Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  “My dearest Jan,” wrote my mother. “I’m glad you were sensible enough to tell me the truth and not to worry about ‘sparing my feelings.’ Of course it was shocking to see Mariana in such a state, but at least, thanks to you, I was prepared for the worst. Her own letter, which preceded her arrival, gave me more than a hint that all was not well, so I was in a way prepared for your letter which arrived soon afterward. Poor Esmond, what a wretched burden for a boy of twenty-one! How mature and sensible and grownup he sounds. Such a contrast to Jonas. I told Mariana she must stay with me and not at Penmarric since Isabella had not been well (a lie) and was not up to entertaining guests, but as you know, Mariana has always despised the farm and refused to stay there. William, thank God, came to the rescue and took her to stay at Carnforth Hall after telling Felicity the whole story, so Felicity and Alice together are now keeping an eye on her. It really is most distressing. I can’t tell you how it upsets me to see Mariana, who was always such a beautiful, fastidious girl—too fastidious, I often thought!—now taking so little trouble with her appearance and wearing clothes that are not as clean as they should be. I asked her why she drank so much and she said nothing had ever gone right for her, which I thought was a strange remark seeing she made two brilliant marriages, had all the money she wanted, a series of beautiful homes and such a handsome charming son. But I believe people who drink too much are inclined to self-pity. ‘Nothing ever went right for me,’ she said. ‘Nobody ever loved me,’—which I thought was a very maudlin and untruthful thing to say. However, one cannot argue with a person like that, so I said nothing and let it pass… What a nice man William Parrish is. Both those Parrish boys turned out so well. I hear Adrian had lunch with the Archbishop of Canterbury the other day…”

  “… so in spite of the war, the future seems to be full of promise for me,” wrote Adrian. “It certainly seems almost indecent that in the midst of so much appalling misery I should feel so happy and fortunate, but I’m afraid—or rather, I’m glad to say—that’s exactly how I feel … I have left it rather late in life to be married, since I’m now nearer fifty than forty, but I think I have spent a lot of time hoping to find ‘True Love’ and ‘The Ideal Woman’ and judging every woman I met by a set of false and utterly unrealistic standards. However, since meeting Anne I realized I had no desire at all to be married to an impossibly virtuous paragon and would much prefer someone human who shared at least some of my human failings! Besides, Anne is perfect for me in every way, and that’s all that matters, isn’t it? She is the widow of a dean, so is well acquainted with the clerical existence and has two grownup children by her first marriage. In a strange way she reminds me a little of my mother—although since it’s nowadays so highly suspect to write such a thing I almost hesitate to commit it to paper!—but then I’m forgetting that you never met my mother and so will be unable to see any resemblance when you meet Anne…”

  “Adrian is marrying a saint,” scrawled William in his large untidy handwriting. “A nice woman, but a bit too ‘good,’ if you know what I mean. One feels she instinctively rates you as a good/bad/indifferent parishioner and allots you an appropriately suitable task to perform for the next church fete. I found her very charming and kind, but I couldn’t help feeling I’d been weighed in the ecclesiastical balance and found wanting! Curious, isn’t it, that I married a sinner and now Adrian’s marrying a saint, but I’m sure he’ll be happy. He and I have always been on slightly different planes…”

  “… she didn’t approve of me,” wrote Isabella. “I think I rated as a ‘lost girl’ with promiscuous tendencies! I could see she was itching to practice some social welfare on me. William and I discussed her for hours when they had gone and Charity got annoyed and tried to turn me out … There’s no other news. My parents keep asking me to go home for a visit, so I suppose I shall have to summon the energy to go before long. Your mother is well, except I think that horrid Jonas has been bothering her again …”

  “… so I gave him ten pounds,” wrote my mother. “I suppose I shouldn’t have done because he’s sure to be back for more, but I do feel sorry for him, and I am after all his grandmother. I know he’s coarse and ill-mannered—as Joss always was—but there is a small resemblance to Hugh, and somehow I can’t help thinking that if Hugh had lived Jonas would have been different and that now he’s merely the victim of circumstance. I know that’s silly, since we’re all victims of circumstances, but I am getting sentimental in my old age and think so much of the past. I think often too of Mariana when she was young… She has been ill again, and Alice Carnforth has been trying to get her admitted to a very good home …”

  “… I was very shocked to see Mariana,” wrote Lizzie. “Eddy insisted that I should take the girls away for a month as it’s been so long since I’ve had a holiday, so we all trundled off to Penmarric on the train. After a couple of days I thought I’d better face the current skeleton in the family cupboard, so I went over to Carnforth Hall to see Mariana. It was an extremely depressing experience. She herself is in a state of constant depression and looks simply terrible. In fact the whole visit home depressed me enormously. Mother is letting herself be victimized by that juvenile delinquent Jonas. I heard him threaten her the other day when he thought she was alone at the farm, and I stepped in to give him a piece of my mind so that he scuttled off with his tail between his legs. I told Mother that the next time he tries to get money out of her she should call the police. It’s ridiculous to be terrorized by your own grandson… Isabella was well, I’m glad to say, although at times her attitude did strike me as being a trifle eccentric. I hardly think you need worry, I hasten to add, since her eccentricity is far from serious, but she asks the oddest people to dinner at Penmarric—one was a most intense young market gardener who declared his mission in life was to develop a new form of hydrangea—and she drives around very dangerously in that fast car of yours (and I’d like to know where she gets the petrol). Apparently these odd people are old friends, known to her parents, so no doubt they’re all very respectable in their own way; besides, she says William always chaperones her. Charity describes it in a somewhat sourer way but I expect she’s having the change of life and shouldn’t be treated too seriously at the moment, poor woman. All in all, I was almost relieved to get back to Cambridge …”

  “YOUR WIFE IS RUNNING LOOSE,” said the carefully printed anonymous letter, postmarked Penzance and written on the brand of stationery that William kept at his house. “ASK HER HOW MANY PASSES SHE HAS MADE AT YOUR BROTHER WILLIAM PARRISH AND HOW LONG HER DINNER GUEST FROM DEVON STAYED LAST WEEK. SHE IS WORSE THAN A BITCH IN HEAT.”

  “My darling Jan,” wrote Isabella, bright as a spring morning. “We did so enjoy Lizzie’s visit although she went green with jealousy at my black market petrol! We got on quite well. What a pity her two little girls are so plain, but perhaps they’ll improve later. Absolutely no news here, darling—really, I feel I’m letting you down with so much newslessness—I’m so sorry I haven’t been writing quite so often. That old bitch Charity is still looking daggers at me whenever we meet—I’m sure she thinks I have designs on William. Honestly! As if I could look at anything over fifty! My parents came down while Lizzie was here and brought Keith with them. I know I used to boast how marvelous it was that Keith and I were still on friendly terms in spite of everything, but to be absolutely honest, it was a bit embarrassing to see him again and I wrote to my parents afterward and told them I didn’t want a second visit from Keith any time in the future. Poor Keith! He was classified unfit for service because of a punctured eardrum and the Government’s making him grow vegetables instead of flowers, so he’s miserable, apart from the fact that he has a curvaceous landgirl to help him … Oh darling, when are you going to come home? I know one shouldn’t write moaning letters but sometimes I lie awake at night and think that I just can’t bear the separation any longer… ”

  “Can you get compassionate leave,” said the telegram from Cornwall. “Bad news concerning Mar
iana stop Took overdose sleeping pills stop Inquest Wednesday funeral Thursday please come if possible stop William.”

  4

  I was at Tobruk at the time. It was 1942, and Wavell had been replaced by Auchinleck before Rommel had driven us out of Cyrenaica at the end of January. Our retreat, coming so soon after the catastrophic news of Singapore, had depressed me and the chance of a visit home, no matter how brief, at first seemed too miraculous ever to come to pass. But my request for compassionate leave was granted. Auchinleck was busy telling Churchill that his Army was in no fit state to go on the offensive when Malta was out of action and supplies were pouring into Rommel, and matters for the moment were at a standstill.

  All the Cornish flowers were beginning to bloom when I arrived home. Abroad bombs had blasted Lübeck, Rostock and Cologne and at home we were suffering the retaliation of the Baedecker raids, but at Penmarric the air was fresh with the scent of the early Cornish spring and the sea was an azure haze beneath a peaceful sky.

  At first all I could see was Isabella. Beautiful, radiant Isabella, her long shimmering hair flying behind her as she ran down the platform into my arms, her huge green eyes bright with tears, her wide mouth soft and sweet and passionate against my own.

  “Oh Jan, Jan, Jan …” She could hardly speak. She clung to me. “Oh Jan, how I’ve missed you—I’ve been so miserable and lost and alone …”

  I knew then that she loved me and that she had not been unfaithful and that she had been waiting for me as longingly as I had been waiting for her.

  “How long?” she said. “How long do we have?”

  “Forty-eight hours.”

  “Eternity! Forty-eight whole hours! Oh Jan, we mustn’t waste any of them, they’re all so precious!”

  But for most of the time we were apart. I had to go to Carnforth Hall, talk to Alice and Felicity, make funeral arrangements with Esmond, who had also been granted compassionate leave. There was the inquest to attend (“Suicide while the balance of mind was disturbed,” pronounced the coroner sonorously) and the day after that was the funeral at Penzance. It was a cremation. “She hated burials,” said Esmond. “I can remember her saying to me that she loathed church funerals so much that when she died she didn’t want anyone to suffer what she had suffered when her relations had died. She would have wanted it to be this way.”

  He left directly after the funeral, a tall young man in uniform, his face tanned by a southern sun, his eyes sad and shadowed, and I did not see him again for many years.

  Lizzie left on the same train. Her husband was ill and she did not want to linger in Cornwall. We were obliged to say a hurried distressing goodbye to each other, each of us wondering if it would have been less hard not to see each other at all instead of for those few tantalizing hours, and then she was gone and I was alone on the station platform as the train drew out of Penzance toward Marazion.

  It was evening, and I had to leave on the early morning train, so time was very short. I decided I must make one last call on my mother to say goodbye, so I got back into the old ponytrap, which the petrol shortage had brought out of retirement, and drove out of Penzance and over the moors to Zillan.

  She had stood the unpleasantness of Mariana’s death well, but her movements were slower now and she was more bent when she walked. When I arrived I found her indulging in her favorite pastime, reading her journal and poring over events of long ago as if she could somehow travel backward in time and live once more in an age where no war was a world war and the Germans had only recently become more than a collection of Ruritanian princelings, poor relations of Queen Victoria.

  “We were all so excited by the twentieth century,” she said. “I remember it very well. Jeanne was born right at the end of 1899. What a pretty little girl she was! So sweet and manageable. Sometimes when she was a baby she reminded me of Stephen. How odd that I still remember Stephen so clearly when he’s been dead more than fifty years! My first child … It was sad he died so young. But then came Marcus and everything was better again. Mariana arrived after that. Then Philip …”

  “Do you ever hear from Helena?”

  “Yes, she writes every month. She’s doing a lot of Red Cross work—I’m sure she’s most efficient. Dear Helena. I was very fond of her. I hope I shall see her again one day, but I don’t expect to live forever.”

  “Now that’s enough of that sort of talk, Mama! When this war’s over and I come home for good I shall expect to see you alive and well, do you understand? And after that I shall expect you to be alive and well for my son’s christening, whenever that will be. You can’t die just yet! I won’t have it.”

  She laughed. I relaxed with a smile. Presently she said, “Talking of grandchildren—”

  “Yes, I was going to ask you about Jonas. Perhaps I ought to see him before I leave.”

  “No—no, you have so little time. Spend it with Isabella. I can handle Jonas, and if ever he gets too difficult I can always telephone William and ask for help.”

  “Lizzie said Jonas had been threatening you—”

  “No, he only wants money and tries to justify himself by saying that it’s rightfully his. The only threats he makes are foolish ones—threats that he’ll go to the police and say you arranged the abortion for his mother and should be prosecuted for your part in her death. Of course the police wouldn’t believe him, but it would be unpleasant and—”

  “But my God, Mama, that’s blackmail!”

  “No, dear, because I’m giving him the money because I feel sorry for him, not because I’m afraid of his silly little threats.”

  “But he’ll think—”

  “I don’t care what he thinks. He’s just a silly boy who’s not old enough to know better.”

  “He’s a dangerous young thug! Look, Mama, next time he comes here I want you to send for William as soon as you see him coming, is that clear? I don’t want you to be involved in this any longer.”

  “Well…”

  “Please, Mama! I insist.”

  “All right, darling. But—”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes, I suppose so. If you wish.”

  I made sure she meant what she said, and after that, still feeling angry at the thought of her paying money in response to Jonas’s wild threats, I reluctantly took my leave of her and returned to Penmarric to spend the last precious hours of my freedom with Isabella.

  The phone rang at eight. We had no butler now since Medlyn had retired to nurse his rheumatism, and I had dismissed the footmen at the beginning of the war as an economy, but we had an efficient head parlormaid who now answered the phone.

  “It’s your mother for you, sir,” she said, putting her head around the drawing room door.

  I thanked her and went out into the hall. I can remember thinking how much more convenient it would be, if less aristocratic, to have the telephone in the drawing room. Perhaps after the war …

  I picked up the receiver. “Mama?”

  “Jan-Yves, I’m keeping my promise to you. Jonas is outside. He’s almost at the front door. Are you going to come over yourself, or can you telephone William for me?”

  “I’ll come myself,” I said at once. “I’ll take the car. Isabella has some petrol for emergencies fortunately, so it shouldn’t be long before I reach you. I’m going to teach that little ruffian a lesson once and for all.” I hung up the receiver and moved quickly back across the hall to the drawing room. Isabella looked up nervously as I came back into the room. “What did your mother want?”

  “Jonas is bothering her again. Look, my darling, I want to settle this Jonas business before I leave. I must go—I’m sorry, but I must. I’ve no alternative.”

  “Oh Jan!”

  “I won’t be long.”

  “But—”

  “I’m sorry, my dear, but there’s no choice. I have to go.” I stooped to kiss her and tried to ignore the anger in her eyes. “Wait for me in the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll come straight upstairs to join you as soon
as I get back.” And leaving her still angry in the drawing room, I ran out to the converted section of the stables where we kept the car.

  I drove fast. I thrust the car down the drive and out along the main road through St. Just. Soon I was swooping cross-country over the moors, and by the time I’d crossed the ridge into Zillan parish the sun had disappeared into a darkening sea and dusk was falling across that eerie landscape. Swinging off the road, I nosed the car down the lane which led to the farm.

  For a moment I thought he must have already gone, but suddenly I saw his bicycle against the wall of the dairy and I knew he was still there. I halted the car in the yard, got out and walked swiftly into the kitchen.