), has suggested that his daughter do the illustrations and Sherwyn has politely briefed her as to what is required. He knows she will be dropping by during the course of the morning but to what end he has no idea, and will be horrified when he understands that the illustrations are a mere cover for her intention to propose marriage.

  And on the Thursday morning when Vivvie walks into his office Sherwyn is already not in the best of moods.

  Overworked and Underpaid

  This is how Sherwyn sees himself: in this he is like most of Ripple & Co’s staff – indeed staff everywhere. (Sufficient reward, thinks Sir Jeremy, to be employed by the nation’s most prestigious and radical publisher: pay more, and staff might feel they were being bribed, not just employed.) Sherwyn, who feels he is entitled to lofty ceilings and general grandeur wherever he works, now finds himself housed in an attic room at the top of what was once a shop but is now an office building, with sloping garret walls crumbly with disintegrating plaster, low oak beams which catch the head and are powdery with what Sherwyn rather hopes is a deathwatch beetle infestation. At least, others might think, he has an office to himself with a door and a casement window, which is more than many an office worker has today. The window opens and he can feed the birds; he can look down to Fleet Street below – in his time a busy thoroughfare with both motor and horse drawn vehicles bumping up against each other, and the hoots and cries of angry travellers rising to the heavens.

  News! News! News!

  There is such a great excitement focused here – how can Sherwyn be immune to it? He is lucky. When he works late he hears the rumble of metal printing presses as they start up, shaking the whole street and stirring the blood.

  On his way to work Sherwyn dodges the giant paper rolls as they’re manhandled across pavements and lowered into the underground basements where the presses are housed; and thinks nothing of it. In the evenings he feels the whole street tremble as the great presses start up and takes it for granted. But he loves the smell of hot printing ink as it seeps up to his open window: exciting times, intoxicating! The nation is newly literate and hungry for news and gossip. Before TV, before even radio, there’s only the printed word to tell you what’s going on outside your own street.

  Sherwyn feels it, and is happy to be part of it, if only obliquely. He is a novelist; he prefers to make things up rather than report reality. Besides, tomorrow the papers will wrap the fish and chips; they make sense of the tumult on the street outside for only a single day. Sherwyn hopes for immortality.

  Rough, Raw Years

  In the nineteen-twenties few understand their own motivations, their own compulsions. Freud is still sniffing cocaine, and feeding it to his unfortunate patients while he works it out. Self interest is at its height, compassion at its nadir. There is no benefits system, no assistance board, only the good will of a public who four years after the war finds pity has worn itself out. Fleet Street is one of the better places where derelict old soldiers can beg for alms – warm air belches up from the printing presses, kindly journalists occasionally bend an ear to their woes. But no-one really wants to be reminded of the war, a dreadful event which will never happen again. A blind patriotism led the nations into all that – well, we’re past that now. Now we have reason, progress, science, the League of Nations. Why would anyone want war? As for the poor, they’re always with us. Jesus said so. They must take their chances.

  Anyway…

  This morning a tall, ragged young man with haunted eyes, caved-in cheeks and one leg laid a begging hand on Sherwyn’s arm. Sherwyn had told him he couldn’t help him and that his own shoes let in water. The caved-in mouth snarled, showing the most disgusting broken teeth, and called out after Sherwyn’s back, ‘On your way, shortie. I hope you rot in hell.’

  A short man can do anything – wage wars, write novels, bed a dozen girls, break a hundred hearts, be as clever and sophisticated as he likes about fine wines and cultural artefacts, political and social movements, past, present and future, predict the very disposition of the world to come – but if a tall man, starving and ill though he may be, refers to him as ‘shortie’, any bubble of self esteem is bound to be punctured. It is the one thing he can do nothing about.

  Did that contribute to how Sherwyn reacted to Vivien’s proposal? Yes, probably. His parts might be big but they were hidden: his height was obvious for all the world to see. Vivvie’s faltering self esteem had been dented by Mrs Ashton’s casual words: She just can’t find a coat to fit, poor thing. So had Sherwyn’s been by ‘shortie’. If only some other people had kept quiet that morning, things might have turned out differently.

  The Power Of Positive Thinking

  Sherwyn gazes from his window at the wet slate roofs of the Royal Courts of Justice, smokes a Turkish cigarette and makes an effort to recover his equanimity. He is never, as it happens, to quite recover from ‘On your way, shortie.’ He is indeed to remember it on his deathbed sixty years later. Only then will it occur to him that if he had only given the beggar a couple of shillings at the time, a lifetime of remorse would not have followed. Such shameful memories as are bound to pile up in anyone’s lifetime would have been so much the less. I would not go so far as to say Sherwyn was to die salvageable in the Maker’s eyes, but at least at the time, in his nineties, after a lifetime of wrongdoing, he was a devoted follower of the Maharishi, and doing his best in the light of his own nature.

  Even now, on that morning in 1922, as a young man, Sherwyn makes an effort of will and decides to give up cursing a cruel fate and concentrate on working out the new short story he has begun in his head.

  Escape Into Fiction

  Sherwyn’s colleague and chum Mungo Bolt recently took him to lunch at The Ivy in Covent Garden where they’d watched fascinated as a very pretty girl pushed away her rare and expensive plate of whiteb
ait – she just couldn’t, she’d moaned to her embarrassed suitor, she couldn’t – all those tiny black eyes staring at you! Sherwyn wonders now how a pretty girl taken to a restaurant in Morocco and faced with a choice of losing her virtue or eating a sheep’s eye would respond. The art of fiction, he has heard his father declare, is to exaggerate reality and see where it leads you. A whitebait eye could become a sheep’s eye, maybe a camel’s eye? Perhaps you start from a title and work back?

  There is the germ of something promising here, he knows. Would Blackwood’s magazine perhaps take it? Blackwood’s published Buchan and Kipling – Sherwyn would be in good company and they paid really good money. Sherwyn’s shoes have begun to leak: there are worn layers practically through to the sock on both shoes but re-soling costs a one-and-thruppence he can ill afford. The sheer indignity of his current life is intolerable. ‘On your way, shortie!’ How has he, a gentleman and a genius, come to this? Fit only to receive the insults of a hollow-eyed one-legged ex-soldier. And condemned to hell. But he already is in hell. Better not think about it. But perhaps Blackwood’s might reject The Eye of the Lamb, and in so doing relegate him to the ranks of the lowbrow. Elinor Glyn could get away with sin on a tiger skin but that was commerce, not literature. The choice he is offering his heroine – sex or sensibility – might seem a bit blunt for a literary magazine. Perhaps the choice should be between money and a sheep’s eye, not her virtue and a sheep’s eye. The story would work as well? The borderline between being seen as a hack – plying for trade as did any hackney carriage – and a serious contender in the world of letters could be difficult to distinguish. A literary chap has to beware falling between the two stools.

  Sherwyn had had a story published in the Egoist – undeniably highbrow – when he was twenty-six and working for the Ministry of Information. He’d been hailed in the Times as a budding young genius, been invited to the right parties, but injudiciously slept with one or two wrong wives. Since those unfortunate episodes he’d published nothing but badly paid, barely noticed essays and reviews in magazines no-one read. His father had flung him out: one of the wives belonged to his father’s publisher. And now his shoes are leaking. And his future depends on a nod from Sir Bloody Poseur Jeremy. It is all an intolerable humiliation.

  The Trials Of The Writer

  The Uncertain Gentleman, his highbrow thriller – and such a thing is possible: isn’t John Buchan respectable enough in literary circles? – has taken Sherwyn a whole three years to write because of his need to take paid employment to make ends meet. And Ripple & Co pay less than any comparable publisher – to have an editorial post in so prestigious a house was seen as compensation enough for paucity of salary. And Sir Jeremy, since his recent elevation to the knighthood, has turned, say all, into a moral sadist who will deliver a blow to any cheek turned to him, just as a moral masochist might turn his cheek to accept any blow. Sir Jeremy must find pleasure in tormenting Sherwyn, or why would he do it?

  The Life Of The Publisher

  The Ripple knighthood had been unexpected, and generally thought to be a mistake on the part of the Palace and something of a joke. In 1919 Jeremy Ripple published Fortitude – The British Warrior, an ironic history of military ineptitude through the ages written by a malcontent, but having been erroneously construed by a drunken reviewer in the Times as a tribute to patriotic fervour, went on to make a great deal of money throughout the world. The irony was not lost on Jeremy Ripple but he was pleased enough to become a knight of the realm, and careful not to point out the error to anyone of influence. Within a few short months of his investiture the staff could no longer drift in and out of his office at will but must now first make an appointment with his secretary Phoebe, with whom he is rumoured, quite unfairly, to be having an affair.

  It was in the eighteen-eighties that the whole institution of marriage had been predicted to break down when the first batch of young unmarried women had trooped into offices as typists: mature men in constant company with young female secretaries were likely to find them prettier and livelier than their wives and would be tempted. As indeed they often were.

  Anyway.

  The Publisher’s Wife

  Sherwyn sees in Phoebe temptation enough – she’s a bright bouncy tactile bobbed blonde – but he does not want to believe the rumours. They seem unlikely. Sir Jeremy’s wife Adela is a palely translucent fragile beauty who glides rather than bounces, looks down from a disdainful well-born height, and provides the money for the whole Ripple enterprise. Such women are hard to come by as wives and their alienation is not lightly risked. Besides, Sir Jeremy adores his wife, and has lately encouraged her to spend huge sums refurbishing Ripple & Co’s foyer, reception area and his own comfortable and smoky offices (while quite ignoring the top floor – which leaks and crumbles, and where the real work is done) in the most up-to-date and fastidious Art Deco style. It even featured in Home and Design’s ‘Offices of the Future’.

  The Publisher’s Offspring

  Sherwyn, who runs across Vivien occasionally at this meeting or that, as she busies herself around the office choosing fonts and providing illustrations for various of her father’s books, has always seen it as strange that Lady Adela Ripple’s narrow fashionable loins could have given birth to a daughter of such excessive bulkiness. It would be grievous to any mother – so much hope goes into parenthood – to have given birth to such an untoward child, and an only child at that. Perhaps having had the one, they decided not to have another? That might make a short story: The Shadow of the Nursery or The Peculiar Daughter or simply The Giantess. He will consult with Mungo, who is good on titles. A good title is half the battle. Presumably, in the absence of a son, Sir Jeremy has been grooming Vivien to take over the family business. She is peculiar rather than stupid, Sherwyn acknowledges, and a pleasant enough person, if clumsy. She’d managed once to tip an inkwell over his valued Corona typewriter he’d bought from an army surplus sale with his last £50, the better to type The Uncertain Gentleman. His fingertips were stained blue for days.

  The Writer At Work

  But there is work to be done, and Sherwyn must get on with it and not let himself be distracted. He sits at his desk, rolls paper into his typewriter and types... The Eye of the Lamb. Seven vowels in five words: the more vowels compared to consonants in title, character’s or author’s name the better. He is not sure why he believes this but he does. Taboo, 3/2, The Hairy Ape, 6/5, Abie’s Irish Rose, 6/7, all currently playing to enthusiastic audiences; Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, 8/9, serve to make his point. His own name, Sherwyn Sexton, 4/9 – will just have to do. He will call the whitebait girl Claire 3/3, the hero – who? Delgano 3/4? That will pass muster, vaguely exotic yet not too foreign. The ‘e’ on the Corona is inked up as usual, so Sherwyn clears it with a hatpin kept especially for the purpose. Yes, Claire in the story will trade her squeamishness for her virtue: she will both eat, and satisfy her carnal appetites. Women have them – why is there so much pretence that they do not? – even, he supposes, girls like Vivien. Sherwyn has a spasm of pity for all the plain girls in the world, who so outnumber the pretty ones. Once he has finished with The Eye of the Lamb, 7/5 – ‘y’s count as vowels – he will get on with The Giantess, 4/7. But then again, perhaps he won’t.

  Midday, November 23rd 1922. 3 Fleet Street

  The Singlemindedness Of Vivien

  It is even as he considers these things that Vivien turns up at the door. She’s astute enough to know more or less how much attention Sherwyn will award her, if he notices her at all. Pretty women get noticed, those less so do not, as Vivvie is all too aware. This means only one woman in every ten gets any attention at all. It’s the pretty ones that attract love and drive men to unreason and despair, and feature in literature and films; the others are just part of the furniture – unless, Vivvie thinks, they happen to have famous family names or be very rich. They exist to set men free for more ‘important’ and ‘interesting’ things, to keep fictional plots goin
g as written by men.

  Vivien is determined. She is damp though, from the London drizzle and fog – and wishes she had remembered to bring a coat. She flicks the scarf in a girlish fashion over her shoulder, but its fronds are actually quite wet and splatter raindrops over Sherwyn’s desk. He barely looks up, doesn’t recognise her, but brushes the drops away in irritation.

  ‘Go away,’ he says, going back to his machine. ‘Don’t you see I’m working.’

  ‘You’re very rude,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you haven’t recognised me.’

  Sherwyn looks at her properly and sees that this very plain, excessively sized young woman with a dull complexion in an ugly grey felt hat is Vivien, Sir Jeremy Ripple’s daughter. It behoves him to be pleasant, but hardly flirtatious.

  ‘Why Miss Ripple,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise it was you. I am so sorry.’

  ‘There is no need to apologise. I am not sufficiently attractive to impinge upon your consciousness.’

  He refrains from assuring her, as custom demands, that she is indeed attractive. She wouldn’t believe him, and it wouldn’t be true.

  ‘May I – do something for you?’ he asks, as she shows no sign of going, but continues to hover. He resents her. The order of his thought has been interrupted, violated. He has been inside the head of a pretty girl removing the heads of whitebait so as not to have to eat the tiny black eyes and he rather liked it in there. Now he must pay attention to the boss’s daughter. Vivien nods and he has no choice but to offer her a chair so she can sit down. And this is how it goes.