“Run along,” Mrs. Windlesham insisted. “You must do your duty.”
Surprisingly he obeyed her, and Mona gave an audible sigh of relief. Mrs. Windlesham chuckled.
“You aren’t so sophisticated as I thought you were, my dear. If you haven’t learnt to manage that type of man by this time you ought to have.”
Mona smiled wanly.
“There are such a lot of things I’ve got to learn. I’ve come to the conclusion I don’t know half as much as I thought I did.”
“We all come to that conclusion some time in our lives,” Mrs. Windlesham replied, “but don’t worry, it’s a sign of grace. It’s often a sign, too, that one’s reached the bottom of the hill and now one must start to climb again.”
Mona understood the meaning of the parable.
“I suppose I’m being stupid.”
“On the contrary,” Mrs. Windlesham remarked, “you are being human and I like you that way. So would Michael if you allowed him to see you like that.”
“Like what?”
“Helpless,” Mrs. Windlesham replied, and there was a twinkle in her eye.
“I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction,” Mona retorted, and she heard Mrs. Windlesham sigh.
“The young are so knobbly.”
“Now what do you mean by that?”
“Well, aren’t you?” Michael’s aunt inquired.
“Perhaps,” Mona answered. “But you don’t know how difficult things are.”
“Things always seem to be far worse when we insist on fighting our own battles without any assistance. What you need my dear, are a few reinforcements.”
“Not the ones you suggest,” Mona said, and suddenly she felt that she could bear it no longer.
She couldn’t stay here and wait for Michael to come back from the Long Gallery – wait to see his look of disapproval, a look perhaps of contempt and disgust. She got to her feet.
“I feel ill,” she said quickly, “but I don’t want to spoil the party. Could you explain to the others that I’ve gone home? I’ll walk – it won’t do me any harm, in fact, it may clear my head.”
Mrs. Windlesham accepted her explanation and made no protest. She was unique in that she never tried to interfere with another person’s actions.
“I’ll tell Mrs. Strathwyn and Mr. Lecker later in the evening,” she promised.
Mona knew that it would give her pleasure to keep them guessing as to what had happened to her. Swiftly she bent down and kissed the older woman’s cheek.
“You’re a darling!” she whispered.
“And you aren’t half as lost as you think you are,” Mrs. Windlesham replied, and Mona, as she slipped unnoticed from the room, wondered what she meant.
Fourteen
The moon had risen and shone with an almost unearthly beauty over the countryside. There was a faint mist over the lake and it reminded Mona of the lakes of Austria, whose soft white mists had often seemed to her to take the forms of wraiths or nymphs in the light of the rising moon.
She pulled her fur coat closely round her and started to walk down the drive. She and Char had come to the Park in Jarvis Lecker’s car, which was now parked with dozens of others in the wide sweep before the front door. It was freezing hard and bitterly cold and yet Mona welcomed the icy fingers of the wind as they touched her face and lifted her hair from her forehead. There was something invigorating, bracing and almost cruel in the severity of the frosty air, yet she felt that it cleansed her a little from her sense of humiliation.
Once, it seemed to Mona, she had been proud of herself, of the life she lived, of what she thought and did. But that had been a very long time ago, so long that it was hard now to recollect the feeling. Instead, during these last years, she had always known this sense of being ashamed, of holding her head high in defiance and not through any inner conviction of nobility. She had paid the price of a fleeting and evanescent happiness with the loss of her self-respect.
‘Why have I been such a fool?’ Mona asked the night, but the cold barren beauty of it had no answer for her.
She skirted the lake and could look back now at the house she had left. Its dignity had a touch of arrogance, which accorded well with that of its owner. What must he think of her? Again the question came to her mind and she was afraid to formulate the answer. All through her life, she reflected, she had sought Michael’s good opinion and it had escaped her. Perhaps because she had been born under the shadow of the Merrill tradition, she had always instinctively looked up to him. The Merrills had counted for something in Little Cobble and for her personally – her mother had fostered the illusion that Michael was of importance.
As she had grown older she had laughed, she had teased him and even jeered at him – this, had he but understood, was a compliment. Mona’s good nature never permitted her to be unkind to anyone she thought vulnerable. It was only at someone who was as impregnable as Michael appeared to be, would she jeer, conscious of her own inferiority. She felt as if it were impossible for her even to try to be friends with Michael now, as she had sunk too low in her estimation of herself to recapture even an illusion of glamour and attraction.
For that had been her only advantage – that the sordid realities of her life had been covered by a thin veneer of glamour. It had glittered for those who did not understand that tinsel can be dazzling. To Lynn Archer, to Dorothy, to so many people in Little Cobble, Mona appeared the personification of all that was carefree, irresponsible and lovely. Their admiration had soothed her into a false sense of security.
Even her mother enjoyed her stories of excitement, of endless amusement, and of having what was called ‘a good time’ in all the most spectacular and expensive playgrounds of the world. It was only she, herself, who knew how pretentious and garish the truth was. But now, to Michael, if not all the others, Char and Jarvis Lecker had burst the gaudy bubble in which she had concealed herself.
If Michael did not know the whole truth he could guess at a good deal of it. Mona was sure of that. She had seen it in the expression on his face as he came into the Tower Room. She had known it as she had met his eyes – cold, inquiring, disdainful.
‘I’m a fraud,’ Mona thought wearily, ‘and my deception has been discovered.’
She heard a car coming behind her and drew to the side of the drive, standing still to let it pass, but as it approached her it slowed down and then stopped. The door nearest her was opened.
“Get in,” a voice said, and she knew who spoke.
“I’m all right,” she replied. “I’d rather walk.”
“Get in.”
