Penmarric (77 page)

—Oxford History of England:

From Domesday Book to Magna Carta,

A. L. POOLE

O
F COURSE TREVOSE HAD
always been there. It wasn’t as if I had just discovered him out of the blue. He had been my closest friend for a long time, the friendship beginning when I was twenty and a novice at the mine, and the ten years which separated us had never seemed to matter. But I had been different in those days when we had first known each other. I was young then, wrapped up in my dreams for the mine and believing that everything I touched would turn to tin if I tried hard enough. Now I was changed. I knew what it was to fail and keep on failing no matter how much I wanted to succeed. I no longer believed myself to be invincible. I was disillusioned, cynical and isolated, and the more I became aware of my isolation the more I longed to confide in someone. But there was no one to confide in except Trevose, my best friend, and my troubles were too private even for his ears. I went on suffering my isolation in silence but gradually as the months passed I contrived to confide in him by implication.

I never mentioned Helena to him, never spoke of my marriage. I sought his company on Sundays, stayed up late drinking with him, had him to an informal supper at Penmarric when Helena was dining at Polzillan House. Inch by inch I saw he guessed what had happened and that although he didn’t know the exact truth he knew, as no one else knew, that Helena and I were privately estranged. Yet still he didn’t speak of it; I never referred to my marriage and never mentioned to him openly that all was not as it should have been between Helena and myself. But I knew that he knew, and I waited for him to make some move to indicate that he was ready to listen if I wanted to confide.

It was in the summer of 1929 when it happened. We were out walking one Sunday morning along the cliffs when everyone else was at church, and suddenly he said without warning, “What happened between you and your wife?”

The sea breeze blew in lightly from the northwest. I heard the surf crash at the foot of the rocks far away and felt the gorse scratch at my trousers as we followed the cliff path to Zennor.

“I’ve always wanted to know,” he said, “but didn’t like to ask. I didn’t want to seem too familiar. None of my business anyway.”

After a moment I said, “I don’t want anyone else to know about it.”

“Sure. I understand. Stands to reason.” We walked on a little farther and the sun shone and the translucent water around the offshore rocks of Gurnard’s Head was the color of Helena’s eyes. “It was no good,” I said at last. “I shouldn’t have married.”

“I told you,” he said, and the ugly colonial accent which predominated in his voice blurred in sympathy and became softer, more Cornish. “Didn’t I? I told you.”

“You told me.”

We walked on, turning out onto the spur of Gurnard’s Head. The cliffs were black and sheer, the white foam frothing on the rocks far below.

“Everyone’s different,” said Trevose. “Some people have to get married and some people have to run around after women and some people don’t. Not all people are alike. Stands to reason.”

“Yes.”

“You’re like me. I knew what suited you better than you yourself did. You ought to have listened to me.”

I laughed at him, mocking his seriousness for some reason I did not understand. “And what would you have told me if I’d listened to you?”

“Not to get married.”

“Just that?”

“Just that.”

“Being a bachelor isn’t everyone’s idea of fun!”

“There’s bachelors and bachelors,” said Trevose. He glanced out to sea. There was a ship on the horizon, far away, scarcely moving, a little man-made toy floating on the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean. “There’s fun to be had,” he said, “if you know where to go. St. Ives can be fun in the summer. I go there now and then. I prefer it to Penzance. Penzance is an ordinary sort of place. Dull really.”

“I didn’t know you ever stirred out of St. Just!”

“I don’t announce it to all and sundry.” He was still watching the ship, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t go often. Maybe one Saturday night once in a while.”

“But how do you get there?”

“Thumb a lift. Or there’s the bus.”

“You stay overnight?”

“Usually have to. No way of getting home late at night. But I don’t mind. There’s usually a free bed somewhere.” He rubbed his nose absent-mindedly. “Why don’t we go together some time? We needn’t get involved in anything if you didn’t want to but there’s a place I know … Interested?”

“Not much,” I said frankly. “I don’t want to waste my Saturday nights picking up women.”

“But I wasn’t talking about women,” said Trevose.

After all had been made clear between us I said, “I’m sorry, I’m not that kind of man. And even if I was I’ve no intention of laying myself open to blackmail. I’ve got more sense.”

“True,” he agreed, unembarrassed. “You’ve got more to lose than I have. All right, let’s forget it.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’m not averse to driving into St. Ives one evening and having dinner at that little fish restaurant by the harbor. Why don’t we do that instead?”

“Fine,” he said. “Sounds like a good idea. When shall we go?”

We agreed on a date and drifted into a discussion of lobsters. Later on he said to me, “Sorry I brought up that other business,” and I said, “Don’t be so bloody silly! There’s no need to apologize. I’m not a prig and I don’t care what you do for amusement. It doesn’t matter to me.”

But I found it did. We went to St. Ives a couple of times and had some grand hours dining together and wandering around the town afterward, but on our third visit we went drinking and visited a pub he knew.

I didn’t like the people there and wanted to leave, but Trevose was busy talking to an old friend and there was no dragging him away. In the end I told him I’d meet him at the car and left him with his friend, but although I waited a long time he didn’t come. Finally I fell asleep in the car and only awoke when he opened the passenger door and slipped into the seat beside me.

I opened my eyes. It was dawn. “What the bloody hell were you doing?” I said in a burst of fury and saw his eyes widen as he lit a cigarette.

We quarreled. I lost my temper but he kept calm and let me shout at him without making an attempt to interrupt me. When I had finished at last all he said was “What’s the matter, sonny? Jealous?”

I stared at him dumbly, and as I stared he put his hand on my shoulder in the gesture of comradeship he had made so often at the mine and said with an odd, contrite honesty, “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again. I just wanted to show you, that’s all.”

There was a silence but when I said, fumbling for my words, “Show me what?” he said, surprised, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, “The truth, of course. What else?”

We had a year together. That was all. Just a year. What Helena thought, I don’t know. She must have realized that there were nights I never came home, but she said nothing to me and I said nothing to her. I hardly ever saw her. I saw more of my mother, whom I visited regularly every week, than I saw of Helena. Toward Christmas I began to drop in at the farm with Trevose from time to time, but my mother didn’t like Trevose. She couldn’t have had any inkling of the state of affairs which existed between us, but although she was very civil to him I could see she was glad when I came on my own.

Spring came, the spring of 1930. The end was very near now, although I didn’t know it. The end was coming very soon. At the close of April it was only four months away. There wasn’t much time left.

May passed. Then June and July. There was no warning, no hint of what was to come. We went to the mine every day and left the “dry” in the evening just as we always did. There were no premonitions, no portents, just our ordinary working life all through the summer until the very end of August.

And then, on the thirty-first of August 1930, my world came to an end.

It was a day just like any other. I went down the mine in the morning and later ate my sandwich lunch at “croust-time” with Trevose at the two-forty-fathom level beneath the sea. When we had finished I said, “I’d better go to the surface now, I suppose. Someone from the freight company is coming to see me about that damned timber problem and I have to have a meeting with him in my office. I’ll see you later.”

“All right,” he agreed. “How about the pub tonight?”

“Seven o’clock?”

“I’ll be there.” He grinned. “Get me a glass of cider if you’re there before I am, and don’t you drink it before I can get there to drink it myself!”

I laughed, waved, turned my back on him, and the light from my helmet turned with me to point down the long gallery back to the main shaft.

I never saw him again.

At the surface I changed, left the “dry” and walked across the yard to my office hut which adjoined the count house. It was a cloudy day but clear and still. I can remember looking back over my shoulder toward Cape Cornwall and seeing the engine house of the Levant standing starkly against that gray summer sky. When I reached my office I went in, closed the door and turned to hang up the raincoat I had slung over my arm.

It was then that a strange thing happened. I reached out to hang up my raincoat and the wall seemed to lean back a fraction from my outstretched hand so that I missed the hook. The coat dropped to the floor. I was just muttering a curse when all the objects on my desk, pens, pencils, ashtrays, began to rattle and beneath my feet I could feel the floor vibrating.

My first thought was that there was about to be a land subsidence directly below the flimsy building which housed my office. I dashed out into the yard. To my amazement I found the ground beneath my feet was still vibrating and as I looked around me wildly I saw a loose brick topple off a wall nearby and hit the ground with a crack.

Before I had time to recover from my surprise, the vibrations stopped. I waited, tensed, but the ground was still, the scene motionless and nothing stirred as far as the eye could see.

The door of Walter Hubert’s office burst open and Jan-Yves rushed out. Swinging around to the buildings behind me, I could see men pouring out into the open from the dressing floors and the engine house, their shouts echoing weirdly in that airless silence.

“What the hell was that?” demanded Jan-Yves. He was white. “What was it, for Christ’s sake?”

“I don’t know,” I said, but I did. By that time I had guessed what it was. It was an earth tremor, a rare but far from unknown phenomenon in Cornwall and the south of England. The tremors seldom did any serious damage and never rated more than a small paragraph in the local newspapers.

My blood ran cold.

I began to run. I ran and went on running, dodging the men who tried to ask me what was happening, and as I ran I thought only of my mine. I wasn’t worried about the lower levels. They were new, sturdily built and could withstand a tremor or two, but not all Sennen Garth was new. Suddenly, far away in the recesses of my memory I heard the mine captain of the Levant say to me when I was a child, “Have you ever heard of a cave-in? Do you know what happens when timber supports are so rotten that one finger-touch will send them crumbling into dust? If there was a cave-in in the western reaches of Sennen Garth, do you know what would happen?”

I knew now what would happen. Knowledge wrapped icy fingers around my heart and throttled the breath in my lungs. When I reached the main shaft all I could gasp was “Where’s the gig?”

“Down at the two-hundred-fathom level, sir. Shall I—”

I grabbed the telephone, wound the handle. The line wasn’t dead but no one answered it. Men clustered around me, but I was scarcely aware of them. I was aware of nothing save the telephone, my last link with my friends below ground, and my own crawling fear.

“Answer” me,” my voice said to the telephone. “Answer me.”

But it was the mine who answered me first. The noise came echoing crazily up the main shaft to meet us, a far-off rumbling roar from the very heart of the mine. It was a shocking noise, primitive and annihilating. It went on and on as if it would never end.

I flung down the phone and ran outside. I stumbled across the yard, scrambled over the slag-heaps and crawled toward the shaft I had explored as a child. All I could hear was the rasping of my breath and the ring of my shoes against the loose stones and far away in another world the distant droning nothingness of the sea.

I reached the shaft. I fell on my stomach and hauled myself to the edge, and when I looked over the rim the blast of stale air rose up to meet me, the smell of air trapped long below ground.

I looked down into my mine.

I saw water. Swift-flowing, evil-smelling black water from the mighty water tank of the flooded mine next door. The tremor had ruptured the dividing wall, the two mines which had stood shoulder to shoulder since time out of mind were now as one, and the water was rushing in from King Walloe.

All my friends died; everyone on that shift died, and we weren’t even able to drag the bodies to the surface. Later there was a memorial service and journalists descended on St. Just from all over the world and sympathetic gifts began to pour in to alleviate the lot of the widows and orphans. People were very kind.

I bought Trevose his glass of cider and watched it stand untasted at the bar as I drank my shot of whisky. I buy cider for him every year on the thirty-first of August. If anyone ever thinks me hard and unsentimental they ought to see me buy that annual glass of cider. It’s odd how a trivial gesture like that can come to mean so much.

It would have taken a fortune to drain the mine and begin again, and anyway there was no more money. As it was I had already spent too much of Helena’s capital, and even if I had spent the rest it would have proved to be a mere drop in the ocean of expenditure required. Sennen Garth was dead, and no power on earth would ever bring it back to life again.

Yet in dying the mine fulfilled the last of my childhood ambitions, for after the thirty-first of August 1930 there wasn’t a tinner alive who hadn’t heard of the famous Sennen Garth mine. Seven thousand miles from Cornwall in the heart of the Canadian Rockies I was to hear men say to me, amazed, “You worked in Sennen Garth? Jesus, how did you ever get out of that hole alive? That must have been the hell of a mine …”