Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  The footman leaped forward with alacrity. “I’ll show you your room,” Marcus offered. “I do hope you’ll like it. I expect it’ll be nice to have a room to yourself after all those years of sharing at Allengate.”

  We went up the great staircase and into a long gallery. In spite of myself I had to stop to look at the portraits on the walls.

  “Past Penmars,” said Marcus humorously. He gave a quick Gallic shrug of the shoulders. “Odd-looking crowd, weren’t they?”

  There was an immense gloomy corridor. Marcus opened a door and we went into an enormous room with a high ceiling and solid Victorian furniture. Beyond the window was the sea.

  “Very nice,” I said politely.

  “Do you like it?” said Marcus with eagerness. He was always so anxious for people to like everything and be happy. “It’s a nice view, isn’t it?”

  “Lovely,” I said.

  “There’s a bathroom quite near-—go to the end of the corridor, then to the right and you’ll find it’s the first door on the left. Come downstairs as soon as you’re ready. One of the footmen will tell you where the drawing room is.”

  “Good. Thank you, Marcus.”

  “See you later!” He smiled at me.

  “Yes.”

  He went out, closing the door behind him, and I was alone at last.

  I looked around me slowly. I hated it. It was the most chilling mansion I had ever seen, and I knew at once that I would not be happy there.

  2

  Hugh arrived the next day from Harrow. He paused at Penmarric just long enough to eat dinner and enjoy a comfortable night’s rest and then the next morning he had saddled a horse and was riding off to Zillan to see his mother. He was gone all day but arrived home just in time not to incur Papa’s displeasure by missing dinner.

  “She looks well, doesn’t she?” said Marcus to him. “Did you think she’d changed much?”

  “Not particularly,” said Hugh, considering the question with care. “Her hair was whiter but otherwise she seemed much the same. I thought she looked marvelous for her age.”

  “She was longing to see you,” said Jeanne. “She could hardly wait. ‘Oh how lovely it’ll be to see Hugh again!’ she said last Saturday. ‘I can’t wait till he comes home.’ ”

  Hugh smiled his peculiarly sweet smile and looked complacent. “She said how good-looking I’d become,” he said serenely, “and said she was sure I’d soon be as tall as Philip. God, I hope she’s right! It’s simply not fair that I should be so short. Everyone’s tall except me.”

  “Did you take Mama a present?” said Marcus anxiously.

  “Of course! I bought her some French perfume in London on the way down from Harrow. It was very tasteful,” said Hugh fastidiously, “and highly suitable for her personality. I spent a long time choosing it.”

  “How lovely!” breathed Jeanne. “Was she thrilled?”

  “Very,” said Hugh. “I knew she would be. I thought it was rather a good present”

  “Did you have a nice lunch?” said Elizabeth with interest. “Did Mama make any Cornish pasties? She makes them very nicely indeed.”

  “No,” said Hugh. “Griselda made some old stew full of herbs. Frankly it wasn’t very palatable but I ate it to be polite.”

  I said, fighting once more to overcome that insidious sense of exclusion, “Who’s Griselda?”

  “Oh, an awful old hag,” said Hugh casually. “She must be at least ninety. I think she was Mama’s old nurse once.”

  “We had a lovely time at the farm last Saturday,” said Elizabeth. “We had a little elderberry wine for elevenses, and quite the nicest honeycakes I’ve ever tasted.”

  “Honestly, Lizzie,” said Mariana, looking up from writing her daily letter to her fiancé in London, “don’t you ever think of anything except your wretched little stomach?”

  “Was Mama pleased about your engagement, Mariana?” said Hugh with interest.

  “My dear, simply thrilled. She was so sweet. She said I had the most beautiful hands, just right for diamonds, and—”

  I was becoming rather tired of Mariana’s diamond ring.

  “—and she said it was a wonderful match for me, and how pleased she was. I must say, I do think Papa has treated her a little meanly, don’t you? I suppose he had his reasons for making it so difficult and upsetting for poor Mama to come to see us when we were at Allengate, but … anyway, I said that of course she must come to the New Year’s Eve ball Papa’s giving for Nick and me and of course she must meet Nick as soon as he comes down to Penmarric after Christmas… Although to be perfectly frank that’s going to be just the tiniest bit awkward. I mean, how on earth am I going to take Nick to that awful farmhouse? I do wish Mama didn’t live there.”

  “I can’t think why she does,” agreed Hugh. “It’s hard to imagine a woman of Mama’s delicate tastes and refined habits actually choosing to live at a farmhouse in preference to Penmarric. Good God, they haven’t even got a proper lavatory! It’s distressingly primitive, to say the least.”

  “Mama could come to tea at Penmarric to meet Nick,” suggested Marcus. “That would solve the difficulty without embarrassment to anyone, and I don’t suppose Papa would object.”

  “What a good idea! I’ll ask him about it at dinner.”

  When we were alone I said to William, “We won’t have to meet her, will we?”

  “Mrs. Castallack? No, of course not! Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do—when Philip brings Mrs. C over here to have tea, let’s ride over to Zillan and pay a visit to the rectory. The rector’s a nice old man and his granddaughter Alice Penmar is a sort of adopted cousin of ours. Her father was a foster-son of Giles Penmar, who lived here before Papa did, and her mother was the rector’s only child. Her parents are both dead and she was brought up by her grandparents at the rectory, but Mrs. Barnwell, her grandmother, died recently, so now Alice keeps house for her grandfather. She’s rather fun. She’s not pretty but she’s amusing. I think you’ll like her.”

  “How old is she?” I said suspiciously, for girls still made me feel awkward and I did not enjoy their company.

  “My age!” William laughed. “Much too old for you! Don’t worry, I’m not trying to pair you off. She’ll probably be calling at Penmarric some time this week to see Mariana, so you’ll soon have the chance to meet her.”

  “I don’t feel like meeting anyone at the moment,” I said obstinately. “I’d much rather be on my own and not have to make the effort to be sociable.”

  And despite all William’s efforts to dissuade me I spent the first few days after my arrival at Penmarric in solitude. I walked around the grounds, scrambled down to the cove below the terrace, explored one or two caves, but then the weather broke and the cliffs were wreathed in mist and I had no inclination to go out of doors. I kept a fire going in my room and spent long hours reading my way through Papa’s collection of novels by Anthony Trollope.

  I even kept to myself at Christmas. They made a fine Cornish celebration of it at Penmarric, but I felt a stranger still, an outsider still dogged by that persistent feeling of exclusion, and I remained in the background as much as possible. Everyone else was very merry. William and Marcus got tipsy on one or two occasions and chased the maids around the mistletoe; presently they began to ride into St. Just in the evenings, or even out to Zennor or Zillan to drink at the local pubs, and often they would not return to Penmarric until late at night.

  I went on sitting in my room or perhaps venturing out for brief walks by myself, and all the while I would think with pricking eyes of past Christmases, of Allengate and of my mother.

  People called at Penmarric to see us. Young Peter Waymark called from Gurnards Grange at Zennor; George and Aubrey Carnforth and their sister Felicity rode over from Carnforth Hall, which stood between Penzance and Marazion. There were parties, invitations, calls to be repaid, but I avoided them all.

  “Do come,” said William. “Please! Why won’t you come? Look, nobody knows about—�
�

  “It’s got nothing to do with that,” I said.

  “They think we’re just a couple of obscure poor relations with Penmar blood in our veins! Nobody thinks that Papa—”

  “I don’t care. I hate parties and I don’t want to meet anyone.”

  “But parties are fun, Adrian! Girls are fun! You’re missing such a lot!”

  But I shook my head obstinately and retreated still further from all opportunities to be sociable.

  Fortunately after Christmas Mariana’s fiancé Nicholas de Leonard came down from London and everyone was too busy entertaining him to concern themselves with me. However, Jan-Yves did not share my pleasure at being ignored, and confided crossly to me one morning that he was sick and tired of “that stupid lord” taking up all William’s time.

  “I wish he would go away and take Mariana with him and never come back here again,” he added darkly. “I hate both of them.”

  “Don’t you like any of your family apart from William?” I said, exasperated. “It’s unreasonable to dislike everyone except him!”

  “Why?” said Jan-Yves. “Marcus always tells me to go away and play whenever I come near him, Mariana looks at me as if I was a dead starfish washed up on the beach, Hugh has never spoken one single word to me except ‘hullo,’ Jeanne’s silly, Elizabeth eats all my food, and you’re always trying to get William’s attention and take him away from me. You’re as bad as the lord and I don’t like you either. And I don’t like Papa because he brought them back here without my permission and I don’t like that new nanny because she slippers me and I don’t like old Cartwright-governess because she’s a stick-in-the-mud. I liked my old nanny,” he added unexpectedly, “the nanny I had before they came. But she drank gin and had to go. Papa didn’t even ask my permission either. I went to her room and found her packing her bags. I said I’d run away with her but she said I mustn’t although I think she wanted me to because she cried. Poor Nanny! Is it so bad to drink gin?”

  “Very,” I said and tried to get rid of him but he stuck to me like a leech.

  “Have you met my brother Philip? I haven’t and I’m not going to either. He lives with her. I hate her more than anyone else in the world. I’m never going to meet her as long as I live. Nobody’s going to make me meet her.”

  “Why don’t you like her?” I could think of nothing else to say.”

  “Because I don’t.” He looked around mysteriously, then grabbed my hand to draw us closer together. “You know how if you see a bit of rubbish on the floor you pick it up and throw it away in the wastepaper basket?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “That’s what she did to me. I was four months old and she picked me up and took me to Nanny and said ‘throw it away!’ But Nanny didn’t. Nanny kept me secretly and looked after me. I know that’s true because Nanny said it was.”

  “I can’t believe your mother ever said—”

  “Well, she went away, didn’t she?” said the child. “And she never came back. She must have thought Nanny had thrown me in the wastepaper basket. Otherwise why didn’t she come to see me? Anyway, I’m not going to meet her. She’s coming to tea tomorrow to meet the stupid lord and Papa says I must be there but I shan’t be. I’m going to go with you and William to tea at Zillan rectory.”

  But Papa had foreseen Jan-Yves’s reaction to Mrs. Castallack’s visit and took care to lock the child in his room the following afternoon to prevent him playing truant.

  “Poor little devil,” said William as we jogged over the moors toward Zillan.

  I had not been to Zillan before. It was a moorland parish east of St. Just and south of Morvah, and to my surprise I found the little village was pretty in its austere Cornish manner, and the church had a fine Norman tower.

  “Our grandfather is buried there,” said William, “and our eldest half-brother who would have been only a few months younger than me if he’d lived.” When I did not answer he added to me abruptly, “For God’s sake, Adrian; I do wish you’d brighten up a bit! I hope you’re not going to sit through this tea party in glum silence or I shall be most horribly embarrassed. Do cheer up a little, there’s a good chap. I hate to see you so down.”

  “I’m sorry;” I sighed. “It’s just that life seems so beastly sometimes.”

  “I think it’s fun,” said William. “Don’t worry, it won’t seem beastly forever! You’ll enjoy it again presently, I dare say.”

  When we reached the rectory we tethered our horses and walked around the porch. As we approached, the front door was opened and a tall thin girl of about twenty with dark eyes, a sharp nose and a clever mouth smiled at us across the threshold. “Good afternoon!” said Alice Penmar in an attractive contralto voice. “How nice to see you both!” And she regarded me with that keen interested stare which I had come to know and dread.

  “Alice,” said William, “may I present my brother, Adrian Parrish. Adrian—Miss Alice Penmar.”

  “How do you do?” I said politely.

  “At last!” said Alice. “I was wondering when you were going to deign to make your debut in west Cornish society. Frankly I was even beginning to doubt that you existed! Every time I called at Penmarric to see William or Marcus or Mariana I never even caught so much as a rear view of you. I can’t think why you hid yourself away. You look eminently presentable to me and even quite friendly—what a relief! I feared you might have some frightful defect which everyone was too polite to mention.”

  I blushed. Shyness overcame me. I managed to smile.

  “Come in,” said Alice kindly, “and meet Grandpapa.”

  We went into a large old-fashioned drawing room and the rector stood up to greet us. He was, I supposed, about seventy years old, but his spare frame was agile and his eyes were brilliantly alive. He had extraordinary eyes, deep-set and lustrous. His hair was silver, giving him a distinguished appearance.

  “Grandpapa,” said Alice, “this is Adrian Parrish.”

  He looked at me and he knew. I saw the recognition flicker in his eyes although he suppressed it quickly enough. How he knew I had no idea, for I had no marked physical resemblance to my father, but he knew.

  “How very nice of you to come,” he said, and he took my hand and smiled at me as if he were greeting a long-lost friend. “What a very pleasant surprise!”

  I smiled at him in return. I longed to ask him how he knew, why he was so unusually glad to see me, but I knew it was the wrong moment for such questions and that they could not be asked until we were alone together.

  As if he could read my thoughts, he said, “We must have a long talk later. I want to hear all about you.” And when he stretched out his hand and touched me on the shoulder it was as if I had reached the end of a long journey, and before me at last I saw the pattern again and knew that I was no longer alone.

  3

  He said to me later, “The Castallacks have called here several times since their return. They were all so full of praise for your mother. She must have been a very remarkable woman.”

  “Yes,” I said. “She was.” Alice was over by the window showing William some photographs she had taken during a visit to St. Ives. They were laughing together. I said clumsily to the rector, “She was a very … good person.”

  “Mark was fortunate to have such a person to look after his children so well. I have known Mark—your guardian—a long time, you know. Since he was William’s age.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, he was not a happy young man. He had difficult times. But he was tough. He survived. The Penmars have a strong streak of durability in their blood, and your guardian was no exception.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “life is so awful sometimes one simply has to be tough to be able to face it at all.”

  “Dear me! You sound as if you’ve suffered the tortures of the damned! Has life treated you so badly?”

  That made me stop and think. “No,” I had to admit at last “No, it hasn’t. Apart from my mother’s death I’ve been mos
t extraordinarily fortunate. I do know that. It’s just that I feel so unutterably depressed by the—the injustice in the world. It seems so unfair that people should often have to suffer for no reason or for something that they can’t help. There’s so much evil and suffering in the world, and since my mother’s death it’s seemed to me especially unbearable that there’s so little I can do about it. In fact I feel that all I can do is turn my back on the world and retreat from it—pretend for as long and as often as I can that all the evil and suffering don’t exist.”

  “But that will hardly help you or anyone else!” The rector leaned forward urgently. His eyes were so dark and brilliant that I found it impossible to look away. “You must face these things. Confront them! Don’t hide your head in the sand and hope they will go away with wishful thinking. The world can indeed seem a better place to you—but only if you contribute to it, for no cause was ever helped by the passive, the apathetic and the uncommitted. Don’t retreat into yourself by pretending the world is so distasteful that you have no place in it! Step out into the world and take your place in it and don’t be afraid any more.”

  4

  After that I decided that I would attend church at Zillan in future. Everyone at Penmarric attended church in St. Just, the, nearest of the mining villages, and Papa in particular felt himself obliged as the largest landowner in the parish to worship at the parish church, but when I asked him for permission to go to Zillan instead he made no objection. Indeed I think, he was pleased that I liked the rector so much and said that the rector had been very kind to him years ago after his father’s death.

  The only obstacle confronting me in my intention to attend church in Zillan was Mrs. Castallack. Her farm stood in Zillan parish, and I soon heard that she never missed matins on Sunday. It was unpleasant for me to realize that she was one of Mr. Barnwell’s flock, but fired by my conversation at the rectory, I told myself resolutely that her presence at matins would be of no consequence to me—or if it was it oughtn’t to be. But I was more worried about Philip’s presence than his mother’s, for I felt sure he would at once think I was trying to cause trouble if he saw me in Zillan church, and I did not want any violent scene with Philip. Finally I decided to attend evensong instead of matins, and this worked out very well. Before the end of the Christmas holidays I went twice to the evensong service at Zillan, and each time the rector invited me to have supper afterward at the rectory. The first time Ì was very shy, especially of Alice, but she soon put me at ease with her quick, effortless conversation, and on my second visit I actually enjoyed talking to her. We spoke of Anthony Trollope’s novels and discussed the character of Ferdinand Lopez in The Prime Minister.