Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  He shocked himself in thinking it. Adela, his pride and joy.

  Sir Jeremy scarcely noticed when she told him the baby would be born in the autumn, that after all the excitements of the wedding she must be careful, she must look after her health and not get too tired, that she might spend the next few months abroad, spend the rest of the summer in the Alps and recuperate in the clean mountain air. Did he remember how happy they had been in Monte Verità? – oh, he did, he did!

  ‘Whatever you think best, my darling,’ he said. ‘You must look after our precious bundle. What a delightful surprise. You breathe new life into an old man.’

  Later On, In Dilberne Village

  Meanwhile Elsie was down in the village high street sharing a late supper of wedding leftovers with her sister Mrs Ashton and Lily, who ‘did’ up at the Court. Mrs Ashton was a widow who had taken over the village shop when her husband died, and ran it very well. After his death her spinster sister Elsie moved in to live with her. Before the war Elsie had worked at Dilberne Court as parlour maid: during the war as a munitionette, and after that, her health much reduced and her skin a yellowish colour but her sewing skills unimpaired, scraped a living as a seamstress. The cut-glass and silver bowl she brought home that day was an unexpected bonus: she would be able to sell it to supplement her old age pension when it came along (5/- a week). She decanted a quart or so of leftover potato salad and mayonnaise and some rejected tomato salad into its clean, polished and uncracked beauty, piled it high with the green oysters Rockefeller which the wedding guests had for the most part left uneaten, and carried the lot home for supper, asking Lily to come round and help eat it.

  When Mrs Ashton came home from the shop she insisted that the salad was put on individual plates, the oysters removed to a safe place, the bowl washed and polished and put for safety in her mahogany cabinet with the latticed windows. Mrs Ashton then asked her brother-in-law Sid the blacksmith to come round to put a value on the bowl. Harrods only hired out the best. Sid, who knew about metals and values, was quite impressed. The rim, he said, was hallmarked with the lion and Birmingham and dated 1895.

  ‘A fine piece you got out of them toffs, Elsie,’ Sid had said. ‘Well done. And I should think so too after all you’ve done for ’em. In time it’ll fetch at least fifty quid, so hang on to it as long as you can.’

  Sid took the plateful of oysters Rockefeller down to his wife, but she scraped the lot out down at the end of the garden – any food so vile a green would do no-one any good at all. Sid was not too sorry.

  Mrs Ashton brought home a few slices of best ham from the shop and they had a feast, washed down with cider. The potato salad leftovers were really good, although the mayonnaise had been made with olive oil which had a strange foreign taste, and it was peculiar to eat tomatoes out of season. Lily found an old cigar butt in her serving, after which the conversation became rather more critical of their benefactors than it had been at the beginning of the meal.

  ‘The idea!’ Elsie said to her sister Mrs Ashton. ‘That bowl! Thinking she can bribe me to keep my mouth shut!’

  ‘I hope you do,’ said Mrs Ashton, severely. ‘Poor Miss Vivvie. Least said soonest mended. She had no idea how to look after herself. Waiting for a train without even a coat, and snow on the way. Anything could have happened.’

  ‘And it evidently did,’ said Elsie. ‘I saw that unborn baby move. Great kick it gave, and all but stretched the satin, and me a respectable person. They might at least have warned me. Enough to put you off dressmaking for life.’

  ‘Worse than finding a cigar butt in your potato salad?’ her sister enquired and Elsie said at least she doubted anyone had done it on purpose.

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Lily darkly. ‘They’re a funny lot, not like the old gentry. If you ask me, Lady Adela herself is pregnant. She as good as told me so. She said she couldn’t face breakfast and then I caught her vomiting in the bathroom. Or at any rate bending over the basin. She shouted at me to go away.’

  ‘Food poisoning,’ said Mrs Ashton, firmly.

  ‘It certainly is not,’ said Lily. ‘I help Cook and I should know. No, I reckon she’s pregnant. She’s not too old. My own sister got a bun in the oven when she was forty-five. It was her eighth. He wouldn’t leave her alone though she begged.’

  ‘Men!’ exclaimed Elsie. ‘All the same, high or low.’

  ‘And I don’t think it’s Sir Jeremy’s either,’ said Lily. ‘He’s not all that often in her Ladyship’s bed. Either in London or in his dressing room.’

  ‘You have no business saying a thing like that, Lily, and I advise you not to repeat it. Whose is it, then?’

  ‘She keeps the house full of young men,’ said Lily. ‘Could be anyone’s. Mr Mungo’s always hanging round. And if Mr Sherwyn’s coming round she puts on more lipstick and draws dark rings round her eyes.’

  ‘Under her husband’s nose!’ exclaimed Elsie.

  ‘He doesn’t notice a thing,’ said Lily. ‘He adores her. No, she’s a real goer, that one.’

  They ate on for a while in contemplative silence, broken only by a shriek when Elsie, who seemed doomed, thought she came across another shard of cigar in the salad, but it turned out to be nothing worse than a piece of potato skin which someone had failed to remove in the initial peeling. It is easily done.

  It was a meal that stayed in the minds of the participants – if only because of both the silver rimmed bowl – which was to stay in Mrs Ashton’s glass cabinet as an object of value and pride for the next seventeen years – and by the shock of a stubbed-out cigar butt found in the leftover salad – perceived by the three women, however vaguely, as symbolic of the humiliation of the have-nots at the hands of the gentry. And just as well that the meal was memorable, becoming as it did most relevant to the twins’ enquiries, years later, into the nature of their parentage.

  After The Wedding

  Sir Jeremy and Adela’s (well, Vivvie’s) wedding gift to the young couple was a brand new yellow three-litre Bentley tourer, fresh from the factory – twin carburettors and a four speed gear box and a top speed of 80 miles an hour. It was in this splendid and well-upholstered vehicle that Sherwyn and Vivvie set out on their honeymoon, leaving the wedding party behind them.

  As soon as there was no-one to observe them they both began to be happy. The sheer effectiveness and rumbling magnificence of the machine they drove, monarchs of all but empty roads, managed to dwarf all personal doubts and fears – Sherwyn forgot he was short, Vivvie that she was tall: they met as equals. (The roads might have been comparatively empty but they were far from safe – drivers were not tested and licensed and there were more than seven thousand fatal accidents that year – mostly pedestrians taken unawares.) But Sherwyn was a good and skilled driver and Vivvie felt he could be trusted. A man whose talent was keeping out of trouble would use the gift in all aspects of life. He would not fall off horses, have road accidents, take unnecessary risks, get food poisoning, choose the wrong hotel or the wrong publisher. She had chosen the right man. Driving, he looked handsome and alert under his peaked flat cap, his rather sharp nose seen in profile, the mouth, she could now see at her leisure, for she had seldom had the opportunity to examine him closely, having been fully occupied trying to forestall or respond to whatever he was saying, had permanently upturned corners, which was what gave him the appearance of always wearing a slightly ironic, somewhat cynical smile. This, Vivvie could see, would always give him an advantage in literary circles.

  As for Vivvie, she wore a mannish brown tweed suit by Coco Chanel and a stern white blouse from Worth for the drive. The suit had a drop waist and by the time they had got to Dover needed to be let out a full inch. She had seemed, he thought, to keep the pregnancy small by effort of will alone. Once the wedding was over and she was out of the grounds of Dilberne Court she could at last breathe deeply and let her body do what it was so good at doing; namely, to grow and expand. He admired her for it. She removed the absurd little pill hat her mo
ther had insisted on her wearing and let her hair fall loose around her face, so its imperfections were less obvious. He even felt affection for her. Perhaps an eventual divorce would not be necessary or desirable. She did not flap, or giggle, or chatter, or smirk, or snivel, or fiddle with her hair and clothes. She spoke only when necessary and then to the point. She was just large. The worst was over. The public scrutiny of their mismatch had been faced and overcome.

  Neither felt the need to speak until they reached Dover. It took them some three hours to cover the 66 miles. Small country roads were not conducive to speed – things would get better, Sherwyn assured Vivvie, when they reached the long straight stretches of tree-lined roads of the Continent – roads which had carried so many armies to one fruitless war or another. They dined at the Castle Inn and caught the ten o’clock night ferry. The Bentley was loaded onto the deck by crane, and much complimented by all and sundry as she swung there, glittering in moonlight and floodlight mixed, and breaths let out as she was safely lowered and roped.

  Sherwyn took care to say nothing of significance until both were preparing for bed.

  ‘A few things I need to know,’ he said.

  ‘I can see that you probably do,’ she said, calmly enough. And then: ‘Wait until we’re in bed.’

  There were two bunks and Vivvie said she preferred the top one, and Sherwyn did not demur. He unpacked his own valise carefully to take out red and black striped silk pyjamas (Weatherill – a gift from Adela), undressed discreetly behind a screen and folded his clothes neatly on the shelves provided. She waited until he had finished and heaved herself up onto the top bunk without bothering to make use of the little ladder. She removed her outer garments decorously enough, but then dropped them unfolded onto the floor. Sherwyn tut-tutted to show his disapproval, but stopped short of getting out of bed to deal with them in a civilised manner. After that they both talked to the ceiling, in what was more like an examination of terms than an actual conversation.

  Strange shadowy shapes moved across the ceiling as the ship slipped away from the lights of the harbour and made for the open sea.

  ‘Let us begin,’ he said. ‘So whose is it?’

  She considered.

  ‘I don’t really know. Can we settle for the Angel Gabriel? At any rate he came unannounced to a humble stable and lo! I was pregnant. He had a halo round his head so far as I know, but I suppose it could have been sunlight striking across his blonde hair.’

  ‘I think Jesus was born in a stable, not conceived in a stable.’

  ‘Yes he was,’ she agreed.

  ‘But you were not unwilling?’

  ‘Good heavens no,’ she said. ‘It was all very – what can I say – gracious. My mother is very much against the explanation that it was divine intervention of some kind. She prefers to believe the baby is yours and that having an immature mind I am in denial. Could she be right?’

  ‘I have no memory of any incident between us that might lead to a pregnancy,’ he said. ‘But blonde you say. At any rate not some kind of foreigner.’

  ‘Not all foreigners are dark,’ she said. ‘I once came across a fair Norwegian. He was very blonde. And very foreign.’

  ‘You must try not to argue,’ he said, ‘or we won’t get on.’

  They were both drifting off to sleep in their different bunks when he said:

  ‘Very well. I accept it was the Angel Gabriel. Just see me as Joseph.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ she said. ‘I think we will have a perfectly satisfactory marriage.’

  ‘I daresay we will,’ he said. Sherwyn went to sleep wondering who would father the whitebait girl’s child and if it might be The Uncertain Gentleman in the second book of the trilogy which now looked likely to happen. The difficulty was the first volume was already at the printer’s, too late to change except at vast expense, and he was confined by what he had already written. Perhaps it wasn’t such a good idea after all. But at least on this extended honeymoon there would be nothing else to do but write. He would not let himself be distracted by trivial diversions. He wondered what culinary delights Vivvie’s Alpine village might have to offer, but feared they would be of the goulash, Weiner Schnitzel and sauerkraut kind. Though you never knew – some mountain goat cheeses were delicious. He fell asleep.

  Vivvie for her part whispered a silent thanks to Greystokes. Everything had turned out very well, as the noble beast had prophesied. It was strange to be sharing so small and intimate a space with another human being, but she supposed it was what marriage entailed. She rather wished she had chosen the bottom bunk. She would have to get out of bed at some stage and didn’t want to wake Sherwyn. But something inside her pressed on something else: pregnancy was a very mysterious process, but somehow at the end of it a new little baby burst into the world. Adela was then going to take it away and bring it up as her own, so she, Vivvie, could start afresh as a virtuous bride. It had sounded a good idea when Adela first mooted it. In many families in the land older sisters turned out to be mothers, mothers to be grandmothers. But supposing she grew to be fond of the baby? No, she didn’t think that would ever happen. The Angel Gabriel’s it might have been, but at the moment it felt like a rather uncomfortable and unsustainable growth clinging on where it wasn’t wanted. And how on earth would it get out? She fell asleep.

  The night passed without incident. In the morning, before setting out in the direction of Reims, Strasbourg and Baden Baden (Sherwyn: ‘at least we can get a good meal at Brenners’), through the Black Forest and on to Munich and then dropping down to Barscherau (Vivvie: ‘I don’t think it will be a matter of dropping down, as much as creeping up. We’re talking about the Alps and in May. Though most of the snow should have cleared by now’). They breakfasted on café-au-lait, croissants and apricot jam in spring sunshine at the Meursualt Hotel in Calais. They consulted maps and compared them with Adela’s written instructions, all of which seemed eminently sensible.

  They were to make for Munich and then down to the Austrian border, the small town of Kufstein and then cut off to Barscherau, a village of a few hundred souls and a deserted Benedictine abbey, nestling in the arms of a mountain whose name she had forgotten. They were to stay at the Gasthaus Post until the baby arrived. Courtney and Baum had written ahead to make necessary arrangements for their arrival. They were not on any account to announce themselves as newlyweds: Sherwyn was there to finish a novel: Adela herself would turn up in July as the mother-in-law to supervise the delivery of the baby and depart a month or so later as its mother.

  ‘Thus saving her only daughter from social disgrace,’ remarked Sherwyn. ‘I see – though I must say it seems a great bother to go to. Girls in the haute bohème don’t worry so much about scandal. It’s either a bottle of gin and a hot bath, or just go ahead.’

  ‘I know so little about how the rest of the world lives,’ she said, sadly.

  To his surprise Sherwyn found himself vastly entertained rather than irritated by Adela’s love of conspiracy, happy enough to be holed up in some mountain vastness with nothing to do but write for three or four months, oddly trusting of Gasthaus cuisine – of which he had heard good things from Mungo – and grateful that he would not have to be saddled with a child which was none of his. Adela would turn up when the snow was properly melted and the hills alive with the sound of birdsong, and the Alpine meadows full of flowers, and all would be well. It certainly made a change from Morocco and sheep’s eyes.

  Adela, it seemed, looked after everything that needed looking after, arranging anything that could possibly be arranged, so long, Sherwyn suspected, as it suited her advantage. It was hardly surprising that Vivvie was the way she was. Ah, the delicate Adela! Going to bed with Adela, which a man might imagine would be like going to bed with some faery child, all fluttering, delicate parts, one would have to be careful not to rub up against the steel inside, and end up like Keats’ wretched knight at arms, alone and palely loitering after his encounter with the Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Still, a man would like to at least try, and she would be turning up at Barscherau, a village too small even to be marked on the map.

  Quite how Courtney and Baum fitted into the Ripple scheme of things he would investigate at his leisure. Vivvie had once suggested she ‘owned’ the village. It seemed highly unlikely. Vivvie was an agreeable fantasist who claimed her baby was fathered by the Angel Gabriel. But then it was also unlikely that Adela had given birth to this immense girl, yet apparently she had. The problem for the writer was making fiction stranger than life, not the other way round. But things had certainly looked up since Vivvie first appeared towering over him in his attic office in Fleet Street. After a few slow days on the road to Munich, past the Vosges mountains and Alsace, Sherwyn was able to let rip on a stretch of straight, well-tarmacadamed road, allowing the Bentley to hit her stride, as he put it, before swinging up through the zigzag roads of the Black Forest. Here the road was enclosed by dark fir trees and the sound of the engine was thrown back from a natural echo chamber, as Sherwyn repeatedly accelerated and braked for the sharp, uphill bends. Vivvie seemed to admire him greatly for his driving ability and he in his turn admired her for the way her head would bump into the canvas roof of the tourer when they encountered bad potholes, and still did not complain. He realised he had become quite accustomed to her height: it was only when they were in company that he became conscious of it.