Penmarric (28 page)

And the panic, the dread and worst of all the fear overwhelmed me so that I could hardly stand for the dizziness before my eyes.

The door opened.

I turned slowly and looked at her.

She was young. At first I could not see her clearly, but I knew at once that she was young. She had good skin, a little pallid, and soft, fine hair, awkwardly styled and somewhat wispy at the sides. She had pale blue eyes and light brown lashes which she should have darkened to make her more striking. I thought her looks anemic and her manner gauche before she smiled, and then—oh!—how pretty she was with her sweet young face and her naïve, enchanting, expression, how radiant she looked! Her air of fulfillment was ravishing, and as I stared, unable to look away, she stepped forward, the folds of her evening gown moved slightly, and I saw that she was going to have a child.

I tried to speak, but no words came. I tried to summon the anger I had experienced in the carriage, but there was no anger any more, only the most dreadful pain. I prayed for the pain to cease, but there was no relief and the ache of shock throbbed through my brain till I thought I would faint.

But I did not faint. I stood motionless, my breathing uneven, and presently the girl said shyly, “I’m so sorry—I’m not quite sure—have we met before? Please forgive me if I—”

She was a lady.

I felt so crushed, so utterly overwhelmed that I had to sit down. I said, mumbling a little, not looking at her, “My husband … is Mark here? My little boy is ill … I wanted Mark … the doctor said …” I could not go on.

I stared at the pretty carpet beneath my feet and then the pattern blurred until it was all a mere red mist before my eyes.

After a long while I heard the girl say in an anxious, concerned voice, “How worrying for you! I hope it’s nothing serious. I’ll fetch Mark at once.”

Light footsteps pattered behind her; a child’s voice said, “Mama, let me stay up a little longer! I don’t want to go to bed yet!”

“Hush, William.” I looked up, saw her stoop over a little boy who was perhaps four years old. He had pale golden hair so that at first I thought he resembled his mother, but when he turned his head to look at me I saw Mark’s slanting eyes in his small bright face.

“Who’s that, Mama?”

“Shhh, William …” She led him out into the hall and closed the door behind her so that I was alone.

I sat there emptily. I thought: He has known her a long time. Certainly for as long as we’ve been married.

I thought of my other pregnancies then, not merely of my time carrying Philip. I thought of my unquestioned assumption that I was the only woman in Mark’s life. The knowledge had given me self-assurance, confidence, the ability to cope with my new social position. I had felt secure and loved, yet all the time here in Penzance he had been visiting this young girl, keeping her in that respectable neighborhood, giving her books on painting and the opera, discussing his work with her, thinking, of course, what a mistake he had made by not asking her to be his wife.

I sat there, dry-eyed now, too appalled even to weep. Time passed. I went on sitting there, and when at last I heard his footsteps crossing the hall I only thought, in detachment: I must pull myself together; behave as he would expect a lady to behave. No scenes. No shouting. No vulgarity.

As he opened the door I stood up and we looked at each other. His face showed nothing. His dark eyes were expressionless, his mouth hard. Presently he closed the door behind him and waited but when I said nothing it was he who spoke first …

“You say Marcus is ill?”

This made speech easier for me. I thought of Marcus lying in his cot in the nursery, his cheeks flushed, his eyes too bright, his forehead burning.

“Yes,” I said unsteadily. “The doctor says it’s measles but not a serious case. I shouldn’t have been so frightened, I know, but poor Marcus was so fevered and distressed. I—it was foolish of me not to wait until you returned home—I shouldn’t have come to Penzance, but—I—I started to remember Stephen—”

“Quite,” he said. “I understand. Did Michael tell you I was here?”

“Yes. I … I forced him to give me the address. He said she was an acquaintance of his. He did not admit … acknowledge …”

“Yes. Did he offer to fetch me?”

“I …” Words stuck in my throat. With a great effort I managed to say, “I’m afraid I behaved very foolishly and I shall have to apologize to Michael. He can’t possibly be held responsible for this. The fault was all mine and he was in no way to blame.”

“I see.” He turned to the door again. “I suggest we leave at once. You have the carriage, of course?”

“Yes.”

“My horse is at the inn. I’ll send someone over later to collect him.” He held the door open for me and we went into the hall. I supposed he had already taken his leave of Mrs. Parrish, for there was no sign of her and he did not pause to say goodbye. He led the way out to the carriage, helped me inside and then climbed in beside me as the coachman held open the door.

“Home, Crowlas, please.”

“Yes, sir.”

We set off on our journey to St. Just.

As we left Penzance he said, “I’m sorry this had to happen.”

I could not answer. Tears were stabbing behind my eyes again and I was too afraid of breaking down and weeping and then not being able to compose myself sufficiently when we reached home. It would never do to show the servants that I was distressed. I could not endure the thought of them all gossiping about me behind my back.

As if he guessed my thoughts he said, “We’ll discuss this further when we have more privacy.” And after that the silence remained unbroken between us throughout the long journey over the moors to the north coast.

We arrived home. One of the footmen took Mark’s hat and coat and told me the vicar of St. Just had called. We went upstairs, I not even able to look at him, and finally entered the nursery.

Nanny came to meet us. “Good evening, sir—good evening, madam … yes, he’s asleep now, poor little lamb, but he’s still very feverish. Once the rash breaks out all over him he’ll be better. He asked for you when you were gone, Mrs. Castallack, and I told him you’d gone to fetch his papa.”

We went into Marcus’ room to look at him. He seemed very little and defenseless, lying there so quietly with his small head resting on the pillow, and suddenly I was remembering Stephen again, remembering his tiny body laid out in his cradle and the silent emptiness of that deserted nursery. Stephen would have been four years old if he had lived, the same age as Mrs. Parrish’s son. My mind began to blur with pain. As the picture of Mrs. Parrish’s son flashed unwanted before my eyes all I could think was: Her child lived. Mine died.

“Where is Mariana?” Mark was saying to Nanny. “I trust she and Philip are being kept in a separate room.”

Tears welled inside me. I knew I was going to cry and could not possibly hold back my tears a moment longer. I managed to say, “Excuse me … I’m a little faint …” and then I was out of the nursery and stumbling blindly down those dark clammy corridors to my room in the west tower. The sobs were almost suffocating me. When I reached my room I slammed the door, lay on my bed and cried until I was too exhausted to cry any longer.

After a long while I struck a match and lit the lamp. The great room, the famous Tower Room, yawned at me emptily. I walked up and down, my fingers trailing over the polished furniture, my mind a mass of confused painful thoughts, but at last I caught sight of myself in the looking-glass and halted abruptly to stare at my reflection. By some trick of the light my hair seemed so fair that it was almost silver. I lit a candle and walked slowly toward my reflection. Shadows cast odd lines about my mouth and eyes, grief made me bowed and somehow, mysteriously, smaller. I stood looking at myself for along time, too mesmerized to look away, for this was my Tomorrow, this was the future which I had known to be lying in wait for me, but now my Tomorrow wasn’t tomorrow any more.

It was today. My shoulders began to tremble again with sobs. I was just pressing my hands against my cheeks in a desperate attempt to control myself when behind me the door opened quietly and I knew at once that Mark had entered the room.

“Janna … dearest—”

“No, please … please don’t. Please leave. I can’t talk now. Please go.”

“But I wanted to explain.”

“I don’t want to hear.” I sat down, my hands over my ears, my eyes tightly closed to try to stop my tears from escaping. “I want to be alone. I can’t talk. Please.”

“Darling—”

“Don’t touch me!”

“I simply wanted to tell you—”

“No—no, I don’t want to listen!”

“—that you’re my wife and I love you.”

“Oh …” I cried. I cried for a long time. He sat beside me and held my hand, and after a while when there was not a dry inch left on my handkerchief he gave me his own handkerchief and bore with me without complaint as I blew my nose and tried to pull myself together. Finally when I was calmer he began to talk in a low voice about the past. He had had an affair with the girl before we had become husband and wife—even before we had become lovers—but after that initial incident he had been faithful to me until the months immediately before Philip’s birth. He offered no excuses for himself, merely saying that it had been wrong of him and he was sorry. It had, he realized now, been wrong of him even to keep in touch with her, but he had treated her so badly in the beginning during the time he had spent with her in St. Ives that his conscience had obliged him to do all he could to make amends; he had borrowed money from Giles Penmar to support her during her pregnancy and later when his mother’s cousin Robert Yorke had died he had had the means to buy her a house in Penzance so that she could live respectably in the manner to which she was accustomed. He had visited her occasionally as a friend and she had instructions only to communicate with him through Michael; their new relationship had proceeded along these correct and formal lines without difficulty until one day he had visited her in Penzance and—

“I don’t want to hear any more,” I said, pressing my hands over my ears, but once I was faced with his silence I immediately had an overpowering desire to make him speak. Before I could stop myself I was saying in a rush, “How could you have let her become pregnant again?” and my voice sounded high and unnatural in that quiet room. “How could you? I know most women of her—her class are ignorant of such matters and I would not expect her to know all the old wives’ tales Griselda passed on to me, but could you not at least have—”

“Yes, of course I advised her.”

“That was all you did? Advise her?”

He reddened but to my surprise held onto his temper. Perhaps he was too guilty to feel angry. “No, I did more than that.”

“But then—”

“Most of the time.” He turned aside abruptly. “But she was taking my advice from the beginning. It was unfortunate that she was unlucky, but you know as well as I do that there’s no foolproof way of controlling such things. All a woman can do is to be careful and hope for the best.”

“Nonsense,” I said harshly. “One always knows when one’s taking even the slightest risk. Even at Chûn I knew it was possible—unlikely, but possible—that I might conceive. If you want a foolproof way you simply don’t take risks, that’s all. That woman wanted another child. She fooled you. She wanted to be pregnant again.”

He bent his head. I was just thinking he had no answer to offer me when he said at last, “She should be married. She should have a nice ordinary husband, half a dozen nice ordinary children, a respectable home—”

“Penmarric perhaps.” I had to say it. I could not stop myself. “How well she would fit in here!”

“I could have married her if I’d wished,” he said evenly. “But I didn’t. I married you, not Rose.”

“Rather an unfortunate choice, perhaps.” I did not want to say such terrible things but some bizarre compulsion forced me to say them. “She would have been such a perfect wife and I—as you reminded me so frankly a year ago—would have been such an ideal mistress.”

“I had you as my mistress,” he said, “and I still wanted you to be my wife. Perhaps you forget.”

I turned my head sharply and stood up. I was being stifled by pain again. I could not speak, but presently I heard him say, “Forgive me, Janna. Please. We’ll start again.”

I fingered the novel on my bedside table and thought of the books on music and art in that house in Penzance. He had gone back to see Rose Parrish even when her condition no longer allowed her to accommodate him. When my condition had placed me in a similar position he had gone away to London to study or to Penzance to amuse himself and I had been left alone at Penmarric.

“I was foolish,” he was saying. “I admit that, but a lot of husbands stray occasionally; it seldom means much. They always come back eventually to their wives.”

“Oh?” I said, trying to keep my voice as steady as his. “And do their wives always forgive them?”

“If they’re sensible.”

I spun around trembling, but when I looked into his face I was aware only of a great desolation as I tried to imagine what life would be like if we remained estranged. There would be no divorce, of course. I knew little of the matrimonial laws, only that there had to be adultery but that the wife could not divorce her husband for adultery alone. There probably would not even be a formal separation. He would want to keep up appearances and avoid a scandal, and so we would go on living at Penmarric, he continuing to live the life he enjoyed so much while I—I would be cut off, isolated, more lonely than I had ever been before, imprisoned forever in solitary confinement behind those iron walls of class. Such a situation could only have been tolerable if I had hated him, but I did not hate him. In spite of all that had happened I still loved him and wanted him and knew I could not endure to exist beneath the same roof with him in a state of estrangement.

“Well, perhaps …” I faltered. Tears pricked again behind my eyes. “For the sake of the children—”

“Never mind the children,” he said roughly, his calm patient manner forgotten. “They’d be better off with separated parents than with parents who were merely together for their sake—and I know what I’m talking about! No, I want a reconciliation because I want
you,
and unless you want a reconciliation because you want me I think we’d best make arrangements to live apart.”