Before the War Read Online Free Page A

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.

Midday, November 23 rd 1922. 3 Fleet Street
    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,