‘I suppose this is love,’ she thought to herself and knew it was a love that she had never experienced before.
It wasn’t exhilarating or exciting, but it was warm and comforting, with a contented quality that seemed to pervade her whole being. She knew then that life with Michael would mean the fulfilment of all that was best and most perfect in life. It would be the final blossoming, a consummation and a union, which could stand up against all the difficulties and all the troubles of everyday existence.
That was what she had never had before, something to safeguard her against trivialities. She had desired adventures in life, believing that they could give her everything worth having. They had brought her experience of passionate emotion, but she had never known the peace of real happiness. Happiness for mankind lay not in glittering, spectacular thrills but in ‘the daily round, the common task’, shared with someone beloved.
Mona realised now that she had never shared things with Lionel. They had loved each other passionately. She had played her part in his life, she had been ready to give him more, but he had not demanded it.
For him she had been a precious valuable possession, but she was not a part of him, there was no real union of their separate lives. They had never shared the simple things. They had never worked in their own garden. They had never spent hours deciding the colour of the walls or the pattern of a sitting room chintz, nor had they walked upstairs together to look at their children asleep in their cots.
‘I loved Lionel,’ Mona thought, ‘but this love is, perhaps, a greater love, more intense, more sincere.’
Then, as Michael waited for her answer, as they swung up the hill and turned in at the great stone gates of the Park, she remembered Char – Char and Lionel – how could there be a future for her with Michael or any other man?
A feeling of intolerable pain swept over her because she must hurt him. She closed her eyes, then suddenly felt him take her hand and hold it very tightly.
“Don’t keep me waiting too long, my darling,” he said gently. “I want you, now and for always.”
Seventeen
‘Now I’ve got to face Char,’ Mona thought as she opened the door of the Priory.
Like a heavy cloud her troubles descended upon her again. She had enjoyed being with Michael and his aunt at the Park. They had been unusually kind and there was a new note of gladness in Michael’s voice and in his whole bearing.
‘He is happy,’ Mona thought, and for the moment could not bear to disperse that happiness by telling him what was on her mind.
When she was with Michael, it seemed impossible that anything so sinister and horrible as Char’s threats could be a reality, and she almost believed that she was imagining the situation. But now when she returned home, she knew that there was no illusion, that, definite and disturbing, the threat was there, ready to injure if not destroy her mother’s peace of mind.
She opened the door of the sitting room to find Mrs. Vale alone, knitting before the fire.
“Oh, here you are, darling!” her mother exclaimed as she looked up with a smile. Mona walked across the room and kissed her.
“You weren’t worried, I hope. I had both breakfast and luncheon at the Park. Have you heard the news about Mrs. Gunther?”
“Yes, I heard. Poor Vicar! It must have been a terrible shock for him.”
“He’ll be grateful to that lorry when he realises that he’s free. After all, it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. Now don’t look shocked,” Mona admonished as her mother said nothing. “You know that if we were honest, we would be hanging out flags to celebrate Mavis Gunther’s demise. It’s the best thing that’s happened to Little Cobble for many a long day!”
“It’s better not even to think such things,” Mrs. Vale said quietly, “but if you must think them, don’t say them.”
“Darling, you’re a hypocrite,” Mona teased.
Then she asked apprehensively,
“Where’s Char?”
Her mother folded her knitting and put it away in a bag.
“Mrs. Strathwyn has gone back to London.”
Mona stared at her mother as if she could hardly believe her ears.
“Gone back to London!” she stammered. “But why? when?”
Mrs. Vale looked up at her daughter.
“I had a talk with her this morning and I asked her to go.”
“You asked her to go!” Mona repeated stupidly, “but Mummy! What did she say? What happened?”
Her mother continued to look steadily into her eyes with an expression of tenderness and compassion, and suddenly Mona dropped on her knees beside her chair.
“Tell me,” she said urgently, “what did she say?”
Very tenderly Mrs. Vale put her arm round her daughter’s shoulders, then slowly, as if she chose her words with care, she began to speak.
“Listen, my darling. When you were a child I vowed that I would never be an interfering mother. I suffered from one myself. My mother adored us to such an extent that she refused to allow us to live our own lives. She was always wanting us to learn from her experience – an impossibility, as eventually she discovered – and so I resolved that you should be free and independent.
“Perhaps I made a mistake, perhaps the pendulum swung too far. One day you may be wiser and more sensible with your children, but I did what I believed to be right and I felt I was there in the background, ready should you want my help.
“You’ve never come to me for help, but now, today, I presumed to take a hand in your affairs. I am old, Mona, and I belong to a different generation, but I think time and years are of little account when one is dealing with one’s own children. When you have yours, you will understand what I mean. One has an instinct about them, one understands many things which lie without and beyond one’s own experience.
“Sometimes one fails, of course, but then one should blame oneself and not one’s child. But suffering and unhappiness are easy to understand, a mother knows it instinctively, however brave, however courageous a child may try to be. You’ve been both, darling, since you came home, but I knew you were miserable and it’s been hard to watch in silence.”
“Oh, Mummy!” Mona’s voice broke and suddenly she covered her face with her hands. “What can I say to you?”
“There’s nothing to say,” Mrs. Vale said gently, “nothing that you need tell me unless you wish to. I have always hoped, since you have been grown-up, that you would confide in me, but when you didn’t, I realised that I must have failed you, that I couldn’t have offered you the sort of friendship that could bridge the years and unite a mother and daughter.”
“Oh! it wasn’t that,” Mona said hurriedly, “it wasn’t because I didn’t want to confide in you, it was because…” She hesitated.
