Before the War (20 page)

Frau Bieler came running, looked and called out so everyone could hear, ‘
Mein Gott! Das Fruchtwasser abgegangen!
’ So one had waters, and they broke. If only one had at hand the medical books she had instructed Sherwyn to find. Well, Vivvie would make do with Frau Bieler as midwife. Frau Bieler had delivered fourteen of her own grandchildren and not lost a single one. Childbirth was an entirely natural process and it seemed that, was one to take the pregnant Tibbles as an example, one could be guided by instinct. She had a pain. It was like a ribbon tightening round her midriff, starting in her back and moving round to her front. At least she wasn’t trying to have her baby in Adela’s lingerie drawer. Vivvie felt quite sane again. It was a great relief. Whatever happened, she would not give her baby away.

And so it was that Vivvie came to give birth to twin girls. Sherwyn was with Adela at the time, posing as Sir Jeremy Ripple. He had gone into Kufstein to buy yet another dipstick – the tip had snapped off at once – it must be a major failing with all these big tourers – but on the way Delgano murmured in his ear that there could be no harm in dropping by on Adela, if only to dissuade her from submitting Vivvie to the eccentric and none too clean Dr Walker’s care, and even perhaps to warn her that Vivvie was having second thoughts about giving the baby away. Not, Delgano suggested, that that was necessarily a good idea. Adela might be right and Vivvie incapable of sensible motherhood. She was a very strange girl, emotionally retarded in some way, seeming in denial of her own pregnancy, going so far as to attribute it to some vague supernatural being, talked him into marrying her and then deliberately foisted a little bastard upon him.

‘What should I have done?’ Sherwyn asked.

‘Signed the contract,’ said Delgano. ‘Then run. Run like the devil, and never looked back! Now look what you’ve got yourself into. And this business with the mother-in-law, madness, but she’s there waiting I bet, all pink and perfect and having breakfast in bed, so you might as well.’

At which point Sherwyn took a left turn to Keifersfelden. If Vivvie had reacted better when he’d read his work aloud to her the night before he might have gone straight on to Kufstein and purchased the new dipstick. But she hadn’t reassured him at all, just seemed rather cold and disapproving. It wasn’t her kind of thing, he could see, but she was hopelessly bourgeois. His mind was doing its overexcited thing again; click, click. Cogs were moving, shifting, falling into place.

There was a way out, Delgano was suggesting, there always was. Get the baby out of the way, and then behave so badly that Vivvie had no choice but to divorce him. He could afford it – the prenuptial settlement was generous – how anxious the family must have been to take Vivvie off their hands! And anyway Sherwyn would by then be so far into his publishing career he would have no further need of Ripple & Co any more. Delgano, his creation, was talking sense, Sherwyn realised. A writer arrived at the truth through his own characters.

As Delgano had predicted, Adela succumbed to the pleasures she had no hesitation in offering. Men and women were alike, as Sherwyn was later to write, in that the more they had the more they wanted. He added ‘Use it, or lose it’ but struck that out. Too crude, too vulgar. That was in his 1946 book
Delgano Lets Live.
Delgano, like his writer, had moved to Paris in 1942, as an undercover restaurateur working for SOE, famous for his pâtisserie.

Sherwyn had started writing as a neutral, anonymous observer of life, not as one who had any special or painful experience of it. Most writers between the wars, before the cult of personality, were recognised only as a familiar (if you were lucky) name on the spine of a novel. To expose anything too emotional, let alone personal, in one’s writing was unliterary, distasteful and shaming. Women’s stuff. The stiff upper lip ruled. After World War II everything changed: the writer became valued for the degree to which he was prepared to expose his emotions and his knowledge of the indecorous. Sherwyn was one of the first to abandon three dots and open the bedroom door. In the mind of the reader, Delgano and Sherwyn quickly became one. And after the publication of Mungo’s
Vice Rewarded
Sherwyn saw no reason that it should be otherwise. The more he was Delgano the tall lover, the culinary connoisseur, the less Sherwyn the dwarf, the better. Sherwyn hoped to reclaim himself in time as a literary rather than a commercial writer – though as it happened he never got round to writing the great novel or memoir which would have established himself as such. It had begun to seem too much like hard work.

Anyway. Or alternatively, so it goes.

It was a swift and easy birth. Frau Bieler and her daughter Greta acted, perforce, as midwives. Vivvie lay on the kitchen table with a couple of pillows. They gave her brandy to keep her cheerful and took some themselves to give them courage. They congratulated themselves that at least no doctor from the town had arrived on the scene. Such a one had come up from Kufstein a year or so back to assist at a neighbour’s delivery but had injected her with the fashionable potion for twilight sleep, and her screams had been heard down the street, and the next day her wrists were raw where she had struggled against the cuffs. But at least she had no memory of the occasion at all. Which was all right for her which they supposed was something. But not for the neighbours or her poor husband.

They talked while they worked. They hoped the baby would be a boy – it didn’t matter much what a boy looked like. It mattered a lot for a girl. Sherwyn was a good-looking man in spite of being on the short side so they reckoned Vivvie must be quite wealthy for it not to matter.

Frau Bieler said they behaved in bed like brother and sister and outside it as well. It was possible Herr Sherwyn was not the baby’s father. Greta said the Burgomeister at Kufstein had said they were not to pass on rumours, hadn’t the cheque for the booking been issued by the same London lawyers to whom everyone in the locality paid their land dues? Frau Bieler said she didn’t care what the Burgomeister said.

They wondered why the English milady, who had been meant to arrive with the young couple, had not turned up to be with her pregnant daughter when the time came, and why the English husband with the big car had left her alone at such a time, but who knew how the minds of foreigners worked? They had paid good money for their quarters, been perfectly pleasant, and caused no trouble, at least until now. The Bielers would charge extra for soiled sheets and towels.

Vivvie smiled when she could and groaned when she couldn’t, and thought it was like her monthly pains but rather more so. They kept putting brandy to her lips and an infusion of angelica root and she sipped and let the women’s voices pass over her. There was a slight problem when the head wanted to come through and couldn’t, but Vivvie’s body, which seemed to have very little to do with her any more, decided to thrust it out, and did. The women seemed very excited and pleased. A little girl, perfectly formed. Vivvie asked what she was called before falling asleep. Angelica infusion can be quite strong.

‘Stella,’ said Frau Bieler, surprised, but pleased enough to be asked. In England, it seemed, the midwife named the baby. Stella meant star. The baby was a lovely little thing, its head quite unsquashed, as could happen if a labour was quick. The afterbirth slipped out and was wrapped in paper and burned. The baby was washed, swaddled and put to the breast. Frau Bieler and Greta had coffee and cake.

Vivvie woke and groaned again and Greta checked to make sure all was well. Then she cried out in alarm. An infant foot had appeared from between the massive thighs. Twins, and this one a breech birth. Greta ran round and called in Frau Auerbach from next door to help. They gave Vivvie more infusion from the angelica root potion. Frau Auerbach swore by Frauenmantel and Alraun or mandrake, so they boiled some of that as well.

A thigh appeared. Vivvie shrieked. Nothing happened. Vivvie fainted and couldn’t push. Greta said, ‘I’ve done this with goats,’ put an arm in and pulled, but not too hard so as to break anything. Another leg burst out and then the body – a girl – and finally the head. A really large baby. Twins they might be, but not identical. This one even played dead for an anxious moment – probably the effects of the mandragora root, which can render a person sleepy – then breathed, lived, opened its mouth and announced its arrival with a cry of rage.

Frau Auerbach was given the privilege of naming the newcomer and chose to call her Mallory, a name which signifies unfortunate. Because this she was. Mallory too was washed, swaddled and put to the breast, but tended to bite while she sucked, having been born with one front tooth already formed. Stella sucked easily, sweetly. Mallory never elicited the same cries of enthusiasm as Stella. She did not smile for quite some weeks, unlike the elegantly formed Stella, and kept her initially squashed head and frowning brow for quite some time. But at least both babies were born alive and healthy, and both were to live into the next century. Mallory was always to have a slight limp because her swaddling, done by Frau Auerbach in the Alpine fashion – swaddling prevents the infant, accustomed to the confines of the womb, from startling itself by its own sudden movements – was a little too tight and resulted in a degree of hip dysplasia. Indeed, she was so busy doing it she did not realise that part of Mallory’s afterbirth remained in Vivvie’s womb. None of these women, after all, were trained in any way.

Frau Bieler swaddled Stella, and did it more loosely and so the baby was to walk easily and dance freely all her life.

When in later life Stella consulted their horoscopes (how Mallory sneered) she came back and told her sister that they were Gemini butterflies. Mercury in Gemini in the first house.

‘Oh,’ said Mallory, ‘then I suppose I’m the vulgar cabbage white and you’re the lovely wood white.’ They were both in their twenties at the time and living in what the army had left them of Dilberne Court. The cabbage white was wreaking havoc in the vegetable garden. The wood white could turn Dilberne woods on a June evening into a shimmering, magic grotto. Dark green shadows and a host of pale lacy dancers. Mallory spoke without bitterness. Like her mother, she was brave in facing harsh truths. She accepted the injustice to which we are all born. That’s what comes of having your transiting moon making a square to the planet Pluto – like mother, like child – if that’s the kind of thing you believe in. Your author half does, if only because it comes in so useful when writing novels.

Anyway. On, on. Poor Vivvie has to die, and all Adela’s fault.

The Bentley pulled up outside the Gasthaus Post the next morning, with Adela in her mink in the passenger seat, and Dr Walker and three of Adela’s cases in the back. Another five filled the boot, which male Bentley owners complained was unnecessarily large but women passengers seldom did. The suitcases were calf skin and from Aspinal. Adela did not travel light. Sherwyn had hoped to get back to Vivvie by Saturday evening but one way and another there had been delays. Adela had decided she might as well move in with the young couple in Barscherau since the food was reasonable, and the Keifersfelden landlady was beginning to look at her oddly – heaven knew why – and Dr Walker must take a preliminary look at Vivvie and bring up his twilight sleep equipment and leave it – ‘
a special bed with straps and cuffs, why? A simple birth! But she supposed he knew what he was doing!
’ so they might as well take the good doctor along for the consultation, and perhaps dear Sherwyn wouldn’t mind dropping him back afterwards and she could have a good chin-wag with Vivvie – this business of her looking after the baby was a nonsense – tittle tattle about shot gun weddings would do Sherwyn’s literary career no good at all – and then Dr Walker had to be persuaded yet again: he seemed reluctant to visit Barscherau – and then Adela had to collect all her luggage, and all Sherwyn wanted was to get back to Vivvie and his writing and the smooth running of the days.

When they did get back, Vivvie was sitting up in a truckle bed in the big front room with two cradles at the end of it, and a wet nurse – Frau Auerbach’s daughter Berthe – suckling baby Stella in a rocking chair beside it. Baby Mallory grizzled alone. Dr Walker was recognised by Berthe as the doctor who had delivered her sister’s baby and she leapt from her chair in gasping alarm, which set Stella off, and marred any touching scene Vivvie had envisaged. Frau Bieler hurried him off to his room. Adela embraced her daughter, but was obviously shocked. Twins. Girls, non-identical from the look of them. Now what? She went to her room.

‘Man proposes, God disposes,’ said Sherwyn, and sat down beside Mallory’s cradle and rocked her until she calmed down and slept, and sang a lullaby the while.

‘Such a weeping and wailing and rocking of cradles

And rocking a baby that’s none of your own.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Vivvie.

‘A song my mother used to sing. She called it St Joseph’s lullaby. I can’t think why it came to mind.’

‘I can,’ said Vivvie. ‘Your own mother was such a gadabout. Why else do you think your father gave you a stepmother who looked like a horse?’

He would stay married to Vivvie. They would keep the twins. Too bad about Adela, who would just have to return to Sir Jeremy with the news that she had had a miscarriage: he was doing her a favour: she would have to grow old gracefully, side by side with Sir Jeremy. No ‘rocking a baby in somebody’s cradle and none of his own’ for Sir Jeremy, poor old man. At least he, Sherwyn, had been sufficiently careful with Adela to be sure she could not get pregnant. There must be an end to complication, however much they might suit Delgano.

Food and drink were brought to Vivvie: she felt sore underneath and rather tired but otherwise perfectly well, had been told not to set foot to floor for three weeks for fear of going mad, and had decided never to part from her babies. Berthe had agreed to come with them, bringing her own baby, when she and Sherwyn went back to England, he with his finished novel, she with her twins. It didn’t matter in the least what gossips had to say. See, she was perfectly capable of making plans, even though her mother was there in the next room, sulking.