Before the War (24 page)

The Marjorie marriage, as Sherwyn now thought of it, three years in, was not going too well. Rita for example would go to bed with a fellow at the drop of a hat, but for Marjorie it had to be a specially trumpeted occasion, for which you almost had to make an appointment, and certainly shower, shave, bring flowers, woo and pursue: he’d be so infuriated at the end of it that actual sexual performance became difficult. He was sure Marjorie discussed his prowess or lack of it with her girlfriends: if she gossiped about her previous film star husbands – blow by blow, to the delight of the yellow press – why not about Sherwyn the bestselling writer?

Sometimes he longed for those few blissful months when he and Vivvie had lain side by side like spoons in the Barscherau cupboard that served for a bed, plum and plum stone, bodies at one but no sex. Life was simple without sex. On the other hand Rita was looking particularly lovely. In her late thirties, perhaps by now, but her eyes still alive and her mouth still generous and as ready to laugh as those fond eyes were ready to weep.

Harrods had whitebait on the menu – he’d checked before he booked. It was February when all the little small fry which swam in great shoals up and down the river estuaries of England could be harvested before they grew into vulgar, bony herrings. It was an annual ritual for Sherwyn: he always thought that first whitebait story had brought him luck. It was the kind of thing Rita understood, and Vivvie would have too, and which Marjorie most certainly would not. It had been a story written at the worst of times, before his genius was recognised, when he was poor as Knut Hamsun was when he wrote
Hunger
, when his shoes let water and he could not pay his restaurant bills or his gambling debts. But now was surely the best of times. With one fell swoop he had switched his destiny, married Vivvie and so set the wheels in motion; all the cogs fell into place and the fame and fortune he deserved were his. And here he was, living with a film star and lunching with his mistress, who was sobbing into her sardines on toast – chosen to keep him company in his whitebait: she refused it herself: ‘All those little eyes looking at you! At least they cut the heads off sardines before expecting you to eat them!’ – and wondering what Rita would say if he asked to take her back to her studio in a taxi. He thought the current studio was in Fulham – not too far from Harrods. Sherwyn wondered if she still had the purple crushed velvet sofa she used to say she kept in memory of him. He was due at a film première at seven o’clock with Marjorie. There would be just about time if they didn’t take too long over lunch.

‘You don’t really love E.L.T. Mesens,’ said Sherwyn, ‘let alone C.R.W. Nevinson. You just want a little excitement when disturbed
in flagrante
by Sybil and there’s some terrible row.’

‘You don’t know Sybil Mesens,’ said Rita darkly. ‘She’d just want to join in with Mesens. and me. Then she’d tell Nevinson all about it and he’ll be so upset. He’s very neurotic at the moment. He’s soon going to be fifty and thinks no-one takes him seriously any more. He had his heyday as a war artist and landscapes just aren’t as exciting. Yet he will insist on painting them.’

‘His chance will come again,’ said Sherwyn. ‘What about me? No-one takes me seriously any more. I go out to dine with Marjorie and heads turn: once it was for me, now it’s for Marjorie.’

‘You’re jealous,’ said Rita. ‘You’re so used to being top dog.’ That surprised him. Could it be true? He certainly felt that the attention the public gave Marjorie was absurd. He, Sherwyn, was acclaimed for his talent and achievement. All Marjorie had to do was waft around and look pretty.

No, it was not jealousy. It was justified resentment. Quite different. He told her so.

‘You always had your eye on the main chance,’ said Rita. ‘That much was always obvious. Writers are so different from artists. Painters just seem to want to destroy themselves.’

They almost quarrelled. Sherwyn said she shouldn’t worry. Another war would come along and C.R.W. Nevinson would be saved by the bell, and absinthe would run out so E.L.T. would be saved from a nasty death. (He was wrong. The absinthe never runs out.)

Rita said war was impossible and Hitler was only taking back what had been stolen from the Germans after the last war. That really irritated Sherwyn. He was becoming quite a patriot, to his own surprise. His current intended, the delightful Elvira, model and bookseller, talked politics quite a lot. It must be her influence. Sherwyn complained that Rita was a dull-witted socialist, Rita that Sherwyn was a reactionary little Englander.

‘The country is in a very serious mess,’ declared Sherwyn. His voice rose. Ladies who lunched looked in his direction. Hats of all shapes and sizes turned to him – velvet parrots, jaunty feathers, discreet turbans and coquettish little veils, floppy brims – though how anyone ate in them was a mystery.

‘Sherwyn, do keep your voice down. Ladies hate to have attention drawn to them.’

‘You could have fooled me.’ But he lowered it and the hats turned away. ‘The nation is torn between bourgeoisie-hating socialists – like my own dear prosperous bourgeois publisher – and now apparently you, my dear.’

‘Sir Jeremy’s a communist. Don’t you even know the difference?’

‘There is precious little, other than that “communism” uses a strong magnetic force to draw every appeaser, every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England to its side. The socialist magnet has a slightly weaker draw. As for thesis, antithesis and synthesis, have you ever known a decent working man take the slightest interest in Marxism? Hence the grand old socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie, at which your initialled bed companions so excel.’

‘No-one can accuse you of doing that, Sherwyn. And you can only be quoting Elvira. How suggestible you are!’ Good, at least she was jealous.

‘Had you not noticed how socialist writers, propagandist writers, dull, empty windbags the lot – ’

‘Name them!’

‘Shaw, Wells, Nesbit, Blair, Sinclair, Tressel, starting with that bore William Morris. Will that do? Hypocrites the lot. Lashing themselves into frenzies of rage against the class to which they invariably belong. If not by birth by adoption.’

‘I was right. You are eaten up with jealousy. You want their reviews. I daresay they want your money. Writers are worse than painters. Can we not talk politics? I was only saying what everyone else is saying.’

‘I would expect no more of you, my dear.’ Nor did he. He calmed down. He really must learn that Elvira was an exception. She was not like other women. She had a brain. He was waiting for his
navarin d’agneau aux navets
and Rita for her
coquilles à la crème.
Sometimes he thought her costermonger origins showed. Few people ordered fish for both courses. First fish, then meat, was what was customary in the middle class. He had a half bottle of Fleury, she had more champagne, simple girl!

‘I have no children. Men never love me. They only want me.’ Time for more tears, it seemed, and a soupçon of self pity. Then she said, surprising him, ‘How clever of you to have reproduced yourself. How are your twins?’

Of course. The twins. Sir Jeremy’s and Adela’s, alleged children of The Change. Rita knew well enough they were Vivvie’s, not Adela’s – Sherwyn had come back from Austria and told her the whole story, or at any rate the bits that didn’t include his nights with Adela. But apparently she assumed that he, Sherwyn, had been the one to impregnate poor Vivvie. He had been her fiancé, after all, why would she, any more than Adela, think otherwise? Vivvie’s Angel Gabriel story had always been absurd.

It got so difficult as years passed and one got older to remember exactly who knew what and who didn’t – things slipped out. A great recommendation for telling as few lies through life as one could manage. He should have kept quiet in the first place.

Rita’s hand crept over onto his, where it lay on the table. You could always tell a woman’s age by her hands, but Rita’s were inscrutable. They were never her best feature at the best of times, always on the large, rough, working-girl side, but so unlike Marjorie’s little white paws he found himself grateful for their touch. They were all promise. He wished Marjorie would let her hand stray to his every now and then, or his to hers, but she’d have had her fingernails painted some new colour and only tell him to be careful not to smudge them, and put him right off. Perhaps he could take Rita home and comfort her? He didn’t like to see women cry.

Sherwyn did not bother to deny paternity. It would take too long. He told her he liked to see the twins once or twice a year. For their last birthday he had brought them both back a string of pearls from Italy.

‘Doesn’t Sir Jeremy find your interest in them rather strange? If he believes he’s the father? You do live a complicated life, Sherwyn!’

‘He takes good care not to complicate his own. If there are boats to be rocked, Sir Jeremy is not going to rock them. I am his prize author. I don’t get literary reviews but I keep the firm in business. He trusts his wife, unlike your friend Nevinson. If Adela has gone to the trouble of presenting him with twin girls and says they are his why should he doubt her? They keep her happy and he wants her happy. As for me I am the husband of a disgraced dead and gone daughter, the twins’ brother-in-law, his ex-son-in-law but two.’ Before Marjorie, Sherwyn had had an unfortunate two-year marriage (including divorce) to a dress designer who had turned out to have lesbian tendencies. ‘It keeps the family in touch but not too much in touch. I drop by, see the twins, smile at Adela who smiles back, and go away again. It suits everyone.’

In truth, he visited the twins to keep an eye on them, to keep his faith with Vivvie as a Joseph to her misbegotten babies, but he was not going to tell Rita this, or anyone. It behoved him as an Englishman to keep quiet about such irrational behaviour. Rita asked if the twins were happy with the pearls. In her experience, she said, young girls rather despised pearls. Sales at Dickins & Jones were right down. It was impossible to tell cultured pearls from the real thing so how could you know if the gift was priceless or shop-girl?

Sherwyn said he would never give the girls cheap pearls. They had been most appreciative of them. They’d looked lovely on Stella’s neck, delicate translucent little things, but rather hopeless on Mallory, who didn’t have much neck at all.

‘Yes,’ said Rita. ‘I hear they’re very different. Of course twins can have two fathers, if the mother has two lovers around the same time. The first one out belongs to the first lover, the next one to the second. One can only hope Stella is yours.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Sherwyn, surprised again. ‘But Vivvie was hardly the kind to have lovers – though how can one ever know anything about women? For all I know Vivvie took after her mother. Everyone but Sir Jeremy knows Adela is a nymphomaniac, and she’s anyone’s.’ He felt bad. He was traducing Vivvie. Horrible how easily one slipped into this kind of disagreeable banter. He never let Delgano do it.

‘Yes, tell me about the fabulous Adela,’ said Rita. ‘I always thought you rather fancied her.’ And she complained that he’d always had a thing about titles at the best of times. He was such a snob. A pity the real aristocrats were always out of reach for someone like Sherwyn. He hadn’t been to Eton, only St Paul’s.

Sherwyn asked for another half bottle of Fleury. She had more champagne. The main course was very slow in coming. Emboldened by her hand in his Sherwyn told her about the nights he had spent with Adela, which was why he hadn’t been there when Vivvie gave birth and so couldn’t tell her which twin was born first. He was ashamed even to remember the occasion, he said, which was true enough. His conduct was the product of high altitude, he said, summer in the Alps, a temporary insanity.

‘And abstinence,’ said Rita. ‘I know what that does to men. But Sherwyn, really, your own mother-in-law! How could you!’

‘I know, I know,’ he said. ‘But it was all so long ago: mists of time, all that. But Adela will keep quiet. I try not to meet her eye. Nor does she want to meet mine. I know where too many bodies are buried.’

‘Supposing she had triplets! Supposing there were three of you. Do you think

Mungo could have got to her? He always wanted what was yours.’

That Sherwyn hadn’t thought of. Nor was it a pleasant thought. Mungo was hardly a candidate for the role of the Angel Gabriel, certainly not one to whom he, Sherwyn, would have been willing to play Joseph. Lucifer, possibly. Sherwyn had assumed Mungo kept turning up with trashy presents for the twins because he was still trying to get back into Lady Adela’s knickers. Or more likely these days – since Adela was beginning to look tiny and withered up, not tiny and delectable any more – to annoy Sir Jeremy for years ago turning down Bolt & Crest as his agency. Boring Olive Crest had long departed the scene, sensibly enough; no doubt having discovered that Mungo was a vindictive man who bore grudges. Crest Zippers were doing just fine, though, under the slogan
For Speed and Comfort Just Zip & Unzip!
Buttoning’s Such a Bother
. Vulgar. It was a possibility of course. Mungo was certainly capable of any villainy. He had been buttering up Sir Jeremy for as long as anyone could remember and had probably been going down to Dilberne Court, one step ahead of Sherwyn every inch of the way.

Really, he thought. Surely Harrods could do better than this. He wanted to eat fast and take her home to bed and dry her tears and shut her up. When at last the food came the
navarin
turned out to be greasy mutton on a bed of mashed turnip and swede; her
coquilles
were rubbery.

‘Let’s go home and have something at my place,’ she said. ‘We might as well have gone to Dickins & Jones. The food is better.’

Sherwyn, gratified, asked for the bill. While they were waiting a large lady came up and asked him if he would be kind enough to sign his book for her. She had bought it, his latest,
Delgano and The Parisian Affair
, in the bookshop on the second floor, and recognised him from a book reading. He thought Rita would be impressed by this evidence of his fame but she sighed and took off her mink and ordered a strawberry ice, which came at once, and settled down to eat. He got rid of the large lady as soon as he could, inscribing on the title page his signature, date, place, and the message ‘Patience and shuffle the cards’ which always seemed to be popular with readers, suggesting as it did that some day Fortune would change their life for them as it had his.