Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  We said no more. She was just about to leave when a messenger rode up the drive with a telegram and she paused as I opened the little envelope and unfolded the message inside.

  “Devastated by news of Philip and Jeanne,” we read silently. “So sorry I cannot come home for funerals but circumstances extremely awkward stop Will write in detail explaining stop Poor Mama how ghastly for her stop Deepest sympathy Helena and Donald stop Give darling Esmond my best love stop Mariana.”

  “Deepest sympathy!” said Helena contemptuously, turning aside in disdain. “Neither of them meant anything to her. I’m glad she’s got the good sense to stay away, although I suppose your mother will be hurt by her absence.” She swept into the waiting car without another word. I remained where I was, the telegram still fluttering gently between my fingers, but when the car had disappeared from sight I went slowly indoors to show the telegram to Esmond.

  He was disappointed to learn his mother wouldn’t be coming to Cornwall. “I was so looking forward to seeing her again” he said wistfully. “That was the one bright spot on the horizon.” He had not been allowed to see her for several years, but he hadn’t forgotten her. “Of course Mama did wrong,” I had heard him say once to Philip. “She shouldn’t have left Papa and run off with someone else even though Papa was old and frail and couldn’t entertain her as much as she would have liked him to. But she’s still my mother, no matter what she does. Nothing can alter that.”

  He didn’t refer to the fact that in abandoning her husband Mariana had also abandoned her only child. I didn’t once hear him reproach her for that. He was a far better son than Mariana deserved.

  Lizzie and her husband arrived with Adrian that evening and the next morning Adrian and I drove over to Zillan together, he to see the rector about the funeral arrangements and I to call on my mother.

  My mother, attended by Annie and the two Turner “girls,” was in bed. She looked at her most elderly and frail, but when I tried to advise her against attending the funeral she refused to listen to me.

  “I want to go.”

  “But, Mama—”

  “I shall go.”

  “It would be too much for you—”

  ”I’m going, Jan-Yves.”

  She was as stubborn as a mule. Presently Adrian called but she could not bring herself to see him face to face at that time. “Tell him how grateful I am to him for coming,” she said, suddenly tearful again. “Tell him how glad I am that he’s going to conduct the service. Ask him to forgive me for not seeing him now, but say I’m so tired I don’t want to see anyone but you, Jan-Yves.”

  “Yes, of course, Mama. Don’t worry, I know he’ll understand.”

  “It’s just that four of my five boys being dead and both of her boys being alive … I know it’s wicked of me to think that, but I can’t help thinking it just the same.”

  “I understand,” said Adrian when I told him, and I saw the compassion in his eyes. “But tell her I’ll visit her whenever she wants to see me.”

  We returned to Penmarric. Finding myself at last in a position where all arrangements had been made and there was nothing else for me to do, I decided it was time to drive to Morvah, face Rebecca and find out if she intended to come with the children to the funeral.

  But when I arrived at Deveral Farm it was Deborah who answered the door. “Mummy’s not in, Uncle Jan,” she said nervously, blushing a little. Poor Deborah wasn’t a good liar. “Is there a message?”

  “I was wondering if I would see all of you at the funeral on Friday.”

  “I—yes, I … think so … at least, I’m not sure. I would like to attend very much. I was fond of Uncle Philip and had such respect for him.”

  “Has Rebecca seen Simon Peter recently?”

  “Yes. At least, that’s to say, I’m not sure. I—”

  “But she knows what’s in Philip’s will?”

  “Yes—oh yes, because we thought Jonas—and then we heard—-”

  “Quite. Well, tell your mother that I’ll send a car over to the farm on Friday to take her to Zillan church unless I hear from her to the contrary before then. Would you tell her that?”

  “Yes, I will. Thank you, Uncle Jan.”

  As I departed I resolved to make no further effort to see Rebecca before the funeral since her fury evidently needed more time to cool. In spite of this I half wondered if I would see her at the inquest the next day, but I did not; the inquest itself was a mere formality, the verdict of accidental death a necessary prelude to the inevitability of the burial, and within twenty-four hours we were all preparing ourselves for the ordeal of the funeral service.

  The time came at last. A light mist blew damply across the cliffs, an eerie half-light wreathed the ruins of the Sennen Garth mine, and five miles away across the moors there was a ghostly air in Zillan churchyard as Philip’s body was consigned at last to the Cornish earth he had loved so well.

  7

  I went to that funeral expecting to be moved and I was moved. What else can I say? Adrian conducted the service faultlessly, the church was packed with people, the graveyard overflowed with mourners. Those are mere facts, but there are some things which are beyond the power of mere facts to describe. I went to the funeral of my brother who had died in an accident at the age of forty-one, but that wasn’t the only funeral I went to on that cold morning in Zillan village. I went to the funeral of all my past jealousies and past hatreds which had so dominated my early life; I went to the funeral of past futility, past discontent and past mistakes. That morning at Zillan I buried a whole past world, a world in which I was forever unjustly doomed to the role of underdog and forced to struggle for my rights against a host of people so much more fortunate than I was. I had stared at the blank incomprehensible mirror of justice all my life in an effort to understand how I might glimpse my own reflection there, but now I had passed through the looking-glass and my whole world had been turned back to front. The people I had envied so uselessly for so long were all dead, all corpses in the earth beneath my feet, and the good fortune for which I had envied them had been a vast illusion masking frustrated, disappointing, even shallow lives. I saw my brother Marcus now not as the gay young man-about-town but as an incurably overgrown schoolboy without purpose or ambition; I saw my brother Hugh not as the glamorous adventurer with a talent for making money but as a shifty idler content to rely on his good luck until it deserted him one day on an isolated Cornish beach. And at last I saw Philip, not the golden hero of a thousand and one mining adventure stories, but an emotional cripple living in his own private twilight world which had collapsed into darkness after the disaster of the Sennen Garth mine.

  So I stepped through the looking-glass, and when I turned to look back at my past world I saw how my attempts to carve some justice for myself had in fact been efforts to wreak injustice on my brothers. It seemed justice was a two-headed monster, a double-sided coin! I had been so concerned about the injustice of my situation that it hadn’t occurred to me that what was unjust for me was just for other people and what was unjust for other people might bring me the justice I had sought all my life.

  But it occurred to me when I saw Philip’s coffin lowered into the fresh grave at my father’s feet. I saw it and I wept, and as I wept I wept not only for Philip but for the unjust justice which I had misunderstood so thoroughly for so many wasted years in the past.

  8

  After the funeral I stayed overnight with my mother at the farm and the next morning as we breakfasted in her room I tried to persuade her to leave Cornwall for a few days to take the edge off her grief. But she refused to hear of it. She stayed in bed all day, since the doctor had strictly forbidden her to attend Jeanne’s funeral that morning, and I left her with the Turner girls as I drove into Penzance for the service. Jeanne was buried quietly at her husband’s Presbyterian church in an admirably plain, simple ceremony, but I’d be lying if I wrote I wasn’t immensely relieved when it was all over. Afterward Lizzie and her husband took Es
mond and myself to the Metropole for lunch, and later when we had all recovered a little from the ordeal of the second family funeral in two days, Lizzie volunteered to come with me when I called at Roslyn Farm for tea.

  “I must show Mother. I mean well,” she said, “although to be frank I don’t believe in lavishing sympathy on the bereaved.”

  However, she was so much taken aback by my mother’s bedridden state that the next morning she cut some flowers from the garden at Penmarric and asked me to drive her back to the farm for a second visit.

  “Now, Mother,” she said briskly, sweeping into my mother’s room with an armful of exotic blooms, “I don’t think it’s good for you to lie here and mope. Why don’t you come to stay with us in Cambridge for a few days? You wouldn’t even have to face a train journey since Eddy has ordered a car and chauffeur to drive us home, and we could arrange for you to return to Cornwall by car when it’s time for you to leave.”

  “No,” said my mother.

  “Mother, I really do think—”

  “It’s kind of you, Lizzie, but no.”

  There was nothing to be done. She was adamant that nothing would induce her to leave her home.

  “Old people are so stubborn,” said Lizzie, exasperated, annoyed that her generous gesture had been rejected so peremptorily. “What can we do with her? Anyway, how long can she go on living in this house on her own with only that simple-minded old servant who’s half blind and practically dumb? Supposing she had an accident?”

  “I shall have a telephone installed,” I said, “and I expect I shall visit her nearly every day. She’ll be all right.”

  “She ought to move to Penmarric where she can be properly looked after.”

  “My dear Lizzie,” I said, amused, “you obviously don’t know Mama! No one tells her what to do. Wild horses wouldn’t drag her to Penmarric.”

  “Well,” said Lizzie with a quick shrug, “she’s your worry, not mine. I suppose Eddy and I must be thinking about returning to Cambridge. The girls will be missing us … By the way, what’s happening to Esmond? Perhaps I ought to have the poor boy to stay. I don’t suppose he wants to remain in Cornwall after all this.”

  “He’s already made arrangements to return to Scotland, I think. But perhaps during the next school holidays—”

  “Yes, I must invite him to Cambridge. By the way, I suppose there’s no further word from Mariana?”

  “None.”

  But a letter arrived three days later. Esmond had by that time left for Scotland, Lizzie and her husband had returned to Cambridge and Helena had gone on a visit to her Warwickshire friends before making arrangements to go abroad. The letter with its French stamp and Riviera postmark, was addressed to me in Mariana’s elegant handwriting.

  “My dear Jan-Yves,” she had written. “I do hope all went well at the funerals and that they weren’t too ghastly. Of course I thought of everyone constantly and wished I could have been there, but life has been extremely trying just lately and when I received your telegram with the news I was slightly embarrassed financially and could not have afforded the fare home. It really is so dreary not to have quite enough to do as one pleases on such occasions, and since I would like to come home and feel it’s my duty to see Mama, I was wondering if you could be terribly sweet and wire me a hundred pounds? I simply hate to ask you, darling, but really I’ve had one misfortune after another this year and everything is frightfully difficult. I would so much love to see darling Esmond—is he still at Penmarric? I do hope he hasn’t gone back yet to that dreary house in Scotland. Does Esmond talk of me much? I think of him so often.

  “Once again, darling, I can’t tell you how devastated I feel and how sorry I am for that nice man Donald McCrae and for Helena. Of course Helena hardly had the ideal marriage, did she, since her husband went off and left her for three years, but I suppose any marriage is better than none at all, poor woman. I do feel so full of pity for her. My fondest love to Mama, and if Esmond is still with you tell him how much I miss him and how I’m so longing to see him again. Now that he’s older perhaps he can begin to understand some of the difficulties which resulted in our separation from each other. Do tell him that I can explain everything and that I’ve always loved him just as much as I used to even though we’ve been apart for so many years.

  “Please write soon, Jan darling, all my love, Mariana.”

  I sighed, reread the letter and sighed again. I had little inclination to help Mariana, and since probate hadn’t yet been granted I didn’t have a hundred pounds to send her without batting an eyelid. I sat down, took up my pen and tried to phrase a polite but firm reply.

  “Dear Mariana,” I wrote baldly at last, “do you really want to come to Penmarric? Helena is away, Mama hasn’t asked for you, and Esmond has gone home to Scotland. If you still want to come back notwithstanding these facts, let me know and I’ll send you the money for your fare. I’m sorry to hear things haven’t been going well for you, but trust your luck will change again very soon. Yours, Jan-Yves.”

  She did not reply, although whether that was because her circumstances improved or because she no longer wanted to come home, I could not tell. I informed my mother that Mariana had written but decided not to show her the letter.

  “She didn’t write to me,” my mother said. “She never wrote to offer sympathy. She only wrote to you because she wanted money.”

  That was perfectly true, but I thought it was tactful not to comment, and after that we did not speak of Mariana for some time.

  It was the day after I had answered Mariana’s letter that I found time to drive to Morvah at last and confront Rebecca. She had not been present at Philip’s funeral and neither had Jonas, although Deborah had turned up with Simon Peter and his wife. I had not been able to have a word in private with Deborah after the service, but the only conclusion I could reach on the subject of Rebecca’s absence was that she was still too upset to face me. This made me angry; I wasn’t surprised that she should have been upset and disappointed to learn that Philip had changed his mind about making Jonas his heir, but I did think she would be sensible enough to see reason after a few days and admit to herself that I wasn’t to blame for the situation. If she did blame me, I told myself, and if she was determined to make a big scene to me about something that wasn’t my fault, she couldn’t love me nearly as much as she’d sworn she did. It was she who had promised that Jonas shouldn’t come between us in the future; if she went back on her word now I would know I had done the right thing in staying unmarried to her, and if I had any sense I should then see to it that the issue of marriage wasn’t raised between us again.

  I admit I was nervous when I arrived at Deveral Farm, but so strong was my desire to face her and find out what was going on in her mind that I didn’t stay nervous for long. When I walked around the house to the back door I found her hanging out some washing in the yard; Jonas, chewing a currant bun, was seated on a nearby water butt, and beyond the open window I glimpsed Deborah rolling pastry in the kitchen. As I rounded the corner of the house and came upon them they all paused to stare at me in silence.

  After a moment I said shortly, “Perhaps I can have a word with you alone, Rebecca.”

  There was another pause. Deborah began to roll the pastry in a furious rush of energy, and Jonas sank his teeth once more into his currant bun.

  “I’ve nothing to say to you,” said Rebecca stonily at last. “Nothing. And you know why.”

  “Why?”

  “You tricked my boy out of his inheritance.”

  So it was just as I had feared. She was, as I had always known, utterly unreliable. Just because she had sworn she loved me too much to let Jonas come between us and I had been fool enough to believe she meant what she said, I had come within an ace of a disastrous second marriage. For disaster it would most certainly have been. It was no use her promising not to make scenes or have tantrums whenever she felt like it. When she felt like making life difficult for me she would make life diff
icult for me—because she didn’t love me enough to know any better.

  My patience snapped. My anger mounted. For ten long years she had called the tune and beckoned me back to her bedroom whenever it suited her to do so, but she had called the tune and beckoned me back for the last time. I turned aside. “There was no question of me tricking Jonas out of his inheritance,” I said abruptly. “It was you who lost it for him, not I. If you hadn’t made that ridiculous scene when Jonas ran away from the sea shore—”

  The kitchen door banged. Deborah had dropped the rolling pin and fled to the front room to escape from the scene. I stopped speaking, and as I hesitated Jonas slid off the water butt, planted his two little feet firmly on the ground and parked his currant bun on the window sill.

  “I didn’t run away,” he announced. “And she didn’t make any scene. You leave my mother alone.”

  I ignored him. “Rebecca, let’s get this straight once and for all. First, I didn’t trick Jonas out of the inheritance. Philip changed his will after you’d rejected all the kindness and generosity he had shown the child. Secondly, I knew this and kept the knowledge from you simply because Philip asked me to do so and I promised him I would. Thirdly—”

  “You deceived me. All through these last few months when we’ve been so close—”

  “I didn’t deceive you. I simply honored my promise to Philip.”

  “You leave my mother alone,” said Jonas, very tough and pugnacious. “You get off our land or I’ll fight you.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Rebecca to me sullenly. “I don’t want to see you any more.”

  “Very well,” I said, losing my temper. “I shall never come here again. Never, do you understand? And this time ‘never’ means ‘never’ and not ‘later,’ so don’t try and pick me up again in St. Just when you’re feeling lonely. If you can’t trust me as a woman should trust someone she loves, then your love can go to hell as far as I’m concerned and I want no part of it.”