Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

“An imbecile, you mean?”

  “Or else it’s a creature so ugly no one can bear to look at it.” Mariana shivered daintily at the thought and Marcus looked solemn.

  In fact every year Papa said he must go down to Cornwall to pay a visit to his estate—and to his youngest child—but somehow he never managed to make the final arrangements for the long journey to the west country. It was really amazing how something always turned up at the last minute to detain him in Oxfordshire, and then talk of a visit to Penmarric would be postponed until the end of the next academic year.

  Mrs. Castallack did not visit Allengate again but instead requested that she visit the girls at the townhouse. Papa refused. Mrs. Castallack then went to the judge, who told Papa that the girls should be allowed to go away with their mother for two weeks to a suitable place. Mrs. Castallack took them to Exmouth, but the visit was not a success because Elizabeth cried all the time for Mama, and Mariana sulked because she had wanted to stay at the townhouse and see the London shops. Even Jeanne, who had been looking forward to visiting the seaside with her mother, seemed glad to be back in Allengate again, and after this unfortunate episode Mrs. Castallack appeared to withdraw more completely into Cornwall and seemed unable to face the annual tussle with Papa about where and when she could see her daughters.

  Later that year Papa’s mother died, but since William and I had not met her the news of her death hardly affected us. Papa even told us it was not necessary for us to attend the funeral in spite of the fact that she had been our grandmother. However, all the Castallacks except for Elizabeth were dressed in black and made to travel to London with Papa, for the service. None of them wanted to go.

  “I was terrified of her,” confessed Marcus. “When she came to Penmarric after Uncle Nigel died I thought she was a witch. I was frightened to death.”

  “So was I,” agreed Mariana; “She was horrible—so loud and noisy. She shouted all the time.”

  “Thank goodness we don’t have to go to the funeral!” I said to William, but somehow as I watched them go away with Papa in the carriage to catch the train to London I was aware of a mysterious feeling of exclusion.

  The years that followed were comparatively uneventful. I hated my first year at Winchester, but then became accustomed to life at a public school and drowned my miseries by throwing myself wholeheartedly into my work. I was given excellent reports. Papa was pleased with me and I felt satisfied that in this field at least I outshone the Castallacks. Marcus’ scholastic ability was unexceptional and in some subjects he was even below average. Philip did well when he felt like it but repeatedly failed to shine at any of the arts; his strong points were mathematics and science, neither of which interested me in the least. Hugh, judging from his accounts of school life, seldom bothered to work but—amazingly—never failed a single examination.

  There was something a little mysterious about Hugh. I often had the feeling he was much cleverer than most of us supposed.

  Apart from William and I, who were both at Winchester, all the others were at different public schools. Papa said this eliminated the risk of one brother outshining another in the close-knit community life and the development of unnecessary jealousies, so after Marcus went to Eton, Philip was sent to Rugby and Hugh to Harrow. As for the girls, they had a governess, a Miss Cartwright, but at sixteen Mariana was sent abroad to a finishing school in Geneva and returned after six months with a wardrobe of French clothes, a grownup hair style and a conversation consisting entirely of her forthcoming debut in London and all the eligible men she would enslave during the course of the Season.

  “Mariana dearest,” said Mama, “you must try to converse on other subjects or people will think you very vain, always talking about yourself. Gentlemen are not attracted to girls who are too self-centered.”

  But Mariana was too excited about the coming Season to take much notice. A dowager friend of Papa’s mother was going to present her and act as her chaperone. Papa spent much time at his townhouse in London, and it was arranged that a ball would be given there for Mariana at the end of May. Philip, Hugh and I would be away at school and were anyway considered too young to dance with the girls who were to be present—“Thank God!” said Philip, who hated dancing—but Jeanne and Elizabeth were to dress up in their party frocks and watch with Miss Cartwright for an hour at the beginning. Marcus, who was eighteen and in his last year at Eton, was going to get special leave to come down to London for the occasion, and William, now almost twenty, would also be there. After leaving Winchester and spending several months on the continent to “broaden his outlook”, he was toying with the idea of going up to Oxford in the autumn of 1911. I did not think he would go. He disliked studying and was secretly pining to lead an outdoor life pursuing the traditional occupations of hunting, shooting and fishing. However, that summer he had nothing to do but enjoy the London Season and was already looking forward with pleasurable anticipation to all the pretty girls he would meet.

  Girls embarrassed me. I did not know what to say to them and decided that most of them were too empty-headed to merit my attention. Certainly Mariana, who was still talking nonstop about her wretched presentation to the King and Queen and her equally wretched ball, seemed one of the most empty-headed girls I had ever met.

  “Oh, Aunt Rose!” she cried. “You will come to the ball, won’t you? Please say you’ll come! I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t!”

  But Mama was unwell with an infection and her health did not permit her to go to London.

  For a time I wondered if Mrs. Castallack would come to her daughter’s coming-out ball, but this possibility was never mentioned and I suspected Mariana was secretly glad to be spared the presence of a former farmer’s wife at such a select occasion. Certainly she never once suggested to Papa that her mother should be present.

  In fact by this time the Castallacks’ attitude toward their mother was uneasily ambivalent. Marcus had first sought permission to visit her on his own when he was sixteen, but after Papa had promised him that once he was no longer a schoolboy he could visit his mother whenever he pleased, Marcus had agreed to wait another two years until the end of his final term at Eton. It occurred to me then that although Marcus was genuinely anxious to visit his mother he was also nervous about the prospect of seeing her again after such a long absence and was much more easily persuaded to delay his reunion than he should have been. I noticed too that apart from Philip, who still threatened to leave school on his sixteenth birthday and fight anyone who tried to stop him, the others were by no means overcome with the urge to see their mother again without delay. “I wish I could run away with you to Cornwall, Philip,” said Hugh, but when Philip started to encourage him Hugh said perhaps he ought to wait until he too was sixteen. “How lovely it will be to see Mama again one day!” Jeanne would sigh occasionally, but meanwhile she was more than content to live at Allengate with Mama. So was Mariana. And as for Elizabeth, it was hard for her to remember that she had not always lived in Oxfordshire and that Mama was not her own mother after all.

  “Pretty odd sort of mother you’ve got,” I could not help commenting after Mariana had remarked that since her mother had not bothered to see her for years one could hardly expect her to bother to come to the ball—even if she were invited. “Well, I suppose it takes all sorts to make a world.”

  Of course Philip had to be near enough to overhear me and make a fuss. “You’re bloody well right it does!” he yelled at me. “But at least my mother doesn’t sleep with a man who isn’t her husband!”

  “Why you—”

  William and Marcus came into the room just in time to drag us apart.

  “My God,” said Philip, white with rage. “I can’t wait to get out of this bloody house! Thank God I’ll be sixteen in June. I’ve had enough of living with a couple of bastards who ought to have been shoved into an orphanage as soon as they were born instead of being brought up to think they’re as good as I am! Just you wait. If you ever try to set foot in any house
of mine I’ll kick you right out into the gutter where you belong!”

  “Oh God,” I said with a calculated yawn, “why on earth would we try to set foot in any beastly house of yours? That would be the one dwelling on earth which I at any rate would avoid like the plague.”

  He spat on the floor at my feet and walked out of the room. The door slammed with a thunderous bang behind him.

  “Adrian Parrish,” said William as he and Marcus regarded me wearily, “will you ever, ever learn any sense?”

  “Why blame me?” I shouted, beside myself with fury. “It was his fault! He slighted my mother and I’ll not stand by and see her insulted! You may think yourself sensible to keep quiet, William, but you’re not—you’re weak! What’s the good of having principles if you’re not prepared to fight for them?”

  And as they looked at me in blank astonishment, I yelled, “Oh, go to hell, both of you!” and rushed headlong out of the room in a rage.

  4

  Mama could not seem to rid herself of her infection. After Mariana’s ball, which all the society papers called “a brilliant occasion,” Jeanne and Elizabeth stayed on with Miss Cartwright in London, and Papa, leaving Mariana in the care of her chaperone, returned alone to Allengate.

  Toward the end of term he wrote me a short note to tell me to go to the townhouse when I left Winchester for the holidays; Mama was still unwell and the doctors had advised that no children or young persons should go to Allengate while there was a risk of infection.

  William met me at Waterloo. He had been in London at the townhouse throughout the Season and so had no firsthand news from Allengate.

  “How’s Mama?” I said anxiously.

  “I don’t think she’s very well. Papa’s hoping she’ll get a little better so that he can take her abroad to Switzerland.”

  “Oh?” A faint dread shadowed my mind and made my heart beat faster. “It’s nothing serious, is it, William? I mean … she’s on the road to recovery, isn’t she?”

  William did not answer. He wasn’t even looking at me.

  “William?”

  “Papa’s coming back from Allengate this evening to see us. We’ll know more then.”

  Panic swept over me. I took his arm and shook it. “What’s wrong with her? Tell met What is it? What’s the matter with her?”

  He looked at me levelly. His eyes were calm but opaque. At last he said in an odd voice, “Papa told me she has tuberculosis.” And then in a tumbling rush, his eyes blind with pain: “I think she’s dying.”

  THREE

  When she died Henry had a splendid tomb made for her before the high altar in the nunnery of Godstow near Oxford.

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  SHE DIED.

  WE WERE WITH HER at the end. Even Mariana, who had looked forward for months to the grand finale of her first season, abandoned the yachting at Cowes and traveled back to Allengate. It was August. Everyone was at Allengate at the end except Philip, who had left Rugby at half-term, quarreled violently with Papa and caught the train to Cornwall on the morning of his sixteenth birthday.

  Papa wrote to him, telling him of Mama’s death and informing him of the funeral arrangements. I saw the letter on the hall chest. It was addressed to Philip Castallack Esq., Roslyn Farm, Zillan, near St.-Just-in-Penwith, Cornwall.

  “He’ll never come,” I said to William; “he never cared. He was the coldest, most unfeeling brute I ever met. Mama just wasted her time being good and kind to him because he didn’t care a jot for her. I’m only glad we don’t have to suffer his presence at the funeral.”

  The funeral.

  I had not been to a funeral before. I had not seen anyone dying before either. I found I was consumed with the most overpowering fear of death and an unbearably painful obsession that God was cruel and unjust.

  “There can’t be a God,” I said to William. “Why does Mama have to die when she’s still young? And from tuberculosis, that horrible, distressing disease! Nothing makes sense any more. Nothing.”

  But Mama had said to me, “There’s a pattern. Never, never doubt that there’s a pattern. There’s a pattern always. Everywhere. In everyone.”

  And at the very end she had said “Be loyal to Papa.”

  She died, and the house was still. The flowers drooped in their vases and the petals fell softly to the ground like tears. It rained. That summer had been the finest in living memory but now it rained and went on raining, and the letters began to come and the flowers, so many beautiful brilliant flowers, invaded the house as if to replace the flowers that had faded away. And when the funeral was held at the little church at Allengate, the people came, dozens of people, Papa’s friends from Oxford, servants from the village, her own friends from St. John’s Wood, mourner after mourner, and none of them either knew or cared what wrong she had done because it no longer mattered and now all that was left was the goodness and it was the goodness that people remembered and for which they came so far to grieve.

  The Castallacks grieved. Philip—naturally—was absent, but all the others were there. Mariana and Jeanne wept through the entire service and little Elizabeth, who was now eight years old, wept with them. Hugh was white and still; Marcus was ashen, his fingers twisting endlessly at his crumpled handkerchief; William cried. But I could not cry. I was beyond tears. And beside me Papa’s face was lined with grief and his hair was gray and he was old.

  It was quiet in the churchyard and very peaceful. The clergyman read aloud from his book and the sun shone again as the coffin was lowered into the grave. He went on reading and I thought: Where is the pattern? Show me the pattern. If a pattern exists let me see it and give me some glimpse of what it all means.

  A breeze ran invisible fingers through my hair. I glanced away, unable to watch any longer, and as I looked up I saw Philip crossing the churchyard toward us, a single red rose glowing in his hand.

  2

  Afterward Papa left my side and went over to him. I heard him say, “Why didn’t you send me a telegram to let me know you were coming? I would have arranged for you to be met at the station so that you could have been here in time for the service.”

  “Would you?” said Philip, insolent as ever in his rudest voice. “I thought you told me when we parted company in June that you would never lift a finger to help me again. You told me never to ask you for anything for the rest of my life.”

  Anger swept away my grief in a black ungovernable tide. I wanted to shout at Papa, Tell him to go away! We don’t want him here! Tell him to go back to Cornwall and never bother us again!

  But Papa touched Philip on the shoulder and said gently, “My dear Philip, I often say words in anger and regret them later and I’ve no doubt you do too. I’m more pleased than I can say that you made the effort to come back for the funeral. I hope you will at least stay with us for a few days before going back.”

  “I’m never staying under your roof again,” said Philip, and with a shock I heard a tremor in his voice. “Never.”

  “Please. I won’t try and persuade you to go back to school or leave Cornwall. I simply don’t want us to remain estranged.”

  He shook his head. “I want to get back to Zillan to my mother.”

  It was then that Papa said, his quiet voice lacerating my aching sense of loss, “How is your mother?”

  I turned and ran. I ran back into the church and hid myself in a back pew behind a pillar. Great sobs tore at my throat and shuddered through my body. I cried and cried as if I were a child of five instead of a youth of fifteen; I cried for my mother and I cried for myself, and as I cried the past closed its doors soundlessly behind me and I was left alone in a cold present without even the courage to look ahead into the future.

  William found me an hour later.

  “We were looking everywhere for you,” he said. “I was getting worried.” He sat down in the pew beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “Come on, old fellow,” he said. “Please. You must stop now. You must t
ry and make an effort to be your usual self again. Mama’s gone and nothing’s going to bring her back. Least of all tears.”

  “Oh, but …” I could not speak. “What’s to become of us?” I said painfully at last. It was still very hard to speak. I seemed to be capable of using only simple, awkward words. “While Mama was alive everything was always well … but now she’s gone nothing’s … certain … safe.”

  “Why, you little ass, don’t be so silly! What do you think’s going to happen? Do you think Papa will summon us to his study, grow a couple of horns, start breathing fire and tell us not to darken his doorstep a day longer? I am surprised at you! Why this sudden lack of faith in Papa? Obviously he’ll look after us and take care of us, just as before. Don’t be so ridiculous!”

  Papa did summon us to his study to discuss the future, but he waited until September when our grief had become dulled and I was reluctantly beginning to think about returning to school. Allengate had long seemed deserted and forlorn; Mariana, promising tearfully to order a becoming selection of black gowns, had returned to her chaperone in London after the funeral, and Marcus had departed for Cornwall to make the long-postponed visit to his mother; Miss Cartwright the governess had taken Jeanne and Elizabeth to Bournemouth for a month, since Papa felt that a holiday by the seaside would be beneficial to them after so many sad days at home, and Hugh had gone to stay for a week with a school friend of his in Norfolk. It was on the evening of Hugh’s departure, when Papa was finally alone in the house with William and myself, that he asked us to join him in his study after dinner and I knew instinctively that he wanted to discuss the future.

  “Well, William,” he began in a friendly voice, “since you’ve said no more to me on the subject I’ve made no arrangements for you to go up to Oxford next month. But I trust you’ve by now decided which profession you wish to adopt. What decision have you reached?”

  William went red. I felt sorry for him, for I knew he disliked the studying which adoption of a profession would entail and had no vocation for such a convenient solution as the Army or the Church. It was his misfortune that he had not been born a country squire with a comfortably unearned income awaiting him at the age of twenty-one, but Papa had made it clear to us some time ago that although he intended to leave us legacies in his will we should always expect to have to earn our own living. Mama had also explained that it was natural for Papa to take this attitude since he disapproved of any young man leading an idle life, and since Mama had accepted this attitude as correct I too had accepted it without complaint. But now I found myself becoming angry. Marcus had just left school but no one had mentioned that he must think of earning his living. In fact Marcus seemed to take it for granted that he would spend his twenties enjoying himself without doing a stroke of work. It suddenly seemed grossly unfair to me that William, who was actually Papa’s eldest son, was supposed to fend for himself financially while Marcus was free to do exactly as he pleased without worrying where the next penny was coming from.