The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “I don’t think you’re at all likely to be a heroine,” I said, aggrieved by her pessimism on the subject of my heroic potential.

  “Why, what impertinence! Here I am, being constantly noble by devoting all my time to you even though you’re two years younger and a boy and do nothing but drive me wild! The truth is that if I wasn’t a heroine I wouldn’t do it. I think I’m wonderful.”

  We gorged ourselves on the strawberries in silence, but eventually I said, “Heroes have to marry heroines, don’t they.”

  “Of course. But actually I don’t believe I’ll marry anyone. Think of all the nasty smelly babies one would have to have!”

  We shuddered.

  “Friendship’s best,” I said, “and friendship’s forever because no baby can come along to spoil it.” And when I grabbed her hand she laughed and we ran off down the path together to our secret camp in the woods.

  We had decided while my sister Celia was an infant that babies were undesirable. Unfortunately in our family a new baby arrived every eighteen months but to our relief they all, apart from Celia, failed to survive. Charlotte lived a year but succumbed to measles. William breathed his last within a week of his birth and Pamela faded away at the age of six months. Only Celia flourished like a weed, whining around our ankles and trying to follow us everywhere, but I took no notice of her. I was the male firstborn and I came first. That was a fact of nursery life, as immutable as a law of nature.

  “First is best, isn’t it?” I said to my father as we walked hand in hand through the woods past the ruined Norman tower, and he smiled as he answered, “Sometimes!”—which, as I knew very well at the age of eight, meant. “Yes, always.”

  “First is best, isn’t it?” I said to my mother in the housekeeper’s room after my eighth birthday when she decided to increase my pocket money by a ha’penny a week. In the affable atmosphere generated by this gesture I had decided the time was ripe to seek reaffirmation of my privileged status.

  “What, dear?”

  “I said first is best, isn’t it?”

  “Well, that depends,” said my mother. “I was the second in my family and I always thought I was the best—but then my father spoiled me abominably and gave me ideas quite above my station. In fact I think that for a time I was a very horrid little girl indeed.”

  That was when I first realized the most disconcerting difference between my parents: my father told me what I wanted to hear and my mother told me what she felt I ought to hear. Resentment simmered. I sulked. When Lion was born a month later I knew straight away that I was outraged.

  I waited for him to die but soon I realized that this was not the kind of baby who would oblige me by fading away into the churchyard at Penhale. I tried to ignore him but found he was not the kind of baby, like Celia, who could be ignored. He was huge and imperious. He roared for everyone’s attention and got it. My mother began in my opinion to behave very foolishly indeed. I felt more outraged than ever.

  “Robert dearest,” said my mother after overhearing my declaration to Olwen the nursemaid that I had no intention of attending the christening, “I think it’s time you and I had a little talk together.”

  My mother was famous for her “little talks.” Her little talks with servants were conducted in the housekeeper’s room and her little talks with children were conducted upstairs in the large bedroom that belonged by tradition to the master and mistress of the house. My mother had a table there where she did her sewing, but when she had an arduous interview to conduct she always sat at her dressing table and pretended to busy herself with rearranging the pots, jars and boxes lined up below the triple looking glass. My mother seldom glanced directly at her victims while she spoke, but watched them constantly in the cunningly angled reflections.

  “Now, Robert dearest,” she said, emptying a jar of pins and beginning to stick them with mathematical precision into a new pincushion, “I know quite well you think of yourself as a little prince in a fairy tale, but because I love you and want the best for you”—a quick glance in the mirror—“I think it’s time someone told you a few home truths. The first truth is that you’re not a prince, and the second truth,” said my mother, turning to look at me directly, “is that this is no fairy tale, Robert.”

  She paused to let me digest this. I contented myself with assuming my most mutinous expression but I took care to remain silent.

  “I thought life was a fairy tale once,” said my mother, resuming her transformation of the pincushion. “I thought that until I was sixteen and came to Oxmoon—and then, when I found myself face to face with what really went on in the world, I felt angry with my parents for failing to prepare me for it. However,” said my mother, glancing into the far mirror, “now is hardly the time for me to talk to you about the ordeal your father and I endured at the hands of his mother and Mr. Bryn-Davies. You’re too young. Suffice it to say that the world is a very wicked place and that one has to be very resolute to lead a decent orderly life—and you do want to lead a decent orderly life, don’t you, Robert? People who have no self-discipline, who are perpetual slaves to all their weaknesses, are inevitably very unhappy indeed. In fact I would go so far as to say,” said my mother, pinning away busily, “that tragedy inevitably lies waiting for Those Who Fail to Draw the Line.”

  “Yes, Mama.” It took a great deal to cow me but I was cowed—not by this familiar reference to drawing the moral line but by the mention of the Great Unmentionable, my grandmother and Mr. Bryn-Davies. Even though I was only eight years old I knew that Oxmoon had not always been a pastoral paradise where little children wandered happily around the kitchen garden and feasted at the strawberry beds.

  “So we must always reject morally unacceptable behavior,” said my mother, tipping the rest of the pins from the jar and aligning them between two scent bottles, “and one kind of behavior that is morally unacceptable, Robert, is jealousy. Jealousy is a very wicked emotion. It destroys people. And I won’t have it, not in this house—because here I have my standards,” said my mother, facing me again, “and here I Draw the Line.”

  I opened my mouth to say, “I’m not jealous!” but no words came out. I stared down at my shoes.

  “There, there!” said my mother kindly, seeing I had fully absorbed her homily. “I know you’re a good intelligent boy and I now have every confidence that you’ll behave well towards Lionel—and towards Celia—in the future.”

  I retired in a rage. When I found my father I said, “Mama’s been very rude to me, and if you please, sir, I’d be obliged if you’d tell her not to be so horrid in future.” But my father said abruptly, “I won’t hear one word against your mother. Pull yourself together and stop behaving like a spoiled child.”

  I ran away and hid in a basket in the wet laundry. I realized that my father, who normally never said a cross word to me, had been suborned into sternness by my mother, while my mother, normally affectionate enough, had been rendered hostile by her irrational desire to place the infant on an equal footing with me. I felt I was being subjected to a monstrous injustice. Vengeance should be mine; I decided to repay.

  Leaving the wet laundry, I prowled around the house to the terrace and found two of the estate laborers installing a new pane of glass in the dining-room window. The previous pane had been cracked when a sea gull had flown into it in an indecent haste to return to the coast which lay a mile away beyond Rhossili Downs. When the laborers had retired I remained, eying the new pane meditatively. Then I extracted a croquet ball from the summerhouse, returned to the terrace and took a quick look around. No one appeared to be in sight but unfortunately the new pane was reflecting the light so that I could not see the maid who was setting the table in the room beyond. When the croquet ball crashed through the window she dropped six plates and ran screaming to my mother.

  My mother went to my father and my father lost his temper. This was a great shock to me because I had not realized he had a temper to lose. Then he beat me. That was an even greater shock
because he had never laid a finger on me before; he always said he had a horror of violence. Finally he summoned my mother and when he told her it was high time I was sent away to school, my mother agreed with him.

  I cried. I said they wanted to get rid of me so that Lion could be first and best. I told them they were making a very big mistake and that they would both live to regret it.

  “What rubbish!” said my father, still in a towering rage, but my mother, whom I had thought so implacable, knelt beside me and said, “There, there! You always knew you’d be going off to Briarwood when you were eight—you can’t pretend now that you’re being sent away to make room for Lion!”

  But I recoiled from her. She was responsible for Lion and Lion was responsible for my humiliation. I turned to my father, and then miraculously the violent stranger vanished as he swung me off my feet into his arms. All he said was, “Don’t you worry about Lion,” and that was when I knew first was still best in his eyes despite all my iniquity; that was when I knew nothing mattered except coming first and staying first, over and over again.

  “I’ll be the best pupil Briarwood’s ever had,” I said to him, “and you’ll be prouder of me than you could ever be of anyone else”—and thus I was committed to the compulsive pursuit of excellence and set squarely on the road to disaster.

  III

  “IT’S GINEVRA’S HUSBAND. HE’S dead, Robert. She’s coming home,” said my father twenty-three years later, and my immediate reaction was This time I shall come first. This time I’m going to win.

  “What an amazing piece of information! Well, I daresay it’ll be rather amusing to see the old girl again.” I was almost unconscious with emotion. I had to lean against the wall to ensure that I remained upright. “When does she arrive?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll show you her wire when we meet tonight. …” My father went on talking but I barely heard him. I was only just aware that I was arranging to meet him at the Savile after my dinner party. When the conversation ended silence descended on the hall, but in my memory I could hear the orchestra playing in the ballroom at Oxmoon and see the candles shimmering on the chandeliers.

  I thought of my mother saying long ago, “This is no fairy tale, Robert.” But who was to say now that my own private fairy tale could never come true? If I got what I wanted—and I usually did—then I would go home at last to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of my childhood, and Ginette would share my life once more in that lost paradise of my dreams.

  The prospect stimulated such a powerful wave of euphoria that I almost wondered if I should become a romantic again, but fortunately my common sense intervened and I restrained myself. This was a situation that called for care, calculation and a cool head. The jilted hero who still yearned passionately for his lost love might possibly seem attractive in a French farce but it was quite definitely a role which I had no wish to play in public.

  Thinking of roles reminded me of the living I had to earn, and an hour later, masked by my barrister’s wig and gown, I had slipped back into my familiar role as the hero of the Old Bailey.

  But all the time I was thinking of Ginette.

  IV

  I survived a day that would normally have reduced me to exhaustion and arrived, clear-eyed and fresh, at my father’s club soon after eleven that night. The idea of a widowed Ginette was a powerful stimulant. I felt taut with nostalgia, prurient curiosity, sexual desire and impatience. It was a lethal mixture, and as I drifted through the rooms in search of my father I half-feared that I might be vibrating with excitement like some wayward electrical device, but fortunately all my acquaintances who accosted me assumed I was merely excited by the result of the trial.

  When I finally reached the corner where my father was waiting I found he had Lion with him. I assumed a benign expression and prayed for tolerance.

  “I hear you won your case, Robert!” my father was saying with enthusiasm. “Very many congratulations!”

  “Thank you. Hullo, Lion.”

  “Hullo, Robert—I can’t tell you how proud I am to be related to you! Why, I’m famous at the bank just because I’m your brother!” He sighed with childlike admiration, a huge brainless good-natured youth towards whom I occasionally contrived to feel a mild affection. It seemed preposterous to think that I could ever have wasted energy being jealous of him. Graciously I held out my hand so that he could shake it.

  “Well, Lion,” said my father mildly when further banalities had been exchanged, “I won’t detain you—as you tell me you have such trouble getting to work on time in the mornings I’m sure you’ll want to be in bed before midnight.”

  But Lion wanted to hear more about the trial and ten minutes passed before he consented to being dispatched.

  “Stunning news about Ginevra, isn’t it!” he remembered to add over his shoulder as he ambled off. “Won’t it be wonderful to see her again!”

  I smiled politely and refrained from comment, but seconds later I was saying to my father in the most casual voice I could muster, “Let’s see this wire she sent.”

  The missive was almost criminally verbose. I have come to believe women should be banned from sending cables; they are constitutionally incapable of being succinct in a situation that demands austerity.

  DARLINGS, gushed this deplorable communication, SOMETHING TOO DREADFUL HAS HAPPENED I HARDLY KNOW HOW TO PUT IT INTO WORDS BUT CONOR IS DEAD I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT ALTHOUGH I SAW IT HAPPEN HE MUST BE BURIED IN IRELAND SO I AM TAKING HIM THERE AT ONCE I CAN’T STAY HERE ANYWAY IT’S NOT POSSIBLE I’LL WRITE FROM DUBLIN ALL I WANT IS TO COME HOME TO OXMOON LONGING TO SEE YOU ALL DEEPEST LOVE GINEVRA.

  “Typical,” I said. “She squanders a fortune on a wire but still manages to omit all the relevant details of her predicament. She seems to assume we’ll know by telepathic intuition when she plans to arrive in Wales.”

  “My dear Robert, don’t be so severe! The poor girl’s obviously distraught!”

  “To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging. However I suppose in due course we’ll get a letter. What was Mama’s response to the news?”

  “Well, naturally,” said my father, “her first thought—and mine—was for you.”

  I took a sip from my glass of brandy before saying in what I hoped was my most charming voice, “I assume my mother sent you to London to find out exactly what was going on in my mind. Perhaps when you return you could be so kind as to remind her that I’m thirty-one years old and I take a poor view of my mother trespassing on my privacy.”

  My father stiffened. I immediately regretted what I had said but he gave me no chance to retract those words spoken in self-defense. With a courtesy that put me to shame, he said, “I’m sorry you should find our concern for you offensive, Robert. I’m sure neither of us would wish to pry into your private life.”

  “Forgive me—I expressed myself badly—I’ve had such an exhausting day—”

  “Bearing the past in mind we can’t help but be concerned. And of course, as you must know, we’ve been increasingly anxious about you for some time.”

  “My dear Papa, just because I’m taking my time about marrying and settling down—”

  “I wasn’t criticizing you, Robert. I wish you wouldn’t be so ready to take offense.”

  “I’m not taking offense! But the thought of you and Mama worrying about me when I’m having this dazzling career and enjoying life to the full is somehow more than I can tolerate with equanimity!”

  “Your mother and I both feel that if only you could come back to Oxmoon—”

  “Please—I know this is a painful subject—”

  “It’s as if you’ve got lost. Sometimes I think it don’t do for a man to be too educated—or too successful. It cuts him off from his roots.”

  “I’m not cut off. Oxmoon’s my home and always will be, but for the moment I must be in London. I have my living to earn at the bar and soon I’ll have a political career to pursue—and it was you, don’t forget, who wanted me to go into pol
itics!”

  “I just wanted you to be the local M.P. More fool me. I should have listened to Margaret when she said you’d never be satisfied until you’d wound up as Prime Minister.”

  “What’s wrong with being Prime Minister?”

  “Success on that scale don’t make for happiness. Look at Asquith. Why does he drink? I wouldn’t want you to end up a drunkard like that.”

  “Asquith’s not a drunkard. He’s a heavy drinker. There’s a difference.”

  “Not to me,” said my father, looking at his untouched glass of brandy, “and not to your mother either.”

  We were silent. There was nothing I could say. My father was the son of a drunkard and had endured a horrifying childhood about which he could never bring himself to speak. No rational debate on drink was possible for him.

  At last I said neutrally, “We seem to have wandered rather far from the subject of Ginette.”

  “No, it’s all one, we’re still discussing your obsessions. Robert,” said my father urgently, leaning forward in his chair, “you mustn’t think that I don’t understand what it is to be haunted by the past, but you must fight to overcome it, just as I’ve fought to overcome the memory of my parents and Owain Bryn-Davies—”

  “Quite, but aren’t we wandering from the point again? Let me try and end this Welsh circumlocution by exhibiting a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness! You and Mama, it seems, are worried in case I now resurrect my adolescent passion for Ginette and embark on some romantic course which you can only regard as disastrous. Very well. Then let me set your mind at rest by assuring you that I’m not planning to conquer Ginette as soon as she sets foot again on Welsh soil.”

  “And afterwards?”

  “Papa, I’m not a prophet, I’m a lawyer. I don’t waste time speculating about the future on the basis of insufficient evidence.”

  “Of course not, but—”

  “The one inescapable fact here is that Ginette is now a stranger to me. Who knows what I shall think of her when we meet again? Nobody knows, it’s unknowable, and so in my opinion any attempt to answer such a question can only be futile.”