Before the War (16 page)

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.

Indeed, she made an excellent travelling companion. She didn’t complain, wriggle, demand stops, chatter on, make little gasps or yelp when he had to make some unexpected manoeuvre – a cat or a child running out on the road, a bird into the windscreen, once a huddle of anti-motorists, armed with pitchforks, trying to bar the way – but remained interested, good humoured and alert. She seemed to regard her pregnancy as a piece of luggage she was doomed to carry round with her but was best ignored. She would, Sherwyn assumed, be relieved rather than distressed when her mother took the burden away.

When they eventually returned home, he with a finished novel, she with a stomach as flat as it ever had been, which was not saying much, they could buy something magnificent and suitable for a successful writer and his wealthy wife, possibly in the Cotswolds. They would entertain. His mother might come over from the States to visit. His father and stepmother would be welcome so long as they showed due respect. He himself would spend time at the Savage and the Garrick and take a flat in the Albany to concentrate on writing. Vivvie could spend time with her horses and if she had the occasional visit from the Angel Gabriel or one of his cohorts so much the better. She would be discreet. He would father his own children when and where he saw fit. He was, after all, a bohemian, a great writer. At heart he lived in a garret, like Baudelaire, like Verlaine; or in a studio, like Holman Hunt, like Modigliani. God, he missed Rita.

I can’t tell you how happy Sherwyn and Vivvie were for those two months. They shared a big feather bed together without either making a sexual move towards the other. She was bulky and soft and growing bulkier by the day. He was shorter, bonier and more crisply limbed than she, but in the dark and warm seemed to fit naturally enfolded into her, as a plum stone inside a plum.

Barscherau still looks much as it does in the picture postcard that was reproduced some fifty years later to sell like hot cakes to the legions of tourists – a tiny picturesque Alpine village perched on a mountainside above the road from Oberammagau to Kufstein. There are flowering meadows in the foreground complete with grazing cows leading down to an azure lake – or however you want to describe that rather shockingly reproduced blue – snow-capped peaks in the background, and just above the village, still to be seen, the ruined domes of an abandoned abbey established in 1524 by nuns fleeing from the worldliness of Venice. The nuns had brought with them enough stolen artworks to glorify God with a splendid church in the wilderness. In 1786 the Emperor Franz Joseph I’s men had made a rather inadequate job of destroying the place, leaving it to the moth and rust of centuries, not to mention the ice and tempests of the mountain, to do the rest. The abbey remained a magnificent partial ruin, even housing a Mediaeval painted wooden Madonna of sufficient mystery and history to keep the abbey on the tourist trail in later decades.

When Vivvie and Sherwyn were there in 1923 Barscherau’s population had fallen below a mere couple of hundred, only to leap to many hundreds then thousands during the late thirties after the building of a ski lift, a score of chalets and a smart hotel. And all on land which was to be eventually owned, by virtue of Vivvie’s great-grandmother’s much disputed will of 1884, by Vivvie’s twin daughters Mallory and Stella. The estate was still badly administered by the London lawyers Courtney and Baum, by then a crotchety and stubborn firm of wily old lawyers, experts in inheritance law, but willing to overlook the odd discrepancy in cheque signing, knowing that few would be interested enough to check up on details of why or how the money rolled in.

Anyway, here they are now, Sherwyn and Vivvie, installed in three rooms in the Gasthaus, a sprawling generous looking wooden house, white painted, window boxes just waiting for red geraniums, and a heavy, gently sloping roof. When they throw open the shutters in the morning it is to the steady drip of melting icicles, snow turning from white to the palest of greens as the grass breaks through, a clear bright sky and lungfuls of crisp, invigorating air. The lake is a deep, clear blue, speaks of unplumbed depths, and reflects white mountain tops. They spend their virtuous nights encased top and bottom in a massive white feather quilt. There is a beautiful ornamental tiled stove in a corner of their bedroom and the wooden furniture might be rough hewed but it is serviceable, and the table in their living room stands up well enough to the pounding of Sherwyn’s typewriter. For breakfast there is fresh baked bread and coffee, butter and plum jam and bright yellow cheese slices made grey with caraway seeds, and eggs – the hens have started laying as the mountain sun grows warmer – for lunch, more bread and even stranger cheeses and apfelstrudel and cream – and for supper goulash, goulash, goulash, mostly beef, but sometimes mutton or goat, onions and potatoes with a dollop of sauerkraut to keep everyone healthy. It is horrible. But Sherwyn, ever practical, has brought oriental spices in the back of the Bentley and teaches both Vivvie and Frau Bieler the landlady how to curry the various meats, using cumin, coriander, turmeric, ginger and garam masala to this end. They have no more complaints.