When Mona arrived at the church, in the simple satin dress that she had bought in a hurry and the ancient lace veil that was a family heirloom, she had found the narrow aisles packed out. The villagers were there, of course, but there were also women wearing orchids whose sleek, shining cars were parked along the village street, and there were Ned’s men friends, some of them dashing and reckless as himself, others from racecourses, bars and nightclubs.
Ned was rich, Ned was generous, Ned was open-handed – they were all very eager to prove their friendship and make themselves as indispensable to Ned’s wife as they had been to Ned in his bachelor days. And to the reporters it was a heaven-sent piece of news,
‘Secret Wedding of Wealthy Baronet and Pagan Goddess’
The name had stuck. Now, everywhere she went the absurd caption was tacked on to her photographs.
‘Lady Carsdale, whose pagan beauty has set a new standard of modern loveliness...’
‘Lady Carsdale, who is known as the Pagan Goddess...’
‘Ancient beauty in modern dress – Lady Carsdale in…’
Oh, how tired she grew of it all! It was hopeless to escape it and, to a fire that was already burning fiercely, Ned provided an unending supply of fuel.
‘Sir Edward and Lady Carsdale have a forced landing in their private aeroplane…’
‘Sir Edward and Lady Carsdale give a racing car picnic on the top of Snowdon…’
‘Ned Carsdale’s filly, Pagan Goddess, loses the Silver Cup at Goodwood by a nose…’
‘Ned Carsdale’s speedboat capsizes in Monte Carlo harbour ... Pagan Goddess escapes death by inches…’
No, there was no ending to the things Ned could attempt, and always, whatever the result, they were good newspaper stories. And Ned liked the publicity, or else he was too good-humoured ever to refuse a reporter.
“Come round and have a drink, old boy, and I’ll tell you all about it,” he’d say when they telephoned him.
In fact it was a joke among the gossip-writers that if they were a hundred words short they rang up the Carsdales for a paragraph.
‘My wedding was symbolic of what was to come,’ Mona thought.
Stanley Gunther, she remembered, had been nervous. She had felt his hand tremble as he had joined hers and Ned’s. But she had been quite calm. Why should anything upset her now? All her emotions had gone, had disappeared, leaving only indifference and a sense of detachment as if she saw the world and everyone in it from behind a glass-paned window.
Lionel was to be married in a week’s time. Well, she had beaten him to the post. He should hear about her marriage first. He should think of her lying in Ned Carsdale’s arms before she must think of Ann Welwyn and … him.
The papers had carried the news of his engagement, they also put in photographs of Ann. Mona had studied them – a pretty face, pretty, but ordinary. Wide honest eyes and a sensible, good-natured little mouth.
‘The perfect Girl Guide,’ Mona thought, ‘the right type of woman to uphold the dignity of the Court of St. James. She’ll look her best when she’s fifty. By that time she will be slightly stout and carry off a tiara with an air of distinction. And I hope Lionel likes that!’ she added savagely. ‘I hope he likes being married to a bread-and-butter miss. Will she be able to kiss him as I have kissed him? Will she be able to make him breathless and incoherent? Will she be able to fire him so that he loses the thread of what he is saying and reaches out blindly for her lips, the softness of her neck, the shadowy slant of her eyelashes against her cheek?’
Once she had torn Ann’s photograph out of The Tatler and thrown it into the fire, but it didn’t help. The feeling of blankness, of being past suffering, of being only a doll dressed up for a wedding that had no reality, remained with her.
Yet, a leaden heart and nerves that had been anaesthetised into an unnatural quiet could not dim the radiance of her appearance as she had walked up the aisle to slip her hand confidently into Ned’s.
To Stanley Gunther, as to many other people in the church, she had been almost unreal in her beauty. The soft veil, parchment-coloured with age, had framed her face, and the slim curves of her body to fall into delicate cobweb-like folds to the floor in the semblance of a train. She had carried the conventional bouquet of lilies – and yet in Mona’s arms they, too, seemed to have an exotic beauty belying the symbolic simplicity of their blossoms.
When the service had ended and Mendelssohn’s Wedding March – played rather badly and jerkily on the organ by Mrs. Gunther – had heralded their procession down the aisle, Mona had noticed that her mother and some of the villagers were wiping the tears from their eyes. She thought them ridiculously sentimental. She had not understood then that her loveliness and Ned’s good looks stirred them to a tenderness which made the tears spring.
There was something so vulnerable and yet so triumphant in the bride and bridegroom’s appearance. It seemed to those with simple minds that it was the real life ending to a fairy story – the prince and princess who lived ‘happily ever after’.
Ned was happy. He loved Mona as much as he was capable of loving anyone. He was enjoying every moment of the excitement, the thrill and the drama of getting married. It was how he liked to live, perpetually giving a theatrical performance in which he was the hero. He said the right thing to everyone, he shook hands with the villagers, he kissed Nanny, and told Mrs. Vale he was the luckiest man in the world. He had sent down cases of champagne from London so that everyone had a lot to drink and became flushed and excited. It was, Mona thought, a very successful wedding, judged by the standard of a stage show.
When they had been driven away on their honeymoon in Ned’s car they had been pelted with rose petals and rice and at least half a dozen horseshoes and old boots had been tied on the back. They had roared off down the road, but when Mona had suggested stopping and removing the evidence of their newly married state, Ned had laughed at her.
“What does it matter?” he asked. “I don’t want to hide the fact that we are married, darling, I’m proud of it.”
They had arrived on the aerodrome from which they were flying to Paris to find, not only a crowd of Ned’s friends waiting to see them off, but also a second and even larger collection of reporters and photographers.
‘What a farce it was,’ Mona thought.
Yet Ned had been pleased and everyone else had thought it an ideal match. She had tried not to remember, when they reached the Ritz in Paris, that only a few streets away Lionel also might be going to bed.
‘Is he thinking of Ann?’ she wondered.
Was he writing to her the sort of letter she herself had so often received in the past? Little snatched notes of love scribbled as he had undressed.
‘Mona, my beloved, a dull day. The sun was shining on the Seine and it made me think of you – the way your eyes light up when I come upon you unexpectedly. I kiss your hair, my sweetheart, and perhaps now it won’t be many weeks before I kiss your lips.’
Notes like that, a few sentences of love, of a love that could not really be expressed because it was so deep, so overwhelming, so wonderful. She was in Paris at last! How often had she wanted to be here. Now that her dream had come true it was like all dreams, distorted and unreal.
She had looked out of her window. The roofs of the city had been silhouetted against a sky that was not dark but rather a warm purple. There was a new moon, a few tender shimmering stars – there was the high toot of the taxis, the continuous murmur of distant traffic.
Paris! How much she had longed to be here! Yet now that her wish had been granted, she was only tortured by a gaiety and beauty which could mean nothing without the man she loved.
‘A honeymoon – without the honey!’ Mona thought bitterly.
She had laughed out loud defiantly and without humour at her own absurdity. Ned, coming through the bedroom door, had seen her standing at the window, the faint breeze blowing her chiffon nightgown close to her body, her head flung back in laughter like some joyous Bacchante.
He had caught her up in his arms, saying over and over again, “You’re lovely! You’re lovely!”
