“There, there,” I said soothingly while casting a surreptitious glance at my watch. “I’m sure she did.”
“My father went on and on at me too. ‘There’s only room for one slut in this house,’ he said, meaning my mother, ‘and just you remember that. If I ever catch you misbehaving yourself with any man you leave my house that same day and never return,’ he said. ‘You bloody well stay chaste till you marry or you’ll regret it all your life. No man respects a whore and God punishes sinners. Just you remember that.’ He kept on and on and on at me—I think he held it against me that I was like my mother to look at and he didn’t want me to be too like her. Poor Mother.”
“Well, both your parents are dead now,” I said reasonably, moving out of the front door into the cold air of early morning. It was high time I left before my car was noticed outside her house, and I had every intention of leaving. “That part of your past is safely behind you. Now you can do as you please and enjoy yourself, and you can be sure, I won’t take advantage of you unfairly or even think of you as a whore and lose my respect for you. I don’t react in that way where women are concerned, and besides, I love you. If you knew how often in the past I’ve longed for a night like this—”
“But it mustn’t happen again! It mustn’t!” Her eyes were dilated in her agitation. “We’d have no future—no good could come of it—-I could never, never marry again—”
I clung to the worn shreds of my patience. “We do have a future,” I said, enunciating each word with clarity to induce her to understand such an obvious truth. “If you don’t wish to marry me I’ll try to accept your decision for the time being in the hope that you’ll change your mind soon, but even without marriage we do at least have a future as a man and woman who enjoy each other’s company. Now be sensible, darling, please—no emotional scenes! Face the facts. You need me and I need you, so we might as well go ahead and make the most of our mutual needs.”
“I—I can’t—I mustn’t—”
“Very well,” I said, thoroughly angry by this time. “When you get the itch for a spot of fornication write me a note and if I’m not doing anything too important I might drop in and offer my services for half an hour or so.”
She burst into tears.
“Rebecca, darling—”
“No, don’t touch me! I gave you so much yet now all you can do is talk to me as if I were a whore!”
What can one do with such a woman? I did the only thing possible in the circumstances. I took her back into the hall and made love to her then and there on the hall floor. After that I kissed her, told her I would call again soon and then beat a rapid retreat to my bachelor bedroom at Penmarric to recuperate from my exhaustion.
5
I would have married her if she had accepted my proposal in the beginning. Unlike many men who practice fornication consistently I had no deep-seated prejudice against marriage. In fact I wanted to get married, not only to ensure myself a ready source of sexual gratification but also because I was lonely and liked to have someone around who could share a joke with me or even merely share a grumble at a spell of wet weather. The older I grew the clearer I came to realize that sexual gratification was available anywhere if one took the trouble to seek it, but a worthwhile friendship was much more elusive—and much more valuable.
At the time when I began my affair with Rebecca at the end of 1926 I was approaching one of the loneliest phases of my life. My favorite sister Lizzie obviously preferred Cambridge to Cornwall; I saw little of her, and to make matters worse her letters to me were full of nothing but swooning admiration for one of the professors, an intellectual with the stuffy name of Edgar St. John Callendar. Apparently they spent their time tea-drinking together and conducting passionate discussions on the subject of the Greek theater. I began to feel depressed. Privately I had long hoped that Lizzie would remain unmarried so that she could come and keep house for me if I failed to find a suitable wife; I hadn’t anticipated her infatuation with academic life to outlive her adolescence and had certainly never anticipated her catching the eye of a Cambridge professor.
As if Lizzie’s unwitting estrangement from me wasn’t misfortune enough, I was horrified to see Charity dragooning William to the registry office and blackmailing him into making her his wife. William had belonged to me just as much as he had belonged to her, but now she had cornered him all for herself. Since he had always professed himself to be a confirmed bachelor I could hardly believe he had been so fickle and vacillating.
“Don’t let her marry you!” I shouted at him, enraged, during a crucial stage of the proceedings. “You don’t have to!”
Silly of me, isn’t it?” William agreed, unruffled as ever. “I suppose I must really want to marry her after all.”
He was hopeless. I almost wept with anger, yet there was nothing I could do to stop him. To make this grisly year of my life even grislier I was turned out of my home. Philip decided he should try to beget a future caretaker for his mine and astounded me by announcing his intention to marry Helena Meredith, a cool, crisp blonde with repellently well-bred bones and a slender, rather sexless body. I was sunk in gloom. I reasoned that Philip, homosexual or not, must know himself to be capable of a normal relationship with a woman or he would never have contemplated matrimony at all; much as I detested Philip I didn’t think even he would have been capable of deceiving Helena by pretending he could be a normal husband when he was impotent, so in that case it now seemed inevitable that between them they would soon produce an heir to Penmarric. My ambitions seemed poised for sudden death. To make matters worse Philip gave me both money and permission to build a house for myself on the estate and made it clear he was buying me off his conscience and out of any future will he intended to make in regard to his wealth and property.
Life had never before seemed so monstrously unjust. I had a hard time accepting his bounty with a smile and displaying as much humble gratitude as my hypocrisy could muster.
After that I stayed for a time with William and Charity at their house in St. Just. I had no interest in building a house of my own on the Penmarric estate, no wish to watch Philip being master of the lands which should have been mine, no wish to clap my hands in admiration every time Helena brought a son into the world. Presently I invested Philip’s money on the stock exchange with the idea of having a small income independent of my salary at the mine, but I was inexperienced in playing the market and soon lost every penny he had given me.
By this time I was in despair. I had no home and no money apart from my salary, and although William and Charity asked me to stay on as their guest I knew I was abusing their hospitality. I proposed again to Rebecca, but she still turned, me down, and although I then suggested we live together for a time without the blessing of the church she wouldn’t have it. I supposed I could understand her refusal. In such a small rural community she would quickly have been ostracized for her loose-living and her Uncle Jared would undoubtedly have washed his hands of her. Besides, she had the children to think of. Naturally she wanted them to grow up with a good opinion of her and not to be affected by the hostility of a community which disapproved of her private life. I could understand, yet even though I understood, her refusal still hurt me. I would have slept with her every night if I had had the chance, but she refused to see me more than once or twice a week. She never once told me she loved me. Each time I had to beg to get what I wanted. If she hadn’t had something so obviously worth begging for I would have abandoned her in a fit of rage and told her to go to hell, but no matter how much we cursed and yelled at each other beforehand I always went back to her afterward and she always ended our stormy scenes by an act of capitulation.
It was a very exhausting affair.
Finally I came to the end of my tether. I forced myself to face the unwelcome fact that Rebecca would probably never consent to replacing her beloved Hugh with a second husband, and with reluctance I came to the conclusion I could no longer wait for her to change her views on the su
bject of matrimony; it was imperative for my peace of mind that I acquire without delay a home, a decent income and a friendly woman who could keep me company when I couldn’t sleep with Rebecca. I looked around feverishly. Almost at once my glance rested on Felicity Carnforth, and then and there, without any further hesitation, I decided to get married.
6
Felicity was the last person of importance to enter my life before the Sennen Garth disaster.
Her two brothers had been killed in the war, so Felicity as Sir Justin Carnforth’s only surviving child was a considerable heiress. She was too much in love with her stable of horses to be greatly interested in a mere man, but she was astute enough to see that it would be more advantageous to her socially to be a married woman and that her father had no wish for her to remain a spinster. As far as romance was concerned she hardly interested me any more than I interested her, for she was an angular girl with buck teeth, but I liked her and thought it not improbable that we could evolve some mutually beneficial arrangement. I had by this time no romantic dreams of marrying for love; the only woman I loved refused to marry me, so that made nonsense of the notion that romance and marriage should go hand in hand. Presently I laid all my cards on the table, explained the entire situation to Felicity and was rewarded when she repaid my frankness by being equally frank with me.
“Well, I would like to get married, of course,” she said. “Every girl does really, although everyone has different reasons. I’m sick of Daddy being grumpy and saying I’m not as pretty as Mummy was—as if it was my fault I inherited his looks!—and I’m sick of everyone saying poor old Felicity, she’s jolly nice and all that but talk about being on the shelf … You know, Jan! You know how people talk! I wouldn’t mind marrying you just to have a bit of peace. Honestly! I’m not in love with you, of course, but I’m not such a ninny as to expect true love will appear one day on a white horse and sweep me off to the altar. I’m simply not the type. Things like that happen to your gorgeous sister Mariana but not to girls like me. I don’t care if you want to marry me for my money—at least you’re frank enough to admit it. I couldn’t have stood it if you’d swooned at my feet, sworn you loved me and promised me my money meant nothing to you! I would have laughed till I was puce and then we would both have been most horribly embarrassed.”
I began to like her even more than I had before. We settled down and began to discuss a suitable marital arrangement.
”I’ll ostensibly do my duty, I promise you,” I said, “I’ll live in the same house, act as your escort and look after you. But I can’t promise fidelity, I’m afraid.” I had already told her about Rebecca.
“What a shame, she won’t marry you!” said Felicity sympathetically. There was nothing bitchy about Felicity. “She’s awfully attractive. I felt so sorry for her being widowed like that.”
We discussed the matter further. “I think it would be best if we were husband and wife in name only,” I said in my most businesslike voice. I had no desire to make love to her. “Then if anything goes wrong we’ll have no trouble getting the marriage annulled.”
“All right, but we’d better not have separate bedrooms to begin with or Daddy might smell a rat. I don’t see why we shouldn’t have twin beds, though. Twin beds are frightfully chic these days, everyone says so. Would you mind twins?”
I said I wouldn’t mind in the least and we fondly departed from each other to announce our engagement to our respective families.
Rebecca at once flew into a passionate rage and called me heartless, faithless and a dozen other more unpleasant words besides. I was startled to see how radically the news affected her. For someone who had always, even after her surrender, professed to care nothing for me, she became hysterically vocal in objecting when I put her indifference to the test. Finally after I had spent at least two hours mopping up her tears and offering my usual brand of comfort, she calmed down and became more rational.
“You’re not to blame,” she said, blowing her nose on my sodden handkerchief. “It was wrong of me to blame you. You only turned to another woman because I’d always refused to marry you—I’d led you to believe I would never marry again, but oh, Jan, perhaps I was wrong, perhaps I should have accepted, perhaps … Oh, Jan, let’s get married! I’m sorry I always treated you so badly—I didn’t mean it—I do love you, Jan, I do—”
I was so childishly thrilled to hear such words from her lips long after I had given up hope of hearing them that I followed her example and lapsed into melodrama. I kissed her passionately, swore I’d never love anyone else as long as I lived, told her she was the most beautiful woman in the whole world and that I was the luckiest man who had ever drawn breath to live.
“All the same, darling,” I said at last, “it is rather a tricky situation. You see, I really do have to marry someone wealthy. It’s not that I don’t love you, but—well, I have debts and obligations and now that Felicity and I have announced our engagement I really can’t draw back. Supposing she sued me for breach of promise? Damn it, I’d end up in prison with my whole life ruined! I have to marry her—there’s no way out of it now.” In fact, I reasoned to myself, it was now absolutely impossible to draw back. It wouldn’t have been fair to Felicity, and besides I had reconciled myself to the thought of sharing Felicity’s prospects at Carnforth Hall. If I were married to Felicity I could live in the style to which I had long been accustomed and still have Rebecca whenever I wanted her, but if I married Rebecca I’d be in perpetual difficulty trying to make ends meet, particularly if we had children, and I had no guarantee I would inherit either Penmarric or the Penmar fortune. “Listen, darling,” I said quickly. “This needn’t make any difference to us. I must marry for expediency’s sake, and who is there more suitable for a marriage of convenience than Felicity Carnforth? Surely not even you could be jealous of jolly old Felicity! I’ve had a talk with her and we’ve already worked out a sensible arrangement, marriage in name only, no sex at all—even separate bedrooms,” I added, slipping in a little lie to make the case more convincing. “Now I ask you, darling, would you really think I’d be tempted to make love to Felicity? Of course not! You know you’re the only woman in my life and always will be.”
“Oh, Jan—” She burst into tears again.
“Besides,” I said, maintaining a fast pace, “you say you’ll marry me, but are you sure you’re not just making wild promises in the heat of the moment? I’d hate you to marry me, regret it later and then accuse me of tricking you into marriage while you were emotionally upset And would you ever be able to put Hugh’s memory behind you? If we were married wouldn’t his memory always come between us?”
She gulped and blew her nose again. “Perhaps …” She was confused. “Yes, perhaps you’re right, Jan, and I’m being rash in saying I’d be willing to marry you …”
I stifled a sigh of relief. I did love her very much and was terrified of losing her. At the same time I now saw clearly that I must marry Felicity. I felt as if I were walking on skates along a tightrope.
“I would love to marry you in so many ways,” I said gently, “but it wouldn’t be for the best, darling. You know it wouldn’t.”
Her lovely eyes filled with tears again. She looked ravishing. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. I know you’re right. It’s just that …” A tear paused on the lush curve of her cheek and glittered like a diamond against her white skin. “It’s so lonely here … and the children need a father. You’re so good with the children, Jan.”
“I’ll come over here as often as I can,” I said, touched. I hadn’t thought of myself being good with children before. In fact I hadn’t cared much for children except for the little girl Deborah, whose shy femininity appealed to me. “Marriage won’t make any difference, darling, I promise you,” I said sincerely. “We’ll go on afterward just as before.”
That was exactly what happened, even though my marriage turned out to be a little different from the prior arrangements I had made with Felicity. We were married nin
e months after Philip in the spring of 1928 and had a smart wedding in London. Felicity was determined to marry in style and make the most of her unexpected trip to the altar. The food at the reception was delicious, the champagne naturally the very best that money could buy, and afterward we roared merrily away to Paris to celebrate the occasion for another couple of weeks. However, the honeymoon proved to be my undoing. Felicity had wrought miracles with her appearance before the wedding and had bought a quantity of clothes which flattered her figure in the right places. Not content with revolutionizing her wardrobe, she had had her hair professionally styled and, I suspected, had also had a barrage of beauty treatments to enhance her looks. The results were shattering. By the time we reached the privacy of our Parisian hotel I knew that twin beds were going to make little difference to certain physical sensations which I had been forced to ignore during the journey, and by the time she had finally arrayed herself in the sauciest black negligee I had ever set eyes on I knew any attempt at chastity would be hopeless. We had a most successful wedding night and enjoyed ourselves enormously.
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