Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  “All right,” he agreed. “How about the pub tonight?”

  “Seven o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.” He grinned. “Get me a glass of cider if you’re there before I am, and don’t you drink it before I can get there to drink it myself!”

  I laughed, waved, turned my back on him, and the light from my helmet turned with me to point down the long gallery back to the main shaft.

  I never saw him again.

  At the surface I changed, left the “dry” and walked across the yard to my office hut which adjoined the count house. It was a cloudy day but clear and still. I can remember looking back over my shoulder toward Cape Cornwall and seeing the engine house of the Levant standing starkly against that gray summer sky. When I reached my office I went in, closed the door and turned to hang up the raincoat I had slung over my arm.

  It was then that a strange thing happened. I reached out to hang up my raincoat and the wall seemed to lean back a fraction from my outstretched hand so that I missed the hook. The coat dropped to the floor. I was just muttering a curse when all the objects on my desk, pens, pencils, ashtrays, began to rattle and beneath my feet I could feel the floor vibrating.

  My first thought was that there was about to be a land subsidence directly below the flimsy building which housed my office. I dashed out into the yard. To my amazement I found the ground beneath my feet was still vibrating and as I looked around me wildly I saw a loose brick topple off a wall nearby and hit the ground with a crack.

  Before I had time to recover from my surprise, the vibrations stopped. I waited, tensed, but the ground was still, the scene motionless and nothing stirred as far as the eye could see.

  The door of Walter Hubert’s office burst open and Jan-Yves rushed out. Swinging around to the buildings behind me, I could see men pouring out into the open from the dressing floors and the engine house, their shouts echoing weirdly in that airless silence.

  “What the hell was that?” demanded Jan-Yves. He was white. “What was it, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, but I did. By that time I had guessed what it was. It was an earth tremor, a rare but far from unknown phenomenon in Cornwall and the south of England. The tremors seldom did any serious damage and never rated more than a small paragraph in the local newspapers.

  My blood ran cold.

  I began to run. I ran and went on running, dodging the men who tried to ask me what was happening, and as I ran I thought only of my mine. I wasn’t worried about the lower levels. They were new, sturdily built and could withstand a tremor or two, but not all Sennen Garth was new. Suddenly, far away in the recesses of my memory I heard the mine captain of the Levant say to me when I was a child, “Have you ever heard of a cave-in? Do you know what happens when timber supports are so rotten that one finger-touch will send them crumbling into dust? If there was a cave-in in the western reaches of Sennen Garth, do you know what would happen?”

  I knew now what would happen. Knowledge wrapped icy fingers around my heart and throttled the breath in my lungs. When I reached the main shaft all I could gasp was “Where’s the gig?”

  “Down at the two-hundred-fathom level, sir. Shall I—”

  I grabbed the telephone, wound the handle. The line wasn’t dead but no one answered it. Men clustered around me, but I was scarcely aware of them. I was aware of nothing save the telephone, my last link with my friends below ground, and my own crawling fear.

  “Answer” me,” my voice said to the telephone. “Answer me.”

  But it was the mine who answered me first. The noise came echoing crazily up the main shaft to meet us, a far-off rumbling roar from the very heart of the mine. It was a shocking noise, primitive and annihilating. It went on and on as if it would never end.

  I flung down the phone and ran outside. I stumbled across the yard, scrambled over the slag-heaps and crawled toward the shaft I had explored as a child. All I could hear was the rasping of my breath and the ring of my shoes against the loose stones and far away in another world the distant droning nothingness of the sea.

  I reached the shaft. I fell on my stomach and hauled myself to the edge, and when I looked over the rim the blast of stale air rose up to meet me, the smell of air trapped long below ground.

  I looked down into my mine.

  I saw water. Swift-flowing, evil-smelling black water from the mighty water tank of the flooded mine next door. The tremor had ruptured the dividing wall, the two mines which had stood shoulder to shoulder since time out of mind were now as one, and the water was rushing in from King Walloe.

  4

  All my friends died; everyone on that shift died, and we weren’t even able to drag the bodies to the surface. Later there was a memorial service and journalists descended on St. Just from all over the world and sympathetic gifts began to pour in to alleviate the lot of the widows and orphans. People were very kind.

  I bought Trevose his glass of cider and watched it stand untasted at the bar as I drank my shot of whisky. I buy cider for him every year on the thirty-first of August. If anyone ever thinks me hard and unsentimental they ought to see me buy that annual glass of cider. It’s odd how a trivial gesture like that can come to mean so much.

  It would have taken a fortune to drain the mine and begin again, and anyway there was no more money. As it was I had already spent too much of Helena’s capital, and even if I had spent the rest it would have proved to be a mere drop in the ocean of expenditure required. Sennen Garth was dead, and no power on earth would ever bring it back to life again.

  Yet in dying the mine fulfilled the last of my childhood ambitions, for after the thirty-first of August 1930 there wasn’t a tinner alive who hadn’t heard of the famous Sennen Garth mine. Seven thousand miles from Cornwall in the heart of the Canadian Rockies I was to hear men say to me, amazed, “You worked in Sennen Garth? Jesus, how did you ever get out of that hole alive? That must have been the hell of a mine …”

  So I had everything I ever wanted for my mine, Sennen Garth, the last working mine west of St. Just. That was fair enough, after all. No man ever worked harder for getting what he wanted than I did, and no man ever made more sacrifices or devoted himself so wholly to his cause and his life’s work. Yet when the fighting was all over and the battles had all been won, the only thing left for me to regret was that I was still alive to enjoy my mine’s fame. For of course I should have died too, died in my own mine with all my friends about me, but that was the biggest part of the tragedy. I didn’t die. My mine spared my life, just as I had always known it would, and I was left to live on alone with the estranged wife, the mighty mansion and the bleak unending web of lies which were left behind.

  V

  JAN-YVES:

  1930-1945

  Justice and Injustice

  Though John grew up to be an exceptionally wicked man … he showed in later life a curious interest in religion—which was not allowed to affect his conduct.

  —The Devil’s Brood,

  ALFRED DUGGAN

  A malign tradition has done much less than justice to the character of King John. … It was not purely formality that chaplains at Chichester said masses for the soul of King John “of blessed memory” … [He] had a genuine and even a conscientious interest in the administration of justice.

  —Oxford History of England:

  From Domesday Book to Magna Carta,

  A. L. POOLE

  Whatever else one may say about John, there is no doubt that his royal duty of providing justice was discharged with a zeal and tirelessness to which the English common law is greatly indebted.

  He was industrious, clever and ingenious. At the same time he was hot-tempered, wilful and capricious. He was generous to those who could not harm him, and merciless to anyone who could. Above and behind all he was secretive and suspicious, over-sensitive to the merest flicker of opposition, relentless in revenge… Is it any wonder that men delighted to tell stories of his wickedness without bothering to es
tablish their authenticity?

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  ONE

  It is possible that he saw little of his mother, for soon after his birth his parents became estranged, and Eleanor retired to Poitou, there to plot mischief for Henry with her older sons.

  Perhaps the only one of the greater barons with whom John was on terms of back-slapping intimacy was his half-brother, William Longsword, earl of Salisbury, bastard son of Henry II.

  —King John,

  W. L. WARREN

  I WAS TWENTY-FIVE AT the time of the Sennen Garth disaster.

  Twenty-five was a splendid age to be in my family. My father, for example, had been the master of a large estate, the husband of a beautiful woman and the father of a shoal of promising infants by the time he was twenty-five. He also had a reputation, soon to increase tenfold, as a historian. My father was a successful man. At twenty-five he had already made his mark in the world.

  My three elder brothers (the legitimate ones) didn’t do too badly either. Marcus never reached the age of twenty-five, but he certainly made full use of his time in the world before succumbing to dysentery at the age of twenty-three. It would be too unkind to call him a rake simply because he spent money like water to retain his place in the society columns, but there was no doubt he did have an extraordinary talent for making friends, charming birds from bushes, wasting my father’s money and doing nothing which could remotely be described as work. My brother Hugh also had a talent for avoiding work, but he did at least have enough brain to know not only how to hang onto his money but how to make it grow as well. Hugh was clever. At twenty-five he had a wife, a daughter, his own home, his own income and all the time in the world to enjoy them in—and how many men of twenty-five can boast that, I’d like to know? Precious few, would be my guess. Finally, my brother Philip …

  Well, I won’t talk about Philip just yet. At the age of twenty-five Philip had a reputation so sacred in our part of Cornwall that he stood in danger of being unofficially canonized.

  So there they all were, handsome heroes basking in golden success by their mid-twenties, and there was I, many years their junior, watching enviously from the wings. However, since it seemed to be taken for granted that one would have the world fawning at one’s feet when one was twenty-five, I prepared myself for the inevitable and when my twenty-fifth birthday dawned at last on one wet August morning in 1930 I sat back and looked around and pricked up my ears to listen to the cheers.

  There was a most unpleasant silence.

  For I was nothing, no one. The family circle, completed before I was born, had remained closed to me, and even now twenty-five years after being born I was still scrabbling on the outside of the circle trying to get in, still tacked onto the family like some ill-fitting appendage, still wondering what I could do to become like my father, like my golden brothers—like anyone except myself.

  I didn’t want to be myself. I was the last person on earth I ever wanted to be.

  “Good gracious me!” exclaimed my beautiful sister Mariana when she first saw me. “Did you ever see such an ugly child?”

  I never forgave her for that. Years later when she wrote to ask my help, I turned her down. I had a long memory, stretching right back to the earliest days of my childhood, and I never, forgot an insult or an injustice.

  “That’s a very naughty child, Mrs. Barlow,” said the housekeeper I later hounded into handing in her notice. “I can’t help thinking you’re too lax in your discipline.”

  “He’s a good child,” said my old nanny whom I loved, “and I’ll thank you to mind your own business, Mrs. Hollingdale.”

  I came to know early in life who my friends were; in fact I came to know several matters of importance early in life: The first fact I learned was that most people were against me. The second was that it was a fallacy to assume that there was any natural justice in the world at all. The only justice that existed one hammered out for oneself in the most expedient way possible, because in this world it was every man for himself and no one was going to raise a finger to help anyone else if it conflicted with his own interests. The third fact of life, a corollary of the second, was that all those nursery clichés such as “the good get their own reward,” “a truthful boy is a happy boy” and “an honorable man has a satisfied mind” were a pack of lies. All the reward the good received were the jeers of the bad, a truthful boy usually ended up with a spanking and a satisfied mind was of little use if there were no material comforts to accompany it.

  I was a realist. High-minded idealism and nobility of soul were all very well for some people, but they wouldn’t do for me, because I was going to get on in the world and I was going to get what I deserved in spite of everyone who tried to stop me. If I had put my faith in the existence of natural justice I could have sat back and been high-minded and waited for what I wanted to fall into my lap, but at an early age I became convinced that the only hope anyone can have for obtaining their just rewards in this life is to possess a quick brain, a lack of scruples and an abiding resolve to trust no one and be forever prepared for those who smile upon you to turn and stab you in the back.

  2

  Having said all this it will be obvious why I felt motivated to put pen to paper to outline a few pertinent facts about myself. This is my insurance that I shall have a just judgment passed upon me by my children in case I should die before they’re old enough to see the truth for themselves. If I were a high-minded idealist I would maintain a dignified silence and trust that natural justice would provide my children with a true perspective on their father’s checkered career, but I know all too well that the famous Latin cliché nil nisi bonum … is as dead as a dodo, and since I do have certain influential enemies I think it would be a gesture of foresight if I set down the facts for my children before it’s too late.

  However, I must make one stipulation. No child of mine under twenty-one reads this manuscript, and I would prefer that none of my daughters read it until they were married. Yes, I know times are changing and I’m an old-fashioned hypocrite, but after all one must have certain standards, mustn’t one? I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.

  First of all let me start by saying that I have no intention of dwelling at length on the events of my life before the Sennen Garth disaster in 1930, a few days after my twenty-fifth birthday. A veil is best drawn over my life before 1930, although I suppose if I’m to present a just picture of my life I shall have to refer now and then to the events of my misspent youth. Let me dispose of this painful subject as painlessly as possible by explaining exactly where I stood in relation to my family and my surroundings by the time I reached my twenty-fifth birthday.

  My father had died in 1926, but my mother was still alive—two facts which meant very little to me since I had never cared for either of them. After they had become permanently estranged about ten seconds after my conception (a most remarkable accomplishment, I’ve always thought) the very idea of my existence was so repulsive to both of them that I was brought up by my large and comfortable nanny at Penmarric while my father removed himself to Oxfordshire to live with his mistress and his eight other children and my mother escaped to her farmhouse in Zillan parish. I saw neither of my parents till I was six. Then they repented and started pestering me for my attention, but by that time it was too late. I always thought it was odd the way they expected me to prostrate myself at their feet with filial devotion when they at last decided to take some notice of me.

  However, long before 1930 I had decided that it would be politic for me to be on friendly terms with my mother and even before my father’s death I had won my way into her good books without much difficulty. Naturally I had an ulterior motive: By chance I had discovered that my father had made my brother Philip his heir, and since there was a possibility that I might be Philip’s heir when he chose to exercise his testamentary power of appointment I wanted to be sure that Philip regarded me in a favorable light. But there was only one road to
my brother Philip’s heart, and that one road was my mother.

  I did not simply dislike Philip. I loathed him. I loathed him because he had all he wanted, because he was popular and successful, because he was my mother’s favorite and the son my father favored in his will. I loathed him for his arrogance and for his attitude of contempt toward me, and I loathed him because I knew I was just as good a man as he was and deserved that golden popularity just as much as he did. Jealousy tore me apart. Even to look at him made my muscles knot themselves until they ached. I could hardly speak to him without making an immense effort.

  My hatred was so intense that I often wanted to unleash it in a fight, but fighting was out of the question. I had to continue to woo him, win his favor, capture his confidence. Yet when I asked myself why I didn’t throw in the sponge, catch the first tramp steamer to America and seek my fortune in another world, I couldn’t at first give myself an answer. I wanted justice, of course. That went without saying. Penmarric should have been mine, not Philip’s. He was my senior, it was true, and thus theoretically the heir by right of primogeniture, but my father was entitled to leave his fortune to a younger son if he preferred. Before I had had the bad luck to get sent down from Oxford (for being discovered in a compromising position during a light-hearted nocturnal raid on one of the women’s colleges) I had definitely managed to become my father’s favorite, and besides, he had been at loggerheads with Philip even after my fall from grace. The will, that masterpiece of illogical injustice, was unfair to me no matter how grievous my disgrace at Oxford.