“Quite right. Your mother has the appropriate idea of the importance of the occasion.”
“Mummy has only one idea,” Mona replied, “and she’s had it ever since I was born.”
“What is that?”
“To see her little daughter chatelaine of the Park. You know that, Michael. Poor darling Mummy, she still goes on hoping.”
Mona smiled provocatively but Michael seemed at a loss for words. Then he laughed.
“Did I tell you,” he asked, “that I’m glad you are back? We’ve been taking ourselves and the war very seriously in Little Cobble. We need a light relief.”
“Light is a tactless word to have chosen,” Mona exclaimed. “After that Michael Merrill, I hope your dinner this evening is burnt to a cinder.”
“I shall be with you punctually at eight o’clock,” he replied. “Until then, Mona, let the village sample you in small doses. We’ve lived a sedentary existence up till now.”
“Goodbye,” she said with a small grimace. “You always were the rudest man I ever knew!”
Michael turned away. Mona sat on the broken wall and watched him walk across the field to where his car was waiting in the lower lane.
He must have seen her as he drove by and come towards her while she was looking the other way so that she had not heard his approach. He walked with a bad limp, she noticed, and it gave him a jerky, slightly raffish look, out of keeping with his usual staid dignity.
Dear Michael, she thought with a smile, how funny he was, although he didn’t mean to be. He had always been the same, conventional and conservative in everything he thought and did. She had always liked teasing him, in fact she had made it her business when they were young to rag him unmercifully. As a schoolboy she thought he had hated her and she had played all sorts of tricks and pranks on him in the holidays.
Then, when she had grown older, it had seemed Michael was becoming interested in her. He had certainly made himself useful by taking her to dances and being at her disposal whenever she wanted an escort. His car had been an invaluable method of conveyance, she had ridden his horses, and made him fetch and carry like she did all the other young men in the neighbourhood. Mrs. Vale had been delighted and had not tried to disguise her feelings. Michael had always seemed to her the ideal husband for her pretty, irresponsible daughter.
But the first Christmas she was grown up Lionel had come to stay and from that moment Michael had ceased to exist, save as a butt for her wit. He had been extraordinarily good-humoured about it on the whole, she reflected now. Perhaps in a way he had enjoyed it. No one else in the county would dare to have spoken in such a way to a young man who was actually of some importance, as things went. The Merrills were a very distinguished family, and Michael was also extraordinarily rich.
‘It’s funny,’ Mona thought, ‘how I always attract wealthy men.’
But it was difficult to know if Michael had really been attracted by her. He had never proposed to her, never spoken a word of love. He had scolded her more often than not.
Never would she forget how horrid he had been during that miserable time when she had fled home, frightened and shaken by what was happening and unable to stem the relentless avalanche of events. She had been like a child, bewildered, terrified and yet determined not to show it, determined to keep her head high, to brazen things out.
Her defiance was the direct result of an agonising fear beyond anything she had ever experienced before, but no one could be expected to understand that.
To an older and staider world, Mona Vale was proving that the newspapers’ vituperative phrases of disgust and horror at the modern manner of living were not unjustified. Those who condemned her did not know that she read the reports of the tragedy with the tears pouring down her face, that she knelt night after night by her bed praying that it was untrue, that nothing more would be discovered, that by some miracle these facts could all be contradicted.
“Oh God, stop, please stop it. Save me ... dear God save me!”
But her prayers went unanswered and every morning the headlines screamed,
‘New Disclosures in Chelsea Suicide Case’
‘Noted Jockey’s Son Victim of Passion’
‘Titled Hostess’s Expensive Presents’
‘Dope Gang Suspected in Connection with Chelsea Suicide’
‘Famous Actress’s Disclosure at Inquest’
‘The Secrets of Society Unveiled’
There was no ending to the discoveries, to the dramas, to the unsavoury sordid details that appeared one after another in every edition of the papers. It was no use for Mona to protest that, until he died, she had no idea of the identity of the young man with whom she had spent the evening. Who wanted to hear that she knew nothing of the dope gang with whom the owner of the studio had been associated? That, in fact, she had never seen cocaine or heroin or any of the drugs that were found in large quantities by the police?
Useless to repeat that she hardly knew Judy Cohenn, to claim that she had no idea that the young Romanian with whom she had dined and danced was the illegitimate son of a famous actress and reigning monarch. Nothing she said made any difference – people believed what they wanted to believe, and Mona tried to laugh at a world who would not listen to the truth.
It was the wrong attitude and one that an older and more experienced woman would not have assumed, but Mona was neither wise nor old. So she lunched and dined at smart restaurants, she allowed herself to be photographed in the street, in the flat, eating, drinking, and dancing. She was interviewed and gave her views not only on the sensational tragedy that continued to monopolize the front pages of the newspapers, but also on current events, on the modem girl, on Mayfair parties, on the morals of the aristocracy.
She generalised on things she knew nothing about. She was sweeping, caustic and extremely ridiculous. There was one reason for everything she did, one reason that drove her further and further on the reckless path to destruction, but a reason that she could explain to no one – Lionel had not returned to London. Instead he had telegraphed to her that he had been recalled to Paris. He had gone without saying goodbye – without coming up, even for an evening, so that they could be together.
Mona understood. She had known deep within herself that it was inevitable from the moment when that scream, like an animal’s, had vibrated across the studio. Lionel had a career. Love, for him, must always take second place to his ambition. No breath of scandal must be allowed to mar his advancement. And so she had driven in deeper the nails of her crucifixion and, laughing, had gone out to dance while her real self was weeping brokenly and bitterly for the future that could never be, for the dreams of happiness that had died overnight as surely as if they, too, had thrown themselves out of a fourth-floor window.
At last the letter she had expected, the letter for which she had been waiting, came. Lionel admitted quite frankly that he was horrified at what had occurred and went on to tell her that in a few weeks his engagement would be announced to Lady Ann Welwyn. He wrote…
‘After my leave was cut short, Ann and her mother came over here to stay with some friends and I have seen a good deal of her. Try to understand, Mona darling, and wish me happiness. I shall always remember the joyful hours we have spent together. Please remember them – and me – kindly.’
Remember them! Was it likely that she could ever forget? The morning his letter arrived she had felt as if something had snapped within her and at last she had done what she should have done a fortnight earlier. She went home to the Priory.
She had crept back like a wounded animal, wanting only to hide her hurt – to lie with closed eyes and let the world drift by. But she had gone too far. There could be no obscurity for her now. Mona was not the type of person that people forget easily, and the papers had taken her up as ‘news’. She was written up as ‘the modern girl’, and a famous artist had been inveigled into saying that her beauty reminded him of one of the pagan goddesses in Greek mythology.
‘Has Paganism Returned?’ one headline ran and added beneath Mona’s photograph – ‘Well-known Beauty Resembles Pagan Goddess’. She had gone to London a pretty country girl who was admired within the narrow radius of her friends. She came back a notorious beauty and her features were known to every newspaper reader over the whole country.
If she had looked sad and crushed at what had occurred it might have been better, but her loveliness had never been of the wistful sort. When Mona smiled, even though it was an effort, everyone who saw her smiled back. She gave an impression of natural gaiety, her voice had a lilt, her eyes sparkled. Mona, at eighteen, was as lovely and as joyous with buoyant flaming youth, as the sun glinting on a playing fountain.
Mrs. Vale had said very little. She was deeply perturbed but she alone understood that Mona’s part in the tragedy had been that of an innocent spectator. She realised, too, that those who rightly criticised and condemned the tragedy did not want to believe in the innocence of anyone who had taken part in it. They wanted, perversely, to believe that beautiful things and beautiful women were easily besmirched – that beneath a decorative exterior there was nothing but vice and rottenness.
The public were passing through what was known as a ‘debunking’ period. They had been disillusioned by world events, they had lost their jobs, their stability and their savings in the depression. They were down and they wanted to drag people and personalities down with them. ‘The Secrets of Society’ made good reading. It revealed that those who flaunted themselves as being important, aristocratic, famous, or merely sensational were all the same – susceptible to temptation, rotten at the core.
