Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  He left the bed as Delgano, sleek and confident, leaving Adela still asleep.

  ‘Frühstück, Herr Ripple? Kaffe? Wurst? Strudel?’ asked the landlord’s daughter. He accepted coffee – more whipped cream – and drove back to Barscherau before Adela woke. A hen had chosen to sleep in the car overnight, fluttering in through an open window no doubt. It objected vigorously to its ejection and Sherwyn had to remove dust and dung before he could drive off. There was no sign of Delgano. Sherwyn drove home as himself, grateful to occupy a single body and mind, anxious about Vivvie, anxious about impossible plot twists he had apparently brought upon himself.

  Friday July 4th 1923. Barscherau

  Sherwyn came home not with medical books but with news that he had encountered Adela, and had not been home when expected because of having to spend the night in Kufstein waiting for a delivery of fuel from Munich. Vivvie imagined he had probably spent the night with some dirndled girl of easy virtue but that did not concern her. Wives had a right to sexual jealousy: platonic lovers – for this was how she was beginning to see herself and Sherwyn – did not. She had begun to see how painful human relationships could be: she had strong feelings about the baby and it was not yet even a human. What would she feel like when it burst upon the world? Burst was probably an unfortunate word: it was what she feared she was about to do. She had once seen a mare from Greystokes’ harem give birth, and the foal stuck a leg out of the mother and nothing happened, and nothing happened and then the rest of it exploded out as the mother’s flanks seemed to implode. The foal lay there for a little and then staggered to its feet and everyone watching cheered. The mare looked behind her, seemed interested but oddly impassive, as if it was all beyond her. Vivvie supposed you just let it happen, and Nature knew best.

  She’d had a dream in which a little boy’s leg stuck out of her for a bit and then the baby fell out, and the child – a cheery little fellow with fair curly hair; he must have been about three – staggered to his feet and ran about. Vivvie had felt very proud.

  It was the prospect of Adela’s arrival – in the next day or two, Sherwyn said – that disturbed Vivvie. She should be happy to see her mother again but she found she was not. Indeed, the very thought of her made Vivvie feel awkward, unnaturally large and unmanoeuvrable, like some uneasy Mount Everest plonked in the way to annoy normal people. Her mother moved and thought so lightly and quickly and despised so much: she was bound to turn up and say the wrong thing to Frau Bieler, whom Vivvie now liked and depended upon. Adela would sneer at the poor woman, probably openly, for her broad waist, the bare strong arms, the full skirt, the puffed sleeves, and the unstylish white smocked bib she always wore. ‘Ignorant peasantry,’ her mother would be quite capable of muttering, but loud enough to be heard, when throwing out the bilberry infusion and horse chestnut paste that Frau Bieler had so carefully made up for Vivvie’s varicose veins, and worked so well. And it seemed a doctor from England was to come and help with the ‘delivery’ – as if the baby was something evil: ‘Dear God, deliver us from evil’ – which was absurd, since Frau Bieler had brought fourteen of her grandchildren into the world.

  As for handing her own baby over to Adela, the more she thought about it, the less she liked it. Adela would only hand over his care to a nurse. It was going to be a boy she was sure of it; she could almost hear Greystokes lifting his nose and whinnying boy, boy, boy – and the Angel Gabriel was not likely to be the agent of someone who would beget a girl. Vivvie acknowledged that she was not a very practical person and might not be a fit mother for a baby boy, but if she were to stay where she was Frau Bieler would probably agree to do the child rearing and Vivvie could stay where she was, amongst the mountains and the geraniums and the feather beds, breathing God’s fresh air and not London smogs or Sussex fogs. After all, she had money of her own – Sherwyn had promised to look into that side of things – and some of the Barscherau inhabitants even curtsied as she went by. She could do as she liked – so long as her mother didn’t come along and argue her out of it.

  And her poor husband, Sherwyn, working so hard to finish his novel. Adela was bound to upset him as well. Sherwyn behaved so much better when he has being admired than when he felt others were being critical. Probably most men were the same. She had been so peaceful and happy and comfortable with Sherwyn: and now a shadow was falling over them all, deep and black, as when the sun goes down behind Mount Untersberg and the ravens swarm and the dangerous little dwarves come out. They pretend to be your friends but they’re not. Vivvie shivered, suddenly cold. But Frau Bieler came in all excited because her Ladyship Adela was coming at last, die glamouröse Dame!

  That night, when she and Sherwyn had supper together, it seemed to her he had somehow changed, though she could not quite put her finger on what it was. He picked at the Schweinebraten with Knödel and cabbage salad of which Frau Bieler was so proud, as if it was somehow not quite good enough, and even pushed it aside so Vivvie had to finish it for him. She asked him if anything was the matter but he said no, he was just rather tired, and then perked up and read her what he had been writing during the day. He wondered if it went too far for contemporary tastes and Vivvie said it certainly did. Sherwyn’s readers did not want to know exactly what went on behind the door after Delgano closed it – a row of little dots was enough for her, and surely everyone else. He didn’t want to find his work consigned to the forbidden erotica rooms of the British Library, did he? Where on earth did he get all these horrid ideas from?

  Sherwyn looked at Vivvie when she said this as if she were some kind of enemy. But why ask her if he did not want her to tell him? And after supper in front of the fire Sherwyn collapsed again and stared into space. He seemed to her to be exuding a different kind of energy and that energy was perverse, and depressed. He no longer looked her in the eye. It was something he had said to her mother, or her mother to him, probably about the baby. Whatever it was, Sherwyn was no longer good father Joseph to Vivvie’s Mary. So mothers destroyed one’s dreams.

  Saturday July 5th 1923. Barscherau

  On Friday night Sherwyn slept like a log and Vivvie very badly. Unplaceable but implacable strains and pains ran up and down her body. She would have tossed and turned all night only she couldn’t: she was too heavy. The baby held her pinned in her middle as if she were a dead butterfly in a display case. She longed to struggle up like a newborn foal finding its legs but she was too weighed down, like a butterfly drenched in a rain storm. A vulgar cabbage white, she thought, nothing special. Nothing collectable, or only by cruel schoolboys, the kind who liked to tear the wings off flies. She would never be compared to the beautiful wood white or the delicate green veined Orpona, as her mother sometimes was. A thing of rarity and delicacy. Her father often spoke of the proletarian butterflies who were going to emerge from peasant chrysalises, but she didn’t see it happening to the Bielers and rather hoped it never did, though according to Sherwyn, Vienna was now known as red Vienna, and part of the Comintern, and any time now even the Bielers would be singing The Red Flag. Another reason, Sherwyn said, not to bring Delgano to Germany, but to keep him in Morocco, currying sheep’s eyes. She fell asleep, and when she woke Sherwyn had gone.

  Frau Bieler said Sherwyn had left early for the Fachgeschäft in Kufstein to collect a new dipstick for the Bentley. No, he had not said when he would be back. Vivvie remembered well enough Sherwyn mentioning that he had managed to buy a new one two days before, designed for the new Audi much esteemed on these parts; they had even been overtaken by one on the road to Kufstein – ‘the advantage of a militaristic past: the roads are always good’! – but suitable for a Bentley, and she said as much to Frau Bieler. She then wished she had not. It smacked of disloyalty, and was none of her business where Sherwyn had gone. She had given him his freedom and must stand by it. She had suspected she was pregnant when she married him: she deserved her punishment, and punishment it was. Yesterday’s high spirits had oozed away: they belonged to some other person. Sherwyn was no
longer Joseph. Adela was welcome to the baby, her shame and disgrace, the uncomfortable, unwelcome lump, more than welcome. How could she have even dreamed otherwise? She would concentrate henceforth on horses. She understood horses. Babies she did not, let alone men.

  ‘Men will be men,’ said Frau Bieler, in English, coming back to bring Vivvie coffee and whipped cream. ‘Not to be depended on.’ Both women by now had a smattering of the other’s language. ‘You are near your time. It happens. The dipping of the stick.’

  What could the woman possibly be implying? A dipstick was a simple dipstick. They broke. And her time, her time. It was terrifying, her ‘time’. Frau Bieler’s comments were unnecessary and crude. And if it was her time, why wasn’t her mother here, looking after her? Where could she be? Vivvie pushed away the coffee – she felt sick – and for some reason complained that the room was dirty and the windows needed cleaning. It wasn’t in her nature to complain. She could see she was behaving very oddly but she couldn’t help herself. Vivvie was put in mind of her tabby cat Tibbles, who when she was about to have kittens, acted as if she were possessed, ignoring her cat basket and insisting on making a home in Adela’s lingerie drawer, all silks and scents and lace and it was all lick, lick, lick until Adela found her and picked Tibbles up by the scruff of her neck and flung her out of the room. Fortunately Frau Bieler did not take offence but smiled indulgently, took away the coffee and brought Vivvie a bucket of hot soapy water and a cloth.

  Vivvie cleaned the windows as best she could, hoping that sanity would return. It seemed very important suddenly that the windows sparkled. But cleaning? She did not normally clean – others did that. When she got back home she would ask Mungo to what extent he agreed with Freud that pregnant women were consumed by penis envy – wasn’t it possible that men were equally consumed by womb envy? – and that this ended up in a lot of unnecessary and compulsive activity and human distress. Men took to women to feel better, while women took to cleaning. If only men and women could be rational! Her mind seemed to be working very slowly. It was as if Sherwyn hadn’t unlocked the Bentley brake properly and the wheels were having difficulty turning round. Then she remembered that Mungo knew nothing of the pregnancy, just that she and Sherwyn were on an extended honeymoon in the Alps, and if anyone was pregnant it was Adela, so she’d better stay quiet. How difficult life was, Heaven alone knew, but how clean and shiny the windows. She was surprised when there was a whoosh and the contents of the bucket ended up on Frau Bieler’s wooden floor. Then she realised the bucket was still full and the water must have come from inside her. Her knickers were sopping wet. She shrieked aloud. She was making a terrible mess. She was coming to bits. She was bursting. And she wanted her mother.

  Frau Bieler came running, looked and called out so everyone could hear, ‘Mein Gott! Das Fruchtwasser abgegangen!’ So one had waters, and they broke. If only one had at hand the medical books she had instructed Sherwyn to find. Well, Vivvie would make do with Frau Bieler as midwife. Frau Bieler had delivered fourteen of her own grandchildren and not lost a single one. Childbirth was an entirely natural process and it seemed that, was one to take the pregnant Tibbles as an example, one could be guided by instinct. She had a pain. It was like a ribbon tightening round her midriff, starting in her back and moving round to her front. At least she wasn’t trying to have her baby in Adela’s lingerie drawer. Vivvie felt quite sane again. It was a great relief. Whatever happened, she would not give her baby away.

  The Morning Of Saturday July 5th 1923. The Road To Keifersfelden

  And so it was that Vivvie came to give birth to twin girls. Sherwyn was with Adela at the time, posing as Sir Jeremy Ripple. He had gone into Kufstein to buy yet another dipstick – the tip had snapped off at once – it must be a major failing with all these big tourers – but on the way Delgano murmured in his ear that there could be no harm in dropping by on Adela, if only to dissuade her from submitting Vivvie to the eccentric and none too clean Dr Walker’s care, and even perhaps to warn her that Vivvie was having second thoughts about giving the baby away. Not, Delgano suggested, that that was necessarily a good idea. Adela might be right and Vivvie incapable of sensible motherhood. She was a very strange girl, emotionally retarded in some way, seeming in denial of her own pregnancy, going so far as to attribute it to some vague supernatural being, talked him into marrying her and then deliberately foisted a little bastard upon him.

  ‘What should I have done?’ Sherwyn asked.

  ‘Signed the contract,’ said Delgano. ‘Then run. Run like the devil, and never looked back! Now look what you’ve got yourself into. And this business with the mother-in-law, madness, but she’s there waiting I bet, all pink and perfect and having breakfast in bed, so you might as well.’

  At which point Sherwyn took a left turn to Keifersfelden. If Vivvie had reacted better when he’d read his work aloud to her the night before he might have gone straight on to Kufstein and purchased the new dipstick. But she hadn’t reassured him at all, just seemed rather cold and disapproving. It wasn’t her kind of thing, he could see, but she was hopelessly bourgeois. His mind was doing its overexcited thing again; click, click. Cogs were moving, shifting, falling into place.

  There was a way out, Delgano was suggesting, there always was. Get the baby out of the way, and then behave so badly that Vivvie had no choice but to divorce him. He could afford it – the prenuptial settlement was generous – how anxious the family must have been to take Vivvie off their hands! And anyway Sherwyn would by then be so far into his publishing career he would have no further need of Ripple & Co any more. Delgano, his creation, was talking sense, Sherwyn realised. A writer arrived at the truth through his own characters.

  As Delgano had predicted, Adela succumbed to the pleasures she had no hesitation in offering. Men and women were alike, as Sherwyn was later to write, in that the more they had the more they wanted. He added ‘Use it, or lose it’ but struck that out. Too crude, too vulgar. That was in his 1946 book Delgano Lets Live. Delgano, like his writer, had moved to Paris in 1942, as an undercover restaurateur working for SOE, famous for his pâtisserie.

  Sherwyn had started writing as a neutral, anonymous observer of life, not as one who had any special or painful experience of it. Most writers between the wars, before the cult of personality, were recognised only as a familiar (if you were lucky) name on the spine of a novel. To expose anything too emotional, let alone personal, in one’s writing was unliterary, distasteful and shaming. Women’s stuff. The stiff upper lip ruled. After World War II everything changed: the writer became valued for the degree to which he was prepared to expose his emotions and his knowledge of the indecorous. Sherwyn was one of the first to abandon three dots and open the bedroom door. In the mind of the reader, Delgano and Sherwyn quickly became one. And after the publication of Mungo’s Vice Rewarded Sherwyn saw no reason that it should be otherwise. The more he was Delgano the tall lover, the culinary connoisseur, the less Sherwyn the dwarf, the better. Sherwyn hoped to reclaim himself in time as a literary rather than a commercial writer – though as it happened he never got round to writing the great novel or memoir which would have established himself as such. It had begun to seem too much like hard work.

  Anyway. Or alternatively, so it goes.

  Later That Morning. Barscherau

  It was a swift and easy birth. Frau Bieler and her daughter Greta acted, perforce, as midwives. Vivvie lay on the kitchen table with a couple of pillows. They gave her brandy to keep her cheerful and took some themselves to give them courage. They congratulated themselves that at least no doctor from the town had arrived on the scene. Such a one had come up from Kufstein a year or so back to assist at a neighbour’s delivery but had injected her with the fashionable potion for twilight sleep, and her screams had been heard down the street, and the next day her wrists were raw where she had struggled against the cuffs. But at least she had no memory of the occasion at all. Which was all right for her which they supposed was something. But not for t
he neighbours or her poor husband.

  They talked while they worked. They hoped the baby would be a boy – it didn’t matter much what a boy looked like. It mattered a lot for a girl. Sherwyn was a good-looking man in spite of being on the short side so they reckoned Vivvie must be quite wealthy for it not to matter.

  Frau Bieler said they behaved in bed like brother and sister and outside it as well. It was possible Herr Sherwyn was not the baby’s father. Greta said the Burgomeister at Kufstein had said they were not to pass on rumours, hadn’t the cheque for the booking been issued by the same London lawyers to whom everyone in the locality paid their land dues? Frau Bieler said she didn’t care what the Burgomeister said.