Before the War by Fay Weldon

Author:Fay Weldon [Weldon, Fay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781784082055
Publisher: Head of Zeus

May & June, 1923. Barscherau, Austria

I can’t tell you how happy Sherwyn and Vivvie were for those two months. They shared a big feather bed together without either making a sexual move towards the other. She was bulky and soft and growing bulkier by the day. He was shorter, bonier and more crisply limbed than she, but in the dark and warm seemed to fit naturally enfolded into her, as a plum stone inside a plum.

Barscherau still looks much as it does in the picture postcard that was reproduced some fifty years later to sell like hot cakes to the legions of tourists – a tiny picturesque Alpine village perched on a mountainside above the road from Oberammagau to Kufstein. There are flowering meadows in the foreground complete with grazing cows leading down to an azure lake – or however you want to describe that rather shockingly reproduced blue – snow-capped peaks in the background, and just above the village, still to be seen, the ruined domes of an abandoned abbey established in 1524 by nuns fleeing from the worldliness of Venice. The nuns had brought with them enough stolen artworks to glorify God with a splendid church in the wilderness. In 1786 the Emperor Franz Joseph I’s men had made a rather inadequate job of destroying the place, leaving it to the moth and rust of centuries, not to mention the ice and tempests of the mountain, to do the rest. The abbey remained a magnificent partial ruin, even housing a Mediaeval painted wooden Madonna of sufficient mystery and history to keep the abbey on the tourist trail in later decades.

When Vivvie and Sherwyn were there in 1923 Barscherau’s population had fallen below a mere couple of hundred, only to leap to many hundreds then thousands during the late thirties after the building of a ski lift, a score of chalets and a smart hotel. And all on land which was to be eventually owned, by virtue of Vivvie’s great-grandmother’s much disputed will of 1884, by Vivvie’s twin daughters Mallory and Stella. The estate was still badly administered by the London lawyers Courtney and Baum, by then a crotchety and stubborn firm of wily old lawyers, experts in inheritance law, but willing to overlook the odd discrepancy in cheque signing, knowing that few would be interested enough to check up on details of why or how the money rolled in.

Anyway, here they are now, Sherwyn and Vivvie, installed in three rooms in the Gasthaus, a sprawling generous looking wooden house, white painted, window boxes just waiting for red geraniums, and a heavy, gently sloping roof. When they throw open the shutters in the morning it is to the steady drip of melting icicles, snow turning from white to the palest of greens as the grass breaks through, a clear bright sky and lungfuls of crisp, invigorating air. The lake is a deep, clear blue, speaks of unplumbed depths, and reflects white mountain tops. They spend their virtuous nights encased top and bottom in a massive white feather quilt.

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