Before the War (17 page)

The Gasthaus Post is run by Herr and Frau Bieler, an amiable pair in their fifties, he the great-great-grandson of the Bieler who built the place. Visitors are rare – mostly government inspectors or public officials, the occasional party of hikers, and the odd antiquarian (usually odd in both senses of the word) following up rumours of a unique wooden Madonna in an old abbey somewhere in these parts. The Bielers deny the existence of such a thing, even to Vivvie who likes to walk up to the old abbey and has actually seen it, large as life, a crude wooden statue of a woman with a serene rather beautiful expression, with dark Asiatic features, a big belly and a cross carved into her forehead, sitting under the only corner of the abbey still with a partial roof – sitting on a marble plinth beneath a delicately painted if weatherworn frescoed dome, or third of a dome. ‘But I’ve seen it,’ says Vivvie. ‘I like to walk up there. Why do they deny it?’

Sherwyn says it is something to do with the terms of her batty great-grandmother’s will, and no doubt the Bielers are under instruction, but from quite whom who is to say? One of the conditions of Vivvie’s inheritance is that the statue in the old abbey is not to be sold. Surely Vivvie knows this?

‘I know practically nothing about my inheritance,’ says Vivvie, who has been putting this moment off for some time. ‘Mama likes to keep me in ignorance. But now I am a married woman perhaps we can all have a proper discussion about these tedious financial things and find out why I am the only one to sign cheques some of the time but not all of the time.’

Sherwyn, who finds money anything but tedious, agrees that it would be a good idea indeed. If he can intervene in the management of Vivvie’s estates so much the better. Barscherau, he can see, but does not say, could be usefully turned into something of an alternative Chamonix, a fashionable centre for winter sports. But he’s on his honeymoon, unerotic though it may be: he is in the middle of a second novel in which his hero Rafe Delgano is turning into more of a languid connoisseur than he had appeared in the first – though still handy with a gun, a knife and a garrotte, the latter to be used of course only on the most bestial of villains – and it absorbs him. Sherwyn is more relaxed and cheerful than he has ever been before – the effect of mountain air and scenery or perhaps just the sudden cessation of the money worries that have plagued him all his life.

‘These things can wait, my dear,’ he says, amiably, ‘until we get back home. Then I promise you I will be a whirlwind of activity and investigation and provide sound financial judgement.’

It is midsummer’s day, and finally warm enough for the cows to be let out to grass. The sound of cowbells is thrown from one mountain peak to another, and is the prettiest sound imaginable, the one described by Johanna Spyri when her heroine Heidi moved from the city to the village of Dörfli in the mountains. But Vivvie cannot concentrate. She is suddenly anxious.

‘My mother has always seen me as intellectually impaired,’ Vivvie says, ‘and at the moment I certainly feel that I am. How is this baby to get out? It seems so large and my openings are so small.’ She asks Sherwyn if he would drive into Kufstein and take out some books on childbirth from the library.

‘They’ll be in German,’ he warns her. ‘Best wait until your mother is here.’

‘Yes, but where is she? She said the baby would be born in July and July is nearly here.’

He wonders if in Adela’s absence he should suggest Vivvie finds a doctor but decides against it. Childbirth is an entirely natural process – did not African mothers give birth in the fields and go straight back to work again? – and if Adela’s plan was to work the fewer witnesses there were to the circumstances of the birth the better. Adela was no doubt sitting out the season in Cannes, or somewhere else agreeably smart and warm, nursing a fake pregnancy.

‘Not that I mind,’ says Vivvie. ‘I may decide to keep the baby. I have grown quite accustomed to it. Indeed, I may have quite strong feelings when the time comes for Mama to take it away. She will only hand it over to nannies to look after, and I could perfectly well do the same. I am not the moral imbecile she thinks I am. A shotgun wedding is not the same as being an unmarried mother. And I have you to look after me, Sherwyn.’

He feels unaccountably pleased at this show of trust.

‘Indeed,’ she says, ‘I daresay the time will come when pregnant brides are two-a-penny.’

‘I have no doubt you are right,’ he says, temporising, thinking hard, rearranging circumstances in his head. If the girl keeps the baby, what will Rafe Delgano do? ‘But this is now and that will be then. Just remember that one can become unaccustomed as easily as accustomed. And that your mother is a very determined woman.’

‘I know,’ she says sadly.

The gears slip and change again. Vivvie will not be pregnant for ever. A baby must come out of her one way or another, sooner or later, a baby that he had envisaged – as much as he had envisaged anything – as being raised by Adela, and presumed by everyone, including Sir Jeremy himself, to be her husband’s offspring. He himself, having been Vivvie’s fiancé, and therefore the most likely suspect, would be free of blame. The possibility of an Angel Gabriel wouldn’t even arise: Vivien was too unreliable a narrator to be taken seriously. But how complicated all matters to do with the Ripple family turned out to be. None of them believed in simple solutions.

But if Vivvie were to raise the little by-blow herself he would be its legal father, and would be required to look after its welfare and education. He would be expected to meet it mewling and puking over breakfast tables, and later over dinner tables, behaving as if it were his own, and God alone knew what it would grow up to be. It might be all shame and embarrassment as he could see that Vivvie had been to her parents. For all he knew the Angel Gabriel was a black man. Perhaps she had offered herself to a black man with the same kind of careless abandon she apparently offered her spiritual self to her horse? There had been no talk of rape or violence: in fact there had been very little talk at all. Adela might know more about the putative Angel Gabriel than she was letting on. Vivvie’s defence that she had not known she was pregnant until just before her wedding day – she had been told by a servant you could not get pregnant if you did it standing up – had always seemed a little thin. That Adela had not even noticed her daughter’s condition was less hard to believe for she noticed only herself. And was it possible that Adela was herself pregnant (what was all that business with Mungo and the ring about?) and meant to emerge one day onto the social scene as the envied young mother of a young child? But no – he was a writer: this was the stuff of fiction, not reality. He went too far; he was in danger of being carried away by his own over-complex plotting. Adela was a good mother making a noble sacrifice to shield her only child from disgrace. That was all there was to it.

But a legal baby! A little lovechild, and none of his own. He was too young, Babies were so ageing. He was not father material, any more than Vivvie was mother material. The sound of the cowbells took on an ominous note. Rafe Delgano would lose his followers if he was seen to father a child. Sometimes, and he is well aware of it, Sherwyn Sexton cannot tell the difference between himself and Rafe Delgano.

‘But one does have to ask oneself,’ says Sherwyn to Vivvie, ‘whether one has the strength and energy to face up to your mother once she has made up her mind.’

‘Now I have had a little rest here in the mountains,’ says Vivvie, ‘I might just have the strength so to do. Let her say and do what she likes. She is not me. I will keep my baby.’

And in thus declaring herself, I am sorry to tell you, she signs her own death warrant. Look, all this happened a long time ago. Sooner or later we all join those who live in the past. And she’s only a character in a book.

A couple of weeks later Sherwyn drove off to the nearest big town – Kufstein – in search of oil and fuel for his car and a book on obstetrics in English, if possible, for Vivvie. He had a strong sense of turning a new page, starting an adventure. He would take it where it led him. The world unfolded before Rafe Delgano, who, unusually for him, had not been to bed with a woman for quite some time. What went on in the bed, according to the manners of the times, tended to fade away into a row of dots rather than give any explicit detail, but the point was generally taken that Rafe acquitted himself manfully and the maiden ended up in love, and docile.

The road to Kufstein was fast and good, remade in 1860 to further the Emperor Franz Joseph’s rather nutty military ambitions, and almost deserted save for the occasional lumbering peasant with cart and a group of brave and sportif young persons enjoying a cycling holiday. He built up what he felt was a good head of steam. Then a brand new Audi Type K shocked him by overtaking: Sherwyn let him go. The war was over.

The road wound up to above the tree line, curled down again to blue lakes and green meadows, with their scattering of timbered mountain chalets with red flowering window boxes, brilliant at this time of year, and their stacks of firewood, much diminished, he noticed, after a hard winter. It was all so charming, so peaceful. Questions had been asked in the House, he was aware, on the subject of Austria’s possible rearming in defiance of the Reparations Commission, and a suspicious relationship with the Škoda works in Czechoslovakia, but there was no sign of trouble here. He felt elated. London and its politics seemed so far away. Perhaps he should move Delgano out of Morocco and into Austria, land of Sachertorte and apfelstrudel, and statues with fig leaves over male parts, so much more indecent than the real thing? More cake, less sex. Cakes had certainly become very popular in England. But no, Rafe’s savoury gourmet self in the exotic spice lands of the Near East was currently much appreciated by readers so why try and mend what was not broken? And the seduction of fair complexioned girls with blue eyes in dirndls and plaits might cause offence, whereas almond eyed, dark skinned murderous beauties were fairer game. Oh, Rita, how he missed Rita. Rita would have to put up with Vivvie’s existence as his wife. He was fond and protective of Vivvie, but as one might be of a sister. She would surely recognise that.

Any day soon the delicious, delicate and dangerous Adela would tear herself away from Cannes and turn up in Barscherau. He would make her an egg curry. She would appreciate that. Not too heavy a dish for so light and lithe a person. Vivvie was happy enough with goulash but it could get tiresome. Vivvie would come to her senses after she’d given birth and realise how unfair it was to land him, Sherwyn, with a baby which was none of his own, and hand the responsibility and the cost over to Adela. They would go back to real life in England, he as a famous writer and Vivvie as a respectable young bride, able to ride Greystokes free of encumbrance. In time the secret might out, and the child’s big sister be revealed to be its actual mother, as happened often enough in the working classes, if rather more rarely in the upper, but by then time would have blunted the sharp edges of scandal. All would be well. ‘Blunting the sharp edges of scandal.’ A good phrase, he must not forget it.

A herd of cows was crossing the road. Sherwyn slowed the Bentley and stopped. The cowbells suddenly sounded strange, a warning cacophony rather than a soothing melody. It was probably only the way rock cliffs were throwing back the sound of the bells, but it made him wary. There was something he had overlooked. But what? Something strange was going on. The Bielers seemed pleasant enough but were too like actors in a play. Mein host and his frau, in traditional costume. He jovial and kindly, she bustling and domestic. Peasantry were easily bribed, everyone knew. But why? To keep quiet about who gave birth to whom, and where? Possible. And what role did Courtney and Baum play? They presented themselves as old and decrepit but they were quite capable of chicanery. Sherwyn must be careful. He must warn Vivvie. She might have more of a fight on her hands than one thought. Strange how a chap could get to feel so protective of a small, heaving lump beneath a swelling belly, hammering with tiny feet and hands to get out. Not the little one’s fault about the Angel Gabriel. In truth he, Sherwyn, rather enjoyed his current role as Joseph. Writers were all Josephs in spirit, as he might claim in his autobiography one day, shepherding dark truths to the light of day. Priests were beginning to fail in their role as moral arbiters to the outside world, scientists had already failed – no matter what H.G. Wells had to say on the subject: look at the aerial bombardment they had made possible – and writers would have to take their place.

The stream of cows reached the track on the other side of the road and the cowbells sounded perfectly normal again. All these were the fears of an over-active imagination and the effect of sound waves bouncing back and forth between rock walls. The cutting ended, the valley road ran beside the river and he was in Kufstein, where there was a newsagent, a railway station, a cathedral, a library, lots of people, a few of them in regional dress, and an intentness and busyness which quite shocked his eyes.

Sherwyn found a week-old copy of the
Times
, fuel enough in cans at the back of the Fachgeschäft to satisfy the Bentley, though the store keeper grumbled at so heavy and sudden a loss of his stock – and he was even able to buy a new dipstick for an Audi Type K which fitted the Bentley well enough. The tip had snapped off his the last time he’d been measuring petrol. He could find no medical books in English in library or bookshop, though the girl in the library ran after him to tell him in her charming broken English accent that there was an English doctor practising in a village called Kiefersfelden just across the border in Germany who might be able to help him.

He thought the girl – she said her name was Greta – dimpled and smiled up at him in such an interested and interesting way that she might be up for something more intimate than a mere conversation about the existence of medical books. She was tiny and had the thickest of thick yellow plaits on each side of her pretty little head, and her smocked dirndl was lower cut than anything English girls dared wear. Perhaps he was altogether wrong about the kind of girl fiction readers appreciated. At any rate the writer owes it to himself, and indeed his readers, to follow opportunities through without fear or favour to see where they might lead. He must take the risk in order that others may lead quiet lives. He was about to ask Greta to step inside the Bentley and show him the way to Kiefersfelden but a stern lady in black called her back into the library, and Greta sighed and shrugged and went back to her work. Sherwyn’s faith in humanity and his own special place in it dipped. Fate, which had begun the day promising so much, had changed her mind and turned her back on him.