Before the War (29 page)

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s all to the good then. Poor wee things.’ It was not how Sherwyn would have described the twins. ‘In that case you being the father –’

Sherwyn opened his mouth to object but gave up.

‘– you’ll be doing the right thing. They need to be with you. I’d be prepared to carry on, for a consideration. What with the war and everything wages are going to be good in munitions; it’s a temptation. But I’m fond of the girls, I’m not saying I’m not. I should miss them and they’d miss me.’

He could see that was true enough.

‘I’ll think about it, Morna.’

It was impossible, of course it was. The father Joseph analogy had long ago worn out. He lived in comfort in the Albany and they didn’t take families there. It had been rewarding enough to take them gifts even though they never seemed quite the right choices. He didn’t understand children and he didn’t want to. They were grown now and he couldn’t envisage a life full of shampoos and scent and strewn underwear and love letters and tears and hysterics and face powder spilt everywhere. He knew what female households could be like. Marjorie had left him with no illusions about that.

‘Yes, you just think about it, sir. Just you remember those twins belong to me now.’

She went back to her room and wrote a letter to her sister in Galway telling her all about it.

Sherwyn found Adela in floods of tears, huddled up under a blanket on the sofa. There was a strong smell of alcohol in the air. The zebra-skin rug which Vivvie had so hated had long since been moved to the Square, but was in a pretty bad state. A decanter of Sir Jeremy’s best whisky seemed to have broken over it and there were slivers of glass everywhere. Adela had not even had the will or energy to clear it up.

She was distraught and clutched at Sherwyn’s arm. She buried her head on his chest and he let her. He pitied her. She was a little old lady in distress. It seemed she had found Phoebe’s underwear in Sir Jeremy’s bed. He had promised never to see the slut again and had not only broken that promise but had actually moved the whore into the house in her absence. What a stupid excuse – the coming war! Everyone was using it. The underground might get bombed on the slut’s way to work. What did it matter if it was? Typists were two-a-penny. She had forgiven Sir Jeremy once before for upsetting her so and they had made their peace. But he had broken the terms of the pact. She would never divorce him, never. She did not approve of divorce, it was immoral. She had gone to join Igor in a religious retreat just to punish him a little, to show Sir Jeremy what it felt like to be jealous.

More tears, and more.

‘Oh come off it, Adela, as if he didn’t know. Give the poor man a divorce.’

‘He’d only marry the slut.’

‘She seems a nice girl, Adela.’

‘You’re just a man, what would you know?’

‘Adela, you are a bit drunk.’

She sat up and dabbed at her eyes.

‘I am not drunk, I am upset. If the place smells of alcohol it’s because Morna tripped and broke the decanter. She’s the one who was drunk. If she thinks I’m going to clear up after her she has another think coming.’

‘Adela, stop making excuses. You are drunk.’

‘Don’t accuse me. Why does everyone always accuse me?’

‘Because it’s usually your fault.’

‘You’d be upset if you were me. Igor’s left me. That’s why I’m here.’

‘I thought it was because of the war. Aren’t all foreign nationals advised to return to their country of origin?’

‘Sod the war,’ said Adela. ‘What about me? Igor fell in love with a man and left me.’

Igor Kubanov a queer? That took some getting used to. Igor the consummate actor, Sherwyn considered, who just went wherever advantage led him?

‘He saw all my powders and paints and said I was too old for him. He said it was disgusting, finding himself with an old baboushka. He said that Stefan was all young flesh and firmness. But Sherwyn, there was nowhere to keep anything secret at the Gurdjieff place. You were lucky to have a decent mattress or a cupboard with a door, let alone a proper meal. Bloody esoterics, them and their higher thoughts! They just hate comfort.’

Igor, of the greenery-yallery persuasion? Sherwyn remembered the hand on his sleeve in Upper Belgrave Street and could see it might be true. In which case, poor Adela. He had to remind himself she was a monster, responsible for Vivvie’s death and all troubles in between.

‘Adela, I have no time for these frivolities. Where are the twins?’

‘In Lausanne, darling. Where they usually are. Switzerland is perfectly safe. It’s always safe where the bankers are. Anyway, you keep denying the twins are anything to do with you, so why should you care?’

‘Adela, that’s mad. Two sixteen-year-old girls alone in a foreign land in wartime?’

‘They’re nearly seventeen. Their birthday is any day now. They were premature, of course. I could push it to September the third. I kept my head about me. I always did.’

‘I shall go myself to fetch them if I have to.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t, darling. Always interfering.’

But he felt a surge of Delgano’s spirit. It stirred his blood, flexed his muscles. He, Sherwyn, was ready for war. The war would bring out the best in him. It would be his salvation. He said so.

‘Oh, do what you like. What does any of it matter?’ said Adela. ‘I’m too old to care. Igor and Stefan have joined the Waffen SS. He’s always been such a snake. That’s why my husband sacked him from the stables in the first place. He’d said he was a Russian Jew in order to get the job. Sir Jeremy discovered he was actually a White Russian
émigré
and threw him out. Fired him. All Igor’s nonsense about Vivvie! He was just getting his revenge.’

‘You mean he actually raped her?’

‘I suppose you could put it like that if you like, isn’t that what Cossacks do?’

‘And you knew? And did nothing?’ Poor twins, the children of rape! And Vivvie too stoical to even complain!

‘Once something’s been done, there’s not much you can do.’

‘As you said when you let poor Vivvie die.’ He was furious.

‘Oh, blame, blame, blame! There is no point in blaming me now. I am old. It is over. D’you know what Gurdjieff said?’

‘No, thank God,’ said Sherwyn.

‘“
A man may be born, but in order to be born he must first die, and in order to die he must first awake
.” I died when I saw Igor walking off to join the enemy. He and Stefan, half his age, leaving practically hand in hand. They both had good calves and such excellent, well-polished riding boots. But now I have woken up. I am awake.’

She sat up straight on the sofa and seemed indeed to come to life. She rang the bell for Morna, but Morna didn’t come.

‘In that terrible place in Fontainebleau they made me stop taking my emminin pills. They did not think it was right to drink the urine of pregnant women. They were right. But the withdrawal can be difficult. One can become tearful.’

The blanket had gone. She seemed now like a dignified old matriarch. Some transition had been made. Still Morna didn’t come. Adela just sighed.

‘That girl will have to go,’ she said. ‘Nothing ever changes. Once it was Vivvie’s mud, now it’s Morna’s whisky. My poor rug.’ But she stirred herself to pick up the fragments of glass and place them delicately in one of Sir Jeremy’s solid glass ashtrays, careful not to cut herself. Sherwyn found himself helping.

‘The smell of drink will soon wear off,’ she said. She looked better without make-up, but her eyes were almost as rheumy as Sir Jeremy’s. She was right. She was old and over.

‘“
A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering
,”’ she said, ‘That’s Gurdjieff too. I have suffered so much from love, because all my pleasures have come from sex. One leads to the other and I have found it very difficult to give up either. I attribute that to the pills.’

‘A bad woman blames her pills,’ said Sherwyn, ‘as a bad workman blames his tools.’

‘Laugh at me if you must,’ said Adela. ‘It is better than hating me. Nature is all rewards and punishments. It rewards you with sex and punishes you with children. It does what it can to lure you into procreation, then makes you suffer if you succumb. It bribes women into loving their children when they’re born. But I never felt that flood of love for Vivvie. It was a difficult birth and really hurt and I was so small and she was so big and Sir Jeremy looking on. I hated her.’

‘Well, I loved her,’ said Sherwyn.

‘How admirable of you. It’s Nature makes us mourn when people die so we take care not to die ourselves. If we were guided by reason we would rejoice. They are out of pain and we are the more prosperous. I rejoiced when Vivvie died because she no longer had to put up with the pain of being her. I wanted a child like Stella, I admit, and made sure I got one, but like all children, she turned into nothing special, just another person. It has not yet happened to Mallory, but it will.’

‘This is very interesting,’ said Sherwyn, ‘but I really have to be off. Travel is going to be a nightmare. Half the world is getting up and changing places.’

‘Do what you must,’ she said. ‘Nature makes some of us cleverer than others. The clever ones lead, the silly ones follow. I think you are being very silly. You are so very male, Sherwyn. Women are smaller, weaker, more talkative, more emotional little things than men. Fuelled by emminin I was the most female woman you ever met. Just as you, fuelled by the power of that great shiny Bentley, were the male-est man I ever met. Perhaps we could just both blame our fuels?’

Sherwyn left, in some haste.

Travel was indeed a nightmare, though at least he journeyed against the flow of human traffic, not with it. Passengers were desperate, frightened, suspicious of spies, intimidated by the policemen and soldiers who stalked the train corridors, overloaded with luggage they didn’t dare put down, on their way to homes that for all they knew might turn out to be more dangerous than the ones they had just left. Between Paris and Geneva Sherwyn saw at least a dozen young men dragged away to an uncertain fate. What had they done? What happened next? Delgano would have to work it out. It took Sherwyn three days to reach Lausanne, and three times he was asked why he was travelling in the wrong direction. At least when he had the girls he would be going in the right direction. But he had left it absurdly late. Delgano would have moved faster.

The Académie St. Augustine occupied a handsome château set in well-kept grounds. Here there was no sign of panic or haste. Well-dressed, well-fed, beautiful girls looking healthy and happy wandered around in the sun with books and music cases in their hands and straw hats on their heads. After days of travelling chaos it seemed like paradise.

The twins seemed to think it was, too. Stella looked taller, somehow smoother and even lovelier than ever in an ingénue kind of way. Mallory’s jaw still seemed to reach for her forehead and she was wider than ever, but seemed more comfortable in herself. They were graciousness itself. Sherwyn wished he had brought better clothes, and had had time to shower and shave. They served him a refined herb tea with lemon, and delicate cucumber sandwiches.

‘Ah, Mr Sexton, we hear you are our father.’ Mallory spoke.

‘We know everything.’ That was Stella. ‘Morna rings us once a week. It is really nice to hear from home, but really nice to be here not there. It sounds really dreadful. And it seems our big sister is our mother.’

‘That made us very angry for a time,’ said Mallory. ‘We have been brought up under false pretences. But we also hear our alleged mother, who turns out to be our grandmother, is in a pitiful state. Drunk all the time.’

Sherwyn opened his mouth to protest. He closed it again. Perhaps his breath smelt? Did he need a mouthwash? Delgano would never have suffered from such awkwardnesses as this.

‘But it is hard to be angry for long,’ said Mallory. ‘My studies tell me that the need for sex can be very powerful in some women, and Grandma may still be a victim.’

‘Sufficient punishment to be Adela and called Grandma for ever after,’ said Stella giggling. Sherwyn allowed himself to relax a little. They were still the nice, funny girls he had always known. If his breath smelled a bit they would surely overlook it. He had come to save them, after all.

‘We want to stay here, Uncle Sherwyn,’ said Mallory. ‘Or Papa, as I suppose we should call you. We know you’re here to bring us back and it will all have been terrible getting here, and we’re grateful but really we want to stay, not go. We are big girls and can look after ourselves.’

‘We know how to look down our noses at other people,’ said Stella, ‘which we have found to be a great help.’

‘I noticed that,’ said Sherwyn.

‘But we can stop when we want,’ said Stella, ‘and we’re behaving now. Daddy, I’ve fallen in love with such a nice boy.’

‘He is not nearly as nice as you suppose,’ said Mallory. ‘No boy is. But it is such heaven here, Papa. The food is divine. They all read your books. At first we were very angry, being sent away the way we were. At least Stella was. I am more sanguine. I have few excitements in life and that was one of them. And now I have got into the Geneva Institute for Psychiatric Genetics, the youngest person to be admitted and the first woman to study there. And the mountain air is so wonderful after London. We would have to go back to boring Belgrave Square and Morna, for who else is to look after us?’

‘We know on which side our bread is buttered, Papa,’ said Stella. ‘And we were glad our paternity was you, not Uncle Mungo. Even though he did give the best presents. And so we mean to stay here. More tea?’

‘Thank you,’ said Sherwyn. They decided he needed more lemon, and possibly some soup, cheese and bread and rang the bell for it.

He enquired about their finances. They said they had explained the new circumstances to old Mr Baum only yesterday and he had assured them if they now inherited from Vivvie not Adela there would be fewer problems. Courtney and Baum still had their agent in Barscherau (a nice Swiss man with, to the German authorities, the reassuringly ‘Aryan’ name of Becht) and the girls could be supplied through his office.