Penmarric (96 page)

“I’ll ask him when he arrives tomorrow. Good God, what’s going to happen about Jeanne? We can’t have a double ceremony! That would be too much for everyone. Perhaps Donald wants her to be buried at their church in Penzance anyway.”

“Let’s hope so. Poor Jeanne, I’ll miss her very much. She was always very kind to Charity, you know, and used to call often at our cottage after she married Donald and came to live in Penzance.”

“Hm.” I was trying not to think too deeply about Jeanne, trying to turn my thoughts instead to the organization of Philip’s funeral. “Lizzie will come down, of course,” I said carefully, “and perhaps her husband too as it’s the long vacation at present. God, how are we going to get in touch with Mariana? I’ve no idea whereabouts she’s living in Monte Carlo.”

“Won’t Esmond know?”

“He’s not allowed to communicate with her.”

“Get in touch with her husband’s lawyers. They probably send her the maintenance allowance each quarter. They’ll know where she’s living.”

“I don’t suppose she’ll come home anyway.”

“Probably not.” He finished his brandy and stared for a moment at his empty glass. “Talking of lawyers,” he said slowly, “who has Philip’s will? Didn’t you tell me he went to another firm of solicitors when he decided to disinherit Jonas?”

It was then—for the first time since the news of Philip’s death had reached me more than twelve hours before—that I allowed the knowledge of my future to rise out of my subconscious and stare me full in the face.

I was master of Penmarric. All I had to do now was to go to Pomeroy and Pomeroy in St. Ives for Philip’s last will and testament and show the world that at long last against long odds Penmarric had fallen into the hands of the one person who loved it better than any other place on earth.

Justice, twisted and bizarre but still recognizable, raised a bloody and battered head to stare me starkly in the eye.

To my surprise I found that Philip had left specific instructions about his funeral in his will. He wanted to be buried at Zillan by his father’s side, or, if there was no room, at his father’s feet. Considering that Philip and my father had spent their lives quarreling with each other I couldn’t help but think this stipulation exceedingly odd, but it was stated in black and white and he had put his signature to the document, so there was certainly no ambiguity relating to the request. The rest of his will was simple. By the power of appointment granted to him under the terms of our father’s will he had left his money and property to me; all his personal possessions, items outside the power of appointment, he bequeathed to Esmond.

“So he made another will,” said old Michael Vincent, sitting in his office like a tired old spider clinging to his thick-woven web. “I thought perhaps he had. I knew it was awkward that Simon Peter and Jonas were cousins, although I drew up the previous will and Simon Peter had no hand in it… Poor little Jonas. This will be a great blow to Rebecca. I’m sure she still believed Jonas was Philip’s heir.”

But I did not want to think of Rebecca. I knew she would fly into a rage as soon as she realized that I had ousted Jonas from his inheritance, and I had enough on my hands at that time without worrying about my future relationship with her.

“I’ve decided to consult Pomeroy and Pomeroy on all legal matters in the future,” I said politely to Michael. “Perhaps you could arrange for transfer of all the relevant papers to them? I hesitate to dispense with your services when you’ve served my family for so long—” I saw him flush as I addressed him as if he were my social inferior—“but you’ve never trusted me and I certainly don’t trust Simon Peter, so I hardly feel we can continue to do business together. I must thank you for all you’ve done for Penmarric in the past and assure you that I’m extremely grateful to you and your firm …”

It seemed a fair enough revenge for all the years he had disliked me and tried to stand in my way.

I left his office and returned to Penmarric. Lizzie and her husband were expected that same evening and Adrian was to board their train when it stopped at Exeter. There was so much to do, so many arrangements to be made. My preoccupation with Philip’s funeral left me little time to think of Jeanne, but that afternoon I managed to call on Donald and express a few words, however useless, of sympathy. Jeanne’s funeral was to be in Penzance the day after Philip’s funeral at Zillan. I offered to do what I could to help, but he said he realized I had enough to handle already and added that Jeanne’s many friends were all being even kinder than he had anticipated.

On returning to Penmarric I found the car at the door and Helena dressed to go out. She wore black, of course, and the mourning clothes were unbecoming so that she seemed elderly and plain. Her fair skin had a transparent look which hinted at her extreme exhaustion, but she was completely composed. All through those appalling days I never saw Helena look other than faultlessly self-possessed.

“I was just going over to the farm to see your mother,” she said. “I intend to tell her the news about Jeanne. I let you carry the burden of telling her about Philip, but I shall tell her about Jeanne. I don’t think it will be too much for her. In fact she may well not grasp what I’m saying. There’s a limit to everyone’s grief, after all.”

I knew she was referring to herself, trying to explain why her manner seemed so cold and unnatural. In an effort to sympathize I said awkwardly, “You needn’t visit my mother yet, Helena. You’ve got more than enough to endure as it is. I’ll tell her about Jeanne.”

After a moment I said, “When all this is over—”

“Oh yes,” she said flatly. “I shall go abroad again, just as I did after Gerry died. It does help to go away. After I come back I think I shall go home to Warwickshire. I was happy there, and I still have several friends in and around the village where I used to live. I don’t want to stay in Cornwall any more. Cornwall brought me little except unhappiness and tragedy. I shall go back to Henley-in-Arden and start all over again from the beginning.”

We said no more. She was just about to leave when a messenger rode up the drive with a telegram and she paused as I opened the little envelope and unfolded the message inside.

“Devastated by news of Philip and Jeanne,” we read silently. “So sorry I cannot come home for funerals but circumstances extremely awkward stop Will write in detail explaining stop Poor Mama how ghastly for her stop Deepest sympathy Helena and Donald stop Give darling Esmond my best love stop Mariana.”

“Deepest sympathy!” said Helena contemptuously, turning aside in disdain. “Neither of them meant anything to her. I’m glad she’s got the good sense to stay away, although I suppose your mother will be hurt by her absence.” She swept into the waiting car without another word. I remained where I was, the telegram still fluttering gently between my fingers, but when the car had disappeared from sight I went slowly indoors to show the telegram to Esmond.

He was disappointed to learn his mother wouldn’t be coming to Cornwall. “I was so looking forward to seeing her again” he said wistfully. “That was the one bright spot on the horizon.” He had not been allowed to see her for several years, but he hadn’t forgotten her. “Of course Mama did wrong,” I had heard him say once to Philip. “She shouldn’t have left Papa and run off with someone else even though Papa was old and frail and couldn’t entertain her as much as she would have liked him to. But she’s still my mother, no matter what she does. Nothing can alter that.”

He didn’t refer to the fact that in abandoning her husband Mariana had also abandoned her only child. I didn’t once hear him reproach her for that. He was a far better son than Mariana deserved.

Lizzie and her husband arrived with Adrian that evening and the next morning Adrian and I drove over to Zillan together, he to see the rector about the funeral arrangements and I to call on my mother.

My mother, attended by Annie and the two Turner “girls,” was in bed. She looked at her most elderly and frail, but when I tried to advise her against attending the funeral she refused to listen to me.

“I want to go.”

“But, Mama—”

“I shall go.”

“It would be too much for you—”

”I’m going, Jan-Yves.”

She was as stubborn as a mule. Presently Adrian called but she could not bring herself to see him face to face at that time. “Tell him how grateful I am to him for coming,” she said, suddenly tearful again. “Tell him how glad I am that he’s going to conduct the service. Ask him to forgive me for not seeing him now, but say I’m so tired I don’t want to see anyone but you, Jan-Yves.”

“Yes, of course, Mama. Don’t worry, I know he’ll understand.”

“It’s just that four of my five boys being dead and both of
her
boys being alive … I know it’s wicked of me to think that, but I can’t help thinking it just the same.”

“I understand,” said Adrian when I told him, and I saw the compassion in his eyes. “But tell her I’ll visit her whenever she wants to see me.”

We returned to Penmarric. Finding myself at last in a position where all arrangements had been made and there was nothing else for me to do, I decided it was time to drive to Morvah, face Rebecca and find out if she intended to come with the children to the funeral.

But when I arrived at Deveral Farm it was Deborah who answered the door. “Mummy’s not in, Uncle Jan,” she said nervously, blushing a little. Poor Deborah wasn’t a good liar. “Is there a message?”

“I was wondering if I would see all of you at the funeral on Friday.”

“I—yes, I … think so … at least, I’m not sure. I would like to attend very much. I was fond of Uncle Philip and had such respect for him.”

“Has Rebecca seen Simon Peter recently?”

“Yes. At least, that’s to say, I’m not sure. I—”

“But she knows what’s in Philip’s will?”

“Yes—oh yes, because we thought Jonas—and then we heard—-”

“Quite. Well, tell your mother that I’ll send a car over to the farm on Friday to take her to Zillan church unless I hear from her to the contrary before then. Would you tell her that?”

“Yes, I will. Thank you, Uncle Jan.”

As I departed I resolved to make no further effort to see Rebecca before the funeral since her fury evidently needed more time to cool. In spite of this I half wondered if I would see her at the inquest the next day, but I did not; the inquest itself was a mere formality, the verdict of accidental death a necessary prelude to the inevitability of the burial, and within twenty-four hours we were all preparing ourselves for the ordeal of the funeral service.

The time came at last. A light mist blew damply across the cliffs, an eerie half-light wreathed the ruins of the Sennen Garth mine, and five miles away across the moors there was a ghostly air in Zillan churchyard as Philip’s body was consigned at last to the Cornish earth he had loved so well.

I went to that funeral expecting to be moved and I was moved. What else can I say? Adrian conducted the service faultlessly, the church was packed with people, the graveyard overflowed with mourners. Those are mere facts, but there are some things which are beyond the power of mere facts to describe. I went to the funeral of my brother who had died in an accident at the age of forty-one, but that wasn’t the only funeral I went to on that cold morning in Zillan village. I went to the funeral of all my past jealousies and past hatreds which had so dominated my early life; I went to the funeral of past futility, past discontent and past mistakes. That morning at Zillan I buried a whole past world, a world in which I was forever unjustly doomed to the role of underdog and forced to struggle for my rights against a host of people so much more fortunate than I was. I had stared at the blank incomprehensible mirror of justice all my life in an effort to understand how I might glimpse my own reflection there, but now I had passed through the looking-glass and my whole world had been turned back to front. The people I had envied so uselessly for so long were all dead, all corpses in the earth beneath my feet, and the good fortune for which I had envied them had been a vast illusion masking frustrated, disappointing, even shallow lives. I saw my brother Marcus now not as the gay young man-about-town but as an incurably overgrown schoolboy without purpose or ambition; I saw my brother Hugh not as the glamorous adventurer with a talent for making money but as a shifty idler content to rely on his good luck until it deserted him one day on an isolated Cornish beach. And at last I saw Philip, not the golden hero of a thousand and one mining adventure stories, but an emotional cripple living in his own private twilight world which had collapsed into darkness after the disaster of the Sennen Garth mine.

So I stepped through the looking-glass, and when I turned to look back at my past world I saw how my attempts to carve some justice for myself had in fact been efforts to wreak injustice on my brothers. It seemed justice was a two-headed monster, a double-sided coin! I had been so concerned about the injustice of my situation that it hadn’t occurred to me that what was unjust for me was just for other people and what was unjust for other people might bring me the justice I had sought all my life.

But it occurred to me when I saw Philip’s coffin lowered into the fresh grave at my father’s feet. I saw it and I wept, and as I wept I wept not only for Philip but for the unjust justice which I had misunderstood so thoroughly for so many wasted years in the past.

After the funeral I stayed overnight with my mother at the farm and the next morning as we breakfasted in her room I tried to persuade her to leave Cornwall for a few days to take the edge off her grief. But she refused to hear of it. She stayed in bed all day, since the doctor had strictly forbidden her to attend Jeanne’s funeral that morning, and I left her with the Turner girls as I drove into Penzance for the service. Jeanne was buried quietly at her husband’s Presbyterian church in an admirably plain, simple ceremony, but I’d be lying if I wrote I wasn’t immensely relieved when it was all over. Afterward Lizzie and her husband took Esmond and myself to the Metropole for lunch, and later when we had all recovered a little from the ordeal of the second family funeral in two days, Lizzie volunteered to come with me when I called at Roslyn Farm for tea.