Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  “Mama!” I shouted, in the worst of tempers by that time. “Where are you?”

  There was a sound from the front of the house. “Jan-Yves?” I heard her call tremulously. “I’m in the parlor.”

  I walked over to the door but she opened it before I could reach her and stood before me with an odd, half-defensive, half-excited expression which I did not understand.

  “The rector’s here,” she said, stumbling over her words. “He said he thought he would choose this day to call for the first time since he felt sure I would be feeling lonely and in need of company. He’s been so very kind.”

  And beyond her in the parlor I saw the somber suit and clerical collar of my half-brother, Adrian Parrish.

  2

  I was stupefied.

  I stood there, staring at him and staring at her, and as I stared I felt the color creep into my cheeks and suffuse my face and neck until I thought I must have turned the brightest, most unbecoming shade of crimson imaginable. Speech was beyond me. I was struck dumb.

  “Oh, Jan darling, don’t be angry,” said my mother quickly, mistaking the cause of my all-too-visible emotion. “It’s all right. Mr. Parrish saw Ethel first and asked her if I wanted to see him. He wouldn’t have come in if I hadn’t invited him. Don’t be angry—please.”

  I swallowed and shook my head.

  Adrian said awkwardly, “I think I must be on my way. I have one or two other calls to make.” He turned to my mother. “No doubt you’d prefer to be alone with Jan-Yves, Mrs. Castallack. Please excuse me if I take my leave of you now.”

  “You’ll call again,” said my mother, “won’t you?”

  “If I may. Thank you.” He edged his way past me as if he could barely wait to escape from my presence. I noticed how he avoided my eye as if he were afraid he had given me great offense.

  My voice said stiffly, “Stay longer. Don’t rush off. What’s the hurry?” and when he looked at me with a start I managed to smile to indicate I was pleased to see him.

  He hesitated. “Thank you,” he said at last, “but I really must be on my way. Perhaps some other time. Thank you again, Mrs. Castallack,” he added, taking her hand for a moment before opening the front door. “I look forward to seeing you at matins next Sunday.”

  “Thank you,” she said simply. “Goodbye.” She stood in the doorway and watched him as he walked swiftly down the garden path to the lane.

  When he was out of sight she closed the door. We were alone. The hall was eerily quiet as if all the ghosts of the old house had gathered to listen to our conversation.

  Presently I said, “I went to Polzillan House but Gerald is too ill for Jeanne to think of leaving him. So I thought I would come back and have tea with you after all.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. Thank you, darling, that was very kind of you.”

  “I didn’t really mean to leave you alone. I just thought that if I could get Jeanne to come over—”

  “Yes, that’s all right. I understand.”

  “I suppose Adrian thought it was a very poor show, me leaving you like that.”

  “Adrian? Oh no, we didn’t talk about you at all.” She moved back into the parlor and stood for a moment looking around the room. She was very still. She had her back to the light and suddenly I had a glimpse of the woman she had been forty years ago, hypnotic in her stillness, graceful in her movements, effortlessly able to fascinate whomsoever she chose. For the first time in my life I wondered how my father had ever managed to leave her for another woman.

  At last I said, “You didn’t … mind?”

  “When you get past seventy,” she said, “you find that what seemed so intolerable at forty ceased to be intolerable a very long time ago.” After a pause she added casually, “I remember so well the first time I saw Adrian because it was just before Mark and I had our final quarrel. … We were at Brighton at the time.”

  I said nothing. I knew perfectly well that I had been conceived there, but she didn’t know that I knew. My father had once given me a careful account of the circumstances surrounding my conception in an attempt to explain my mother’s initial aversion to me.

  “Adrian was a nice-looking child,” said my mother, “fair-haired and chubby like a little choirboy. I remember being surprised by the name Adrian because I hadn’t heard of it before.”

  She said nothing else, but presently my silence seemed to draw her attention to me, for she took my hand and leaned forward to kiss me on the cheek. “I’m so pleased you came back, Jan-Yves,” she said. “I confess I was feeling very miserable until Adrian arrived.”

  “I shouldn’t have left you,” I said at once, thinking that family affairs had reached a new rock-bottom low when my mother had to turn to her husband’s bastard for comfort because all her own children had deserted her. I felt consumed with guilt and shame. I almost hated Adrian for his courage in visiting her when she was the last person on earth whom he was morally obliged to visit, and resolved on the spot to start behaving exactly as a model son should behave toward his elderly widowed mother.

  Throughout the days that followed I think I surprised myself as well as everyone else by my meticulous attention to her welfare. I called every day at the farm, brought her flowers three times a week, took her for a drive every Saturday afternoon and escorted her to church on Sundays. It was true that the more my conscience was appeased the less meticulous I became, but for several weeks at least my behavior toward her was beyond reproach.

  While attending church at Zillan I soon became impressed with Adrian’s well-constructed sermons; several times I managed to discuss them with him afterward and we fell into the habit of lunching together once a week and spending a good two hours in delightfully intricate discussions of dogma, doctrine and deity. In matters of religious taste he was by no means a High Churchman and had been opposed to the Anglo-Catholic overtones of the revised Prayer Book which had caused such a stir a year or two earlier; on the other hand he did not care for the revivalist methods of the “Oxford Group,” and thought the Buchmanite movement was more suited to America than England. He set out to steer a middle course between Low and High Church attitudes, but his primary interest was in making the church attractive to the younger generation who seemed to be drawn in increasing numbers to the predominant new prophets of the Left; neither Marx nor Freud nor Einstein exactly encouraged religious faith, and agnosticism was gaining ground as fast as the fashionable literary cult of debunking established attitudes and outlooks.

  Adrian was astonished by my unlikely interest in the subject of theology, but when he asked why I was so interested in it I found it hard to give him an answer.

  “I want to find out what God can do for me,” I said at last. “I know there’s a God somewhere, but so far He hasn’t shown much interest in seeing I get a square deal in life. Realism tells me there’s no natural justice in the world, but hope—probably false—leads me to think that there might be if one only knew how to reach it. I want to know if God is so detached from the world as He appears to be or whether He does shoot off a few bolts of natural justice when He feels like it. I want to find out more about God. I think if I can find out more about God I can find out more about justice.”

  “Perhaps,” said Adrian, “if you found out more about justice you would find out more about God.”

  I privately thought this remark was a little slick for a clergyman, but I supposed it was crafty enough if one liked that kind of thing. I smiled and said politely, “Perhaps” and dredged up another subject to discuss with him. Occasionally we discussed politics, but politics were so depressing at that time that I tried to avoid the subject whenever I could. I knew it was terrible that unemployment was rising, but frankly by this time I was a little tired of hearing about the far-flung results of that tedious Wall Street crash, and although I felt sorry for the unemployed I preferred not to think of them unless I was absolutely forced to. I supposed the current Labour Government meant well, but for me Labour symbolized the d
reariness of the masses, the ugly ribbon developments around big towns, the cheap shacks of council houses which offended the eye, the cheap goods in multiple stores and the cheap news of the popular press. I knew it was splendid that the lot of the masses should be improved, but I regretted the vanishing elegance and glamor of a more select age and knew exactly why my mother often spoke longingly of the “good old days” when the “age of the masses” was just a phrase in a social philosopher’s notebook.

  “But the good old days weren’t really good at all,” said Adrian. “They only seem that way because we look back at them across the horror of war. But we look back through rose-tinted spectacles.”

  I personally didn’t see why one should always scorn rose-tinted spectacles but I didn’t argue with him. If he wanted to go through life gazing at everything with the naked eye there was no reason why he shouldn’t, but I found this ceaseless quest to confront reality unflinchingly a little tiring, to say the least. However, no doubt it was inappropriate for a clergyman with a social conscience to cherish a useless illusion or two.

  William attended Adrian’s services sometimes, but he was not a regular churchgoer and only turned up once a month as a courtesy to his brother. I saw him daily, however; he and Charity had left their house in St. Just and moved to the bailiff’s cottage on the Carnforth Hall estate, but although William liked his new job he admitted to me that never a day passed when he did not miss Penmarric and all the familiar faces on the Penmarric estate together, but the Hall had never been my main interest and my knowledge of its affairs was superficial.

  1931 arrived. Philip was happily settled in a tin-mining district of British Columbia, and writing letters in praise of the Canadian mines, Smithson the new bailiff at Penmarric was amusing himself by ruling his tenants with an iron hand, and Simon Peter Roslyn was no doubt savoring to the full his monthly visits to my home to inspect his cousin Jonas’s inheritance,

  Since they were all so plainly enjoying themselves I decided it was high time I joined in the fun; at the end of January I abandoned my practice of visiting Penmarric only while acting as my mother’s escort and instead began very cautiously to appear there on my own.

  3

  I was welcomed with open arms. I would drive to Penmarric, borrow a horse from the stables and go out riding on the estate, ostensibly for pleasure, but my rides would take me all over the estate so that I could spend as much time as possible talking to the tenants and discussing their problems with them. Nobody liked Smithson. Everyone asked how long Philip would be away and how long they would have to wait to make their complaints.

  “Make your complaints to me,” I said, welcoming their discontent and encouraging their confidences. “I’m in touch with my brother. Tell me all about it.”

  They told me Smithson was extortionate. He had raised the rent again. Everyone who lagged behind in his rent payments was threatened with eviction. He had refused to repair the roof of Granny Logan’s cottage because he said she had been behind with the rent, and everyone knew how poor old Granny suffered miseries from rheumatism in wet weather. He was boldly stealing—requisitioning, he called it—an acre of Tom Towan’s farm because he wanted to build himself a fine house overlooking the sea.

  “Mr. Castallack said I could,” he said when I raised the matter with him and showed me Philip’s authorization to prove it.

  I noted where he put the authorization and presently burned it. Then I went to Penzance to see Michael Vincent.

  I did have some success; I managed to establish that Philip had granted the authorization in a hurry without consulting his trustees, but Michael said the position could be legalized and advised me as politely as possible to refrain from stirring up more trouble. However, by this time the tenants were enjoying stirring up trouble without assistance from me, and when Smithson began to build his house in the autumn of 1931 he found building materials disappearing, tools vanishing and men failing to turn up for work. Naturally he complained to Simon Peter and naturally Simon Peter ran straight to his superior and naturally Michael told the police. A couple of old constables were put on duty at the site at night, but materials still kept disappearing and in the end Smithson sank to desperate measures; despite his failings I have to admit he did have a certain resourcefulness. Now, in the face of this continued hostility, he hired a gang of unemployed toughs from St. Ives, housed them in tents and told them to protect his property from malicious damage.

  The situation could hardly have been more inflammable. Soon fights began and breaches of the peace, until finally in the spring of 1932 even Michael had to admit that retaining Smithson as bailiff of Penmarric was more trouble than it was worth.

  “I’ll take over the estate until Philip comes home,” I said, confident that this was the best solution that could possibly be devised to cope with the problem. “The tenants know me and trust me and I’ve had experience at the job. I could get everything running smoothly again in no time at all.”

  But Michael, stony-faced and hostile, merely repeated that he would write to Philip.

  I waited, convinced that Philip would agree to dismiss Smithson, positive that he, if not Michael, would see the advantages of letting me run the estate instead. But I was wrong. Philip agreed to dismiss Smithson, but he didn’t appoint me to manage estate affairs in his stead. He had chosen old Walter Hubert, the former purser of Sennen Garth, to totter out of retirement and put the Penmarric administration on a stable footing; deputies were to be appointed to perform the physical tasks of rent-collecting and inspection for him, and if he refused to take up the appointment Michael was to select the most suitable substitute he could find.

  Naturally the substitute wouldn’t be me. Michael was quite shrewd enough to realize that I had engineered the trouble at Penmarric, and by this time there was no love lost between us. Feeling sick with disappointment at this latest injustice, I went to London for a week or two to cheer myself up, but the mood of London seemed to have changed subtly and the frenetic gaiety I remembered so well from my honeymoon was missing. The great financial crisis of the previous year which had led to the formation of the National Government seemed to have left the city limp. There was still gaiety, of course, and still plenty of amusement for anyone who had money to burn, but the vitality of the Twenties seemed to be drifting into a less spontaneous and less striking form of frivolity. After a while I began to wonder if the fault lay with me; I was on my own, since Rebecca had refused to accompany me for the sake of her reputation and Felicity had preferred to stay at home for the sake of her horses, and although in theory this should have given me a delicious amount of freedom I found I was too lonely to do more than go through the motions of having a good time.

  Finally I cut short my holiday after a performance of Noel Coward’s Cavalcade had wedged me for an entire evening among a middle-aged audience sobbing with nostalgia, and returned to Cornwall. I reasoned that if I couldn’t enjoy a Coward play—or indeed any other of the current joys of London life—there must be something very wrong with me, but fortunately as soon as I reached Carnforth Hall, family affairs prevented me from wallowing in my depression. My brother-in-law Gerald Meredith died at last, and after the funeral Jeanne closed Polzillan House just as Philip had closed Penmarric and departed with Helena for an extended visit to the Continent. No sooner had we waved goodbye to them than news of a more cheerful kind reached us: Lizzie had married her professor. However, she had done so with such stealth that not one member of her family had been invited to the wedding and—adding insult to injury—her letter informing me that she was now Mrs. Edgar St. John Callendar did not reach Carnforth Hall until after she had departed with her husband for a honeymoon in Greece.

  I don’t know whether I was more hurt than my mother or whether my mother was more hurt than I was. We were both of us deeply offended by the news.

  “She might have told me!” exclaimed my mother angrily. “She might have let me know! I would love to have gone to the wedding!” Her curios
ity overcoming her injured pride, she added, “A professor! Fancy! Well, I suppose that’s quite suitable. I always hoped Lizzie would marry despite her plainness, but to be honest I feared her personality would tell against her even more than her looks. She was so aggressive and unfeminine.”

  I did not voice my opinion of Lizzie’s behavior to my mother, but as soon as I had the opportunity I wrote her a stiff letter of congratulations. “I can understand you not inviting Mama to the service,” I said acidly, “but I think you might have invited me. Am I ever to be allowed to meet your husband one of these days or is he to remain as private as your wedding?”

  “Dearest Jan,” Lizzie wrote contritely as soon as she returned from her honeymoon in September. “The wedding was just a short church blessing by a clergyman in front of two witnesses! I hardly thought it was worth hauling you up from Cornwall to be present, but please forgive me if I’ve mortally offended you. Of course I wasn’t going to invite Mother to take the wedding arrangements out of my hands and turn the event into a circus, and anyway I think if Eddy had known my mother was coming he would have taken fright and locked himself in his study. He’s very shy and sensitive, poor darling, and after spending almost seven years luring him into matrimony I simply couldn’t run the risk of any last-minute hitches! However, now we’re safely married he actually seems anxious to meet my family and so I expect we’ll be making the trek west before long. Have you any idea where we can stay? Since both Penmarric and Polzillan House are closed I’m at a loss to know where to go. I’d like to stay with you at Canforth Hall but I don’t think I could stand Alice for long and I know Eddy couldn’t stand Felicity. No offense meant, of course, but horsey, hearty women make him extremely nervous, and I don’t want him upset. Perhaps it would be easiest if we stayed at the Metropole. Any suggestions?”