Penmarric (87 page)

“How fetching you look, Lizzie,” she said politely. “It’s a pity Jeanne doesn’t take as much trouble to look smart and attractive. She looks very dowdy nowadays.”

“Hm,” said Lizzie, pretending to be impervious to the long-delayed stamp of approval, but after that the tension in the atmosphere eased and they were more friendly toward each other.

My brother-in-law gazed at my mother in admiration when he thought she wasn’t looking and was sometimes coaxed by Lizzie into saying “yes” and “no” when the occasion demanded it.

“I’ve never been to Cambridge,” said my mother to him at lunch. “Isn’t that a terrible thing to have to admit? But I once visited Oxford.”

“Oh?” he murmured, obviously at a loss for words. “And did you like Oxford, Mrs. Castallack?”

“Not in the least,” she answered, giving him the perfect response, and after that he felt encouraged enough to speak for some time on the glories of his chosen city.

“You must come and stay with us,” he said kindly, taking no notice of Lizzie’s horrified expression, and my mother smiled and was gracious and said yes, perhaps one day, although she didn’t care to travel much nowadays.

After lunch the three of them walked off around the garden to inspect the greenhouses, and I drove over to Morvah to collect Rebecca and the children.

By the time four o’clock came we were all having tea together in the drawing room at Penmarric. It was an ill-assorted gathering. Rebecca, behaving as she always did when the gathering was too grand for her, became colorless; she was studiously polite to my mother, who was studiously polite in return, but made an awkward effort to be friendly to the visitors. Poor Deborah was even shyer than her mother and painfully self-conscious as well; she could answer questions only in blushing monosyllables. I might have begun to feel shy myself amidst so much reserve had it not been for the presence in that formal tea party of my nephew Jonas.

He was six years old, solid, chunky and tough. “Please” and “thank you” were not words he had ever found necessary to add to his vocabulary, so he wandered from one plate of cakes to the next and threw the cake on the floor if it did not appeal to his palate. He refused to have milk, upset his cup of tea and became angry when his mother, much embarrassed, begged him to sit down.

My mother eyed him thoughtfully. I could almost feel her fingers itching to slap him. Presently she glanced across at me and as our glances met she raised an eyebrow in distaste.

“All right, Jonas,” I said. ‘That’s enough. Sit down and behave yourself or else you go straight upstairs to my room where you’ll stay until it’s time for your mother to leave.”

He put out his tongue and waggled it daringly at me. His blue eyes were bright with impudence.

“Very well,” I said calmly, setting down my plate, “if that’s what you want.” I prepared to rise to my feet.

“You can’t touch me!” he yelled, suddenly becoming nervous. “You’re not my father!”

“Fortunately,” I said with a smile.

“You can’t touch me because you’re not my father!”

“Jan,” began Rebecca unhappily. “Jan, I—”

“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt him.” I crossed the room as gracefully as a dancer, lifted him by the scruff of his neck and propelled him swiftly out of the room as he roared with fury and humiliation.

Outside in the hall I closed the door and relaxed my grip. He started to flail his small fists at me, so I tucked him firmly under my arm and carried him, still kicking and screaming, upstairs to my room.

“You beast!” he shouted, scarlet with rage. “You wicked ugly old man! I hate you!”

I supposed that to a six-year-old mind even a man of twenty-seven would seem elderly.

I locked the door, pocketed the key and stood looking down at him.

“Let me out!” he cried, stamping his foot imperiously. “Let me out! I want my mother!”

“You want your father,” I said, “but fortunately for him he never had the chance to know what a little monster he’d begotten.”

He dimly understood that he was being insulted and rushed at me again with flailing fists. One of his puny blows happened to prod a sensitive part of my anatomy, and suddenly I lost my temper.

“That’s enough of that!” I said, white with anger, and as he saw my expression change the pugnacity drained out of him and he stepped backward away from me. “I’ve had more than enough of your unruliness and bad manners! It’s time you learned you can’t go through life doing exactly as you please while your mother runs after you with the apologies. Come here!”

He backed away, very small, very quiet. I stooped to the floor beside my bed and picked up one of my slippers.

“Mummy!” he shouted, panicking. “Mummy!”

“This is one occasion,” I said, “when ‘Mummy’ isn’t going to rush in to stop you getting a little well-deserved punishment.”

“Mummy!” He was frantic. He made a rush at the door without realizing it was locked, and I caught him, swung him around and pulled down the trousers of his little white sailor suit.

He screamed and screamed even before I had laid a finger on him. In the end I gave him six sharp taps with the slipper and let him go. I remembered from my own childhood that humiliation is a more effective punishment than physical pain, and it seemed unnecessary to make the taps hearty whacks of the type one received at school. The beating was symbolic, a demonstration of authority; it was the humiliation he would remember, not the half-dozen brisk taps on the bottom.

He picked himself up, his face awash with tears, and flung himself at the door again, scrabbling at the handle with his little pink hand and impotently battering the panels with the other.

“Mummy, Mummy, Mummy—”

“No,” I said. “You’ll stay here until your mother’s ready to leave. You’ve caused enough trouble for one day.”

It was then, from the corridor outside, that I heard Rebecca calling my name.

Oh my God, I thought.

“Mummy!” shrieked Jonas. “Help! Help! Mummy!”

“Jonas!” I could hear her running footsteps, then the rattle of the door handle. “Jan? What are you doing to Jonas? Let me in!”

“It’s all right,” I said in my calmest voice. “Just a moment. I’ll unlock the door.”

I unlocked the door. She burst in.

“Mummy!” bawled Jonas, sobbing wildly. “Mummy!”

“Jonas darling—”

He flew into her arms and stuck there, weeping stormily against her bosom.

“There, there, darling. Mummy’s here …” She looked up at me fiercely. “What did you do to him?”

“I gave him six taps on the bottom which wouldn’t even have harmed an hour-old flea. There’s absolutely no need for you to get upset.”

“How dare you!” she stormed. “How dare you lay a finger upon him without my permission! Just because of our relationship you think you can treat my children any way you like!”

“Come, Rebecca, stop talking such nonsense. Did you ever see a child behave more atrociously than he behaved in the drawing room just now? You can’t go through life condoning his mistakes, you know! There are times when children need to be punished and in my opinion this was one of them.”

“I don’t give a damn for your opinion! Who are you to dictate to me about how I should bring up my child? How dare you try to tell me—”

“For Christ’s sake! Haven’t you any idea of how a mother should behave? I’m beginning to think you’ve got even less idea than I thought you had about how to bring up children!”

She slapped me across the mouth. The blow made me cry out before I could stop myself. I looked at her. I was too angry to speak. Glancing down, I saw the child, white-faced and round-eyed, looking up at us.

“You’ve never liked Jonas,” Rebecca said, trembling. “Never. And don’t think I don’t know why! You’re jealous of him because one day he’ll have Penmarric and you’ll never have it, never as long as you live! You’re jealous!”

“Be quiet.” I moved away from her into the corridor. “I’ll drive you home.”

“We’ll walk! I never want to see you again—never, do you understand? I’m finished with you. Utterly finished. Forever.”

“Oh?” I said, engulfed by bitter rage. “And who are you going to take up with next? Your pale cousin Simon Peter, perhaps? I’ll bet you could show him a thing or two! Or Peter Waymark? I hear he has a roving eye these days. Or young Farmer Polmarth over the hills at Zillan—now he’s an eligible bachelor! You might even marry him—if he ever bothered to ask you, which he probably wouldn’t in view of your current reputation as my mistress.”

She hit me again, a vicious side-swipe, and her rings clawed at my face and left a trail of pain in their wake.

“Dear me,” I said. “How unladylike.”

She burst into tears and ran off, dragging the child with her.

When she reached the end of the passage and turned the corner I went back into my room. The slipper was still lying where had dropped it. I kicked it under the bed. After a while I went to the window and stared outside at the summer afternoon, but there was no message there for me, only the sea melting hazily into the sky and the black rocks of the bleak headland shimmering in the heat.

I thought: I’ll get her back. Within a week she’ll be begging me to visit the farm again. She always makes these reckless scenes and then regrets them later. She’ll come back.

But I felt wretchedly depressed.

At the point we have now reached the young king of France entered upon his life-work—the break-up of the Angevin empire and its incorporation in the royal domain. Philip, known to history by the surname “Augustus” [was] possessed of great political sagacity … though not a great soldier he was a shrewd and unscrupulous diplomat.

—Oxford History of England:

From Domesday Book to Magna Carta

A. L.
POOLE

The selfishness of Philip’s intentions should have been obvious but John was ready to take a gambler’s chance… It was a critical situation. Richard alone remained undisturbed: “My brother John,” he said, “is not a man to win land for himself by force if there is anyone to put up a mere show of assistance.”

—King John,

W. L. WARREN

I
HEARD NOTHING FROM
Rebecca during the remainder of Lizzie’s visit and was too occupied in entertaining my guests to dwell much on her silence, but after Lizzie and her husband had returned to Cambridge I became acutely aware of our estrangement. Finally I wrote her a letter in which I apologized for the scene with Jonas and offered to take her out to dinner.

She did not reply.

After that I pulled myself together, determined not to spend time mooning over a difficult woman who was bent on ignoring me, and flung myself heart and soul into enjoying my extended stay at Penmarric. I rode on the estate every day, went for long walks, wrote a little when I felt like it, and began to read my way through my father’s extensive library. However, when all his historical and biographical volumes had exhausted my intellectual stamina I imported some books of my own and spent happy hours enjoying the exploits of Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot and Bulldog Drummond.

I also tried, with varying degrees of success, to read some less frivolous modern works—Huxley’s
Brave New World,
which had just been published, the turgid anguishings of D.H. Lawrence and the more readable stories of J.B. Priestley. But on the whole I thought the earlier works of Wells, Galsworthy and Walpole were more entertaining than the latest crop of literary masterpieces.

Apart from reading I also developed a new fondness for listening; there was a wireless set at Penmarric, but it was old-fashioned and presently I bought a new one, which gave me a better reception and enabled me to enjoy listening to the test matches with the maximum of comfort. Soon I had smuggled in my gramophone from Carnforth Hall as well as a selection of my favorite records. Contemporary serious music, such as the compositions of Vaughan Williams and Delius, bored me, but I played Rachmaninoff so much that even today I can’t hear that second piano concerto without thinking at regular intervals, “That’s where I turn over/change the record.” I bought the best of the popular music too—which for me meant Noel Coward—but jazz became my first love and soon the strains of Rachmaninoff faded to be replaced by the trumpet of Louis Armstrong. At first it seemed odd to hear such music at Penmarric; Medlyn, I know, was enormously shocked and used to bring my whisky and soda to the library with a cold-eyed distaste, but presently we both became accustomed to my father’s former sanctuary being violated by such undignified American sounds and accepted the change in tradition without further thought.

I was certainly content enough on my own in many ways, but presently as my estrangement from Rebecca persisted I began to feel too solitary for comfort; in the end I invited Felicity to join me, but she had had an invitation to stay somewhere in the Midlands and soon she departed from Cornwall for several weeks.

I continued to visit my mother regularly and often brought her over to Penmarric for lunch and tea.

“How long are you going to stay at Penmarric?” she asked at the end of October. “You’ve been on your own here for some time now and I know Michael doesn’t approve.”

“I can’t think why not,” I said. “I’m not interfering in any way with Walter Hubert’s administration and never even show my face in his office. I’m not sure how long I’ll stay here. Till Felicity comes back to Carnforth Hall, perhaps.”

But Felicity returned two weeks later and I made no effort to join her. Instead I renewed my invitation to her to come to Penmarric, but she was reluctant to leave her horses and we agreed amicably to live apart for a while.

“Michael’s very annoyed,” said my mother. “Perhaps you shouldn’t stay here much longer, Jan-Yves.”

“I’m not doing any harm,” I said truthfully, but I saw her purse her lips disapprovingly even though she made no adverse comment on my behavior.

The very next day I had a visit from Simon Peter Roslyn on behalf of Holmes, Holmes, Trebarvah and Holmes.

He was a slim man, not tall but neatly made and well-proportioned. Manual labor might have given him a wiry toughness, but books and study had instead bestowed on him an air of wan asceticism. He was supposed to have been delicate as a child. Even now he hardly looked robust, but I hadn’t heard of him missing a day’s work from ill health, so I supposed his constitution had improved with age. He had limpid eyes, a soft handshake and a clever, calculating mouth.