A year after they were married Mavis was delivered of a still-born child. She was desperately ill and the doctors told her that she could never have another. It was then that she began to persecute her husband for being unable to give her the love she craved, the love she believed was her due. She told him she believed that marriage in the eyes of the Church was instituted only for the procreation of children. As God had denied them that blessing, they must work together in His service, they must live together as man and wife, but their marriage must be above physical delights, beyond the uniting of their material bodies.
It was a monstrous cruelty to inflict on any young man of twenty-five, let alone one of Stanley Gunther’s temperament, who, strong and healthy, had been made to breed children, to live, love and be happy.
He was too much of a gentleman to force himself upon his wife or to treat her as she should have been treated. Instead, slowly, perceptibly, his abnormal private life took its toll. Something withered and died within him so that he lacked sympathy and sometimes understanding with those who turned to him in trouble. The fire was lost from his preaching, the spring from his step. Far too soon he became an old man, a man who went through life like an automaton finding contact with few people, hardly conscious of what he missed, only a shell of what he once had been. Everything seemed uninteresting to him, drab and dull, as flat as the county in which he now lived, as unchanging as the fields and the slow, turbid waters of the river.
There was only one goal, one horizon – death. Between that and the present there were but grey days, grey hours, and his own grey thoughts to keep him company.
Yet now, looking down into Mona’s face, he felt a sudden stirring within himself. She had always been to him the most beautiful woman he had ever seen – but now her small, oval face held a new beauty, seeming spiritualised, as if her loveliness had grown transparent, and through it one could see the springing, leaping flame of unquenchable life within.
“I am so glad you are back.”
He spoke simply, but it was as if he had stretched out his hands towards a fire.
“Thank you for saying so,” Mona answered. “I’ve been half-afraid that I should not be welcome.”
“How could you doubt that?” he asked. “We have been very dull and some of us very lonely without you. Your mother, for instance. She has been counting the days until you returned.”
“Poor Mummy. I’m feeling guilty so don’t scold me too much. Nanny’s already had ‘her say’ and you know what that means.”
Stanley Gunther laughed.
“I do. Your Nanny always makes me feel as if I were a little boy. She came down to the Vicarage last week to speak about some dead flowers that had been left on the graves, and I expected at any moment she’d put me in the corner for having forgotten to have them removed.”
“Dear Nanny. I think we are all children to her. Perhaps Nannies, as a clan, fear neither God nor man. How delightful that must be.”
“But, surely, you are not afraid of anyone?” Stanley Gunther asked.
“Oh, yes I am!” Mona exclaimed. “I’m terrified of hundreds of people, women mostly, I must admit.”
She did not add ‘and your wife is one of them’, but she thought it.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“I was going up to the Park to ask Major Merrill if I might arrange a party there for all the land girls in the neighbourhood.”
Stanley Gunther had been going to do nothing of the sort. It had been vaguely, very vaguely, on his conscience for some time that nothing had been done for the influx of land girls into the neighbourhood, but he had felt apathetic and lazy. What did it matter what he did? things eventually got done even if he did nothing about them. But now, suddenly, he felt an infusion of interest, a new desire to be energetic, to do all those things that wanted doing and which had been neglected for so long.
It was Mona who made him feel like this. He remembered now that she had always had that strange quality of galvanising him, and he supposed others, into activity. She suggested nothing, she made no demands, and yet she inspired each man she met with the desire to shine in his own particular little world.
“A party! What a good idea!” Mona cried. “And I shall come to it, so don’t forget to invite me. I’d like to see Michael surrounded by land girls.”
“He’s employing a good number of them himself,” Stanley Gunther answered. “We are glad to have him back, but I know he is sorry that he had to leave the Army.”
“His leg is quite bad.”
“Yes, I’m afraid it always will be,” the Vicar replied, “but it was a gallant action and I’m glad that it was recognised.”
“What do you mean?” Mona asked.
“Haven’t you been told? He got the D.S.O.”
“No, I hadn’t heard. What did he do?”
“Although he was wounded, he dragged himself nearly a quarter of a mile to a deserted machine-gun post. With the help of a sergeant – who was killed later – he kept the enemy at bay for nearly twenty minutes until reinforcements could be brought up and the position saved.”
“It sounds like Michael somehow,” Mona said. “He’d hate to give in. He gives one the impression of being invincible.”
“I don’t know that I have ever thought that about him,” Stanley Gunther said, “but then I am very bad at dissecting the characters of those I know well.”
“Perhaps that is a good thing for some of us,” Mona said with a smile, but the Vicar noticed that the expression of her eyes was sombre.
‘I wonder if she is afraid of what people say?’ he thought.
He was so used, like everyone else, to thinking of Mona dancing through life unaware of what lay beneath her feet, deaf either to the applause or reproaches of those who only watched her. He felt suddenly ineffectual. He wanted to say something comforting and reassuring and yet he could not find the words.
‘What a failure I am!’ he thought angrily. ‘There’s something here – a tragedy perhaps – and yet I cannot understand it.’
A suffocating sense of his own inadequacy to cope even with the little insignificant community in which he lived, made Stanley Gunther suddenly clench his hands and swear deep within himself that he would try again.
‘I won’t let it get me down,’ he told himself, and knew that to be truthful he might have put the pronoun in the feminine gender.
Feebly, he sought for words and chose the wrong ones,
“I so often think of your wedding and what a beautiful little service it was.”
“Was it?” Mona asked.
The smile that moved her lips was a cynical one. It had not been a beautiful little service, and in reality Stanley Gunther did not think so. It had been a riot of insincerity, of reporters, photographers and newsreels. They tried to keep it quiet, she and Ned, for he had agreed with her that after all the publicity over the case, a quiet wedding, with only her mother and his present, would be the wisest and best arrangement. But Ned could do nothing quietly. Of course, he talked, of course he told a few chosen friends and asked them to come down to Little Cobble.
