Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Sherwyn studied the sum as if deciding whether to accept or not, nodded coolly, folded the piece of paper and put it in his breast pocket. It wasn’t, after all, all that great a sum. You could buy a half way decent house for it, he supposed, and pay off a few debts, that was all. It is the sort of money a newly discovered writer could expect for a book but not the kind you would get for marrying an unwanted daughter, saving her from the shelf. Had she even told the truth about the Alpine village? He had assumed so – it didn’t seem in her nature to lie – but supposing it was a fantasy? Supposing Sir Jeremy was sufficient of an old devil to be publishing his book as a bribe to marrying off his unwanted daughter? They might have conspired together. The trouble with being a writer of fiction was that the possibility of different plot flows was endless.

  £525 for the novel, £525 for the wife? Or did they come as a £1,050 package? He had only himself to blame if they did. Asked if he loved Vivvie he had replied yes, and as he spoke it had not felt like a lie. Though that of course was the same for most lies: they work best if the liar believes them. He could hardly love the girl because he hardly knew her and she was certainly not attractive to him. But he did like her and the freshness, indeed the oddness, of her ways. She was at least not like other girls: she was no beanstalk simperer. A man could always buy built-up heels for a wedding, he would be allowed to go his own ways, there was money in his pocket and the world was his oyster.

  But Sir Jeremy was still talking.

  ‘See it as an advance on a dowry if you like,’ said Sir Jeremy, ‘but The Uncertain Gentleman – working title, of course – should at least pay its way. We’ll talk about contracts in good time. I’m thinking of a royalty of twenty per cent on publisher price and thruppence on colonial and dominion sales. The book’s already written so you have your advance. Just go and buy yourself a new suit and a decent pair of shoes from Lobb’s, and come down to Dilberne for the weekend and meet the family. Get the address from Phoebe on your way out.’

  Sir Jeremy had given up the sherry and now poured himself some whisky into a heavy frosted glass beaker with gold leaf trimmings – but failed to pour any for Sherwyn. ‘But please don’t let me delay you any longer, dear boy,’ and he smiled his courteous Old Etonian smile of dismissal. ‘I’m sure you must have many things to do and I certainly do.’

  The Stars Look Down

  Sherwyn went out into Fleet Street uncertain as to which of them had outwitted the other, but finding himself surprisingly languid, matter of fact. Well, one minute you’re a poor man and next minute you’re rich. It’s the way things went and probably would for the rest of his life. His father had had his horoscope done when he was born – Libra in the ascendant, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune conjunct in the first house, somewhat opposed to Mercury in Aries in the seventh. Charming, witty, attractive, subject to strange events and violent swings of fortune. A thousand guineas in an uncrossed cheque. Doomed to prosperity and an unfortunate marriage; a vigorous Jupiter and a Saturn in Capricorn.

  Coutts would be closed now but he could hand in the cheque over the counter at eight the next morning and collect the cash, though to be seen to be in a hurry would never do. But he has a cheque for an unimagined amount in his pocket and all things seem possible, fame and fortune at last within his grasp and Vivvie not such a bad old thing really. Just a pity she’s so tall.

  Six O’Clock In The Evening, Thursday 23rd November 1922. Dilberne Court

  So. Vivvie has a suitor. Wonders will never cease. Jeremy thinks favourably of him. She is to meet him at the weekend.

  Lady Adela Ripple finishes the call from her husband and puts the receiver back in its cradle with her tiny delicate hands, tipped with carefully manicured pale pink nails – scarlet and crimson are all very well for night but by day nails must be kept unobtrusive. A pity that Vivvie never bothers with her hands – raw, red, peasant things dangling from the end of intolerably long and large limbs. The girl is obviously a throwback – but to whom? Adela’s father? A long line of personable aristocrats marrying beautiful women. Adela’s mother? Did some giant of a mountains guide steal into a royal bedroom one night and lay a seed that was to flower generations later? No. More likely Jeremy’s side. Army mostly, generals and brigadiers, horse breeders, someone along the way was bound to have gone native. Vivvie, married. Possible, peasant hands and all. But to what kind of person? What kind of breeding?

  A Turn-Up For The Books

  Jeremy’s telephone conversation with her had been brief. He’d described Sherwyn as an interesting if impecunious young man who was a good novelist, would go far, and apparently wanted to marry Vivvie. He hadn’t been to Eton but at least to St Paul’s, which would do at a pinch. He could come down for the weekend so she might meet him and approve of him, or otherwise. She must bear in mind that Vivvie was certainly not likely to do better. All in all, so far as he was concerned, it was a consummation devoutly to be wished. He was working late; he would stay over at the Garrick, one of his clubs.

  Vivvie and Sherwyn Sexton! Now which of Jeremy’s young tyros was Sherwyn Sexton? Of course, the good-looking if short one with the bright blue eyes who’d gatecrashed the party to celebrate Jeremy’s knighthood. It had been a splendid party even though Vivvie had done her best to spoil it – ‘A Knight of the Realm? Daddy? Isn’t that rather hypocritical for a social radicalist? I thought he was meant to loathe everything to do with the realm’ – and had even refused to turn up, which was probably just as well as she’d just have towered over everyone and insisted on wearing something dreadful; but it had rather upset her father. When Adela had tried to tempt her with the promise of lobster soup and oyster patties, Vivvie had said the money would be better spent re-thatching the stables, and the whole event was absurd. Vivvie was good at disapproval. And Sherwyn Sexton was prepared to put up with her? It was true that some men seemed to flourish under its weight. The handsomest bons viveurs often turned out to marry the plainest prunes of wives, bug-eyed Betties who tagged along at dinner parties as sort of walking consciences and were the kind who asked their husbands to fetch their fans or their handbags for them, and the husbands did. Perhaps Vivvie and Mr Sexton would be this kind of couple? The wife had to be good so the husband could be bad?

  This Sherwyn Sexton had certainly showed a flirtatious spirit. He’d been rather drunk and so, she remembered, was she, though perhaps rather more with exhilaration than alcohol. She’d have thought she herself was more to his taste than Vivvie.

  Extraordinary, thinks Adela. Vivvie and Sherwyn Sexton! Manly enough, with the kind of mobile, responsive face she herself found attractive but one so seldom met these days. She’d even rather shocked herself at the time, thinking if only she were not married to Sir Jeremy and didn’t have an all too grown daughter and was twenty years younger – but that way folly lay. Don’t think of it.

  It had been such a triumphant party – though she’d drunk too much champagne; a really special day, the day she became Lady Adela Ripple; not as good as Adela, Lady Ripple, of course, as she would have become had she married a peer, but certainly more befitting her status than plain Mrs Ripple, née Adela Hedleigh. She’d been wearing a floaty pale pink Hilda Steward dress and was looking her best. She’d had Harrods cater the evening with the most delicious oyster soup and lobster patties. It was at the end of the evening that this drunk young man, this editor, this Sherwyn Sexton had taken her hand and held it a moment longer than a junior employee of her husband should, while fixing her with his blue eyes and saying something perfectly foolish and soppy: ‘Oh the Lady Adela. Oh the delicacy of the damsel! The lightness of her being! I swoon, I swoon!’, which was not what people usually said, but for some reason made her feel light-headed and entranced. But then his friend had snatched him away before he could make yet more of a fool of himself, and just as well.

  Sherwyn Sexton, interested in Vivvie. Why? Well, obviously for her money. Why else would anyone woo her? In itself it was not so bad a sin. Why did most girls marry
most men? The marriages turned out well enough. Since girls felt no shame in marrying for money, why, in a changing world, should not men?

  On Mother Love

  Of course Adela loves Vivvie: Vivvie is her child, and one loves one’s child but it is because of Vivvie that Adela must put up with the one child she has, and cannot try again for better luck with others. Vivvie was a big baby, and did permanent damage to Adela as she burst from the womb – such a young, frail, angelic mother, such a vigorous bouncing child – and Jeremy behaving as if the lying-in room was a windowed foaling box and cheering her on through dreadful agonies telling her to be a man, girl, bear up and don’t let it get you down. None of her friends have had to put up with a man present at the birth. It is unheard of. Adela really does not like horses, nor has she since the birth. Adela nearly died. But she had a vision, when in extremis, of her parents beckoning her to paradise and knew it was a trap and stayed alive, to the doctors’ astonishment. She had given up hope of Vivvie actually ever marrying.

  Vivvie did one season, sat round looking sulky, refused to do another and has showed no interest in young men, only horses, ever since. Yes, decidedly Jeremy’s side.

  Money Vivvie may have – far more of it, technically, than Adela herself – but she does not have grace, and will sit around at home graceless, or such is Adela’s nightmare, until she sees her mother out.

  Then all of a sudden, a phone call from Jeremy and everything changes; the world lights up.

  It occurs to Adela, with a great lifting of the heart, that married to someone like Sherwyn Sexton her only daughter might at last become a source of envy, not of pity. To have a daughter married to a successful and good-looking young man meant she, Adela, had not failed in her maternal duty. And since he was short and Vivvie was tall it might even itself out if it came to anything and they had children, and she could become a grandmother of perfectly acceptable children.

  A Zebra-Skin Rug

  Even as Adela recovers from her husband’s news Vivien bursts into the morning room in muddy boots, and strides across the black and white zebra-skin rug that takes up much of the parquet floor. It must have been an enormous beast. Now its poor dead legs reach to the white sofa on the left and to the mirrored walnut cabinet on the right, its head – though at least without its original Van Ingen taxidermy head – to the mirrored club fender, and its tail to the new plate glass picture windows with their view of the drab winter garden. Lady Adela’s best friend Syrie Maugham’s taste is here too, as it is in the Ripple offices, but perhaps seeming a little out of place in so rural an environment, so old a country house. (The redecorating zeal of Adela’s aunt Isobel seems to have been inherited, more’s the pity. Surtout pas trop de zèle?)

  Vivvie’s boots leave strands of straw behind and tread mud into the striped white of the zebra skin. Adela does her best not to notice but her sensibilities are hurt.

  Vivvie goes straight to the drinks cabinet and pours herself a large whisky, ignoring her mother. She is behaving rudely, reverting to teenager behaviour; albeit teenager is not a term to come into use for another forty years, when fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds with money to spare were recognised by advertisers as an identifiable consumer group.

  ‘Such wonderful news, darling,’ says Adela. ‘You and Sherwyn Sexton. But what a delightful surprise, my dear!’

  ‘Father phoned you?’

  ‘He did. Apparently Sherwyn – I suppose we must call him Sherwyn – asked permission for your hand in marriage. What a delightful lad – so old fashioned!’

  ‘That was quick,’ says Vivvie. ‘He didn’t waste much time. And Father said yes?’

  ‘He asked him to Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Vivvie. ‘That’s a pity. Overcooked beef, soggy roast potatoes, flat Yorkshire pudding and disgusting trifle. Sherwyn is accustomed to Rules and The Ivy. I don’t want him changing his mind. I suppose we don’t have time to fire Cook?’

  ‘No,’ says Adela, flatly. And then, because in spite of all, she loves her daughter, ‘Vivvie, I suppose you know what you’re doing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have proposed to him if I didn’t,’ says Vivvie, who has this unfortunate compulsion to tell the truth, if only because she can’t be bothered to look for a polite lie. ‘I just didn’t know if it would work. But he must have gone straight down and asked Father. I needn’t have worried. But Greystokes said I’d done the right thing, Greystokes always knows.’

  ‘I do wish you’d stop this Greystokes nonsense,’ says Adela, goaded. ‘Greystokes is a horse. And I wish you’d wipe your boots before coming in from the stables. It’s been raining.’

  So much for the touching scene she has envisaged, but to which perhaps, she realises, only the mothers of beautiful daughters are entitled.

  ‘Let Lily brush it up,’ says her daughter. ‘It’s what she’s paid for.’

  Intolerably Grand

  Vivvie can be intolerably grand. Adela marvels: a royal blood line seems to control so many of her daughter’s sentiments, albeit housed in the body of a rough Alpine guide. Lily’s the maid of all work, one of a staff of three. Lily, the cook, and an outside man: all of them live out, not in, which is something. The unspoken fear amongst the Upstairs classes was that Downstairs would creep up in the middle of the night and kill them in their beds. It did happen from time to time. But we’re in 1922 now, and though the servant problem is worse than ever, at least it’s easier to get menials to live out than live in, so it’s safer. At the best of times Adela has never quite had the knack of keeping hers in control. Servants have always been a bother. When it comes to it she’d actually rather make a bed herself than have to instruct other people in how it’s properly done. It’s a matter of principle. She is, after all, like Jeremy, a socialist: she respects the proletariat. Besides, once servants were silent and shrinking (if murderous) when master and mistress passed by. Now they demand conversation, care and concern. They poke and pry and are as likely to despise you as to love you, and can be worryingly quick to take offence. If Lily is asked to clean up unnecessary mud she will probably do so. But she is bound to scowl; and look cross; best now to placate, not aggravate.

  ‘Sherwyn Sexton is certainly a very good-looking young man,’ Adela says cautiously. ‘I met him briefly at your father’s investiture party. The one you refused to go to, because you didn’t like your dress. The Coco Chanel one with the bow. The bow was removable, didn’t you realise? And so charming. And now suddenly an engagement! A wedding! Indeed, a wonderful surprise. I had no idea you and he were so close! How did it all happen? Do tell!’

  Vivvie, almost deliberately, Adela thinks, shakes her boot so that more mud and straw fall onto the floor and then tips down her whisky in a great gulp, chokes a little and then says with a calm ferocity:

  ‘We’re not at all close, Mother. Do stop gushing.’

  On Having A Difficult Daughter

  It is not just her daughter’s looks – or her lack of them – that so bother Adela, but how she can have given birth to someone who is so swift with the truth but so bad at light conversation. Or indeed a person of so much aggressive – how could she put it? – solid physicality? Yes, that’s it. Solidity of body and mind, look at Vivvie now – she has been down at the stables again. Her great grimy hands seize the thick glass of the decanter and pour with no trouble at all, while she, Adela, a snowflake of a person, almost translucent – like an angel, admirers declare – can hardly get her tiny fluttering hands to lift such a thing, nor would it occur to her to pour such a drink for herself. Well, sherry, perhaps, whisky no.

  She tries to absorb what her daughter has just said and plays for time.

  ‘And doesn’t one need more water in one’s whisky than that, darling?’

  ‘Spoils it,’ says Vivien shortly, as she tips yet more golden liquid down her massive throat.

  Vivvie doesn’t sip, she tips. She is trying to annoy. But why? She should be really happy. Even if she did the proposing – an indignity to
be driven to such lengths, Adela can see – but the response was positive. Engaged to be married, and after so many disappointments! Now a flake of mud falls off the hem of Vivvie’s skirt onto the brilliant white of the shockingly expensive rug. It springs to Adela’s lips to say ‘I might be losing a daughter but at least I would gain a rug’, but she bites back the words. Her daughter is easily hurt and views parental witticisms with mistrust.

  Adela loves Vivvie though she has difficulty showing it, as do most mothers of the time. The maternal role was to instruct, chide and feed. The paternal role was to educate: hugging and kissing was frowned on, as were any declarations of love. Maternal embraces were what turned sons into pansies, daughters into trollops. The duty of the parent is to refrain from praise, no matter how naturally it sprang to one’s lips, since it was what made boys self-satisfied and girls vain: better to search for reasons to find fault, so that the child strives harder. Never tell a girl she’s pretty or it will go to her head and she’ll end up on the streets. Never tell a boy he’s clever or he’ll stop trying and end up in the gutter. It is a world away from how we live now.

  Anyway...

  The Story Continues

  ‘Vivvie, I wish you every happiness, you know that,’ Adela says. ‘Your father and I will be losing a very precious daughter. Just be sure you are doing the right thing. Such a good-looking young man. Most manly, though perhaps rather short.’

  ‘Only in comparison to me, Mama,’ says Vivvie. ‘I expect to other people he seems to be within acceptable limits.’

  ‘And well spoken. St Paul’s, I believe. He must be really very clever.’

  ‘I could hardly aspire to Eton, Mama. One must be realistic.’

  One never knew when Vivvie was being sarcastic, that was the trouble. Adela decides, wrongly, that she is not.