The Leaping Flame E-Book

Barbara Cartland

• Herausgeber: Barbara Cartland Ebooks Ltd
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: The Eternal Collection
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 397

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

She wasn't sad. Sad was the wrong word. Sadness did not capture the pain when a whole life had collapsed. Not sad. But broken, dazed and utterly forsaken even for misery. Home again after five years, in her quiet ancestral home in wartime England, Mona's past comes back to her in poignant, agonizing memories, memories of an ecstatic, clandestine love affair. Despite her unhappiness, Mona affects everyone with whom she comes into contact. The parson, the doctor, the landgirl and Michael the local Squire, are all changed as if ignited by a living flame. How a woman from the past threatens to destroy Mona's healing heart and expose the secret she thought was buried forever, and how through physical suffering she has a final chance of real happiness, are all told in this passionate and dramatic story by Barbara Cartland.

Leseprobe

The Leaping Flame

©1942

‘And there are those

Through whom the stream flows slowly,

Often dim and grey, but never still.

Its flow unceasing, ceaseless,

Till – as dawn breaks in a sable sky –

The purpose of its moving stands revealed,

The path of God – the leaping flame of life.’

One

‘Hell, I look awful!’

Mona knelt on the seat of the railway carriage and stared at herself in the looking-glass. She was too thin and there were dark lines heavily scored under her eyes.

‘Overdressed, too,’ she thought, and reaching up, she unclasped the diamond brooch from her shoulder. She stared at it for some moments. The diamonds were exquisitely set in platinum – French workmanship of course as no one could design or set jewels like the French. But it wasn’t of its beauty that Mona was thinking as she turned it over in her hands then hurriedly, as if she could not bear to look at it any longer, put it away in her handbag.

How vividly she could remember Lionel giving her that brooch. They had been in Naples. They had dined together and just before midnight they had walked out onto a wide marble balcony. Beneath them lay the city, its golden lights glittering and flashing, and in the distance was Vesuvius, silhouetted against the velvet sky, and not far away a young voice of haunting beauty was singing a serenade.

It was a night of stars, which the sea reflected on its smooth surface – smooth, yet moving gently and rhythmically, like a woman’s sleeping form. Mona had leant forward with her arms on the cool stone of the balustrade. She could feel the soft night breeze on her face, smell the fragrance of flowers and hear, above the murmur of the city, Lionel’s voice ask softly,

“Are you happy, darling?”

She had turned towards him. No need for words – he could read the answer in her eyes, in the expectant parting of her lips.

Then, breaking in upon the enchantment of the moment midnight had struck, came the tinkling chimes from many parts of the city, clear and melodious on the night air.

“Many happy returns of the day, my darling.”

Lionel had kissed her and for a moment they had clung together, a moment so ecstatic, so pulsating with wonder and loveliness that Mona shut her eyes, wanting it to last until eternity. Then he had released her and drawn a small pink leather case from his pocket.

“For you, my sweet.”

She had opened her eyes to thank him but it was difficult not to look at the man she loved rather than the present he offered. She had opened the box and drawn in her breath.

“Oh, it’s too marvellous! Put it on for me.”

He had pinned it where her dress ended low between her breasts.

“It suits you,” he said.

Thinking more of the touch of his fingers than of his gift she had whispered,

“I wish it could stay there forever. I wish we could stay here forever.”

“Darling, I can think of better places – not so public,” he had laughed, and broken the intensity of her mood so that she had laughed too.

How wonderful Lionel had been that night. How old had she been? Nineteen? No, twenty. Five years ago! How far away it seemed now! How lost – that quivering, breathless happiness…

Mona was suddenly conscious that she was still kneeling and staring with unseeing eyes at her reflection in the railway carriage mirror. She stood up, steadying herself against the swaying movement of the train. Again she looked at herself in the glass. The brooch was gone but it made little difference. She could not alter the cut of her clothes, the richness of silver foxes, the elegance with which the curls of her red-gold hair lay against her ears. Every inch of her screamed sophistication, polished poise, ‘a woman of the world’ and she knew just how flamboyant she would appear in Little Cobble.

She made a slight grimace at her reflection. Oh well, what did it matter? But she unpinned a spray of orchids from the furs lying across her shoulder – purple orchids, fragile, exotic and romantic.

How long, she wondered, would it be before she was given such flowers again? That nice man had scoured Lisbon for these.

“To bring you luck,” he murmured as he said goodbye.

She had let him kiss her hand and then her cheek. What did it matter? She would never see him again and he had been kind this last month while she had waited for a seat in an aeroplane to bring her home.

“You were made for orchids,” someone had once told her.

She had forgotten now who it was but she could recall the tone of voice in which the nameless one had spoken. Perhaps it was true. Orchids were useless, beautiful flowers without any scent.

‘That’s me,’ Mona thought. ‘Something decorative without a soul.’

Then she laughed out loud at her own theatricalism.

‘How serious I am becoming – and what a bore!’

She glanced out of the window. She would arrive in another five minutes.

The train was passing through a well-remembered bit of flat, dismal country and the weather might have chosen its mood specially to greet her – a grey day, a mist on the horizon, the fields wet and muddy from recent rains.

‘Typical English weather,’ she told herself. ‘I might as well get used to it.’

Funny to think how long it was since she had last seen the dreary dampness of an English winter. Four, or was it five years since she had been home? It was difficult to be sure, but her mother would be able to tell her exactly.

At the thought of her mother Mona made an impatient gesture. Here was really the reason for her self-criticism. Darling Mummy – how eagerly she would be waiting – killing the fatted calf, of course, for the return of the prodigal daughter.

‘And what shall I say to her?’ Mona asked herself. ‘Mother, I have sinned against Heaven and before thee?’

That, at least, would be appropriate and truthful. Yet was she going to tell the truth? Hadn’t she planned in her own mind to announce that she had come back to help her country.

“I understand there is work for every Englishwoman however unskilled.”

How easily, how convincingly she would say it! No! – she was sick of lies, sick of subterfuge. Hadn’t she had enough of them these last years? She’d tell the truth – she’d say,

“I’ve come home because I’m broke.”

That was the truth, anyway, even if it wasn’t the whole truth. And supposing Mummy asked,

“But, darling – what did you do with the salaries you told me you were getting all these years, the sums you got as secretary to that American millionaire? As companion to that delightful Frenchwoman? For running that little dress shop in Cairo?”

Or was it Cannes? Why hadn’t she kept a list of the things she was supposed to have done? She had forgotten them now, forgotten the lies she had invented, the convincing answers she had given to the questions from home. She couldn’t even remember the names of the people with whom she was supposed to have been. They had been clever names, too.

Sometimes Lionel and she would amuse themselves by inventing them. Sometimes she would take them from the character in a play or from the gossip columns of some local paper, and then she would go on to describe the person wittily and in detail. Having written them down, across the world her lies would wend their way by aeroplane, by train, by ship, until finally they reached their destination at the Priory.

Now they would be waiting for her, those pages and pages and pages of lies, preening themselves like the white pigeons on the grey gables. That was a good simile because they were white lies after all…

‘Yes, white,’ Mona told herself fiercely, as if someone had contradicted her.

And if white lies had kept Mummy happy and free from worry, wasn’t she justified in telling them? How could she have told the truth? How could she have begun to explain? Now, perhaps, she might have to! Not if she could avoid it, but there was always the possibility that she would not be able to go on lying. What was it Nanny used to say when she was a child?

“Be sure your sins will find you out.”

Dear old Nanny. She would be waiting too, getting excited now at the thought of seeing her.

The train was slowing up. Mona threw the spray of orchids under the seat and started collecting her things – the crocodile dressing-case, the soft pale-blue cashmere travelling rug, the mink coat of dark, specially selected skins – they all seemed incongruous in her present situation with a third-class ticket in her handbag.

When she had tipped the porter that would leave her exactly ten shillings in the world. Of course, when she got to the bank, she might find that some of Ned’s ridiculous shares had paid at last, but it seemed unlikely in wartime. Oh well, she was lucky to get home at all. There were many English women abroad in a far worse position than herself, left completely penniless without even the price of their ticket home.

Now the train had stopped. She opened the door and saw Dixon standing on the station. How old he looked! of course he must be over seventy, but she had even thought of him as an old man when he had first taught her to ride a pony!

“Here I am, Dixon.”

She held out her hand.

“It’s fine to see you, Miss Mona.”

Dixon never could remember that she had another name.

“I’ve got a mass of luggage in the van. Is there a porter?”

“There’s one of them women about somewhere,” Dixon replied. “Ted was called up last week. Reckon us’ll have to move it ourselves.”

“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” Mona said. “The cabin trunks are very heavy.”

“Maybe someone will give us a hand,” Dixon said laconically as they walked down the platform together.

His optimism was justified. A couple of soldiers assisted and soon all Mona’s numerous pieces of luggage were piled on the platform, their foreign labels looking like a flight of butterflies, she thought, a bright, frivolous touch on the otherwise dreary station.

She thanked the soldiers graciously.

“It’s a pleasure,” one of them told her.

People always found it a pleasure to do things for Mona  there was something appealingly feminine about her and if she needed help men appeared as if by magic.

“Reckon us won’t get all this in the trap,” Dixon said, scratching his head.

“Dixon, you don’t mean to say you’ve brought the little governess cart?”

“It’s that or nothing nowadays,” Dixon replied. “Us put up the car at the beginning of the war.”

“Well, we certainly can’t get even half these in on one journey,” Mona said. “What are you going to do?”

“Robinson will bring ’em up when he brings the coal,” Dixon said. “It’ll be all right.”

Mona looked slightly apprehensive at the idea of her luggage resting cheek by jowl with the sacks of coal, but there was nothing for it, and soon, with only her dressing case beside her, she was being driven away from the station in the old governess cart in which she had driven round the countryside as a child.

“How is my mother?” she asked.

“Her seems well enough,” the old man replied. “Don’t alter much.”

“Nor do you, Dixon,” Mona said, but he shook his head.

“I be getting on,” he replied, “but I mustn’t grumble. I ain’t fared too badly this winter, one way and another, and there’s been a lot to do. I be the only man left at the Priory nowadays.”

“Your son’s gone then?” Mona asked, remembering vaguely, although she could not recall his name, a middle-aged man who used to work in the garden.

“Yes, Jack be in the Pioneers,” Dixon said. “He were in Crete but he got away and the last the wife heard from him he were somewhere in Egypt.”

“Somewhere in Egypt!” That brought back memories. Memories of palm trees and sand, of moving slowly up the Nile, of Luxor, of a moon shining on the enigmatic mystery of the Sphinx, of driving out into the vast waste of empty desert, and of the hot, weary nights when she had lain in loneliness longing for Lionel…

No use thinking of that now. She gave herself a little shake. She must keep her mind on the present.

They had reached the bottom of the hill and the pony began to climb slowly up it. She could see the squat tower of the church, the thatched cottages and the ugly red brick of the school.

“The village hasn’t changed much,” she remarked.

“No, things don’t alter in Little Cobble,” Dixon answered.

“Is everyone the same? Are the Gunthers still at the Vicarage?”

“Yes, they be here right enough.”

“And Doctor Howlett and his wife?”

“Yes, the doctor be here, too.”

They reached the top of the hill. Mona looked back. That was the view which always meant home and England to her – the valley, green and flat, stretching away into a blue distance, broken only by the winding of the river and a line of poplars pointing like startled fingers towards the sky.

Now they were driving past the church with a few very white gravestones. And here were the gates, the gates of the Priory, just as they always had been, dilapidated and still in need of a coat of paint – but what did that matter when they always stood open invitingly?

The overgrown drive, the rhododendron bushes interspersed among the green and red holly, the oak trees, which had once formed an avenue but which were now irregular and ragged, their orderliness destroyed by age, by tempest and by lightning. And there was the house, the clinging ivy green against the weathered beauty of Elizabethan brick, the delicate tracery of stone-mullioned windows, and the nail-studded oak door under its pointed arch.

‘Home!’ Mona thought, and saw her mother standing in the doorway, a smile of eager welcome on her face.

Upstairs, Mona drew her hat slowly from her head. Her room seemed very small and yet she was ridiculously glad to be in it again. She had been half-afraid that her mother would insist on her sleeping in the spare room. But it had been stupid of her to think for one moment that such an idea would occur to her mother. Custom and tradition were the ruling factors at the Priory and, even though she had been away for years, nothing had changed, everything was just the same. Even the ornaments were in their accustomed places.

She looked round her bedroom. Yes, it was identically as she had left it, even to the pig with Brighton’s coat-of-arms across its back standing on the mantlepiece! The chintz four-poster, the blue casement curtains – a little more faded perhaps – the dressing table with its flounced petticoats to match, and the silver candlesticks by the bed – nothing was forgotten, nothing was changed.

‘I’ve come home,’ Mona thought, ‘and now that first moment of arrival is over, I’m glad.’

It was a relief to be able to relax, to know that she need not be amusing or clever, to know there were no cold, calculating eyes waiting to criticise, no bitter, spiteful tongues moving relentlessly.

Suddenly she wanted to identify herself with the house, to be part of its quiet, cosy shabbiness, to shut away in a cupboard with her mink that other smart, sophisticated self she hated – and regretted.

‘I must find something suitable to wear,’ she reflected, visualising those piles of chiffons and satins, ermine-trimmed velvets, brocades and lamés, all waiting at the station for the privilege of coming up in the coal cart. How utterly incongruous they would be here. No, need even to unpack them, she would never need them. All she would want would be an old tweed skirt, a jumper or two, and a pair of thick shoes.

“I don’t believe I possess such a thing,” Mona said out loud.

“Possess what, dearie?” a voice asked from the doorway, and she saw that Nanny had come in.

“The right clothes.”

“Haven’t you brought any with you?” Nanny inquired. “Because if you haven’t, I’ve got some of your old things put away in the wardrobe.”

“What things?”

“The tweeds you had before you married and that tea-gown of yours that you used to be so fond of – the black velvet with the little lace collar.”

“Oh, Nanny, you haven’t really kept them?”

“Indeed I have, and perhaps you will be glad of them now. What with coupons and high prices there’s nothing that doesn’t come in useful.”

“I shall be thrilled to see them again – they’re exactly what I want.”

“They’ll have to be taken in then,” Nanny said reproachfully. “You’ve got so thin there’s nothing of you. What have you been doing with yourself, child, all these years? Burning the candle at both ends, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“That’s exactly what I have been doing,” Mona replied, half-seriously, “but, oh Nanny – it gave a lovely light!”

Nanny sniffed.

“You always were one for doing too much. Restless, tearing about, wearing yourself out. But now we’ve got you home again we’ll soon fatten you up, though goodness knows what with! So little butter and so little sugar. As I said to your mother, it’s a puzzle nowadays to know what you can eat, and no mistake.”

Mona suddenly put out her arms and giving the old women a hug, she kissed her wrinkled cheek.

“I am glad to be home, Nanny, really glad.”

“And so I should hope. It’s about time you did come home – five years next April it will be since we last saw you.”

“As long as that?”

“As long as that,” Nanny echoed sharply. “Disgraceful. I’ve always thought it, the way you neglected your mother – but there, she wouldn’t listen to me.

“‘Write and tell her to come back,’ I’ve said to her so often, but she wouldn’t listen.

“‘She’s having a lovely time, Nanny,’ she’d answer, ‘and she’s meeting nice people. That’s what I want for my daughter – nice friendships with the right sort of people.’”

Mona turned away sharply. If Mummy only knew! But thank God she didn’t!

“Nice people!” she almost laughed aloud.

What would Mummy have thought of..? But no, she wouldn’t even think about them now, they had passed, they had all gone from her life, they all belonged to a chapter that was closed. She had tried to forget their names. She had tried to forget all they had said and all that they had meant over the passing years. Some things she could never forget, those things that were hers and Lionel’s, secretly, exquisitely their own – but the rest could be swept away into the limbo of the unwanted and forgotten.

“You look sad, pet.” It was Nanny speaking.

“Do I?” Mona asked. “I’m not.”

No, she wasn’t sad. How could anyone speak of sadness when their whole life had collapsed, had crashed into pieces? That didn’t make one sad, that just shattered one’s whole being, left one dazed and broken and too utterly forsaken even for misery.

“No, I’m not sad,” she repeated. “I am happy, so happy to be home. Let’s go downstairs. Where’s Mother?”

“She’s getting the tea ready for you.”

“Haven’t we any maids?”

“We have a woman who comes in in the mornings, of course all the others have been called up – and then your mother and I manage in the afternoon.”

“Good heavens! – but what about the housework?”

“We’ve shut up most of the rooms,” Nanny explained. “We had evacuees in them at the beginning of the war but they all went back to London. They found it too dull here. ‘I’d rather be bombed than bored,’ one of them said to me – a pert young bit she was. Complained because she couldn’t get her hair waved once a week! If they start bombing again, I suppose we may get some children, but at the moment the rooms are empty. I give them an airing once a month, but otherwise we keep them shut up.”

“Perhaps it’s a good thing,” Mona said. “The house always was too large for us, or rather, too large for our income.”

“And your Mother has let the Lodge. Did she tell you?”

“No, I haven’t heard any of the gossip yet. Who has she let it to?”

“A writing woman of some sort,” Nanny answered. “She got her house bombed in London and has three small children. Her husband is there, too, he’s an adjutant at the aerodrome. They manage all right, but how, I can’t think. The Lodge was always too small even for old Hodge and his wife.”

“What’s happened to them?”

“Dead some time now. Both carried off the same winter from pneumonia.”

“I thought I saw some new gravestones in the churchyard as I passed.”

“They’re not the only ones,” Nanny said,

“Well, don’t be gloomy darling,” Mona admonished. “I think I had better hear about the births first and come to the deaths slowly, although I know there’s nothing Little Cobble enjoys more than a funeral.”

She left her room and walked down the wide oak staircase with its heavy carving, which had been there since Elizabeth’s reign. The stained glass in the hall windows cast a strange, iridescent light and the heraldic leopards on the newels stood out in relief against the sombre darkness of the panelling.

Mona opened the door of the sitting room. It was a long, low room and over the open fireplace was the one treasure in the house, the portrait of the first Vale to own the Priory, painted by Van Dyck.

Mrs. Vale, small, grey-haired, and indefatigably energetic, was sitting by the fire pouring out tea. She looked up as her daughter entered and smiled. There was a faint, faded echo of Mona’s loveliness, combined with the charm of a sweet personality.

“Come along, darling,” she said. “I’ve made some hot buttered toast for you. You must be hungry after that long journey. I wish I could offer you an egg, but just because Nanny and I particularly hoped they’d do their best for your arrival, the hens have all refused to lay for three days.”

“I couldn’t eat one even if it was there.”

“All the same, I’d like to have been able to offer you one. You have got so thin darling, you really must try to eat a lot now you are home again.”

“At least I’m fashionable,” Mona said lightly.

“But I don’t think it’s pretty,” her mother replied. “You never were fat, but your face has got quite haggard.”

“Tell me I’m looking a fright and have done with it.”

Her mother smiled at her affectionately.

“You were always pretty, you silly child, but I like to see you looking your best. After all, you’ve been away so long I want to show you off.”

“Good heavens! – who to?”

“All our friends,” Mrs. Vale replied. “I can’t tell you how excited everyone is at the thought of your return.”

Mona helped herself to hot buttered toast.

“It gives them something to talk about, I suppose. They must have been hard up for scandal since I went away.”

“Now, darling,” her mother admonished, “you mustn’t talk like that. You know that little trouble has been completely forgotten – completely. Besides, a lot of people down here really knew nothing about it. It was only the more sensational London papers that made such a fuss. And since then you’ve been married.”

“And widowed,” Mona added.

“Yes, dear. Poor Ned! Do you ever hear anything from his relations?”

“Not a word.”

“I did see something in the paper about his mother the other day,” Mrs. Vale went on. “I think she was opening a bazaar or something like that.”

“She would be. A tiresome woman – I never liked her.”

“Poor thing, I was sorry for her. Such an unsatisfactory way to lose one’s only son. But I never thought that was an excuse for the letter she wrote to you. Why, you might have thought that you’d encouraged him to go dashing about in that idiotic manner!”

“Perhaps I did,” Mona said reflectively.

“Now darling, don’t talk like that,” her mother pleaded. “You always make yourself out worse than you are.”

“That would be difficult.”

“Mona!”

“I’m sorry, Mother. Go on telling me how delighted everyone will be to see me and who you want to show me off to. How do you suggest I dress for the occasion? In sackcloth and ashes as the repentant sinner?”

“Darling, you are being very unkind.”

“I’m sorry, Mummy, I really am.” Mona got up, and putting an arm across her mother’s shoulder, kissed her gently. “It’s just embarrassment that’s making me stupid.”

“Embarrassment?”

“Well, shyness, if you like. It’s so long since I have been home.”

“But it is your home and it has always been there waiting for when you were ready to come back.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s true, it’s always been here waiting for me. I’ve thought about that. I have really, and though I’ve been afraid, it’s been a heavenly feeling to know it was there.”

“Afraid? Why should you be afraid of coming home?”

“Did I say afraid?” Mona asked quickly. “That’s a silly word. Don’t listen to me, Mummy. Go on talking, tell me what you were going to say about your friends. Who is there to see I’m back?”

“Well, Michael for one.”

“Michael! Of course, I had forgotten him. Is he still here?”

“Of course he is, my dear, where else would he be?”

“I didn’t think about it really. Isn’t he in the Army or something?”

“Now, Mona, I told you in my letters how he was wounded at Dunkirk. He has been invalided out of the Army now and I’m afraid he’ll always have a permanently stiff leg. He did everything he could to make them keep him, but it was no use and so he’s back again farming. And a very good thing too, really, the estate got into a terrible way when he was in the Army.”

“Michael!” Mona spoke his name softly. “Do you know, Mother, I hadn’t thought about him all these years and yet I suppose Cobble wouldn’t be Cobble without Michael at the Park.”

“Indeed it wouldn’t,” Mrs. Vale said. “I always hoped…”

She stopped.

“…That I would marry Michael,” Mona finished. “But, darling, of course we all knew that. Why, I was thrown at his head ever since I could sit up in my pram. I remember at a children’s party when you insisted on us dancing together that I pinched him and in retaliation he pulled my hair.”

“Michael was always very fond of you.”

“Yes, that’s true. When I first came out, he did like me in a condescending sort of way. Now, Mother, don’t argue. Michael was very condescending, so dark and so superior, and the Merrill nose gave him a supercilious air.”

“He couldn’t help that.”

“No, I know he couldn’t. There have been Merrills with that sort of nose at Cobble Park ever since there have been Vales with noses turned the other way like mine at the Priory. Well, it’s no use, those sort of noses don’t mix well together, despite all your scheming my darling.”

“You’re a ridiculous child. I shall ask Michael to dinner in spite of all you say.”

“And I shall be delighted to see him,” Mona replied.

She got up from the table and stretched herself.

“Oh, it’s good to be back. You make me feel young again, I feel as if I was seventeen, leaving school and coming out into a big, exciting world full of drama and romance and young men and excitements. What fun I had! Do you remember that first Christmas – the party here, and how we danced even after breakfast, and how we skated on that lake and tobogganed down the hill to the station? How shocked everyone was at the way we went on – and what glorious, perfect fun it all was!”

“I remember,” Mrs. Vale said. “And Lionel was one of our guests. You knew, of course, darling, that poor Lionel had died in America?”

Mona stood still. She felt suddenly paralysed. The one question she dreaded had come.

Two

She waited for the agony she had anticipated to stab her, but it didn’t come. Instead, she heard her voice, quite steady and impersonal – the voice of a stranger – say,

“Yes. I knew.”

“Such a tragedy!” her mother said sadly. “After all, he was only thirty-nine and with such a brilliant career ahead of him. Everyone said he was certain to be given an Ambassadorship soon. I suppose you didn’t see anything of him just before he died?”

“No.”

That was true too, those three days had seemed like centuries – centuries of frantic, agonizing waiting.

Mrs. Vale was still talking.

“I expect his wife will stay on in America. It would be the wise thing to do with those two small children. Senseless to come back to England and risk both the journey and the bombing. I’m afraid she will be broken-hearted, poor girl. The whole thing was so sudden and unexpected. Did you like her, darling?”

“I didn’t know her.”

Must they go on talking like this? Was there no way to stop these questions?

“I should have thought you might have run across Ann in your travels, but then I suppose diplomatic parties weren’t much in your line. You always did hate ceremonial occasions. But I’m sorry about Lionel. How excited he was about his first appointment! He heard about it when he was staying here. Do you remember, the Christmas you came out?”

“Yes.”

“I can see him now coming down to breakfast wearing an eyeglass instead of his horn-rimmed spectacles. You all teased him and someone, I’m not certain it wasn’t you darling, said,

“‘Lionel, you look the perfect diplomat.’

“‘I am one, at last.’ he replied.

“Then he told us about his appointment. He wasn’t to go at once but to remain in London for some months and then go to Paris. That’s right isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Of course, it all comes back to me now. And you saw quite a lot of him in Paris when you were living over there, didn’t you darling?”

“Yes, quite a lot.”

“You know Mona, at one time I’d an idea that you and Lionel were fond of each other. Of course, you had so many young men that I didn’t pay any particular attention to those that were in love with you, but I rather fancied that you had a soft spot in your heart for Lionel. I shouldn’t have minded you marrying him, for, although you were cousins, it wasn’t really near enough to make any difference to your children, and I always liked Lionel. He had great charm and he was so ambitious that one felt he was bound to go far. Still, as things have turned out, perhaps it’s all for the best.”

‘Stop! Stop!’ a voice inside her was shrieking. ‘I can’t hear any more, I can’t bear it!’

Now the pain for which she had been waiting was twisting her heart. She couldn’t bear it – no, she couldn’t. And yet that strange, impersonal voice, which didn’t seem to belong to her, was speaking quite casually.

“It’s raining.”

“Oh, is it?” her mother exclaimed. “It isn’t surprising. I’ve been expecting it all day. I’m thankful it’s held off till now. And perhaps it’s a blessing, it will mean there’s no chance of Mrs. Skeffington-Browne coming here this evening.”

“Who is she?”

“Oh, my dear, the most tiresome woman! She’s taken The Towers.”

“Why, what’s happened to the Colonel?”

“Darling, you know he died two years ago. I wrote and told you.”

“Yes, of course.”

‘Funny,’ Mona thought, ‘I can’t remember a thing about it. Did I merely forget to read Mummy’s letters, or was it that they meant nothing to me, that I was too busy thinking of other things, too busy living, and loving?’

“Well, these Skeffington-Brownes,” Mrs. Vale was saying, “bought The Towers. I don’t want to be a snob, but really the Skeffington-Brownes are almost unbearable. They are rude to all the nicest people, and toady to all those whom they think are important. A title, of course, is Mrs. Skeffington-Browne’s idea of bliss. You should have seen her eyes glisten when she heard you were coming to stay.”

“‘I shall take the first opportunity, Mrs. Vale,’ she said to me, ‘of coming to call on your daughter, but I’m afraid Lady Carsdale will find it very dull here after her exciting life abroad.’”

Mona turned away from the window.

“She sounds terrible,” she said indifferently. Then added earnestly,

“Mother, I want to ask you something. Do you think I must use my title now I’m home again? I’d forgotten about it abroad, as I told you, I preferred not to use it. I like being Miss Vale. Don’t you think I can go on calling myself what is, after all, my own name?”

“No, I don’t think you can,” Mrs. Vale exclaimed. “It will look so odd. After all, what will people think?”

“I’d much rather not use it,” Mona insisted.

“Well, darling, you can’t help it. You are a married woman, or rather a widow. In the eyes of the law as well as in the eyes of the world, you can’t call yourself Mrs. Vale. That would be too confusing, and I don’t see how you can be a ‘Miss’.”

“No, I suppose it’s a silly idea. I just felt that perhaps I could start again.”

“That’s easy,” Mrs. Vale said lightly. “You can start again by getting married to somebody really nice.”

“That’s one thing I shall never do,” Mona replied. “Never! Never!”

She spoke with a sudden passion, her voice vibrating through the room. Her mother looked startled.

“But why…” she began, and then Mona stopped her.

“I’m sorry, Mummy. Don’t take any notice of me, I’m tired.”

“Of course you are darling, and I mustn’t worry you with plans for the future the moment you arrive home. There’s only one thing I want at the moment and that is to have you to myself. Goodness knows I haven’t seen much of you these past years.”

Mrs. Vale put her hand on her daughter’s arm.

“I am so terribly glad to have you back.”

“Bless you!” Mona bent and kissed her mother on the cheek.

“There now,” Mrs. Vale said, putting her handkerchief to her eyes, “I feel quite absurdly sentimental. Mona, dear child, sit down in front of the fire and be cosy. I am going to help Nanny do the black-out. We had to have boards made for the hall windows and it takes two of us to lift them up. Such a nuisance and expense!”

“Shall I come and help you?”

“Certainly not. This is your first night home and you’ve got to rest and let us look after you. I shan’t be long – just look and see if you can find a khaki scarf somewhere in the room. I can’t think where I’ve left it and I’ve got to get it finished by tomorrow.”

“Is it so important?” Mona asked, looking around her.

She knew of old her mother’s habit of leaving things in the most unlikely places.

“Well, we have our knitting party here tomorrow – or is it the W.V.S.? I can never remember.”

“Is there any difference?”

“Difference!” Mrs. Vale exclaimed. “I should think there is! I can’t begin to tell you the trouble there is in the village over the war services. Really, we seem to have had a little war of our own about it. It’s all been very unfortunate, but I’ve managed to compromise the best way I can.”

“We have the knitting party here one afternoon a week and the W.V.S. another. I’m afraid you’ll find them rather a nuisance, except that the W.V.S. sit in the dining room. We have the knitting party in here.”

“Why must they have different rooms if they don’t come on the same day?” Mona asked.

“I really don’t know,” Mrs. Vale replied vaguely, “except the feeling has been so intense between them that I think Nanny and I felt that even the atmosphere might be charged with hostility.”

“How ridiculous!” Mona laughed.

“It is, isn’t it? But after all, when one has to live in the place, I do dislike having to fight with anyone and so I belong to both. The only trouble is I keep muddling them up and taking the socks I’ve knitted for the W.V.S. to the knitting party and vice versa. My gifts are then received in stony silence.”

“As I can’t knit,” Mona said, “I shan’t have to join either, thank goodness!”

“Don’t you be too sure,” Mrs. Vale retorted. “There are some very determined women in both parties. Well, do find my scarf darling, I must have it by tomorrow.”

Mrs. Vale went out of the room and closed the door, but when she was alone Mona made no effort to look for the lost scarf. Instead, she stood staring into the heart of the fire.

Then, as if suddenly stirred into action, she raised her hands to the portrait of Sir Francis Vale above the fireplace. She pressed a hidden spring at the corner of the finely carved frame and, as she did so, a piece of panelling on the other side of the fireplace swung slowly open. Mona hesitated a moment, took a deep breath, and entered the tiny, secret room where Sir Francis had once hidden with the Prior of the monastery while Queen Elizabeth’s men searched the building. The room where another Vale had been concealed while Oliver Cromwell’s men looted and sacked the house – the room where Lionel had first kissed her at that Christmas party long ago.

The room was square and oak-panelled. It contained two old high-backed chairs and a prie-Dieu. It was nearly dark, for it was dusk outside and the light came through skilfully concealed openings in the bricks.

Mona closed the panel that opened into the sitting room and stood still in the twilight. There was the musty smell of age and dust and yet it seemed to her that the atmosphere was steeped in happiness – that ecstatic happiness which had been hers, here in this secret place.

It had been snowing outside – snowing too hard for the party to go out. Someone had suggested playing ‘Sardines’ and Mona and Lionel had chosen to go and hide. It was Lionel who had thought of the hidden room.

“It wouldn’t be fair,” Mona had protested, “the others don’t know about it. After all, it is supposed to be a family secret. They’ll never find us.”

“Never mind,” Lionel had replied. “We’ll go in there for a bit to give them a real run for their money – then, when they think they have looked everywhere, we’ll creep out and surprise them in some quite obvious place. Come on.”

Mona had agreed. She had found it easy ever since he had arrived in the house to agree with her good-looking older cousin. They had pressed the spring in Sir Francis’s picture, the oak panelling had swung and they had crept through, closing the narrow door behind them.

There had been a faint, eerie light in the secret room, they could just see the expression on each other’s faces, and they seemed to stand in a No-Man’s-Land between the centuries, knowing neither age nor period but only a disconnected present. They had been silent and Mona was conscious of some strange tension, of a breathlessness she had never known before. Lionel was looking down at her, and the laughter that had come so easily to her lips all day was stilled.

“Mona,” He spoke her name, hardly above a whisper. She did not answer and he said it again. “Mona, why are you trembling?”

“I don’t know,” she replied, her voice as low as his.

And yet she did know. It was his nearness, the feeling of being softly and steadily overwhelmed, of watching him come nearer, of feeling his arms go round her and her head fall back against his shoulder. With his lips close to hers he had waited just a second longer.

“You’re lovely,” he said. “Oh, God, Mona, how lovely!”

Then he had kissed her. Her first kiss and the whole world was throbbing, pulsating, trembling and quivering, until she did not know whether she was more happy or afraid. He had kissed her eyes, her hair, and the softness of her neck. He was gentle and experienced, aware that she was as tremulous as any captured bird.

His lips were on her fingers and the palms of her hands and again he sought her mouth.

“Oh, my lovely ... my lovely!”

His words were broken now. Lionel, the sophisticated, the assured, the poised young diplomat, was incoherent with emotion. Mona thrilled at the first awareness of her power even while she still trembled.

So this was love? This restless, breathless beauty, this beating of heart and pulse, this unsatisfied seeking of lips and hands? How long they stood in the secret room she had no idea. In sentences half-lost in kisses, they planned their future. They must wait, of course, they’d tell no one as yet...

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