Before the War (21 page)

She loved both twins equally but Mallory rather more so because she alone had a squashed-up face, and a vague look of the Angel Gabriel – had he perhaps been a stable hand? It had been hard to remember detail when everyone was so keen for her to do so, but now the babies were real and no longer a dream it might be possible. She would tell Sherwyn. Stella looked more like Adela, which bothered Vivvie a little. One didn’t want a child who would grow up to tell you what to do all the time.

That night all ate in the kitchen, since Vivvie was lying-up in the front room. Adela looked out of place, still wearing her mink and complaining of the cold though the night was warm, almost hot, and the stars shining so brightly and beautifully in a clear sky.

Sherwyn was looking rather ravishingly handsome, if not so tall as many, or so thought Berthe, Frau Auerbach’s daughter, who was eighteen and lived next door, but it was not her place to say so. Berthe had a year old child of her own, but since the carry-on the day before had been acting as wet nurse until Frau Sexton’s milk came in – twins, after all; and the mother might not have enough, one of them being so difficult and greedy. Berthe’s mother had rashly named that little later one Mallory, which was unlucky, meaning ‘unfortunate’. At least she, Berthe, had been named ‘bright’ by the one who brought her into the world. Sherwyn had taken off the glorious leather coat she so admired from her upstairs window as Sherwyn came and went, but was wearing a smart white shirt and a red spotted cravat, dashingly knotted. Berthe thought perhaps Vivvie’s mother, Lady Adela, as she insisted on being called, was after Sherwyn from the way she looked at him, but she couldn’t be; she was an old woman in spite of all her jars of this and pots of that and the silk knickers. Berthe had had to help her unpack, even though one of the babies was crying. Berthe thought that if Frau Sexton meant what she said, and would take her with her back to London, she would probably go. She would send money back. Her mother had been as far as Munich but she herself had hardly gone to the end of the road.

She kept having to slap down the English doctor who was making stupid attempts to nibble her ear – disgusting, horrible old man who didn’t even notice his glasses were broken, not to mention dirty. He’d been the one who’d attended her big sister Trudy (meaning ‘strength’, chosen by Frau Bieler, who brought her into the world) and given her the twilight sleep after which she was never quite the same again. Berthe was surprised he had the nerve to show his face in Barscherau again. And everyone knew about poor little Maria who’d had to marry the English doctor, and then had two more in a single year, and a twilight sleep with all three – not that she’d ever been up to much anyway. What could one expect? Did not ‘Maria’ mean ‘sea of sorrow’?

For supper the guests had Wiener Schnitzel and Tiroler Gröstl followed by strawberry strudel and whipped cream: the rest round the table made do with Käsespätzle and apfelstrudel. Adela scraped the lovely crust of the Schnitzel before picking at it and sawing away with her knife as if it were tough but it was not. Like all Frau Bieler’s cooking it was excellent. She caught Herr Sherwyn looking at Adela as if he didn’t like her one bit.

‘Twins, eh? I think they’ll come back to London with Vivvie and me. We’ll stay at the Albany for a bit, though I’m not sure babies are quite their thing.’

‘Indeed they are not,’ said Adela. ‘It is out of the question. You have no idea at all about babies, and your wife even less.’

‘We’ll take Berthe back with us,’ said Sherwyn. ‘She has all the wisdom of the untutored peasant.’

‘She’s an ignorant, impertinent chit of a girl,’ said Adela, throwing down her fork so that the cream made grease marks all over the table. ‘And just look how she’s making up to the unfortunate Dr Walker. The girl’s uncouth.’ It was fortunate that Berthe’s schoolgirl English was not good enough to understand fully what was going on, though since she was considered clever she was allowed to study at the boy’s gymnasium in Kufstein.

‘My wife, my children,’ said Sherwyn.

‘That’s what you say,’ said Lady Adela, in a harsh and ugly tone of voice which made everyone at the table uneasy. Dr Walker took off his spectacles, wiped them with his napkin and put them back on by their one remaining arm. Now it seemed to Berthe he could see through them, or more or less.

‘Ah. I thought you were the grandfather,’ said Dr Walker. ‘But I see you’re too young. You’re the father.’

Then Adela’s face, which had gone quite crimson, faded quickly back to its normal pallor, and she smiled sweetly round the table at everyone and turned to Sherwyn and said:

‘We could split the difference. You take one, I take one.’

‘I know which one you’d take,’ said Sherwyn. ‘No. Or only if I have first pick.’

‘That wouldn’t work,’ said Adela, ‘I’d be back where I began.’

‘Exactly,’ said Sherwyn. ‘Face it. Go back to Sir Jeremy and grow old.’

Which Berthe thought was rather cruel, even to someone as nasty and skinny as Adela. Sometimes when she looked at Sherwyn he seemed much taller than at others, and more broad shouldered. But they ate by candlelight not lamplight because of the presence of guests, and in the flickers sight could be deceptive. Or perhaps Berthe saw what she wanted to see. Mind you, she really liked Frau Sexton even though she was peculiar, and Berthe wouldn’t want to do anything that might upset her. One of the babies started to cry in the next room and she had to leave the table. Dr Walker tried to follow her but Frau Bieler, who noticed everything, called him back and forestalled him.

Berthe drowsed by Vivvie’s bed into the small hours. It would have been more sensible just to go to bed – one had been made up for her in the attic – but she was too tired. She’d fed baby Mallory at around eleven o’clock. Mallory had been born with a single front tooth showing and though the baby fed well, with strong and powerful gums, the tooth could dig in and tear. Not that it was the baby’s fault. When finally Mallory settled, baby Stella woke and was put to the breast. She sucked steadily and sufficiently, then smiled – though they’d say that was wind – had her back patted and went back to sleep. The mother slept the while, propped up in bed, occasionally stirring or spluttering or doing what people did when they slept. It must have been after midnight when the lamps were extinguished in the kitchen and she heard the cat being turned out. After that the household slept.

An hour or so later she was disturbed by Vivvie’s moaning and heaving, though she still seemed asleep. Berthe thought she’d better check and, pulling back the quilt, found blood oozing out freely from beneath its padding. She thought perhaps she should get help. The doctor was the obvious choice, but she had no intention of knocking on his door in the middle of the night. She didn’t want to disturb Frau Bieler who had worked so hard and cooked so well; Herr Sexton was not the kind to involve himself in female matters. Frau Ripple was the next choice: why should she sleep soundly when others did not?

Berthe found her way upstairs by flashlight to the room where she knew Lady Adela slept and tapped on the door. There was no reply so she opened the door and shone the torch into the bed recess. There were two heaps in it. One was Lady Adela and the other, so far as she could make out, was Herr Sexton. The room smelt strongly of brandy. Berthe retired to the staircase, recovered from the shock and then banged and battered upon the door. Lady Adela eventually appeared, wearing her mink but nothing else.

‘Your daughter is bleeding to death,’ said Berthe. ‘You need to go.’

‘Everyone bleeds after childbirth,’ said Adela.

‘Not as much as this,’ said Berthe.

‘Go to your room, girl,’ said Lady Adela. ‘I’ll see to it. I’ll call the doctor if I think she needs it.’

So Berthe Auerbach climbed to the top of the stairs and fell into bed and slept and woke to the sound of babies crying, her own mother shaking her, and pandemonium in the house downstairs. The dogs were barking, the babies were crying. Lady Adela was staring into space. The doctor was on the phone to the medical examiner in Kufstein. Frau Bieler and Greta were washing out piles of bloodstained quilts. Herr Bieler was in the front room, mopping up blood from the floor where Vivvie’s truckle bed had been – the legs of Mallory’s cot were inches deep in it: Stella’s were spared: the wooden floor must slope quite badly. Herr Sexton was moaning and dashing away tears over a lifeless Vivvie laid out on the kitchen table, big white marble limbs naked under a cloth, but eyes closed and at peace, which was more than her husband was.

‘For God’s sake someone shut up those babies,’ he shouted, being at the end of his tether, though it only set the dogs off again. Frau Auerbach from next door had had the sense to fetch Berthe down and she now put one baby to each breast and the twins fell silent as they sucked, and at least everyone could think.

But it was a gruelling and horrid scene, not easily forgotten by anyone involved. Vivvie had died from a postpartum haemorrhage while she slept. Dr Walker accused Frau Auerbach of not having checked that both afterbirths had been delivered, and she accused him of having sent her eldest daughter mad with his twilight sleep and shouting ensued. Berthe marvelled that one body could produce so much blood, pigs were bad enough but at least you could eat them afterwards. She hated thinking about her poor sister. Dr Walker denied having been called for.

‘Even if I had been, there would have been nothing I could do.’

He was probably right. Ergometrine as a drug for childbirth was not synthesised until 1935, after which a swift dose of it would have cleared away the retained placenta and Vivvie would not have bled to death. But this was ‘before which’ not ‘after which’, and ‘before’ has a multitude of risks, though thank God they diminish with the passage of the years. But Dr Walker could perhaps have done something to remove the clot with a suction pump – he had any amount of surgical equipment in the boot of the Bentley – or just lifted her legs, plunged in his arm and removed it by hand. It might have worked. It might not have.

‘You should have gone to look and fetched me,’ he said. ‘She was your daughter.’

Frau Ripple wept a few dainty tears and said she had gone to look but the girl had been exaggerating, only a few drops of blood and she had no medical training so she’d gone back to bed. In the morning she’d heard one of the babies crying and had gone to see what she could do, the girl being nowhere to be seen, and found poor Vivvie dead in a pool of blood. Her own daughter. Imagine the shock.

The medical examiner came and forms were filled in. The English doctor was able to get a lift back to Kufstein in the examiner’s pony and trap. The body went with them. Everyone fell silent – even Frau Auerbach; who now the doctor was gone seemed able to stop weeping. Herr Sherwyn went to his room and typed. Milady went to her room and revarnished her nails. Greta took in the washing – it had already dried, being a hot, windy day – and folded everything away. Berthe suckled the twins. Frau Bieler was able to make everyone a nourishing goulash soup with beef and paprika and dollops of sour cream. Most ate without speaking. There seemed little to say.

But that night there were tears and angry sounds all over the house. In the morning an ashen and angry Herr Sexton left in the Bentley for London without taking either of the babies. Two days later Adela departed for Keifersfelden, taking both of them with her. She dropped them off at Dr Walker’s house. Thus they spent the first three months of their life with Maria, she of the vale of tears, who was still nursing her youngest. Adela herself stayed quietly at the Gasthof until the end of September, when she hired a nanny and a nursemaid in Munich, and departed with the babies for London.

Vivvie was buried in Barscherau in the grounds of the old abbey, where the Black Virgin reigns. The whole village climbed up the mountain to be with her, and to strew flowers on her coffin to mark her passing – small neat bouquets, which the undertaker provided. Courtney and Baum dealt with the funeral expenses, and sent an expensive wreath all the way from Munich.

Sir Jeremy was too busy to attend – Trotsky had accused Stalin of centrism, Stalin, Trotsky of factionalism: the Central Committee was in uproar. Sir Jeremy’s new magazine
Workers Arise
was in crisis – but he sent a representative of Ripple & Co, to be with Adela at this dreadful time. She must come back to him as soon as she could.

At least Adela was there, brought by pony and trap from Keifersfelden, climbing up the mountainside to say goodbye to her daughter when it would have been so much more practical for everyone for the interment to have been on level ground in Kufstein. She left the mink behind but looked very stylish in little black fur bootees, a flowing black dress with rows and rows of expensive pearls, a little black cloche hat, and smoked a black Sobranie from an ebony holder throughout the ceremony. She spoke to no-one, not even the Bielers, who had done so much for Vivvie, and all but turned her back on poor Berthe, who was having to live on sage infusions to dry up her milk.

‘In your mercy look upon this grave,’ said the priest, sprinkling the large coffin with holy water, and what more beautiful place than this could there be to be buried, if only Vivvie were there to see it, ‘so that your servant may sleep here in peace; and on the day of judgment raise her up to dwell with your saints in paradise.’

‘Amen,’ said the congregation.

‘We pray for our sister now but let us pray also for ourselves, so weak and prone to sin, and also for our enemies.’

‘Amen,’ said the villagers, though they could not see that they had done much wrong. But no-one can be free from guilt and certainly not foreigners who have won the war. Perhaps he was talking about them.

When the first clods of earth landed on the coffin, Adela left.

I think I have been rather hard on Adela. A girl can’t help her nymphomania,