Penmarric (101 page)

“But isn’t there anything you can do?”

“Everything possible will be done, I promise you. Meanwhile perhaps we’d better do something about the children. How old is the girl?”

“Seventeen.”

“Better tell her the situation isn’t too good and that it would be as well for her to stay at the hospital for a while. The boy would be better off away from it all probably. Are there any relations he could go to?”

“I’ll telephone Simon Peter Roslyn.”

“The solicitor?”

“Yes, he’s their cousin.”

“Good. Ask him if he’d be so kind as to come to the hospital straight away.”

“Very well,” I said dully and walked slowly away down the white sterile hospital corridor to the cupboard in the hall where they kept the public telephone.

She spoke only once. A plainclothes policeman was at the bedside on the chance that she would reveal the name of the abortionist, and the doctor and nurse were present, but otherwise the only people there were Simon Peter, Deborah and I. Simon Peter would not look at me; he had his arm around Deborah, who was crying soundlessly into her handkerchief, and his eyes watched Rebecca. No other member of the family was there; Jonas was in the waiting room with Simon Peter and Deborah and I imprisoned by those four hospital walls, and before us on the bed Rebecca lay motionless, her eyes closed, her lips ashen, her life-blood ebbing away before our eyes.

All I could think of was the past. I thought of fourteen-year-old Rebecca Roslyn in her gingham dress on the rectory lawn, of twenty-one-year-old Rebecca Castallack just married to my brother Hugh; I thought of her sudden widowhood, Jonas’s birth, her tortuous recovery from her bereavement. I saw her in that scarlet satin dress again, her first capitulation, our long uneven relationship spread over ten long difficult years. But I didn’t think of the quarrels, the stormy scenes, the words we always regretted later. I thought only of the happiness, the joy and the laughter; I remembered only my pride in her when I took her out for an evening, my comfort in lying close to her in the bedroom, the longing for her which drew me back time and again to that farmhouse even after our worst quarrels. For ten years she had been the most important woman in my life, the woman I loved better than all the other women in the world. I had not loved her as I now loved Isabella, but I had loved her nonetheless and she had loved me. Then why, since this was so, had we so often made each other unhappy?

It was her fault, I told myself as the tears blurred my eyes, all her fault. She never trusted me when I told her I loved her. She refused to marry me and then refused to forgive me when I wouldn’t marry her later. She was selfish and hurtful and made no effort to understand.

She spoke.

Her lashes flickered and her lids opened but her eyes beneath were blind. She opened her mouth, said very clearly in a strange, quiet voice, “Hugh?” and then after that there was nothing except for the knowledge that it was not her fault but mine, that I had been a mere clumsy, insensitive substitute who had never understood her, and as I watched, too stricken with grief and guilt to speak, a small shallow sigh escaped from her lips and she died.

I went out into the night

It was dark and windy and the rain lashed against my face and mingled with my tears. I crawled into my car and sat there, unable to drive, marooned on a street in Penzance early on one sightless, stormy March morning, but at last I managed to drive up onto the moors and halt the car for a while. Dawn came. The sun was rising in the east beyond Marazion, and the wet gray spear of St. Michael’s Mount rose from the cold morning sea like a tarnished dream.

After a long while I went home.

“Yes,” I said to Isabella. “Yes, I’m upset. I can’t help it. I’m sorry but I can’t help it. Please forgive me.”

“Oh, Jan darling, as if there was anything to forgive!” She put her thin child’s arms around me and pressed her soft young cheek to mine. After a moment she said, “I mean, there isn’t anything to forgive, is there?”

I looked at her. “What do you mean?” I said dimly. My mind was in a haze of shock still and I couldn’t grasp what she was saying. “I don’t understand.”

“Nothing, darling.”

“If I ever find that schoolmaster who got her into trouble in the first place, I’ll—”

“Yes, darling. I know.”

“And who could she have gone to for the abortion? I hope to God the police find out who did it.”

“Yes, darling, yes. I expect they will.”

“If only she’d done what I told her to do! Why did she have to panic like that? I could have organized her journey to London for her—she needn’t have been afraid! But I suppose she was in an irrational state when she saw things out of proportion and the prospect of a visit to London seemed suddenly more than she could cope with. She must have made up her mind to save herself the trouble—save me the trouble—she must have convinced herself that a quick visit to Penzance was the best way—”

“Darling, don’t think about it any more. Please! It’s wrong to blame yourself like this. You did your best for her, but she didn’t take your advice—and that’s all there is to say. Try not to worry about it any more. The police will soon find out who did it, I’m sure. Try to get some rest.”

She took me off to bed. It was only there, with my head pressed against her breast as she lay quietly beside me, that I fell at last into the dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

Rebecca was buried in Zillan churchyard beside Hugh on a cold blustery afternoon a few days later. Her children were both there and so were all the Roslyns and her friends in Morvah. Her cousin Alice Carnforth came over in Sir Justin’s chauffeur-driven Daimler and William and I arrived in my new Lagonda. No one spoke to us. Simon Peter was white-faced, tight-lipped and hostile, and even Deborah, usually so affectionate toward me, hurried away afterward without pausing to look in my direction. It was a sad, somber, depressing experience, and the memory of it was to upset me for many months to come.

The spring came; I took Isabella to London, then up to Cambridge to stay with Lizzie and finally to Scotland to spend August with Esmond in his remote Highland castle which he used as a country house. The long holiday did me good; gradually the memory of Rebecca’s death began to recede from the forefront of my mind, and soon I had picked up the threads of my old life and was once more enjoying myself as I had been before the disaster.

“We were having such fun!” said Isabella wistfully. “Remember?”

“And we’ll have just as much fun again,” I promised her and set out to entertain her as lavishly as possible for the remainder of 1938 and the beginning of the new year.

But time was running out for us both, just as it was running out for the rest of the world, and although we plunged ourselves with determination into a gay carefree existence as two of the gayest most carefree members of the West Country aristocracy, I knew already that our light-hearted days were numbered. Times had changed since the Spanish Civil War had turned Lizzie into a militant and me into a pacifist. A stalemate had developed in Spain, but by the time Franco’s forces finally won in 1939 everyone’s eyes were not on the triumph of facism in Spain but its triumph in Austria and Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain was Prime Minister now. During the spring and summer of 1938 “appeasement” was an honorable word implying calm and reason and patience, but that was all changed after the drama of Munich. Hysterical relief that war had been avoided gave way to shame and renewed fear, and when Hitler occupied Bohemia and Moravia in the March of 1939 appeasement was dead and with it all our blind and irrational hopes for peace.

“War is unthinkable,” I had said so often to William. “It just can’t happen.” And what I had really meant was: I don’t want to believe that war can happen again; I don’t want to believe that my life could be disrupted so unjustly because the contestants who had fought themselves to a bloody standstill twenty years before could be insane enough to assemble for a second round.

But 1939 was the year of the unthinkable, and on the first of September German armored divisions and planes invaded Poland.

The party was over. All that remained was a dog-eared photograph album of champagne memories, an empty nursery upstairs and the prospect of a long and indefinite separation to come.

Duchess Constance died in 1201… Now Duke Arthur was doubly orphaned, and had lost his last tie with the house of Anjou. He was entirely at the hands of French advisers appointed by King Philip.

—The Devil’s Brood,

ALFRED DUGGAN

“
… we heard that the Lady our mother was closely besieged at Mirebeau, and we hurried there as fast as we could, arriving on the feast of St. Peter ad Vincula. And there we captured our nephew Arthur …”

—King John,

W L. WARREN
quoting King John

“WHAT A BORE THESE
Germans are!” said Isabella, but she was frightened.

“Doesn’t look too good, does it?” said William to me, worried, over a glass of beer at the pub. “So this is where we got with our appeasement policy! I suppose we ought to have guessed months ago that militant madmen like Hitler are simply unappeasable—or was it that we all guessed and yet couldn’t face the implications of such a horrifying truth?”

“Darlings,” Mariana wrote scratchily from Paris. “Isn’t this news the
end?
I’m having terrible difficulty getting away from this country now and only wish I’d left after Munich. Can you possibly lend me fifty pounds? I’ve been trying to contact Esmond but without success—he must be somewhere in the wilds of Scotland—because I thought I could come and live with him in Edinburgh at last, but now I suppose he’ll have to go away to fight and we’ll still be kept apart …”

“You won’t have to go away to fight, Jan, will you?” said my mother tremulously. “You’re well over thirty. They’ll take the young men first, won’t they?”

“Why volunteer?” said Isabella, green eyes burning in a white face. “Why not stay here as long as you can?”

“Because if everyone did that,” I said, “we’d soon have Germans at Penmarric and our children would grow up to be Nazis.”

“But we have no children! And Penmarric’s only a house—”

“Be quiet!”

“But it’s true!”

I shook her in a fit of rage; she clawed at me but then burst into tears. “Oh Jan, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, I’m so frightened, I don’t want you to go—I want a baby—”

“We’ll have a baby.”

But we didn’t.

“Oh!” cried. Isabella. “Why did we wait? Why did this have to happen to us? Why, why, why? It’s not fair!”

“No,” I said, “it’s not fair.” And once again the two-headed monster seemed to rise up before my eyes, but now the face of justice was hidden from me in a dark shroud and only the face of injustice was left exposed. My search for justice, hitherto unflagging, was now about to begin a long process of erosion until in the end it had narrowed itself down to a handful of basic elementary aims which guided my life.

The most basic of these elementary aims was simple. I wanted to stay alive. I could not face the injustice of a premature death. My second aim was to keep Penmarric solvent. I could not face the injustice of debt, mortgage and foreclosure. Finally before I was parted from Isabella I wanted to leave her with the prospect of a child. I could not face the reality that my young wife became bored too easily unless she had constant diversions to keep her occupied. My marriage had stood the test of time; well while the sun shone and we lived in our frivolous world among our rich contemporaries, but now I was frightened. There are many flowers which flourish in greenhouses but which wither away once they’re exposed to the cold air of a winter’s day.

I was afraid to leave her
.

But I left. What else could I do? The phony war came to an end, France collapsed and the British Army was washed into the sea at Dunkirk. We were alone. The sun shone all the way through that beautiful summer and sometimes one could look at the splendor of the countryside and imagine that nothing was wrong, that life was just as it had always been, but of course that was an illusion, the longing to escape from a reality too terrible to face.

“My sermon this morning,” said Adrian from the pulpit, “is inspired by chapter seventeen of the first book of Samuel, by that passage which describes how …” He paused. There was an immense silence. Then: “How David slew Goliath,” said Adrian, and his voice rang out like steel striking sparks against a sheet of shining stone.

I met Adrian in London. He was fresh from a conference of important clerics and had been invited to give a guest sermon at St. Clement Danes. I was always sorry that church was bombed later. All through the war I carried with me the memory of sitting on my own in the midst of that full congregation and listening to Adrian as he announced to that intense, yearning silence: “David slew Goliath …”

All through the war, I never thought I would come through it all alive.

“I’ll come back, Mama,” I said dryly to my mother. “Only the good die young. Look after yourself and don’t try to do too much. I’ll write to you as often as I can.”

I hardly thought I would see her again. She was eighty now and strong for her years, but when one leaves anybody over eighty one should not take it for granted that they’ll live forever.

I hated to say goodbye.

Worst of all was to say goodbye to Isabella.

“I’ll let you know as soon as I get some leave,” I said. “With luck we won’t have too long to wait.”

She nodded, white-faced, white-lipped, her green eyes enormous in her small pinched face.

“I’m sorry there’s no—” But she could not say it. She had wanted a baby too much for too long.

I touched her soft hair. “When we next meet …”

Then I was on a train and her face was a white blur on a station platform, and injustice, cold and harsh and merciless settled down to control my life.

I had been a spectator through most of 1940, forced to stand helplessly on one side and watch as the fiasco in Norway led to Churchill replacing Chamberlain and the fiasco at Dunkirk led to the huge upsurge of national morale when the fiasco was transformed into a victory. However, at last the army began to notice that I had volunteered my services and I was in uniform though still waiting to be posted when the handful of pilots won the Battle of Britain and put an end to Hitler’s immediate plans to invade British soil. It was not until the last part of 1940 that my training was completed and I was shipped off to North Africa, but by that time the tide of fiascos had temporarily receded and Mussolini was receiving the first of a series of reverses which were to continue until the May of the following year.