We married four months after Ginger introduced us, in September of 1927. My bouquet was a cluster of lilies and white carnations, which Karen helped select as a gift, but the choice of my dress was mine—a slim crêpe de chine with sleeves that clung to my arms and a long silver fringe that lay over the skirt like a net of stars. I’d cut my hair for the day in a tightly cropped shingle I had done on impulse, liking immediately how free and cool my neck felt without the weight.
D stood in for my father to give me away and cried doing it, dabbing at his face with damp sleeves. Afterwards there was a fine lunch at the Muthaiga, and through it all I tried not to linger overlong on thoughts of Denys. He was off in Tsavo, then Uganda. I had cabled him with an invitation and got no response. I wanted to believe it was jealousy that kept him silent and absent, but it was just as likely that my news hadn’t reached him at all.
I put my horses on the ease list, said goodbye to Ruta, and we then left for several months’ honeymoon in Europe. In Rome we stayed near the Spanish Steps, at the Hassler Hotel, which looked like a nineteenth-century palace to me. Our bed was enormous and draped with gold velvet. The bathtub was Italian marble. The parquet floors had been polished to shine like mirrors. I couldn’t stop wanting to pinch myself to see if it was all some sort of dream.
“The George the Fifth in Paris is even finer,” Mansfield said. When we were there, and I stood gaping at our private view of the Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées, he said I should wait until I’d seen Claridge’s in London. He was right about that, too. We arrived in Mansfield’s Rolls-Royce, a car beautiful enough to get all the doormen hopping. The attention and the gleaming marble, the vases full of flowers and the draping silk, helped to dispel the ghost of my previous trip to London and how knocked sideways I’d been. This wasn’t that. Whenever I started to drift and the past came back too clearly, I watched the trail of our Louis Vuitton trunks.
We had escargot in Paris. Choucroute garnie with sprigs of fresh rosemary. Spaghetti with mussels and black squid ink in Rome. Even better than the meals were the cultural highlights in every city: the opera, the architecture, the views, and the museums. And with every new sight or incomparable view, when I thought, Denys should be here, I tried to ignore that voice. It was disloyal, for a start, and also impossible. Denys had made his choice and I’d made mine—and Mansfield was a good man. I respected and admired him through and through, and if the love I felt for him wasn’t exactly the kind that could send me over the top of a mountain on horseback in the middle of the night, it was quietly solid. He stayed by my side. He held my hand and kissed me over and over, saying, “I’m so happy we’ve found each other. I can hardly believe it’s real.”
—
Mansfield had always been close to his mother, a relationship I was trying to understand, but how could I really? He was keen for her to like me, and thought it important that we get off on the right foot.
“She’ll have certain expectations of what you’re supposed to be,” he told me.
“What do you mean?”
“Africa is Africa. When we’ve finished here we can hide away and behave however we like. But Mother and her friends aren’t very advanced in their views.”
I thought he was speaking of politics until we arrived at Elizabeth Arden. He’d booked me in for a full day of beautification and dropped me at the red door before I had time to protest. He took himself to Bond Street, and then to Harrods, while I was prodded and primped to within an inch of my life. My brows were plucked bare and drawn on with kohl. My upper lip and legs were waxed and buffed and my lips stained the deepest red I’d ever seen.
“How is this meant to please your mother?” I asked him at the end of the process. I felt naked with so much paint on. I wanted to hide behind my hands.
“It’s perfect. You’re exquisite. She won’t be able to resist you, don’t you see?”
“I’m worried…not that she won’t like me, but that it matters so much to you. The whole scenario.”
“Everything’s going to be fine,” he assured me. “You’ll see.”
Off we went to Swiftsden, the manor house where Mansfield’s mother lived with her second husband, Colonel O’Hea. He was fifteen years younger than she, and neither of the Markham boys had much patience with him. I found him plump and silent, whereas Mrs. O’Hea was plump and full of opinions about everything. When I tried to shake her hand, she accepted only the tips of my fingers.