Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  ‘How do you know all this?’ asked Stella.

  ‘Because you have the looks but I have the brain. People look at you and try to please you. They look at me and try to forget me. Everyone thinks you’re nice because you tell lies to save their feelings. People think I’m nasty because I want to know the truth. You know how to get round people but I know how things work.’

  ‘Isn’t there some way we could share?’ asked Stella.

  ‘You mean both of us have one leg a quarter of an inch shorter instead of my having half an inch? Not really. No. Pity. But it’s very nice of you to offer.’

  ‘We can’t be as one, but we could act as one,’ suggested Stella. ‘We could swear an oath.’

  Which is what they did. They took the razor blade from the utility knife that Mallory kept hidden in the wardrobe for emergencies, and cut into the sides of their thumbs and mingled their blood and swore on the collected works of Tennyson (which Mallory considered to contain more wisdom than the Bible) to work together all their lives to find out how they were born, and to whom, and why. Adela would have had a fit, and the fact that they were spoiling the kelim by dripping blood upon it wouldn’t have helped. Mallory’s hand slipped and she cut into the artery on her wrist by mistake. Morna the nanny from Galway was down in the kitchen preparing the twins’ lunch, Adela was in Harrods – having for once left Stella behind, for once – helping Igor Kubanov the equestrian to purchase knee boots, and they were alone in the nursery. Mallory didn’t panic but wrapped a handkerchief tightly round her wrist and held her hand above her head, in the meanwhile continuing to proclaim the oath.

  ‘Let us swear an oath together, Stella and Mallory combined,

  While in Belgrave Square we sisters live and lie reclined…

  Let who conceived us, how conceived us, be the truth we seek to find.’

  Mallory would have worked further on the metre but the circumstances were beginning to seem rather drastic. The kelim rug, a present from Uncle Sherwyn a few years back, was quite soaked. Fortunately the blood stopped flowing of its own accord.

  ‘Fill the nursery bucket with warm water,’ said Mallory, ‘and bring as many towels as you can find.’ Stella ran to do as she was told. Morna would be back very soon. Mallory sloshed the water all over the rug, so lots of the blood ran out onto the parquet floor.

  ‘Put the towels on the floor and tread up and down on them.’ Stella did. Mallory ran with the sopping towels to the window that looked out over the front door and dropped them on to the balcony below. She would retrieve them later. The two bloody handkerchiefs followed.

  ‘Just as well there’s lots of red already in the kelim,’ Mallory said. ‘No-one will notice.’ And nobody did. Stella thought her sister was wonderful. She herself would never have thought and acted so fast. She said as much.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mallory. ‘But you might have charmed Morna into not telling Mama which would have been just as good.’ Mallory was always very fair. They agreed that they made a good team, and by the time Morna came in with lunch (fish in white sauce, potatoes and mashed parsnips, followed by rice pudding with golden syrup – the blander food looked and tasted, the better it was for children) they were sitting up at the table peacefully waiting: Stella, with an air of blonde Madonna-like serenity about her, and Mallory lowering as usual, though she couldn’t help it, it was just the way her brow leaned down towards her jaw.

  They lived quiet nursery lives.

  ‘I worry about them,’ Morna would write to her mother in Galway, ‘but at least they have each other.’

  Mallory would keep a paper screw of white pepper from the downstairs dinner table in her pocket, together with a little bottle of Angostura bitters borrowed from her father’s drinks cabinet (walnut burr, as sold to Lady Adela, though she and Syrie Maugham were to quarrel over the price) to enliven the nursery meals. Mallory would offer some to Stella who would recoil in horror, preferring her food both unadulterated and guilt free. The bottle was kept behind the leg of a chest of drawers.

  Every now and then, often at weekends when Father was away at Dilberne Court with the horses, one or other of the Uncles would appear, say very little, but gaze at the girls with wondering eyes, then leave behind spectacular gifts which the recipients rather tended to despise. The kelim rug got spattered with oil paint as well as drenched in blood. Adela had not wanted it in the nursery in the first place but Sir Jeremy had insisted, saying it was a present to the twins, brought back from Morocco by their favourite author, and the twins should have it.

  ‘I don’t worry about Stella,’ Adela said. ‘I’d trust Stella with anything, even a Lalique vase. But Mallory! Even a simple thing like a rug – she’ll only end up tripping over it and breaking her leg.’

  Sir Jeremy sometimes wondered if something couldn’t be done about Mallory’s limp, but Adela said no. It did the girl no harm, was not painful and wasn’t likely to ward off suitors. ‘She’ll have to learn to be a lot more pleasant if she’s ever to find one of those!’

  Sir Jeremy said: ‘You used to say the same thing about her big sister, as I remember, and poor Vivvie did very well in the end. Got Sherwyn Sexton, of all people!’

  Adela was well into The Change by now – though no-one would have known it what with the cucumber slices, the monkey gland masks, the ice treatments and her pretty little daughter Stella trotting along by her side – and found she sometimes couldn’t concentrate properly. When Sir Jeremy did something like referring to poor Vivvie as the twins’ big sister, she could get confused and have to change the subject quickly. One way and another Vivvie seldom got mentioned in the twins’ hearing. Once they’d had a sister much older than them but she’d passed away.

  Though once they’d been lunching with their parents, learning table manners (Morna wasn’t very good at it, apparently) when Vivvie’s name came up. Greystokes, long dead, had sired a horse which had won the Oaks. A winner for him at last!

  ‘Your sister would have been so pleased,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘If only she had lived to see it. But she died in childbirth.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’ the twins asked.

  ‘A dear little boy,’ Adela said quickly.

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Sir Jeremy. ‘What a pity!’ He wasn’t much interested in children: women’s world.

  ‘Such a painful time for me,’ put in Adela, ‘losing poor Vivvie like that. And I was so pregnant myself, and abroad at the time, and so upset. I’m sure the shock didn’t help.’

  By which presumably she meant Mallory’s limp. All their big sister’s fault. After that Mallory recorded every mention of Vivvie in a little diary especially kept for that purpose. She kept it under a carpet in the splendid dolls’ house given to them by Uncle Mungo.

  ‘Is he a real Uncle?’ Stella asked Morna the nanny, their surrogate mother.

  ‘Ask your mother. She’s the one to know,’ Morna replied: an unsatisfactory answer which Mallory carefully recorded in the doll’s house diary.

  Morna kept out of Lady Adela’s way, and Lady Adela kept out of hers. Both knew upon which side their bread was buttered. Morna had a good room in the nursery wing at the back of the house, and could ask her boyfriend in – he was in the Horse Guards – whenever he was off duty. Which was more than she could do in Galway, where it was marriage or nothing. She ate well, albeit by herself, and slept in a warm bed, had Saturday night off and seldom had to venture into the rest of the house. She was fond of the children – Stella was a sweetheart, though Mallory could be difficult – and Morna wanted nothing to change.

  But Morna did like to disapprove: indeed, it was one of her main pleasures in life. The twins rarely saw their father, who got home late every night and was off at weekends to see to his horses down in the country. The mother gadded about and spent money, yet worried about the cost of heating the nursery. The Ripples entertained every Wednesday – writers, publishers, politicians – though at least she got caterers in to see to it all. And the people who visited the house! Fi
rebrands, revolutionaries, socialites, beauticians, masseurs, the endless stream of painters, decorators, interior designers – Syrie Maugham and her crew. And then of course the Uncles: Morna, ever suspicious, looked for resemblances to them in the twins, but saw none. Stella was obviously her mother’s but fortunately taller, more solid and with more colour in her cheeks – but Mallory was a child out of the blue, a changeling, an elf child, belonging to neither alleged parent, let alone one of the Uncles. All Mallory wanted to do was read and write and play patience while she waited to grow up, so Morna let her just get on with it.

  There were other Uncles too over the years who came and went – wasn’t Adela too old for this kind of carry-on? – but Sherwyn and Mungo were the only ones who’d drop by, leave presents, stare at the twins, say very little and go away. Always separately and often on a Saturday, Morna’s night out. Well, how Lady Adela chose to live was her business, so long as she didn’t mind going to hell, not Morna’s, and if Sir Jeremy wanted to look the other way that was his business.

  But little Stella had to be forever dressed up to be taken out by her mother to some charity do or other, or some smart restaurant lunch, or only to Bond Street for beauty treatments – Adela said a girl was never too young: but eight? – or to Harrods to be bought some pretty new frock or other. As a result Stella spent most of what spare time she had admiring herself in mirrors, whereas Mallory made herself so difficult on outings that Adela preferred just to leave her at home. When she was three she’d have tantrums and her mother would come back with her ankles black and blue. Which suited everyone.

  If all was not perfect inside the house it was certainly better than outside. Wall Street had crashed, the pound had devalued, unemployment was double what it was when the twins were born, hunger stalked the land, though you could never tell such a thing within Harrods where Adela did the shopping. You could buy anything from an elephant in the Pet Shop to caviar and yak butter in the Food Hall. But sales of Workers Arise slumped. The workers had arisen in the General Strike and much good did it do them.

  Sir Jeremy tried to woo A.J. Cronin, he of Hatter’s Castle, onto his fiction list but failed. Readers went on preferring to buy books about middle-class detectives rather than suffering workers, though Zola did all right in France. Understandably, perhaps. France was a republic; England limped along behind as a regressive monarchy. For some reason Mallory’s limp seemed to Sir Jeremy to act as a metaphor for the whole nation – limping along when it could be struggling upwards into the new Marxist-Leninist dawn. He didn’t seem able to forget poor Vivvie falling off her chair at his investiture ceremony. It had seemed at the time some kind of omen. A better man than he would have been true to his principles, refused the knighthood, not consented to kneel before the monarch. He’d felt obscurely to blame for what had happened next.

  And he should never have let Adela go off on her own to have the twins in Austria where the doctors were known to have such odd ideas. As it was Adela hadn’t been able to save Vivvie – all that had happened was that he had lost a grandson and was landed with two daughters in his old age – one of them with a limp as a result of the shock to their mother of Vivvie’s death. He hadn’t been paying proper attention – he’d been fairly taken up with Phoebe at the time: a lamentable episode of which he was not proud. But probably the older a man got the more there was with which to reproach himself. There was no escape. And it pleased Adela to have a title. Fortunately money was not such a trouble to her these days. Rosina’s will had left her well provided for – some compensation for the unfairness of her grandmother’s will, which had so exercised her in her younger days.

  He was so lucky in Adela. Other men had a far worse time; they had wives who looked old, felt old, talked and behaved old. Adela seemed to be perpetually beautiful, youthful, gracious, kind and capable – above all capable. Other women talked about the servant problem all the time – Adela just got on with it. She could not bear too many servants about the house. She said Morna was bad enough but at least she kept herself to herself, did what she was told and took proper care of the children. But other live-in staff? No. They gossiped, they broke things, they stole things, they were never properly trained, they took time off for funerals – especially if they were Irish as they so often were these days, and came from large families. As she told Sir Jeremy she’d rather make do with a couple of dailies and a laundress, and bring caterers in for dinner parties or anything special. The rest she’d do herself. She could peel a carrot or wipe a basin as well as the rest of them.

  Sir Jeremy could almost believe his wife was a proletarian at heart. Rumours were coming through from the British Embassy there of ‘a famine’ in Russia but it didn’t seem possible with Stalin in charge. People were so ready to believe bad news coming out of the USSR, so reluctant to believe the good. Most likely just the kulaks at it again, sabotaging the Great Idea, spitting in the wind against the mighty onrush of historic necessity.

  February 15th 1937

  The twins were thirteen, rising fourteen. Sherwyn took Rita out to lunch at the Georgian restaurant in Harrods. It was not a place the literati frequented, and Rita had insisted on it. Rita’s reason, he found, was that ‘Sybil would never go there’. Sybil was E.L.T. Mesens’ wife, and worked as a buyer for Dickins & Jones, the department store, and was much feared in artistic circles. Sherwyn found this amusing. E.L.T. was a surrealist painter who ran the London Gallery, and with whom Rita was having an affair under the nose of C.R.W. Nevinson.

  ‘Too many initials for comfort, Rita.’

  ‘Yes but I love him.’ E.L.T., C.R.W., what difference did it make to her? ‘But I love him!’ was Rita’s perpetual cry, and it had done her quite well. She was beginning to make quite a name for herself as a painter, being a source of both scandal and erotic delight for the truly talented, who did what they could to foster what little talent she had. Sherwyn even had a painting by Rita over the mantelpiece of his Orme Square house, where he lived with his wife Marjorie McShannon, the American actress who had starred in the film of Black Eyes, adapted from the novel The Eye of the Lamb by Sherwyn Sexton. Zukor at Paramount had put the kibosh on the original title; dark eyes now referred to Marjorie’s fabulous eyes, and Delgano ended up as a Chicago gangster – but that was the way the film industry was – you took the money and ran; and Sherwyn ran, taking Marjorie McShannon, that pocket Venus, with him. The film had made good money for a while, though the gangster seam had eventually run out and in the next novel Delgano had to be seized by remorse and return to Europe and haute cuisine.

  The Marjorie marriage, as Sherwyn now thought of it, three years in, was not going too well. Rita for example would go to bed with a fellow at the drop of a hat, but for Marjorie it had to be a specially trumpeted occasion, for which you almost had to make an appointment, and certainly shower, shave, bring flowers, woo and pursue: he’d be so infuriated at the end of it that actual sexual performance became difficult. He was sure Marjorie discussed his prowess or lack of it with her girlfriends: if she gossiped about her previous film star husbands – blow by blow, to the delight of the yellow press – why not about Sherwyn the bestselling writer?

  Sometimes he longed for those few blissful months when he and Vivvie had lain side by side like spoons in the Barscherau cupboard that served for a bed, plum and plum stone, bodies at one but no sex. Life was simple without sex. On the other hand Rita was looking particularly lovely. In her late thirties, perhaps by now, but her eyes still alive and her mouth still generous and as ready to laugh as those fond eyes were ready to weep.

  Harrods had whitebait on the menu – he’d checked before he booked. It was February when all the little small fry which swam in great shoals up and down the river estuaries of England could be harvested before they grew into vulgar, bony herrings. It was an annual ritual for Sherwyn: he always thought that first whitebait story had brought him luck. It was the kind of thing Rita understood, and Vivvie would have too, and which Marjorie most certainly
would not. It had been a story written at the worst of times, before his genius was recognised, when he was poor as Knut Hamsun was when he wrote Hunger, when his shoes let water and he could not pay his restaurant bills or his gambling debts. But now was surely the best of times. With one fell swoop he had switched his destiny, married Vivvie and so set the wheels in motion; all the cogs fell into place and the fame and fortune he deserved were his. And here he was, living with a film star and lunching with his mistress, who was sobbing into her sardines on toast – chosen to keep him company in his whitebait: she refused it herself: ‘All those little eyes looking at you! At least they cut the heads off sardines before expecting you to eat them!’ – and wondering what Rita would say if he asked to take her back to her studio in a taxi. He thought the current studio was in Fulham – not too far from Harrods. Sherwyn wondered if she still had the purple crushed velvet sofa she used to say she kept in memory of him. He was due at a film première at seven o’clock with Marjorie. There would be just about time if they didn’t take too long over lunch.

  ‘You don’t really love E.L.T. Mesens,’ said Sherwyn, ‘let alone C.R.W. Nevinson. You just want a little excitement when disturbed in flagrante by Sybil and there’s some terrible row.’

  ‘You don’t know Sybil Mesens,’ said Rita darkly. ‘She’d just want to join in with Mesens. and me. Then she’d tell Nevinson all about it and he’ll be so upset. He’s very neurotic at the moment. He’s soon going to be fifty and thinks no-one takes him seriously any more. He had his heyday as a war artist and landscapes just aren’t as exciting. Yet he will insist on painting them.’