Mona crept home, but she couldn’t shut herself away in seclusion.
The world was waiting on her doorstep – the telephone rang, photographers, reporters, advertising agents, theatrical managers besieged her. All were hopeful of gaining something from her, of using her newly acquired publicity to their own advantage.
Mrs. Vale kept them at bay for a few days while Mona lay on her bed upstairs crying over a letter that would have told them a story far more human and pathetic than anything they wanted to hear. But such a commonplace story would hardly have interested them. It was as old as the story of the creation. A girl with a broken heart, a girl who loved a man who no longer wanted her.
Youth is resilient. After several days, during which she longed to die, Mona stopped crying. She tore Lionel’s letter into tiny fragments and in a dramatic mood carried them up to the ancient, ruined tower. There she threw out her arms in a gesture of renunciation and watched the little white pieces of paper float away, like fallen, fading blossoms of a flower that had once been fragrant and very lovely. Then she had slashed lipstick on her mouth and gone downstairs with her chin in the air.
Michael was one of the first people she had seen. He had misunderstood – as everyone else did – her laughter, the courage that made her talk carelessly and indifferently about what had occurred, and the smooth beauty of a face that did not betray the shrinking misery of her heart. His words of disapproval had made Mona feel as if she were being whipped naked when already she had been tried beyond her strength.
She had mocked at Michael, answering him defiantly, and all the time something inside her was holding out its hands for sympathy, crying out for understanding, for compassion. Michael failed her and there was no one else to whom she could turn for comfort. And so, when Ned Carsdale came rushing down in his long, shining racing car, tearing noisily up the drive, the exhaust frightening the pigeons from the gables, the birds from the lawn, she had run out eagerly to meet him. Here at last was a friend, someone who had taken the trouble to seek her out, to be kind.
“Come back to London,” he had said. “What are you staying down here for?”
“I don’t know,” she had replied, and wondered why she had stayed so long. Why she had let herself cry over the letter, which had now been carried away on the wings of the wind? Why she had listened to Michael or let his cruelty hurt her?
“Come back,” Ned had cried, and she had gone with him.
He had told her there were parties waiting for her, there were friends longing to see her, and she had listened neither to her mother’s pleadings nor to Nanny’s reproachful protests. She had packed her bags and they had set off that very evening. Ned looking like some fair young Viking, she thought. They had both been hatless in the open car as they had swept, too fast and too noisily, down the village street.
Many eyes had watched them go, but they saw only each other. They were the spirit of youth defying the fates, denying the possibility of retribution, and risking the future for the thrill of the present. Their car might have been a chariot carrying them from the gloomy strongholds of rules and regulations to a palace of glittering, sunlit tinsel.
Ned was proud of his car.
“I’ll let her out when we get on the Great North Road,” he shouted above the roar of the engine.
“Yes, do,” Mona replied.
They had skidded on two wheels round the sharp corners of the twisty country lanes. Once Mona had looked back. Silhouetted against the red sky she had seen the Park and the roofs and chimneys of Michael’s great house looked dark and disapproving against the warm glow of sunset.
‘Why should I care what he thinks?’ she asked herself,
Yet she knew that Michael had stood for something in her life – if only for childhood memories of clear, untainted laughter, of clean, spontaneous fun, and of easy, undemanding companionship. Well, he was an enemy now, as, in reality, were the people waiting for her in London.
That crowd – already she felt she knew them well – who liked sensationalism, were interested in her because she had achieved notoriety. She was alone, except, perhaps, for Ned. Ned, who really seemed to like her.
She snuggled down in the rugs he had wrapped round her legs, she smelt the heady scent of the big bunch of tuberoses that he had given her on his arrival. They were pinned incongruously against the collar of her tweed coat and they seduced her with their strange, exotic fragrance.
They were a part of the life towards which she was heading. A life of excitement and surprise, of thrills, music and champagne. A life where nothing mattered except enjoyment, where the croakings of the old and the respectable did not count and were not listened to, where men like Michael were considered boring. A world where the only ambition was to go to a bigger and better party tonight than the one enjoyed until the dawn this morning.
Lionel would disapprove, she thought suddenly, but then Lionel’s opinion no longer mattered. He was going to be married, his arms would be round Ann Welwyn, his hands – those thin, sensitive hands she had loved – would never touch her again. For a moment Mona shut her eyes against the rushing wind. Lionel’s lips were on hers, Lionel’s voice was calling her “darling”, telling her how lovely she was. Lionel touching her throat with his fingers, pushing back her curls so that he could find her ear. Lionel loving her and her love for him growing in intensity beyond all words, beyond all expression. What was the use of thinking of it? She opened her eyes and moved nearer to Ned, nestling her shoulder against his, putting her hand on his knee. He turned to laugh down at her, his eyes alight.
“Now we’ll let her go,” he cried. “I can get ninety out of her if the road’s clear.”
“Good,” Mona replied, the force of the wind snatching the word from her mouth even as she spoke.
“You’re sweet,” Ned told her, “so sweet. You’re going to marry me, aren’t you, Mona?”
His voice was jerky, coming in gasps. The landscape was rushing past them – houses, trees, a horse and cart, some children on bicycles…
“Say yes,” he called to her, his eyes on the road ahead.
He was smiling and the last rays of the sun turned his hair to gold.
“Why not?” Mona asked.
Suddenly she began to cry silently, the tears running swiftly down her cheeks as they raced faster and faster towards London.
Five
Mona left the lake and walked along the right-of-way that came into the village at the back of the churchyard. As she reached the stile she sat still for a moment looking down the sloping pastureland to where the River Ouse, in flood, had overflowed into the green meadows, turning them into smooth lakes reflecting the pale sunshine and blue and grey sky.
‘How quiet and peaceful it all is,’ she thought. ‘Perhaps I, too, shall become like that.’
As she lingered a sharp March wind caught her shining curls, blowing them across her forehead, and to the man coming up the church walk she looked at that moment the incarnation of vivid, living beauty. She heard his footsteps, turned her head swiftly, then jumped down from the stile and walked to meet him.
“How are you, Vicar?” she said, holding out her hand.
“I heard you were home,” he replied, “and I was coming up to the Priory this afternoon hoping to be one of the first to welcome you.”
“Thank you,” Mona said. “How are you? – and how’s the world been treating Little Cobble since I have been away?”
“Things are much the same,” he answered, but he smiled and that smile transformed his lined, melancholy countenance, giving it a fleeting impression of youth.
Stanley Gunther had been a very good-looking young man. He had thin, clear-cut features and the broad shoulders and narrow hips of an athlete. He had been exceedingly popular at Oxford, and several people had thought that he would go far. But he had made a fatal mistake – in the second year of his curacy he had married his Vicar’s daughter.
Mavis Gunther was the type of woman who, in medieval times, would doubtless have been easily disposed of by one of her enemies. In the twentieth century she could not unfortunately, be exterminated. She was warped and frustrated – a nature twisted and contorted out of any semblance to real humanity. She had married her father’s curate because his virility had attracted her. She had wanted him, and with the cunning and determination of a strong character, she had made it impossible for him to escape her.
Stanley Gunther never could remember quite clearly how he had become engaged to Mavis. She could have told him, for she had planned every movement, every moment almost every word of what would be said and what would happen. Having captured her man she was not content to accept his half-blooming affection for her – she wanted to bludgeon him into love. Because she had no real knowledge of what love meant and not even a faint reflection of it within herself, she killed the first groping tenderness with which her husband approached her. Being shrewd, she realised what she had done and then, disappointed, took her revenge cruelly and relentlessly.
