Penmarric
Page 85
And one day, in 1945, I went home.
6
I was at a station, a big station, Waterloo. It was filled with people. Oddly enough I half wished I was back in my dreams but this time I wasn’t dreaming. It was reality.
I was very frightened.
I got out of the train, stepped onto the platform, tried to see my way through the milling throngs. Husbands and wives were being reunited all around me. Everyone was shouting and laughing and crying all at once. The air was heavy with emotional excitement, and when an engine suddenly let off steam with a roar no one seemed to notice.
I walked down the platform. I was in uniform and carrying my bags. It was possible I might look just like any other soldier from a distance, so I told myself it was up to me to try to see her, not for her to try to see me. I reached the barrier, went through to the gigantic hall beyond but there was no sign of her.
Perhaps she hadn’t got my telegram. I lingered by the barrier straining my eyes for a glimpse of her, but all I saw were faceless people, men and women flying into each other’s arms while I waited stricken and alone by the station platform.
So there was no justice after all, no two-headed monster capable of a benign smile, no God who cared. I had deceived myself fancifully for years. All that existed was chance, blind, haphazard chance spinning meaninglessly in a dark vacuum, for Isabella hadn’t come to meet me, Isabella didn’t care any more and Isabella was lost to me for the rest of my life.
My eyes began to fill with foolish unwanted tears of grief.
I closed my eyes for a second to blot the pain from my mind, but when I opened them again she was there, smiling, coming toward me with that light airy grace I had seen so clearly in my dreams, but this was a different Isabella, a changed Isabella, an Isabella who was at once both familiar yet terrifyingly strange.
I caught my breath, unable to move or speak.
I saw a woman, twenty-five years old, very smart, with ash-blond hair beautifully dressed beneath an enormous sophisticated hat, a slender, dazzling woman with great green eyes brilliant with tears and luscious, slightly parted red lips.
“Jan!” she cried. “Oh Jan, I couldn’t find you—it was horrible—worse than my worst nightmares—”
And then all nightmares ended for both of us as she ran forward headlong into my arms.
A Biography of Susan Howatch
Susan Howatch is a bestselling British novelist who has published twenty books ranging from murder mysteries to family sagas. Her work deals with complex relationships in a range of settings and explores themes revolving around sex, power, ambition, forgiveness, redemption, and love.
Howatch was born in a small town in Surrey, England, on July 14, 1940. Her father was a stockbroker who was killed in World War II. She grew up an only child in an era of post-war austerity, but had a happy childhood, particularly enjoying her time at Sutton High School in the London suburbs. In 1961, she obtained a law degree from King’s College London, then a part of London University, but dropped out of a law career in order to write. She had started writing novels when she was twelve and had been submitting manuscripts since the age of seventeen.
Eventually Howatch despaired of being published in England, and in 1963 she emigrated to New York, where—almost at once—her novel The Dark Shore was accepted for publication. In 1964, she met and married Joseph Howatch, an American artist and writer. (He passed away in 2011.) They had one daughter, Antonia, who was born in 1970.
The Dark Shore was followed by five other short novels, which, with one exception, were all twentieth-century whodunits or suspense stories. Then, in 1971, Howatch published Pennmaric, a family saga that became her first international bestseller. Using multiple narrators, Howatch follows the fortunes of the Castallack family from 1890 to 1945 and shows what happens when a grand passion leads to dire results for all concerned. This novel was based on the true story of the early Plantagenet kings of England, a story that Howatch updates to modern times.
She took another Plantagenet slice of history for her second family saga, Cashelmara (updated to the mid-nineteenth century). This novel was followed by The Wheel of Fortune, based on the last Plantagenets and updated to the twentieth century. However, although the Plantagenet history concerns only one family, the three novels are not interrelated and describe different families in different settings and eras.
In contrast to these stories, Howatch’s novel The Rich Are Different is not a family saga. It tells a topical story about freewheeling cutthroat bankers in New York and London during the 1920s and 1930s, and is based on the life of Cleopatra, her love affairs with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and her final battle with Caesar’s great-nephew Octavian. The sequel, Sins of the Fathers, describes what has happened to the survivors.
By the 1980s Howatch’s novels had sold millions of copies and had been translated into many languages. She had also returned to Europe. In 1975, she and her husband separated (they were never divorced) and she and Antonia lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before moving to England in 1980. Eventually, they spent three years in Salisbury and then settled in London, where Howatch lived from 1987 until 2010.
While in Salisbury, the cathedral inspired Howatch to write the Starbridge series, six related novels about three very different Church of England clergymen and their families. The novels explored many ideas—religious, mystical, spiritual, ecclesiastical, and psychological—and focused with a new intensity on the subjects of obsessive love, addiction to power, the evil of violence, and the redemptive nature of forgiveness and love. One of the books, Scandalous Risks, won a literary prize, and the launch of the final novel took place at Lambeth Palace in the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury. Howatch used money from the Starbridge series to set up a lectureship at Cambridge University in theology and natural science, and is now a member of the Cambridge Guild of Benefactors as well as the Salisbury Cathedral Confraternity.
Her last three books, the St. Benet’s trilogy, form a spin-off from the Starbridge series and are set in London in the late twentieth century. They explore the borderlands where Christianity meets medicine, psychology, and the paranormal.
Howatch retired after publishing the final St. Benet’s novel, The Heartbreaker (2004), and now helps out with her family in Surrey.
Susan Howatch, age four, with a friend in 1944.
The first page of the penultimate draft of The Dark Shore, Howatch’s first published novel (printed in the United States in 1965). The final draft was typed. The Dark Shore was written in England, and Howatch sent for it after she immigrated to America in 1964.
Howatch in 1971, at the time of publication of her first international bestseller, Penmarric.
Howatch in 1977, around the time of publication of her bestseller The Rich Are Different. This photo was taken in Ireland, where she was living then.
Howatch in 1978 with her eight-year-old daughter, Antonia.
Howatch in the mid-1980s, at the time of publication of The Wheel of Fortune.
During a 1992 publicity tour, Howatch’s Mystical Paths took over the windows of a paperback shop in Oxford.
Howatch at a 1993 dinner party for fifty people at the Ritz Hotel London, given by Eddie Bell, then CEO and chairman of HarperCollins, to celebrate Howatch’s Starbridge novels. Bell is on the right; on the left is the Very Reverend Michael Mayne, who was then Dean of Westminster Abbey.
In 1999, Howatch was elected Fellow of King’s College London, from which she graduated with a law degree in 1961.
Four generations of Howatch’s family in 2006: Susan (standing, third from left), with her daughter Antonia (second from left), her mother (holding baby), and her three grandchildren.
Howatch in 2007 with her three best friends from high school—“the three sisters I never had,” says Howatch. They are celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of their first meeting. From left to right: Hazel, Susan, Gay, and Jan.
Certificate recording the Honorary Doctorate of lett
ers conferred on Howatch in 2012 by Hope College, Holland, Michigan.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1971 by Susan Howatch
cover design by Linda McCarthy
978-1-4532-6341-9
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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