Before the War (25 page)

The strawberry ice seemed to have sweetened Rita and he got her home to her studio – the rent paid for, he gathered, by E.L.T.’s wife Sybil – which was agreeable enough, smelt as ever of paint, turps, anthracite and old knickers, and yes, there was the crushed velvet purple sofa. Sherwyn acquitted himself well enough. Indeed, Delgano would have been proud of him, and he was in Leicester Square, washed and shaved, to meet Marjorie by seven.

The film was
Fire Over England
, with Flora Robson as Queen Elizabeth and Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh as juvenile leads. Marjorie said of Olivier, ‘So handsome! So brutal!’ and of Leigh, ‘Not nearly as pretty as everyone says’ and of Flora Robson nothing at all. Sherwyn thought perhaps he might try being more brutal.

It was a Saturday morning, and an eventful day for Adela. It was her fifty-third birthday which was bad enough. War clouds were gathering over England, someone had said on the radio, but there was little sign of that in Belgrave Square, other than that a lad had delivered four gas masks to the front door at eight in the morning when he should have gone to the back, which was easier to open. The front door always stuck. Adela had called and called for Morna to open it but the woman had refused to hear, as so often these days. Morna would have to go. She was idle and rude. The twins would make a terrible fuss but it would have to be done. However, not today. Today was going to be busy. She would ask the music teacher to stay for lunch – a darling lad, so like Tarzan the Ape Man it was amazing that his fingers were so small and deft – she had said as much to him, and he had said ‘If I’m a Johnny Weissmuller then be my Maureen O’Sullivan. Those beautiful grey eyes!’ so he was certainly interested, deserved lunch. His name was Carlo. When she’d looked in the mirror this morning she’d actually been rather pleased. She didn’t look a day more than forty.

Sex was the most effective beauty treatment of them all, not that this was anything one could say aloud. Sir Jeremy, thank heavens, had always been most attentive, though he was rather falling off these days. He was twenty years older than she. Not of course that she envisaged anything more than lunch. Igor was coming to dinner and it would be just him and her. She had said to Sir Jeremy that the last thing she wanted was her birthday celebrated – people kept looking at one and wondering how old one actually was – and he must go down to Dilberne Court for the weekend as usual. She had never understood this love of horses; horrible, smelly, enormous, oafish things, pooing whenever and wherever the fancy took them. Odd how her life had drawn her to the horse-mad. Perhaps it was something to do with her stars? First Sir Jeremy, now Igor, and of course poor Vivvie and her Greystokes.

And of course Sir Jeremy had insisted on being there when Vivvie was born, as if they were all in a foaling box, and she’d always thought it was something to do with the way Vivvie had turned out. They said men turned to litigation when the sexual drive left them, but Sir Jeremy’s had turned to horses. But it could be useful. It gave her her weekends free. The Dilberne stud farm had become racing stables, the Grand National was only two weeks away, Mayfair Lights was a keen contender, and the owner Frank Darling would be down to keep an eye on his darling. The least Sir Jeremy could do was to be there too.

Mayfair Lights was the grandson of Greystokes, long departed this life. Like Vivvie, poor Vivvie. Adela tried not to make the same mistakes with Mallory as she had with Vivvie; let her go to school and tried to focus on her good qualities not her bad, as Mungo had always advised, being so keen on Freud. Freud had suggested that girls who had a low opinion of themselves ended up with an unbalanced ‘id’ and a reduced ‘superego’ which drove them to promiscuity.

‘Freud, Adler and Jung,’ Mungo had said, ‘were all of the same opinion.’

‘Oh, fried, addled and hung,’ she had replied, thinking herself rather clever. ‘You complain I’m promiscuous but my “id” is in perfectly good order, as you may have noticed. If anything I’m rather vain.’

Mungo had come back with some nonsense of her having had undemonstrative parents and been orphaned at too early an age. She was still fond of Mungo but really he had to go. At least Sherwyn hadn’t forever been bringing up her past as Mungo loved to, if only, Sherwyn said, in compensation for the inadequacy of his parts: ‘Big nose, small willy.’ Sherwyn could be very catty, but was well endowed. Part, if not all of his attraction. But then she seemed to be so easily attracted to men.

Those early years were not ones she cared to think about: when as a young orphan everyone thought she was dead and she had been obliged to earn a living pretending to be a spiritualist and healer. But she had even ended up at the Prince of Wales’ sickbed, when his appendix had burst in the nick of time of its own accord, and he was saved from the death everyone expected. The smell of the putrid organ had been atrocious. But Queen Alexandra had given her a ruby ring in gratitude and she still wore it on special occasions. It had brought her luck. She had worn it on their wedding day when lightning and thunder had split the skies on Monte Verità. Those were the days! She might wear the ring for lunch today. She would choose the pale pink jumper with her white skirt; the jumper was a little tight but that was all to the good: her breasts were as full of promise as they ever were, little perky mounds with pronounced nipples: the deep red of the ruby would flash invitation and promise.

There may have been some truth in what Mungo said about belief in the self. Adela had done what she could to build up Mallory’s confidence and Mallory showed no signs of being at all easy with her favours the way Vivvie had been. And this was in spite of the misfortune of Mallory’s looks – even worse than Vivvie but at least not so enormous and much, much quicker of thought and tongue. No-one would mistake Mallory for the village idiot. Vivvie had been smart enough, just reluctant to speak before she thought and determined to speak the truth. Mallory had no such ambition. If anything, unlike Vivvie, Mallory was turning out to be a man hater and a bluestocking, insisting that the North London Collegiate inspired by the famous bluestockings the Misses Beale & Buss was the only place for her:

‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale,

Cupid’s darts do not feel.

How different from us,

Miss Beale and Miss Buss.’

Mallory went all the way over on the No 13 bus to Hampstead every day just to study science. She obviously took after her Aunt Rosina, who had been something of an academic and probably, as so many of these women were, a good friend of Sappho. Stella was happy enough to be home tutored: a stream of young tutors came and went, some of them good-looking and all of them in the end half in love with Adela,
la belle dame sans merci
, and just occasionally, and very prudently, a few of them gratified in that love.

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.’