Telegrams, telephone calls, Berlin to Philadelphia, Berlin to London, Philadelphia to Berlin.
The wedding would take place in spring 1925 in Philadelphia, and the honeymoon in Europe. It would be a large wedding, with a reception for several hundred at Atholl, but the service, attended only by family and close friends, would be held in a small old church. Margaret insisted on St David’s; it dated back to the early eighteenth century, was built of white clapboard and stood among fields. She couldn’t stand the idea of parading down the aisle of a fashionable church, wrapped in white satin and being gawked at by Old Philadelphia murmuring, ‘My, I never thought that girl would get married. . .’ But at St David’s, where she’d gone as a child to sit beside her grandmother on a hard wooden pew and through the plain glass windows watch the clouds sailing by, she could feel at peace.
Who should be the best man? So many of his friends had been killed. Alexander would not enjoy the role. None of the Graf set would really do, and anyway the Salts would be dismayed by a German best man. There was no one in the embassy. Then a letter of congratulation arrived from Harry Mansell in Washington. Who could be more perfect? He sent Harry a telegram that day, and he accepted. ‘Oddly enough,’ Harry wrote, ‘I’m going to be married myself at the end of the summer, a wonderful girl, you must both be at the wedding.’ So like Harry, never to be outdone.
Mark began to see everything he did in Berlin in terms of last opportunities. ‘I’ll never see the lilac coming out in the Tiergarten again.’
He had a long and very painful conversation with Karl, who told him he was a traitor to himself.