Before the War Read Online Free Page B

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.’
    ‘You are not Duncan. Though you are to all accounts a virtuous and well-liked man.’ Well, thinks Sherwyn, at least she knows her Shakespeare. Then she says:
    ‘I am here to ask you to marry me.’
    Just like that. Straight out. No preamble. Oh dear. Mad.
    How very awkward. What is a man to do?

June 21 st 1947. The Albany, Piccadilly
    The Unwelcome Package
    Sherwyn was to confide what happened next to Mungo, his colleague in the attic office next door. Mungo was also an aspiring writer – it was Sir Jeremy’s policy to get young men of budding talent onto his staff, especially if they were good-looking – and twenty-five years on, in 1947, Mungo will include an approximation of the proposal scene in his own first and only novel Vice Rewarded . He will by that time be managing director of Bolt & Crest, his own advertising agency. A proof copy of Vice Rewarded will arrive unexpectedly at Sherwyn’s bachelor apartment in the Albany, Mayfair – Sherwyn’s between wives at the time, after finally divorcing Marjorie McShannon the Hollywood film actress. The maid has brought in breakfast from Fortnum & Mason down the road, but rationing is tight and she’s only managed Camp coffee concentrate and scrambled eggs made from powdered egg and milk on dry toast with no butter. She’s also brought in a package. It feels like trouble. Sherwyn had spent much of the war in Paris as an undercover SOE agent and that kind of thing makes a man wary, paranoid, even.
    Sherwyn opens the package – only a book, with a covering letter from Samuel Epstone himself. He reads. Perhaps, Epstone asks, Sherwyn could provide a note of recommendation to go on the jacket of a new novel he was publishing, since Mungo, he gathered, was a friend of Sherwyn’s back in the earlier days of Ripple & Co? In Mungo’s Vice Rewarded , it seemed, Epstone saw another book as important as something like Camus’ L’Étranger. Mungo