Christie is that year’s Bachelor Catch. While the winter snow lies impacted month after month, and half Europe starves, and the bombers overhead carry food for Germany instead of bombs, and the gas dwindles to a flicker, and the electric lights waver, and strangers stand close to each other for comfort – Christie shines before Grace like a beacon of hope and promise. He is all clear-cut, up-standing (but only in marriage) masculinity. Christie is Grace’s ambition. Not a diploma, not a career, nor the world’s recognition, not any more. Just Christie.
She loves him. Oh, indeed she does. Her heart quickens at the sight of him, her bowels dissolve with longing. But she will not, she cannot, succumb to his embraces. He takes her on his boat, well chaperoned (yes, he sails) and up mountains, rather less chaperoned (yes, he climbs). He offers to buy her a flat (yes, he can afford to) but no she will not. No diamonds, thank you, Christie. No wrist watches. No gifts, no bribes, my dearest. Chocolates, yes, oh thank you! And orchids, and invitations to dinner and a taxi ride home, and yes, a kiss, and yes, you may touch my breast (how wicked we are!) and quickly, quickly, goodnight, Christie. My own, my love, my dearest dear. I would die for you but I will not sleep with you.
Christie stops off at Soho on the way home and spends an hour with a tart. How else will he survive?
She loves him. She means to marry him. How else will she survive?
‘I can’t,’ Grace says to him, weeping, wriggling out of his arms on some deserted shore. It is night. The moon shines. The whole world waits. ‘I can’t. I’m not that kind of girl. If I say no, I know you’ll leave me, and then I’ll die, but no, no, no. Oh Christie, if you knew how I loved you!’
What a risk she takes. He nearly leaves her, she doesn’t know how nearly. Grace disturbs first his nights and then his days, and Christie has enterprises to keep going, and an office, and a staff and a million to be made.
Grace wins the unofficial Slade Prize, not for the most accomplished student, but for the Most Desirable Girl of the Year. Christie stays. He likes success. Grace’s eyes are incredible: her skin through the very effort of virtue has the pallor of debauchery. When she walks, sometimes, her knees knock together as if she was a young colt and could hardly control them. It’s as if, Christie thinks, you only had to push her and she’d fall down and wait, knees obligingly apart.
But she doesn’t, and she won’t. Grace wins.
‘Grace, will you marry me?’
What a catch, everyone says! This thirty-year-old, tall South African with his land-owning father, his background of parched veldt and black servants, and his riches; and his naïveties about the English social scene, born out of Cavalcade and Mrs Miniver and Brief Encounter and The Way Ahead, making a fortune in pre-stressed concrete, lording it over the new light-weight aggregates. You can build high on London clay, these days, as never before. London can become New York. Christie’s first to realize it. The safety factors are uncertain. No-one knows quite what they are. Christie tells them, if they ask.
Christie arranges the wedding, the way he arranges anything. He must forego his ambition of a wedding quite like the one in Father of the Bride, for the Bride’s Mother is dead, and the Bride’s Father disaffected in Bournemouth, but Christie does what he can.
The wedding is held in a church in the Sussex village where Christie’s English aunt lives. The reception is in a marquee set up in the garden. The sun shines, bells ring, flowers bloom, the virgin bride, beautiful and translucent in white, comes down the aisle. The groom stands beside her; the union is blessed. Was ever there a more charming couple? Cucumber sandwiches, strawberries, champagne. A thunderstorm. Laughter, tears, off to Cornwall and the honeymoon in the Bentley with the old shoes tied behind.
Those little fishermen’s cottages, those deserted rocky shores. You could make love on a beach, in those days, and there wouldn’t be a soul for miles. (It isn’t like that now. The Life Guard would have you up for indecency in five minutes.) Christie is sated: so is Grace, languid as can be. Tactfully but persistently he inquires about her already ruptured hymen. These things are important.
Horse-riding, she says.
And so it might be, after all.
Then back to St John’s Wood and life as a young matron. There’s no reason that anyone can see, in those innocent days, for Grace and Christie not to live happily ever after.
Grace even conceives, on her wedding night.
What judgement, what skill, what luck. Playing Grandmother’s footsteps with fate. Wanting just enough, never too much.
Good days!
Grace gives birth to a boy in March. Piers. Two years later, Petra is born. They are rather delicate, fragile, whiney children, as if all the strength of preceding generations has gone into the parents and left none over for these afterthoughts. Grace loves them, intemperately.
And Marjorie! Marjorie goes to Grace’s wedding. (Patrick is not invited.) She is happy for her friend, and her complexion is clear and spotless. She wears a New Look dress with soft unpadded shoulders, tight waist, and full skirt – and needn’t have bothered because at the reception, sheltering from the thunderstorm under an oak-tree, she meets Ben, who does not care in the least what she looks like but likes to listen to what she says.
Within three weeks she has left Frognal and is living in a tiny flat in West Kilburn with Ben. Ben is an architectural student and has been asked to the wedding because his father is a business contact of Christie’s. Ben, himself, has many doubts about Christie’s business methods, let alone his constructional ones, but keeps them to himself. Ben’s family is Zionist. Marjorie wonders whether, having a Jewish father herself, and feeling sympathy with that much suffering race, she should not become a Jew herself? But Ben, who takes his Judaism in a political rather than a religious sense, feels it to be unnecessary. As for marriage, there is lots of time for that. They have a sure sense of a long future together. Besides, if they married, she would lose her grant, finally obtained from a reluctant local authority after many solicitors’ letters and injunctions from Helen in Mexico.
Chloe is asked to Grace’s wedding, but cannot attend. She has other matters to occupy her mind.