Before the War (6 page)

‘You don’t think mine has got smaller with the years?’

‘I see no sign of it,’ she said soothingly – and, thus encouraged, it leapt obligingly to life yet again. One way and another it was a pleasing afternoon, in spite of Mungo’s outrageous offence.

Rita made him a cactus tea from the remnants of a powder which the married portrait painter Martin Dunsdale, one of the true loves of her life, had given her five years back and which made anyone who drank it agreeably foolish. Sherwyn sipped, and feeling braver and more relaxed, and a good deal less indignant, went back to
Vice Rewarded
, but Rita interrupted him.

‘But you did marry Vivvie,’ she said. ‘You did. You failed me. You sold your soul and broke my heart. Say what you will about me, I never sold my soul.’

‘No-one ever asked to buy it,’ he said, more unkindly than she deserved.

A Long-Term Affair

Sherwyn had first met Rita in 1921, when she was nineteen, a voluptuous redheaded girl from Bermondsey living in a borrowed studio, no better than she should be, an artists’ model, an artist’s moll, presently to be known as a painter in her own right. Indeed, in 1976, when she was seventy-four, Rita actually had a three month retrospective of her own at the Tate Gallery, under the title
Love and the Artist
. Sherwyn, aged eighty-seven, didn’t go, claiming the infirmities of age. Rita, feeling it was the least he could have done, was bitter.

(I, your writer did go along: large murky giantess figures without proper definition, lots of heavy purple and black, heavy gold frames not helping at all, not a patch on the work of some of those she had loved and who had loved her. I imagined it was Rita’s notoriety as the mistress of so many luminous men of the art world which the curators supposed, rightly, would draw in the crowds. The work of the well known was reproduced in the catalogue, but only a handful of companion pieces by them could be afforded for the walls. I don’t suppose the exhibition cost much to mount. But the reviews were good, and I was glad of it. Famous courtesans deserve some honour. The patience they must have had!)

Rita and Sherwyn had kept company most of their lives, in between his marriages and love affairs: witnesses to one another’s life. We should all have such a relationship, someone to observe and comment. Rita didn’t exactly love Sherwyn, that is to say he did not have the capacity to break her heart; but she cared for him, cosseted him and nurtured him, a strange verbal creature, a writer in a world of painters.

When Sherwyn and Rita pored over Mungo’s
Bildungsroman
it was 1947 and Rita was forty-five. Her hair was no longer flamboyantly red but a kind of thinning, peppered chestnut. The flesh of her limbs was a little less resilient than once it had been, but she still looked good naked against the purple velvet. The fabric in its turn had faded and thinned with the years. It comforted Sherwyn to feel that Rita and he had faded together, melded together. The sofa had moved house and home with her wherever she went: a kind of magic token, he liked to believe, to keep him with her in spirit if not always in the flesh. And she would certainly tell him so – she was adept at flattery. Sherwyn would return to Rita time and time again to offer a progress report on his life: to lie entwined with her on her squishy purple chaise longue, share his disappointments and his triumphs, and rail with her against the ever increasing ranks of his enemies. They never married, nor had he asked her to. Rita was a bad habit. She was a costermonger’s daughter, she had big raw, working hands and cigarette stained fingers. Vivvie had money, Marjorie had looks, Elvira had style: in the face of these three what could Rita offer, other than love and familiarity, and a role as witness to the life? Not enough.

They first encountered each other when Sherwyn was turned out of his family home by an angry father, and Rita was living in the studio where she had been set up by a professor at the Slade School of Fine Art. Some said it was Victor Hewtin, the landscape painter, others C.R.W. Nevinson, the war artist. Other lovers came and went. But all of them, so far as Sherwyn could tell, ‘arty’. Keeping Rita was apparently seen as a joint effort.

Having nowhere else to go after a late party, Sherwyn had moved in to sleep on Rita’s floor and pretty soon to share her bed, at least on a part-time basis. Victor Hewtin visited her whenever there was trouble with his wife but this did not happen often. The person who was or was not C.R.W. Nevinson visited more rarely. There was time for Sherwyn to conceal all evidence of his presence and move out for a day or two. He found these visits both annoying but oddly stimulating. As he noted at the time, painters, even more than writers, believed firmly that the creative impulse was dependent on the sexual availability of the Muse. And Rita represented that Muse, which she herself saw as a noble calling.

Other Things To Think About

Back in 1922, when he’s a mere thirty-something, Sherwyn looks at his watch. He has no idea the future is watching him so closely. All he knows is that he needs to get Vivien out of his office as soon as he can. It’s not just the embarrassment of the moment; the whitebait girl is scratching away at the edge of his unconscious and demanding attention. Her name is Patricia (4/4) or possibly Claire (3/3). Perhaps she means to be taken on a holiday by a woman friend but ends up alone in Morocco in the company of a sheik determined on ravishment and the sheep’s eye is the price of her virtue? Perhaps Patricia/Claire isn’t pretty at all, is not delicate and fastidious, but plain and somehow brutal – as is Miss Ripple, a pallid giantess hardly entitled to dietary fussiness – but still exotic in Moroccan terms, and desirable as the daughter of a powerful infidel diplomat called Delgano (3/4)? Oh dear, an extra consonant. It could be Delano (3/3) but that is one of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s names (9/14). Delgano feels right.

Sherwyn finds it fascinating how it sometimes happens that the personal and the fictional world seem to clash and intertwine, jamming up against one another – how the gods of invention elbow reality out of the way, and render the writer at the mercy of what is laid in front of him. Sherwyn needs time to sort it out in his head. He must get Miss Ripple out of the sanctuary of his office, get rid of her as soon as is politely possible. He has to find time for Patricia/Claire and Delgano.

‘Miss Ripple,’ he says. ‘Thank you for your proposal, though I must say it comes as a surprise.’ How do men turn down women who demand marriage? It so seldom happens. There are few literary references. ‘I need time to think, and I will respond within the week. But I am honoured and flattered that you should put such trust in me. I respect your confidences and can assure you I will keep them to myself.’

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘That is very prettily said.’

He tells Vivien he has a meeting with Mungo any minute now to settle the new timetable for
A Short History of the Georgians
and must hurry away. Will she leave the folder of illustrations with him? He admires her work and very much looks forward to seeing them. Mind you, the picture has changed somewhat since he last saw her. With the news that Joseph Stalin, a Georgian, had been appointed General Secretary of the Communist Party of the new Soviet Union, her father has expressed the belief that Georgia will cease to be just a place known only to the historians and intrepid travellers but will be celebrated by all who have faith in the future of mankind: Sir Jeremy anticipates that the book will sell well, and that, this being the case, more time and money must be spent on its production.

‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Father is unusual in that he lives in such great hope of Utopia. I hope when I take over the business I can retain such trust. Don’t think you are obliged to use my drawings just because he is your boss and I am his daughter. Myself, I would not think of employing me. There are others who cost less and do better.’

Pillow talk with such a one would require application, he could see. Sweet nothings would be rare. Intelligence, wit and honesty, in his view, are not necessarily desirable qualities in a wife: the girlish trill of vapid chatter might prove more restful.

She takes the hint and unfolds her long large self to leave. Good teeth, he notices, strong and even, though of gravestone shape and size. He prefers little sharp teeth, the kind that are almost translucent, like Rita’s, like Phoebe’s.

‘I hope you will think seriously about my offer. It remains on the table. I think it would suit us both. You are the kind who finds fidelity intolerable and I am the kind who, frankly, finds male attention unbearable.’

Ah, that’s the clue. She’s an invert, a lesbian. Love between women is fashionable in some literary and titled circles. Free-thinking women drift from man to woman and back again, revelling in emotional storms, but some do seem to have an actual aversion to the opposite gender. She is probably one of these congenital unfortunates, and scared of the world’s disapproval. To be married to such a one might do him no harm in literary circles.

Sherwyn Wonders And Worries

And Vivvie leaves. He marvels. It seemed to be one of life’s wonders – some writer said it – that nothing happens and nothing happens and all of a sudden everything happens. It is a sign from fate. He has no choice now but to hand in his notice. If he refuses her she may find a way of having her revenge. His career as a literary man about town has been hanging fire long enough. He must act, and now. Left to his own devices Sir Jeremy will never do Sherwyn any favours, let alone accept him for a son-in-law. Less than a year ago Sherwyn went to some trouble to write, at Sir Jeremy’s behest, a series of articles for the house magazine
Futures
on the inevitable collapse of the Liberal Party. He doubted that these articles would ever appear in print and Sherwyn was right. What did happen was that Sir Jeremy kept them and used their substance in a lecture to the Fabian Society (watchwords:
Educate, Organise, Agitate!
) without so much as crediting the real author. And meanwhile
The Uncertain Gentleman
languishes on a shelf unread and ripe for anyone’s stealing. Bitter, bitter. The novel is a thriller, true, inasmuch as a murder is committed, and by whom is the key. But what was the great Conrad if not a thriller writer? What else was
The Secret Agent
?

A novel with a strong plot can nevertheless be literature. Books can’t be all reflection and contemplation.
The Riddle of the Sands
is much admired. Sherwyn thinks of poor doomed Erskine Childers, its author, even at the moment languishing in Dublin under sentence of death by an Irish military court. Childers’ alleged sin? Carrying a pistol on his person – a Spanish-made ‘Destroyer’, a 32 calibre semi-automatic – the same one Sherwyn’s Irish hero Patrick Vickery, goaded beyond endurance, uses in
The
Uncertain Gentleman
. Childers’ real sin? Writing a novel with a discernible plot. Perhaps the Irish connection – which Sir Jeremy always preferred to eschew on the principle that no good ever came out of Ireland – is unwise and will prejudice its reception. But too late now: the novel is written. Once those two fateful words ‘The End’ are written, there must, for the wise writer, be no going back.

Strange that Sherwyn’s thoughts happened to turn to Childers that very day. On the very next President de Valera is to have the quixotic warrior-writer taken out and executed by firing squad, ignoring an appeal that was pending and never allowed to happen. But perhaps Thomas Hardy’s ‘Immanent Will’, in his guise as Spinner of the Years, as the intricate set of gears that rule all our comings and goings, tends to engage a little more as anniversaries approach, move a notch on.

Sherwyn, ignorant of everything that is to come, and only vaguely aware of what is past (it being without the context of the future) takes a few minutes of his present to look at Vivien’s portfolio of illustrations. He finds the fanciful pen-and-ink drawings of old Georgia competent enough – a peasant’s hut, a pretty village, a child’s face, various romanticised sanguinary battles. He himself has seen trench warfare in the flesh, an unattached foot here, a smashed in head there, and finds himself glad Vivien had been spared such visions. Already he seems to have protective feelings towards her.

Her illustrations will do. The production period won’t have to be too much extended.

He does not think many will share Sir Jeremy’s new enthusiasm for Georgia just because it’s the up-and-coming Stalin’s birthplace. He’ll share a sandwich with his pal Mungo in the office next door and tell him about the extraordinary episode of Miss Ripple and her proposal.

Let’s take another look at Vivien, since she is not to be with us for long. She takes the 2.20 Brighton train back to Dilberne Halt. She doesn’t go straight home but drops by at the stables to compose herself and spend a little time with the being she describes as her best friend, her hunter Greystokes, a dappled grey, but his coat fading almost to pure white around the rump; a handsome creature, a good-tempered, gentle galloper and easy ambler, an ex-racer with a good pedigree but a bad record, since he is not given to exerting himself if he can help it. He has lost so many races he has been bought cut price by Sir Jeremy to be hired out for stud. Greystokes is a big horse of more than sixteen hands, and Vivien looks quite small as she leans against him for comfort and nuzzles into his warm neck.

Vivien is to marry Sherwyn, of course she is. At face value he is a rotter, a cad, a bounder, but Vivien is as clever as her writer in detecting Sherwyn’s hidden virtues. He will live to be a perfectly amiable if rather vain old man with many tales of the past to tell; she, as we know, is soon to die giving birth to the twins, Mallory and Stella, who will inherit very different aspects of their mother’s nature but not Sherwyn’s, since he is not to be their father.