Free Penmarric by Susan Howatch Page A

especially interested, but she was always faultlessly polite. I think it was then, on that second meeting, that I began to realize I was wasting my time, but by then it was already too late. It was useless to try to tell myself I had best forget her attraction for me and move to fresher woods and greener pastures. I could not turn my back on her, could not continue through life as if she had never crossed my path. I had to go on seeing her. My obsession was utterly irrational but I could not rid myself of it. I knew I was making a fool of myself, and I knew that every visit I paid to the farm was yet another step down a blind alley, but I simply could not stop calling on her. Visits to other women, a useful panacea in the past to ease the raw ache of frustration, now made little difference to my peace of mind. I remained obsessed.
    In love, I called it, but it was not love. An infatuation others might have judged it, but it was not merely an infatuation. It was a painful combination of lust, greed, admiration and longing, and above all the desire to possess. My favorite daydream was concerned solely with images of completed possession. I dreamt of her surrendering—but not willingly. That somehow would be less satisfactory. But I dreamt of an unwilling surrender which I had forced upon her yet was not a form of rape. I dreamt of her taking off her clothes, one by one, each article torn from her body by those long sinuous fingers and folded neatly before being placed upon a chair. She would be cool, stony-faced, contemptuous. Since she was a respectable woman she would not undress to the point of complete nudity but would keep on her petticoat, and when she sat down on the bed with her back to me and lifted her white arms to her head to undo her hair I would lean forward and unfasten the hooks of her bodice and slip my hands around her body to her breasts… Her hair would fall silently down her back and I would bury my face in it and pull her down on the pillows and then …
    Nothing else mattered. All I wanted was to possess.
    And I went on daydreaming, wiling away hour after hour, and so young was I, so ingenuous in my desires, that it never once occurred to me as I cherished my fantasies that in possessing her I would become myself possessed.
5
    Meanwhile I had quickly adjusted myself to my new surroundings. Walter Mannack, the housekeeper’s husband who acted as gardener and handyman at Deveral Farm, had collected the luggage I had left at the Metropole Hotel in Penzance, and presently in response to a request sent to the housekeeper remaining in charge of Gweekellis Manor I received some more clothes as well as the box in which I kept my writing materials and my notes for the thesis on King John. However, having no desire to resume my historical labors at that point and being anxious to discover some way of passing the time in between my visits to Roslyn Farm, I rode into Penzance and explored the town thoroughly—an excursion which I had never before had time to make during previous fleeting visits with my mother. I found it a curious mixture of a place, the new gentility of the seaside town mellowing the ancient coarseness of the fishing port. The Metropole Hotel was part of the new gentility, a modern building that faced the sea and catered to visitors anxious to breathe the sea air in refined surroundings, but the town’s high street was far older than the esplanade and stood farther inland to remind the stranger that a sea view had not always been considered desirable by the inhabitants. The mixture of old and new was again emphasized, however, by the new market house at the top of the historic Market Jew Street and by the new public gardens with their semitropical vegetation a stone’s throw from the narrow streets and cobbled alleys around the harbor. And beyond the harbor, reducing both the old and the new to insignificance, rose the fairy-tale castle of St. Michael’s Mount, which as a child I had once