Before the War

by Fay Weldon

  Looking back, Adela’s determination to pass off the girls as her own did seem something of a madness, but it had happened and she had carried it off. Sir Jeremy never seemed to doubt that the girls were his and had been proud of this last evidence of his manliness, fathering children at his late age. And Stella had always been such a pleasure to show off. And even Mallory, the ugly little brain box, could at least make people laugh.

  At around ten Harrods’ green van came round to deliver her special birthday dinner in its cold box. Oysters, blinis with caviar, soured cream and chopped egg, fillet steak and vegetables prepared for cooking – Igor wouldn’t mind helping with the cooking: there would be just the two of them and a little domesticity would be fun – followed by trifle. The image of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan rather appealed to her, and she saw herself as a miniature version of Maureen O’Sullivan: he was so big and she was so small...

  Adela put the oysters aside and decided she would serve them for lunch after the piano lesson; oysters and caviar was perhaps overdoing it for dinner. She had been having this on-and-off affair with Igor since the handsome young White Russian refugee out of royal St Petersburg had been employed by Sir Jeremy down at the Dilberne stud.

  That was before Sir Jeremy discovered communism and was merely on the side of refugees everywhere. Igor was now an Olympic gold medallist, winning the equestrian event in Berlin in 1936, and now show-jumped in events all over the world, but always visited when passing through London. He was a fine-looking man, tall and slim-hipped, olive-skinned but with a shock of blonde hair, now rather thinning and fading but whose didn’t – though compared to young Carlo with his broad shoulders he did seem a little, well, flimsy. But one never knew about the parts men protected and hid so assiduously: tall and slim-hipped translated in Igor’s case into agreeably long and enquiring: in Carlo’s, who was to say what broad shoulders implied? It might turn out to be short and stubby?

  Well, she could only find out. She had always been plagued by a really terrible curiosity. She got on perfectly well with Mallory, able to ignore the girl’s deformities, but found Stella less interesting, a perfect mannequin but hopelessly innocent. Yes, Carlo for lunch, Igor for dinner. The twins would be safely in the nursery wing. Sound did not carry. First the oysters, then the caviar. One wasn’t going to get away with it for ever, but who cared? She shivered in anticipation.

  Adela was in this pleasant mood of self analysis and expectation mixed when the twins came into the morning room to wish her a happy birthday and bring her a birthday gift. Good Lord, Stella had grown so tall. She positively towered over Adela. She was going to be as tall as Vivvie, only at least slim and elegant, with these long, long, perfect legs. Mallory just stayed short and squat. How old were the girls? Fifteen, sixteen?

  The parcel had been beautifully wrapped in pink crepe paper and pale blue ribbon. She suspected this was Stella’s doing. Stella favoured pastels, Mallory strong colours – lots of black and red – she herself stuck to whites, greys, fawns. It looked like a book. It was. Sherwyn Sexton’s latest novel – Delgano’s Archipelago. (11/8, Sherwyn would say. He had worried about the proportion a lot but gone with it in the end. It sounded right.)

  ‘I know you love him, Mama! He’s such a good writer, isn’t he’ That was Stella.

  ‘I wouldn’t go as far as to say that,’ put in Mallory. ‘But we thought you might enjoy it.’

  ‘Is he our father, Mama? Do tell!’ said Stella.

  ‘What an extraordinary question, girls!’ Adela laughed merrily. ‘What on earth are you talking about? Your father is Sir Jeremy Ripple.’

  ‘Why can no-one ever call him just Jeremy Ripple?’ asked Stella. ‘Why does he always have to be Sir Jeremy?’

  ‘Your father is a very impressive and important man,’ said Adela, though she had sometimes wondered herself. Remarkable how that investiture occasion seemed to have threaded through all the years, since Vivvie had fallen off her chair and embarrassed everyone so much. ‘You are lucky to have him as such a father, a man knighted by the King himself.’

  ‘And we know you’re not our mother,’ said Mallory, ‘we worked that out years back.’

  ‘This is complete madness,’ said Adela. ‘I shall get very angry with you in a minute.’

  ‘Like any man rightfully accused of infidelity,’ said Stella, and she no longer looked straight at Adela, but down at her feet, ‘anger will be the first reaction of any woman accused of having stolen some other woman’s children.’

  Stella is no longer any use to me, thought Adela. Anyone who sees me with her will believe that if I’m old enough to have given birth to this tall towering creature I must be well past my prime. I suppose it had to come. I earned some fifteen years of youth by starting afresh with Vivvie’s children, but now I’m back to where I was. Well. So be it. But how am I going to work it so these children don’t tell Sir Jeremy? He’ll be none too pleased to find out he’s been fathering children who are none of his own. But perhaps he won’t worry too much, what with Germany about to invade Austria. He’s been so angry about the mood of appeasement that has struck the country he’s been hardly able to concentrate even on Mayfair Lights’ chances of winning the Grand National. She herself thought the Austrians were the same as the Germans anyway, apart from a few details like what they ate for breakfast and what kind of bed they slept in, so what was all the fuss about? She told the girls she wouldn’t listen to another word of this pernicious nonsense and set them to opening oysters. She would show them life was not so easy as they thought.

  But she couldn’t help asking them what made them think she was not their mother, as they struggled and groaned and risked hands and eyes with slipping and breaking table knives. Adela did not lead them to the drawer where the oyster openers were kept.

  Mallory said that when they were eight they had made an oath but it had taken them many years to realise all they had to do was ask. She quoted it.

  ‘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.’

  Adela complained that it was hardly up to Tennyson’s standard, and Stella said she’d realised that at the time, but they’d been only eight.

  ‘After all this money spent on your education!’ Adela said. ‘Me not your mother! Who, then? I was here at dinner the other Wednesday sitting next to your father’s hero, Herr “Bert” Brecht from Germany, whose play Fear and Misery of the Third Reich your father means to translate –’

  ‘Get translated,’ put in Mallory, the pedant.

  ‘– and he said to me that a child belongs to the person who looks after it not the person who gives birth to it. He was talking about the nation and the German worker, no doubt, but there was a lot of truth in what he said. Have I not looked after you, reared you, at considerable expense to myself?’

  They considered this.

  ‘Very well,’ said Mallory, charitably, ‘we accept you as our mother,’ and Adela breathed a sigh of relief. This at least simplified matters. ‘But who is our father? Sir Jeremy is simply no use. Horses! Uncle Mungo or Uncle Sherwyn? Both behave as if they were, bringing us presents and asking about our education and our boyfriends. We don’t have those, we are too young but they don’t seem to comprehend that.’

  Who indeed, thought Adela. When she’d told Sir Jeremy back in 1923 that she was pregnant, it had not been a lie. But by whom she could not tell. It could indeed have been Sir Jeremy, it could have been Mungo. It could have been Sherwyn’s, all on that one occasion, the investiture party, when people drank far too much because of Syrie’s inedible nibbles. Syrie should have stuck to interiors, not branched out into food. She’d been with Sir Jeremy the night before: his knighthood had made him very eager; Mungo a very quick celebratory get-together when she’d been dressing at home before the party and Sir Jeremy was already boringly at a meeting; and then Sherwyn
at the end of the party though he was so drunk he might not have even remembered and certainly showed no sign of doing so thereafter – but that speech of his, what was it? – Oh delicate damsel, I swoon, I swoon, had been so unexpected and he the gatecrasher, the interloper, the romantic knight in shining armour, she’d thrown caution away. She must have drunk far too much herself.

  And then she’d miscarried the day after Vivvie’s wedding: the strain of the event had been too much: Vivvie pregnant, and by Sherwyn! She didn’t tell Sir Jeremy, it would have been too, too shaming. Everyone would have laughed and said of course she was too old to carry a baby. And of course she wanted Vivvie’s, she had lost her own. It was very strange, being a woman and propelled by instincts she knew nothing about herself. Sometimes she wondered if it could be the effects of emminin, the pill she’d been taking since Vivvie’s birth to control her migraines. It worked for the migraines, and had been prescribed by a Harley Street physician, and was derived from the late pregnancy urine of Canadian women and contained the ovary-stimulating hormones of the placenta which didn’t sound very nice – but anything to stop the crucifying headaches. If she stopped taking it they came back. But what else might they not do?

  Sherwyn had once accused her of nymphomania which she had strenuously denied. She was no kind of whore, she was not sex-mad. It was no kind of compulsion which made her both so attractive and so attracted by men. She just enjoyed sex and men sensed it. Other women could be happy with one man in their entire lives. But times were changing. There was hope for even Mallory yet. Intelligent women were not the source of horror that once they had been, pitied for being brainy because they were destined to be neurotic and unhappy because having babies would never be enough for them. She found herself fond of Mallory as she had never managed to be with Vivvie.

  Sometimes she felt bad about Vivvie. She had gone into the room in Barscherau in the middle of the night and found Vivvie passed out in all this blood and just shut the door and gone away and called no-one. Sherwyn had to have time to get back to his room and he couldn’t have done that with the whole house in uproar. And there was nothing anyone could have done anyway. Vivvie had been delivered safely. Now she had a postpartum haemorrhage. Blood everywhere. One of those know-it-all peasant women had not checked that both placentas were out. The twins had not shared a placenta. Anyone could have noticed even then that they were not identical. These days Dr Walker might have had Ergometrine in his little brown emergency bag but not back then, in 1923. She had to claim the babies as her own. There was no way out. Sherwyn could never have coped with them. He was far too selfish.

  She had cut both men, Mungo and Sherwyn, out of her life. It seemed that the best she could do for the twins was to attribute them both to Sir Jeremy and herself. As Vivvie’s young sisters they would inherit, and she, Adela, would manage their estates until they reached their majority.

  ‘I’ve done the best I could,’ she said to the girls, ‘in the light of my own nature. What else can any of us do? As to your Uncles, for them to be real uncles your mother and father would have to have siblings, and we have not.’

  ‘We’re not idiots,’ Stella said. ‘We worked that out.’

  ‘Last time I was down at Dilberne,’ said Mallory, ‘I asked the old women in the village shop whose sister made our sister’s wedding dress, and they said yes, Miss Ripple was pregnant when she was married.’

  ‘Servants’ gossip,’ said Adela. ‘A long time ago. And they’re not very bright. How would they remember?’

  ‘You gave them a glass and silver bowl with old potato salad in it,’ said Mallory, ‘and they assumed it was a bribe to keep quiet about it. How could they not remember? She still has it in her cabinet: she washes it out once a month and polishes the silver because the cottage is damp and it’s prone to tarnish.’

  ‘They have it wrong,’ said Adela. ‘I was the one who was pregnant.’ Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive, Adela thought. She was going to be exhausted before this day was out. ‘I didn’t want that getting about. I’d just found out that your sister Vivvie was pregnant: it was a dreadful shock. She was engaged to your Uncle Sherwyn. I didn’t want that getting about either.’ She explained that brides in those days were meant to be virgins and went into hiding if it became evident that they were not. There was all kinds of skulduggery over dates and premature births and so on. Sherwyn and Vivvie went into hiding in Bavaria, so he could finish his novel in peace.

  ‘They must have loved each other very much.’

  ‘They did. And then poor Vivvie died giving birth and her little boy too. Puerperal fever.’

  ‘Did they name the baby?’

  ‘Of course. Arthur. After my cousin Arthur. He was an Earl, you know, and was brought up in this very house.’

  ‘So you keep telling us.’ That was Stella the beautiful. She could be very catty.

  ‘And it was a month or two before I could bring you two back to your father. Death can keep one very busy, especially when it’s in a foreign country. Your Uncle Sherwyn was too upset to be much help. If your Uncle Sherwyn turns up with gifts it’s because he still feels guilty.’

  It didn’t sound totally plausible but she thought they had accepted it, and then the front door bell rang and it was Carlo the music teacher with the Tarzan shoulders. and just as well because now how was she going to explain Mungo? People were such a bother. The girls for asking questions. Sherwyn and Mungo for not fading away when required.

  Mallory had her lesson first. Adela could hear from the kitchen. It sounded both delightful and determined. Mallory was a dab hand at Rachmaninoff. When Stella had hers she struggled through an early Mozart sonata which sounded pretty enough. She also sang a little Handel, and Adela felt very proud. One way and another the twins could only bring her credit. She laid the table for two and cut bread as thinly as she could. When the lesson was finished the twins would go back to the nursery wing where Morna would have prepared steamed plaice, cauliflower cheese and parsnips as ever.

  The lesson seemed to be going on rather a long time and Adela could hear the sound of girlish giggling. She went into the library and found Stella on the piano seat gazing up at the music teacher with loving eyes, trying to sing Handel, Did You Not See My Lady, Go down the Garden Singing, while Tarzan the music teacher had his hand down her chest and was rubbing her nipples. Stella was now giggling so much her voice quavered and faded into breathlessness. Both seemed to be enjoying the experience very much. Adela threw Tarzan out of the house.

  Adela felt old, jealous and helpless, taken advantage of, humiliated. Carlo only wooed her the better to woo Stella. Something she had not foreseen; the daughter must always be more fanciable than the mother. As the daughter grows up, the mother grows old. Stella was sent weeping back to her steamed plaice and parsnips and Adela scraped the oysters into the sink.

  Then she called Courtney and Baum and found some ancient, boring person there, who turned out to be the original Mr Baum himself, and told him to arrange for the twins to be sent off to the best finishing school in France. He said he could recommend one in Lausanne in Switzerland where his grand-daughters went, but had brought them home because of the international situation and he feared the lights were going to go out all over Europe. Adela said what nonsense, nothing was going to happen. Hitler wouldn’t dare: people must not be intimidated but go about their business as usual. Otherwise he had won. If Mr Baum was Jewish he might be well advised to bring his family home, but these were good English, Christian girls, and would be perfectly safe.

  She instructed him to arrange their passage to the Académie St. Augustine, a finishing school which royalty attended, and to do it forthwith. Then she went to the nursery and gave Morna her notice to quit. The girls were grown up now and her services were not needed. Morna threw a dish of cauliflower cheese against the wall and it dripped down onto the kelim rug. The children wept profusely. Morna packed but stood at the door saying she would be back for her w
ages. Adela said she would deduct the cost of cleaning the rug and doubted there would be anything left to pay. Morna said the rug was nothing but an old rag, Mr Sherwyn was a mean bastard, but went back into her room and slammed the door. It was the girls who packed, saying they couldn’t wait to be finished and get out of this madhouse. Adela locked the door between the nursery wing and the main house, went up to her bedroom, took another emminin in case the migraine returned, and fell asleep.

  Saturday Evening, March 11th 1938

  But the day was not yet over. Igor let himself in at around six o’clock, as was his custom through the side door of the mews entrance at the back of the house, and up the unused side staircase which Inspector Strachan had insisted on being built when Robert, Earl of Dilberne was Minister of Trade and in danger from Irish terrorists and might need a quick getaway. Adela had always felt that perhaps Isobel, his wife, was more in danger from Inspector Strachan.

  Igor took off his riding boots – he was seldom without them – with some difficulty, and joined Adela in the bed. It seemed to him the least he could do. He did not like to see women upset. Some complained that she was not as young as she used to be, but he was not as disturbed by age as so many of her compatriots seemed to be. So far as he was concerned many a good tune was played on an old fiddle. When she felt better they went down to the kitchen for supper.

  Adela explained how badly the girls were behaving, how important it was to send them abroad to finishing school to learn how to become ladies and at least learn some discrimination. The music teacher! A scurrilous lout, louche as a rat, and poor little Stella bewitched. Adela had never been so angry.

  ‘A mother in defence of her brood,’ he sympathised. The caviar was excellent. It reminded him of home, long ago. He had left St Petersburg as a lad in 1917, a White Russian émigré from Soviet persecution, found work in riding stables, excelled in equestrian circles, been accepted into society – ‘a Cossack, don’t yah know!’ – and indeed, being so charming and presentable, into many high-born beds. He’d been a gold medallist in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, after which nothing was too good for him.