Before the War (10 page)

‘I’ll bear it in mind, Sir Jeremy,’ said Sherwyn.

‘Of course,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘I may be wrong about you and Duckworth’s. It may be the very house for a man of your talents. I’ll need to discuss it with my co-directors.’

His hand reached out as if to take back the cheque.

Sherwyn saw his new glittering landscape fading, the phantasmagoria dying: he was to be thrust back into his old world of disappointment, rejection, leaky shoes. Since there seemed nothing to be lost but everything to be gained he played his remaining card.

‘As it happens, sir, I have news too. Talking of matrimonial mattresses, I am all too aware that mine is currently non-existent. But I am much encouraged by your reaction to my manuscript and think now is the moment to ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage. Emboldened, indeed. I have come to know Vivien well in the last few months – and she, me. We have been working together on
A Short History of the Georgians
. To know is to admire, and to admire is to love. I admire her for her intelligence, her competence, her integrity.’

The fingers, which had seemed likely to snatch back the cheque, were stilled. Touch and go.

‘That’s very interesting, young man,’ said Sir Jeremy, after a well-controlled blink or two. ‘My daughter’s hand in marriage. Very brave new world. Indeed, quite a turn-up for the books, as the bookmakers say. Hard to Adam and Eve it. You know we’re shortly publishing a guide book to Cockney rhyming slang? No? Even East Enders now carry literary significance. In the new world we strive for, all men will be equal; Earl and barrowboy, Old Etonian and Pauline, humble worker and capitalist boss.’

‘And here’s the Joe’s lamb to the slaughter wanting to get cash and carried to the office boy, I should bloody cocoa,’ said Sherwyn, smiling his most charming smile, temporising, thinking fast, arranging this new set of cards in his hand, working out in what order to play them. ‘Which translated means the boss’s daughter wants to marry the office boy. Why beat about the bush?’

‘Really?’ asked Sir Jeremy, increasing the pressure of his fingers on the folded cheque so it edged further towards him, and away from Sherwyn. ‘You seem to do a lot of beating at our Monday morning meetings, should you deign to turn up. But perhaps you’ve been burning the midnights finishing your manuscript? One would hope so. But I’m only teasing you, dear boy. You’re such a serious fellow in a world of fools. And Vivvie’s actually willing, is she? So far she’s frightened most suitors off. She finds it so difficult to smile, poor girl.’

‘It was she who approached me,’ said Sherwyn. There seemed little point in presenting the matter as other than it was. There are moments when it suits a born gambler – as Sherwyn was – to show his cards.

It is the right answer. Management’s hand pushes the cheque a fraction further towards Sherwyn, but he resists the urge to snatch. He is not to be seen to be easily bought. Nor indeed, as a great writer, should he be swayed by anything as vulgar as money. The rich were truly bastards. He smiled on.

‘Are you marrying the girl for her money?’ asked Sir Jeremy and Sherwyn was taken aback, not for the first time in his life, or the last, at how swiftly delicate negotiations could degenerate into brutal confrontation. ‘Because if you are you will find certain legal hindrances in your way.’

‘I am sure it is not in my nature to marry for money,’ Sherwyn said carefully, ‘any more than it is Vivvie’s to marry where there is likely to be none. And if I’m as good a writer as you say, earning enough for both of us should not be a difficulty. I would be happy to sign a prenuptial contract, of course. It would be the honourable thing to do.’

‘And no more foolish talk about Duckworth’s?’

‘No,’ says Sherwyn, simply. Lead title in a new fiction list at Ripple & Co was not to be sneered at. What he lost in literary credibility and pale blue covers would be made up for by healthy royalty cheques. But still Sir Jeremy did not push the cheque over.

‘My daughter has inherited many things from me. Good teeth, a strong jaw and a height and scale which makes romance with ordinary men difficult. She also has, I do believe, inherited my gift for picking unlikely winners. If she has picked you that is good enough for me. And you’re a competent enough writer and will look good on the back flap of the jacket. I have been talking to Mungo and he agrees with me that the way forward is to present the writer, like the publisher, as a marketable commodity, a personality. As to Vivvie, I will discuss the matter with Lady Adela. You actually love my daughter?’

‘I do, sir,’ said Sherwyn. What else could a chap say without being seen a thorough cad?

‘Good,’ said Sir Jeremy, taking back the cheque, crossing out what was written, altering figures and words, changing the amount on the stub, ‘because I need to be able to tell my wife that.’ Sir Jeremy slowly pushed the cheque over, mangled but legible, uncrossed. Five hundred guineas had been struck out and a thousand guineas substituted and initialled. £525 had become £1,050. A great deal of money. The thing to do was seem to be unimpressed.

Sherwyn studied the sum as if deciding whether to accept or not, nodded coolly, folded the piece of paper and put it in his breast pocket. It wasn’t, after all, all that great a sum. You could buy a half way decent house for it, he supposed, and pay off a few debts, that was all. It is the sort of money a newly discovered writer could expect for a book but not the kind you would get for marrying an unwanted daughter, saving her from the shelf. Had she even told the truth about the Alpine village? He had assumed so – it didn’t seem in her nature to lie – but supposing it was a fantasy? Supposing Sir Jeremy was sufficient of an old devil to be publishing his book as a bribe to marrying off his unwanted daughter? They might have conspired together. The trouble with being a writer of fiction was that the possibility of different plot flows was endless.

£525 for the novel, £525 for the wife? Or did they come as a £1,050 package? He had only himself to blame if they did. Asked if he loved Vivvie he had replied yes, and as he spoke it had not felt like a lie. Though that of course was the same for most lies: they work best if the liar believes them. He could hardly love the girl because he hardly knew her and she was certainly not attractive to him. But he did like her and the freshness, indeed the oddness, of her ways. She was at least not like other girls: she was no beanstalk simperer. A man could always buy built-up heels for a wedding, he would be allowed to go his own ways, there was money in his pocket and the world was his oyster.

But Sir Jeremy was still talking.

‘See it as an advance on a dowry if you like,’ said Sir Jeremy, ‘but
The Uncertain Gentleman
– working title, of course – should at least pay its way. We’ll talk about contracts in good time. I’m thinking of a royalty of twenty per cent on publisher price and thruppence on colonial and dominion sales. The book’s already written so you have your advance. Just go and buy yourself a new suit and a decent pair of shoes from Lobb’s, and come down to Dilberne for the weekend and meet the family. Get the address from Phoebe on your way out.’

Sir Jeremy had given up the sherry and now poured himself some whisky into a heavy frosted glass beaker with gold leaf trimmings – but failed to pour any for Sherwyn. ‘But please don’t let me delay you any longer, dear boy,’ and he smiled his courteous Old Etonian smile of dismissal. ‘I’m sure you must have many things to do and I certainly do.’

The Stars Look Down

Sherwyn went out into Fleet Street uncertain as to which of them had outwitted the other, but finding himself surprisingly languid, matter of fact. Well, one minute you’re a poor man and next minute you’re rich. It’s the way things went and probably would for the rest of his life. His father had had his horoscope done when he was born – Libra in the ascendant, Jupiter, Venus and Neptune conjunct in the first house, somewhat opposed to Mercury in Aries in the seventh. Charming, witty, attractive, subject to strange events and violent swings of fortune. A thousand guineas in an uncrossed cheque. Doomed to prosperity and an unfortunate marriage; a vigorous Jupiter and a Saturn in Capricorn.

Coutts would be closed now but he could hand in the cheque over the counter at eight the next morning and collect the cash, though to be seen to be in a hurry would never do. But he has a cheque for an unimagined amount in his pocket and all things seem possible, fame and fortune at last within his grasp and Vivvie not such a bad old thing really. Just a pity she’s so tall.

So. Vivvie has a suitor. Wonders will never cease. Jeremy thinks favourably of him. She is to meet him at the weekend.

Lady Adela Ripple finishes the call from her husband and puts the receiver back in its cradle with her tiny delicate hands, tipped with carefully manicured pale pink nails – scarlet and crimson are all very well for night but by day nails must be kept unobtrusive. A pity that Vivvie never bothers with her hands – raw, red, peasant things dangling from the end of intolerably long and large limbs. The girl is obviously a throwback – but to whom? Adela’s father? A long line of personable aristocrats marrying beautiful women. Adela’s mother? Did some giant of a mountains guide steal into a royal bedroom one night and lay a seed that was to flower generations later? No. More likely Jeremy’s side. Army mostly, generals and brigadiers, horse breeders, someone along the way was bound to have gone native. Vivvie, married. Possible, peasant hands and all. But to what kind of person? What kind of breeding?

A Turn-Up For The Books

Jeremy’s telephone conversation with her had been brief. He’d described Sherwyn as an interesting if impecunious young man who was a good novelist, would go far, and apparently wanted to marry Vivvie. He hadn’t been to Eton but at least to St Paul’s, which would do at a pinch. He could come down for the weekend so she might meet him and approve of him, or otherwise. She must bear in mind that Vivvie was certainly not likely to do better. All in all, so far as he was concerned, it was a consummation devoutly to be wished. He was working late; he would stay over at the Garrick, one of his clubs.

Vivvie and Sherwyn Sexton! Now which of Jeremy’s young tyros was Sherwyn Sexton? Of course, the good-looking if short one with the bright blue eyes who’d gatecrashed the party to celebrate Jeremy’s knighthood. It had been a splendid party even though Vivvie had done her best to spoil it – ‘
A Knight of the Realm? Daddy? Isn’t that rather hypocritical for a social radicalist? I thought he was meant to loathe everything to do with the realm
’ – and had even refused to turn up, which was probably just as well as she’d just have towered over everyone and insisted on wearing something dreadful; but it had rather upset her father. When Adela had tried to tempt her with the promise of lobster soup and oyster patties, Vivvie had said the money would be better spent re-thatching the stables, and the whole event was absurd. Vivvie was good at disapproval. And Sherwyn Sexton was prepared to put up with her? It was true that some men seemed to flourish under its weight. The handsomest
bons viveurs
often turned out to marry the plainest prunes of wives, bug-eyed Betties who tagged along at dinner parties as sort of walking consciences and were the kind who asked their husbands to fetch their fans or their handbags for them, and the husbands did. Perhaps Vivvie and Mr Sexton would be this kind of couple? The wife had to be good so the husband could be bad?

This Sherwyn Sexton had certainly showed a flirtatious spirit. He’d been rather drunk and so, she remembered, was she, though perhaps rather more with exhilaration than alcohol. She’d have thought she herself was more to his taste than Vivvie.

Extraordinary, thinks Adela. Vivvie and Sherwyn Sexton! Manly enough, with the kind of mobile, responsive face she herself found attractive but one so seldom met these days. She’d even rather shocked herself at the time, thinking if only she were not married to Sir Jeremy and didn’t have an all too grown daughter and was twenty years younger – but that way folly lay. Don’t think of it.

It had been such a triumphant party – though she’d drunk too much champagne; a really special day, the day she became Lady Adela Ripple; not as good as Adela, Lady Ripple, of course, as she would have become had she married a peer, but certainly more befitting her status than plain Mrs Ripple, née Adela Hedleigh. She’d been wearing a floaty pale pink Hilda Steward dress and was looking her best. She’d had Harrods cater the evening with the most delicious oyster soup and lobster patties. It was at the end of the evening that this drunk young man, this editor, this Sherwyn Sexton had taken her hand and held it a moment longer than a junior employee of her husband should, while fixing her with his blue eyes and saying something perfectly foolish and soppy: ‘
Oh the Lady Adela. Oh the delicacy of the damsel! The lightness of her being! I swoon, I swoon!
’, which was not what people usually said, but for some reason made her feel light-headed and entranced. But then his friend had snatched him away before he could make yet more of a fool of himself, and just as well.

Sherwyn Sexton, interested in Vivvie. Why? Well, obviously for her money. Why else would anyone woo her? In itself it was not so bad a sin. Why did most girls marry most men? The marriages turned out well enough. Since girls felt no shame in marrying for money, why, in a changing world, should not men?

On Mother Love

Of course Adela loves Vivvie: Vivvie is her child, and one loves one’s child but it is because of Vivvie that Adela must put up with the one child she has, and cannot try again for better luck with others. Vivvie was a big baby, and did permanent damage to Adela as she burst from the womb – such a young, frail, angelic mother, such a vigorous bouncing child – and Jeremy behaving as if the lying-in room was a windowed foaling box and cheering her on through dreadful agonies telling her to be a man, girl, bear up and don’t let it get you down. None of her friends have had to put up with a man present at the birth. It is unheard of. Adela really does not like horses, nor has she since the birth. Adela nearly died. But she had a vision, when
in extremis
, of her parents beckoning her to paradise and knew it was a trap and stayed alive, to the doctors’ astonishment. She had given up hope of Vivvie actually ever marrying.