Everything comes to him who waits, Bill King must have thought. He had loved Anita for five years. An early, undated, letter of his declared: ‘Anita, dear heart, oh the awful gloom of leaving you again. I fell so in love with you in a week it’s just unbelievable.’ And now he was going to marry her. He didn’t mind that she was carrying Peter Wilson’s baby. From another undated letter: ‘I want your happiness but we must think mostly for the baby. What are you going to call him? I think Eton is a good idea. All the Etonians I know have benefitted from it.’ Just before their engagement was announced at the end of December 1948, Bill wrote to Shane:
Dear Sir Shane, As you have heard, Anita has promised to be my wife.
For me it is a great fulfilment because I have been in love with her for five years of war and peace … I am not a healthy man, nor ever will be but I have enough to keep her in reasonable comfort until the socialists scoop the pool, when we shall probably become professional yacht hands.
In this letter, Bill made it plain that he intended to remain a Protestant.
Bill was highly amused by the Leslies – ‘fun was a word much on their lips’, he observed. Arriving unexpectedly at Glaslough – his telegram hadn’t arrived – he found Anita and Marjorie arguing about the breeding of greyhounds, ‘topply table covered with Ming … the yowls of nervy greyhounds as they slipped on the parquet’. Bill’s family had come from County Galway but it was only when he went there with Anita that he discovered this, and that his grandfather had been a professor at what was then Galway’s Queen’s University, as well as a famous archaeologist.
The bride-to-be was bird happy. To Rose: ‘Such a whirl – but I crave protection and tenderness and loving care and am so glad we are going to get married … Bill’s radiant happiness and unselfishness has given me a kind of fire – mentally I’m alright again – only physically a bit peaky.’ What she was doing may not have struck Anita as particularly odd. As Shane was to point out in his book Long Shadows (1966): ‘Cherished records have been at the mercy of those whose advantage is to conceal illicit infusions under the façade of wedlock.’ The illicit infusions had to remain a secret. Anita made plans: after the hastily arranged wedding at Glaslough, she and Bill would stay with Rose at her chalet in Megève, where Bill could ski. Then Anita would make a furtive return to Dublin to give birth in June, leaving the city before anyone caught sight of the baby, whose official birth date was August. She would lie low until the baby could be shown to friends and family. This concealment would entail taking the baby on a round-the-world voyage on the 24-foot waterline ocean racer that Bill was having built. It didn’t seem such an outlandish idea to a woman who had joined the army in order to escape from her first husband.
When Anita was happy she could never recognize someone else’s pain. Before her wedding she wrote to Rose from Glaslough: ‘Darling Pete arrives for Xmas – he is glad too.’ Peter was far from glad but tried to cope with the situation by joining in with the wedding plans. During that fraught December, he wrote frequently to Rose, leading her to believe that he and Anita together had decided on her marriage to Bill, and that Bill himself understood that he would have Anita’s companionship only on a part-time basis. At times, in this flurry of correspondence, Peter, now divorced, is convinced that Anita would have married him had not the Bishop of Galway and Peter’s own antipathy towards the hypocritical Catholic church made this impossible. He believed that Anita was marrying Bill for his, Peter’s sake, and this made him even more devoted to her than he had been for the last ten years. At other times he tells Rose that Anita is unable to love anyone and that he pities Bill, whom he recognizes as loving Anita as much as he, Peter, does. He insists that he must attend the wedding, since he is the only person who can lace Anita into her corset to hide the baby, whom he refers to as ‘little Rose’.
He rails against the Leslies, whom he considers theatrical, publicity-mad show-offs; the Jews in Palestine who, he claims, are fighting the Arabs with American and Russian weapons; and the situation in France, which he considers makes the country unsafe for Fleur, Rose’s little daughter, who Peter suggests should be sent to Oranmore. He writes to everyone who he suspects might think that Anita has callously thrown him over, and claims to have had his ego boosted by two offers of marriage since the announcement of Anita’s engagement. The cascade of letters, flitting from Anita’s corset to the war in Palestine to his complicated financial situation, make him sound raving mad rather than heartbroken and bereft. Anita ignored his true state of mind. To Rose: ‘Bill and Peter want me to have a white wedding to annoy Paul! They are both so sweet and tender and loving and want to look after me – such big love.’
Like a little girl playing dress-up, she raided Glaslough’s attics for her bridal attire. ‘Can I wear the old lace veil symbol of virginity or will my friends laugh!!!’ Her dress was first worn by a Leslie bride in 1890, the bodice now let out by the blacksmith’s wife, the orange blossom headdress ‘woven with wire by Monaghan’s “modish coiffeuse”’. There would be a bower of flowers from the greenhouse and a dispensation for the mixed marriage by the bishop. Marjorie was in America and would miss the wedding, as would Rose, but this didn’t dampen Anita’s spirits. She was ready to face the future. To Rose: ‘If I think more about other people’s happiness I won’t get so wrought up in myself … I am getting excited … at being able to give so much happiness by just stopping my distressed sulks.’ Distressed sulks were a bit of a euphemism to describe the recent suicide attempts. She insisted that Peter felt as happy as she did: ‘Pete looking 20 years younger and in terrific spirits is enjoying the shooting here.’
The Rt Hon. Winston Churchill, had he remembered that less than a year ago Anita had asked him to meet her then fiancé, Colonel Philip Parbury, may have been surprised to receive an invitation to her wedding to Commander William D. King. He and Mrs Churchill were unable to attend but sent a congratulatory telegram. In spite of his plans to supervise the fitting of the corset, Peter couldn’t go through with it. He couldn’t face the church service either but for Anita’s sake, he told Rose, he went to the reception at the flower-bedecked castle, which, to add to his distress, was full of Bill’s relations. Living a lie was beginning to tell on him.
From Megève, Anita wrote to Shane to thank him for organizing the wedding: ‘I don’t think any wedding could have been nicer and it has given a happy aura to the old place where our family has been loved and respected for so long.’ At the end of this letter, rather ungraciously, since a bishop had accommodated her mixed marriage, she took a snipe at his profession. Irish bishops were ‘pompous tyrants with no knowledge of world affairs’. She also wrote, provocatively: ‘Don’t you really approve of partition? I do,’ although she must have known that Shane didn’t. He was both a Catholic and a royalist, who wished to see a united Ireland on warm terms with England. At Megève Anita skied all day, although Peter had begged Rose not to let her. She planned to stay with Rose until April, while Bill went to Austria for some more serious skiing with his old friend Ruck-Keene. Unusually, perhaps because he felt lonely at Glaslough, Shane wanted to know his daughter’s future whereabouts. Anita produced an itinerary that didn’t mention the forthcoming stay in Dublin. She told Shane that after April she was going to Oranmore while Bill finished building his yacht. Bill had asked her whether she needed a lavatory on the boat, ‘or could one just throw buckets overboard as it sails faster without a drain!!!’ She had insisted on a drainage system. She gave her father the impression that the yacht, when ready to sail, would be moored in the south of France, close to the villa that Rose would be renting for the summer. Naturally, she did not mention her plans to give birth, secretly, in Dublin or to take the unannounced baby on a long sea voyage.
Rather bossily, she instructed Shane on how to talk about her marriage: ‘Be sure to tell everyone how pleased the family is at my marrying Bill and what a hero he is and what a darling too. It’s so important that everyone should know what sort of person Bill is owing to last summer’s dramas.’ The Philip Parbury fiasco had not done her reputation much good; one of Bill’s many assets was that he was able to provide her with respectability.