Penmarric (23 page)

We received a few calls but did not entertain much on account of my condition. On the whole the people we saw most often were the Barnwells, for we still crossed the parish boundaries to worship at Zillan and occasionally we would lunch at the rectory after matins. Their daughter Miriam, who had disgraced herself the previous year by running off with young Harry Penmar, was like myself in “a delicate condition”—or so that tiresome woman Mrs. Barnwell confided to me cozily over tea one afternoon. Harry Penmar had married Miriam, so she was at least an honest woman, but he was up to his ears in debt as usual and I had a suspicion that Miriam might have begun to regret her impulsive elopement.

Time passed; Mark was busy working on some historical thesis which was much too learned for me to understand and seemed not to mind the quiet life we were leading. I was content enough at Morvah, but sometimes I longed to visit Roslyn Farm, and only the knowledge that I would have an unpleasant reception if I tried to go there enabled me to suppress the longing and stay away from that quarter of Zillan parish. I had leased the house to Jared but to appease my conscience had charged him only a nominal rent; there was no reason why I should have felt guilty where he was concerned, but he had had bad luck and I had always treated him coldly. His bad luck continued, however, for that summer two of his children, including his only son Abel, died of a sickness and his wife, who was one of those meek, faded women constantly on the brink of maternity, began a long period of miscarriages. I felt sorry for him, but he did not want my sympathy. He became more religious, I heard, and never missed chapel on Sunday. He had begun to attend the Wesleyan chapel at Morvah instead of the parish church at Zillan soon after I had married his father—in a gesture of defiance, no doubt, for he knew my husband did not hold with Methodists—but even after his father’s death he continued to go there to worship with his family and Joss. In addition to this unexpected surge of religious zeal he became an active man in the community that summer and began to hobnob with the miners. Presently he organized a working-mens’ club in Zillan and used to make speeches there saying the miners should strike for better conditions and that they had as much right as the aristocracy to lead decent, comfortable lives.

“Very radical,” I said distastefully to Mark, but Mark himself had a strange outlook for a young man of his class and responded to my comment with all kinds of intellectual reasons in favor of Jared’s point of view.

August came. I had a month of waiting still before me, but by this time I was so bored with my uncomfortable shape and Dr. Salter’s fussy insistence that I should rest as much as possible that I could hardly wait for the baby to arrive. By the end of the month I was just sighing for the hundredth time and wishing it were all over so that I could wear my beautiful London gowns again when the baby, as if responding to my impatience, decided to enter the world early and I was suddenly brought face to face with the ordeal of childbirth.

I had not imagined I would have any difficulty. I had always been a healthy person, and I think perhaps too at the back of my mind was the thought that as I had successfully survived my terminated pregnancy years earlier I would successfully survive this normal one. The one fact that I had failed to consider was that any woman who has her first baby when she is over thirty years old is begging for trouble.

My boredom changed to discomfort; my discomfort gave way to active pain; my pain gave way to fright, fear and nightmare. I cried out incessantly for Griselda. I shouted and screamed for Griselda, but there was only the midwife murmuring platitudes and later young Dr. Salter saying with useless kindness, “You must be brave, Mrs. Castallack. It will soon be over.”

I cursed at him, saw his mouth gape at my language, and then at last Griselda was there, pushing her way to my side, her old face wrinkled with rage that she should have been kept from me.

I fainted. Afterward I thought: Never again. Never, never, never again as long as I live.

But then my son was placed in my arms, my poor ill-fated little son whom I was to love so much, and I forgot everything save the joy that I had given him life.

The happiness and pride that engulfed me after the birth were far greater than I had ever anticipated during the months of waiting, and with the happiness and pride came another emotion harder to define, a sense of exquisite security, as if God himself had solemnly promised that I would never be alone or unloved again. For the baby was so small, so helpless, so dependent on me, and I thrived on his dependence because it made me feel needed and loved and satisfied. It was then that I realized how empty my life had been without children. How could I ever have tolerated a childless future during my years at Roslyn Farm? I found it hard to remember how indifferent I had been to maternity then, for now I was so dazed with my new happiness, so dizzy with my unexpected bliss, that ecstasy was hardly the word to describe such overpowering euphoria.

We called the baby Stephen, which was Mark’s second name and one which we both liked, and spent long hours hovering over his cradle as if neither of us could believe he was real. Naturally he was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen. I could hardly wait to leave my bed and display him to the world in his perambulator.

“I suppose he must take after you,” said Mark. “He’s certainly not like me.”

For Stephen was fair. His blue eyes showed no signs of darkening and on top of his head was a hint of golden hair to come.

“Oh, it’s much too early to say,” I said at once, fearing a discussion of family likenesses in case the conversation should wander toward the forbidden subject of Laurence. “Stephen’s eyes may yet turn darker and his hair grow black. At the moment he doesn’t look like anyone. He’s just himself.”

This was perfectly true. I was about to begin a discussion of christening arrangements when Mark said suddenly, “Do you think he might be a little like my father?” and I was so surprised both by his uncertain tone of voice and by his reference to the forbidden subject that I could think of no easy reply.

At last I said, again repeating the truth, “It’s much too early to perceive any family likenesses, Mark. Everyone knows newborn babies seldom resemble anyone, and Stephen’s no exception.”

He nodded, shrugged as if the subject were of no importance and turned aside.

“Mark …” I suddenly had an urge to confront this shadowy barrier between us and tear it aside. “Mark, about Laurence …”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” he said fiercely at once.

“Oh, if only you could see the truth and not be so consumed with jealousy whenever his name is mentioned! We had an affair. I was romantically attached to him and he, I think, was fond of me. We were two lonely people longing for a release from loneliness. He died. It finished. Now the entire episode is past history. You’re my husband and I love you and you’re the only man in my life and that’s all there is to say.”

“You don’t understand,” he said harshly. I was just thinking that he did not intend to say anything further on the subject when he burst out in despair, “You don’t understand how I felt when I heard you were his mistress! You don’t understand how much I hated you—and him—and his insufferable hypocrisy …” He stopped. And then suddenly he said in a small voice, “I felt so very much alone. If Mr. Barnwell hadn’t been so kind to me I don’t know what I might have done.”

I was distressed. The flash of tears in his eyes reminded me how young he was and my newly kindled maternal instinct was roused. “Oh Mark …” I began, but he would not let me finish.

“But that’s all over now,” he said abruptly. “Mr. Barnwell showed me how pointless hatred was, and besides I couldn’t go on hating you when I realized …” He stopped again.

“Realized?”

“… that I had to have you no matter how much I hated you because I loved you more than anything else in the world.” He turned aside but I stopped him and raised my lips to his. I could feel the passion begin to shudder through his body, but as we lingered in each other’s arms the baby awoke across the room and cried plaintively for attention in his high, lost little voice.

We had just completed the arrangements for the christening when Mr. and Mrs. Barnwell received news of a bereavement and we offered to postpone the ceremony for a few days in sympathy for them. Their daughter Miriam had died after giving birth to a girl, and since her husband died soon afterward of a liver infection caused, so the gossips said, by a prolonged surfeit of alcoholic spirits, the baby was brought to Zillan rectory to live with her grandparents. They called her Alice, a name which I did not like, and occasionally I went to the rectory to see her, but I thought her a puny, ugly baby not nearly as fine as Stephen, who was large and strong and (to my mind) quite perfect. He had a serene, contented face, beautiful little features and on top of his head there was now a smooth fair down which I liked to stroke with one finger. We engaged a nanny to look after him and so my maternal instinct was never strained too far by being obliged to tend him in the night when he cried or to change his linen when the occasion demanded it. Whenever I saw him he was at his best, and so I have no sullied memories of him, no recollection of any difficulties.

Spring came. Stephen grew. Mark was working on further historical researches again, but roused himself to take me in the ponytrap to Penzance once a week with Stephen and Nanny. We kept a perambulator at the Metropole, and on our arrival we would collect it and wheel Stephen up and down the esplanade or beneath the palm trees of Morrab Gardens before we all retired to the hotel for tea. I bought him toys, a white woolly dog, blocks of bricks, moving beads on a stick; he loved them all. Whenever he did something exceptionally clever with them I would take him in my arms and hug him and say to Mark how advanced and intelligent Stephen was, and Mark would laugh and share my delight and I was happy.

Those were the best times, when we could laugh and be at ease with each other, but in recent months such times had become infrequent and I was often aware of a constraint between us. It was not that we were unhappy; far from it. After Stephen’s birth we had resumed our relationship in the bedroom without any trouble whatsoever, but marriage, as everyone knows, consists of more than a successful sharing of a double bed. I had not realized before my marriage that Mark was such a dedicated scholar, and my belated discovery of his passionate addiction to history was not altogether welcome to me. For hours and hours he would be closeted in his study, both in the morning and in the evening, and in the afternoons he would usually choose to go out for a walk by himself to “think.” Once a fortnight he would go into Penzance on his own to lunch with his friend Michael Vincent, the young solicitor of Holmes, Holmes, Trebarvah and Holmes, and afterward he would call at Carnforth Hall, where the other young gentry of his own age congregated, but naturally I was never allowed to go with him on these occasions. I did not mind him seeing his friends, for all men like their own company from time to time, but I did mind being left alone for long hours with neither occupation nor conversation to divert me. Sarah Mannack ran the house so smoothly that there was little for me to do, and although I passed the hours planning redecorations to the house and engaging in the certain church charity work that was expected from the wife of a gentleman of means, I was often lonely and restless.

At length it occurred to me that my own inadequacies were in part to blame for my predicament and I at once set about trying to improve myself. I started reading novels again to widen my vocabulary and began to practice my writing by keeping a diary—not this present journal; that came much later after many years of practice, but a small memorandum of my daily activities. I bought an atlas for my geography, a child’s schoolbook which explained English history in simple terms, an introduction to the study of French and a large dictionary to assist my spelling.

“But why this sudden urge to be scholarly?” said Mark, surprised, catching me amidst my books one day. “You know I dislike bluestockings!”

“Yes, but …” I hesitated. Then: “I thought you wouldn’t be so reluctant to invite your friends here,” I said in a rush, “if you knew that I—”

“My dear, any unsociable tendencies I may possess nowadays have nothing to do with you, I can assure you. I shall be more than happy to invite Justin Carnforth or Roger Waymark or Russell St. Enedoc to see us when I feel the time is right.”

“I realize it might embarrass you if Mr. St. Enedoc were to remember me, but Mark, when I was at Menherion Castle he was only a little boy in the nursery—”

“Darling, I’ve just told you my unsociable mood at present has nothing to do with you at all!”

“Then why—”

“I merely feel that Deveral Farm is hardly the place to entertain on a respectable scale.”

I was flabbergasted. I had thought my innovations had made Deveral Farm quite charming and comfortable enough for any friends Mark might have invited to see us, but evidently I had been naïve in supposing that the local aristocracy could be received in a former farmhouse.

“Perhaps we could have the Barnwells to dinner?” I faltered. “Or even Dr. and Mrs. Salter—”

“I think not,” said Mark. “When we live at Penmarric we won’t be asking them to dine with us, although no doubt we can invite them to lunch now and then as a gesture. So since this is the case I feel we should start as we mean to go on. We can’t ask them to dinner now and then drop them as soon as we move to Penmarric. It wouldn’t be the done thing at all.”

“Oh,” I said. I could think of nothing else to say. The very idea that the middle-class Barnwells and Salters would be socially inferior to us once we moved to Penmarric was enough to chill me to the bone. I could with a great effort be tolerably at ease when we lunched at the rectory and had supposed that with an even greater effort I could become accustomed to receiving Mark’s friends among the local gentry, but the, idea of a life surrounded entirely by the Carnforths and St. Enedocs of the county straight away filled me with panic. However, I suppressed my nervousness as thoroughly as I could and did my best to concentrate instead on Stephen’s progress and the. management of household affairs.