The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “That’s true. But all the same—”

  “Go home and tell Mama,” I said, “that I no longer believe in fairy tales—and tell her too,” I concluded strongly, “that despite the somewhat dramatic nature of these circumstances I have every intention of behaving like a mature and intelligent man.”

  Yet all the while I was speaking in this commendably sensible manner I was listening to the voice in my mind whispering to Ginette as it had whispered so often in my dreams: “Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood. Take me back to Oxmoon and make it live again.”

  V

  “FRIENDSHIP’S FOREVER!” SAID THE child Ginette in that lost paradise of Oxmoon when I had no rival for her affections. “I wonder if you can possibly realize how lucky you are to have a friend like me?”

  I did realize. During my first term at school I had spent many a homesick night imagining her playing with Gwen de Bracy or Angela Stourham and forgetting my existence. When one is eight and has a friend of ten one is perpetually worrying for fear one may be dismissed in favor of more sophisticated contemporaries.

  “No matter how long I’m away at school I’ll always come first with you, won’t I?” I said, anxious to quash any lingering insecurity generated by my absence.

  “Always. Here, lend me a penny, would you? I want to buy some of those boiled sweets.”

  We were in the village of Penhale, two miles from Oxmoon, and enjoying one of our regular excursions to the village shop. I remember thinking as I stood in the dark cozy interior and gazed at the tall jars of sweets that perfect happiness consisted of returning home from school and finding everything unchanged, Ginette still with the holes in her stockings and the stains on her pinafore, the jars in the village shop still waiting to gratify our greed.

  “I wish it could be like this forever,” I said as we walked home munching our purchases.

  “I don’t. I’m becoming partial to the idea of growing up and getting married, like Bobby and Margaret. They’re always laughing and behaving as if marriage was rather a lark.”

  “But think of all the babies!”

  “Maybe they’d be rather a lark too.”

  I was silent. My dislike of infants had remained unchanged, although I now took care to conceal this from my parents. I was aloof but polite to Celia. I feigned an Olympian interest in Lion. But I was still quite unable to imagine myself responding to a sibling with genuine enthusiasm.

  Then, two years after Lion was born, John arrived in the world.

  Lion was livid. That automatically pleased me, and from the beginning I patted John’s head when I made my regular visits to the nursery to inspect him. This delighted my mother but Lion was enraged and tried to block my path to the cradle by flailing his little fists at my knees. My mother became cross with him. Their discord was most gratifying.

  Finally, much to my surprise, I realized I was becoming genuinely interested in the infant. He was acute. He talked at an early age, a fact that made communication less of an effort. Although we lived in an English-speaking area of Wales Welsh was my father’s first language, and because he wanted his children to grow up bilingual my mother had followed a policy of employing Welsh-speaking nursemaids. However for some reason although we all grew up with a rudimentary knowledge of Welsh colloquialisms, John was the only one who became bilingual. This impressed me. After Celia and Lion, who were both stupid, I had not anticipated the advent of an intelligent brother. Later, as an intellectual experiment, I taught him a letter or two and found him keen to learn, but before we could advance further into the world of literacy I was obliged to depart for my first term at public school and the lessons fell into abeyance. However when I returned from Harrow for the Christmas holidays, there was John, waiting for me on the doorstep, eyes shining with hero worship.

  Here was someone who had realized, even at a tender age, that first was best. My private opinion of siblings underwent a small but telling revision.

  “I think that child might turn out reasonably well,” I remarked to Ginette as he waited on us hand and foot in the holidays.

  “Isn’t he a poppet? So different from ghastly Lion. Honestly, I can’t think what Margaret sees in that monster. If ever I give birth to something so plain and stupid, I hope I’d have the sense to drown it.”

  She was fifteen. I was thirteen. The gap in our ages was widening but I was unaware of it. As far as I was concerned she was still my own Ginette and paradise was still coming home to Oxmoon and finding her waiting to welcome me back; paradise was still riding with her over the Downs or walking to the sea or scrambling across the tidal causeway called the Shipway where long ago Mr. Owain Bryn-Davies had drowned and my grandmother had gone mad and my father had witnessed all manner of horrors which were now enshrined in local myth; paradise was laughing over such distant melodrama and saying how droll it was that dotty old Grandmama should ever have played the role of the tragic heroine. We laughed, how we laughed, and paradise was laughing with Ginette at Oxmoon while we played croquet on the lawn and paradise was suppressing laughter in church as I tried to make her giggle at the wrong moment and paradise was laughing at her latest three-decker novel which she found so romantic and laughing as she tried to box my ears and laughing as we rode to hounds with the West Gower hunt, laughing, laughing, laughing from Llangennith to Porteynon, from Penrice to Oxwich, from Penhale to Rhossili, from Llanmodoc Hill to Cefh Bryn, and paradise was the Gower Peninsula, sixteen miles of heaven on earth stretching westwards into the sea beyond the industrial wasteland of Swansea, and the glory of Gower was Oxmoon and the glory of Oxmoon was Ginette.

  It remained so clear in my mind, that paradise lost, the blue skies, the corn stubble, the lush stillness of the bluebell woods, the purple of the heather on the Downs, the brilliant sea, the shimmering sands. I remember even the golden shade of the lichen on the dry-stone walls and the streaks of pink in the rocks on the summit of Rhossili Downs and the coarseness of the grass in the sand burrows of Llangennith. I remember the cattle being driven to market along the dusty white roads and the sheep being herded across the Downs; I can hear the larks singing and the Penhale church clock celebrating a cloudless high noon. It all seemed so immutable. I thought nothing would ever change. And then in the June of 1896, shortly after I had celebrated my fourteenth birthday, my father wrote to me at Harrow.

  My dear Robert, I read, this is just a quick line to let you know we’ve had a spot of trouble with Ginevra. To put the matter in a nutshell, I can only tell you that she tried to elope with a cousin of the Kinsellas but he’s gone away now and Ginevra’s staying with the Applebys while she recovers. I’m afraid she’s cross with us at the moment, but I’m sure it won’t last so don’t distress yourself—it was really just a little storm in a teacup and no harm’s been done. I remain as always your very affectionate father, R.G.

  At first I was so stunned by this communication that I was incapable of action. I merely sat and stared at the letter. I had, of course, been aware that Ginette was growing up in various ways which were all too visible but I had long since decided it would be kindest to take no notice; I felt genuinely sorry for anyone who had to grow up into a woman. But the thought that she might now be old enough to take a carnal interest in the opposite sex had never occurred to me. I found the notion both horrifying and repellent, but far more horrifying and repellent was the knowledge that she could have cared deeply about someone other than myself. I had thought myself safe till she was eighteen and put her hair up—by which time I would be sixteen and, puberty permitting, fit to present myself as a future husband without arousing either her laughter or her incredulity. But now I was so young that I could hardly stake a claim without looking ridiculous. My voice had not finished breaking. I was too lanky. None of my clothes seemed to fit me. I had decided that surviving adolescence was purely an attitude of mind but now when I contemplated the utterly unfinished nature of my physique I was in despair. How could I ever compete with a full-grown male who display
ed predatory intentions? The entire future had become a nightmare.

  In agony I reread the letter in the vain hope that I had misinterpreted it, and this time the news seemed so preposterous that I seriously wondered if my father had gone mad. The theory seemed all too plausible. I remembered my grandmother, locked up in a Swansea lunatic asylum and allowed home only once a year, and the next moment before I could stop myself I was writing urgently to my mother for reassurance.

  My dearest Mama, I began, determined to conceal my panic behind a civil, rational epistolary style, I have just had the most extraordinary letter from Papa. In it he appears to state that Ginette has left Oxmoon and is staying at All-Hallows Court. Is there perhaps some misunderstanding here? Ginette thinks Sir William Appleby an old bore and Lady Appleby dry as dust, and as for that lily-livered Timothy, Ginette and I both agree that you could put him through a mangle and wring out enough water to fill a well. How can she choose to live with such people? I suspect someone is not being quite honest with me about this.

  Have you and Papa thrown her out of Oxmoon because you suspect she’s lost her virtue? If so please accept my respectful assurance that you must be mistaken: she would never lose it. The heroines of those dreary novels she reads always preserve themselves most conscientiously, and Ginette is well aware that Fallen Women are inevitably doomed to a tragic fate. (Please excuse any indelicacy here and kindly attribute any unwitting coarseness to my inexperience in writing on such subjects.) Anyway, how could any cousin of the Kinsellas’ be less than sixty years old? I didn’t even know they had any relatives except for some bizarre Irish connection which they do their best to conceal.

  Dearest Mama, please believe me: even if Ginette were partial to gross behavior, for her to lose her virtue to a man over sixty must surely be physically impossible, and for her to lose her virtue to an Irishman of any age is mentally inconceivable. Please, I beseech you, write and tell me what’s really going on. Ever your affectionate and devoted son, ROBERT.

  I then wrote Ginette a fevered note in which I begged her to solve the mystery at once, but it was my mother who answered by return of post; Ginette failed to reply. My mother wrote with calm fluency: My dearest Robert, I am so sorry that you should have been so distressed. I know that was the last thing your father desired when he wrote to you, but your father, though acting with the best will in the world, finds it hard to adopt a blunt, or one might almost say an Anglo-Saxon, approach to unpalatable facts. This is neither a fault nor a virtue but merely a racial difference which one must recognize and accept. However let me do what I can to clarify the situation.

  First of all let me assure you that nothing bizarre has occurred. Alas, I fear such incidents happen only too frequently when a young girl is as beautiful as Ginevra and is heiress to a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. Second, let me quash your notion that the elopement was some extraordinary fiction. The man was, as you surmised, one of the Kinsellas’ Irish connections, but you were wrong in assuming he had to be over sixty. He was twenty-four, tall, dark and handsome, but having said that I must add that he was quite definitely not a gentleman by English standards, and I have no doubt that he had only one purpose in coming to our obscure corner of Wales and paying his respects to these aging, distant but wealthy relatives of his. He had the mark of the adventurer upon him, and of course it wouldn’t have taken him long, in our small community, to find out that Ginevra is an heiress.

  We met him at the Mowbrays’ house, but if it hadn’t been there it would have been somewhere else—indeed even Lady de Bracy might have received him at Penhale Manor out of courtesy to his relatives who are so thoroughly blameless and respectable. When we met him I could see Ginevra was charmed at once, just as I could see that the young man was, as my dear papa used to say, “a wrong ’un.” I said afterwards to your father: “That’s one young man we don’t invite to Oxmoon,” and your father agreed with me.

  Shortly after this meeting with young Mr. Kinsella a most unfortunate episode occurred. I had to go away—you will remember how I wrote to you recently from Staffordshire after poor Aunt May’s baby died. Of course it’s most unusual for me to be away as I hate leaving home, but May wrote me such a pathetic letter that I felt I would be failing in my sisterly duty if I refused to visit her for a few days. I should have taken Ginevra with me but I knew May would want no visitors other than myself and besides I thought Miss Sale would be able to supervise Ginevra without trouble. Miss Sale might have had her shortcomings as a governess, but she had always been a conscientious chaperone and I had complete confidence in her.

  What can I say except that my confidence was misplaced? There were clandestine meetings on the Downs. I don’t blame Ginevra entirely. Young Conor Kinsella is the kind of man who would lead even the devoutest nun astray, but of course when I came back and found out—as I inevitably did—what was going on I was very angry and so was your father. (Being greatly preoccupied with the estate he too had been all too ready to put his trust in Miss Sale’s competence.)

  Your father and I told Ginevra that we could not permit her to see Mr. Kinsella again, and this edict, I regret to say, led to some most unfortunate words being exchanged between the three of us. This was the night on which Ginevra slipped out of the house and rode all the way to Porteynon to the Kinsellas’ house where she proceeded to throw stones against a window which she supposed to belong to her beloved. It belonged, however, to Miss Bridget. More distasteful scenes ensued. It is quite unnecessary for me to chronicle them in detail, so I shall simply say that Ginevra was left feeling so humiliated and miserable that it seemed kindest to suggest she stayed elsewhere for a while. When she received the suggestion gratefully I appealed to Maud Appleby and Ginevra’s removal to All-Hallows Court was then arranged with the utmost speed.

  Why should she go and live with such people, you ask with such regrettable rudeness. I shall tell you. Looking after Ginevra is going to be an increasingly arduous responsibility and I did not feel Bobby and I had the right to ask for help in any other quarter. As Sir William is her godfather, it is nothing less than his moral duty, to help us surmount such a crisis.

  Your father saw Mr. Kinsella in order to buy him off, but much to our surprise Mr. Kinsella refused to take a penny. We might have been impressed by this if he hadn’t sworn he had never at any time behaved with any impropriety. Of course he was trying to save his skin—no doubt he thought that if he accepted money from us it would rank as a confession of guilt in the eyes of his wealthy relatives—but I fear poor Ginevra must have been quite crushed when she heard he had denied his advances to her. All we can do now is hope and pray she has learned from the experience and will be a little wiser when the next fortune hunter makes his inevitable approach.

  So much for Mr. Kinsella. The gossips of Gower, needless to say, are having a fine time exercising their tongues, but believe nothing you hear which does not accord with the above account.

  You were perfectly correct in your assumptions regarding Ginevra’s virtue; you may be distressed that her reputation has suffered, as it inevitably has, but you may rest assured that she has not been sullied beyond redemption by this squalid but by no means catastrophic experience. (Your remarks on the subject were somewhat singular but I realize you were trying to express yourself with propriety and on the whole, considering your youth, I think you did well. In future, however, you should not allude to the carnal capacities of gentlemen in any letter you may write to a female. This is most definitely not The Done Thing.)

  And now I must close this letter. I do hope I have to some extent alleviated, any anxiety you may have suffered through being ill-informed, but should there be any further questions you wish to ask about this unfortunate incident, please do write to me at once so that I can set your mind at rest. Meanwhile I send all my love and in adding that I long to see you again I remain, dearest Robert, your most affectionate and devoted MAMA.

  VI

  I BECAME OBSESSED WITH the name Conor Kinsella. I reme
mber writing it down and as I stared at it I thought what a sinister name it was, so foreign, so different, so smooth yet so aggressive, the stress falling on the first syllable of each word so that the hard C and the hard K seemed doubly emphasized, twin bullets of sound followed by the soft ripple of easy consonants and vowels. The Porteynon Kinsellas, an elderly celibate trio of a brother and two sisters, were descended from an Irish pirate, sole survivor of an eighteenth-century shipwreck in Rhossili Bay, and the wild lawless Gower Peninsula of a hundred years ago had been just the place for a wild lawless Irishman to settle down and feel at home.

  Remembering the past I at once saw Conor Kinsella as an Irish pirate, invading my home and capturing what was mine by right. Scraping the barrel of my unsophisticated vocabulary I thought of him as a cad and a blackguard, a rip, a rake and a rotter, but all the while I was reducing him to cardboard in this fashion I was aware that somewhere in the world was a flesh-and-blood man ten years my senior who ate and drank and slept and breathed and shaved and cursed and counted his pennies with anxiety and probably gave flowers to his mother on her birthday and perhaps even helped little old ladies over the road on his way to church.

  The truth was that I knew nothing of Conor Kinsella. Yet when I finally saw him, I recognized him at once, not merely because he fitted my mother’s chilling description but because I sensed he was like Ginette, and in knowing her I knew him.

  I am uncertain how I knew that he was going to come back into her life. Perhaps it was because in the beginning she herself was so sure of it.

  “He swore he’d come back for me,” she said. “He told me he’d go to America and make some money and then he’d come back and sweep me off on horseback into the sunset and we’d get married and live happily ever after.”