Penmarric (2 page)

“The entire family estate was left to Giles,” Cousin Robert Yorke had whispered to me while I had been receiving my frenzied briefing for the meeting with my mother. “It was monstrously unjust and the most crushing blow to poor Maud. Her father at least had the decency to leave her a moderate annuity, but Penmarric and the rest of the Penmar fortune fell into that blackguard’s hands. However, if Giles thought that Maud would accept the situation and let the matter rest he was very gravely mistaken …”

“… so naturally,” said my mother, setting down the teapot with a bang, “I considered it my moral duty to take the matter to court. It was a point of Honor. Justice had to be done. I trust, child, that your father has brought you up with a proper respect for Honorable Conduct, if for nothing else …”

“… Under no circumstances mention your father to Maud,” Cousin Robert Yorke had pleaded with me earlier. “Maud is very sensitive on the subject of her unfortunate marriage to your father.”

“… Your father told you nothing about the Inheritance, I presume,” said my mother in contempt as she reached for a hot buttered crumpet. “How typical! He told you nothing, I suppose, about the legal battles I’ve been fighting—and am continuing to fight—since I left his roof six years ago? Nothing about my ceaseless quest for Justice—nothing about my continuing efforts to ensure that the Inheritance will one day be yours? Well, perhaps I should hardly be surprised. No doubt he’s been poisoning your mind with untruths about me during the past six years!”

I managed to speak. I opened my mouth and heard a quavering treble that sounded most unlike my voice say: “He never speaks of you, ma’am.”

“You may call me Mama. There’s no need to address me as if I were the Queen. So Laurence never speaks of me! How remarkable! And do you and Nigel never speak of me to him?”

“No, Mama. Nanny said we weren’t to.”

“Dear me, what a disagreeable woman! Well, since I am considered so unspeakable, why did your father permit you to visit me for a week in this fashion?”

And suddenly I was back in Cornwall, back at my home in Gweek by the Helford River, back in that mellow beautiful manor house where my father’s family had lived for hundreds of years before an upstart named Baker had gambled his way into a fortune and changed his name to Penmar. I was in my father’s study and my father was holding my mother’s letter in his hands and saying in that quiet voice I loved so much: “But of course you must go, Mark. You have a filial obligation to visit her if she wishes it.”

And all I could say was a mutinous “But why does she want to see me? She’s never wanted to see me before! And why doesn’t she want to see Nigel? He’s her son, too!”

“Perhaps Nigel will see her later.”

And later in the nursery Nigel had said placidly to me, “I don’t mind her not wishing to see me. I don’t suppose she’s nearly so nice as Nanny.” Nigel was Nanny’s favorite. He had golden curls, blue eyes and the virtuous expression of an insufferable cherub. “In fact the more I think about it,” said Nigel, “the nicer I think it would be if Mama preferred you to me. Sometimes I don’t think it’s very fair that everyone prefers me to you.”

He seemed surprised when I started fighting him, although he should have known by that time that I always seized every excuse he gave me to use my fists. Some children are incorrigibly slow learners.

“Mark,” my father was always saying to me wearily, “you must make more effort to control your unfortunate temper.”

My mother had possessed an unfortunate temper. Even though she had left Gweekellis Manor more than six years ago, the memory of her temper lingered on among the servants.

“You take after your mama,” Nanny was in the habit of saying to me, and each time she would add darkly to the nursemaid, “More’s the pity.”

“Well!” said my mother, pouring herself a second cup of tea in the gloomy drawing room of Cousin Robert Yorke’s house in Park Lane and pausing to regard me with a critical eye. “You’re a little short, a trifle stout and undeniably plain, but you’ll do. I recognize that look in your eyes. You’re tough. You’re like me. Don’t look so horrified! That’s a compliment. I need a tough strong son. Now help yourself to another crumpet and listen to what I propose to do. I have a feeling you and I are going to get on exceedingly well together.”

She was wrong. We did not get on well at all. Looking back, I can see that she wrongly estimated her own needs and wrongly assumed she required a tough strong son. She did not. She wanted a son who would echo her, a weak shadow, a masculine complement to her dominant personality. When I was a child not yet eleven years old she subjugated me as she subjugated Robert Yorke—by sheer force of character—but once I was no longer a child I was no longer so easily held in subjugation. But a relationship had sprung into existence between us that day at the townhouse, and throughout the ten years that followed before I finally broke her will and reversed our roles, we were never indifferent to each other.

“You are ten years old,” said my mother to me during that first confrontation in London, “and you have never seen your Inheritance. I intend to remedy that immediately. We leave for Penzance tomorrow.”

Evidently this was the sole reason for her request to see me. Ten was judged to be an age when I could clap my hands in delight when I saw my Inheritance for the first time.

Naturally I was excited at the prospect of seeing Penmarric; I thought I would be able to explore the grounds, ride around the estate and tour the house from top to bottom. This, however, was not what my mother had in mind. After an arduous journey to Penzance, three hundred miles away from London in the southwest, we stayed at a hotel on the esplanade called the Metropole and next morning hired a carriage to begin another wearisome journey north over the moors to the parish of St. Just. I was too young to appreciate the scenery; all I knew was that it was a world away from my home at Gweek, from the peaceful estuary and fishing boats. I looked at the landscape of this alien strip of Cornwall and my child’s mind thought: The devil would feel quite at home here. For the scenery was bleak and powerful, dominated by stretches of arid moors without trace of a tree or house, and the moors snarled into towering hills crowned with outcrops of black rock. The emptiness of the landscape combined with the steep gradient of the road produced sweeping views; I remember looking back toward Penzance and glimpsing the castle of St. Michael’s Mount shimmering far off in the blue of the bay.

For a moment I wished that St. Michael’s Mount were my Inheritance, although naturally I did not dare admit as much to my mother.

As we moved inland the mines began to dot the harsh landscape and I had my first glimpse of the copper and tin industry for which Cornwall had been famous for centuries, the stone towers of the engine houses, the black belches of smoke, the eerie piles of slag. There were two mines on the Penmarric estate, my mother told me, but only one, Sennen Garth, was still operating. The other, King Walloe, had been closed for decades,

“Can I go down the mine?” I inquired hopefully.

“Good gracious, no, child, you’re not an artisan. … Now, look out of the window and you can see the coast of the North. There! Is it not a magnificent view here from the top of the ridge? There are three parishes side by side which border the sea. St. Just is the one to the west, Morvah is straight ahead of us, and Zennor is to the east of Morvah. Penmarric, of course, is in the parish of St. Just.”

“Which parish are we in now?”

“Zillan. It’s an inland moorland parish lying behind Morvah. … Robert, tell the coachman to hurry!”

We continued westward, through the gray mining village of St. Just and out along the road to Land’s End, but presently we turned off the Land’s End road and headed north to the sea.

“Now,” said my mother at last. “Tell the coachman to stop, Robert.”

The carriage rolled to a halt.

“Get out, child.”

I did as I was told. The spring breeze blew lightly against my cheek and the sun was warm as it shone from the spring skies. There were wildflowers already by the roadside, and beyond the wildflowers the banks of gorse were poised to burst into a blaze of yellow blooms.

My mother grabbed my arm. “Look.”

I looked. Across a shallow valley, beyond a spinney of trees unusual in that barren landscape, stood a castle built on cliffs facing the sea. I gasped and then saw on a second examination that the building was not a castle at all but an immense house built of gray-black stone and endowed with turrets and towers and fanciful architectural fripperies which captivated my childish imagination. Later I was to dismiss the whole preposterous design as a contortion of modern taste, but to me, as I saw the house for the first time through my child’s eyes, it was beautiful,

“I want that house,” said my mother, echoing my thoughts, and the bond was forged that was to chain us to each other throughout all the quarrelsome years ahead. “I want that house, and I’m going to get it—if not for myself, then at least for you.”

And I said, “Can we go on? Why are we stopped here? Can we not drive to the house and call on Cousin Giles?”

She looked at me as if I had gone mad. “Call on Giles? My dear child! Do you really think that after six years of incessant litigation I would be received as a guest under the roof which he illegally claims as his own? What an extraordinarily unintelligent remark! I hope you’re not going to grow up to be a fool.” She turned to our driver, a Cornish yokel who was gaping at our conversation as he struggled to understand our English accents. “Home to Penzance at once, my man. The purpose of our drive is accomplished.”

I allowed myself one last look at Penmarric before I followed her into the carriage. It was four years before I was to see my Inheritance again.

I was fourteen when my mother won her lawsuit and demanded to see me once more. Again we journeyed down to Penmarric, this time with the intention of crossing the threshold since Giles was no longer the legal owner of the house, but Giles had lodged an appeal against the decision and the matter was no longer resolved but
sub judice.
The front door was closed and bolted in our faces; my mother, trembling with rage, battered the panels with her fists, but her gesture was worse than useless. Penmarric still belonged to Giles.

Two more long years of litigation passed, and then came the disaster. The Court of Appeal decided in favor of Giles and the decision of the court below was reversed.

“I shall appeal to the House of Lords!” cried my mother, wild-eyed with grief. “I shall never give up, never!”

But the House of Lords rejected her suit. Years of futile litigation and endless expense had ended in the annihilation of her cause.

Yet still she refused to give up. Something, she decided, must be salvaged from the wreck of her hopes. She would travel down to Penmarric, make her peace with Giles and at least coax him to allow her to visit the house now and then. In vain Cousin Robert Yorke and I pointed out that there was no reason why Giles should pursue a policy of forgiving and forgetting the past twelve years of extreme animosity; in vain we told her she would be wasting her time. She remained—as always when her will was opposed—highhanded, domineering and incorrigibly inflexible.

“Very well,” I said with all the aggressive defiance of a sixteen-year-old youth who wished to show some independence. “Go alone, if you wish. But don’t expect me to waste my time by coming with you.”

“You’re coming with me whether you like it or not!” My mother was more than a match for any sixteen-year-old youth anxious to rebel. “Robert, remind the boy of his filial duty!”

“Mark, you really do owe it to your mother, you know,” said Cousin Robert obediently. “Maud’s worked so hard on your behalf.”

I gave in with a great show of sulkiness and my mother somehow managed to refrain from boxing my ears.

It was on this, my third visit to Penmarric, that I first met Giles’s children, my three cousins, Raymond, Harry and Clarissa Penmar. In actual fact Giles had only the one child, my cousin Raymond, who was the same age as I was, but Giles’s wife, who was now dead, had taken pity on an orphaned nephew and niece of hers, and Giles had assumed the responsibilities of guardianship when he had allowed her to bring them to live at his house. Harry, the adopted son, was by this time eighteen; his sister Clarissa was a year or two younger than Raymond and myself. I knew nothing about them beyond these sparse facts, and later, particularly where Clarissa was concerned, I was to wish I had remained in ignorance. Why was it that I disliked Clarissa so much? At sixteen when I first saw her I was certainly old enough to appreciate her looks, but dark girls have never attracted me, perhaps because they remind me of my mother and her domineering attitudes, and besides, my dislike of Clarissa went further than a mere antipathy to her good looks. On reflection I suspect that my dislike sprang into existence on our first meeting on the steps of Penmarric, when she insulted me with the cattiness of a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl and gave me forewarning of the spitefulness which I was to encounter, with such disastrous results when we were older. Perhaps even when I first saw her I sensed that her influence on my life was not destined to be benign.

The trouble began when—to no one’s surprise but my mother’s—we were refused admittance to the house by the butler. My mother at once demanded to see Giles in person, but the butler, who was by this time very white around the gills, said that Mr. Penmar was indisposed and could see no one. It was at this moment that I had the unfortunate idea of parleying with my cousin Raymond; I suppose I thought that two sixteen-year-old youths were more likely to reach a friendly agreement than our parents were, but that was my mistake. When Raymond emerged cautiously from the hall the first thing he did was to order me off the porch as if I had yellow fever.

“You get away from here!” he yelled with the sort of charm that I at once realized was characteristic of him. He was a tall youth with a spoiled mouth, soft hands and a petulant expression. Pitching his voice loud enough to reach my mother, who was waiting with Cousin Robert in the carriage, he added, “Penmarric will never be yours now, so you can go back to London and rot for all I care!”