Before the War (5 page)

Deprived of his customary allies, Sherwyn gave up his hope of rabbit fricassee, put on his bowler hat and leather gloves, took the No 19 bus and went to visit Rita in her Chelsea studio.

Sherwyn was at the time divorcing his third wife, and now wooing his fourth. His aesthete action hero Rafe Delgano, six foot two inches, was selling well in novel after novel. Two were in the pipeline to be filmed. The Moroccan restaurant Sherwyn first described in
The Eye of the Lamb
had become Rafe Delgano’s gourmet safe house. The end of the war had not meant an end to food rationing – far from it; by 1947 the nation found itself hungrier than ever: even bread was rationed. Rafe’s excursions into Middle Eastern cuisine as he dodged bullets, angry ex-wives and the caresses of various sultry temptresses found favour all over the world. Rafe Delgano cooked well, ate well, aimed and shot well, and made love well; he was Sherwyn Sexton’s alter ego, only seven inches taller.

Sherwyn – disrobed, pale-skinned, lacking inches in height, but his member famously long and purposeful enough, and in general well muscled and proportioned – sank back into Rita’s faded purple plush sofa. As artists’ studios went Rita’s was as good as any London could offer, Sherwyn thought,
bien situé
on the banks of the river, expensive, spacious and practical: wide, high windows letting in a good north light, smelling – as had all Rita’s studios from the beginning and there had been at least five – of a heady mixture of oil paint, turpentine, Rita’s Evening in Paris scent, discarded silk knickers – or so Sherwyn liked to imagine – and the mildly exhilarating hot metal fumes from the Pither stoves that heated them. Like the sofa, memento of so many lovers, the stove travelled with her. And Cheyne Walk was a notoriously good address. All kinds of famous people had lived here, from Whistler’s mother to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt to Thomas Carlyle, and Sherwyn, famous writer, felt at home.

Rita, wearing nothing but a crimson silk kimono splashed with red roses, leafed through
Vice Rewarded
, occasionally laughing, occasionally snorting. Sherwyn watched her anxiously.

‘It’s not so bad,’ she said at last. ‘He’s just an advertising man trying to write a novel, not a proper writer like you. He’s jealous.’

‘Why on earth should Mungo be jealous?’ demanded Sherwyn. ‘He’s doing well enough in his own field. He makes as much as me, even more. Bound to. He tells lies. I tell the truth. Once he was my friend. Now he ridicules me. It’s quite obviously an attack on me. Why else would he refer to me as the fucking “Dwarf”! I’m not tall, I can see that, but “The Dwarf”!’

‘I can see it’s awfully painful,’ she said. ‘But didn’t you once go off with his wife?’

‘I didn’t go off with her,’ he said crossly. ‘I spent an hour or so with the wretched woman beneath the coats at some party. I was drunk, I can barely remember. She was very thin. I could feel her ribs, I remember that. And the elbows were sharp. It was at least twenty years ago, it was more her idea than mine. She was trying to make Mungo jealous, or so I imagined.’

‘Well, she succeeded,’ said Rita. ‘And so far as I can tell you remember very well. Ribs and elbows.’

‘And she swore she wouldn’t tell. She was a department store heiress. American. What a nerve Mungo has, accusing me of marrying for money! He married his wife to get hold of a trivial zipper account for his agency.’ Rita was beginning to laugh.

‘Women always tell. Why do you think there are so many divorces? Perhaps she told him your cock was so much bigger than his. You men find it hard to overlook a thing like that.’

Sherwyn felt a little better. She was so right. Mungo’s missile, his message would surely misfire. The short marriage of convenience to Vivvie was forgotten. The parentage of the twins was neither here nor there. But what a fool he’d been. Of course Mungo had taken notes. Indeed, he now remembered encouraging Mungo to do so: ‘
Be Boswell, Mungo, to my Dr Johnson. Write it all down for posterity.
’

And indeed, Mungo had, and posterity had caught up with them both. And there hadn’t only been the matter of Olive Bolt, née Crest, Mungo’s ex-wife, but the article he’d written in 1935 when Mungo had been awarded a CBE for services to advertising – to the effect that such a decoration was a sure sign of the decadence of the times. What was advertising but the glorification of the salesman, of snake oil merchants, confidence men all? Yes, Sherwyn could see that Mungo might have taken it personally and been annoyed. Mungo might not understand that anything went in love and war.

‘No-one’s going to recognise me, surely, as “The Dwarf”? It’s intolerable.’ He was still agitated.

‘I shouldn’t think so. Rita was kind. ‘Elvira hardly moves in modern literary circles. Her old books are for selling, not for reading.’

Which was true enough. Elvira was Sherwyn’s intended fiancée, now that Marjorie the film star had retreated in a sulk and gone to Reno to see about a divorce. (Marry in haste, divorce in Reno. Everything can be arranged by those who have money.) Elvira might not be as young as she had been, but was still a favourite of the fashion pages, beautiful, decorous, intelligent – and much respected as a businesswoman. She bought and sold antiquities, Russian icons and rare books. Any man would see her as a prize, especially if they’d been married to Marjorie. But Elvira was proving difficult to woo. She was reluctant to put Sherwyn’s ring upon her finger. She thought he was too easy in his affections.

Married, the Giantess explained, she could have her own establishment and with it her dignity. Unmarried, she was doomed to live with a mother who saw her as a freak of nature, a cross and a humiliation.

‘At least Mungo got that right,’ said Sherwyn. ‘Poor old Vivvie. She was so desperate to get away from her Mama.’

‘You’re not the only one who’s desperate,’ Rita said, vulgarly. ‘Look at you!’

It was true. Elvira was so slow falling into his arms, and the smell of Rita’s studio was so familiar an enticement. Rita might be the age his mother was when she walked out on his father and left him to the mercies of the stepmother with the face like a horse, but the appeal was still strong. Rita did what she could for him, then put a sheet over him afterwards to cover his parts, still waving about but now without further purpose she reckoned, and make him decent, and went on cleaning her brushes. Her kimono fell open from time to time but now he took little notice. He was still too busy worrying away at the ins and outs of Mungo’s betrayal.

‘What astonishes me,’ said Sherwyn, ‘is that this preposterous tosh of Mungo’s has actually found a publisher. He’s hoping for a
roman à clef
scandal but he’ll never get it. “The Dwarf”, “The Giantess”. So cruel. Something that happened twenty-five years ago, and not at all the way he remembers it. But who knows, who cares? All that rubbish about incest and my stepmother having a face like a horse!’

‘A foul calumny, I know, I know,’ said Rita. ‘A betrayal not just of art but of friendship. Perhaps you should both strip naked and fight a duel. Then everyone could see from your balls who was the better man.’

‘Why do you always laugh at me?’ he complained. ‘At least it’s so badly written no-one’s going to buy it, let alone believe it: “
Raising her black fringed eyes to his
”! Vivvie had rather short sandy eyelashes, poor thing, if I remember.’

‘You’re angry because you’re saving it up for the memoirs you’re never going to get round to writing.’

She went too far. She was not funny. She had grown hard and unsympathetic with the decades. Sherwyn had thought he could trust her but he could not; she was like Mungo, enemy posing as friend. He thought he might be angry: might walk out on her and go off to Rules for the fricassee: that would teach her. But then she came and sat composedly on the sofa next to him. He felt the touch of her thigh and forgave her.

Actually Sherwyn had indeed been saving the proposal scene for his own writing, though the occasion to use it had never arisen. His bestselling novels and stories tended to feature epicurean, but tough, detectives whose hearts were in hock to unfeeling but beautiful wives who did not appreciate the heroes’ cooking – and had no origin in Sherwyn’s own life experience. Lately he had been on a winning streak with Rafe Delgano. But he wrote (which was customary at the time) as a neutral, anonymous observer of life, not as one who revealed any special or painful experience of it. To think clearly was surely more important for a writer than to feel deeply, which would be uncomfortable for both reader and writer: leave self revelation to the poet. Indignation, rage, social protest, appreciation of all things beautiful and even sensuous – such responses were acceptable, even necessary, but the chin must not tremble, the lip must not quiver; a cool impartiality must be maintained. Rafe Delgano hovered on the edge of acceptability, too commercially successful for Sherwyn’s own literary good. As for his own memoirs, Rita was right, he would never get round to writing them. Perhaps he should feel more kindly towards Mungo, forgive him all that was past as the Lord’s Prayer recommended.

Sherwyn recovered his composure.

‘Poor old Mungo,’ he said. ‘He always was obsessed with bloody Freud. He has Vivien talking about stallions, parents and the primal scene. She would never have so much as mentioned such things.’

‘I saw a photograph of her in her obituary,’ said Rita. ‘
Tragic Death of Publishing Heiress
. If only she’d thrown back her shoulders and pushed out her bosom and smiled she could have joined the chorus line of the
Folies Bergère
. How a girl looks is so much a matter of how she presents herself. It’s either take me or keep off me.’

‘I tried to make her see reason,’ said Sherwyn. ‘I said she was far too young to be talking the way she did, that rich girls always found husbands in the end. And all she said was that she was proud, vain and ugly, and that was not an easy mix, and would I marry her. She was tired of being an object of mirth and derision, of having to put up with the leftovers of pretty girls.’

‘You came home from the office drunk on the proposal night and told me all about it. I remember the phrase, “the leftovers of pretty girls”. You had this cheque in your pocket you tried to hide from me. You owed me rent but you had no intention of giving me a penny. You’d already agreed to marry someone else but didn’t even tell me. I don’t know why I put up with you, then or now.’

‘But you do,’ he said, ‘you do put up with me, you always have.’

‘You were ashamed of me.’

‘I certainly didn’t tell Vivvie about your existence, though I daresay Mungo knew. All I wanted was to get her out of my office. She was just so large and looming. And frankly I was beginning to feel not just embarrassed but insulted. I was, I am, an English gentleman, a writer, a genius, not someone to be bought and sold in marriage like a slave. Vivvie was completely out of order. I thought perhaps Vivvie had somehow got me muddled up with Mungo. But she said no. Then she said that though she hoped I’d see fit to give her two sons for reasons of inheritance, I would of course be free to pursue my own interests, by which I assumed she meant someone like you.’

‘How jolly generous of her,’ said Rita. ‘Posh, royal. An heir and a spare. But she couldn’t have known about my existence.’

‘It is possible,’ admitted Sherwyn, ‘though not likely. I was quite fond of Phoebe at the time, and you know how typists talk. I may have been indiscreet. Do you think that was why Sir Jeremy was always so disagreeable to me at the editorial meetings?’

When Sherwyn encountered Sir Jeremy on those Monday mornings long ago, he would find his employer oddly hostile. Sherwyn couldn’t understand it. True, he would often arrive late, sleepy and unshaven when straight from Rita or Phoebe’s bed. Sir Jeremy had taken to either ignoring or insulting him, calling him ‘our lad from the orlop deck where the lowlife dwells’, or ‘our poor Old Pauline’ – Sir Jeremy being an Old Etonian, as was Mungo, and Sherwyn merely an old boy of St Paul’s, the lesser, if older, school. Mungo would be asked his opinion about, say, the length of the print run, the quality of the paper, the pricing of the finished volume – and his advice be then apparently accepted. Sherwyn’s opinion would be publicly jeered at, if later privately followed.

‘It is perfectly possible,’ said Rita. ‘I daresay as Phoebe’s employer he thought he had prior rights.’ Her fingers tightened, and the gentle scratches became less gentle.

‘And I wanted to get on with my story. I was working on
The Eye of the Lamb
. You know they made it into a film?’

‘Of course I know,’ Rita said. ‘They called it
Black Eyes
and you were stupid enough to marry the star. That’s enough of your back. My wrist is tired and I’ve broken a nail.’

‘I’ve made you jealous,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’

Rita scratched harder still. Her mouth went down towards his member. It seemed undecided whether to rise or fall, as emotion succeeded emotion, rising up with rage and vanity, falling with despair, regret and anxiety, but engorged by a generalised excitement of sudden and unusual event. Elvira’s fastidious mouth was never likely to approach him in this way. The thought made him appreciate Rita the more; habit is strong, and the broken nail had actually drawn blood. For some reason neither of them cared to investigate, the blood stirred him on.

Afterwards he asked, ‘And Rita, by the way, how are you so familiar with the tiny size of Mungo’s cock?’

‘Good heavens,’ said Rita. ‘Have you forgotten? When you were courting poor Vivvie you palmed me off on Mungo.’

‘Oh,’ said Sherwyn. ‘Did I? Well, never apologise, never explain? In any case, in those days you were anyone’s, more of an artist’s moll than an artist.’

‘True,’ she said amicably enough. ‘But I had become accustomed to yours, and his was such a little finger of a thing. The assertive and demanding is so much more appealing than the small and tentative.’