by P. G. Glynn
Instead of heeding one who knew about these things, he had put his faith in a girl with no knowledge of the world and in a man who never thought beyond betting and drinking. John was bad through and through – a fact that was obvious to anyone with a scrap of sense – and yet Howard, who was usually sensible, had both liked and trusted him. He had not seen the badness for some reason and had maintained that in John’s keeping Marie would be safe. Well, Janet was the last person ever to say ‘I told you so’ but, were Howard alive today, she would be sorely tempted to say it. With him dead, though, she had no-one to say it to. Her task now was to take sole responsibility for showing Marie her daughterly duty.
Since Otto Berger’s remark at tea Janet had, strangely, almost stopped thinking of her as Mary. If he thought that the name Marie Howard looked impressive in lights, then who was she to argue? He was, after all, quite clearly a man who knew a thing or two about life … and she must take account of the fact that he seemed anxious to do right. So it was not as if he had compromised Marie intending to leave her in the lurch. Perhaps, even, in his country they did things out of turn. Yes, allowances must be made since it would not do to let a rebuke drive him away.
Janet would need to tread very carefully, keeping the right balance between disapproval and approval while ensuring that he married Marie … and quickly. Then, instead of having to hang her head along the village street, Janet would be able to walk tall as usual – or taller. It was not in her to boast, but in the normal course of events she would have to tell folk that her daughter would soon be mistress of a castle in Czechoslovakia. Which would cause talk, of course, but not of the wrong sort. Janet must remember, however, to check with Mr Berger on whose side he fought in the war. It would not go down well around here if Czechoslovakia had sided with Kaiser Bill and Marie was in effect marrying the enemy, but Janet felt sure that if necessary even this could be smoothed over. And she doubted it would be necessary since for the life of her she could not recall any derogatory mention of Czechoslovakia while the war was being fought.
All things considered Marie looked set to land on her feet, which was where she had always landed no matter how much she erred. While seeing no justice there Janet could see certain advantages for the whole family in a match between Marie and Mr Berger. For one thing, after the marriage Janet would no longer need to worry about her wayward daughter. Marie would be living far from John, far from the licentious London theatre. She would be respectably married, with a husband to take care of her and ensure that she kept to a narrower path in future, and her children would be heirs to a castle and all that went with it. In addition, she would never want for anything and would most likely be in a position to send more money home than she sent at present. As the wife of a wealthy man she could afford to be generous to her family. Not that she was ungenerous now, fair do’s. Marie’s generosity could increase though, couldn’t it, in direct proportion to her good fortune?
That satisfactorily settled in her head Janet waited until they were all back in Beulah after chapel before saying to Marie: “I’ve some clothes to iron out with you. While the others make themselves comfortable and Alice puts the kettle on for a nice cup of tea you, my girl, are coming with me.”
“Might I come too?” asked Otto deferentially.
“Not yet,” Janet said, rather enjoying his deference and Marie’s obvious discomfiture. She’d soon sort out this problem and have them both exactly where she wanted them. “I’ll let you know when we’re ready for you.”
Following Mam meekly into the front room, which was seldom used, Marie found that lines of Florence’s kept floating through her head: ‘I have not shrunk back from you, Mama, because I fear you, or because I dread to be disgraced by you. I only wish to do my duty to Papa’. She could not seem to empty her head of them, nor rid her heart of an overwhelming sense of impending disaster. Through the window she could see Pa’s poplars and, between these, the Sugar Loaf which currently appeared to be mocking her. Marie turned from the view to face her mother.
“Mam … ”
Janet imperiously held up one hand. “Don’t ‘Mam’ me!” she instructed, sitting with her back to the window in the armchair that had been Howard’s and that was part of the family’s Rexine three-piece. “I want some plain-speaking so I’m going to ask you a question I never thought to hear myself asking. Are you still as you were when you left Gilchrist?”
Marie could not look at Mam without seeing Pa in that chair and it was strangely as if he had spoken. She had never lied to Pa in her life and could not lie now. But she could bluff a little, postponing the dreaded moment. “I’m not sure I follow you.”
“Indeed you do!” Mam’s expression was so forbidding that Marie’s legs went weak and she sank on to the settee, from which there was no avoiding the sight of the Sugar Loaf rising like a spectre from her childhood. “Nevertheless, so that there can be no possible misunderstanding, I’ll spell it out for you: are you still a virgin?”
“No.”
Janet’s thin lips all but disappeared as she sucked them in. “You brazen hussy!” she accused as soon as she could find sufficient breath. “Sitting there as if butter wouldn’t melt and telling me you’ve consorted with the devil. This is a terrible day for the Jenkins family. The next question,” she sighed, raising her eyes heavenwards, “is how much disgrace have you brought on us? Are we dealing here with one sin, or with many? You’d best tell me and have done with it. Are you, or are you not, expecting? Just answer ‘no’ or ‘yes’.”
“Yes,” Marie said.
Janet now closed her eyes as if to indicate that she’d sooner be blind than have to look at her wanton child. “Then give thanks that your father is already dead. This shock could otherwise have killed him.”
“Don’t say such a thing – please, Mam, don’t say it!” Marie felt as if her world were ending. “Pa would never have judged me without giving me a fair hearing. He … ”
“It’s said – and, what’s more, it’s correct. You’re forgetting that I knew your father rather better than you did. He was an upright, God-fearing man with a healthy respect for the laws of our land as well, of course, as for the Ten Commandments. He was not a man to go through life bending rules to suit himself. Nor,” she paused meaningfully, “was he a man to stand by and watch others bending them. And many’s the time I heard him say that flouting convention was a great mistake for which the flouter always paid in some way. He’d be shocked rigid by your wicked behaviour, my girl – yes, shocked to the core – and would likely disown his favourite daughter. Howard put such trust in you, such faith, which I regret to say was entirely misplaced. You were not to be trusted to be let loose in London and now as a well-respected family we are faced with the consequences of your shameful ways. From this moment on, I’m telling you straight, you will stop your selfish wilfulness and will do as I say.”
The door opened then and Otto walked in with a tea tray. Balancing this on one hand and closing the door behind him he smiled at them, saying: “Talking’s such thirsty work that I thought you’d be needing refreshment and assured Alice that I was quite capable of bringing it in without spilling tea in the saucers. I’ve also brought something else.” Taking centre-stage after depositing the tray on an occasional table, he reached into his breast pocket and produced a small jeweller’s box, opening and holding it so that Janet could examine the contents. “My darling Marie admired the diamond during a walk along Bond Street,” he told her, “and, unable to deny her anything, I later had it made into this ring. Do you like it?”
Like it? She was transfixed. Not having known that diamonds could come in such a size, never mind that they could sparkle as if lit with a thousand lights, Janet couldn’t speak for some while. Then, still mesmerised, she asked him: “Is it the kind of ring I think it is?”
“That depends on what you’re thinking.”
He had deflowered and – horror of horrors! – impregnated her daughter so she should rightfully be angry with
him, but she could hardly show anger if this was an engagement ring. It must be that in his country the honeymoon preceded marriage, which was an odd custom but one must allow for foreign ways differing in certain respects from Welsh ones. To do otherwise might be a sign of narrow-mindedness and Janet’s mind was satisfactorily broad. She said, proceeding with extreme caution: “Here in Wales, such a ring would be regarded as a symbol of … intent.”
“Ah, yes! We understand each other perfectly. You see, it has long been my wish to marry Marie but, naturally, I could not ask her until I had asked her mother’s permission. That is how we do things in my country. Is it also how you do them here?”
Sighing with relief that this was proving so straightforward, Janet answered: “It is indeed! Obviously, you would be asking her father if only he were still with us … but Marie will have told you, I’m sure, that Howard was killed in the war. Speaking of the war, Mr Berger … you will have fought for the Allies, of course?”
Otto spread his hands helplessly. “I hope it won’t go against me in your eyes that I didn’t fight. For reasons beyond my control, I’m afraid that I spent the war in Yorkshire.”
“You did?” Janet smiled. It did not matter to her if he was a pacifist, or even a conscientious objector, just as long as she could tell people that he had not fought for the enemy. “Then that is not a problem … but your Catholicism might be.”
“Might it?”
“Being a Catholic is not the same as being a Baptist.”
“It isn’t,” he cheerfully agreed.
Janet decided against making too much of this. “Are our two religions very different?”
“I truly don’t know.” Enjoying himself hugely, Otto backed away from Janet and sat on the settee next to an extraordinarily subdued and silent Marie. “Do you have a Pope?”
“No, we don’t … and nor do we hold with worshipping anyone other than God,” Janet told him primly.
“You’re referring to our worship of the Blessed Virgin?” When she nodded, blushing, he protested: “Then you must be forgetting that Jesus was immaculately begotten by God and born of Mary, who was therefore God’s wife in a sense! You do believe in the Virgin Birth and its significance?”
Janet nodded again, thinking that he seemed remarkably oblivious to the imprudence of speaking just at present of virgins. “I also believe in the sanctity of marriage and in being married before … before indulging, and certainly before giving birth.”
“Indulging?” he queried.
Not minded to clarify and anxious to finalise things, Janet said to him: “We can overlook your being a Catholic, I think, since innocent babes should never be made to suffer for their parents’ sins.”
Wondering whether she saw him as sinful for being a Catholic as well as for fathering the baby that Charles had in fact fathered, Otto asked: “So I have your blessing, have I, to ask Marie to be my wife?”
“You have mine,” Janet answered, with a meaningful glance at Marie, “and, I’m certain, her father’s. Will you marry in London, or in Czechoslovakia?”
19
Marie had felt too numb to prevent Otto’s ring being slipped on her finger, but not too numb to insist that the wedding wouldn’t take place in Czechoslovakia. She had also insisted that she would never live there, only to see Otto raise an eyebrow as if to remind her of the dangers of saying ‘never’. He had then been very solicitous, vowing to make her happy and telling her that once married they could live anywhere she wished. His loving attentiveness after Mam’s onslaught had warmed Marie to him a little – and she had been vastly relieved that he had kept from Mam the fact that the baby was not his. He had also, when over a cup of tea Mam had queried how Marie had hurt her wrist, come up with a cock-and-bull story that made no mention of Mrs Purfitt’s. That marked him as a gentleman, didn’t it? There were worse things than marrying him.
Alice and Lucy had reacted oppositely to her engagement ring. Alice, like Mam, had been impressed by the size of the diamond while Lucy had looked troubled as if sensing that Marie’s betrothal to Otto was not all that it should be. She had even asked Marie ‘Are you happy?’ to which Mam had replied sharply ‘Of course she is!’ As for Nell: she clearly felt that Marie had done the right thing in opting for respectability. If she had any pangs about Otto now being spoken for it was not in her nature to say so or show these.
So would Pa want this marriage – and would he truly share Mam’s belief that she was wicked? Marie could not accept that he would, let alone that he would disown her, but perhaps she should and perhaps Mam actually had known him best. She was married to him, after all, and yet … and yet …
It did not seem to matter to Mam whether Marie loved Otto, whereas that would surely have mattered to Pa. Marie was certain that Pa saw love as important – more important than appearances – and that whatever the circumstances he would at least have asked her whether she loved the man she was agreeing to marry. Perhaps Mam had assumed she did, given that Mam thought it was Otto she had been to bed with. Oh, what a mess it all was! Marie could have wept for the mess she had made of things.
Not that crying would help and nor was it advantageous to look back and wonder what she should have done differently. There she had been, at the top of her tree and worry-free, while now she felt bowed down with self-doubt and with guilt for having sinned.
How had her love for Charles brought her to this? Her love for him had seemed the purest thing, carrying her to heights she had not dreamed existed. Best not to think about it; best just to be thankful that Otto wanted to marry her despite her condition.
So resigned, Marie slept for the rest of the journey back to London. They were driving through the night, not having been invited to stay at Beulah. There wasn’t room for them all, of course, besides which Marie had had no wish to linger in Gilchrist. Mam’s presence was too unsettling, too confusing, and had made her feel like a helpless child again. She had needed to leave at the first opportunity so that she could revert to thinking for herself instead of having thoughts put into her head. Marie regretted, though, that there had been no chance to talk to Lucy on her own.
+++++
John Jones would have been frantic with worry had it not been for Otto’s note. The fact that Marie was with Otto was reassuring in that if she was with him she was not in the hands of some back-street abortionist. When she left this morning (no, yesterday morning!) she seemed preoccupied and somehow removed from him, as if intent on doing something she should not be doing. It had not been a bit like a normal Sunday, with Marie dashing off somewhere exotic, and there had been an air of doom about her. John was fairly sure he was not imagining this, given though he was currently to lurid imaginings. So the note delivered by a messenger from Claridge’s had eased his mind a little, even while adding to the mystery.
If when she left Marie had had the intention of meeting Nell, and emphatically not Otto, how was it that both girls were with Otto now, in some unspecified place? The note had been brief, to say the least, simply telling John that Marie and Nell were in safe hands and that they would be home very late. John, who was standing in his dressing gown and slippers in the middle of an otherwise deserted Marylebone Lane, thought that three o’clock in the morning went beyond the bounds of lateness into another territory altogether. But for the fact that he instinctively trusted Otto, he would by now have been at panic-stations. Perhaps he should be panicking. Perhaps he should call the police. Where could the three of them have gone that took so long?
John suddenly knew the answer: Monmouthshire! Of course! Otto, desperate to marry Marie, had driven to Wales to meet her mother. How that had all come about John could not say, but everything pointed to Otto having gone to see Janet. Only he, to whom distance meant nothing, would have undertaken such a journey at the drop of a hat but John reckoned it was a fair bet that he had undertaken it, despite the fact that Marie was due on-stage tonight in OLIVER TWIST. Trustworthy in some respects, Otto was devious in others and accustomed to
having his own way. So what would he be up to with Janet? John strongly suspected that he was up to something underhand - something not necessarily in Marie’s best interests. At present John was a better judge of these than Marie, whose judgment was clouded by her predicament. Did Otto know of her condition and could he somehow have used it as a lever with her mother, who in turn would convince Marie that marriage was the only answer? John could just hear Janet saying ‘Think of your poor father, who would turn in his grave if he knew of this disgrace!’ Yes, his sister was a past master at emotional blackmail and knew every trick in the book when it came to having things her way. But John was jumping the gun. Why, he did not even know for certain that Otto had taken Marie to Wales!
He knew an hour later, as the Rolls finally purred to a standstill alongside the kerb. “We dropped Nell off first,” Otto told him, alighting, “which is why we’re on the tardy side.”
“Tardy?” queried John, who by the gaslight from almost immediately above him could see Marie curled up on the rear seat, fast asleep. “I wouldn’t call this tardy – I’d call it lunacy! Where in God’s name have you been?”
“Seeking permission to marry your niece who has made me the happiest of men by consenting to marry me.”
“Under duress from her mother?” John asked curtly.
“Duress?” Otto echoed. “That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?”
“Not for my sister, it isn’t, the gutless bitch! Why, as a matter of interest, didn’t you ask my permission? I might not be Marie’s father, but I’m Howard’s stand-in – and, unlike her mother, I want what’s best for her.”
“And you don’t think I fit into that category?”
“I might, if she loved you … but I rather doubt she does. Nobody, ever, under any circumstances, should enter a marriage without love.”