Before the War (2 page)

Anyway. I haven’t yet quite determined whose fault Vivvie’s death is going to be, but it is certainly someone’s. I will let you know. It’s good to have someone to blame, so it’s not just happenstance. The purposelessness of real life can get depressing.

A Matter Of Class

For some people a late train is a blessing. ‘Oh thank heaven the train’s late,’ says a voice behind Vivien. It’s Mrs Ashton, the widow who keeps the village shop, off to London to buy stock for the winter – the hot water bottles, lozenges, tonics and so forth the village will need as winter settles in. Vivien is glad at least someone else has turned up. The train begins to take on material existence. It may be late but at least someone else has faith in its eventual arrival.

Mrs Ashton, unlike Vivvie, is taking no chances with the weather. She’s a wizened rabbit-like creature herself, with a tiny face and a sniffling nose, muffled up in a rabbit fur coat with a fox-fur scarf dangling from her neck as well – little glass eyes staring out of its head one end, little paws, clawing at thin air, the other. Vivvie, who always does what she can to assist small wild creatures, thinks the scarf is gruesome, but wisely keeps her opinion to herself. Such scarves are very fashionable; even her mother Adela owns one, along with a pale mink coat for best and a sable jacket for evenings.

At least Mrs Ashton will be travelling Second or Third Class, thinks Vivvie, so they won’t have to travel together. Mrs Ashton is a perfectly pleasant person, apart from her desire to hang her body with dead small animals; but Vivien prefers to travel alone, if only today, to prepare for her coming conversation with Sherwyn Sexton. She herself will of course be travelling First Class.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ Mrs Ashton asks Vivien as at last the train’s whistle comes into earshot. It sounds singularly melancholy and forlorn, as if it knows it’s just a steam flash in time’s pan, that it’s not long for this world, and will soon enough be replaced by an electronic wail. ‘Shouldn’t you have brought a proper coat?’

‘I have a good scarf and the cold doesn’t bother me anyway,’ Vivvie replies as the train wheezes in with flurries of steam, black flecks of soot and motes for the eye, and Vivvie can move away from the one who too familiarly addresses her.

Vivvie comes from the Big House and Mrs Ashton comes from the village and was her mother’s maid twenty years ago. It’s not just that Vivvie has Asperger’s syndrome – always a state more easily forgiven in men than in women, being expected, and one that makes social intercourse difficult – it’s that the habit and custom of class distinctions tend to run in the blood of the nation. Vivvie knows that her natural place is in First Class, where the seats are upholstered leather, Mrs Ashton knows hers is in Second Class, where the seats are padded but one step up from Third Class where the seats are wooden slats and most people expect to stand anyway.

And though Vivvie’s father Sir Jeremy Ripple, recently knighted by King George V ‘for services to literature’, is a keen supporter of the Labour Party, and increasingly admiring of the new Soviet Union of Russia, and has brought Vivvie up to believe all men and women are equal, Vivvie finds herself over-aware that Mrs Ashton was once the maid. In theory she, like the rest of her family, are on the side of the people, the proletariat – in practice she finds it difficult to talk to the workers on easy terms. Nor indeed does the cold bother her; though she shivers now, some echo from the future no doubt reaching her, just as it passes from her to me and makes me shiver too even as I write. Let’s just leave it that Vivien prefers to travel alone in the eight months left to live that I have allotted her.

As they move together to board the train, Vivvie to the First Class carriage, Mrs Ashton to Second Class, Vivien hears or thinks she hears Mrs Ashton say: ‘A lie if ever I heard one. Of course she’s cold. She just can’t find a coat to fit. Poor thing!’

Is it spoken or does Vivvie just hear what she expects to hear? Whatever it is, she is cut to the quick. She can never be like other people. There are tears in her eyes as she finds a seat in First Class, all dark blue plush cushioning, amongst ladies like her, up to London for the day; but for lunch and shopping, not in a desperate attempt to change the pattern of their lives.

Anyway.

Would You Marry This Man?

Now consider Sherwyn Sexton, at work in the editorial department of Ripple & Co in November 1922. He is a handsome young man of thirty-three, a Douglas Fairbanks look-alike, many say; that is to say lean, vigorous, muscular and clean-cut of feature, very much in the fashion of the day (but fair-haired and half an inch shorter than Douglas Fairbanks, who in spite of seeming so tall and swashbuckling on camera, was in real life a mere five foot seven). Sherwyn’s lack of height greatly perturbs him. He sees his short stature as unfair. Fate gave him so much – looks, charm, wit, talent, a determined heterosexuality, a penis of remarkable strength, length and reliability – why had fate stopped when it came to this last stamp of natural authority – the ability to tower over other men? True, in his short stint at the front as a second lieutenant – 1916, six months – he was known to his command as Napoleon, which has reassured him a little. He may be short but he is recognised as a leader of men. His movements are quick and light. He is a fine dancer. He has bright blue eyes. He is excellent company when in a good mood and knows how to make women laugh. When he is not in a good mood he knows how to make them suffer for it. If you offend him he can sulk for days and days and how you might offend him is never made clear.

He is something of a dandy, in a bohemian kind of way. He wears a red cravat rather than a tie to signal his defiance of office convention. Like so many of his generation he has a small, well-trimmed pencil moustache and no beard – beards are for old men. A generation who saw active service in the trenches – in 1916 the average survival time at the front was a bare six weeks – have turned against beards. Beards interfere with gas masks. At least half way through the months that Sherwyn was at the front the War Office decided to distribute those effective if ugly things – before then a hopeless piece of fabric soaked in urine had to suffice for him. These things, however short-lived, can affect a man’s outlook on life for ever. He is a man, not a lad.

Apart from the accident of lacking a few inches in height good fortune is usually on Sherwyn’s side, though he rather doubts it at the moment, doomed as he seems to be to scrape a living – but perhaps he should gamble and drink less – in one of his employer’s cold and draughty attic offices. Sherwyn is thirty-three and his ambition had been to reach thirty as a published and prosperous literary writer like his father before him. As it is, his life is running behind schedule. He lost a mother to a passing American lover and gained a stepmother whom he does not get on with, and has been thrown out of a comfortable home of his childhood and so has to fend for himself. He is obliged to spend time editing other people’s books instead of getting on with his own. This has put his schedule back by at least three years. He doesn’t for one minute doubt his genius – it is merely, cruelly, on hold.

Size Isn’t Everything. What About His Prospects?

Sherwyn has at least just finished his first novel in the face of financial and personal problems which would have defeated a lesser man. The manuscript has been typed up by the girlfriend with whom he cohabits, but now sits waiting attention in a neat pile of other rivalrous works on the shelf behind Sir Jeremy Ripple’s elegant Arts & Crafts rosewood desk. And there it has stayed unread for a full three weeks. Though Ripple & Co does not itself publish fiction, Sir Jeremy is a power in the profession (not yet described as an industry, and very much the preserve of amateur literary gentlemen) and his recommendation will go far. He has promised to recommend the novel – should he like it sufficiently – to Herbert Jenkins, an excellent publisher of popular novels.

But Sir Jeremy, to Sherwyn’s rage and indignation, has not so far bothered to turn the pages, read and respond. Sherwyn does not suffer from literary self doubt – egoistical, vain little dwarf, as his enemies refer to him, those enemies being the husbands or lovers of girls he has seduced away. (In the rather louche literary and artistic circles Sherwyn likes to frequent, news of sexual prowess soon gets about.) It’s just that a wait of a full three weeks for a mere recommendation seems out of order. A genius deserves better from the boss who is lucky enough to employ him. Too busy for three whole weeks? Poppycock! No. The boss, for all his affectation of proletarian sympathies, is at heart just another unscrupulous old man, the kind who let the Great War happen, filched what glory and profit from it he could, and now hopes to make money from a growing anti-war sentiment. Sherwyn doesn’t trust him further than he could throw him. Which wouldn’t be far: Sherwyn being short and Sir Jeremy being tall and well set up. But Sherwyn might ask his friend Mungo to do it. Mungo works in the office down the corridor, and is an Oxford rugger Blue.

Sherwyn’s Better Self

Sherwyn has met Vivvie on occasion, mostly in connection with
The Short History of the Georgians, an Outline
. It was at Sir Jeremy’s suggestion that Vivien, who according to her father has artistic talents (though Sherwyn doubts it – in his experience female artists are a good-looking lot: he lives with one; he should know), has suggested that his daughter do the illustrations and Sherwyn has politely briefed her as to what is required. He knows she will be dropping by during the course of the morning but to what end he has no idea, and will be horrified when he understands that the illustrations are a mere cover for her intention to propose marriage.

And on the Thursday morning when Vivvie walks into his office Sherwyn is already not in the best of moods.

Overworked and Underpaid

This is how Sherwyn sees himself: in this he is like most of Ripple & Co’s staff – indeed staff everywhere. (Sufficient reward, thinks Sir Jeremy, to be employed by the nation’s most prestigious and radical publisher: pay more, and staff might feel they were being bribed, not just employed.) Sherwyn, who feels he is entitled to lofty ceilings and general grandeur wherever he works, now finds himself housed in an attic room at the top of what was once a shop but is now an office building, with sloping garret walls crumbly with disintegrating plaster, low oak beams which catch the head and are powdery with what Sherwyn rather hopes is a deathwatch beetle infestation. At least, others might think, he has an office to himself with a door and a casement window, which is more than many an office worker has today. The window opens and he can feed the birds; he can look down to Fleet Street below – in his time a busy thoroughfare with both motor and horse drawn vehicles bumping up against each other, and the hoots and cries of angry travellers rising to the heavens.

News! News! News!

There is such a great excitement focused here – how can Sherwyn be immune to it? He is lucky. When he works late he hears the rumble of metal printing presses as they start up, shaking the whole street and stirring the blood.

On his way to work Sherwyn dodges the giant paper rolls as they’re manhandled across pavements and lowered into the underground basements where the presses are housed; and thinks nothing of it. In the evenings he feels the whole street tremble as the great presses start up and takes it for granted. But he loves the smell of hot printing ink as it seeps up to his open window: exciting times, intoxicating! The nation is newly literate and hungry for news and gossip. Before TV, before even radio, there’s only the printed word to tell you what’s going on outside your own street.

Sherwyn feels it, and is happy to be part of it, if only obliquely. He is a novelist; he prefers to make things up rather than report reality. Besides, tomorrow the papers will wrap the fish and chips; they make sense of the tumult on the street outside for only a single day. Sherwyn hopes for immortality.

Rough, Raw Years

In the nineteen-twenties few understand their own motivations, their own compulsions. Freud is still sniffing cocaine, and feeding it to his unfortunate patients while he works it out. Self interest is at its height, compassion at its nadir. There is no benefits system, no assistance board, only the good will of a public who four years after the war finds pity has worn itself out. Fleet Street is one of the better places where derelict old soldiers can beg for alms – warm air belches up from the printing presses, kindly journalists occasionally bend an ear to their woes. But no-one really wants to be reminded of the war, a dreadful event which will never happen again. A blind patriotism led the nations into all that – well, we’re past that now. Now we have reason, progress, science, the League of Nations. Why would anyone want war? As for the poor, they’re always with us. Jesus said so. They must take their chances.

Anyway…

This morning a tall, ragged young man with haunted eyes, caved-in cheeks and one leg laid a begging hand on Sherwyn’s arm. Sherwyn had told him he couldn’t help him and that his own shoes let in water. The caved-in mouth snarled, showing the most disgusting broken teeth, and called out after Sherwyn’s back, ‘On your way, shortie. I hope you rot in hell.’

A short man can do anything – wage wars, write novels, bed a dozen girls, break a hundred hearts, be as clever and sophisticated as he likes about fine wines and cultural artefacts, political and social movements, past, present and future, predict the very disposition of the world to come – but if a tall man, starving and ill though he may be, refers to him as ‘shortie’, any bubble of self esteem is bound to be punctured. It is the one thing he can do nothing about.

Did that contribute to how Sherwyn reacted to Vivien’s proposal? Yes, probably. His parts might be big but they were hidden: his height was obvious for all the world to see. Vivvie’s faltering self esteem had been dented by Mrs Ashton’s casual words:
She just can’t find a coat to fit, poor thing
. So had Sherwyn’s been by ‘shortie’. If only some other people had kept quiet that morning, things might have turned out differently.