Penmarric (58 page)

“And I’m charitable to you tonight, Mr. Philip,” she promised. “Everything free, all secrets kept and no questions asked—”

“William Parrish would have a question or two to ask if he could hear you!”

“William Parrish!” sniffed Charity, tossing her black curls. “He don’t have as much to say with me as he likes to think! If he’d marry me it’d be different, wouldn’t it, but powerful set against marriage he is, even with those girls who be good enough for him, let alone those that ain’t. And if he won’t marry me I’ll not answer to him as if I was his wife. I’ll do as I fancy.”

But I did not feel in the mood for anyone’s charity that night when I had so many other more exciting things on my mind, so I eluded her as tactfully as possible and returned to the bar. The celebrations continued so long that it was very late when I rode into the yard of my mother’s farm and unsaddled my horse in the stable.

My mother was waiting up for me, not knowing what had happened to delay my return.

“We did it!” I shouted as I ran across the yard toward her. “We found it! We struck the lode!”

My shouts rang out over those silent moors. It was as if I were calling to the ghosts of long ago, the generations who had worked in Cornwall since time out of mind, but I wanted to call all tinners everywhere. I wanted to shout the news to the whole world, because my mine was alive again, my mine had come back from the dead, and my mine was going to be the mightiest mine in the history of the Cornish Tin Coast.

Jared Roslyn, meeting me the next day in St. Just, invited me to his farm for a glass of wine, and, not wishing to offend him, I accepted. I found his house gloomy and his unmarried daughters oppressively eager to draw attention to themselves, but I liked his son, Simon Peter, and thought that even though he was puny for a boy of twelve he had a sharp intelligence and seemed genuinely interested in mining. I was about to leave when Joss Roslyn arrived with his wife, a fat, gray-haired, sullen-looking woman, and the atmosphere of hospitality at once degenerated into awkwardness.

“So you made your peace with the Castallacks, Jared,” said this obstreperous and thoroughly dislikable man. “Well, it’s your business who you allow to cross your threshold, and your business who you allow your daughters to be acquainted with.”

“There’s nothing wrong with young Mr. Philip,” said Jared at once. “If it hadn’t been for him there’d still be out-of-work men leaving the area to save their wives and children from starvation. Say what you will about his parents, but he’s an honest upright young man and there are others who’ll say the same thing. He doesn’t get drunk and he keeps the Commandments and he goes to church on Sundays, and if that kind of young man isn’t fit company for my girls I’d like to know the kind that is.”

“I don’t care what kind he is,” said Joss Roslyn with his talent for demonstrating that his mind could only travel along a single track, “but there’s bad blood in his family, that we all know, and bad blood always tells.”

I wasn’t going to let that pass without comment. One good blow below the belt deserved another, so, I did something I wouldn’t normally have done and used the unfair weapon of my background against him. “My dear Mr. Roslyn,” I, said in my best public-school drawl, “you surprise me. I would have thought you found bad blood attractive since you took such painstaking care to marry a Penmar.”

The man went scarlet with rage, but I noticed his wife gave me a bitter smile before I turned my back on them both and took my leave. She had been an adopted daughter of my father’s predecessor at Penmarric, but Joss Roslyn had taken advantage of her penchant for working-class lovers and had managed to marry her, money and all. The marriage had produced one child, a girl who was now about seventeen, and for some time Hugh had been exercising his compulsive need to flirt with danger where women were concerned by carrying on a secret intrigue with her. The one girl in all Cornwall any Castallack should have avoided was Joss Roslyn’s daughter, so to Hugh of course she was totally irresistible.

“I hope Hugh does manage to marry Rebecca,” I said angrily to my mother over the kitchen table that evening. Although I enjoyed Hugh’s company from time to time I was becoming increasingly disenchanted with his taste for fornication, fabrication and general deviousness. “He’s exactly the kind of son-in-law that bastard Roslyn deserves.”

But my mother did not like this slight on her darling Hugh, who was always so charming and devoted to her, and said tartly that any child of Joss Roslyn’s was the last person she would ever choose to have as a daughter-in-law.

My mother clung especially to Hugh at that time because she was frightened he would choose to enlist. He was eighteen now and had finished his schooling at Harrow that summer.

“Will you enlist?” I asked him bluntly when he arrived home from school at the end of July. “Or will you go up to Oxford?”

“I don’t know,” mused Hugh, suave as ever. “It’s a tricky situation, isn’t it? If I go up to Oxford everyone will immediately point a finger at me and call me a coward idling my time away in peace and leisure while my contemporaries are dying for their country, so the temptation is to enlist. However, it’s better to be alive and a coward than dead and a hero, so I might go up to Oxford after all. If only there was some convenient middle course!”

“Well, if there is,” I said, “I’m sure you’ll find it.”

He did. He had a friend at Harrow whose father was a colonel who knew someone who knew someone else who … It was interminable. The upshot of it all was that he was promised a safe little ADC job well away from the front lines if he enlisted then and there, so he decided to take the plunge and volunteer for the army.

“Compulsory enlistment is only a matter of time anyway,” he told me. “Even if I did go up to Oxford I might be hauled down by force or else recruited as soon as I was due to leave. Then I’d probably end up in the trenches and once you’re in the trenches you’re as good as dead, as far as I can gather.”

It was 1915. By this time everyone was realizing that this was an entirely new kind of war in which there was no limit to the catastrophes that could happen, no precedent for the total involvement of civilians as well as soldiers, and no end seemingly in sight. The casualties already staggered the imagination. In May of that year Asquith had reconstructed his Government in an attempt to reorganize matters at home to cope with the hideous crises abroad, and now there was a new ministry, a ministry of munitions headed by Lloyd George, and the talk was all of manufacturing munitions quickly enough to keep pace with the need of the army in France. But soon concern for supplies at home began to rival concern for supplies abroad. The Zeppelin raids had been too sporadic to have widespread effect, but the German blockade of the British Isles meant that food became scarcer and poorer in quality. Even in Cornwall we noticed the difference and I felt glad we lived on a farm and were not entirely dependent on the shops for our supplies.

But we were well off in Cornwall; across the sea the disasters continued, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli at the other end of Europe, the unending bloodshed of the trenches nearer home. Adrian was in the trenches. So was Marcus, although the two of them weren’t together. Every day I would get hold of a newspaper to see if any major disaster had overtaken their regiments, and every day I fully expected never to see either of them again. It was then that I was filled with guilt that I should still be at home even though by that time I had no reason to feel guilty. I was needed at the mine. I was doing a vital job producing tin to use against the enemy. If compulsory enlistment came I could obtain an immediate exemption.

Yet still I was aware of guilt.

William Parrish was obsessed with it. Whenever I met him in St. Just he would say how inadequate he felt not being able to do anything useful in the war.

“You’re seeing that twice as many crops are grown on the Penmarric estate, aren’t you?” I pointed out to him as if in stemming his guilt I could also stem my own. “Someone’s got to devote time to the country’s agriculture to see we don’t all starve! Besides, could you help having diphtheria when you were thirteen? It’s not your fault you’re unfit for service.”

But it was no use. He was embarrassed by his safety and was pining for the reek of stinking trenches and the ragged roar of guns.

When Hugh went away in the autumn of 1915 William was the only one of my father’s sons still at Penmarric. Jan-Yves was away at school, and when he returned he did not come to church at Zillan with William and Alice any more but accompanied my father to church at St. Just as consolation for the others’ absence. That meant my mother and I never saw him—not that I cared, for he was a sullen, disagreeable little brute, but my mother was saddened by his stubborn hostility and spent long hours regretting it. Why she should have felt this way never ceased to surprise me. Jan-Yves had been an unwanted child, and she had suffered so much during the pregnancy and birth that when he was born she had taken an understandable aversion to him. Since he was technically in my father’s custody she had seen little of him until he was six years old, but from the very first moment that she saw him again after the long interval her aversion disappeared and was replaced by a most irrational obsession. It made no difference to her that he was ugly and rude. He was her child and she loved him and she was filled with regret that she had played little part in the first six years of his life. My mother was a very maternal woman, devoted to all her children, and so she was all the more upset that an aversion resulting from a difficult pregnancy could have caused her to act out of character where Jan-Yves was concerned.

Fortunately although Jan-Yves never visited us, my younger sisters traveled to Zillan every Saturday to have lunch at the farm. Jeanne was nearly sixteen now and liked to practice cooking in the farm kitchen. Elizabeth tried too but was seldom successful. Her bread was soggy, her scones as hard as bullets and her cakes sank in the middle.

“Never mind, Lizzie,” said Jeanne, who had an inexhaustible repertoire of feminine platitudes. “Think how clever you are at your lessons. You can’t be good at everything.”

“Phooey!” said Elizabeth, aggrieved. “What does it matter if the cake sank in the middle? It still tastes the same.” She tossed back her pigtails, a round little girl with a face like a currant bun. “I don’t care.”

“Poor Lizzie,” my mother would say to me afterward with remorseless regularity. “So plain.”

Jeanne was plain too, although I did not say so. Her hair, fair in childhood, was now brown and she was too tall for a girl. She had a pleasant face and a bright smile, but she was no longer as pretty as she had been as a child.

“Sixteen is an awkward age for a girl,” said my mother, still hoping Jeanne would recapture some of her former glory one day. “She’ll look better later. At least she has excellent features and isn’t grossly overweight.”

Mariana, on the other hand, was still as good-looking as ever. She was widowed in 1916, her husband being one of the twenty thousand men killed in a single day’s fighting during the blood-bath of the. Somme, and arrived at Penmarric in swaths of black crepe to recuperate from the shock. I was prepared to make a nominal effort to be sympathetic when she arrived at the farm to see my mother, but she refused all gestures of sympathy.

“I don’t want people being sad and sorry for me,” she said. “That makes me feel all the worse. I don’t want to cry and I don’t want to think about death and war. Let’s talk about something else.”

And she proceeded to talk in her affected London way of how dreary it was at her husband’s mansion due to wartime economies and how she detested her mother-in-law.

“Will you stay long at Penmarric?” I inquired, thinking she might want to return to her family, but she made a gesture of distaste.

“Oh, God, if it’s not one dreary mansion it’s another. I’m sick of cold, soulless mansions! I think I might go and live in the townhouse, but it’s so dull in London with the war on and so depressing. Oh, how boring this war is! How boring and hateful and beastly!”

And she burst into tears.

Emotional feminine scenes have always embarrassed me, so I chose that moment to withdraw, but after Mariana had gone my mother said to me, “I wonder if Mariana was happy with Nicholas? I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I half wondered during the course of the conversation if she wasn’t actually glad to be a widow—while hating herself for being glad, of course. She struck me as being distressed for all the wrong reasons.”

I yawned. “Even if she wasn’t happy with Nick she was happy with her house in Upper Grosvenor Street and her mansion in Kent and her cartload of jewelry. I shouldn’t worry about it, Mama.”

“But material possessions really mean so little,” said my mother, who believed, as all good women believe, that a woman should marry for the purest possible motives. “I’m not saying Mariana married Nicholas for his title, but she was so young—eighteen is too young for many girls to know their own minds—that she mightn’t have realized the shallowness of her feelings until it was too late. Also she’s so beautiful that Nicholas might have wanted to marry her for all the wrong reasons.”

Since my brother-in-law was dead this discussion struck me as being too academic to take seriously. However, not wanting to be tactless, I smothered a second yawn and nodded my head in agreement.

“I wonder why she didn’t have a baby?” said my mother, still worrying over the situation. “They were married two years before Nicholas had to go to France and most young girls of her age and upbringing are mothers by the time they celebrate their first wedding anniversary.”

“Quite,” I said, bored by this unending feminine speculation, and took the bowl of scraps out into the yard to give to the pig.

My mother continued to worry about Mariana and even went so far as to write to my father to say he should insist that Mariana stay at Penmarric until the war was over.

“It will make her feel more secure,” said my mother, “to be in a familiar environment, and besides, a young widow should live a quiet life after such a bereavement. Grief can lead to impaired judgment and she might remarry too soon before she had recovered sufficiently to know what she was doing.”