Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Igor, of the greenery-yallery persuasion? Sherwyn remembered the hand on his sleeve in Upper Belgrave Street and could see it might be true. In which case, poor Adela. He had to remind himself she was a monster, responsible for Vivvie’s death and all troubles in between.

  ‘Adela, I have no time for these frivolities. Where are the twins?’

  ‘In Lausanne, darling. Where they usually are. Switzerland is perfectly safe. It’s always safe where the bankers are. Anyway, you keep denying the twins are anything to do with you, so why should you care?’

  ‘Adela, that’s mad. Two sixteen-year-old girls alone in a foreign land in wartime?’

  ‘They’re nearly seventeen. Their birthday is any day now. They were premature, of course. I could push it to September the third. I kept my head about me. I always did.’

  ‘I shall go myself to fetch them if I have to.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t, darling. Always interfering.’

  But he felt a surge of Delgano’s spirit. It stirred his blood, flexed his muscles. He, Sherwyn, was ready for war. The war would bring out the best in him. It would be his salvation. He said so.

  ‘Oh, do what you like. What does any of it matter?’ said Adela. ‘I’m too old to care. Igor and Stefan have joined the Waffen SS. He’s always been such a snake. That’s why my husband sacked him from the stables in the first place. He’d said he was a Russian Jew in order to get the job. Sir Jeremy discovered he was actually a White Russian émigré and threw him out. Fired him. All Igor’s nonsense about Vivvie! He was just getting his revenge.’

  ‘You mean he actually raped her?’

  ‘I suppose you could put it like that if you like, isn’t that what Cossacks do?’

  ‘And you knew? And did nothing?’ Poor twins, the children of rape! And Vivvie too stoical to even complain!

  ‘Once something’s been done, there’s not much you can do.’

  ‘As you said when you let poor Vivvie die.’ He was furious.

  ‘Oh, blame, blame, blame! There is no point in blaming me now. I am old. It is over. D’you know what Gurdjieff said?’

  ‘No, thank God,’ said Sherwyn.

  ‘“A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake.” I died when I saw Igor walking off to join the enemy. He and Stefan, half his age, leaving practically hand in hand. They both had good calves and such excellent, well-polished riding boots. But now I have woken up. I am awake.’

  She sat up straight on the sofa and seemed indeed to come to life. She rang the bell for Morna, but Morna didn’t come.

  ‘In that terrible place in Fontainebleau they made me stop taking my emminin pills. They did not think it was right to drink the urine of pregnant women. They were right. But the withdrawal can be difficult. One can become tearful.’

  The blanket had gone. She seemed now like a dignified old matriarch. Some transition had been made. Still Morna didn’t come. Adela just sighed.

  ‘That girl will have to go,’ she said. ‘Nothing ever changes. Once it was Vivvie’s mud, now it’s Morna’s whisky. My poor rug.’ But she stirred herself to pick up the fragments of glass and place them delicately in one of Sir Jeremy’s solid glass ashtrays, careful not to cut herself. Sherwyn found himself helping.

  ‘The smell of drink will soon wear off,’ she said. She looked better without make-up, but her eyes were almost as rheumy as Sir Jeremy’s. She was right. She was old and over.

  ‘“A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering,”’ she said, ‘That’s Gurdjieff too. I have suffered so much from love, because all my pleasures have come from sex. One leads to the other and I have found it very difficult to give up either. I attribute that to the pills.’

  ‘A bad woman blames her pills,’ said Sherwyn, ‘as a bad workman blames his tools.’

  ‘Laugh at me if you must,’ said Adela. ‘It is better than hating me. Nature is all rewards and punishments. It rewards you with sex and punishes you with children. It does what it can to lure you into procreation, then makes you suffer if you succumb. It bribes women into loving their children when they’re born. But I never felt that flood of love for Vivvie. It was a difficult birth and really hurt and I was so small and she was so big and Sir Jeremy looking on. I hated her.’

  ‘Well, I loved her,’ said Sherwyn.

  ‘How admirable of you. It’s Nature makes us mourn when people die so we take care not to die ourselves. If we were guided by reason we would rejoice. They are out of pain and we are the more prosperous. I rejoiced when Vivvie died because she no longer had to put up with the pain of being her. I wanted a child like Stella, I admit, and made sure I got one, but like all children, she turned into nothing special, just another person. It has not yet happened to Mallory, but it will.’

  ‘This is very interesting,’ said Sherwyn, ‘but I really have to be off. Travel is going to be a nightmare. Half the world is getting up and changing places.’

  ‘Do what you must,’ she said. ‘Nature makes some of us cleverer than others. The clever ones lead, the silly ones follow. I think you are being very silly. You are so very male, Sherwyn. Women are smaller, weaker, more talkative, more emotional little things than men. Fuelled by emminin I was the most female woman you ever met. Just as you, fuelled by the power of that great shiny Bentley, were the male-est man I ever met. Perhaps we could just both blame our fuels?’

  Sherwyn left, in some haste.

  September 1st 1939. Académie St. Augustine, Lausanne

  Travel was indeed a nightmare, though at least he journeyed against the flow of human traffic, not with it. Passengers were desperate, frightened, suspicious of spies, intimidated by the policemen and soldiers who stalked the train corridors, overloaded with luggage they didn’t dare put down, on their way to homes that for all they knew might turn out to be more dangerous than the ones they had just left. Between Paris and Geneva Sherwyn saw at least a dozen young men dragged away to an uncertain fate. What had they done? What happened next? Delgano would have to work it out. It took Sherwyn three days to reach Lausanne, and three times he was asked why he was travelling in the wrong direction. At least when he had the girls he would be going in the right direction. But he had left it absurdly late. Delgano would have moved faster.

  The Académie St. Augustine occupied a handsome château set in well-kept grounds. Here there was no sign of panic or haste. Well-dressed, well-fed, beautiful girls looking healthy and happy wandered around in the sun with books and music cases in their hands and straw hats on their heads. After days of travelling chaos it seemed like paradise.

  The twins seemed to think it was, too. Stella looked taller, somehow smoother and even lovelier than ever in an ingénue kind of way. Mallory’s jaw still seemed to reach for her forehead and she was wider than ever, but seemed more comfortable in herself. They were graciousness itself. Sherwyn wished he had brought better clothes, and had had time to shower and shave. They served him a refined herb tea with lemon, and delicate cucumber sandwiches.

  ‘Ah, Mr Sexton, we hear you are our father.’ Mallory spoke.

  ‘We know everything.’ That was Stella. ‘Morna rings us once a week. It is really nice to hear from home, but really nice to be here not there. It sounds really dreadful. And it seems our big sister is our mother.’

  ‘That made us very angry for a time,’ said Mallory. ‘We have been brought up under false pretences. But we also hear our alleged mother, who turns out to be our grandmother, is in a pitiful state. Drunk all the time.’

  Sherwyn opened his mouth to protest. He closed it again. Perhaps his breath smelt? Did he need a mouthwash? Delgano would never have suffered from such awkwardnesses as this.

  ‘But it is hard to be angry for long,’ said Mallory. ‘My studies tell me that the need for sex can be very powerful in some women, and Grandma may still be a victim.’

  ‘Sufficient punishment to be Adela and called Grandma for ever after,’ said St
ella giggling. Sherwyn allowed himself to relax a little. They were still the nice, funny girls he had always known. If his breath smelled a bit they would surely overlook it. He had come to save them, after all.

  ‘We want to stay here, Uncle Sherwyn,’ said Mallory. ‘Or Papa, as I suppose we should call you. We know you’re here to bring us back and it will all have been terrible getting here, and we’re grateful but really we want to stay, not go. We are big girls and can look after ourselves.’

  ‘We know how to look down our noses at other people,’ said Stella, ‘which we have found to be a great help.’

  ‘I noticed that,’ said Sherwyn.

  ‘But we can stop when we want,’ said Stella, ‘and we’re behaving now. Daddy, I’ve fallen in love with such a nice boy.’

  ‘He is not nearly as nice as you suppose,’ said Mallory. ‘No boy is. But it is such heaven here, Papa. The food is divine. They all read your books. At first we were very angry, being sent away the way we were. At least Stella was. I am more sanguine. I have few excitements in life and that was one of them. And now I have got into the Geneva Institute for Psychiatric Genetics, the youngest person to be admitted and the first woman to study there. And the mountain air is so wonderful after London. We would have to go back to boring Belgrave Square and Morna, for who else is to look after us?’

  ‘We know on which side our bread is buttered, Papa,’ said Stella. ‘And we were glad our paternity was you, not Uncle Mungo. Even though he did give the best presents. And so we mean to stay here. More tea?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Sherwyn. They decided he needed more lemon, and possibly some soup, cheese and bread and rang the bell for it.

  He enquired about their finances. They said they had explained the new circumstances to old Mr Baum only yesterday and he had assured them if they now inherited from Vivvie not Adela there would be fewer problems. Courtney and Baum still had their agent in Barscherau (a nice Swiss man with, to the German authorities, the reassuringly ‘Aryan’ name of Becht) and the girls could be supplied through his office.

  ‘As we say,’ said Mallory, ‘we try not be angry, but just get on with things without rancour.’

  ‘I had the best of Grandma,’ said Stella. ‘I loved all that shopping when I was small.’

  ‘Alas, poor Stella,’ said Mallory. ‘A damsel of infinite jest, of excellent fancy.’

  They had even learned their Hamlet in the finishing school, along with fine cookery, manners, how to greet royalty and look down their noses. They would survive without him.

  ‘We could have stopped you coming, Papa, but we needed you. We want you to take us to visit our mother’s grave on our birthday. We believe it is at an abbey in what was Austria but is now Germany. We understand crossing borders may be difficult if we are unaccompanied.’

  ‘The understatement of 1939,’ said Sherwyn. He almost felt like crying, it had all turned out so well. And he was so relieved. If they’d gone home with him he’d have stood no chance with Elvira. He did not want that. Elvira was everything a man could want. And then suddenly he became Delgano again, restored and confident. He did not look forward to going back to London. But one way or another he would move the plot of his life to a satisfactory ending.

  Sherwyn hired an odd little car, one of Herr Hitler’s new populist Volkswagens, and they crossed without trouble into Germany, down to Munich and from thence to the Bavarian Alps. They were charged double what they should have been for petrol. Rationing was expected. Such deals were done cheerfully. The locals were buoyant. War was coming but who needed to be scared? The Nazis were at hand. The war would be sharp and short, restore the nation’s territories and pride and show the rest of Europe who was master.

  Barscherau was no longer the little village Sherwyn remembered. It was now a tourist destination: in the winter a cable car took skiers to the higher mountain slopes. Now, in the summer bird watchers and hikers thronged the streets, uniforms and KdF groups were everywhere; the swastika was everywhere; geraniums bloomed in the window boxes: no-one seemed cheerless or gloomy. The old Town Hall was now spectacular with traditional Bavarian Lüftlmalerei. There was a shop doing good business selling cuckoo clocks. The Gasthaus Post had been extended and refurbished. Sherwyn looked through the window and saw the Bielers sitting by the fire, old people, nodding and smiling.

  It seemed prudent not to linger. The twins spoke perfect German but Sherwyn could be too easily recognised as an Englishman. They found the office of Herr Becht, Rechtsanwalt, on the high street, but it was closed for lunch.

  As they took the new road up to the abbey, Sherwyn began to feel more at home. The mountain above was snow capped. Eagles soared, the long grass below was alive with Alpine flowers. It had been a glorious summer, indifferent to human affairs. Sherwyn marvelled at how nature seemed to apologise for the terrors other forces were about to unleash, by creating such spells of benign weather. One could become very suspicious, sometimes, of clear blue skies. The old abbey had been partially restored, which was a pity. He preferred it as a ruin. But at least the Painted Madonna stood where she always had, calm, smooth and perfect, now beneath an elaborate frescoed baroque ceiling that did not leak. Vivvie would be pleased.

  Mallory found the grave under the long grass. Someone had cleared it lately and left some flowers in a jam jar. There was a simple cross and a small brass plaque on which was engraved Vivien Ripple and Requiescat in Pace. There was no date. Sherwyn was embarrassed to admit he had not been to the funeral.

  ‘I was upset at the time,’ he said.

  ‘Because you loved her so much,’ the twins said.

  ‘She gave her life for us,’ said the twins. ‘Thank you, Mama.’

  Sherwyn could see it behoved him not to elaborate.

  Next to it they found a smaller cross and an even smaller plaque:

  ARTHUR RIPPLE

  Infant, one day old

  R.I.P.

  The cow, thought Sherwyn, enraged, the cow! Adela thought of everything.

  ‘You mean we were triplets? We had a brother who died?’

  All of it, all of it, Adela’s fault. It was intolerable.

  Fortunately Sherwyn found the person who had left the flowers. Actually there were two of them. One introduced herself as Maria Walker, the English doctor’s wife. The other as her friend Berthe.

  ‘We come here quite a lot,’ Maria said. ‘Such a blessed place. And she was so good. Almost a saint. She gives me hope still.’

  ‘She had twins, you know,’ said the other one. ‘Not a son. I should know. It was two little girls I breast fed for their first day of life. One doesn’t forget a thing like that.’

  ‘I took them after that,’ said the doctor’s wife. ‘For a whole month. My husband insisted. My own little girl had to go hungry. One was a little angel, the other one scratched and fought. So why the son? We’ve always wondered.’

  ‘A genuine mistake,’ said Sherwyn. But oh, beware, he thought, one’s sins will find one out. He had not played fair with Vivvie. Some things may be confessed to, others never. But, as it occurred to him later, some benign influence he did not deserve came to his rescue. Delgano would have it that it was the Painted Madonna, with his reward for being Joseph.

  The twins came back into the church at that moment looking for their Papa, and were met by cries of joy and delight from the two people who’d nourished them and known them when they were babies. For all concerned it made the day complete. The twins heard from Berthe that she had known their mother well before she died, and from Maria Walker that her husband had been present when Vivvie died, and there was nothing anyone could have done to save her. In the noise and tumult of reunion the matter of Arthur, infant, was forgotten; this poor baby that Adela never had.

  Sherwyn conveyed the twins safely back to the Académie St. Augustine in Lausanne, content to get on with their lives. He was able to use his best Delgano skills in getting himself back to London and the Albany. It was the day after the declaration of war, and
all borders were closed and closely guarded; a disgruntled fisherman managed to get him back to Dover for a price. The journey had been dangerous, but he had survived. Major Grand of Section D would be pleased. At last the real war could begin.

  ~

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  The story continues in After the War, which will be released in spring 2017

  For an exclusive preview of the first book in Fay Weldon’s Love & Inheritance Trilogy, read on or click the image below.

  Or for more information, click the links below or use your device’s Go-to menu:

  About Fay Weldon

  Also by Fay Weldon

  About the Love & Inheritance Trilogy

  An invitation from the publisher

  Preview

  Read on for a preview of

  In the dying days of Victoria’s reign, the events of a single turbulent morning herald bankruptcy and ruin for the Earl of Dilberne. His wife, the Countess Isobel, believes the solution is to marry off their handsome, wilful son to a rich and pretty heiress from the Chicago stockyards. It’s a clash of cultures and principles that rocks the household from parlour to pantry.

  Gold mines fail, bankers plot, bad girls flourish, the London fog descends, Royalty intervenes and unlikely lovers triumph. Habits of the House, the first book in the Love & Inheritance trilogy, is a ravishing portrait of the fin de siècle from one of our best-loved British authors.

  Can’t wait? Buy it here now!

  Her Ladyship’s Troubled Morning

  8.45 a.m. Tuesday, 24th October 1899

  As it was, even without the annoying arrival of Mr Baum, Isobel anticipated a busy day. There were eighteen to dinner and Rosina had upset her seating plans, deciding the company was not interesting, and had found a meeting she had to go to at a new ladies’ club in Bayswater, this one in support of the movement for the peaceful settlement of international disputes. Pleas from her mother merely hardened Rosina’s resolve. Isobel sometimes complained to her husband that Rosina had stuck at the age of sixteen, when girls were at their most wilful and argumentative. Isobel would rely on Grace to help her with the seating and the place names. Grace had her finger on the pulse of society, on the many-tongued gossip which travelled from lady’s maid to lady’s maid, concierge to concierge, footman to footman all around London: only butlers could be relied upon to be discreet. In any case that was the common perception.