Penmarric (80 page)

“I didn’t enjoy it.”

“My dear?” I said, exasperated by this time, “I don’t know what you were taught when you were a little girl but when I was a little boy I was taught it was very naughty to tell stories. In fact I grew up to believe it was even naughtier to tell stories than to admit that sex could just possibly by a great stretch of the imagination be enjoyable. But obviously you had a different childhood upbringing from mine.”

“Men take advantage of a woman who enjoys that sort of thing,” she said doggedly, not looking at me. “Men are always ready to take advantage of a woman and if the woman gives in she has nothing but unhappiness.”

“But didn’t you ‘give in,’ as you put it, to Hugh?”

“Not until we were married. After we were married it was different.”

“After you were married you found you enjoyed sex as much as any woman!”

“Hugh was my husband. I loved him.” Her eyes filled with tears. “He was good and kind and unselfish,” she said, trembling. “No one knew Hugh as I knew him. He said I was the only person in the world who truly loved him, and I knew he was the only person in the world who truly loved me. My parents didn’t love me. My father was always grumbling because I wasn’t a boy and my mother never forgave me for ruining her health and spoiling her figure. Both of them used to shout at me when they weren’t shouting at each other. My mother used to go on and on at me. ‘Men take advantage of a woman,’ she used to say, ‘and don’t you forget it. I wouldn’t be in this hovel now,’ she used to say, ‘I wouldn’t be in this state if I hadn’t let Joss take advantage of me.’ She had an affair with my father before she married him. She told me. Then he said he wouldn’t go on sinning and that if she wanted to keep him she’d better marry him, but even when she promised to marry him he wouldn’t marry her until she’d signed over all her money to him. She was so infatuated with him, you see, she just wanted to do anything he wanted—she couldn’t bear the thought of losing him. But if he hadn’t forced her like that she wouldn’t have married him because she was so much better than he was, a real lady with this money of her own and everything, and he was nothing, just a penniless farmer.” A tear eased its way down her cheek. She fumbled for her handkerchief. “And then after they were married he changed,” she said. “He made Mother unhappy. But it was too late by that time. He had all her money and she couldn’t go away because she had nowhere to go—all her friends had turned their backs on her when she married. ‘I wouldn’t have married him and given him my money if I hadn’t been so infatuated with him,’ she said to me, ‘and I wouldn’t have been so infatuated with him if I hadn’t stooped to a love affair. I would have kept the situation in perspective, seen things in proportion.’ I think she did love me in a way even though my birth spoiled her health and figure. She was so determined I shouldn’t make her mistakes—that’s why she went on and on and on about not letting anyone take advantage of me. I think she did care what happened to me. I think she really did care.”

“There, there,” I said soothingly while casting a surreptitious glance at my watch. “I’m sure she did.”

“My father went on and on at me too. ‘There’s only room for one slut in this house,’ he said, meaning my mother, ‘and just you remember that. If I ever catch you misbehaving yourself with any man you leave my house that same day and never return,’ he said. ‘You bloody well stay chaste till you marry or you’ll regret it all your life. No man respects a whore and God punishes sinners. Just you remember that.’ He kept on and on and on at me—I think he held it against me that I was like my mother to look at and he didn’t want me to be too like her. Poor Mother.”

“Well, both your parents are dead now,” I said reasonably, moving out of the front door into the cold air of early morning. It was high time I left before my car was noticed outside her house, and I had every intention of leaving. “That part of your past is safely behind you. Now you can do as you please and enjoy yourself, and you can be sure, I won’t take advantage of you unfairly or even think of you as a whore and lose my respect for you. I don’t react in that way where women are concerned, and besides, I love you. If you knew how often in the past I’ve longed for a night like this—”

“But it mustn’t happen again! It mustn’t!” Her eyes were dilated in her agitation. “We’d have no future—no good could come of it—-I could never, never marry again—”

I clung to the worn shreds of my patience. “We do have a future,” I said, enunciating each word with clarity to induce her to understand such an obvious truth. “If you don’t wish to marry me I’ll try to accept your decision for the time being in the hope that you’ll change your mind soon, but even without marriage we do at least have a future as a man and woman who enjoy each other’s company. Now be sensible, darling, please—no emotional scenes! Face the facts. You need me and I need you, so we might as well go ahead and make the most of our mutual needs.”

“I—I can’t—I mustn’t—”

“Very well,” I said, thoroughly angry by this time. “When you get the itch for a spot of fornication write me a note and if I’m not doing anything too important I might drop in and offer my services for half an hour or so.”

She burst into tears.

“Rebecca, darling—”

“No, don’t touch me! I gave you so much yet now all you can do is talk to me as if I were a whore!”

What can one do with such a woman? I did the only thing possible in the circumstances. I took her back into the hall and made love to her then and there on the hall floor. After that I kissed her, told her I would call again soon and then beat a rapid retreat to my bachelor bedroom at Penmarric to recuperate from my exhaustion.

I would have married her if she had accepted my proposal in the beginning. Unlike many men who practice fornication consistently I had no deep-seated prejudice against marriage. In fact I wanted to get married, not only to ensure myself a ready source of sexual gratification but also because I was lonely and liked to have someone around who could share a joke with me or even merely share a grumble at a spell of wet weather. The older I grew the clearer I came to realize that sexual gratification was available anywhere if one took the trouble to seek it, but a worthwhile friendship was much more elusive—and much more valuable.

At the time when I began my affair with Rebecca at the end of 1926 I was approaching one of the loneliest phases of my life. My favorite sister Lizzie obviously preferred Cambridge to Cornwall; I saw little of her, and to make matters worse her letters to me were full of nothing but swooning admiration for one of the professors, an intellectual with the stuffy name of Edgar St. John Callendar. Apparently they spent their time tea-drinking together and conducting passionate discussions on the subject of the Greek theater. I began to feel depressed. Privately I had long hoped that Lizzie would remain unmarried so that she could come and keep house for me if I failed to find a suitable wife; I hadn’t anticipated her infatuation with academic life to outlive her adolescence and had certainly never anticipated her catching the eye of a Cambridge professor.

As if Lizzie’s unwitting estrangement from me wasn’t misfortune enough, I was horrified to see Charity dragooning William to the registry office and blackmailing him into making her his wife. William had belonged to me just as much as he had belonged to her, but now she had cornered him all for herself. Since he had always professed himself to be a confirmed bachelor I could hardly believe he had been so fickle and vacillating.

 
“Don’t let her marry you!” I shouted at him, enraged, during a crucial stage of the proceedings. “You don’t have to!”

 Silly of me, isn’t it?” William agreed, unruffled as ever. “I suppose I must really want to marry her after all.”

He was hopeless. I almost wept with anger, yet there was nothing I could do to stop him. To make this grisly year of my life even grislier I was turned out of my home. Philip decided he should try to beget a future caretaker for his mine and astounded me by announcing his intention to marry Helena Meredith, a cool, crisp blonde with repellently well-bred bones and a slender, rather sexless body. I was sunk in gloom. I reasoned that Philip, homosexual or not, must know himself to be capable of a normal relationship with a woman or he would never have contemplated matrimony at all; much as I detested Philip I didn’t think even he would have been capable of deceiving Helena by pretending he could be a normal husband when he was impotent, so in that case it now seemed inevitable that between them they would soon produce an heir to Penmarric. My ambitions seemed poised for sudden death. To make matters worse Philip gave me both money and permission to build a house for myself on the estate and made it clear he was buying me off his conscience and out of any future will he intended to make in regard to his wealth and property.

Life had never before seemed so monstrously unjust. I had a hard time accepting his bounty with a smile and displaying as much humble gratitude as my hypocrisy could muster.

After that I stayed for a time with William and Charity at their house in St. Just. I had no interest in building a house of my own on the Penmarric estate, no wish to watch Philip being master of the lands which should have been mine, no wish to clap my hands in admiration every time Helena brought a son into the world. Presently I invested Philip’s money on the stock exchange with the idea of having a small income independent of my salary at the mine, but I was inexperienced in playing the market and soon lost every penny he had given me.

By this time I was in despair. I had no home and no money apart from my salary, and although William and Charity asked me to stay on as their guest I knew I was abusing their hospitality. I proposed again to Rebecca, but she still turned, me down, and although I then suggested we live together for a time without the blessing of the church she wouldn’t have it. I supposed I could understand her refusal. In such a small rural community she would quickly have been ostracized for her loose-living and her Uncle Jared would undoubtedly have washed his hands of her. Besides, she had the children to think of. Naturally she wanted them to grow up with a good opinion of her and not to be affected by the hostility of a community which disapproved of her private life. I could understand, yet even though I understood, her refusal still hurt me. I would have slept with her every night if I had had the chance, but she refused to see me more than once or twice a week. She never once told me she loved me. Each time I had to beg to get what I wanted. If she hadn’t had something so obviously worth begging for I would have abandoned her in a fit of rage and told her to go to hell, but no matter how much we cursed and yelled at each other beforehand I always went back to her afterward and she always ended our stormy scenes by an act of capitulation.

It was a very exhausting affair.

Finally I came to the end of my tether. I forced myself to face the unwelcome fact that Rebecca would probably never consent to replacing her beloved Hugh with a second husband, and with reluctance I came to the conclusion I could no longer wait for her to change her views on the subject of matrimony; it was imperative for my peace of mind that I acquire without delay a home, a decent income and a friendly woman who could keep me company when I couldn’t sleep with Rebecca. I looked around feverishly. Almost at once my glance rested on Felicity Carnforth, and then and there, without any further hesitation, I decided to get married.

Felicity was the last person of importance to enter my life before the Sennen Garth disaster.

Her two brothers had been killed in the war, so Felicity as Sir Justin Carnforth’s only surviving child was a considerable heiress. She was too much in love with her stable of horses to be greatly interested in a mere man, but she was astute enough to see that it would be more advantageous to her socially to be a married woman and that her father had no wish for her to remain a spinster. As far as romance was concerned she hardly interested me any more than I interested her, for she was an angular girl with buck teeth, but I liked her and thought it not improbable that we could evolve some mutually beneficial arrangement. I had by this time no romantic dreams of marrying for love; the only woman I loved refused to marry me, so that made nonsense of the notion that romance and marriage should go hand in hand. Presently I laid all my cards on the table, explained the entire situation to Felicity and was rewarded when she repaid my frankness by being equally frank with me.

“Well, I would like to get married, of course,” she said. “Every girl does really, although everyone has different reasons. I’m sick of Daddy being grumpy and saying I’m not as pretty as Mummy was—as if it was
my
fault I inherited
his
looks!—and I’m sick of everyone saying poor old Felicity, she’s jolly nice and all that but talk about being on the shelf …
You
know, Jan! You know how people talk! I wouldn’t mind marrying you just to have a bit of peace. Honestly! I’m not in love with you, of course, but I’m not such a ninny as to expect true love will appear one day on a white horse and sweep me off to the altar. I’m simply not the type. Things like that happen to your gorgeous sister Mariana but not to girls like me. I don’t care if you want to marry me for my money—at least you’re frank enough to admit it. I couldn’t have stood it if you’d swooned at my feet, sworn you loved me and promised me my money meant nothing to you! I would have laughed till I was puce and then we would both have been most horribly embarrassed.”

I began to like her even more than I had before. We settled down and began to discuss a suitable marital arrangement.

”I’ll ostensibly do my duty, I promise you,” I said, “I’ll live in the same house, act as your escort and look after you. But I can’t promise fidelity, I’m afraid.” I had already told her about Rebecca.

“What a shame, she won’t marry you!” said Felicity sympathetically. There was nothing bitchy about Felicity. “She’s awfully attractive. I felt so sorry for her being widowed like that.”

We discussed the matter further. “I think it would be best if we were husband and wife in name only,” I said in my most businesslike voice. I had no desire to make love to her. “Then if anything goes wrong we’ll have no trouble getting the marriage annulled.”