Penmarric (68 page)

“I’m not testifying anything!” He was white with fright. “I’m not standing up in a court of law and giving evidence against my own father! Do it yourself!”

“Don’t be a bloody fool,” I said, exasperated. “It’ll never get to court! All I want is enough evidence to enable Mama’s lawyers to get as far as serving a petition—if such a move proves necessary. It may not even be necessary to go that far. I’m going to write him an ultimatum first of all and see how he responds to that. But if that doesn’t work I’ll go to the solicitors in St. Ives who handle the St. Enedocs’ affairs and show Father that I mean what I say.”

“But suppose there’s nothing between him and Alice?”

“He’d have to drag her through the dirt trying to prove it. No, he’ll never let the case get beyond the preliminary stages, but I still need your help to get the plan moving.”

He looked at me. The small pink tip of his tongue slid around his lips. He had an expression of strained calculation on his face as if he were involved in some fantastically complicated gamble. At last he said slowly, “I don’t think I could risk it. If Papa found out he’d disinherit me.” He glanced up at me with his sharp little eyes. “You’d have to make it worth my while financially, otherwise I might lose out all along the line.”

I suppose my contempt must have shown in my face, for the next moment he burst out passionately, “No, I won’t take a penny of your damned money! Nobody’s going to accuse me of selling my own father for gain! I’ll do what you want but I won’t take a penny for it. I’m not disloyal.”

Personally I failed to see how he could have been more disloyal and thought the question of the money utterly irrelevant, but I wasn’t going to bother to understand his tortuous line of reasoning. I had guessed that the rift existing between him and my father since his dismissal from Oxford had never fully healed, so I was prepared for his behavior, but I was still disgusted. It was then that I made up my mind about him after my years of indifferent distrust; to me he was a mere overgrown schoolboy who continued to cling to a juvenile talent for mischief, a worthless individual too shiftless to be trusted and too futile to be taken seriously. He was obviously another Hugh with no purpose in life except to acquire easy money. Yet he hadn’t Hugh’s charm or maturity or able brain. Hugh, I felt, had had redeeming qualities. This ugly, cowardly, disloyal, hypocritical, avaricious, sly, stupid lout had none at all.

I despised him. Suddenly incredulous that he could ever have been held in esteem by my father, I said as an afterthought, “Are you really Father’s heir? Has he really made his will in your favor?”

He looked at me swiftly as if he were suspicious, then gave a quick shrug of his shoulders. “To be frank, I haven’t actually seen the will. But who else can he choose now that Marcus and Hugh are dead and you’re more estranged from him than you ever were before? He won’t give it to the bastards. William told me Adrian wouldn’t accept anything except a token legacy anyway and that both of them had been told more than once that they must always expect to earn their living.”

I turned abruptly, went to the window, stared at the sea. I was imagining myself trying to work with Jan-Yves over the mine, having to ask him for money, struggling with him as I had had to struggle with my father. Revulsion swept over me again, a disgust mingled with anger that there should be so little justice in the world. I couldn’t understand how anyone could believe there was a God. The world was so corrupt, so obviously condemned to perpetual injustice.

“Adrian arrives home today for a visit,” said Jan-Yves nervously, fumbling with the door handle. “You’re not going to deliver that ultimatum just yet, are you? I’m sure Adrian will think I had something to do with it.”

He was even scared of Adrian. My patience snapped. “Oh, for God’s sake get out,” I said wearily. “We’ve said all there is to say anyway.”

“But the ultimatum—”

“That’s my concern, not yours.”

“All right,” he muttered and slipped out of the door as fast as his legs could carry him.

I watched him until he had disappeared from sight and then turned back into my office with a grimace. I didn’t trust him to be any more loyal to me than he had been to my father, and I couldn’t help feeling he would be a highly unreliable witness if his talent for perjury were ever put to the test in court.

To my surprise my mother had grave misgivings about my plan, and although she agreed to do what I wanted she remained doubtful of the plan’s success.

“I’m sure Mark would never misbehave with Alice,” she said. “She’s not at all the sort of woman who would attract him and besides she’s the granddaughter of Mr. Barnwell, one of his oldest, most respected friends… Yes, I know Rose Parrish was from a similar sort of background, but I can hardly believe Mark would make such a fool of himself twice! As for Alice, well, I wouldn’t be surprised if she had her eye on being mistress of Penmarric one day—after all, she’s given ten years of her youth to that house; surely she must regard it as some sort of investment!—but I think marriage would be what she had in mind, not an affair.”

But I was not convinced. Privately I thought that my mother’s deep sense of propriety made it impossible for her to see the situation in its true perspective, and that same night after she had gone to bed I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote the ultimatum. It took some time and several drafts but in the end I felt I had said all that I wanted to say. When it was completed I read it through again.

“Sir,” I had written. “This is to inform you that my mother has a strong desire to avail herself of the new remedies arising from the recent innovations in the field of matrimonial law. Neither she nor I wish to institute what may prove to be some exceptionally sordid legal proceedings, but unless you mend your ways and revise certain regrettable opinions which you hold on a matter which I need not trouble to name to you, you may expect to be the defendant in a petition for divorce on the grounds that you have been committing adultery with Alice Penmar. In case you think this is a mere idle threat which cannot be substantiated, I must tell you that I have sufficient evidence of adultery to justify my mother initiating the petition through her solicitors. In case you think too that this would be a quiet divorce with the details kept to a minimum I assure you that it won’t be anything of the kind. You got off lightly with Rose Parrish. This time you won’t. Bearing in mind the shame and humiliation and pain you’ve caused my mother in the past I don’t think you can possibly term as unjustified any attempt she may make to obtain a divorce from you now and enable you to taste a fraction of the suffering she has had to endure since you married her in 1890. Unless I hear favorably from you my mother will consult her lawyers a week from the day you receive this letter. I remain unfortunately, sir, your son, Philip Castallack.”

After reading the letter for the final time I decided that it would serve its purpose, so I put it in an envelope and sealed the flap. Then I went to bed and snatched what sleep I could before dawn.

It was after nine when I arrived at Penmarric to deliver the letter, and the house lay quietly in the September sunlight as I rode up the drive. The lawns were white with a premature frost and the flowers were pinched after the chill of the night. Leaving my horse with a groom, I went up to the front door and rang the bell.

One of the footmen opened the door, but the butler was in the hall almost before I had crossed the threshold.

“Good morning, Medlyn,” I said. “Is my father in the dining room?”

“He’s not up yet, Mr. Philip. He wasn’t feeling so well this morning. Is there a message?”

I hesitated, fingering the envelope in my pocket, and as I paused by the front door a well-remembered voice called out, surprised, “Good morning, Philip! Isn’t it rather early for social calls?”

A shadow fell across the wall below the first Penmar portrait, the next moment my half-brother Adrian Parrish, looking unclerical in a pullover and slacks, was strolling down the stairs toward me.

We looked at each other, and as I looked into his eyes I saw back into the past. Hatred gripped me like a vise and made me wooden.

“How are you?” I said. “I suppose you’re doing well.”

“Well enough, thanks,” he said. “Life’s treating me kindly at the moment.”

That was no surprise. Life had always treated him kindly. Probably half my resentment of him sprang from the fact that life had treated him a damned sight better than it had ever treated me.

The injustice of the world sneered at me again. I turned aside, taking the letter from my pocket.

“Give this to Father, would you?” I said, holding it out to him. “With my compliments.”

Before he could reply I was on my way outside to fetch my horse.

Jan-Yves was in my office when I reached the mine. He had overheard the scene in the hall with Adrian and had immediately run out of the house, taken the short cut along the cliffs and reached my office seconds before my arrival. It turned out that he had had second thoughts about the entire scheme. He was sorry but he really didn’t think he could go through with it.

“You bloody—!” I yelled at him, falling back on Trevose’s vocabulary in my rage. “Can’t you make up your mind about anything? You’re not even worth the shirt on your own back! Are you such a bloody coward that you can’t even stick to a decision once you’ve made it? You sicken me! I wish to God I’d never bothered with you!”

“And I wish to God I’d never got involved with you and your damned mine!” he yelled back at me. “Don’t you dare call me names and tell me I’m not worth the shirt on my own back! What kind of a man do you think you are anyway? No, don’t tell me how wonderful you are to your mother and what a hero you are at the mine! Don’t tell me what an outstanding example you are to the community! My God, to think you have the nerve to say I sicken
you
—why, however much I sicken you it’s nothing compared to how much you sicken me! You make me want to vomit!”

I hit him, not hard, just enough to knock him over and make the room spin a little before his eyes. He shook himself, recovered his balance, scrambled to his feet.

“Get out,” I said.

His eyes were empty. He rubbed the place on his jaw where I had hit him and watched me with those empty black eyes. I had cut open his lower lip; I had to suppress a shudder as the blood trickled down his chin.

“You’ll regret that one day,” he said. “I have a long memory. You’d be surprised if you knew how long it is; I don’t forget easily.”

I stepped forward, crowding him, but he turned without hurrying and pushed open the door. Cool air from the yard outside fanned my cheeks. Beyond Jan-Yves I could see across the slag-heaps and along the coast to Penmarric.

He stepped outside. I was just about to slam the door after him when I saw him freeze and whirl to face me.

“Adrian’s coming,” he said.

Miners working underground can sometimes hear a disaster even before it reaches them. If water floods the galleries above them the air is trapped and the pressure rises in their own gallery until the men can hear a high-pitched ringing in their ears. If your ears begin to ring, that’s the time to get out and to get out as fast as you can because that’s disaster time and by the time the noise stops you may not be alive to hear the silence.

I wasn’t underground, but I felt as if I were. I stood there high on the Cornish cliffs on that cold September morning and my miner’s sixth sense told me it was disaster time and I seemed to hear that high-pitched ringing in my ears telling me to escape.

But there was no escape. Not this time. This time I was trapped.

I turned my back on the doorway. “He probably wants you,” I said to Jan-Yves, “not me.”

I rustled some papers on my desk, tried to find a cigarette. When I next looked up Jan-Yves was back in my office and closing the door behind him. “Something’s happened,” he said, frightened. “I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to see anybody from Penmarric.”

“Pull yourself together, for Christ’s sake.” I found a cigarette, lit it. I wanted to turn him out but my strength had deserted me and we stood there, the two of us, six feet apart, and waited in silence for what was to come.

We went on waiting. I was just wondering how he could possibly be taking so long when I heard the clatter of his horse’s hoofs in the yard and the next moment the ring of his riding boots on the old granite paving stones as he walked up to the hut.

“Oh, God,” said Jan-Yves violently, and as if he could not bear the strain of waiting a moment longer he reached out and pulled open the door.

Adrian was on the threshold, but Adrian didn’t see him. Adrian saw no one except me. Adrian brushed aside Jan-Yves much as one would brush aside a troublesome fly and took two long paces toward me until we were inches apart from each other in that small, quiet room …

“You’ve killed him,” he said to me. His voice shook. His blue eyes brilliant with hatred blazed into mine. “You bloody murderer, I hope you rot in hell.”

There was a long, long silence. And then at last I realized Adrian was speaking again, this time in a lower, more even voice.

“Papa received your letter,” I heard him say flatly. “He opened it and read it.” I was there. I saw him. When he had the stroke a few seconds afterward I was able to raise the alarm and get help immediately, but even then it was too late.” He swung around on Jan-Yves. “I suppose you were in this with Philip.”

“I…” Jan-Yves was trembling. Tears ran down his cheeks and transformed him into a child again. “I didn’t mean it, I didn’t want anyone to know, please don’t tell anyone—”

“My God, your father’s just died and all you can do is worry about what everyone will think of you! To hell with you both.” He walked out of the hut into the yard but then paused to look back at me. “And if you so much as set one foot inside Penmarric, Philip, I swear I’ll—”

“You’re swearing rather a lot for a clergyman,” I said, “aren’t you?”

That was all I said. I stood there and watched him turn his back on me and vault into his horse’s saddle and all I said was “You’re swearing rather a lot for a clergyman.”