Penmarric

by Susan Howatch

  “We’ll still be friends, won’t we?” I said unhappily to Felicity afterward. “We’ll still see each other now and then?”

  “Of course!” said Felicity. “Why not? No hard feelings.”

  “I feel I’ve treated you so badly in so many ways—”

  “Bunk,” said Felicity. “We had some jolly good times and I don’t regret a moment of it. Just think—if you hadn’t married me no one would have done it! Be thankful for small mercies, that’s what I say. Don’t go all conscience-stricken and pile on the sob stuff, there’s a good chap, or I shall start howling myself. I say, why don’t we go to the Metropole and have dinner and a bottle of champagne? No sad regrets! No going weepy on each other’s shoulders! Let’s go out and get tight and have a marvelous time!”

  We did. But at the end of the evening we became maudlin, much against our better judgment, and she cried a little and said she’d loved me all along but had thought the only way to keep me was to give me as much freedom as I wished.

  “Perhaps it would have been different if I’d had a baby,” she said. “I hoped I would have one but then I went to a gynecologist—no, I never told you. Why? Oh, I don’t know. I expect you were having one of your Rebecca moods when you simply didn’t notice me at all … It doesn’t matter now. We aren’t suited to each other, I know that really, and it’s much more sensible to be divorced.”

  However, even when Felicity was granted a decree nisi in August of 1935 I found there was no one I wanted to marry. My depression deepened. Filled with a desire to escape from it, I went to Cambridge for a fortnight and was welcomed by Lizzie with open arms. She was pregnant again but feeling well, and she and her husband entertained me so hospitably that I soon forgot my troubles and began to enjoy myself. She seemed very happy. Her little girl, my niece Theodosia, was by this time two years old and already learning the Greek alphabet.

  “Poor child,” I said, amused.

  “Nonsense,” said Lizzie. “She enjoys it. I wish someone had tried to teach me Greek when I was two instead of letting me languish in ignorance until I was sixteen.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want to be educated,” I suggested, but this idea was dismissed as too frivolous to be taken seriously.

  It was while I was staying with Lizzie that I became sufficiently diverted from my personal affairs; to take some interest in national events. In fact it would have been impossible to stay with Lizzie and not be forced to take an interest in at least one of the current issues under discussion—in this case the intellectual pros and cons of pacifism and its effectiveness in coping with the rising Fascist tide.

  “But isn’t fascism just a fad?” I said vaguely, “a reaction to all that Bolshevik hysteria of the Twenties? You surely can’t take people like Mosley seriously! Of course I know that Fascist rally at Olympia last year was a bit of a disgrace, but—”

  “Mosley!” said Lizzie, eyeing me as if I were a very unintelligent schoolboy. “Olympia! What about Hitler and his purges—if you’re going to talk about last year’s Fascist excesses what about the Night of the Long Knives in Germany? And what about Abyssinia and Mussolini, and Hitler adopting conscription in direct contradiction to the Treaty of Versailles? And what about—”

  “Well, that’s all abroad,” I said, assuming a placid, self-satisfied air to tease her for her impassioned harangue. “Here at home things are all right, aren’t they? Unemployment down, the economy cheering up at last, the Silver Jubilee—”

  “Sentimental absorption in an admirable royal family,” said Lizzie severely, “is no excuse for ignoring the political realities of a menacing international situation. The only hope of avoiding international chaos is by the propagation of pacifism—unilateral disarmament and individual conscientious refusal to fight are the only morally tenable solutions to present European problems in my opinion.”

  “Well, Baldwin still seems to believe in the League system,” I said comfortably. “Look how he’s replaced Hoare with Eden as Foreign Secretary.”

  “Politicians!” snorted Lizzie. “They believe whatever they want to believe, depending on how soon the next election is! I’m tired of watching Baldwin flirt with the idea of rearmament!”

  “I don’t suppose it’ll matter if we rearm or not,” I said soothingly. “Nobody’s going to indulge in full-scale war again, not even your favorite bogeymen in their black shirts and swastikas. There’s a limit to everything, after all.”

  “You sound just like Baldwin,” said Lizzie coldly, “in one of his ‘I’m just a plain, pipe-smoking, country-loving Englishman’ moods.”

  But I only laughed at her.

  It was in September, just after my return from Cambridge, that I met Rebecca face to face in St. Just. I had not seen her for some months and had schooled myself not to think of her any more as soon as I had realized that she paid more attention to her lodgers than she would ever again pay to me. I now considered myself over the worst of my long infatuation with her. I could even tell myself—and believe it—that she was a trying woman who had been a trying mistress and would have been without doubt a trying wife if I had ever made the mistake of marrying her. I no longer even admired her looks as much as I had once admired them. During the past couple of years she had put on weight in the wrong places; there were silver threads in her black hair and unmistakable lines about her eyes and mouth. She was not old, still under forty, but I could not look at her now without remembering that she was seven years older than I was.

  I remembered those years when I met her in St. Just early on that rainy September afternoon. I looked at her and she no longer attracted me. I was free, beyond her reach.

  “Good afternoon, Rebecca,” I murmured out of politeness, expecting her to sweep past me in her usual sullen fashion, but to my surprise she stopped and gave me a distant smile.

  “How are you, Jan?”

  “Well, I suppose. And you?”

  She shrugged. “All right.” She smiled faintly at me again and the breeze caught the facings of her open raincoat and revealed the black jersey and tight gray skirt beneath.

  “I hear you’re divorced now,” she said.

  “More or less. We have the decree nisi.”

  She seemed to have lost the excess weight I had noticed earlier. Her waist was still small, her hips still well-molded, her bosom still overgenerous.

  “I suppose you plan to remarry,” she said.

  “I suppose so,” I said. “Eventually.”

  “You’ve no one in mind?”

  “No.”

  She pushed back a strand of dark hair which had blown into her eyes. I glanced at her face again for the telltale lines of age but saw only her white skin, her black lashes and her moist, full-lipped mouth.

  “How are the children?”

  “They’re both well. Deborah goes into Penzance now to take a typing course with shorthand, but she doesn’t like it much. Jonas is doing well at school.”

  “So you’re alone during the day.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m alone.” She was coloring a little. She turned and stared down the street.

  “No lodger?”

  “Not at present.” She was blushing. She adjusted her grip on her shopping basket and tried to move past me, but I blocked the pavement.

  “May I drive you home?”

  “I have more shopping to do yet.”

  “I’ll get my car and wait for you in the square.”

  She did not object. Thirty minutes later I was driving her to Morvah, and within an hour we were in bed together at the farmhouse.

  Afterward I lit a cigarette and said to her. “Why the sudden truce after all these months of hostility?”

  “I was lonely.”

  “Even with your lodgers?”

  “I was just the landlady renting rooms, nothing more.”

  “Oh?”

  I must have sounded skeptical. She smiled unexpectedly. “A fifteen-year-old daughter and a nine-year-old son make excellent chaperones! Besides, I
had no desire to do wrong. They weren’t attractive men.” She kissed me, laid her head against my shoulder. “I never managed to forget you, Jan. I did try, but it was no use. When I heard you were getting a divorce I couldn’t help wondering if you’d found some other woman—I felt I had to find out—”

  “There’s no one else.”

  “Then …” She broke off. “Jan, you do love me, don’t you?”

  “More than any other woman in the world,” I said and meant it. I was still wondering how I managed to deceive myself into thinking she was no longer attractive. “I’ve always loved you—you should know that by now. It was you, not I, don’t forget, who decided we should be estranged from each other for all these months.”

  “Everyone told me I should give you up.” Her eyes were brilliantly dark. Her voice shook a little. “They said you didn’t love me and were just using me whenever you felt like it. They said if I had a grain of self-respect I should end the affair and never take you back again.” Her lips trembled. “They said I should be ashamed of myself with a young girl like Deborah in the house—”

  “My darling …” I held her tightly in my arms; I hated to think of her being made unhappy. “Don’t think of that any more.”

  “I tried to tell myself I didn’t love you. It was easier when you were unkind to Jonas, it was easier to tell myself then that I didn’t care. In the end I truly believed I didn’t love you and could tell myself I’d been foolish to expect a second love in my life after Hugh. But then … when I heard you were divorced … oh, Jan, all the love came rushing back—I wanted you so much—”

  “And I wanted you. Always.”

  We did not speak after that for a long time. At last I lit another cigarette. Outside beyond the window rain was still falling from leaden skies and a mist was swirling in from the sea.

  “Jonas will be back soon,” said Rebecca, but she made no move to leave the bed.

  I thought of Jonas. One day Rebecca would find out that Philip had changed his will in my favor, and when she found out there would be more trouble. Jonas would always come between us; I knew that now. The older he grew the worse the situation would get, and there was nothing whatsoever I could do about it.

  Almost as if she had guessed my thoughts she whispered, “Jan … Jan, could we—perhaps if we … Jan, we could be married now, couldn’t we? You have a good salary from Philip and the nice house in St. Just—or we could live here at Deveral Farm …”

  There was a silence. I, fingered the sheet and didn’t look at her.

  “But Jan, now that you’re divorced what’s to prevent us from marrying?”

  “I think we would soon quarrel over Jonas.”

  “Jonas would be good with you if he saw we were happy together.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “He could go away to school,” she said timidly. “I don’t want him to go but perhaps I was being selfish and not considering his best interests by keeping him at home. He wouldn’t be any trouble in the holidays. He’s a good boy, really, Jan. I know he’s been difficult in the past, but I think he’d be different if there was a man in the house he could treat as a father.”

  I knew at once that Jonas would never regard me as a substitute father. In his mind I would always remain the wicked uncle.

  “Hm,” I said and scrambled out of bed to get dressed. “It’s an awkward situation. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “But we might—perhaps—be married soon?”

  “I’ll have to think about it.” I began to button my shirt. “It’s not that I don’t love you,” I said reasonably, “but marriage is a big step, isn’t it, and since I’ve already got one divorce behind me I want to be sure that before I marry again there’s no possible risk of anything going wrong. Perhaps at Christmas I’ll have a clearer idea of how matters stand.”

  But Christmas came and went and still I couldn’t make up my mind. Jonas did make some effort to conceal his dislike of me, but dissimulation is hard for a small boy and I saw through his sullen politeness all too clearly. I knew he didn’t want me to marry his mother. As if in silent rebellion against her infidelity to Hugh’s memory he made a scrapbook of all the photographs of his father he could lay his hands on and mounted them lovingly on the dark leaves of an expensive album. For some days whenever I came to the farmhouse he was busy painting white captions beneath the photographs and pointedly emphasizing the fact that although some people might have forgotten his father he certainly had no intention of doing so.

  This was all very commendable, and I’ve no doubt Hugh would have been proud of his son, but it hardly encouraged me to assume the role of stepfather. I had to ask Rebecca to be patient with me, and at Easter I did vow to myself that I would make up my mind one way or the other by the end of the school summer holidays. I reasoned that after eight weeks of Jonas being at home all day I should know whether or not I could tolerate him as a stepson.

  I wasn’t living at the farm, of course, but I did spend a great deal of time there. My mother disapproved, I knew; both she and Lizzie would have been disappointed if I had married Rebecca, and although William never spoke a critical word to me on the subject of my private life I sensed he also thought Rebecca would be the wrong woman for me to choose to be my second wife.

  It was all most difficult.

  It might have been easier if I had been smitten with the urge to marry someone else, but that was out of the question. I did not even expect it to happen, because I knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t have the slightest desire to look at another woman so long as I could drive along the coast road to Morvah and have Rebecca waiting for me in the bedroom at Deveral Farm.

  2

  Money was tight at Penmarric that year. The house was costly to run, the servants’ wages had gone up, and all the tenants’ cottages seemed suddenly to be in a bad state of repair. The barren economic climate of the early Thirties seemed to linger on in Cornwall, and although I heard matters were supposed to be improving elsewhere I saw little sign of improvement among the ruined mines of the Cornish Tin Coast. The Penmar fortune seemed to diminish before my eyes; Philip was not extravagant in comparison to many landowners I knew, but he couldn’t be bothered with budgeting and spent exactly as he pleased. He made enough fuss about other people counting his pennies for him but he himself was supposed to be above it all. Fortunately Helena took a less Olympian attitude to money. I noticed how she kept a watchful eye on the household accounts, and I guessed she supplemented her husband’s bank balance with her own private income more and more frequently. I myself had to work hard not only to make the estate accounts look respectable but also to balance my own small financial resources. Gone were the days when I had been a reckless spender; if anyone had told me when I was up at Oxford that one day I would know not only how much was in my bank account without referring to my bank statement but also how much was in my wallet without taking it out to examine the contents, I would have laughed in scorn, but now I found I had such a tight hold on my money that I could account for every penny I spent.

  “How middle-class!” my brother Marcus would have cried in horror in those golden days before the war, but times had changed and social conditions had changed with them.

  “I hear Simon Peter Roslyn is quite the country gentleman nowadays at Polzillan House,” said my mother with distaste. “That would never have happened before the war! Why, a Roslyn couldn’t even have married a Trehearne of Helston in those days—or if he had, they wouldn’t have been received. I don’t want to seem old-fashioned, but I can’t help thinking all these changes are not necessarily for the best.”

  But times went on changing. Our new King was soon to give up his throne to marry an American divorcée; 1936 was the year of the Abdication, and as if that were not disaster enough we had to digest the news of Mussolini at Addis Ababa and the formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis.

  “I suppose you’ve been following the international situation in your usual Baldwinesque fashion,” wrote Liz
zie crisply from Cambridge. “That man ought to be put out to pasture along with those pigs he keeps. How dare he blame pacifism for the current international debacle? How dare he damn pacifism on the one hand and yet refuse to lift one finger to help a worthy cause in Spain?”

  Like many intellectuals who favored the Left, Lizzie was gradually abandoning her pacifist stance as the Spanish Civil War assumed the dimensions of an ideological conflict. Indeed as the Thirties entered their second half it was the Left, formerly devoted to pacifism, who became militant and the Right who retreated into the pacifist cause.

  “Everyone gets so hysterical about this war in Spain,” I complained to William. “Personally I’m sure both sides are as bad as each other and I’m damn glad Baldwin’s decided on a neutralist policy. I simply don’t see Lizzie’s argument that we should all go and fight for the Communists. Of course, I believe fascism should be contained wherever possible but nevertheless I don’t think one should be unnecessarily hotheaded about it. The days are long since past when everyone picked up guns and rushed into war at the drop of a hat. If Lizzie wasn’t so wrapped up in all her idealistic intellectual theorizing about this wretched civil war she’d have the common sense to see that any intervention on our part would be madness—as well as being inconsistent with our past foreign policy.”

  “Lizzie will soon forget about Spain when that new baby grows up a little and demands more of her attention,” said William placidly, but I doubted it. I knew her better than he did.

  Lizzie visited Penmarric soon after the birth of her second daughter Pamela and gave my mother the opportunity to see both her new grandchildren. Successful marriages seemed to be in vogue at that time; Jeanne was clearly happy with her second husband, and, not to be outdone by Lizzie’s ventures into motherhood, announced in 1936 that she expected a baby in the autumn.