Penmarric (66 page)

“Marvelous!” said Jan-Yves with enthusiasm. “I’ll be looking forward to it!” And swinging himself up onto his horse, he flashed his wide smile at me once again before riding jauntily off up the hillside to Cħûn.

I watched him till he was out of sight. Despite my natural inclination to return friendship with friendship, I couldn’t help thinking that Jan-Yves was after something much less innocuous than mere maternal love and filial affection.

I didn’t trust him an inch.

But I saw Jan-Yves before I was to meet him in the pub the following evening. I saw him the next morning at the one place on earth I wouldn’t have expected to find any of my family—at the two-hundred-and-forty-fathom level of the Sennen Garth mine. It was a Friday morning and I had been with Trevose far out under the sea to inspect the blasting area and check the stopes. We were on our way back to the main shaft when we saw one of the shift bosses, Willie Halloran, coming toward us and with him, looking odd in some borrowed overalls, was Jan-Yves.

“Good God!” I said, amazed. “What the hell are you doing down here?” Part of my amazement was due to his guts in coming down the mine. Most laymen were wary of going so far below the earth’s surface and did not care for the experience at all. “What is it?” I demanded. “Has something happened?”

“I’m afraid it has. I was sent to fetch you. Can I have a word with you alone for a moment?”

I stared at him. Beside me Trevose said, “I’ll wait at the shaft for you, sonny” and walked away down the gallery with Willie Halloran. The light from their helmets flickered on the moist walls and cast ghostly shadows up and down the level.

“What is it?” I repeated sharply.

“It’s Hugh.”

“Hugh?”

We looked at each other. There was an odd expression in his eyes.

“Has something happened to him?”

“Yes, he had an accident. Swimming. He and Rebecca and the child were picnicking at Portheras Cove. He misjudged the current.”

“You mean he—”

“He was drowned,” said Jan-Yves and added with a grimace of pain, “Rebecca saw it all.”

Geoffrey was fatally wounded in a tournament…

—King John,

W.
L. WARREN

When Richard announced publicly that this money, rightly his and unjustly detained by his father, would be used to strengthen the northern defences of Aquitaine, it seemed that open war between father and son must soon be waged with full vigour.

—The Devil’s Brood

ALFRED DUGGAN

This dramatic scene was the occasion for the last rebellion… Undutiful as Richard’s conduct certainly was, he had great provocation.

—Oxford History of England:

From Domesday Book to Magna Carta,

A.
L.
POOLE

A
LL I COULD SAY WAS
“But Hugh was a good swimmer. He was always first-class at swimming.”

Jan-Yves said “yes”—nothing more, just the one syllable, and after that we were silent.

Around us the mine was dark and comforting in its familiarity. I turned aside, stared down the gallery into the blackness.

“Rebecca wasn’t swimming. She was paddling with the child. She heard Hugh cry out, but—”

“Be quiet.” I turned and began to walk on down the gallery to the main shaft. “I don’t want to hear about it.”

He was silent again. His footsteps echoed behind me, and around us was my mine, Sennen Garth, the last working mine west of St. Just, the mine that had turned Hugh into my enemy and kept us estranged month after month, year after year.

We walked on, still not speaking, just Jan-Yves and I walking toward the land from beneath the Cornish sea.

At last I said, “Who sent you?”

“Papa.”

“When did the news reach Penmarric?”

“About an hour ago. Jared Roslyn came over himself and told William. I was with William at the time. We didn’t know what to do. In the end William told Alice and Alice broke the news to Papa. Then Papa and William went over to Morvah in the car to see Rebecca and be with her when the police arrived. There’ll have to be an inquest although God knows when they’ll ever find the body.”

I tried not to listen. I let my fingers trail against the rocky walls and timber props of my mine and tried not to think of the sea above me, the beckoning breakers, the lethal currents and the jagged teeth of the offshore rocks. People drowned every year in Cornwall. Strangers, holiday-makers, people who either knew nothing of the Cornish sea or who fancied they knew everything there was to know—they were the ones who got sucked to their deaths by whirling water and pounded to pulp on the waiting rocks. All you needed to get drowned in Cornwall was either total ignorance or total vanity. Either you didn’t know the currents existed or else you thought you could outswim any current on God’s earth.

Vanity. It didn’t matter how much you enjoyed living, how successful you were at making money, how cleverly you had managed to survive a world war without a scratch; it didn’t matter how much talent and charm and cunning you possessed; you could have a first-class brain and first-class good looks and enough potential to launch any career you chose, but one single moment of vanity could bring it all to nothing. A flash of vanity and you were gone, wiped out, blasted beyond recall.

“What a waste,” I said to my mine, “What a bloody waste.”

“What did you say?” said the boy behind me.

“Nothing.”

I thought of Hugh all the way home, but I didn’t think of those last years of estrangement. I thought of other better days, because they seemed more real to me than those times after we had quarreled. I wouldn’t have quarreled with him if it hadn’t been for my mine; or if I had I would have forgiven him long ago and patched up the friendship, because despite everything I had liked Hugh and he was the one brother whose company I had actively sought. I hadn’t meant the mine to come between us. I hadn’t meant it to happen that way.

I rode on over the moors, and around me the sun shone, the bracken swayed and the gorse was in bloom. When I reached the farm I broke the news to my mother as gently as I knew how, and afterward I sat with her and suffered her tears and tried as I had tried so often before to take my father’s place at her side.

It was a month before they found the body. I had a moment of panic in case I was asked to identify it, but my father went to the morgue to make the identification and no one suggested that I should be present.

After that came the funeral.

There was no escape from that.

The funeral of an elderly person—Griselda, for example—is a mere ceremony, a gloomy ceremony certainly, but an experience which usually only grazes the emotions. When you’re old you expect to die; you’ve had your life, lived it and no one can live forever. Death is inevitable, and its inevitability serves to numb the emotions. But the funeral of a young person is a totally different experience. The funeral of my own brother, dead in the prime of life just before his twenty-eighth birthday, was the worst ordeal I had ever endured on consecrated ground.

It was unspeakable.

Everyone was there. Mariana even came down from Scotland with her small son, and Jeanne left her convent in London. The service was at Zillan and the body was buried besides the graves of my grandfather Laurence Castallack and my eldest brother Stephen, who had died in infancy. The rector; now over eighty but ageless as ever, was very kind to my mother afterward and suggested that I take her home to rest as quickly as possible.

All my mother could say was “All my boys. All my beautiful boys.” And she cried until her face was lined and old and exhausted and she looked every one of her sixty-six years.

“Well, you still have me,” I said, thinking I was offering her consolation, but to my distress she began to weep more violently than ever.

“Oh, Philip, Philip …” I could hardly hear what she said, and suddenly I no longer wanted to hear what she said because the knives of memory were grinding in my brain, just as they always did when I saw her unhappy, and long-forgotten scenes were crawling out into the light from the darkest corners of my mind. I stood up, but as I moved she cried out, “Don’t throw your life away too, don’t lose your life in the mine—I couldn’t bear it, Philip, if you were killed. I don’t know what I’d do.”

I saw her crying when I was taken away from her and sent to Allengate. I saw her crying at the townhouse in London during the ill-fated half-term weekend that had marked the beginning of the final rift between my parents. I saw her crying at—

My mind snapped shut.

“Mama…” My voice was speaking even before I had decided what to say. I was having to make such an effort to stay in the room that the sweat was breaking out on my forehead and every muscle in my body ached with tension. “Mama, listen—please … Nothing will ever happen to me in Sennen Garth. Nothing. It’s my mine and I know it won’t kill me. I know and love it too well. You need never be afraid that I won’t come home from the mine.”

But she was not in the mood to believe me.

Later the rector called and after that she was better. I managed to persuade her to have an early night and also suggested she cancel an invitation she had made to Mariana to visit the farm next day, but she was longing so much to see her grandson Esmond that she refused to agree to such a cancellation. Privately I thought she was making a mistake. I went to bed depressed but found to my surprise the next day that Mariana’s visit was a welcome opportunity to take my mind off the harrowing memories of the funeral. She arrived for morning coffee at eleven, and with her in my father’s chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce was my nephew Esmond. Her husband, as before, was in Scotland; this time he was recovering from a mild stroke and his health had not permitted him to attempt the long journey to Cornwall.

“Darling Archie,” said Mariana, remembering him at last. “He was so sorry not to be able to come with me to Penmarric.” Her glance flickered quickly over the farm parlor with her usual casual disdain. “He’s longing to meet you, Mama—I wish you’d come up to Scotland to visit us sometime.” She began to talk of her three homes, the townhouse in Edinburgh, her place by the sea at North Berwick, her mansion in the Highlands. “I just adore Scotland—honestly! I have so many absolutely divine friends in Edinburgh …”

The divine friends all seemed to have masculine names. I looked closely at her. She was in her early thirties now but looked no older than twenty-five. I studied her hard Penmar mouth, cold eyes and bleakly perfect features and wondered how anyone so artificial could ever attract so many admirers.

“Philip,” said my mother suddenly as I stifled a yawn, “why don’t you show Esmond around the farm? I expect he’d like to see the animals.”

“Oh!” cried Mariana before I had had time to look unenthusiastic. “What a lovely ideal. Esmond darling, you’d love that, wouldn’t you? Run along with Uncle Philip, there’s a good boy, and make sure you behave yourself.”

I wasn’t interested in children. They bored me and I hadn’t the patience for them. But I liked Esmond. There was no reason why I should, since he was the son of a sister I had never liked and of an elderly Scottish peer I had never met, but for the first time in my life I found a child who caught my attention and held it. At the start I did not intend to take him for more than a cursory tour of the farm, but he was so well-behaved and intelligent that I found myself smiling at his questions and taking trouble over my replies. He was still a few weeks short of his fifth birthday, but he was tall for his age, fair-haired and blue-eyed, and suddenly I saw myself in him so strongly that I understood why it was that men wanted sons and cared that there was someone to come after them when they themselves were gone.

I was thirty years old. It occurred to me for the first time that if I were to die tomorrow as Hugh had died I would leave behind nothing except a tombstone in Zillan churchyard, a few memories among the miners of Sennen Garth and a number of possessions in my bedroom at Roslyn Farm.

I knew I ought to marry, but the knowledge blunted my enthusiasm for a son and made me feel listless. There was no woman I wanted to marry. I had never been in love. I found the idea of marriage depressing and decided that it wouldn’t hurt if I put it off for another five years or so. Why should I hurry to get married? I was happy enough as I was.

But Esmond had disturbed me. Long after I had waved goodbye to him I kept remembering his small bright face upturned to mine, and although it was some time before I saw him again the memory of his visit to the farm never entirely faded from my mind.

With the funeral over at last the memory of Hugh’s death began to recede slowly and life reverted to a more normal pattern. Adrian returned to the Oxford parish where he had just become a curate; Lizzie returned to Cambridge, where she won a first in her final examinations and decided to stay on at Girton for further studies; and Jeanne stayed at Penmarric instead of going back to her convent. When questioned about her decision to leave the Order she would only say that while she had enjoyed the nursing she found she hadn’t the vocation to be a nun.

“Thank goodness for that!” said my mother to me afterward. “Now perhaps if Jeanne bought herself some smart clothes and had her hair styled fashionably and made an effort to meet more people—”

But Jeanne had other ideas. She wanted to live quietly at Penmarric, take an interest in parish affairs and do some charity work.

“But Jeanne,” said my mother, horrified, “that’s all very well for a married woman, but it would be so dreary for a young unmarried girl.”

“Then I’d like to be dreary, if you don’t mind, Mama.”

“But you’ll never meet any men if you just—”

“It’s no good simply meeting men, Mama, one has to attract them as well. I found that out when I was in Scotland with Mariana. And I’m not attractive to men.”

“Fiddlesticks!” said my mother angrily. “Absolute nonsense! Any girl can attract a man if she wants to. It’s simply an attitude of mind.”