Penmarric (18 page)

Even my husband’s lawyers seemed to regard me with a prurient interest. My husband’s new will was in the care of Mr. Trebarvah, the senior partner of Holmes, Holmes, Trebarvah and Holmes, the largest firm of solicitors in Penzance, and with Mr. Trebarvah when I saw him that morning was his assistant, a young man called Mr. Vincent. After Jared and Joss had arrived the will was read, and Mr. Trebarvah, translating the legal terms for us, explained what my husband had done before his death.

Jared had been cut out of the will; his little son Abel, who was two years old, inherited the money, the stock, the land and the tenant farm, although Jared, as co-trustee with Mr. Trebarvah, was allowed to administer this inheritance for the child till he came of age. Joss received his father’s gold watch and twenty-five pounds. As for me, I was left with the house—and without a penny to support myself or maintain the house, yard and garden which had been devised to me not for life but in fee simple. The result, as I quickly saw, was that I would be forced to sell my inheritance while Jared, acting on behalf of his son, would be forced to buy if he wanted to recover his family home. My husband had kept his promise and left the house to me, but in such a way that it would be impossible for me to live there.

“So be it, Janna,” said Jared, struggling to contain his rage. “We’ve both of us been punished. Name your price, and if it’s a fair one I’ll see you get your money. Mr. Trebarvah here can draw up the deed and see it’s all done in a proper legal fashion, and afterward when the money’s yours you can go and buy yourself a little cottage in St. Ives.”

As soon as he uttered the words “St. Ives” I knew I could not and would not leave the farm. The farm was my home—the only true home I had ever had. It represented peace and security, a refuge from all those years of toil and hardship which had followed my dismissal from Menherion Castle. The house was mine and I loved it and no one, least of all Jared, was ever going to take it away from me.

“I won’t sell,” I said.

There followed a bitter and heated quarrel during which Mr. Trebarvah tried in vain to act as mediator and young Mr. Vincent looked both distressed and embarrassed.

“But you’ve got no money!” shouted Jared. “And if you want to make ends meet you’ll have to replace the stock that’s been left to me!”

“I’ve money saved,” I said, But it was a lie.

“Even if you can replace the hens and cows you couldn’t make ends meet!”

“That remains to be seen.”

“Yes, you’ll see well enough!” cried Joss. “We’ll drive you out!”

“Really, young man,” said Mr. Trebarvah, much scandalized by this threat. “That’s no way to talk to a lady.”

“She’s no lady!” said Joss, trembling with hatred. “Ask anyone in St. Ives!”

And he stalked out of the room.

Jared and I left soon afterward. In the street outside he tried to bargain with me again, but I would not listen and ran all the way back to the inn yard where Cullis, one of the farm laborers, was waiting with the ponytrap. Within the hour I was back at the farm, shutting myself in the little sitting room behind the parlor where I kept my household accounts, and trying in despair to decide how I could ever get the money I needed.

I did not dare go to the Jews; I was too afraid that I would be unable to pay their rates of interest and would lose the roof over my head. I could approach a bank, but I thought the financiers there would look down on a mere farmer’s widow when the rest of their clients were gentry or wealthy merchants.

It was then at last that I acknowledged the thought which had been at the back of my mind all the time and allowed myself to think of Laurence Castallack.

I knew he would help me just as surely as I knew no one else would. It did briefly occur to me that to sit down and write a begging letter to a gentleman with whom one was barely on speaking terms must break all recognized conventions of etiquette, but I dismissed the thought as irrelevant. Etiquette did not matter because he would understand.

So taking enormous care with my grammar and spelling, I wrote, asking him if he would call at the farm to advise me on a matter which I wished to discuss with a gentleman of quality and education, yet when the letter had been posted my courage ebbed and my confidence in him faded. Afterward all I could think with dread was: He will not come.

But he did come: He came when the rain had died away in the east and the May sunshine shimmered in a cloudless blue sky and the wildflowers blazed from the banks of the lane. He came in the afternoon in the long hours before supper, at the time when I was ironing, when my hair was untidy, when my black dress was drab beneath my shabby apron. And when I opened the door and saw him there he smiled and took off his hat, just as he always did, and there was nothing more to be said between us because we already knew all there was to say.

I had waited over thirty years without really knowing what I was waiting for, but at last the moment came and the thirty years were as nothing because time ceased to matter any more. It did not matter that I was no longer young. I was a woman; I was loved; I loved in return, and during our love the spring blazed into summer, a long, lingering, languid summer, and the whole world seemed reborn in my eyes so that each moment was doubly meaningful to me.

He would come in the afternoons, not every afternoon, only twice or perhaps three times a week, and he would stay for two or three hours. It seems curious now and even painful to look back and see that out of the one hundred and sixty-eight hours of each week I did not spend more than nine hours in his company, but to me then the nine hours seemed a great wealth of happiness. I had never before been nine hours a week in the company of someone I loved; at first I was merely grateful that such hours could exist, but gradually I became restless and my yearning for him grew until the nine hours were a mere drop in the vast ocean of time and it seemed that all my days were spent longing for his arrival and dreading his departure. I wanted him every afternoon, not merely on two or three. I began to long for him in the mornings and evenings, not simply in the afternoons. And most of all I longed for him at night when I was alone in bed and the house was dark and still.

But I was afraid of seeming too eager, too immodest. He was shy, fastidious in his emotions, and I did not wish to alarm him by any frank declaration of feeling. So I schooled myself to be as restrained as he was, and forced myself never to complain when he took his leave, never to ask when he would be back, never to burst out saying how much I would miss him when I was alone. The years had taught me immense self-control, but even my self-control was no match for my emotions that summer. I endured it until July, and then one Wednesday when he was taking his leave of me I broke down and wept.

“I can’t bear you going away,” I sobbed. “I can’t bear it … I love you so much … I want to be with you all the time …” All the things that a woman should not say to a man. All the emotions a clever woman should not express aloud to her lover. And I said them all. “Can you not come every day? I can’t bear all these terrible partings and all the hours and hours till I see you again!”

“Janna dearest …” He was confused and upset. Despite the fact that he was a sensitive man he had had no idea of my feelings before that moment. “If I’d known you felt so strongly or minded so much—”

“I mind every hour I don’t spend with you!” I was so distressed, so utterly devoid of self-control that I cried out, “Could we not be married? I would be a good wife to you—I would learn how to be a lady, to speak without any accent—I wouldn’t be an embarrassment to you—”

I stopped. There was a terrible silence. But even before I could begin to feel appalled by what I had done he said in a low, unhappy voice, “But I cannot marry you. I would have told you from the beginning but I assumed you already knew. I’m not divorced. In the eyes of the law—not to mention the eyes of the church—I’m still a married man.”

I looked past him. On the mantelshelf was a clock which he himself had given me, its hands pointing to half past four. It was a small attractive wooden clock with Roman numerals painted in black on the white dial. Ever afterward I remembered looking at that stolid comforting little clock keeping time with its stolid comforting little hands.

“Forgive me … If I had known your thoughts had turned to marriage …” And he began to explain that his wife had given him no cause for divorce, that divorce was impossible on the grounds of desertion alone, but I barely heard him. After a long while I managed to say, “Please, Laurence, think no more of it. I must apologize for behaving so very foolishly. You must be thinking I’ve quite taken leave of my senses.”

If only he could have accepted my apology and responded with some light remark—then I could have maintained the shreds of self-possession I had summoned from the battered remnants of my pride and all would have been well. But instead he said, “Janna my dear … Janna darling …” And the compassion in his voice made me break down again and weep until my body shook with sobs.

I clung to him and he kissed me. From there it was but three paces to the bed, but after all was finished between us I was conscious as I always was of not having had enough of him, and the whole corrosive series of emotions began to wrack me all over again.

It was exactly as if nothing had happened, exactly as if nothing had changed.

It was two days later that I first saw Mark.

Laurence had naturally spoken to me of both his sons, and because I loved him so much I had been filled with a curiosity to see them so that I could glimpse their likeness to him in their features and mannerisms. When I had asked him if they resembled him closely he had talked at some length of Nigel, the younger boy, before adding that Mark shared his intellectual tastes. Despite the fact that he then went to great trouble to explain to me how anxious he was not to praise Mark too much for fear I would think him too boastful a father, it occurred to me as time passed that Nigel, not Mark, was the favorite son. This, I decided, was probably because Mark, although a dedicated scholar, was quiet and dull while Nigel, although less gifted intellectually, had more natural charm and grace of manner.

It amuses me now to look back and think how wrong I was.

I remember Mark as I first saw him, remember thinking him unprepossessing since he was small and pale and inclined to fat, but then I noticed that his hair was thick and dark, the kind of hair women long for but seldom possess, and that his shoulders had an unexpected breadth for one so young. Yet his eyes were his most unusual feature. They were black, blacker than the deepest mine shaft, and narrow, as if he surveyed the world warily and with constant speculation.

I did not trust those eyes. I trusted them still less when it became clear that he wished to pay me his precocious respects by calling at the farm. His boldness, coupled with his apparent indifference to my subtle hints that he was not welcome, annoyed me intensely but at the same time to my confusion I found myself admiring the boldness that annoyed me so much. Most boys of twenty are very lacking in polish, but he had an odd veneer of sophistication achieved, I suspected, by a combination of courteous manners, a quick tongue, a heavy dash of aristocratic arrogance so common among the upper classes, and last but not least by his obvious experience in a matter of which a young gentleman of twenty is not supposed to be a connoisseur.

I did not like him.

Finally, after our initial meeting in Zillan churchyard, after a truly remarkable scene at the farm in which he routed Jared and Joss, who were making one of their disagreeable visits to pester me about the house, and after several social calls during which I was obliged to be polite for fear of arousing his suspicions, I managed to explain to him in no uncertain terms that I no longer wished to receive his attentions, and he took himself off for a week to St. Ives to sulk.

I was enormously relieved. The possibility that Mark might have discovered his father’s relationship with me had been a constant danger, even though Laurence never visited the farm unless Mark was spending the day, as he often did, in Penzance. I had hoped Mark would soon tire of being with his father and. return to his friends in London, but he persisted in staying at that farmhouse which must have seemed both uncomfortable and isolated to him.

“You worry about him too much,” said Laurence to me soothingly.

“But if he should suspect—”

“Such a thought would never cross his mind.”

It irritated me that Laurence should have no idea of his son’s true personality and should merely think him an overgrown schoolboy who had taken a naïve and touching interest in an older woman. Against my better judgment I said rashly, “I don’t think he’s half so innocent as you think he is! I think—”

“My dear, I know Mark better than you do. If you were a parent yourself you would understand that a father necessarily knows his own child better than any stranger can.”

Long afterward when I look back it astonishes me that Laurence, who was an intelligent and sensitive man, should have been capable of hurting me so much without realizing it. Nothing could have hurt me more than this open reference to my childlessness. After years of indifference to maternity I now longed passionately for a child—his child—and at the beginning of our affair when I had thought he was divorced I had hoped that I would become pregnant and thus encourage him to marry me. My passion for him had made me oblivious to the reality of the situation; for a time I ignored the fact that my social station was so far inferior to his that I was unlikely to be his wife under any circumstances, but once I had learned that he was not after all divorced I came to my senses and, advised by Griselda, did everything I could to avoid the disaster of pregnancy.

But the longing for a child remained.

However, I think Laurence did sense he had hurt me during this trivial squabble about Mark’s true nature, because as soon as we were ourselves again he began to speak of a plan he had in mind for the future to ensure that I would have all the security I would ever need.