Before the War (18 page)

But, as it turned out, fate was only teasing and it was as well that Greta was not beside him, for when he arrived in Kiefersfelden he ran into Adela. It was a shock. His grasp on reality, never strong, faltered, and, some might say, failed. It was as if he had started a new chapter in the novel of his life. She was leaning against the wall of an elaborately decorated Gasthof, all wooden shutters, Lüftlmalerei and geraniums, smoking a pink Sobranie from a long ivory holder. Smoke curled above her head and drifted into vast pale blue skies. Sherwyn brought the Bentley to an abrupt halt, with a squeal of brakes there was no-one else around to hear, for the village seemed deserted. Only a couple of hens ran squawking for safety. They would have to become accustomed to the automobile age, or suffer death. He managed to think this, a Rafe Delgano thought which he must remember to use when convenient, even as he contemplated her reality, or lack of it.

Sherwyn stepped out of the Bentley. He was wearing his long brown leather coat with the silver buckle which Vivvie so admired. ‘It makes you look like a romantic hero,’ she had once said and now he wore it whenever he could. The morning air was crisp and sharp and the mountain shadows deep and it felt the right thing for a chap to wear.

Adela wore a mink coat, bulky round the shoulders but falling down to slender ankles. It was colourless: she seemed to be hiding inside it, as if she were some tiny furry Alpine creature evading predators. Her pale hair was tied up in a sweetly disordered knot on the top of her head, so that fetching tendrils fell around her brow. She smiled up at him, as so few women could. She was usefully tiny. Her lips were sweet but her teeth were thin and sharp. He had a vision of Vivvie’s teeth, strong, solid and reassuring, but preferred Adela’s.

‘Adela, it can only be you! A pink Sobranie. But why, how? This is the ends of the earth.’

‘I’m your mother-in-law, darling, and mother-to-be of your child. Why should I not be here? And what have you done with poor Vivvie?’

‘Safe at home in Barscherau. Her village.’

‘Our village, darling. She must be very near her time, Sherwyn. Should you leave her alone?’

‘I am looking for books on obstetrics, as it happens. And an English doctor by the name of Harold Walker.’

‘Ah, dear Harry! But how clever of you to have searched him out! One simply has to have an English doctor when in foreign parts. Look at what happened to poor Victoria, Crown Princess of Prussia.’

’What did,’ he asked crossly, ‘if it’s relevant?’

‘Ah, so relevant. They made her have German doctors, not English, for the royal birth, which was why the Kaiser was born with a withered arm and the whole world went to war. I’m so glad to see you, darling. We can go all go together in a proper car: I expect all Harry has is a pony and trap. We don’t want poor Vivvie to face the event alone.’

It seemed that Adela had taken the train from Munich to Kufstein in search of an English doctor for Vivvie’s delivery – ‘I
care
, darling, I
care
. She is my only daughter’ – but found the town to be intolerably provincial and without charm – ‘perhaps you haven’t noticed, darling, but then you are on honeymoon!’ She was laughing at him. He hated her. ‘I ran the English doctor to ground here in Keifersfelden – such impossible names they have here – but such a darling man, a real scholar, he reminds me of Sir Jeremy – and he found me this divine Gasthof across the border, where they make their apfelstrudel with butter not lard and the Eintopf is quite bearable, beef instead of goat, and real beds, not feather swamps in cupboards. So I stayed. But it will never be home. And how is dear Vivvie bearing up?’

‘Perfectly well,’ he said. He hoped he spoke coldly enough for Adela to notice. How had Vivvie survived her mother?

‘Of course she is. Strong as a horse. Indeed, I sometimes I think she is a horse. Sir Jeremy insisted on being present at the lying in, as if he was in some kind of foaling box. I’m sure that’s why Vivvie turned out the way she did. Strong of neck and fetlock, or whatever it is that horses have. And such good childbearing hips. But impossible to dress, impossible, no matter how much one spent. You’re not going to demand to be present, I hope, Sherwyn.’

‘Good God, no. Women’s work.’ The idea horrified him. Blood and gore. One would rather not think about it. Adela prattled on, quite mad, more herself than he remembered, but then she was outside her normal setting, and he had grown accustomed to peaceful peasant ways, a slow rural life. She was probably always like this, self obsessed, butterfly minded, languidly vicious, and he just hadn’t noticed. Poor Vivvie. But the baby had to go, even into the clutches of this fiend in angel form. What other choice was there?

The page turned. They were in the Bentley in search of Dr Walker, a quarter of a mile up the rutted track to Madron, when she complained of heat and shrugged off her mink. It was impossible not to notice that her arms and shoulders were translucent and slim, and that the little hands were perfectly manicured – the nails and the lipstick brightest red, matching the common geraniums in the window boxes, a touch of vulgarity that seemed almost deliberate, a kind of ‘take me, I’m anyone’s’ gesture in defiance of all propriety, as a bad girl would suddenly bare her breast, presenting the lure of the unattainable suddenly attainable. Another good Delgano phrase he must remember to remember. When the hand crept up under his romantic hero coat and pressed its fingers gently against his trousered parts, as Vivvie described them, they twitched in automatic response. Sherwyn was outraged, but kept on driving as if nothing had happened. But it had. A new paragraph had begun. Forget Delgano, he suddenly knew what it was to be Mungo, thus no doubt so assailed. He, Sherwyn, was just one of many. She was a predator, fearsome: the fur coat was her wolf’s clothing. He was the lamb, the helpless little furry thing. He was not accustomed to it. He was usually the predator: the one who pounced on the unwary. He brushed away her hand and Adela laughed, her little trilling superior laugh.

‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘An outrage! Your own mother-in-law, a nymphomaniac. But you started it. You fathered a baby on my innocent child.’

Another shock. He had got so used to assuming that the Angel Gabriel, or some equivalent, had done the fathering, he had quite forgotten that as he had been Vivvie’s fiancé he would be held responsible for all eventualities. In the circles in which Vivvie moved, a shot gun wedding suggested an unseemly carelessness, a passionate intensity of the kind married adulterers engaged in; not romantic young lovers, who were all sighs and stolen kisses. The Thames, in living memory, floated with the bodies of shamed girls. And what did she mean, that he ‘started it’? He remembered vaguely being drunk when he first encountered her at some ridiculous office party, all detail lost in the mists of time. But ‘started it’? Vivvie had ‘started it’, by proposing to him in the first place. He should have known better than to listen. The Ripple women were all mad. But here he was, married and trapped, stuck up a mountainside with two of them, one improbably enormous and refusing sexual congress, one improbably tiny and propositioning him, the two of them forcing him into a fictional role over which he seemed to have no control and certainly had no understanding. How could it possibly benefit Adela to be behaving as she was? Drugs? Possibly. But that was a plot point too far. The hand was back, exploring. What would Delgano do? He laughed aloud. A whole flurry of dot, dot, dots, no doubt, to spare the blushes of sensitive readers. Everyone knew, nobody said: what an odd world it was.‘Don’t be bitter, darling, I do so love this coat. Such soft, fine leather. It’s all perfectly simple. Vivvie is to have a little brother or sister, not a son or daughter, and will share an inheritance – morally mine, in any case – which I can control for another twenty years. Vivvie, as you must understand by now, is incapable of managing money. Someone has to develop Barscherau and you’re so busy with your fiction.’

As a plot point it seemed implausibly thin but the little soft mouth with its little sharp teeth followed where the hand had led and Delgano’s parts, unleashed, sprang to life to meet it. Sherwyn pulled in to the side of the road.

What a busy day, and not over yet! Dr Walker’s home, once found, was a chalet on the edge of the village. The window boxes needed watering, the woodstack replenishing, the shabby shutters repainting, and the skinny guard dog, leaping and noisy at the end of its chain, could have done with feeding. The doctor had no books on obstetrics in English, let alone German. He apologised if he was still in his dressing gown and slippers but they had taken him unawares: he had a deadline to meet. He was writing a book on the uses and abuses of clinical spinal anaesthesia for Ripple & Co’s new medical list. Adela said yes, she knew that, he was one of her husband’s band of writers: indeed, indeed, she had once met him, it must have been in 1903, on Monte Verità, when she had briefly been with the Ascona community.

‘Good Lord,’ said Dr Walker. ‘You!’ and he sat down abruptly. He gazed at Adela with what Delgano could only describe as lascivious eyes, while the young Mrs Walker – a plump blonde little thing – ran round serving coffee with whipped cream and large slices of Sachertorte from none too clean porcelain cups and saucers. At least three little children all with runny noses ran about the room, along with cats, dogs and hens, stirring up books, papers, crumbs and toys. The doctor – at least fifty, Sherwyn reckoned, and safely unappealing, with balding hair, broken glasses and dandruff – explained he had been studying neurology at the Preyer Institute of Physiology at Jena – ‘the Germans are so far ahead of the English when it comes to pain relief’ – when he’d met and married little nurse Maria from the Tyrol, and now lived in happy domesticity in the shade of Madron Peak, finishing his book. He no longer practised medicine on moral grounds; what was doctoring but a hidden conspiracy against humanity, a plot to ensure the fittest could not survive?

Sherwyn thought the safest thing to do was cut and run; the doctor, though he might have been to a good school, was a recusant non-conformist and spiritual failure too mentally wayward to be trusted with the little
bâtard
’s delivery. A local doctor or midwife would be a better bet. But Adela took no notice of Sherwyn’s nods and winks towards the exit and seemed delighted with the doctor – how lucky she was to have found so highly qualified, charming and experienced a doctor in so unlikely a place, and an old friend of her husband’s at that, and entreated him to attend Vivvie in the hour of her need, and so on and so on. The doctor seemed hypnotised. Sherwyn marvelled. The little mouth seemed to have so many uses.

Still the doctor hesitated. They were right to look out a physician. A midwife could not meet the needs of the woman in labour.

‘The mother wants to please the doctor, who is the father figure, and so relaxes: the midwife represents the mother, with whom she is in competition. And so she tenses.’ Dr Walker went on to say that there were two pathways to pain: the physical and the emotional. The spinal injection blocked the physical pathway, but it was the doctor’s presence that soothed the mother: thus suffering was halved. ‘But it’s twenty years since I myself have attended a delivery. Things can go wrong.’

It occurred to Sherwyn that the good doctor had been struck off for incompetence or malpractice or both, which was why he was hiding here in Kiefersfelden, but Adela was determined to get her way. She let it be known that Ripple & Co were eagerly awaiting Dr Walker’s study on the perils of spinal anaesthesia, undoubtedly a timely and seminal work. The doctor perked up a little: so interesting an area, so little understood! He was a twilight sleep man himself – scopolamine and morphine induced amnesia, so mothers remembered nothing at all about the experience – though they had to be strapped down during labour: they struggled and shrieked so – but times had moved on. Hypno-anaesthesia was seen as old fashioned, but studies proved it safest of all. Was their daughter easily suggestible? He peered at his visitors through spectacles which hung from one arm and seemed not to have been cleaned or wiped lately.

‘Not that I’d noticed,’ said Adela. ‘If I told her to do something she’d always do the opposite. Let’s stick to the twilight sleep.’

Sherwyn thought that, on the contrary, Vivvie was extremely suggestible – why else the Angel Gabriel? – but he held his tongue. Contradiction seemed impossible. Adela’s mink coat gleamed and shone in the little room, her tiny red tipped fingers fluttered. The doctor himself seemed mesmerised. Maria suddenly leapt to her feet and ran round the room after her children, wiping their noses with savage hands still sticky from Sachertorte. Hens squawked, cats squealed, dogs bared their teeth, dead flowers drooped across small windows and blocked the light. The Alpine paradise suddenly looked and sounded if not like hell, like purgatory. The doctor looked as if he was beginning to think so too. Perhaps his imagined sensual heaven with young Maria was not working out as he had hoped. He capitulated. Of course he would attend to Vivvie.

Notes were taken and arrangements were made. Adela would send a telegram the moment Vivvie went into labour. Dr Walker would be notified within the hour, and would set out in his pony and trap for Barscherau. Adela was not to worry her angelic little head. The doctor had never known a woman deliver in less than six hours and he would be there within three. Maria opened her mouth to protest but shut it again, unwilling to risk disturbance of the domestic peace in which her husband’s memory would conflict with hers. Sherwyn suggested he simply drove Vivvie into the public hospital in Kufstein for the birth but Adela said such hospitals were not safe places: they were full of germs and ‘ordinary people’. Dr Walker agreed, and Sherwyn found himself overruled.

He was only a man: what could he, Delgano, know about these female matters? He would leave it to those who did. He was happy to be back in the Bentley with Adela. She was so certain, so, well, upper class. She behaved as if the incident in the car had not happened, which seemed to Delgano to be the height of aristocratic sophistication. She was, after all, the niece of an Earl, Delgano was the son of a market trader. Unlike most detectives in literature – Lupin, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey – he had been to board and grammar school, and was the more easily socially abashed – though seldom sexually. Readers liked him the more for it. He was a wounded class hero. Delgano belonged to the future, as Sir Jeremy never tired of saying; was not this the age of the common man, whether worker by hand or brain? When it came to virility at least, an unshaven working class had the edge on a wrung out, neurotic bourgeoisie, and Delgano typified it, glorified it.