Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  So I wanted justice. But that wasn’t all. I wanted Penmarric. It took me a long time before I realized how much my home meant to me, but I realized it when I was obliged to leave it and live in Penzance. I knew what I wanted then, when I woke each morning to stare at the tranquil waters of the south Cornish coast and the placid sands of Mount’s Bay. I wanted the North Coast, the vital ugliness of the Cornish Tin Coast with its hideous cliffs and vicious flying spray, the roar of the breakers, the swoop of the gulls, the cruel empty moors sunning themselves beneath those restless changing skies. I didn’t want the tame esplanade of Penzance or the stunted palm trees in the formal gardens near the Metropole! I wanted that other land; seven miles away across the hills, and most of all, even more than I wanted the land, I wanted the house, the ugliest old mausoleum in the whole of Cornwall, because for me it was home and I loved it and love somehow made it beautiful to me. Gradually as the months passed after my father’s death and the years brought me closer to my twenty-fifth birthday and the Sennen Garth disaster, I came to realize that what I wanted most of all was to be master of Penmarric—not because of the money or because of the social prestige or because possession would symbolize success, but because I loved the house, each ugly gray stone, each square foot of the Cornish earth on which it was built, and because its very ugliness struck a spark of sympathy in my soul.

  3

  There were only two things Philip cared about, our mother and the Sennen Garth mine. By the time he became master of Penmarric I already had my mother eating out of my hand, so it was only logical that I should decide to turn my attention to the mine by offering to work there. I was penniless and had to earn my living somehow; and I thought it would be a wise move to learn as much as I could about the family business so that I could later win Philip’s favor by proving my usefulness to him in the field of administration. Besides, I was already bored with helping my brother William with his duties as bailiff and felt a hankering for a new challenge in order to stave off my ennui.

  The mine was exactly the challenge I thought I needed.

  I soon realized I had bitten off more than I could chew. I loathed the place. The dark eerie galleries beneath the sea terrified me, and if it hadn’t been for Philip’s friend, the kingpin of the mining community, Alun Trevose, I would have abandoned my self-imposed apprenticeship before the end of my first week below ground. But Trevose made magic out of that mine. So great was his ability to inspire confidence in me that my fears dissolved as soon as he was within arm’s reach and soon I found myself liking him as much as I trusted him. I liked his cynicism and his irreverent contempt for established institutions, and I liked the way he treated me as a man instead of following Philip’s example and treating me as a schoolboy. For three months I trailed after him as he initiated me briefly info the mysteries of mining, but at last, I was able to retire with my pride and dignity intact to the surface to help old Walter Hubert with the paperwork, and this suited me much better. Before long I was at ease with all aspects of the administration, including the accounts, and at times I was tempted to alter a figure here and there to improve my weekly salary. Common sense, however, always stopped me. If Philip had ever caught me being dishonest I knew I would have to forget my ambition to own Penmarric one day, and my dream of being master of Penmarric meant far more to me than a chancy increase in my weekly wage now and then.

  By this time I was convinced I was Philip’s heir. Even if he did marry (a disaster which his indifference to women made highly unlikely) I suspected he would be unable to beget anything but a lump of tin, and the only other rival I had was my infant nephew Jonas, the son of my dead brother Hugh and …

  The most important woman in my life at the time of the Sennen Garth disaster.

  My sister-in-law Rebecca, the sexiest woman west of the Tamar.

  I could barely remember a time when I had not wanted Rebecca. I first saw her at Zillan rectory during a tea-party with the rector. I was almost seven years old at the time and she was twice as old as I was. Seven years old was a little young for carnal desire, but I do remember admiring her white skin and the glossiness of her dark hair. She was attractive at fourteen, and when she married Hugh at the age of twenty-one she was ravishing. I myself was fourteen then, in the throes of the darkest of adolescent depressions because I was so small and plain, consumed with the most unbearable frustration and racked by the most violent of fraternal jealousies.

  In the end it was William who helped me to cope with the trials and tribulations of adolescence. William was the hero of my childhood, the eldest and best of my eight brothers and sisters, the idol who had assumed the roles of father, guide, philosopher and friend to me since I was six years old. William was always the first person I turned to when I was in trouble, so when I eventually discovered that I had inherited the strong predilection for the opposite sex which runs erratically through our family it was to William that I eventually turned. I was sixteen when, beside myself with furious misery, I poured out to him in morbid detail every aspect of my inferiority complex. Women would never look at me. I repulsed them. I wished I had been castrated before puberty so that I wouldn’t have to suffer so now. Nobody would ever love me. I was horrible, vile and sexually unattractive.

  “How right you are,” said William, urbane as ever. “I can’t imagine any woman being attracted to a hideous scowl and a shifty expression and a mouth that turns down at the corners. Try smiling. Or laughing. Or better still, talking. No matter how good-looking a man is he won’t attract anyone if he behaves like a stuffed dummy. The most valuable asset a man can have is an easy manner, a pleasant voice and an amusing line of conversation. You’ve got all three—when you try. So why give up without trying? All a man needs is nerve, charm and a bit of dash.”

  I sighed gustily. I didn’t know what to say to women, I told him. I didn’t know how to be charming. Most of them probably wouldn’t like me anyway.

  “Nonsense!” said William. “Most women will pay attention to anything in trousers. Stop being so overcome with false modesty and get out and enjoy yourself!”

  But I didn’t know how to set about it. I didn’t know how I could meet a girl who might be friendly.

  “I’ll ask Charity,” said William kindly. “Perhaps she knows a suitable girl brave enough to tolerate you.”

  Charity was the mistress he kept in St. Just. Before she had retired to devote herself exclusively to William’s welfare she had won herself the reputation of being the best whore between Land’s End and St. Ives, and even now was remembered as much for her generosity and warmheartedness as for her bedroom prowess and carnal hospitality. At William’s request she gave me the address of a woman at Madron, and after that as far as women were concerned I never looked back.

  Yet always at the back of my mind was the thought of Rebecca.

  She and Hugh were very happy together. She had eyes for no man but him, and he—Hugh the philanderer!—had eyes for no woman save her. Marital bliss emanated from them so strongly that I could hardly bear to be in the same room with them whenever they visited Penmarric, and although as I grew older other women were to ease my frustration I spent all my teens and part of my twenties in love with a woman I couldn’t have.

  As soon as Hugh died I made my feelings clear to her, but that was too soon, she was too full of grief, and even when she began to recover she found she was pregnant and after that she had no wish to see me. I still called occasionally, but she was resentful of any attention from me, and in fact it upset me to see her pregnant with Hugh’s child. I knew then that it would be many months before I had the chance of furthering our relationship along the lines I wanted.

  The child, Hugh’s posthumous son, was born eight months after Hugh’s death, and my mother immediately wrote to say that as this was my father’s first grandson to bear the Castallack name Rebecca would of course call the child Mark—or else some other family name which was suitable.

  “I’ll be damned if I will!” said Rebecca fur
iously, ripping the letter to pieces. “Who does she think she is, dictating to me like that? All right, I’ll call him by a family name—a Roslyn family name! She called you Jan-Yves after her father, didn’t she? And who was her father anyway? An illiterate fisherman from St. Ives! Well, I’ll call my boy after my father—he at least was a semi-literate farmer! I’ll call him Jonas. That was my father’s real name. Joss was just an abbreviation.”

  “But I thought you didn’t even like your father!” I protested. “You always said how disagreeable he was!”

  “He’d had a hard life. He’d suffered.”

  “But—”

  “No, don’t you start dictating to me! That baby’s name is Jonas and it’s going to stay Jonas and if your mother dares to object—”

  She did object. The quarrels over the wretched infant’s name resounded back and forth across the moors between Rebecca’s house at Morvah and my mother’s house at Zillan and I wasted a lot of time attempting to pour oil on the troubled waters. But at least it gave me a good excuse to start calling on her again.

  However, calling didn’t get me very far, and as Christmas approached I found myself considering the situation afresh to make sure that I had made no error in my approach to her. My reasoning seemed logical enough; I knew without doubt that Rebecca wasn’t going to remain chaste for the rest of her life; therefore since it was evident that she would one day sleep with another man I saw no reason why that, other man shouldn’t be me. I was available, kind to her, fond of the little girl Deborah, and ready and willing to help alleviate the loneliness of widowhood. Even though I was only twenty-one at that time I had already had enough women to know that I could get my own way with them if I tried hard enough. In theory I should be able to seduce her.

  But in practice I was trying hard enough to burst a blood vessel and getting nowhere at all.

  In the end it was Philip—of all people—who made matters easier for me. On Christmas Eve that year he gave his first dinner party at Penmarric and among the guests who were invited were Rebecca and myself. I had a hard time persuading her to go since she disliked Philip and was too much of a social half-breed to feel at ease at such a formal gathering, but once she was there I knew my efforts at persuasion had been worthwhile. I remember she wore a marvelous dress, bright red, with a neckline which so fearlessly exposed a section of the most breath-taking part of her anatomy that the view alone would have stopped a marauding army dead in its tracks. My mother once remarked that Rebecca’s bosom was indecently large; I almost but not quite replied, “Who the devil wants a decent bosom?” The sight of Rebecca in that dress with her breasts swelling lushly upward from the strained scarlet satin was enough to make me so weak—or rather so strong—that I could hardly stand without severe embarrassment.

  No woman, I thought to myself, not even Rebecca, wore a dress like that unless she was after something more indelicate than a good meal and decorous conversation.

  I became more unbearably excited than ever.

  When the evening was over I borrowed the Penmarric car, drove Rebecca back to Morvah and invited myself into the farmhouse for a cup of tea before beginning my return journey.

  “All right,” she said without enthusiasm.

  We went into the kitchen. The children were staying the night with their great-uncle Jared Roslyn in the farmhouse next door and there was no one in the house apart from ourselves.

  “I do like that dress,” I said pleasantly. “But I can’t believe you wore it without some sort of motivation.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” she said in anger. “I wore it because I thought it was smart and fashionable and I didn’t want to look dowdy besides that snooty Miss Meredith.”

  “Hardly fashionable, is it? Bosoms aren’t in vogue at the moment, I hear.”

  She gave me a disdainful look and adopted her haughtiest, most ladylike tone of voice. “Must you,” she said, “be quite so vulgar?”

  “I don’t see anything vulgar about a good bosom.”

  She turned away in a fit of temper, opened the larder door, looked inside, and slammed the door shut again. “You can’t take a hint, can you?” she blazed, swinging around to face me. “How many more times am I supposed to say no? Are you so conceited that you can’t accept the fact that I find you repulsive? Not only do you nauseate me physically but you revolt me with your smugness as well! Get out of my house and leave me alone!”

  “I’ll bet I’m as good as Hugh was in the bedroom. He and I were much the same height and build. Once you turned out the light you could imagine—”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t!” She spun away from me, her shoulders shaking with sobs, and clapped her hands over her ears.

  I couldn’t stop myself.

  Taking a step forward, I unhooked the top fastening of her dress before she whirled around and started to fight.

  “Let … me … go!”

  She fought wildly, scratching, clawing and biting.

  I kissed her. I went on kissing her until all the fight had gone out of her and then I slipped my hand between her breasts and bent to kiss the flesh I exposed.

  “No!” she said wildly, wrenching herself away. Her voice was harsh with sobs. “Go away—don’t touch me!”

  She escaped, ran out of the room and raced down the hall. I hared after her. She was stumbling up the stairs, the boards protesting noisily beneath her feet, but although I leaped up the stairs two at a time in pursuit she had dived into her room before I reached the landing.

  The door slammed.

  I stood staring at it, the blood pounding in my ears, and wondered if I was going deaf. There had been no sound of a key turning in the lock. Almost expiring with anticipation, I reached out and tried the handle.

  The door was unlocked. Taking a deep breath, I tiptoed into the room.

  She was lying face down on the bed, her voluptuous body asking to be released from the taut satin, her shoulders shaking with a virtuous display of protest. From the silver-framed photograph on the bedside table Hugh’s face smiled at me knowingly. I placed the frame face downward on the table and waited. Nothing happened. There were no paroxysms of rage, no screams for help, no hysteria, and presently her sobs became softer and more inviting as if she had at last resigned herself to the inevitable.

  I was dazed. My shoes eased themselves from my feet, my jacket alighted on a nearby chair and my tie floated toward the floor. Still hardly daring to believe that triumph was at hand, I stooped and, trembling in every limb, began to kiss the white naked nape of her neck as I peeled away that sensuous scarlet satin.

  4

  For a woman who said that I repulsed her and who had implied that she would not under any circumstances stoop to fornication, she really didn’t do too badly. Despite the fact that I couldn’t get enough of her she didn’t seem to be dismayed. Her protests became mere courtesies to Hugh’s memory; her stiffness dissolved at a touch; her sobs were swiftly transformed into shivers of sexual pleasure. We spent a wild, wicked, wonderful night together in that wide, deep double bed, and although she woke at dawn from a brief doze and begged me to leave before anyone should see my car still outside the house, I took her again while it was light enough for her to see my face. I thought it might be judicious to remind her who: I was in case she had been fancifully thinking of me as Hugh. When I was dressed later she came downstairs to see me off and I asked when it would be convenient for me to call again.

  “I don’t want this to happen again,” she said, her beautiful eyes brilliant with tears. “I’ve sinned terribly. I’ll feel guilty for weeks.”

  “Nonsense,” I said roundly. “You’ve been listening too much to your Uncle Jared and all that chapel tarradiddle about hell-fire and damnation. God wouldn’t have made you the way you are unless he intended you to go to bed with men.”

  “You’re an atheist. You can’t understand.”

  “I most certainly am not an atheist!” I said indignantly, for religion had always fascinated me and
I had often wished I could have studied either philosophy or theology at Oxford instead of trying to please my father by reading history. I confess I had never had any calling to be either a parson or a priest or even a Buddhist monk, but theological issues intrigued me, just as a legal problem will captivate a lawyer, and I would have liked to have given religion a more thorough intellectual examination—if only to prove to myself that natural justice did not exist and that God only bothered to help those who helped themselves. Now, annoyed at being accused of atheism, I said sharply to Rebecca, “I believe in God, just as you do, but I don’t go to chapel, that’s all. I don’t believe it’s wrong to enjoy oneself.”

  “I didn’t enjoy it.”

  “My dear?” I said, exasperated by this time, “I don’t know what you were taught when you were a little girl but when I was a little boy I was taught it was very naughty to tell stories. In fact I grew up to believe it was even naughtier to tell stories than to admit that sex could just possibly by a great stretch of the imagination be enjoyable. But obviously you had a different childhood upbringing from mine.”

  “Men take advantage of a woman who enjoys that sort of thing,” she said doggedly, not looking at me. “Men are always ready to take advantage of a woman and if the woman gives in she has nothing but unhappiness.”

  “But didn’t you ‘give in,’ as you put it, to Hugh?”

  “Not until we were married. After we were married it was different.”

  “After you were married you found you enjoyed sex as much as any woman!”

  “Hugh was my husband. I loved him.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He was good and kind and unselfish,” she said, trembling. “No one knew Hugh as I knew him. He said I was the only person in the world who truly loved him, and I knew he was the only person in the world who truly loved me. My parents didn’t love me. My father was always grumbling because I wasn’t a boy and my mother never forgave me for ruining her health and spoiling her figure. Both of them used to shout at me when they weren’t shouting at each other. My mother used to go on and on at me. ‘Men take advantage of a woman,’ she used to say, ‘and don’t you forget it. I wouldn’t be in this hovel now,’ she used to say, ‘I wouldn’t be in this state if I hadn’t let Joss take advantage of me.’ She had an affair with my father before she married him. She told me. Then he said he wouldn’t go on sinning and that if she wanted to keep him she’d better marry him, but even when she promised to marry him he wouldn’t marry her until she’d signed over all her money to him. She was so infatuated with him, you see, she just wanted to do anything he wanted—she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. But if he hadn’t forced her like that she wouldn’t have married him because she was so much better than he was, a real lady with this money of her own and everything, and he was nothing, just a penniless farmer.” A tear eased its way down her cheek. She fumbled for her handkerchief. “And then after they were married he changed,” she said. “He made Mother unhappy. But it was too late by that time. He had all her money and she couldn’t go away because she had nowhere to go—all her friends had turned their backs on her when she married. ‘I wouldn’t have married him and given him my money if I hadn’t been so infatuated with him,’ she said to me, ‘and I wouldn’t have been so infatuated with him if I hadn’t stooped to a love affair. I would have kept the situation in perspective, seen things in proportion.’ I think she did love me in a way even though my birth spoiled her health and figure. She was so determined I shouldn’t make her mistakes—that’s why she went on and on and on about not letting anyone take advantage of me. I think she did care what happened to me. I think she really did care.”