Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  ‘My dear girl! ’says Adela. ‘You’re not as bad as all that. You’re a lovely girl and quite a brain box yourself. You should get on well. Like calls to like. Not everyone has the money for Eton, these days. But the main thing is for you to be happy.’

  ‘Happy?’ repeats Vivvie. ‘Happy? What has happiness to do with anything?’

  Adela supposes her daughter knows the facts of life, and what marriage entails, though it’s possible that she doesn’t. Vivien seems to lack the basic curiosity that other girls have. She lives in the country and will have seen the antics of livestock often enough, but it is still possible for a girl not to make the necessary connection between animal and human life. It’s just not the kind of knowledge a refined mother can impart to a daughter without unease and embarrassment. Now is hardly the time to bring the subject up. She could envisage her own naked body next to Sherwyn Sexton’s well enough, but Vivien and Sherwyn together made a comic scene.

  ‘I just so hope you know what you’re doing, darling.’

  ‘I have no illusions, if that’s what you mean. Sherwyn is putting up with my looks and nature in favour of my bank balance, and you and Father are anxious to get me out of the house, for fear of my having to live with you for the rest of your lives. Of course you want a wedding! Don’t concern yourself. Courtney and Baum will no doubt look after my financial interests, or rather you will, as usual. Don’t concern yourself. I will not interfere with our existing arrangements, other than perhaps take over Father’s stud farm. At least Sherwyn is not like Father: he knows nothing about horses; and is concerned only with himself, his writing, and his sensual consolations. I hope to leave him alone as I hope he will leave me.’

  It was a full half minute before Adela replies. Vivvie downs some more whisky.

  Then Adela says: ‘But darling, life can’t be all practicalities and money. Surely there has to be a little love?’

  Adela speaks with sincerity and from the heart. She crosses the room and touches her daughter’s large red hand with her own little fingers; she is not quite sure why she does it, other than is this not the flesh of her flesh? Her own creation, however strange, burst from her loins, just as she herself once burst, a sensuous, passionate stranger, into her mother’s chaste and abstemious life?

  And as she does it the poor girl’s face puckers and Vivvie explodes into tears and actually howls, and the hundred silver tipped prisms in the four concentric rings which compose the chandelier jangle and clink. When Adela cries she is an angel weeping for the sins of the world, which are far removed. When Vivvie cries she grows bloated and pink, and makes chandeliers rattle. Adela snatches her fingers away. She trusted where she had no business to trust.

  ‘What love did you ever show me? All you ever wanted is to get rid of the embarrassment of me. Father couldn’t wait, could he? Did he offer Sherwyn money to get me off your hands? Is that how it happened? And you with your “darlings” and “dears” and “do tells”. More love in a day than I’ve had in twenty years.’

  ‘Vivvie, you are very cruel and unreasonable. What I’d like is for you to go and fetch a dustpan and brush and clear up the mud your boots have left behind. Lily has enough to do as it is.’ At which, after another gulp and a hoot or two at least, Vivien regains her composure and says:

  ‘I am not your answer to your servant problem, Mama.’

  And Adela, floored, thinks: ‘Well, if this Sherwyn Sexton is prepared to take Vivvie on, he has my blessings,’ and hopes that if children result the girls will take after their father. It doesn’t matter so much about boys.

  ‘And by the way,’ says Vivvie, as she stalks in indignation to the door, and the ceiling chandelier shakes and rattles some more, ‘if I am expected to pay for thatching the stable roof, I think the least Father can do is allow me to ride Greystokes whenever and however I want. And your friend Syrie Maugham is an idiot and ruins everything she touches. Ripple & Co now looks like some vulgar advertising agency, and as for this bloody morning room it’s a joke. Before you spend any more of my money I’d like you to consult me. And I hate this rug.’ And she stomps away to her bedroom.

  Things Not Working Properly

  This, thinks Adela, puts a new and rather alarming slant on everything. It is dark outside and the temperature is falling. There are scattered drops of rain on the inside of the plate glass window which can only mean it hasn’t been fitted properly. Nothing ever works properly in the morning room. But then it’s where in 1905 they laid to rest the body of her uncle Robert, Earl of Dilberne after his shooting accident – one could hardly expect the room to be cheerful. It’s all very well in the summer to have the mirrored walls which Syrie Maugham so adores, but in the winter all they do is magnify a sense of desolation, surrounding one with the sight of dank lawns and decaying vegetation, not the fecundity of summer and the generosity of nature.

  Memories of past litigation assail Adela, the anxious tedium of it all, the obtuseness of countless lawyers, decades of waiting while she and Jeremy fought through the international courts for their child’s inheritance – the child herself seeming quite indifferent to their success or otherwise, only now at this late stage deciding to throw her weight (considerable) about and deciding to interfere in matters she knows nothing about: the art of interior design, for example. And heaven knew what kind of wild card this Sherwyn Sexton is going to turn out to be. What can Jeremy be thinking of? Doesn’t he realise just how vulnerable Vivvie is? How delicate the situation?

  Supposing this young man with his embarrassing ‘I swoon, I swoon!’ – the words had been absurd but she remembers the touch of his hand and it was not unpleasant – decides Vivvie’s money is better spent on her husband than on his parents-in-law? But with any luck Jeremy has left sufficient options open so that there is time to re-think the marriage, put Sherwyn off these absurd nuptials. One or other of the parties involved must be talked out of it. Well, Adela is good at that kind of thing.

  She hopes money has not changed hands already, that they have not unwittingly dropped into breach of promise territory – though that is normally a defence for brides, not grooms. She hopes she has not upset Vivvie too much.

  Adela fetches the dustpan and brush herself, dons rubber gloves (size: small) and sees to the straw and mud on the carpet herself. Lily has gone home.

  Around Seven O’Clock, November 23rd 1922. Cumberland Market, N.W.

  It is in good spirits that Sherwyn approaches Rita’s tall, thin, grimy little house on the South side of Cumberland Market. The wide, shadowy market place has seen many changes. Before the war it was where the hay carts which kept the horses of London fuelled would gather and unload, and here that the building stone which was needed to keep the city growing would be landed from the Regent’s Canal. Now that the motor car increasingly usurps the horse, the fuss and bustle has moved on elsewhere, and Rita’s second floor flat looks out on an almost empty square. But nothing is without benefit. As the saddlers, the stone masons, the porters move out the artists move in, rentals being cheap and available. Rooms might be narrow and staircases steep, but windows are large and let in good daylight, and the Slade School of Fine Art is just down the road in Gower Street. Forget that the air is often thick with coal smuts from the railway lines behind Euston Station and bronchitis is endemic. Let the working classes cough and spit and hawk and grow old before their time, the young bohemians will flourish and suck the area dry for atmosphere and cheapness and then move on to healthier climes.

  At the moment the area suits Sherwyn very well. It’s as well for a young writer preparing for great things to be living in sin in Cumberland Market. Respectability was for before the war, this is now, now, now. Experience is everything. He is a little drunk. He stopped by at a bar he knows and shared a quick glass or two of absinthe with an acquaintance who seemed happy enough to pay.

  ‘Rita, Rita,’ he could say in exultation, ‘we are rich! I have sold my novel! I am to be married to Miss Vivien Ripple the well-known giantess!
’ and they will share a good bottle of wine and he will leap on top of Rita on the purple velvet chaise longue she has just bought for two shillings in Kentish Town Market.

  Commonsense Rules

  No, on second thoughts perhaps that isn’t all that sensible. Rita will be all in favour of him marrying for money – is she herself not kept as a rich man’s mistress? Sherwyn must move out when he comes by – so that is no concern; if he says his novel is to be published she will be delighted; but when it comes to money he must be careful. If he says he is rich Rita will demand the rent he owes – how quickly sums do mount up. He mustn’t forget he is seriously in debt. He owes his father some £265 (or £450 according to his stepmother, the horse-faced Enid); some £50 to various dining and bookmaking establishments.

  And now he must outfit himself, not just for life as an up-and-coming young writer, but immediately for a weekend at Dilberne Court. He hates to be rushed when it comes to clothes. Serious and careful consideration must be paid to the impression they make; and he had so little of what is the correct wear for a handsome young suitor wooing a large, plain woman. No, he must not think like that. Flowers, of course. His mother had always bought hers at Moyses Stevens, but they were so expensive and at this time of year there would be nothing to find in his father’s garden except a few laurel leaves. It would simply not be wise to tell Rita about the cheque.

  What Has He Done?

  For what is left after debts have been paid – horribly little – will have to support him for the couple of years it will take to write the next novel. Such is the writer’s life. And at what cost has the money been earned? Engaged to marry Vivien Ripple! He can hardly imagine how in the course of a single day he has arrived at a situation which will take him weeks, months, to wriggle out of. Somehow or other the engagement must be broken off. With any luck Vivvie will do it of her own accord, if he shows himself to be impossible enough. Then he will be free as well as rich. A man with money in his pocket can take his pick of desirable girls. He will keep quiet about the cheque. Rita will not necessarily understand how much of a joke the whole thing is. She might even weep and make a fuss. You can never tell with girls – they sometimes seem to lack all reason.

  No, better to keep quiet and content himself with the good bottle of wine he borrowed from the bar and leaping upon her on the purple chaise longue, to which he is greatly looking forward. Perhaps the whitebait girl has some of Rita’s characteristics? Rita is not averse to all sorts of practices of the kind ‘nice’ girls would not even imagine, let alone think of doing. She has turned out to be a real brick, and he is grateful for it, but she too might have to go. To be living with an artists’ model is fitting for an aspiring young literary man about town, though for a successful writer perhaps not. Her father keeps a fruit stall in Bermondsey. These things count, no matter how much of a bohemian a man might be. Oddly, an Old Etonian can get away with anything, a Pauline, not so.

  But Oh, Rita!

  But it will be hard to let her go, she is so pretty and striking; almost Moroccan in appearance; dark-complexioned; small lithe limbs; big breasts and little ankles; enormous, blue reproachful eyes – and then this mass of wild dark red hair. When they go about together in the street he attracts looks of envious curiosity from other men. She earns her own living as a model for the figure- and head-painting classes at the Slade, where she’s become so much of a favourite they’ve even let her enrol as a pupil. She spends her free time daubing away in her studio, and her nights – well, that didn’t bear too much thinking about but at least for the moment she spends them with him. He started sleeping on her floor after a party but little by little has risen to become a fixture in her bed.

  True, he once had to make himself scarce when the married lover turned up and demanded his dues. But when the lover turned out to be a famous landscape painter and a professor at the Slade, and not just some wealthy businessman, Sherwyn found his pangs of jealousy quite assuaged. He felt at least he was in good company. Rita denies that the lover pays her rent, claims she loves him passionately and that no money changes hands. Of course her lover pays her rent: why she demands that he, Sherwyn, pays towards it seems unreasonable. It is all very reminiscent of Alexandre Dumas’ La Dame aux Camélias, not to mention La Bohème. It is the very stuff of drama. Fate, Sherwyn realises, is on his side, as so often happens in the making of a great writer. It will never let him be short of subject matter. A writer does well to be open to as wide a range of emotional experience as possible. As it is, he is able to record his own inevitable spasms of jealousy, while being set free every now and then to engage in other couplings of his own. The nights Rita spent with the professor are the nights Sherwyn spent with Phoebe. They were not very rewarding nights. She had no conversation and wept most of the time.

  It might indeed be possible, Sherwyn supposes, to be contentedly married to Vivien Ripple while keeping Rita as a mistress. That would spare him the scandal and fuss of a divorce. He could be both emotionally and sexually satisfied, and still concentrate on writing. Wealth was certainly infinitely desirable. The cheque in the pocket was the key to creativity. Money meant the end to anxiety and freedom to the soul. And it could always be like this. He would not even insist on fidelity on Rita’s part: she moved in interesting circles: as life went by perhaps others yet more famous and more fortunate than the landscape painter might join in her life and look good in his biography. One must always think of the biography. And of course Vivvie would have no option other than fidelity.

  Sherwyn, thus tempted, climbs the steep grimy staircase to Rita’s studio. He finds her standing barefoot in front of her easel, a coat over what seems to be her nightie, trying to use the light that comes from the gas-lamp in the street below to guide brush to canvas. She is annoyingly impractical, but so very beautiful.

  Intermission

  As it happens I know Adela, Vivvie’s mother, well. I lived with her as her writer for five of her teenage years, over three novels of mine which took place between 1900 and 1905. I left her when she was seventeen rising eighteen at the end of Long Live the King. Book Two of the Love and Inheritance Trilogy. A very different kind of book from this. I reunited her with her affectionate aunt Isobel and thought I had finished with her. But no. Here she is, twenty or so years later. Odd that I never realised until now that she had the roots of evil in her: that she turned out not to be a good person at all. I am writing Vivvie’s story, not hers. I saw Vivvie on the station platform at Dilberne Halt waving at me out of the past and stayed with her, and only then realised, of course, she was Adela’s daughter, though as unlike her as chalk from cheese.

  So here is dear Adela, back in this book. I had thoughtlessly given her too harsh and traumatic a childhood for her to lead a harmless life. Because people are victims does not mean they are necessarily nice: on the contrary, they tend to learn the same tricks as their oppressors.

  Being the grand-daughter of a Princess and the niece of an Earl did not save little Adela from a disturbed, hungry and dysfunctional upbringing by parents who, while of the blood, were religious fanatics and convinced that to feed the body was to starve the soul. Feeling hopelessly guilty about the sexual act which had brought their daughter into the world in the first place all they wanted for her was to live an asexual life and to become a bride of Christ, Anglican not Catholic. But when Adela was sixteen her parents died in a fire in the rectory where her father was rector. Adela was saved. It was a tragic and terrible event, but it at least saved her from a future in a convent.

  But now I wonder if something nasty entered her teenage soul during her brief stay at the Bishop’s Palace in Wells after the rectory fire, from which she was rescued in the middle of the night, shivering and naked. Covered only by a blanket, she watched as the shrivelled and burnt corpses of her mother and father were carried past her on a stretcher, still sexually entwined. No-one had the forethought to hide her eyes. Perhaps whatever it was stayed and festered, having used the wound left by her parent
s’ death as a point of entry. She’d had such a hard time from them that she scarcely grieved for them at all, and grief normally puts up a protective barrier against evil forces. The Bishop’s Palace, where she received refuge, grand and beautiful place that it is, was no protection. On the contrary, where there are angels there are devils as well. It was from the Palace that the orphaned Adela fell into the clutches of spiritualist fraudsters, who put her on the stage as a medium and clairvoyant. And heaven knows what happened to her psyche there. Messing with ‘the other side’ can be dangerous.

  And then of course Adela’s cousin Rosina, with the help of the Theosophists, took her to Monte Verità in Switzerland and there she joined the community of hope and light – and where there is light there are shadows as well.

  Adela believes herself to be a good person. She thinks that all her actions are justified, that anyone would do as she does in the circumstances in which she finds herself. But the more I write about her the more I have discovered just how awful she has become.

  Mothers get the blame for everything as a matter of course, I know – too cruel, too kind; too cold, too enveloping; too discouraging, too full of unrealistic praise; too controlling, too careless; made me fat, made me thin; made me have an abortion, stopped me having an abortion; forced me to be an Olympic star, actress, opera singer whatever, stopped me being an Olympic star, actress, opera singer, whatever. Any stick will do with which to beat a mother. The truth being that most of us mothers do our best within the limits of our own nature. But I must say I think Adela was pretty awful when it came to poor Vivvie, even though once she spent so much time as my heroine. She just couldn’t bear being mother to a plain daughter and let Vivvie know it. Adela’s mother, of course, was a plain woman who couldn’t bear having a pretty daughter.