Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  I began to have grave reservations about this husband of hers. After considering the letter again I was just about to write to propose I visit her in Cambridge to save her the tedium of a visit to Cornwall, when I suddenly saw how the situation could be turned to my advantage. I went pale with excitement. The idea simmered in my mind for five delightful minutes, and then I picked up my pen and wrote a charming letter inviting Lizzie and her husband to visit Penmarric at the earliest opportunity which presented itself to them.

  4

  My mother thought it was an excellent idea that I should be host to the visitors at Penmarric, and since she was in favor of the scheme Michael could hardly do less than acquiesce. I asked Felicity if she minded my spending a few days at Penmarric, but she was just off to visit friends in Devon and didn’t mind in the least.

  Luck at last seemed to be on my side.

  I was excited at the thought of seeing Lizzie again, for as I have already mentioned she was my favorite sister, sharp-witted, quick-tongued and good company. We were rather alike; we both took after our father in looks, so both of us were in the unfortunate position of being plain children among a host of handsome older brothers and beautiful older sisters; and both of us were always aware of an antipathy existing between ourselves and our parents. Only two years separated us in age, and in childhood at least we had had several interests in common. However, as we grew up we grew less alike. Lizzie, like our father, was a born intellectual with a passion for learning, but learning for learning’s sake held no appeal for me, and although I was well informed—particularly on my hobby, religion—and didn’t consider myself a fool, I was certainly not an intellectual. Lizzie’s long love affair with the academic life of Cambridge was something I had never been able to understand. However, my lack of comprehension had not lessened my affection, and even now, long after I had accepted the fact that I seldom saw her, I had only to see her once to regret our long periods apart.

  I started regretting them again as soon as she stepped out of her husband’s chauffeur-driven Bentley to meet me on that fine September morning. She looked well—and smart, smarter than I had ever seen her look before. Her luxuriant black hair was coiled sleekly upward and crowned by a glamorous hat. Her skin, over which she had shed so many frustrated tears in adolescence, was milkily smooth; her slanting eyes sparkled; her full-lipped mouth seemed sensual instead of out of shape. She wore a cream-colored suit that emphasized the generous curves of her figure, and her legs, always good, were encased in a pair of the sheerest silk stockings.

  “How you improve with age!” It was she who spoke, not I. We hugged each other. “Whatever happened to that ugly little horror I had to share a nursery with?”

  “I was asking myself exactly the same question!” I kissed her. “Marriage must suit you, Lizzie.”

  “You too evidently! Here’s Eddy. Eddy darling, this is Jan-Yves.”

  I turned to inspect my brother-in-law. I had expected a desiccated elderly bore, but instead I was confronted with a tall good-looking man of about forty-five with gentle blue eyes and a sensitive mouth. Lizzie had understated his extreme shyness. I could hardly get a word out of him until we had finished dinner that evening, but at last the two whiskys before the meal, the three glasses of Hock with the food and the two brandies after the cloth had been drawn finally gave him the courage to open his mouth.

  “Interesting place, Cornwall,” he said, making his major speech of the evening. “Elizabeth’s told me there’s a fine example of an ancient hill fort near here.”

  “Yes indeed,” I said. “Chûn Castle.” After I had talked for a minute of the archaeological glories of Cornwall, he asked several questions which tested my knowledge to its skimpy limits, but I held my own and soon he was talking of Greece, his favorite subject, and I was able to leave him to carry the conversation. Presently we joined Lizzie in the drawing room. I was just wondering if I would ever have the chance to speak to her alone when he excused himself from us and said he needed an early night after the long journey. “And I’m sure you two would like a few words together,” he said with a shy smile at his wife. “I know it’s been a long time since you’ve seen Jan-Yves, Elizabeth.”

  After such an understanding gesture my last reservation about him fell away and I decided I approved of Lizzie’s marriage after all.

  “Why did he take such a long time to marry you?” I demanded of her as soon as we were alone. “He seems a decent sort of fellow. Why couldn’t he make up his mind?”

  Lizzie launched into some high-flown rigamarole about how they had both believed in the intellectual validity of free love and had been content for some time to avoid such a fundamentally bourgeois institution as marriage. What she was really saying was that Eddy, a confirmed bachelor, had been frightened that a wife might have impinged on his dedication to his work, and Lizzie had evolved her own way of proving to him that he worked better with her than without her.

  “I hope you haven’t betrayed your intellectual principles by your trip to the altar,” I said with a straight face.

  “Oh heavens,” said Lizzie, “it’s much more comfortable to be married and respectable.”

  “How fortunate you both came to the same conclusion!”

  We laughed together.

  “I suppose I was rather naughty,” admitted Lizzie presently, “but I did love him and at the end I did desperately want to marry him, so I don’t think I was being too low. Not nearly so low as Mariana. Honestly! Whoever will she sleep with next?”

  Mariana was then living in Kensington after leaving her husband and child, running off with some undesirable roué and becoming enmeshed in a most unsavory divorce.

  “Of course her husband refuses to let her see Esmond,” said Lizzie. “How much does Mother know about it all, do you think? I suppose Philip would have kept the newspapers from her when Mariana was the ‘other woman’ in that horrible divorce, but she must have heard something. Didn’t you hear any of the details? My dear, it was three-in-a-bed and everything. I knew someone who was actually at the hearing and she said …”

  From Mariana’s sex life the conversation gravitated to mine. “I’m surprised you’re still infatuated with Rebecca,” said Lizzie—cattily I thought. “And I can’t think why you’re still married to Felicity. I’m not suggesting you should marry Rebecca—it’s obvious you can get exactly what you want from her without a trip to the altar—but why don’t you divorce Felicity and at least be free to marry again when you want to?”

  “I don’t think you have any understanding of my relationship with Rebecca, Lizzie,” I said coldly. “And as for my marriage, that’s my insurance for the future. After all, one must have some sort of security, and now that I shan’t inherit Penmarric—”

  “You could go to London, get a good job and earn a living. You’d probably make a lot of money in no time, and anyway aren’t you bored with being a gentleman of leisure by this time? No, don’t tell me how you help run Carnforth Hall and write detective stories in your spare time! That’s not a good enough excuse! You’ll be telling me next you can’t go to London because you couldn’t possibly leave Mother!”

  I had no intention of arguing with her; I was too, pleased to see her again. “Mama’s not a bad old girl really, Lizzie,” I said, subtly changing the subject. “We never knew her properly when we were children.”

  “I knew her quite well enough, thank you! I suppose she’ll have to come over to Penmarric tomorrow to inspect Eddy. What a bore! Would Rebecca come too with the children, do you think? I’d like to see if Jonas is such an abominable child as you say he is, and anyway I think a tea party with Mother alone might be too much of a strain …”

  However, I knew my mother wouldn’t want to meet her new son-in-law for the first time in Rebecca’s presence, so I managed to coax Lizzie into agreeing that my mother should first come to lunch on her own.

  “How difficult things are sometimes!” said Lizzie grumpily afterward. She was never at her best whe
n a meeting with our mother was pending.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing them both,” said my mother politely when I arrived at the farm the next day to collect her. “I’m so glad you asked me to lunch.” But her fingers were trembling as she drew on her gloves and I realized with astonishment that she was even more nervous of the corning meeting than Lizzie was.

  In fact the meeting did begin uneasily. There was the usual awkwardness of the introductions and the opening remarks, and afterward I put my mother in the best armchair with a glass of sherry before her while Lizzie scrabbled frantically for a cigarette and Eddy wandered off in search of a distant ashtray. I was just wondering what I could say if my mother made some disparaging remark about women smoking when my mother herself put everything right with one short simple sentence.

  “How fetching you look, Lizzie,” she said politely. “It’s a pity Jeanne doesn’t take as much trouble to look smart and attractive. She looks very dowdy nowadays.”

  “Hm,” said Lizzie, pretending to be impervious to the long-delayed stamp of approval, but after that the tension in the atmosphere eased and they were more friendly toward each other.

  My brother-in-law gazed at my mother in admiration when he thought she wasn’t looking and was sometimes coaxed by Lizzie into saying “yes” and “no” when the occasion demanded it.

  “I’ve never been to Cambridge,” said my mother to him at lunch. “Isn’t that a terrible thing to have to admit? But I once visited Oxford.”

  “Oh?” he murmured, obviously at a loss for words. “And did you like Oxford, Mrs. Castallack?”

  “Not in the least,” she answered, giving him the perfect response, and after that he felt encouraged enough to speak for some time on the glories of his chosen city.

  “You must come and stay with us,” he said kindly, taking no notice of Lizzie’s horrified expression, and my mother smiled and was gracious and said yes, perhaps one day, although she didn’t care to travel much nowadays.

  After lunch the three of them walked off around the garden to inspect the greenhouses, and I drove over to Morvah to collect Rebecca and the children.

  By the time four o’clock came we were all having tea together in the drawing room at Penmarric. It was an ill-assorted gathering. Rebecca, behaving as she always did when the gathering was too grand for her, became colorless; she was studiously polite to my mother, who was studiously polite in return, but made an awkward effort to be friendly to the visitors. Poor Deborah was even shyer than her mother and painfully self-conscious as well; she could answer questions only in blushing monosyllables. I might have begun to feel shy myself amidst so much reserve had it not been for the presence in that formal tea party of my nephew Jonas.

  He was six years old, solid, chunky and tough. “Please” and “thank you” were not words he had ever found necessary to add to his vocabulary, so he wandered from one plate of cakes to the next and threw the cake on the floor if it did not appeal to his palate. He refused to have milk, upset his cup of tea and became angry when his mother, much embarrassed, begged him to sit down.

  My mother eyed him thoughtfully. I could almost feel her fingers itching to slap him. Presently she glanced across at me and as our glances met she raised an eyebrow in distaste.

  “All right, Jonas,” I said. ‘That’s enough. Sit down and behave yourself or else you go straight upstairs to my room where you’ll stay until it’s time for your mother to leave.”

  He put out his tongue and waggled it daringly at me. His blue eyes were bright with impudence.

  “Very well,” I said calmly, setting down my plate, “if that’s what you want.” I prepared to rise to my feet.

  “You can’t touch me!” he yelled, suddenly becoming nervous. “You’re not my father!”

  “Fortunately,” I said with a smile.

  “You can’t touch me because you’re not my father!”

  “Jan,” began Rebecca unhappily. “Jan, I—”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him.” I crossed the room as gracefully as a dancer, lifted him by the scruff of his neck and propelled him swiftly out of the room as he roared with fury and humiliation.

  Outside in the hall I closed the door and relaxed my grip. He started to flail his small fists at me, so I tucked him firmly under my arm and carried him, still kicking and screaming, upstairs to my room.

  “You beast!” he shouted, scarlet with rage. “You wicked ugly old man! I hate you!”

  I supposed that to a six-year-old mind even a man of twenty-seven would seem elderly.

  I locked the door, pocketed the key and stood looking down at him.

  “Let me out!” he cried, stamping his foot imperiously. “Let me out! I want my mother!”

  “You want your father,” I said, “but fortunately for him he never had the chance to know what a little monster he’d begotten.”

  He dimly understood that he was being insulted and rushed at me again with flailing fists. One of his puny blows happened to prod a sensitive part of my anatomy, and suddenly I lost my temper.

  “That’s enough of that!” I said, white with anger, and as he saw my expression change the pugnacity drained out of him and he stepped backward away from me. “I’ve had more than enough of your unruliness and bad manners! It’s time you learned you can’t go through life doing exactly as you please while your mother runs after you with the apologies. Come here!”

  He backed away, very small, very quiet. I stooped to the floor beside my bed and picked up one of my slippers.

  “Mummy!” he shouted, panicking. “Mummy!”

  “This is one occasion,” I said, “when ‘Mummy’ isn’t going to rush in to stop you getting a little well-deserved punishment.”

  “Mummy!” He was frantic. He made a rush at the door without realizing it was locked, and I caught him, swung him around and pulled down the trousers of his little white sailor suit.

  He screamed and screamed even before I had laid a finger on him. In the end I gave him six sharp taps with the slipper and let him go. I remembered from my own childhood that humiliation is a more effective punishment than physical pain, and it seemed unnecessary to make the taps hearty whacks of the type one received at school. The beating was symbolic, a demonstration of authority; it was the humiliation he would remember, not the half-dozen brisk taps on the bottom.

  He picked himself up, his face awash with tears, and flung himself at the door again, scrabbling at the handle with his little pink hand and impotently battering the panels with the other.

  “Mummy, Mummy, Mummy—”

  “No,” I said. “You’ll stay here until your mother’s ready to leave. You’ve caused enough trouble for one day.”

  It was then, from the corridor outside, that I heard Rebecca calling my name.

  Oh my God, I thought.

  “Mummy!” shrieked Jonas. “Help! Help! Mummy!”

  “Jonas!” I could hear her running footsteps, then the rattle of the door handle. “Jan? What are you doing to Jonas? Let me in!”

  “It’s all right,” I said in my calmest voice. “Just a moment. I’ll unlock the door.”

  I unlocked the door. She burst in.

  “Mummy!” bawled Jonas, sobbing wildly. “Mummy!”

  “Jonas darling—”

  He flew into her arms and stuck there, weeping stormily against her bosom.

  “There, there, darling. Mummy’s here …” She looked up at me fiercely. “What did you do to him?”

  “I gave him six taps on the bottom which wouldn’t even have harmed an hour-old flea. There’s absolutely no need for you to get upset.”

  “How dare you!” she stormed. “How dare you lay a finger upon him without my permission! Just because of our relationship you think you can treat my children any way you like!”

  “Come, Rebecca, stop talking such nonsense. Did you ever see a child behave more atrociously than he behaved in the drawing room just now? You can’t go through life condoning his mistakes, you know!
There are times when children need to be punished and in my opinion this was one of them.”

  “I don’t give a damn for your opinion! Who are you to dictate to me about how I should bring up my child? How dare you try to tell me—”

  “For Christ’s sake! Haven’t you any idea of how a mother should behave? I’m beginning to think you’ve got even less idea than I thought you had about how to bring up children!”

  She slapped me across the mouth. The blow made me cry out before I could stop myself. I looked at her. I was too angry to speak. Glancing down, I saw the child, white-faced and round-eyed, looking up at us.

  “You’ve never liked Jonas,” Rebecca said, trembling. “Never. And don’t think I don’t know why! You’re jealous of him because one day he’ll have Penmarric and you’ll never have it, never as long as you live! You’re jealous!”

  “Be quiet.” I moved away from her into the corridor. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “We’ll walk! I never want to see you again—never, do you understand? I’m finished with you. Utterly finished. Forever.”

  “Oh?” I said, engulfed by bitter rage. “And who are you going to take up with next? Your pale cousin Simon Peter, perhaps? I’ll bet you could show him a thing or two! Or Peter Waymark? I hear he has a roving eye these days. Or young Farmer Polmarth over the hills at Zillan—now he’s an eligible bachelor! You might even marry him—if he ever bothered to ask you, which he probably wouldn’t in view of your current reputation as my mistress.”

  She hit me again, a vicious side-swipe, and her rings clawed at my face and left a trail of pain in their wake.

  “Dear me,” I said. “How unladylike.”

  She burst into tears and ran off, dragging the child with her.

  When she reached the end of the passage and turned the corner I went back into my room. The slipper was still lying where had dropped it. I kicked it under the bed. After a while I went to the window and stared outside at the summer afternoon, but there was no message there for me, only the sea melting hazily into the sky and the black rocks of the bleak headland shimmering in the heat.