Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Five Past Four, Thursday November 23nd 1922. The Editorial Office, Ripple & Co

  Sherwyn had been Mungo Bolt’s good friend – which was why he now takes the literary betrayal so hard. Both had been second lieutenants in the Artists’ Rifles, invalided home for minor injuries at the same time, then both seconded to the National War Aims Committee where they worked agreeably together on advertising campaigns to persuade the public to do the right thing: Follow the King! Eat Less Meat! Women Do Your Bit! Men of Britain Will You Stand for This? and so on, which was not only fun but saved them from the trenches. After the war Mungo, like Sherwyn an aspiring writer with a North London literary background, followed Sherwyn into the world of publishing and eventually to Ripple & Co’s editorial department. From here they look down in comfort on streets thronged with ex-soldiers, blind, halt, shell-shocked, hungry and cold, begging for employment. In the land fit for heroes the two of them at least have jobs: but then they are gentlemen with strings to pull. Nothing much changes.

  Sherwyn and Mungo see themselves as young (as I too see them, a hundred or so years on, life expectancy being about double what it was in 1922, even including the sudden horrific dip in the four years of the Great War) but those born just a decade or so later see the pair as battle hardened and seasoned men of experience as they swan about the night-clubs of Piccadilly, picking off girls like grouse. They have been through the trenches and survived, and are envied as heroes. Girls swoon before them. Already younger men than they are beginning to lament that they have ‘missed the war’, and are preparing in their hearts for the next, which will be fought for more complicated reasons than love of country.

  So much for the Great War, the war to end all wars; so much for patriotism, which begins to be seen as a great evil. A terrible cynicism rules the land.

  Anyway. Sherwyn closes Miss Ripple’s folder and goes into Mungo’s office down the mean little attic corridor. A chap has to bend his neck to get along it. Nothing’s fair; Mungo is lucky: his father Ambrose is managing director of Charlton and Hoare, a large and wealthy general publishers. Ambrose is from a generation which believes a gentleman should not be obliged to work for a living, and so gives his son a substantial allowance to add to his wages. Sherwyn is not so fortunate in his father, a writer, who thinks any man should be able to keep himself once out of Oxford. Sherwyn is finding paying his own way in the world increasingly difficult. Indeed, last time Sherwyn tried to book lunch at Rules he noticed a decided reluctance to take the booking. He was running up too high a bill for a customer whose shoes, should the maître d’hôtel look down, clearly let in water. Such a thing would never happen to Mungo. Nor need it ever happen to Sherwyn Sexton, he was already thinking, if he were husband to Mrs Sherwyn Sexton, née Ripple.

  Sherwyn tells Mungo with dramatic detail how Miss Ripple has just proposed to him out of the blue and both men shudder at the thought. It makes a fine story. Both agree that while to woo and marry the boss’s daughter would in most cases be both sensible and desirable, Miss Ripple could be a different matter. Prolonged intimacy with a giantess did not appeal, and what would the children look like? Sherwyn demurs at this and says the problem with begetting children at all is the element of chance involved: one simply does not know what will emerge from the maternal womb.

  ‘Miss Ripple’s father,’ he says, ‘is perfectly decent looking in Edward the Seventh style, and the mother’s something of a beauty in a transparent kind of way, and to all accounts more intelligent than Sir Jeremy, who will let his heart rule his head. Miss Ripple’s children might very well revert to type, and be perfectly presentable.’ Mungo is taking notes, and Sherwyn, ever suspicious, asks why.

  ‘I will be Boswell to your Johnson,’ Mungo says. ‘I shall preserve your bons mots for posterity.’ Sherwyn is satisfied. Mungo at least recognises who is top dog.

  ‘However,’ says Sherwyn, ‘the next time I see Miss Ripple’s father it will not be to ask for her hand in marriage but to hand in my notice. I cannot continue to work in a place where I am humiliated and scorned.’

  ‘Oh come on, old pal,’ says Mungo, who is a reasonable fellow. ‘It’s not as bad as all that.’

  ‘My soul is shrivelling,’ says Sherwyn, as if this was enough of an explanation.

  Looking To The Future

  Mungo murmurs that there is some work to do on A Short History of the Georgians. Sherwyn says he’d rather get on with his story about the girl and the sheep’s eyes, but Mungo persists and points out that Sir Jeremy is convinced that the deep pool of right-thinking readers out there who’ve never heard of a place called Georgia will now be dying to find out. This very morning the great man put Mungo in charge of a new department to be called Publicity. The advertising budget is to rise by 150 per cent, from £23 to £57.10s. Mungo is to take out American-style ads in The Ethical Socialist, The Schoolmaster and The Daily Chronicle.

  ‘How extremely vulgar,’ says Sherwyn. ‘And yet another slap in the face for me.’ Mungo says not to worry, no extra money goes with the new title, just more work.

  ‘But why are you to be in charge, not me?’

  ‘Because you think publicity is vulgar,’ says Mungo, who is getting slightly irritated. He is to go on to be managing director of Bolt & Crest, one of the great inter-war ad agencies. ‘And I don’t. Because he heard my vulgar little speech at the last monthly meeting, when I told the assembled company that love, hate, trust, fear, hope and greed were mankind’s prime emotions. And the way to sell anything was to connect the product with two or more of these fundamental responses. It would work the same for books on politics as it did for the recruiting ads we used to do in the war – in the days when we were happy and young: Daddy, what did you do in the war?’

  ‘But everyone knows that. Pavlov’s dog stuff,’ says Sherwyn, dismissive.

  ‘It’s not Pavlov, it’s Freud’s Totem and Taboo. And it sounded new and wonderful to Sir Jeremy,’ says Mungo, ‘which is all that matters. He envisages a new list which will change the world: A Short History of the Georgians is only the start. But it needs a new title: Love, Fear and Hope in the Land of the Georgians perhaps. I leave it to you. Just trawl primary emotions. Hate the capitalists, love the “communists” – that’s the new word for bolsheviks. A fresh dawn breaking, new sun rising. Workers Arise!, all that. We must get the author’s permission to change the title. Georgia Awakes! might do – it’s shorter, and if there’s time ask him for a new chapter on Stalin, the coming man, the new glorious son of the Caucasus.’

  ‘Very flashy, the improved Ripple & Company,’ says Sherwyn. ‘The sooner I’m out of here the better. I am a king and country man myself: no kind of parlour pink. The Russians kill each other as others kill fleas.’

  ‘They’re the hope of the world according to our boss,’ says Mungo, ‘so perhaps you had better believe it too.’

  He picked up Vivvie’s portfolio and flicked through it.

  ‘As for sacking yourself, think again. If I know the way your mind works, and I think I do, Miss Ripple is to be Mrs Sexton before long,’ says Mungo, ‘and how useful it would be to have your publisher as your father-in-law.’

  ‘Absurd,’ says Sherwyn. ‘I write fiction. Ripple & Co publish non-fiction.’

  ‘So it has crossed your mind,’ says Mungo. ‘I am glad to hear it. A pity that her drawings are so dull. Still, I daresay a dull wife is preferable to a skittish one.’

  ‘You’re out of your mind,’ says Sherwyn. ‘I am not the marrying kind.’

  ‘If you’re already making excuses for your future children,’ says Mungo, ‘and arguing that various obvious contrasts might work themselves out in the begetting, the deed is as good as done.’

  Five In The Afternoon, November 23rd 1922. 3 Fleet Street

  At five o’clock precisely Sherwyn went down to beard Sir Jeremy in his newly refurbished and opulent den. No 3 Fleet Street is a thin narrow building dating from the mid eighteenth century, once a master printer’s residence, then a bo
okshop, then a disreputable publisher’s; only now, passing into Adela’s possession ten years back, becoming Ripple & Co. In its history, I may say, No 3 Fleet Street has periodically attracted the attention of authorities as a possible source of sedition and scandal, and agents of the police and government have knocked upon the door before. It stands where Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham once used a print shop to plant disinformation; it is where Adela’s cousin Rosina wrote her work on the sex life of the aboriginals, and it is where now Sir Jeremy flirts with communism. Some buildings are just like that.

  The first and second floors of the building have undergone a transformation. With the aid of a cheque from Coutts bank Jeremy’s wife Adela has lately had the room redecorated in all that is latest in fashionable design. The place no longer looks like a working office, but more like a modern Art Deco drawing room. She has learned a lot, or perhaps indeed – who’s to say – has inherited from her aunt Isobel a tendency to favour all that is latest and trendiest in contemporary design. Adela is cousin to Arthur, Lord Dilberne, who sold off most of the estate before decamping with his motor business to the US during the war, leaving not just No 3 but his ancestral home and its gardens in Adela’s competent care and control, if not actual ownership.

  Sherwyn finds the transformation from Edwardian respectability to Art Deco lightness and glitter extreme. The once latticed windows are now an expanse of plate glass, the old heavy mahogany furnishings thrown out, old wallpaper stripped, dusty old velvet curtains replaced by pale Venetian blinds, the old single central hanging light replaced by aluminium standard lamps – sinuous naked caryatids stretching high, bare-nippled breasts raised, embracing globes of diffused light.

  A fortune has been spent on the first floors while the attic floor, where the workers toil away making money for the capitalist class, has been left to rot, as Sherwyn observes. Nevertheless, five o’clock being the time at which Sir Jeremy, a leading member of the Enlightened Publishers’ Reform Committee, makes himself available for one-to-one approach by employees, Sherwyn is wise enough not to show any distaste as he enters the room. He knows the value of politesse. (He is scrupulously polite to his stepmother, the very plain woman who replaced his beautiful mother, still alive and breathing and living with her own mother in San Francisco.) Sherwyn is steady in his determination to quit his job, having cast aside Mungo’s horrific prediction – Vivvie’s proposal is pathetic, laughable and, worse, embarrassing.

  A Happily-Married Man

  Sherwyn finds his employer standing in front of an oval silver-framed cheval mirror and admiring his well-trimmed beard and moustache. Sir Jeremy is somewhat incongruous in his new Art Deco surroundings but oblivious as to how he seems to others, as are so many men of consequence and high self esteem. He is formally dressed in a heavy tweed suit complete with waistcoat over which his prosperous belly strains, sports a full beard, rather wild un-pomaded hair and a Homburg that he seldom removes even when indoors. He looks untidy, as if something was basically awry, as are his thought processes. His tie is not quite in the middle, he has an egg stain on his tie, he hasn’t bothered to button his waistcoat properly, his shoes need a good polish. He looks, and is, in need of a valet, which the times do not allow him to employ. He is in his late fifties and has lived through Edwardian times, when it was rather bad form for a gentleman to look in mirrors, and would leave it to a manservant to improve his appearance before leaving the house. Since then there have simply not been enough servants around to do it. His wife, after more than twenty years of marriage and approaching her forties, automatically wipes him down and brushes him up whenever she sees him, while taking his appearance for granted. She is more concerned with her own. Which Sir Jeremy quite understands, adoring his wife as he does, confident in her respect for his vision and intelligence, as he respects hers, though her views are rather more spiritual and esoteric than his own, being concerned more with the Universal Oneness of all things than the dawn of the proletarian age.

  A Wife Of Many Talents

  Jeremy will adapt his office to the new world on her account, just not the way he dresses. He knows he is lucky to have married a woman both beautiful, intelligent, propertied and rich, considerably younger than himself. Their child Vivien was born when Adela was barely eighteen – and conceived out of wedlock, though no-one now would suspect such a thing. As others observe, his wife’s smallest wish is his command. If legally much of the family wealth comes through the inheritance of their biddable daughter, the parents pay little attention to such detail. Moral right surely triumphs over the law and Courtney and Baum agree. The family lawyers are no longer young and are exhausted by a decade’s worth of correspondence and enquiries into international laws of inheritance, and arguing the validity of the codicil of a will written in Bavaria in 1884 by a disagreeable elderly Princess, disowning her daughter, Elise Hedleigh, and her daughter’s daughter, Adela Ripple née Hedleigh, but returning the Alpine estate to the grand-daughter, Vivvie Ripple, on her twentieth birthday. Their funds, after all, come from managing the estate. If no-one argues, why should they? They are very old and one Ripple signature looks much like another.

  Sherwyn first encountered Lady Adela on the occasion of the office party which celebrated Sir Jeremy’s raising to the knighthood for services to literature. He had to gatecrash, too lowly an employee to be formally invited.

  ‘A fair new look for a fair new society,’ he overheard her Ladyship say to the somewhat sceptical group of publishers gathered for cocktails and canapés at the party. Evidently she, like her husband, believed that communism was to herald in a new Utopia. He did not fancy her: she was not his type, a porcelain, delicate, fastidious blonde – his own taste ran to the rounded, exotic and passionate – but he could see her desirability. That she was Vivvie’s mother astounded him: how could such flimsy loins have given birth to so large and crude an energy? Vivvie had not been there at the party. He could see why. She would hardly have fitted in.

  In The Afternoon, A Month Earlier. Buckingham Palace

  A Sorry Occasion

  See, as I do, Vivvie trying to fit into the little gold chair she is expected to sit on as she watches her father’s investiture. After today he will be not merely Mr Ripple, but Sir Jeremy Ripple. She is prepared to witness his elevation – Buckingham Palace, after all – but not to go to the party afterwards – though her mother tries to persuade her. The little gold chair collapses beneath her; fortunately before the ceremony is to begin – while the great and the good are still lining up, and the King has not yet taken up his sword – and she sits with a great thud upon the parquet floor in a welter of fabric, the Coco Chanel dress her mother insisted she wore and does not suit her at all, childishly girlish, with a striped white and blue grosgrain bodice, stiff but not stiff enough to keep the bulge of her breasts under control, topped with a ridiculous great white satin bow, on top of a very full floaty skirt which makes her look even more enormous than she is. Attendants rush to her side to help her up but have to sort out the skirt to get to her. People stare. Meanwhile her mother, dainty and composed, apologises for the fuss. Another larger more solid chair is brought. Now her knees are a hazard to anyone who tries to walk by.

  The whole ceremony is stupid, her being here is even more stupid. She is out of place. She is always out of place. Why is she so doomed? And why, come to think of it, has she recently signed an enormous cheque for the Savile Row tailors who provided her father’s new suit, and the one for the Coco Chanel silk georgette outfit her mother is wearing? Let alone the grosgrain monstrosity with the bow which her mother claimed made her look ‘charming’. Vivien normally makes do with the Dilberne village dressmaker who is perfectly adequate. Aren’t parents meant to provide for their children, not the other way round?

  Doubts And Realisations

  Doubt assails her just as the sword lifted by King George V falls upon her father’s shoulder and he becomes Sir Jeremy. Does he deserve it? Why? How? The sudden uncomfo
rtable and embarrassing thump upon her coccyx (though that’s a knowledgeable term; ‘behind’ is what Vivvie would have called it; even ‘bottom’ seeming unladylike) seemed to have let loose a whole host of realisations and doubts. They come pouring in. There is so little in this world that you can depend upon. The Lloyd George government had made a great deal of money from the sale of titles, everyone knows.

  Perhaps Daddy has bought his, perhaps she, Vivvie, is the one who paid for it? It’s not as if she’s ever consulted over anything; from the menus at the parties to the constant refurbishment of everything she takes pleasure in as it was to begin with. Come to think of it, she hates Syrie Maugham’s passion for black and white and for mirrors everywhere – wherever you look you have to see yourself – at her father’s publishing house, and now at Dilberne Court. The old bamboo furniture she loved has gone and the family portraits too: it’s just more black and white and mirrors everywhere, not the nice speckled kind old fashioned ones but ones which throw back a hard, glossy and merciless reflection.

  She hates the food Syrie Maugham serves for her mother’s smart parties – bitter oysters Rockefeller and watery scrambled eggs – and most of all she hates the zebra rug (poor slaughtered beast) which now covers the lovely old oak floor of the morning room at Dilberne Court. And she is the one who has signed the cheques for most of it, so far as she can see, though there are more stubs in the cheque book than she can recall having written out… Perhaps her mother forges her signature? She complains often enough that it’s simple and childlike. Which is true – though if she’d been allowed to go to school instead of having a series of inept governesses it might now have character enough. As it is, forgery would be easy. But that way madness lies.