Penmarric (64 page)

Having brooded over the situation for some time, I came to a decision. The next day at the mine I went to the telephone in my office and asked the operator if Mr. Gerald Meredith had had a telephone installed at Polzillan House. He had. I asked to be connected, and when the butler answered the bell seconds later I wasted no time in asking to speak to Helena.

I invited Helena to dine with me at the Metropole that evening, and when she accepted I gritted my teeth and steeled myself to ask my father for a favor. I needed his car and chauffeur for the evening since it was out of the question for me to drive Helena into Penzance in my mother’s pony-trap, and I foresaw he would be reluctant to grant me any favors as we had been on worse terms than usual for some months. But I was wrong. To my surprise he almost fell over himself trying to be helpful when he heard why I wanted to borrow the car and told me I was welcome to both car and chauffeur whenever I liked. Having solved the problem of transport with such unexpected ease, I returned home early to Roslyn Farm to have a bath and try on the dinner jacket I had not worn for years. I had had a bathroom installed at the farm at the end of the war more for my mother’s convenience than for my own, but as I grew older I admit I did enjoy the comforts of modern sanitation.

“Yes, I’m home early today,” I said to my mother when she arrived home later from a visit to Zillan. “I shan’t be in tonight. I’m taking Helena Meredith out to dinner at the Metropole.”

“Oh!” cried my mother, for all the world as if I had produced six white rabbits out of my trouser pockets, and immediately began to flutter around me like some overanxious butterfly. “Your shirts—I haven’t ironed them yet—your dinner jacket—I’m sure it’ll have to be altered-—”

I did wish she wouldn’t make so much fuss. By the time my father’s chauffeur arrived that evening it was a relief to escape from the farm and concentration my evening with Helena.

I was out of touch with fashionable society and had no idea what was happening in London, but of course I had not forgotten how to behave at a place like the Metropole; ten years of rural living hadn’t affected my memory of manners instilled in childhood. The Metropole was still the same stuffy hotel with the pseudo-French menu and the palm-court atmosphere, but I was astonished by some of the diners. There were several women with short hair and skimpy dresses and ugly necklaces, and one was actually smoking in public. If this was Penzance, was my reaction, what on earth could London be like? I thought, amused, how shocked my mother would have been by such changes in feminine conventions.

“Thank God you’re not looking like those people over there!” I said frankly to Helena. “I’ve never seen such a hideous collection of women.”

She laughed. “I’m glad you say that! I was beginning to feel not only old-fashioned but decidedly dowdy as well.”

“Nonsense!”

After we had ordered I turned the conversation to the subject of her brother and asked if his health showed any signs of improvement, but she told me frankly enough that he was a permanent and not a temporary invalid and that nothing further could be done to improve his health.

“That’s tragic,” I said, picking up my soup spoon as the waiter approached with the first course, “but at least he’s not totally paralyzed. I suppose that’s one good thing.”

She gave me a fleeting glance. Her eyes were cool and green, like the color of the sea around the offshore rocks of Cape Cornwall. “Yes,” she said. “He can move from the waist upward.”

I made a great business of tasting my soup and saying how good it was. She said her soup was good too. We smiled at each other.

“I hope Jeanne isn’t pestering your brother too much,” I said carelessly. “It seems she’s always at Polzillan these days! I hope she’s not boring him.”

“Good gracious, no! Far from it! You’ve no idea how he’s changed since Jeanne began to call regularly. She’s given him an interest in life and he doesn’t get so depressed or maudlin as he used to. He looks forward to every one of her visits.”

“That’s a relief,” I said casually. “I was afraid he was too polite to ask her not to call so often.”

She shook her head. “No, he enjoys seeing her immensely. I think he’s very fond of her.”

“I think she’s fond of him,” I said.

“Yes, I think, so too.” She was calm and self-possessed. I liked the way she didn’t simper or blush at the least hint of an awkward subject.

“Do you think he loves her?” I asked after a moment.

“Possibly,” said Helena. She raised her cool green eyes to meet mine again before glancing away. “But of course,” she said, “there can be no question of marriage. If Gerry does love her he’ll keep it to himself. He knows he can’t expect a girl like Jeanne to tie herself to a man in a wheelchair.”

That was what I had brought her to Penzance to find out. I relaxed in my chair with relief and started to enjoy my food, but of course the evening wasn’t over and I had to sustain the effort of making conversation. I had been well brought up. I could almost hear Rose Parrish say seriously in her light, gentle voice, “One cannot take a lady out to dinner and then proceed to ignore her.”

But the rest of the meal passed easily enough. I asked her about her family and the place in Warwickshire where she had been born. Her mother had died when Helena was three and her father had been killed in the Boer War; Gerald was her only surviving relative.

“I thought of living on my own when the war was over,” she said. “I was sure Gerry would get married and if he did I didn’t want to stay on in his house and get in his wife’s way. But then Gerry was wounded and I felt Ì should really stay with him as long as I was free to do so.”

“He’s fortunate to have you with him,” I said with mechanical courtesy and added as an afterthought, “You have the means to live on your own if you wish?”

“Oh yes,” she said, unperturbed. “My father had unusual ideas for a man of his generation and decided to leave his money equally between us.”

“I see,” I said impassively, just managing to conceal my amazement. For Gerald Meredith kept a well-heeled establishment at Polzillan House. There were plenty of servants to maintain the rambling old mansion in perfect order, several gardeners to attend the immaculate grounds, numerous grooms to look after the well-bred horses. I couldn’t help wondering if the establishment was financed by Meredith alone or with his sister’s help.

“… so Gerry and I were independent of each other even before Cousin Algernon died,” she was saying. “I’m much more fortunate than many girls.”

“So old Meredith—your cousin—left his estate to your brother—”

“No, he died intestate. Isn’t that amazing? You would think at the age of ninety-six he would have a will all ready for his death, but he didn’t Gerry and I inherited the estate equally as next of kin.”

“Ah,” I said. I was too astounded to say anything else. It had never occurred to me that she might be an extremely wealthy woman. Not that it mattered to me. I didn’t care about money although I would have welcomed a few pounds to spend on new equipment for the mine. However, one hardly sells oneself into marriage merely to buy several hundred feet of ladders and a few thousand yards of piping.

Presently we went outside for a stroll along the esplanade. The night air was cool but not unpleasant; a full moon shone, transforming the sea into a hypnotic pattern of black and silver, and I stopped to stare out over the water. I never tired of watching the sea; I could watch the surf of the north coast and the meek little waves of the south with equal fascination.

Beside me Helena was refreshingly silent and I gave her credit for good taste. Most women would have made some comment about how lovely the moonlight was.

I decided then that I liked Helena Meredith. There was nothing displeasing about her. Her slim figure was always well dressed; her appearance never jarred the eye and her fair hair and light eyes appealed to me. I also admired the way she never said anything silly or mawkish, and most of all I admired her for her self-possession. Here was a woman, I thought, who would be incapable of initiating an embarrassing scene. I felt drawn toward her, and when we parted at the end of the evening I thought vaguely that I might ask her to dine with me again some time in the future.

The next morning I found my mother waiting agog at the breakfast table.

“You can relax,” I told her as she hovered around me with the eggs and bacon. “He’s incurably paralyzed from the waist downward but he has no intention of proposing. I’ll have three slices of toast, please, and some of the new chunky marmalade.”

“And how was Helena?” said my mother. “Did you have a nice time?”

“Yes, it was pleasant. Aren’t you interested in what Helena said about her brother?”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, what did you say she said? I wasn’t listening.”

I repeated the news patiently.

My mother was seriously alarmed. “But Helena can’t
know
her brother wouldn’t propose!” she exclaimed at once. “Supposing he asks Jeanne to come to Polzillan as his nurse and companion? Naturally she would have to marry him, and Jeanne’s quite foolish and softhearted enough to say yes even if he proposed under such adverse circumstances! Dear me, it’s all most worrying. I think I shall write to Mark. I’m sure he has no idea how dangerous the situation has become, and I think the time has come for him to be warned.”

“But is it really necessary to interfere?” I asked frankly. “Jeanne’s always wanted to be a nurse and she obviously enjoys Meredith’s company or she wouldn’t visit him so much. Assuming she knew beforehand that he was impotent, why shouldn’t she marry him if she wants to? She’s over twentyone, and if she doesn’t have a mind of her own by this time I think it’s high time she started to develop one.”

My mother was shocked. “Darling, I don’t think you quite understand the situation. Of course Jeanne mustn’t marry him! It doesn’t matter how old she is. She must be prevented from making such a terrible mistake.”

“But would it be such a mistake? Supposing she doesn’t care how impotent he is. Supposing—”

“Really, darling, must you be quite so crude? If she doesn’t care about such matters; then she should. She should marry to fulfill her role as a woman, not to be an unpaid nurse to a cripple.”

I sighed in the face of this unanswerable feminine platitude and decided to concentrate on my breakfast without attempting any further comment.

Throughout the events that followed I kept firmly in the background. My mother went to Penmarric for a conference with my father; my father wrote to Mariana and my mother spoke to Jeanne. Between the two of them they reduced her to a state of abject misery and packed her off to Scotland to spend the summer with Mariana.”

“With a stroke of luck,” said my mother, “she may meet some eligible man and make a suitable marriage. I hear Edinburgh is a very sociable place and of course Mariana will know all the right people.”

But Jeanne didn’t marry. She stayed in Scotland from the summer of 1921 to the autumn of 1922, and then without my parents’ approval she entered a small religious order which sent its nuns to nurse the sick in a charity hospital in London.

My mother was naturally upset by Jeanne’s decision and for a while avoided thinking about it as much as possible by concentrating on her grandchildren. Hugh’s daughter, Deborah, had been born in the June of 1920, but since I refused to have anything to do with Hugh and had no interest in babies I avoided the christening and made no effort to see the child afterward. This was hard on my mother, who of course doted on the baby and would have liked to have discussed it constantly with me, but it was no good my pretending an enthusiasm I didn’t possess and after a time she became reconciled to my attitude.

Mariana’s son, Esmond Mark Duncan Donald Alexander, Earl of Roane, was born six weeks after Deborah in early August. Since Mariana’s husband was over sixty by then I supposed that represented some sort of achievement, but personally I thought it was embarrassing. However, I was careful not to comment because I knew my mother’s first marriage had been to a man over sixty when she had been about Mariana’s age and I didn’t want to hurt her by a couple of thoughtless remarks. In truth my mother’s situation had differed from Mariana’s in one important respect; my mother had been John Henry Roslyn’s wife in name only and had come to the farm more as his housekeeper than as his wife; marriage for her then had been the most expedient way of keeping up her respectability in a household consisting of three unmarried men, and although my mother’s delicacy on such matters had stopped me from asking her outright, I knew her well enough to assume she and old Roslyn had always had separate bedrooms.

The news of her grandson’s arrival in Scotland sent my mother into the expected frenzy of delight. It had been a sore point with her that Mariana had so far made excuses not to bring her second husband down to Cornwall for inspection, but now all was forgiven and my mother’s one concern Was that Mariana might be dilatory in presenting the baby to her. Mariana wasn’t. After a visit to Penmarric on which she was accompanied by a nanny, a nursemaid and her own personal maid but not by her husband, she launched into an ecstatic correspondence with my mother and sent her a steady stream of photographs of the baby and clippings of his blond hair and long letters about how wonderful he was. This was much more surprising than the facts would suggest at first glance. First of all Mariana wasn’t the sort of woman one would expect to enter into the role of motherhood with such zest, and. secondly she and my mother had never been close. But now all that was changed. Mariana became the Favorite Daughter, and soon I was so bored with hearing about the prodigious infant Esmond that my mother no longer bothered to read Mariana’s letters aloud to me.

“Oh, all these dreary children!” said my sister Elizabeth, echoing my own point of view on a visit to the farm at the end of the summer holidays. “I’m bored to tears with this incessant baby talk! I can’t wait to get back to Cheltenham and escape from Deborah and Esmond, the joint eighth wonder of the world!”