Thank Heaven Fasting (28 page)

Monica was touched at her mother's self-restraint in not having said a word about her own loneliness when her daughter should be gone.

She put her arms round her neck, as she had not done since childhood.

“You won't miss me too much, will you? I shall be quite
close by, you know, and it'll be such fun showing you the house and everything. You won't feel too lonely?”

“No, no. I shall be all right. Nothing in the world could make me happier than to see you safely married to a good man—and a gentleman—someone we've known almost all our lives, like Herbert.”

They kissed, stirred by unusual emotions.

Suddenly Monica felt her mother's hot tears on her face.

“Darling,” whispered Mrs. Ingram brokenly, “it isn't what we once dreamed of for you—it isn't as if——But oh, Monica, say you'll be happy. I couldn't, couldn't have borne to see you an old maid.”

Monica could not answer.

She pressed her mother more closely in her arms.

At last she said, in a stifled murmur:

“It's all right, mother—really. I'm very happy.”

It was true.

Monica was happier than she had ever thought to be, since the far-off days of her unshattered, youthful confidence.

For the first time since her foolish love-affair with Christopher Lane, Monica had regained her self-respect.

It was Monica's wedding-day.

She was moving slowly up the aisle, veiled and robed in white, to the pealing of the organ, just as she had so often, waking and sleeping, dreamed of doing.

The tightly-frock-coated form of her bridegroom stood at the chancel rails, a white flower correctly decorating his button-hole, his hand nervously smoothing the thin, dark strands that lay sparsely across the crown of his head.

Monica did not really see him.

She did not see her mother in the front bench, already sobbing in a quiet ecstasy, nor cousin Blanche craning anxiously forward under her huge flowered hat.

She did not see Frederica and Cecily Marlowe, the resemblance between them now strangely accentuated until each looked merely the pale shadow of a pale shadow.

She did not see Carol Anderson, who stood with folded arms and compressed lips, gazing at her with a fixed look of mingled reproach and fortitude.

Monica saw nothing. She was conscious of nothing, save that the moment towards which the whole of life had been tending had come at last.

As she knelt at the chancel steps, her heart was filled with a prayer of ardent and humble thanksgiving.

She was to have a life of her own, after all.

A home, a husband, a recognized position as a married woman—an occupation. At last, she would have justified her existence.

Up to the very last moment she had been afraid, and had known that her mother was afraid, lest something should happen to prevent her marriage.

Nothing had happened: she was safe for ever.

There was no further need to be afraid, or ashamed, or anxious, any more.

She prayed that she might be a good wife to Herbert, and that if ever they had a child it might be a son.

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Penelope Fitzgerald 1988

The moral right of author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448204366
eISBN: 9781448203772

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