It was unthinkable for a young diplomat seeking his first job to arrive with a wife. But later it would be easy. He’d get ahead very fast, be so successful that it would only be a year or two at the very most before they were together for always, when he could know that she was his, could hold her like this, could kiss her like this…
“Oh, darling, darling!”
She heard her own voice, warm and caressing, and it sounded to her like the murmur of the silver stream as it reached the fall above the lake. At last, she knew what living meant, this plunge, exciting, thrilling and exhilarating, into the unknown and unexplored depths of love.
“We must go back.”
It was Lionel who remembered that they had been away a long time. The others would have got tired of looking for them, would be playing something else, cards perhaps, or toasting chestnuts in the open fireplace of the Long Gallery.
“We must go back,” Mona echoed. Yet, as the panel opened and they emerged from the secrecy of the hidden chamber, she had felt as if she left behind something that was infinitely precious. Perhaps never again would there be such a moment of exquisite wonder, such a moment when time would stand still beyond any reckoning of hours or days or centuries. She was back in the dear familiarity of the sitting room. Only an hour had passed since she left, yet with its passing Mona had merged into womanhood – she had grown up.
Standing now in the darkness with her eyes closed, Mona, the woman, felt again the sweet, pulsating madness of it. Lionel’s voice, Lionel’s hands, Lionel’s lips. She could feel them – and then blindly she groped her way back to the door. She could not bear the echo of that perfect moment.
She had opened up the past and now it was too poignant for her. She closed the oak panel behind her and then sank down on to the hearthrug before the fire. Her eyes were dry and so were her lips.
She could only stare ahead and experience what it felt like to be old, to have only memories on which to exist – only memories and no hope for the future.
Three
The door opened and Mrs. Vale came in.
“There, we’ve finished the rest of the house,” she said, “now there’s only this room to do. Thank goodness we’ve got blinds in here!”
She pulled them down as she spoke.
“You’ll find it difficult to remember the black-out at first,” she went on. “How funny it would seem now to see bright street lighting and know that one could leave the curtains undrawn without having an irate warden hammering on the door within a few minutes!
“Nanny and I have often thought about you in the ‘Lights of Broadway’. Well, as things are at the moment, it seems to me it will be a long time before we talk about the ‘Lights of Piccadilly’ again.
“And talking of New York reminds me,” Mrs. Vale went on, pulling the last curtain and coming towards the fireplace. “I want to show you the scrapbook into which I’ve put all your postcards.”
“My postcards?” Mona questioned.
“Yes, darling, the ones you have sent me over these last years. So interesting, I thought, they are like a kind of pictorial diary. You remember how I used to keep all the cuttings and photographs about you that appeared in the newspapers? Well, I stuck those into a book and then when you went away it seemed rather sad to have a gap of years. Of course, I didn’t know you were going to be away so long, but still I started then and there to stick in the postcards you sent me and now I have nearly completed a whole book. Would you like to see it?”
“I’d love to, of course,” Mona replied. “What an old hoarder you are, Mother! I don’t believe you’ve ever thrown away anything.”
“Not very much, I must admit,” Mrs. Vale replied. “Do you know, Nanny and I were looking through things in the attic the other day and we found a petticoat that my mother wore at her wedding, and the tie your father wore at his. Oh dear! such memories they brought back – and a satin belt that I wore at my coming-out ball. I had an eighteen-inch waist in those days. It seems unbelievable now to think it ever went round me.”
“I suppose you think if you keep it long enough,” Mona said, “it will come back into fashion again.”
“No, darling, I don’t think that. I don’t believe we could ever be so ridiculous as to tight-lace ourselves again. But you never know, it may come in useful as a head-band, or you may even want it yourself as a collar or something in these days of rationing. Now let me think, where did I put your book?”
Mrs. Vale opened several drawers in a Queen Anne bureau and finally found what she wanted on the lower shelf of the bookcase.
“Here it is,” she said. “It’s really a record of your whole life. ‘Mona Book’, Nanny and I call it and it starts off with you being born.”
Mrs. Vale opened the first page to show the cutting from the front page of The Times announcing the birth of a daughter ‘to Mary, wife of Stephen Thornton Vale, of The Priory, Little Cobble, Bedfordshire.’ Then she rapidly turned over the pages to where the postcards were stuck in neat orderly rows.
“They are all here,” she said, “and I have put the dates by each one. There – that’s delightful, that lovely one of the Seine at twilight, and I love that view of the Bay of Naples. I remember your father and I went there on our honeymoon. And here we start the Egyptian page. You sent me quite a lot from there, did you like Egypt?”
“No, I hated it.”
Mona’s voice was muffled, but Mrs. Vale didn’t seem to notice.
“Well, I often think these beauty spots are overrated,” she said. “And here’s one from Vienna – a place I always loved – and now I suppose it will never be the same with those awful Nazis there. New York was rather disappointing really, you didn’t send many and the ones you did are very conventional. Surely, there must be other aspects of America besides the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building?”
“It’s what you are expected to admire,” Mona said. “I must look at this book properly, Mummy.”
She picked up the book and moved away from her mother to the other side of the fireplace. She sat down and tilted it on her knee, swiftly turning the pages backwards.
“I’m so glad you are pleased with my idea,” Mrs. Vale said, delightedly. “I used to say to Nanny. ‘I wonder how long it will be before Miss Mona comes home and we can show her the book instead of just sticking things in it?’ Ah! here’s my knitting.”
She moved a cushion on the sofa and pulled out her scarf.
“Now where was I… two purl, two plain. I had to undo three rows last night.”
She chattered on, unaware that her daughter was not listening.
Mona had turned the pages swiftly, past a photograph from The Tatler captioned ‘the beautiful representative of an old Bedfordshire famil’, past snapshots of herself at a point-to-point, in the finals at a tennis tournament, winning the first prize at a local gymkhana, past all these until she came to what she sought – headlines from the more sensational papers, photographs – long, long columns of interrogation. There were several pages of them. Mrs. Vale had faithfully cut out from every newspaper, the bits that referred to her daughter.
‘Here is my history,’ Mona thought, ‘and here is where everything went wrong in the story of Mona Vale.’
It could so easily have been told in another way. How ridiculously trivial fate was! It allowed the lives of several people to hinge on one unimportant action, one unpremeditated decision in which a “Yes” might so easily have a “No,” and the pathway taken would have been a broad and happy one, instead of tortuous and stony.
She had been in London, unhappy, wanting Lionel and angry because he was staying longer in the country than she thought necessary. After all, his holiday was so short, soon he would be going back to Paris and then goodness knows when she would see him again. It was this secrecy over their engagement that made things so difficult. Surely he was now well enough established to announce publicly that he was engaged. They might have to wait to get married, that Mona could understand, but not this wearing, unnecessary subterfuge – this pretending a casual friendship when really there was something very different. Yet Lionel was so insistent.
“I must think of my career, darling,” he said over and over again. “You want me to succeed and a false step at the beginning can do one immeasurable harm – in fact, it can cripple one’s whole future. You know I love you and if you love me what does a short time of waiting matter when we have our whole lives together afterwards? You aren’t jealous? – you know there’s no reason for you to be.”
