Before the War (3 page)

The Power Of Positive Thinking

Sherwyn gazes from his window at the wet slate roofs of the Royal Courts of Justice, smokes a Turkish cigarette and makes an effort to recover his equanimity. He is never, as it happens, to quite recover from ‘On your way, shortie.’ He is indeed to remember it on his deathbed sixty years later. Only then will it occur to him that if he had only given the beggar a couple of shillings at the time, a lifetime of remorse would not have followed. Such shameful memories as are bound to pile up in anyone’s lifetime would have been so much the less. I would not go so far as to say Sherwyn was to die salvageable in the Maker’s eyes, but at least at the time, in his nineties, after a lifetime of wrongdoing, he was a devoted follower of the Maharishi, and doing his best in the light of his own nature.

Even now, on that morning in 1922, as a young man, Sherwyn makes an effort of will and decides to give up cursing a cruel fate and concentrate on working out the new short story he has begun in his head.

Escape Into Fiction

Sherwyn’s colleague and chum Mungo Bolt recently took him to lunch at The Ivy in Covent Garden where they’d watched fascinated as a very pretty girl pushed away her rare and expensive plate of whitebait – she just couldn’t, she’d moaned to her embarrassed suitor, she couldn’t – all those tiny black eyes staring at you! Sherwyn wonders now how a pretty girl taken to a restaurant in Morocco and faced with a choice of losing her virtue or eating a sheep’s eye would respond. The art of fiction, he has heard his father declare, is to exaggerate reality and see where it leads you. A whitebait eye could become a sheep’s eye, maybe a camel’s eye? Perhaps you start from a title and work back?

There is the germ of something promising here, he knows. Would
Blackwood’s
magazine perhaps take it?
Blackwood’s
published Buchan and Kipling – Sherwyn would be in good company and they paid really good money. Sherwyn’s shoes have begun to leak: there are worn layers practically through to the sock on both shoes but re-soling costs a one-and-thruppence he can ill afford. The sheer indignity of his current life is intolerable. ‘
On your way, shortie!
’ How has he, a gentleman and a genius, come to this? Fit only to receive the insults of a hollow-eyed one-legged ex-soldier. And condemned to hell. But he already is in hell. Better not think about it. But perhaps
Blackwood’s
might reject
The Eye of the Lamb
, and in so doing relegate him to the ranks of the lowbrow. Elinor Glyn could get away with sin on a tiger skin but that was commerce, not literature. The choice he is offering his heroine – sex or sensibility – might seem a bit blunt for a literary magazine. Perhaps the choice should be between money and a sheep’s eye, not her virtue and a sheep’s eye. The story would work as well? The borderline between being seen as a hack – plying for trade as did any hackney carriage – and a serious contender in the world of letters could be difficult to distinguish. A literary chap has to beware falling between the two stools.

Sherwyn had had a story published in the
Egoist
– undeniably highbrow – when he was twenty-six and working for the Ministry of Information. He’d been hailed in the
Times
as a budding young genius, been invited to the right parties, but injudiciously slept with one or two wrong wives. Since those unfortunate episodes he’d published nothing but badly paid, barely noticed essays and reviews in magazines no-one read. His father had flung him out: one of the wives belonged to his father’s publisher. And now his shoes are leaking. And his future depends on a nod from Sir Bloody
Poseur
Jeremy. It is all an intolerable humiliation.

The Trials Of The Writer

The Uncertain Gentleman
, his highbrow thriller – and such a thing is possible: isn’t John Buchan respectable enough in literary circles? – has taken Sherwyn a whole three years to write because of his need to take paid employment to make ends meet. And Ripple & Co pay less than any comparable publisher – to have an editorial post in so prestigious a house was seen as compensation enough for paucity of salary. And Sir Jeremy, since his recent elevation to the knighthood, has turned, say all, into a moral sadist who will deliver a blow to any cheek turned to him, just as a moral masochist might turn his cheek to accept any blow. Sir Jeremy must find pleasure in tormenting Sherwyn, or why would he do it?

The Life Of The Publisher

The Ripple knighthood had been unexpected, and generally thought to be a mistake on the part of the Palace and something of a joke. In 1919 Jeremy Ripple published
Fortitude – The British Warrior
, an ironic history of military ineptitude through the ages written by a malcontent, but having been erroneously construed by a drunken reviewer in the
Times
as a tribute to patriotic fervour, went on to make a great deal of money throughout the world. The irony was not lost on Jeremy Ripple but he was pleased enough to become a knight of the realm, and careful not to point out the error to anyone of influence. Within a few short months of his investiture the staff could no longer drift in and out of his office at will but must now first make an appointment with his secretary Phoebe, with whom he is rumoured, quite unfairly, to be having an affair.

It was in the eighteen-eighties that the whole institution of marriage had been predicted to break down when the first batch of young unmarried women had trooped into offices as typists: mature men in constant company with young female secretaries were likely to find them prettier and livelier than their wives and would be tempted. As indeed they often were.

Anyway.

The Publisher’s Wife

Sherwyn sees in Phoebe temptation enough – she’s a bright bouncy tactile bobbed blonde – but he does not want to believe the rumours. They seem unlikely. Sir Jeremy’s wife Adela is a palely translucent fragile beauty who glides rather than bounces, looks down from a disdainful well-born height, and provides the money for the whole Ripple enterprise. Such women are hard to come by as wives and their alienation is not lightly risked. Besides, Sir Jeremy adores his wife, and has lately encouraged her to spend huge sums refurbishing Ripple & Co’s foyer, reception area and his own comfortable and smoky offices (while quite ignoring the top floor – which leaks and crumbles, and where the real work is done) in the most up-to-date and fastidious Art Deco style. It even featured in
Home and Design
’s ‘Offices of the Future’.

The Publisher’s Offspring

Sherwyn, who runs across Vivien occasionally at this meeting or that, as she busies herself around the office choosing fonts and providing illustrations for various of her father’s books, has always seen it as strange that Lady Adela Ripple’s narrow fashionable loins could have given birth to a daughter of such excessive bulkiness. It would be grievous to any mother – so much hope goes into parenthood – to have given birth to such an untoward child, and an only child at that. Perhaps having had the one, they decided not to have another? That might make a short story:
The Shadow of the Nursery
or
The Peculiar Daughter
or simply
The Giantess
. He will consult with Mungo, who is good on titles. A good title is half the battle. Presumably, in the absence of a son, Sir Jeremy has been grooming Vivien to take over the family business. She is peculiar rather than stupid, Sherwyn acknowledges, and a pleasant enough person, if clumsy. She’d managed once to tip an inkwell over his valued Corona typewriter he’d bought from an army surplus sale with his last £50, the better to type
The Uncertain Gentleman
. His fingertips were stained blue for days.

The Writer At Work

But there is work to be done, and Sherwyn must get on with it and not let himself be distracted. He sits at his desk, rolls paper into his typewriter and types...
The Eye of the Lamb
. Seven vowels in five words: the more vowels compared to consonants in title, character’s or author’s name the better. He is not sure why he believes this but he does.
Taboo
, 3/2,
The Hairy Ape
, 6/5,
Abie’s Irish Rose
, 6/7, all currently playing to enthusiastic audiences; Wharton’s novel
The Age of Innocence
, 8/9, serve to make his point. His own name, Sherwyn Sexton, 4/9 – will just have to do. He will call the whitebait girl Claire 3/3, the hero – who? Delgano 3/4? That will pass muster, vaguely exotic yet not too foreign. The ‘e’ on the Corona is inked up as usual, so Sherwyn clears it with a hatpin kept especially for the purpose. Yes, Claire in the story will trade her squeamishness for her virtue: she will both eat, and satisfy her carnal appetites. Women have them – why is there so much pretence that they do not? – even, he supposes, girls like Vivien. Sherwyn has a spasm of pity for all the plain girls in the world, who so outnumber the pretty ones. Once he has finished with
The Eye of the Lamb
, 7/5 – ‘y’s count as vowels – he will get on with
The Giantess
, 4/7. But then again, perhaps he won’t.

The Singlemindedness Of Vivien

It is even as he considers these things that Vivien turns up at the door. She’s astute enough to know more or less how much attention Sherwyn will award her, if he notices her at all. Pretty women get noticed, those less so do not, as Vivvie is all too aware. This means only one woman in every ten gets any attention at all. It’s the pretty ones that attract love and drive men to unreason and despair, and feature in literature and films; the others are just part of the furniture – unless, Vivvie thinks, they happen to have famous family names or be very rich. They exist to set men free for more ‘important’ and ‘interesting’ things, to keep fictional plots going as written by men.

Vivien is determined. She is damp though, from the London drizzle and fog – and wishes she had remembered to bring a coat. She flicks the scarf in a girlish fashion over her shoulder, but its fronds are actually quite wet and splatter raindrops over Sherwyn’s desk. He barely looks up, doesn’t recognise her, but brushes the drops away in irritation.

‘Go away,’ he says, going back to his machine. ‘Don’t you see I’m working.’

‘You’re very rude,’ she says. ‘But I suppose you haven’t recognised me.’

Sherwyn looks at her properly and sees that this very plain, excessively sized young woman with a dull complexion in an ugly grey felt hat is Vivien, Sir Jeremy Ripple’s daughter. It behoves him to be pleasant, but hardly flirtatious.

‘Why Miss Ripple,’ he said, ‘I didn’t realise it was you. I am so sorry.’

‘There is no need to apologise. I am not sufficiently attractive to impinge upon your consciousness.’

He refrains from assuring her, as custom demands, that she is indeed attractive. She wouldn’t believe him, and it wouldn’t be true.

‘May I – do something for you?’ he asks, as she shows no sign of going, but continues to hover. He resents her. The order of his thought has been interrupted, violated. He has been inside the head of a pretty girl removing the heads of whitebait so as not to have to eat the tiny black eyes and he rather liked it in there. Now he must pay attention to the boss’s daughter. Vivien nods and he has no choice but to offer her a chair so she can sit down. And this is how it goes.

Why? Why?

Vivvie unfolds her gawky self into a chair and Sherwyn perches on the corner of his desk. He finds the fashions of the day unappealing at the best of times – beanpole women with low waists and flattened chests, droopy attitudes, long beads, longer scarves: only the very good-looking can get away with it. But most at least make some sort of effort to please men. Vivien Ripple doesn’t. She takes off her hat and shakes out her hair, and that at least is quite pretty. She has not had it bobbed and it ripples down her back in a reddish brown stream.

‘Ripple by name and ripple by nature,’ he says, courteously. ‘Charming.’

‘I’m thinking of getting it bobbed,’ she says. ‘People always admire my hair when they have to think of something complimentary to say. Better if they didn’t say anything.’

He could see that on closer acquaintance she might be quite entertaining. She did say the unexpected and at least seemed to have a functioning brain, which was more than you could say for most of his female acquaintances. One never could tell, of course. So many girls were taught not to display intelligence in case it put men off, any female idiocy might well be mere affectation. The prettiest face might hide the wittiest brain.

Miss Ripple falls quiet again. She is more serviceable than pretty, he thinks. Her jaw juts as does her father’s, but what proclaims a man as a master of lesser men makes a girl look sulky and stubborn, as though something went wrong at her birth. Well, her mother Adela’s hips being narrow – perhaps there had been some breeding difficulty?

‘Well?’ Sherwyn tries to hurry Miss Ripple on and out. She seems reluctant to speak at all. His own position of rest – and he is aware of the paradox – is one of overwhelming impatience, a constant preparedness, alert for the next blow from the unexpected: words burst out of him all too easily. He stops his legs swinging. Miss Ripple might get a glimpse of the soles and despise him. But the state of his shoes is hardly his fault, but that of her father, of Sir Jeremy the hypocritical skinflint: why should Sherwyn care what the daughter thinks of him? She for her part is dressed very oddly. There are actually moth holes in her scarf. Perhaps the father is as mean to his daughter as he is to his staff, which is why she dresses as she does? He feels a flicker of fellow feeling for her – they are both victims.

‘I’ve had to “screw my courage up to sticking place” for this,’ she says. ‘I’d be glad of a little mercy.’

‘You and Lady Macbeth?’ he says. ‘If you want me to murder Duncan you may have come to the wrong person.’