Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Adela, in 1922, is still a large-eyed, beautiful, fragile little thing, with the tiny body, large head, hands and feet of a surviving anorexic, or anyone who for some reason didn’t get enough food in childhood. As a young girl she had the vulnerable transparency and innocence which large tough men found appealing. It was on Monte Verità, whither he had come in search of a suitable author to write a book on the life of Madame Blavatsky, that Jeremy Ripple, the cricket and rowing Blue and gentleman publisher, clapped eyes upon the ethereal, well-born and well-spoken Adela. He fell instantly, hopelessly and permanently in love with her. He proposed marriage within the month and was accepted. A roll of thunder around the mountain tops was heard as he put a ruby wedding ring upon her finger. The ring as it happened was Adela’s own, a present from Queen Alexandra herself, but it was the only ring available on the remote and unworldly Mountain of Truth where artists and thinkers gathered from all over the world to spread the message of truth and light, hear the music of the spheres and join in Universal Oneness, and where wedding rings were scarce.

  Anyway.

  How was Jeremy Ripple to know that his child bride – she was just eighteen – was eventually to come into possession of Dilberne Court and with the birth of Vivvie the premises at No 3 Fleet Street, which was one day to house Ripple & Co, Publishers. Though some did assume, unkindly and in error, that it was not so much love at first sight as a fairly obvious act of self-interest. Adela was an Earl’s niece and Jeremy, from an army family and an Old Etonian, knew all too well the value of family connections in all parts of British society. But Adela believes in love, and how could she, or indeed Jeremy, or any of the Asconites gathered there on that momentous wedding day dismiss the clap of thunder which shook the mountains at the exact moment the tiny ruby ring was placed on the tiny finger? The Gods themselves were present, and a very harmonious marriage it turned out to be. It produced Vivvie, and out of Vivvie and the Angel Gabriel, Mallory and Stella. As it happens there was at the time a young White Russian Czarist refugee called Igor Kubanov, later to enter the fashionable world as a famous equestrian champion, working at the Ripple stud farm as a stable hand – a handsome fellow, and his blond hair could look quite angelic with the sun behind it.

  As some people seem born to be, Adela remains event-prone – that is, major events swirl around her while leaving her untouched, undamaged. One meets such people in novels – it is Adela’s intervention that saves the Prince of Wales himself to live another day – but also, I have found, on occasion, in real life. These are the individuals who walk unscathed from the rail accident, who stand next to the grassy knoll when Kennedy dies, who watch from the ship when Krakatoa erupts – the ones who seem fated to be witnesses, not the victims, of great events. Far worse to be accident-prone, the ones whom fate has it in for. Disasters and cancers strike them and theirs, law suits are lost, vital files misplaced – in the end a truck veers off the road and mows them down, a tile just falls off the roof when they pass by and knocks the life out of them. It’s enough, if not quite, to make a writer believe in the machinations of a divine power. Some people are just born lucky, others just unlucky.

  The other thing which impressed Adela in her girlhood was not just the beautiful spiritual sentiments of the Monte Verità inhabitants, but the flabby skin and scrawny limbs of those who most espoused them. (Jeremy by comparison was a smooth, sturdy tree trunk of a man in his prime, a man of virility and consequence.) There was great relief to be found in simply getting away from the black bristles which sprouted between the toes of elderly sandalled artists as they sunbathed naked, or from their armpits as they raised their arms in worship of the rising sun. It was in those Monte Verità months, no doubt, that squeamishness, if nothing worse, entered into her soul.

  I know Adela to be capable of great acts of kindness and it is possible to see her decision to steal Vivvie’s babies as an attempt to save the family from disgrace – but what disgrace? the children were legally Sherwyn’s – his being the name on the marriage certificate – and a little care would ensure that no-one would suspect otherwise: it would be possible to claim that Adela wanted to redeem herself by being as good a mother to her grand-daughters as she had been a bad one to her daughter. But I think she was such a selfish bitch she thought that having small children at her knee would make her look young and envied by her friends and most of all she would punish Vivvie for having been born and so deprived her of having the children she deserved. And that is why when it became apparent on her wedding day that the girl was pregnant, it came to Adela that to bring up the Angel Gabriel’s baby as her own was such a good idea. And it was a fairly commonplace occurrence at the time. The disgraced daughter lay low until the baby was born. Her mother or married older sister would step forward with the newborn, crying ‘Look what I made!’ Everybody knew, nobody told.

  Adela sees herself as a good person, as do so many in this wicked world. And being a good person, how can anything she does be wrong? If she maintains that she is the mother of her daughter’s misconceived twins – how can she possibly believe Vivvie’s tale of the Angel Gabriel – how can any of us, come to that? – the family is at least saved the disgrace of their illegitimacy and ensuing social embarrassment. If she had known – as a modern scan would have instantly told her – that Vivvie was carrying twins, then Adela might have changed her mind – twins, as one might say today, being decidedly something else, even for a wealthy woman who can afford nursemaids. And she had enough to deal with without the extra burden and being in love with Sherwyn took up a lot of emotional time and energy resisting the temptation to go to bed with him. She was, after all, a married woman and had what was left of the vast and prosperous Dilberne estate to look after and keep up to date. The estate is now much reduced in size. When in 1916 the war budget demanded tax of five shillings in the pound, Arthur, Lord Dilberne, always an impetuous man, simply sold up and took himself, his family and his auto business to Chicago, handing over the ancestral home, Dilberne Court, a very pretty Jacobean manor house, a few hundred acres of tenanted farmland, including a well-managed stud farm, to Adela’s care. His mother Isobel claimed that Adela was the only one of the family with a head for business and so it proved.

  There may now be only a staff of three to help Adela run the place, but all the same the upkeep of a manor house and grounds is not cheap. It was fortunate that money from Vivvie’s estate was able to contribute, one way and another, to the refurbishment and running of the property. Adela felt herself entitled, if only morally, to such of it as she could get her hands on. It is not nice, indeed it is unfair, to be disinherited, cursed even in utero, on the grounds of a mother’s infidelity to the Catholic cause in 1883. Many felt at the time that the Bill of 1882 which allowed married women to own property in their own right was a great mistake; women, as everyone knew, did whimsical things.

  The funds that came in from Ripple & Co were never certain. Sometimes the company was in profit, sometimes not, depending on how Sir Jeremy’s hunches worked out. Adela was able to persuade Jeremy that if only his offices were refurbished in tune with modern times a new and upcoming generation of writers would flock to the firm and ensure that it prospered. The cost of the investiture party had been extreme – Syrie had upped her prices disgracefully – but there was surely something to celebrate, and many other London publishers had followed suit. Out with the old, in with the new! Keep up to date in style and a new literature for a new age would surely emerge, fit for the age of the League of Nations and universal peace.

  In any case so long as Vivvie, justly inheriting, is wealthy in her own right, Adela, unjustly disinherited, feels morally entitled to at least some of her daughter’s money to help with the upkeep of Dilberne Court, and it is indeed Vivvie who ends up paying for the splendid refurbishment of both the Court and her father’s offices. Vivvie, such is the effect of what these days we would call her ‘low self esteem’, finds herself unable to challenge parental authority. She longs to please those
she has so displeased by her existence: it is the least she can do for the mother who bore her, so disappointing a child for such a fastidious and beautiful mama.

  And indeed it is no easy a thing for a pretty mother to give birth to a dull, ugly daughter. The mother will be deprived of so much: put the child in pretty frilly clothes and she looks absurd, dress her as a fairy princess for the party and friends just laugh. She must learn to put up with pitying looks – which is what Adela has most feared all her life. But the blow – for blow it is – goes even deeper. How has this happened? Adela vaguely fears that she has given birth to some ugly inner aspect of herself – her shadow side, as Carl Jung would have it, ‘consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism’.

  Adela, we must remember, spent time at Ascona, and though glad to escape, puts much faith in Jung, even occasionally reading passages of The Theory of Psychoanalysis to Vivvie as she grows up. Her daughter is not all marks of weakness, marks of woe: Vivvie is intelligent enough, but was never sent away to school to have the rough edges of human interaction rubbed smooth. When she was small she ate mostly at the kitchen table with the maid. Now she had grown to twice Adela’s size she did her best to maintain a sulky silence at the dinner table.

  Vivvie, who loves and admires her tiny mother intolerably, takes much comfort from the fact that at least Adela doesn’t have to suffer the pangs of envy so many other mothers feel as their own beauty fades and that of their daughter grows, and of rage as the daughter takes the affection from the father that was once his wife’s by right. And some comfort in that at least her mother has risen up the social ladder now that her husband has been dubbed a Knight of the Realm by a grateful monarch and at last has a title, ‘Lady Adela’. She no longer feels so bereft at being so well born on her father’s side and yet a mere Mrs, and actually a Princess on her mother’s side had not so many European titles been abolished over the years by revolution and the fall of empires.

  I think you know Sherwyn, Vivvie, Sir Jeremy and Adela well enough by now and I will move swiftly on, racing through the decades to slow up in 1947 by which time Vivvie is well-dead, brown-bread, and Mallory and Stella, twins, shadow sides of one another, beauty and beast, are twenty-three.

  PART TWO

  Scenes From Married Life, 1923–39

  A May Afternoon In 1923. Dilberne Court

  Adela was helping the seamstress with a fitting for Vivvie’s wedding dress. Syrie had tried her hand at dress designing and the bridal gown was to cost £100, prix d’ami. The bridal gown was in elegant draped white satin so slippery it was hard to manage, but Syrie thought it would make a splash in the dim candlelit recesses of the church.

  The seamstress, who as it happened was a sister of Mrs Ashton, the village store keeper whom we last saw with Vivien on the platform of Dilberne Halt, was busy putting a new set of pins along the front of the hem.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Elsie was saying. ‘I thought I’d got it right a month ago. But now the hem in the front is a good two inches higher than at the back.’ Vivvie huffed and puffed and wriggled and shifted from one leg to another which didn’t help.

  ‘Then unpick, re-pin and re-do,’ said Adela. ‘Vivvie, do at least try and stand still.’

  ‘Sherwyn stood in the mud at Verdun,’ said Vivvie, ‘and moving from one foot to the other was the only thing that stopped him falling down and drowning.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Vivvie, we are not on the battlefield. You are having a fitting for a wedding dress.’

  Vivvie and Sherwyn had had a peaceful enough courtship. It involved no kisses or sweet sentiments, and neither talked about anything dear to them. The ring went on her finger on Christmas Day. The wedding was to be in May. Sherwyn visited weekly as seemed proper, and made it his business to charm Adela.

  ‘Naughty boy! What a flirt you are,’ Adela would say, and Vivvie would wince.

  Adela put on scarlet lipstick when Sherwyn came round and wore her most flattering clothes. Vivvie abjured cosmetics – they seemed to her a form of cheating. When Sherwyn was alone with Vivvie he contented himself with telling tales of heroism in battle, mostly involving himself and mostly invention. If dates, times and places became so implausible even she objected, he would say, ‘But I write fiction. I have to keep in practice.’ And she would raise her bushy eyebrows and even egg him on. They got on well enough together.

  There was to be a quiet ceremony in Dilberne Church on May 23rd. Neither Sherwyn nor Vivvie wanted a big wedding. Mungo suggested that readers preferred their male authors unmarried and as Ripple & Co’s new head of publicity (Sherwyn had become Editorial Consultant) he had plans for a photo of Sherwyn to appear on the cover of The Missing Millionaire (new title for The Unquiet Gentleman) which was to be released in late May in Ripple’s new Discerning Yarns list. Writers could no longer afford to be anonymous. They must become personalities. Sherwyn should appear with a pipe, but not in a book lined room but against a curtain of running water – universal symbol of profundity. So just as well that the wedding was kept quiet; the honeymoon would be in a Swiss ski resort no-one had heard of: the happy couple would return to live in the renovated dower house at Dilberne, where once the Dowager Duchess Isobel had spent her last days guarded by a security man whose closeness to her, some thought, was rather suspect. Sherwyn would probably write in a small flat in London where he could be close to the humming heart of cultural life – gone were the pre-war days of ivory towers, where Walter de la Mare’s Listeners came to knock upon the moonlit door, where horses in silence chomped the forest’s ferny floor. All that escapist, sub-occultist stuff that so entranced Sherwyn’s father just didn’t wash any more.

  ‘Tell me, Elsie,’ said Adela. She was pacing to and fro as she did when she was puzzling. Elsie was on her knees in front of Vivvie the better to tack-stitch the folds of satin she was draping over the slim skirt. (Syrie had decided on a trompe-l’oeil approach.) ‘Do you think if we have arum lilies in the church people will think of funerals?’

  ‘My sort of people will, Madam,’ said Elsie. ‘I don’t know about yours. Arums at a wedding! The idea!’

  Elsie’s reply bordered on rudeness but she was a very good seamstress and Adela overlooked it.

  ‘But May is simply dreadful when it comes to white flowers,’ complained Adela. ‘Only freesias really, and white tulips of course, if only the gardener had any forethought, but he didn’t.’ The month had been particularly bad: dry and cool and with a predominant north-westerly wind which seemed to make all the garden flowers shiver and sulk. ‘On the other hand,’ she went on, ‘there are some simply splendid arums down by the pond. They make such a good display. Otherwise it looks as if one had to make do with Harrods. So common not to use one’s own flowers.’

  Syrie was doing the flower displays for the Dilberne wedding, including the church interior.

  ‘Oh use the arums, who cares?’ said Vivvie. ‘It’s my wedding, though everyone seems to forget it.’

  Elsie Fletcher the seamstress, kneeling on the floor in front of Vivvie’s belly, gave a little cry and dropped her box of pins.

  ‘But it moved,’ she cried. ‘I saw it move. Something in there moved.’

  Adela stood stock still. Once one accepted the impossible her daughter showed every sign of being pregnant. How had she missed it? She supposed because one so often averted the eyes.

  ‘Indigestion,’ she said firmly. ‘Vivvie, best if you go and lie down. You ate far too much at lunch: you are so excited about the wedding you do tend to overeat. Elsie, that will be enough for today.’

  Elsie put away her needles and threads and walked down to the village. ‘If you ask me,’ Elsie said to her sister, ‘that girl’s got a bun in the oven.’

  ‘I thought something was up,’ said Mrs Ashton. ‘What with the short engagement and all. You’d have thought people like that knew better. She’ll have to go into hiding.’

  Vivvie went to her bedroom and lay dow
n on her bed. Syrie had been at work here too. There was nothing familiar or comforting anywhere. The old dusty crimson velvet of the bed hangings had been thrown out and replaced by white gauze drapes. There were mirrors everywhere. and Vivvie studied herself in one of them.

  Adela did a Coué exercise to steady herself – every day in every way I’m getting better and better – and went on up to Vivvie’s room. She didn’t knock. Vivvie was looking at herself in the mirror, full length, first this way, then that. She seldom looked at her body.

  ‘Am I like the Van Eyck painting in the National Gallery?’ Vivvie asked. ‘The pregnant wife one?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Adela, ‘that’s exactly what you’re like, only not so far gone, thank God. You and Sherwyn have been very foolish. I’m very angry with the dear boy. It puts us all in the most embarrassing situation. But don’t worry. We’ll whisk you away after the wedding and you can come back with the newborn when it’s about three months old, keep out of sight for a little. With any luck your dress has enough drapes to get you through the wedding. Thanks to Syrie, whom you so despise.’

  ‘But Mother–’

  ‘Don’t argue, Vivvie. This is all a great shock. Don’t push me.’

  ‘Village girls get pregnant all the time.’

  ‘Yes but they’re village. You’re gentry. It’s not what’s expected.’

  ‘It can’t be Sherwyn’s because we haven’t done it. He’s not interested, neither am I. I don’t know how it happened. You don’t get pregnant when you do it standing up. The stuff falls out. It’s different for horses. Lily told me. But she must have been wrong.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ Adela was amazed.

  ‘Sherwyn isn’t the father. It can only have been the Angel Gabriel.’

  Adela asked Vivvie many questions and then said: ‘I see, pregnant by a passing stable boy, and you don’t even know his name. Are you out of your mind?’