Before the War (15 page)

‘I think all that went very well, don’t you, Elsie?’ said Adela.

‘Yes, Ma’am, and didn’t the bride look a picture.’

‘Let us say she looked as good as she could. But the dress was magnificent. Thank you for your skills and ingenuity, Elsie. Not the slimmest of brides, of course. Overeating in anticipation of the great day, I fear.’

‘I’m sure that’s what it was, Ma’am. I’ll say nothing to anyone, don’t worry yourself. I’m fond of Miss Vivvie, and we’re all glad down in the village she found someone to marry.’

‘Quite so,’ said Adela.

She took one of the six trifle bowls and studied it. It was made of cut glass, caught the light deliciously, and sparkling in the evening light and rimmed with real silver as it was, looked, and was, a really desirable object. Expensive too, and from Harrods.

‘But oh dear, this one has a crack in it,’ Adela said. Elsie was taken aback.

‘It looks all right to me, Ma’am. It’s not damaged. I’ve been very careful.’

‘Oh no, see, it’s quite cracked. It can’t go back to Harrods like that. I’ll have to declare it as wastage. Such a pity! Still, these things happen. Perhaps you’d like to take it home, Elsie? You could keep flowers in it.’

‘Oh I couldn’t, Ma’am, it’s far too grand for me.’

‘Nonsense, Elsie. It’s in gratitude for all your fine work and loyalty.’

‘Thank you, Ma’am. That’s very kind of you. Not a word to anyone as long as I live.’

And Elsie put the bowl carefully to one side to take home with her after work, and Adela smiled and went back to what was left of the party. One by one guests were drifting away, by Bentley and Rolls-Royce, over smooth roads recently tarmacked to join up with the main road to London (Vivvie paid, helped by grants from Brighton County Council and the new Road Fund), humbler folk by charabanc to Dilberne Halt. Everything organised by Adela went swimmingly. But then she had, as they say, the luck of the Devil.

Adela then waylaid her husband Sir Jeremy, who was only a little drunk. She was wearing a pink and white beaded silk tulle dress as simple as Vivvie’s had been elaborate, but then she had so little to hide. She came up to his shoulder; she looked up at him, so appealing, so small, so pale. The only flash of colour was from the Queen Alexandra ruby ring he had first put on her finger twenty years ago at Monte Verità. Sir Jeremy was touched. And still they loved each other – now more than ever.

‘Such a day, darling,’ she said, ‘such a day! Our daughter married at last, and to a truly worthy mate.’

‘I sincerely hope so,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘He’s a devious bastard, if a good enough writer.’

Adela then broke the good news to him; she was expecting; they were going to have a baby. She hoped he was as happy as she was.

Sir Jeremy peered at her through mists of alcohol. She had always told him that after Vivvie she was unable to conceive. Something had gone wrong in the unknown complexity that formed the female body. Women were strange creatures. One thing one day, another thing another. But surely bright young things had babies, not mature women such as his wife.

‘I am happy if you are,’ he said. ‘But is it safe at your age?’

‘Good Lord, darling, I am not as old as all that. It is perfectly safe.’

He had no idea how old she was, come to think of it. He could hardly ask her outright – that was unthinkable, and besides women were expected to lie about their ages. He could work it out, he supposed, but that too seemed an insult. It had been a long day and he was tired, unlike Adela, who was indefatigable. Now she was laughing merrily.

‘An unexpected blessing, it is true. But Mother Nature often hands we women a last departing gift. It happens to the best of couples.’

‘It might be a son, I suppose,’ he said, doubtfully.

‘Someone to take over from you. Ripple & Co could become Ripple & Son.’

‘I am not a draper or a funeral director,’ he said testily. ‘I am a publishing house.’

He did not particularly want a new baby in the house. Having got rid of one child surely he deserved his wife’s full attention. But who was he to stand in the Almighty’s way? If God had blessed Vivvie’s mother in her old age with a baby, as in biblical times He had Mary’s mother Anne, who was he, a mere lower-case mortal, to argue with Him? He, Sir Jeremy Ripple, had other matters to think about. If the great and noble Lenin died, how long would the new order survive in a greedy and self-interested world? How could it stand up to the lies and slanders of the hundred-mouthed bourgeois press – all these scorpions! Well, anything Ripple & Co could do to lead the working class forward, to help forge the unity and solidarity of the Party’s ranks, it would strive to do. In the end victory would be achieved over the enemies of the working class. The Labour Party at home might have success at the next election, which would be a step in the right direction, for the reforms they planned were better than nothing, but all that was nowhere near true socialism, let alone communism: the struggle was universal and he knew what side he was on.

As for Somerset Maugham, what a stinker! Jeremy was still smarting from the snub. What was a novel at the best of times but a bit of a yarn with a social conscience? What Somerset wrote, everyone knew, was heavy on plot but light in discernment. Somerset was the last person entitled to put on airs. He needed someone with whom he could mull this over. But whom? Sherwyn would dismiss Maugham as being of no literary consequence, a mere plot merchant; Mungo would make Jeremy look a fool for believing that when Maugham said that the novelist lived in a troubled world and it was his duty to acknowledge and contend with it, that he meant a word of it. Maugham was guided by money not principle.

Normally he could have discussed all this with Adela but all she seemed able to talk about was a new baby. A baby! But he was an old man; it was something of an embarrassment. Men of his age were long past the age when physical congress with a wife occurred. She was so damned attractive, that was the problem – and now how the world would snigger. Dignity would be impugned. His contemporaries would mock him; the up and coming see him as an old goat. Vivvie would go off and presumably get pregnant by Sherwyn – that was what marriage was about, after all, though it was hard to envisage and best if one didn’t – and here would Adela be, emulating her, the generations hopelessly confused. In the meanwhile Adela was trilling on. It occurred to him that, for all her admirable qualities, she was just silly.

He shocked himself in thinking it. Adela, his pride and joy.

Sir Jeremy scarcely noticed when she told him the baby would be born in the autumn, that after all the excitements of the wedding she must be careful, she must look after her health and not get too tired, that she might spend the next few months abroad, spend the rest of the summer in the Alps and recuperate in the clean mountain air. Did he remember how happy they had been in Monte Verità? – oh, he did, he did!

‘Whatever you think best, my darling,’ he said. ‘You must look after our precious bundle. What a delightful surprise. You breathe new life into an old man.’

Later On, In Dilberne Village

Meanwhile Elsie was down in the village high street sharing a late supper of wedding leftovers with her sister Mrs Ashton and Lily, who ‘did’ up at the Court. Mrs Ashton was a widow who had taken over the village shop when her husband died, and ran it very well. After his death her spinster sister Elsie moved in to live with her. Before the war Elsie had worked at Dilberne Court as parlour maid: during the war as a munitionette, and after that, her health much reduced and her skin a yellowish colour but her sewing skills unimpaired, scraped a living as a seamstress. The cut-glass and silver bowl she brought home that day was an unexpected bonus: she would be able to sell it to supplement her old age pension when it came along (5/- a week). She decanted a quart or so of leftover potato salad and mayonnaise and some rejected tomato salad into its clean, polished and uncracked beauty, piled it high with the green oysters Rockefeller which the wedding guests had for the most part left uneaten, and carried the lot home for supper, asking Lily to come round and help eat it.

When Mrs Ashton came home from the shop she insisted that the salad was put on individual plates, the oysters removed to a safe place, the bowl washed and polished and put for safety in her mahogany cabinet with the latticed windows. Mrs Ashton then asked her brother-in-law Sid the blacksmith to come round to put a value on the bowl. Harrods only hired out the best. Sid, who knew about metals and values, was quite impressed. The rim, he said, was hallmarked with the lion and Birmingham and dated 1895.

‘A fine piece you got out of them toffs, Elsie,’ Sid had said. ‘Well done. And I should think so too after all you’ve done for ’em. In time it’ll fetch at least fifty quid, so hang on to it as long as you can.’

Sid took the plateful of oysters Rockefeller down to his wife, but she scraped the lot out down at the end of the garden – any food so vile a green would do no-one any good at all. Sid was not too sorry.

Mrs Ashton brought home a few slices of best ham from the shop and they had a feast, washed down with cider. The potato salad leftovers were really good, although the mayonnaise had been made with olive oil which had a strange foreign taste, and it was peculiar to eat tomatoes out of season. Lily found an old cigar butt in her serving, after which the conversation became rather more critical of their benefactors than it had been at the beginning of the meal.

‘The idea!’ Elsie said to her sister Mrs Ashton. ‘That bowl! Thinking she can bribe me to keep my mouth shut!’

‘I hope you do,’ said Mrs Ashton, severely. ‘Poor Miss Vivvie. Least said soonest mended. She had no idea how to look after herself. Waiting for a train without even a coat, and snow on the way. Anything could have happened.’

‘And it evidently did,’ said Elsie. ‘I saw that unborn baby move. Great kick it gave, and all but stretched the satin, and me a respectable person. They might at least have warned me. Enough to put you off dressmaking for life.’

‘Worse than finding a cigar butt in your potato salad?’ her sister enquired and Elsie said at least she doubted anyone had done it on purpose.

‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Lily darkly. ‘They’re a funny lot, not like the old gentry. If you ask me, Lady Adela herself is pregnant. She as good as told me so. She said she couldn’t face breakfast and then I caught her vomiting in the bathroom. Or at any rate bending over the basin. She shouted at me to go away.’

‘Food poisoning,’ said Mrs Ashton, firmly.

‘It certainly is not,’ said Lily. ‘I help Cook and I should know. No, I reckon she’s pregnant. She’s not too old. My own sister got a bun in the oven when she was forty-five. It was her eighth. He wouldn’t leave her alone though she begged.’

‘Men!’ exclaimed Elsie. ‘All the same, high or low.’

‘And I don’t think it’s Sir Jeremy’s either,’ said Lily. ‘He’s not all that often in her Ladyship’s bed. Either in London or in his dressing room.’

‘You have no business saying a thing like that, Lily, and I advise you not to repeat it. Whose is it, then?’

‘She keeps the house full of young men,’ said Lily. ‘Could be anyone’s. Mr Mungo’s always hanging round. And if Mr Sherwyn’s coming round she puts on more lipstick and draws dark rings round her eyes.’

‘Under her husband’s nose!’ exclaimed Elsie.

‘He doesn’t notice a thing,’ said Lily. ‘He adores her. No, she’s a real goer, that one.’

They ate on for a while in contemplative silence, broken only by a shriek when Elsie, who seemed doomed, thought she came across another shard of cigar in the salad, but it turned out to be nothing worse than a piece of potato skin which someone had failed to remove in the initial peeling. It is easily done.

It was a meal that stayed in the minds of the participants – if only because of both the silver rimmed bowl – which was to stay in Mrs Ashton’s glass cabinet as an object of value and pride for the next seventeen years – and by the shock of a stubbed-out cigar butt found in the leftover salad – perceived by the three women, however vaguely, as symbolic of the humiliation of the have-nots at the hands of the gentry. And just as well that the meal was memorable, becoming as it did most relevant to the twins’ enquiries, years later, into the nature of their parentage.

After The Wedding

Sir Jeremy and Adela’s (well, Vivvie’s) wedding gift to the young couple was a brand new yellow three-litre Bentley tourer, fresh from the factory – twin carburettors and a four speed gear box and a top speed of 80 miles an hour. It was in this splendid and well-upholstered vehicle that Sherwyn and Vivvie set out on their honeymoon, leaving the wedding party behind them.

As soon as there was no-one to observe them they both began to be happy. The sheer effectiveness and rumbling magnificence of the machine they drove, monarchs of all but empty roads, managed to dwarf all personal doubts and fears – Sherwyn forgot he was short, Vivvie that she was tall: they met as equals. (The roads might have been comparatively empty but they were far from safe – drivers were not tested and licensed and there were more than seven thousand fatal accidents that year – mostly pedestrians taken unawares.) But Sherwyn was a good and skilled driver and Vivvie felt he could be trusted. A man whose talent was keeping out of trouble would use the gift in all aspects of life. He would not fall off horses, have road accidents, take unnecessary risks, get food poisoning, choose the wrong hotel or the wrong publisher. She had chosen the right man. Driving, he looked handsome and alert under his peaked flat cap, his rather sharp nose seen in profile, the mouth, she could now see at her leisure, for she had seldom had the opportunity to examine him closely, having been fully occupied trying to forestall or respond to whatever he was saying, had permanently upturned corners, which was what gave him the appearance of always wearing a slightly ironic, somewhat cynical smile. This, Vivvie could see, would always give him an advantage in literary circles.

As for Vivvie, she wore a mannish brown tweed suit by Coco Chanel and a stern white blouse from Worth for the drive. The suit had a drop waist and by the time they had got to Dover needed to be let out a full inch. She had seemed, he thought, to keep the pregnancy small by effort of will alone. Once the wedding was over and she was out of the grounds of Dilberne Court she could at last breathe deeply and let her body do what it was so good at doing; namely, to grow and expand. He admired her for it. She removed the absurd little pill hat her mother had insisted on her wearing and let her hair fall loose around her face, so its imperfections were less obvious. He even felt affection for her. Perhaps an eventual divorce would not be necessary or desirable. She did not flap, or giggle, or chatter, or smirk, or snivel, or fiddle with her hair and clothes. She spoke only when necessary and then to the point. She was just large. The worst was over. The public scrutiny of their mismatch had been faced and overcome.