Penmarric (106 page)

I was there until the end of the war. My intense restlessness channeled me unawares into leadership among the prisoners. I organized concerts, poetry recitals, gymnastic displays and a dozen other activities to keep everyone including myself occupied. For someone who had displayed nothing but rebellious non-conformity at school, I developed the most astonishing community zeal.

“Yer nuffin but a ruddy tornado,” said our tame Cockney wit. “On the go all the ruddy time with all these smart ideas. Major Smart-aleck, you are, not Major Castallack. You was named wrong at yer christening.”

I did not try to escape. I helped four men get away, including my best friend, and was just preparing to join them later when they were all brought back and shot. After that I stuck to my concerts and gymnastics.

I began to dream more, dreaming during the day as well as at night. When I was asleep I dreamed of Cornwall and Penmarric. I dreamed of Isabella. And I dreamed of other times long ago, of my old nanny slipping teaspoonfuls of gin into her tea and reading me stories about hobgoblins before I went to sleep. I dreamed of my father saying, “Nanny’s gone away. You’re going to have a new nanny now and share the nursery with Elizabeth.” And there was Lizzie, plump and black-haired, with a lollipop in her hand. I saw Mariana too, radiantly beautiful, the belle of the ball, coming down the great staircase at Penmarric, and Marcus was behind her, gay, charming Marcus, so effortlessly aristocratic, and suddenly Jeanne was clutching me and saying, “Oh, Mariana’s so pretty! If only I could be as pretty as that! What a lovely ball this is!” But then the ball merged into the Penmarric stables and Adrian was muttering unhappily to William, “Do you think everyone has guessed by now who we are?” And suddenly my father appeared, his hand on Adrian’s shoulder, until the scene was changing and Philip was shouting something about the Sennen Garth mine and the next moment I was down at the two-hundred-and-forty-fathom level and Trevose was saying with a laugh, “One bloody glass of cider wouldn’t turn an elephant bloody pink!” And after that came the funerals, so many funerals, and deaths, so many deaths, and death wanted me too but I was alive and I was going to stay alive, and I was sane and I was going to stay sane because Isabella was waiting for me, and one day I would be coming home.

I dreamt I was home, running up the long twisting drive of Penmarric, and the rhododendrons were in bloom. Isabella was waiting at the porch and she was wearing a long white wedding gown and she was smiling at me as I ran toward her. So I ran and ran and ran, and I could smell fresh-mown grass and the salt wind from the sea, and the sunshine was bright and warm, and at last I reached Isabella and she was a mere waxen image and when I pushed my way past her into the hall, the house was dusty and deserted and the roof had fallen in.

“Isabella!” I shouted. “Isabella!”

I was sweating, but when I opened my eyes Penmarric vanished and I found myself in my hard prison bunk.

“For Christ’s sake!” complained someone from close at hand.

“Shhh. it’s only Major Smart-aleck reciting the Queens of Spain. Nothing to get excited about. Happens every night.”

I fell asleep again. I was dreaming of Simon Peter Roslyn now, Simon Peter in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce while I stood by the roadside and took off my hat and bowed as he passed by, and as I returned to my plow I was thinking that nothing mattered, not even Penmarric crumbling into ruins, because I had Isabella and Isabella loved me and Isabella would be waiting for me when I came home …

I was at a station, a big station, Waterloo, I think, and I was coming home at last and there were huge crowds everywhere so that it was difficult to see her. When I did see her at last she had her back to me and I thought how odd it was that she should have her back to me when she should have been searching for me as eagerly as I had been searching for her. I ran the whole length of the platform, in and out among all the people, and when at last I reached her I saw she wasn’t Isabella at all but a strange woman I had never seen before. So I pushed my way through the crowds, and as I fought my way through the maze of people I began to shout her name.

“Isabella! Isabella! Isabella!”

“Shut up, Johnny, there’s a good chap. You’re giving us all insomnia.”

“Chrissakes—”

“Recital’s lasting a long time tonight. More value for money.”

Isabella was waiting for me. Isabella would be there when I came home. All I had to do was stay alive. All I had to do was to stay alive and stay sane because Isabella was waiting for me and one day I would be going home.

I dreamt of the purple heather and green bracken and gray walls of Chûn Castle and I would smell the wild roses around my mother’s front door, and the banks of the narrow country roads would be gay with pimpernels and harebells and buttercups, and the garden of Penmarric would be a blaze of exotic colors. Isabella was there, in the garden of Penmarric, and Isabella was smiling and walking toward me and Isabella was saying, “I’m so sorry, Jan, but you see I thought you wouldn’t come home. I was so
bored,
Jan, and so stifled, and—well, I’m afraid I just didn’t want to wait any longer. I know you’ll understand. You’re so understanding, darling, and I’m sure you’ve guessed by now that I really loved Keith all the time. It was your fault for coming along and sweeping me off my feet when I was too young to know better. But don’t blame yourself, darling, don’t reproach yourself for the way things have turned out. I forgive you utterly. In fact I pray for you every day and hope that when you have a free moment you’ll come and see us in Devon.”

But of course that was all a dream, and I knew it was a dream as soon as I opened my eyes, because Isabella loved me and she was waking for me, and one day—

And one day, in 1945, I went home.

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.

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.