Penmarric (63 page)

I hit him, but he was ready for me. He dodged, swung an uppercut at my jaw, spun me back against the wall. He tried to leave then but I wouldn’t let him. My temper was gone; a mist swam before my eyes; I was blind with rage. As he opened the door I grabbed him by the collar, shoved him back and lashed out with my fists. But he was quick on his feet, nimble and agile. I couldn’t close in and whenever I tried to get to grips with him he would pack a solid punch to the body and knock me aside. But I kept going. I was just thinking I’d finally cornered him and was just gasping out, “Now, you crooked little liar,” when he hit me below the belt. I jackknifed with the pain. As I lay winded on the floor I was dimly aware of him opening the door, slipping outside and slamming it shut behind him before he walked away.

It took me several minutes to recover. When I could walk again I went to the first-aid post, told Jack Priske, who was in charge there, that I’d had a fall, and took a shot of brandy from the medicinal bottle. After that I felt better. I looked at my face in the mirror. I was bruised across one cheekbone and my lip was cut, so I took out my handkerchief, found a clean patch and pressed it against my mouth. After a moment I took the handkerchief away and looked at it. Scarlet flared against the white linen and suddenly—for no reason—I was remembering Mariana’s wedding, Mariana passing beneath a stained-glass window which had made a scarlet gash of her mouth. The next moment I vomited. Fortunately I managed to get outside before making a mess of the first-aid room, but Jack Priske began fussing around me and telling me I should go home and rest.

“I’m all right,” I said shortly. In truth I did feel better for having vomited. I supposed the tension of the scene with Hugh had combined with his blow below the belt to give my stomach a tough time, but now I was better all I wanted was to go down the mine and find my friends. “I’m fine,” I said to Jack. “It was nothing. I’m fine now.” And still sucking the blood from my cut lip, I began my journey to the two-forty-fathom level far out below the Cornish sea.

* The third of Henry’s legitimate sons to survive infancy. To be distinguished from Geoffrey of York, Henry’s favorite bastard.

Trevose called Hugh a lunatic and said his insults were a load of rubbish. “Lunatic” and “rubbish” are the best printable translations of the words he used.

“The trouble with Mr. Hugh,” said Trevose sourly, “is that being a bloody gentleman he don’t know nothing about being a bloody miner down a bloody mine. ’Course you’re as good as any Cornish tinner! ’Course you love your mine! Any man who’s ever worked with you’d say the same bloody thing. Mr. Hugh’s jealous of you, sonny, that’s what he is, just bloody jealous because you’re twice the man he’ll ever be and with more friends than he’ll ever have and if that’s not the bloody truth my name’s not Alun Trevose.” Trevose’s worst insult was to call someone a gentleman. I began to feel better. “Bloody cheek,” said Trevose. “Bloody gentleman.” In fact he used the word “bloody” only once during his tirade, but it serves as a useful substitute for his other obscenities. I told him then how I’d refused Hugh a job and why.

“ ’Struth!” said Trevose. “You do have your troubles with that family of yours, don’t you?”

But the worst of the troubles were still to come.

My father took Hugh’s side, said that it was highly commendable that Hugh wanted to work in the family business and told me to employ him without further delay.

“I won’t,” I said, “and I’ll tell you why. I don’t trust him. He’d be filching money from the accounts whenever my back was turned.”

“Rubbish!” said my father. “The plain fact of the matter is you don’t want Hugh at the mine because you won’t admit that you’re lax with the paperwork and that your office is a shambles. You won’t admit Hugh could be more than useful to you in straightening out the administrative mess you now have on your hands—”

That put me in an awkward position because I knew I did need help in the office. But I wouldn’t admit I needed Hugh. “I’ll employ someone else to help me,” I said, “but I’m not employing Hugh. You can’t make me employ him.”

“Why not? It’s not your mine, you know, although I admit I’ve let you treat it as if it were. But it’s not yours. It belongs to me, and not only does it belong to me but I also control the company—”

“Yes, but—”

“—and I sign the checks.”

That threat was all I needed to make me lose my temper. I shouted at him for several minutes, but all the time I knew I’d lost because the mine desperately needed money to keep it both open and safe and my father’s fortune was much too vital to ignore. He could threaten to fire me and stop my salary—I could have stood that, for if necessary I would have worked for nothing—but I couldn’t let him withdraw his financial support from the mine. In the end all I could do was repeat stubbornly, “I’ll work with a clerk at the count house, but I won’t work with Hugh. I don’t trust him and I think it would be a mistake to employ him. And beyond that I have nothing to say.”

“Very well,” said my father, “but Hugh goes on the payroll whether you like it or not. I fail to see why he should be penalized for your pigheaded and unreasonable attitude.”

At first I thought I couldn’t possibly have heard him correctly. “You mean I must pay Hugh a salary even though he won’t be doing a stroke of work?”

“Precisely.”

“And pay the new clerk as well?”

“Naturally.”

“But that means we’ll be paying two salaries instead of one!”

“Your decision, not mine.”

“But the mine can’t afford it!”

“Then if you really care about the mine you’ll agree to work with Hugh.”

“God … damn … you …” I felt sick with rage. “I won’t work with Hugh!” I shouted. “I won’t. I’ll put most of my salary back into the mine to compensate for the loss, but I won’t work with him! Damn you both to hell!”

And with that I turned my back on him, strode out of the room and slammed the door as violently as I could behind me.

But later when my rage had cooled it occurred to me in bitter disgust that Hugh, not my father, had had the last laugh. He had said on his return to Cornwall that he wanted a job earning money in the easiest possible way, and now all he had to do was to sit around on his backside being a gentleman of leisure while my hard-earned profits from Sennen Garth flowed gently into his bank account.

We were the last mine west of Cape Cornwall now. We were one of the last mines alive in the entire county. For the year was 1919, and on the twentieth of October 1919 the Levant came to an end.

It wasn’t quite the end perhaps, for the mine did linger on for a few years afterward while the miners worked the levels above adit, but it was the end of Levant as we all knew it, the end of a mine which ranked with Dolcoath, Cook’s Kitchen and Botallack as one of the greatest mines in Cornish history.

Fabulous Levant! To me—and to many others—-it was unparalleled in its magnificence, the mightiest mine in Cornwall, the richest in copper and tin of all those rich mines on the north Cornish coast. But now Levant was dead. It was hard to believe at first. St. Just mourned the loss in stricken silence as the news swept through England and flickered around the world. Levant was dead. Levant, the mine which was so vast that no man knew the fullest extent of its workings, the mine that went far out under the sea and sank to levels hundreds of fathoms below the Cornish cliffs, Fabulous Levant! The mine where the miners traveled to work on that monstrous invention of a man-engine which carried each man on a thirty-minute ride into the heart of the Cornish earth, wondrous awe-inspiring Levant where the lodes were as big as a cathedral and the miners’ singing would echo as if they were in a mighty church. Unique Levant! There wasn’t a tinner alive who didn’t know its name and admire it as one of the most incredible mines of them all.

But Levant is dead now. It began to die on one calm October day in 1919, and when it finally closed for the last time after its lingering death, its splendor was ended forever and its levels were abandoned to the rats and rising waters. You can go back to the outbuildings still, you can walk among the ruins decaying above Cape Cornwall and pick your way across the slag heaps grown over with weeds; you can see the ruined engine house still standing on the cliff and sometimes on a quiet night you can almost hear the roar of the furnace and see the miners laughing as they leave the “dry.” You can go to the surface of the Levant because the surface is still there. But you can’t go down to the bottom of the mine.

For on the twentieth of October 1919 there was a disaster. Nearly forty miners, all of them known to me, never saw the light of day again. In the evening they were riding to the surface as usual when suddenly with no warning the man-engine collapsed into the shaft with a grinding roar, and after that there was nothing except dust and dead bodies and the weeping of the women at the surface.

The equipment was faulty, people said. Not enough money had been spent on maintenance. The Levant was old and dangerous and no longer even very profitable. It must stay crippled. There was nothing else to do but let it die.

And after that there was a terrible quiet on the Cornish Tin Coast, as if it had been brought home to us at last that we had been born at the end of an era which had endured for thousands of years and that we were the last of the Cornish tinners who would ever mine the Cornish tin. All the mines were dead or dying and Sennen Garth was one of the handful left alive.

It was in 1920 that I first met Helena Meredith. Old Algernon Meredith, who owned the only mansion in Zillan parish, died at the ripe old age of ninety-six, and since he had been a bachelor his estate reverted to his cousins, the Warwickshire Merediths. There had been Merediths at Polzillan House for many generations, just as there had been Carnforths at Carnforth Hall and Waymarks at Gurnards Grange, but since old Meredith had been bedridden for thirty years with arthritis few people apart from the rector had seen him and only the eldest inhabitants of Zillan could remember days when Polzillan House had not resembled a nursing home. But in 1920 there was a promise of change. A certain Gerald Meredith arrived with his sister to take up his inheritance, and all the tongues of Zillan parish were soon wagging themselves into exhaustion as the gossip flew back and forth like a ping-pong ball.

However, it soon became clear that Polzillan House was to remain a nursing home; young Meredith had been wounded in the war and was confined to a wheelchair.

“However,” said my mother, “his sister seems perfectly able-bodied. He’s lucky to have her to look after him.”

But I was too deeply involved with the mine to care much about the new inhabitants of Polzillan House.

“We should call on them, Philip,” said my mother. “Perhaps we can call on Saturday and take Jeanne with us. It would be nice for her to meet a young man, even if he is in a wheelchair. I wonder if he’s convalescing or whether the wound is permanent? I wish Mark would take Jeanne to London now that the war’s over and give her a season. I know she refused to go last year, but he should have insisted—or at least he might have taken her to London and arranged for her to meet a few people informally. She’ll be twenty-one next Christmas and she’s never had any young man taking her out and about and entertaining her. And now that Peter Waymark is married and the Carnforth boys were killed in the war …”

I ceased to listen. I was obliged to listen to my mother worrying about Jeanne’s marital future at least six times a week.

“… and his sister is very pretty,” said my mother. “I saw her in church last Sunday when you had to miss matins to get the vet for that cow.”

“Hm.”

“She’s really a very good-looking girl. Fair hair and green eyes, an excellent complexion and elegant figure. I believe her name is Helena.”

“Hm.”

“Philip, are you listening to me?”

“Yes, Mama. You said you believed her name was Helena.” I hoped she had no intention of acting as a matchmaker for me as well as for Jeanne. I hated to be told how to organize my life.

In fact Helena Meredith was every bit as good-looking as my mother had promised she was. I found her pleasant. In contrast her brother was fractious and evidently resented his helplessness bitterly. I disliked him at once, but Jeanne, whose ability to sympathize was more extensive than mine, was filled with compassion and thought him very courageous in his adversity.

“I wish I could be a nurse,” she said to my mother as we walked back to the farm after calling on the Merediths. “If the war hadn’t ended I would have asked Papa if I could have been a V.A.D. Do you suppose he would let me study nursing?”

“I don’t know about your Papa,” said my mother, “but I wouldn’t approve at all. You’re much too young to waste yourself being worked to the bone in some large hospital, and young girls of your class don’t become nurses anyway.”

“Yes, Mama,” said Jeanne. She never argued with my mother. The subject of nursing didn’t arise again between them but I noticed how quickly Jeanne became friends with Helena Meredith and how often she used to visit Polzillan House to see the invalid. I heard Helena in turn was often at Penmarric, but since I never went there myself I seldom saw her except at church on Sundays.

At first my mother was pleased that Jeanne saw so much of the Merediths, but as the months passed she began to worry about the scope of Gerald Meredith’s disability and had second thoughts about encouraging Jeanne to visit Polzillan House. To my discomfort she tried to persuade me to find out more about his paralysis.

I was reluctant to interfere, but I did see that my mother felt it was her duty to find out more about Meredith and I also saw that it was my duty to help my mother. The trouble was I couldn’t think how to set about it. I didn’t get on well with Meredith anyway, and even if I did I couldn’t very well call on him and demand to know if he were capable of sexual intercourse. At last it occurred to me that the key to the problem lay in Meredith’s feelings toward Jeanne; if he were either indifferent to her or uninterested in matrimony it would hardly matter how impotent he was.