Before the War (7 page)

For a strange and unexpected thing had happened to Vivien a month earlier. She was half way through grooming Greystokes – her father kept the stables heated, as her nursery had never been – when an angel appeared in the doorway in the form of a well-muscled young man. That is to say he appeared to Vivien rather as an illustration of the Angel Gabriel she had once seen as a child, as he brought the good news to Mary, outlined against brilliant light and with a discernible halo, though that might have been an optical illusion, because of the way the sinking late October sun was shining through the curved slats of the stable door. A slit of clear sky must have opened up where black storm clouds had been gathering in the West.

An Innocent Girl

Bear in mind Vivien’s extreme innocence, or ignorance as some might call it. General conversations did not drift to sexual matters as so many do today: bodies, except for an expanse of flesh around female shoulders in the evenings, were by and large kept shrouded. Revelation was left for the marriage night. Vivvie has never had the opportunity of seeing a naked man. (She has visited Vienna, but there sculpted genitals were hidden by fig leaves.) She did not examine herself ‘down there’, ‘down there’ being vaguely indecent. The nooks and crannies of the female body were best left ignored. Parts remain unnamed and without words the owner is left as though blind in the land of the sighted.

Vivvie had quickly averted her eyes when once she came across her parents entwined on the marital bed in some surprisingly noisy and impulsive act but did not care to dwell upon the detail. She had seen mares covered by Greystokes often enough but made little connection between animal and human behaviour; that of humans must surely be more dignified and affectionate than that of the beasts.

The young man with the halo wore stable overalls. He was remarkably handsome. He said something in a foreign language but whatever it was seemed polite and pleasant enough. She did not understand why but she unpinned her hair, which was her best feature. Now it rippled glossily over her shoulders and almost down to her waist. He was taller than she was and that made her feel both secure and helpless. She could even lean her head on a male shoulder. The Angel Gabriel for his part undid a couple of buttons round shoulders and waist and the overalls fell down and he was all skin, though she was so close to him and her skirt rucked up so that she could not see, only feel, the secret that had been kept from her.

One did not argue with a visitation from the Angel Gabriel; gratitude was expected. She was up against the stable wall; the unknown and unseen thing was inside her. She was aware of a kind of dark blanketing mist dividing her soul from her body and that it was best and certainly desirable to let the body have its way. Greystokes showed no surprise at all, which she took as his assent. And then the Angel Gabriel was buttoning up his overalls and he was gone, as lightly and pleasantly as he had come. She smoothed down her skirt, found her mitts – how had she come to lose those? – and went back to curry-combing Greystokes. The storm broke and there was a sudden shock of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the stable but Greystokes calmed quickly. (Your writer feels it necessary to point out that if the breaking of Vivvie’s hymen resulted in no trauma or bleeding, she is, remember, a keen horse rider, and any vigorous exercise can disrupt the fringe of tissue that is all a hymen is. She felt no pain,only marvel.)

Had that been the sexual act, the hidden thing? Vivvie supposed so. Did that mean she could have a baby? Probably not. Whatever it was, the event could hardly be classed as sin. It did not involve moral judgement. Besides she had been standing up and she had heard them say in the kitchens that you didn’t get pregnant if you were standing up when you ‘did it’. The Angel Gabriel has gone back to heaven or wherever such visitations go and left her cheerful and energised and with an understanding that sudden change is possible. She will beard Sherwyn in his den and propose to him.

Anyway, here is Vivvie, mission accomplished, nuzzling into Greystokes’ glossy neck as the sinking sun shines through the slats of the stable door, and confiding the day’s events to the dumb beast. She has to confide in someone, and if it’s a horse who doesn’t answer back or doubt her, and a horse who has witnessed what she remembers as a transfiguration so much the better.

A Woman Of Alpine Property

Vivvie had thought about it for a whole month before making her approach to Sherwyn. He seems a suitable candidate for marriage, a veteran, a man of action, not afraid of her father, able to charm her mother, someone who understood the importance of money – she had seen the soles of his shoes – and as such would protect her inheritance so long as it was to his advantage. She lacks the courage to confront her parents about the details of that inheritance, which she knows exists and is vast. Apparently she owns an Alpine village in Bavaria, church, inn, town hall and fifty houses (she receives ground rent and tithes from all of them) accumulated over fifty years. She seems to be a direct descendant through her mother’s line of the Wittelsbach family, Counts Palatine of Schyren, and until the abolition of the German nobility in 1919 would thus have been entitled to call herself a Princess. For two whole generations Vivvie’s long deceased grandmother Elise and her mother Adela had unjustly been barred from the inheritance for reasons of religion. Elise had turned Protestant back in the eighteen-eighties and angered her mother, Maria, a devout Catholic, greatly. This much Vivvie knows and supposes it to contribute to the palpable tension whenever she tries to bring up the subject of money. Since she turned twenty Vivvie’s mother has been getting her to sign cheques for considerable sums. Vivvie does not like to press her father on the issue. He will just tell her to leave complicated matters to those who understand them.

Not Surprising, Look At Me

Her father’s stud farm, Vivvie cannot help noticing, needs considerable upkeep. Greystokes is not kept all that busy – looks are not everything. He’s big and strong, has got perfect conformation, great length to his neck, and big, powerful quarters; great, correct limbs; and plenty of bone, but his record in siring winners is declining. Vivvie has checked the stud book. Greystokes was enormously popular at first – out of Gainsborough the 1919 Derby winner out of famous Epsom Oaks Rosedrop – and covered a record two hundred and fifty mares in his first two years at stud, at around 150 guineas a shot. The year after it was down to eighty at a mere 100 guineas, this season it’s down to sixty-five at 65. Costs exceed takings by a long chalk. The foals look good but don’t make winners. But her father won’t give in – he blames the mothers not the fathers for the failure of the progeny. Not surprising, thinks Vivvie, look at me. But given the right dam, he is convinced, sooner or later Greystokes will sire a spectacular winner and things will look up. In the meantime her father’s incurable optimism makes the stud farm an expensive business. But she is not encouraged to raise doubts – financial matters are best left to men. She signs Coutts cheques, she notices, countersigned by Courtney and Baum, her mother’s family lawyers.

So That’s All Right Then

Anyway. Here is Vivvie, the enthusiasm inspired by the Angel Gabriel four weeks earlier having diminished a little, and what seemed so sensible in theory now seeming a little eccentric in reality, calming herself down by currying Greystokes and wondering if she has done the right thing. Greystokes’ sturdy flanks are reassuring: they heave, they shudder, as she tugs with the comb. He understands her; he is on her side. More dark hairs remain in the comb than pale. Greystokes will be more white than dappled by the time she is finished. Autumn is turning to winter. How beautiful will his progeny be.

Vivien, if asked, would have denied it, but she does share certain characteristics with her mother. Some things Vivien, as does Adela, just
knows
. To what degree she can foretell the future – how much her prophecy, when acted upon, really brings the future about, who’s to tell? What Vivvie does know is that if Greystokes lifts his head in agreement she’ll be right, if he lowers his head and whinnies she’ll be wrong. He is all the oracle she needs, and he serves her well.

‘Did I do the right thing, old friend?’ she asks. ‘Will I end up as Mrs Sexton?’

Greystokes lifts his handsome head and flurries and snuffles the air in apparent agreement, just as he did when the Angel Gabriel approached, all aglow with heavenly light.

So that’s all right then.

Vivvie On A Horse

Vivien being so tall, large and bosomy, Greystokes is the only horse upon which she has ever looked good. Her quarrel with her father is that he restricts the amount of time she can ride Greystokes – on the somewhat unscientific grounds that too much exercise weakens and degrades sperm, be it of human or horse. Vivvie thinks maybe he is talking about himself – Sir Jeremy having been both a cricket and a rowing Blue when he was at Oxford and look at what resulted: herself, Vivien. She seems to have inherited her father’s biceps as they were when he begat her, though twenty years on his muscles seem to have changed to flesh and fled to his belly, and he now looks as substantial and splendid as Edward VII in his prime.

Vivien knows she is over-fanciful: indeed, she reproaches herself for having an over-fevered imagination just as a contemporary girl would accuse herself of being paranoiac – the latter term being not yet in common usage. (Freud’s work,
Certain Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality
, a successor to
Totem and Taboo
, was published in English that very year and made quite a splash.) Be all that as it may, she feels that if only she had more time with Greystokes his success rate as a sire would improve: he would breed winner after winner.

Once in a position to run her own establishment – which she surely would be when married to Sherwyn Sexton – she will take over the stud farm, turn it into a money-making proposition, and ride Greystokes as much and as long as she pleases. Sherwyn is not frightened of her father. With Sir Jeremy by his side everything will get sorted out. The world is full of hope and the promise of pleasure.

Her face as I regard her is gentle, relaxed and only mildly sorrowful. I see her as the slats of light come through the stable door and fall across her body. She unwinds her damp scarf and it drops where it falls, in hay and dust and stable muck. She doesn’t notice or care. She takes off her hat and her hair falls rippling down, reddish gold, and glorious before the sun goes in when all things quickly turn to a kind of newspaper grey. I see her as almost a ghost, but not quite, being fictional rather than real. Greystokes whinnies again. That is the scene as I remember it or invent it, I can no longer be sure which.

Sherwyn had been Mungo Bolt’s good friend – which was why he now takes the literary betrayal so hard. Both had been second lieutenants in the Artists’ Rifles, invalided home for minor injuries at the same time, then both seconded to the National War Aims Committee where they worked agreeably together on advertising campaigns to persuade the public to do the right thing:
Follow the King! Eat Less Meat! Women Do Your Bit! Men of Britain Will You Stand for This?
and so on, which was not only fun but saved them from the trenches. After the war Mungo, like Sherwyn an aspiring writer with a North London literary background, followed Sherwyn into the world of publishing and eventually to Ripple & Co’s editorial department. From here they look down in comfort on streets thronged with ex-soldiers, blind, halt, shell-shocked, hungry and cold, begging for employment. In the land fit for heroes the two of them at least have jobs: but then they are gentlemen with strings to pull. Nothing much changes.

Sherwyn and Mungo see themselves as young (as I too see them, a hundred or so years on, life expectancy being about double what it was in 1922, even including the sudden horrific dip in the four years of the Great War) but those born just a decade or so later see the pair as battle hardened and seasoned men of experience as they swan about the night-clubs of Piccadilly, picking off girls like grouse. They have been through the trenches and survived, and are envied as heroes. Girls swoon before them. Already younger men than they are beginning to lament that they have ‘missed the war’, and are preparing in their hearts for the next, which will be fought for more complicated reasons than love of country.

So much for the Great War, the war to end all wars; so much for patriotism, which begins to be seen as a great evil. A terrible cynicism rules the land.

Anyway. Sherwyn closes Miss Ripple’s folder and goes into Mungo’s office down the mean little attic corridor. A chap has to bend his neck to get along it. Nothing’s fair; Mungo is lucky: his father Ambrose is managing director of Charlton and Hoare, a large and wealthy general publishers. Ambrose is from a generation which believes a gentleman should not be obliged to work for a living, and so gives his son a substantial allowance to add to his wages. Sherwyn is not so fortunate in his father, a writer, who thinks any man should be able to keep himself once out of Oxford. Sherwyn is finding paying his own way in the world increasingly difficult. Indeed, last time Sherwyn tried to book lunch at Rules he noticed a decided reluctance to take the booking. He was running up too high a bill for a customer whose shoes, should the maître d’hôtel look down, clearly let in water. Such a thing would never happen to Mungo. Nor need it ever happen to Sherwyn Sexton, he was already thinking, if he were husband to Mrs Sherwyn Sexton, née Ripple.

Sherwyn tells Mungo with dramatic detail how Miss Ripple has just proposed to him out of the blue and both men shudder at the thought. It makes a fine story. Both agree that while to woo and marry the boss’s daughter would in most cases be both sensible and desirable, Miss Ripple could be a different matter. Prolonged intimacy with a giantess did not appeal, and what would the children look like? Sherwyn demurs at this and says the problem with begetting children at all is the element of chance involved: one simply does not know what will emerge from the maternal womb.