The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  She was making a blouse for Celia and her worktable was littered with various pieces of material, but my mother herself was, as I had anticipated, sitting at her dressing table in front of the triple looking glass. Her box of assorted buttons was open before her and she was sifting through the collection in search of a suitable set for the blouse.

  “Sit down, dear,” she said, not looking up. “I’ve just been talking to your father.”

  I sat down. The chair was cunningly angled so that I was reflected in all three mirrors, and as I noticed this unnerving multiplication of my guilty image I felt a queasiness form in the pit of my stomach.

  “Your father,” said my mother, poking away busily among the buttons, “is capable of considerable eloquence, but when a conversation is of a painful nature he often finds it difficult to be as explicit as he would wish. I have spoken of this to you before and attributed this characteristic to his Welsh temperament but we must also never forget that he was not brought up to speak English by his Welsh mother and his Welsh nursemaids and that in times of stress he thinks more easily in their language than in ours.”

  Poke-poke-poke among the buttons. A swift glance into the far mirror.

  “So I thought,” resumed my mother tranquilly, “that I should see you for a moment to … clarify your father’s statements in the unlikely event that you might be feeling a trifle bewildered or confused.” She paused, glanced into all three mirrors and then returned to the buttons before adding: “Now, I want to talk to you briefly about your grandmother and Mr. Bryn-Davies—your father has not, I think, yet broached the subject with you in any detail.”

  I was so startled that it took me a moment to answer, “No, Mama.”

  “Well, that’s as it should be. Your father is the best judge of when you should hear the whole story, but I think a word or two from me now wouldn’t come amiss, especially as the case seems strangely … pertinent to what I have to say.” She toyed with a large red button. Then putting it aside she continued with the same tranquil fluency: “Let me start with your grandmother. Now, you may be surprised to hear that I do not entirely condemn poor Grandmama for her liaison with Mr. Bryn-Davies. She loved him. Her husband had treated her vilely. She certainly deserved a little happiness. Of course her conduct was immoral and wrong, that goes without saying, but,” said my mother, deciding to look at me directly, “everyone in this world is subject to temptation and since very few people are saints, most people cannot always succeed in living as they know they should live. So Grandmama’s lapse was, in that sense, pardonable; she was guilty primarily of human frailty. However,” said my mother, finding two more red buttons, “where Grandmama made her cardinal error was that she abandoned all attempt to keep up appearances. A secret liaison conducted with discretion would have been socially acceptable. A public performance as a harlot destroyed her. Remember that, Robert. Discretion is everything. And it has nothing to do with morality. It’s a question of good taste, common sense and consideration for those you love and who love you. Have I made myself entirely clear?”

  “I—”

  “There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high. You may not end up a saint—I’m not at all sure I would want a son who was a saint—but at least you’ll end up with an ordered civilized private life. Oh, and of course—though it’s hardly necessary for me to add this—an ordered civilized private life doesn’t include seducing family servants and causing extreme embarrassment to the parents who love you. There are to be no more seductions beneath this roof, Robert. I draw the line. What you do elsewhere is entirely your own affair and I neither expect nor desire to know anything about it—you should ask your father for further advice on the subject, and when you do you must insist that he’s explicit with you. It is not a mother’s provenance,” said my mother, “to advise her son on subjects of a carnal nature.”

  After a pause I said, “No, of course not, Mama.”

  We looked at each other for one brief telling second in the triple glass. Finally I managed to add, “Thank you.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to thank me,” said my mother. “I’m merely clarifying what your father said—or what he would have said if he hadn’t been subject to linguistic difficulties when distressed.”

  The interview was concluded. At first I was conscious merely of an overpowering gratitude towards her for reprieving me from a lifetime of cold baths, but later my attitude became more ambivalent. I was aware that in some nameless competition which I could not begin to define she had come a highly commendable first while my father had come a most ineffectual second, and this truth which instinct urged me to deny but which my intellect forced me to acknowledge ran contrary to my most deeply entrenched beliefs not only about my parents but about the male and female sexes. In the world in which I felt most comfortable men were always first and best, heroes were always more important than heroines and the father who idolized me could do no wrong. But my mother had unwittingly opened a window onto another world, the world which Ginette had shown me when she had eloped with Kinsella, the real world which I secretly knew I had yet to master and which I secretly feared I might never master to my satisfaction. In my dread of coming second there I resented that world and above all I resented the women who had shown it to me. I still loved Ginette—but there were moments when I hated her too. I loved my mother—but there were times when I resented her so much that I could barely keep a civil tongue in my head when I addressed her.

  My mother’s understanding should have brought me closer to her but in adult life I found we were estranged. We were each faultlessly polite whenever we met but nothing of importance was ever uttered between us, and later when my considerable success had deluded me into believing I had mastered the real world, my attitude mellowed from resentment into an affectionate contempt. Poor Mama, I would think, so plain, so dumpy, so unfashionable, so provincial—what did she know of life when she had barely ventured from her rural backwater since the age of sixteen? The only crisis she had had to surmount had been her mother-in-law’s determination to live in sin with a sheep farmer, and even that droll little inconvenience had been smoothed aside by my father who had played the hero and visited his mother regularly in her Swansea asylum.

  My father never did tell me the whole story about his mother and Owain Bryn-Davies, but the older and more sophisticated I became the less curious I was to hear about this amusing slice of Victorian melodrama which I felt sure by Edwardian standards would be judged tame. In my late twenties when I became involved with defending criminals of the worst type I quickly reached a state of mind in which no human behavior could shock me, least of all a little indiscreet adultery in South Wales in the Eighties, and when my father said after my grandmother’s funeral that my mother had been urging him to talk to me of the past, it was all I could do to suppress a yawn and assume a look of courteous sympathy.

  “It must be exactly as you wish, Papa,” I said. “If you want to talk then I’m willing to listen, but you shouldn’t let Mama dragoon you into a course of action which at heart you’ve no wish to pursue.”

  “Your mother thinks you could be a comfort to me,” said my father. “I feel so tormented sometimes by my memories.”

  We were strolling together across the heather to the summit of Rhossili Downs. It was a clouded winter day not conducive to walking, but after the ordeal of my grandmother’s funeral we had both felt in need of fresh air. I was twenty-eight but considered myself worldly enough to look older; my father was forty-eight but considered himself lucky enough to look younger; we had reached the stage when we were occasionally mistaken for brothers.

  “Yes, I must tell you,” said my father. “I must.”

  We paced on across the heather in silence. I waited, but when nothing happened I automatically fell into my professional role of playing midwife to the truth.

  “What were they like?” I said, throwing him a bland question to help him along.

&
nbsp; “What were they like?” repeated my father as if I had astonished him. “Oh, they were charming, all of them—my mother, my father, Bryn-Davies … Yes, they were all the most charming and delightful people.” He stopped to stare at the skyline and as I watched the color fade from his face he said in a low voice, “That was the horror, of course. It wasn’t like a melodrama when you can recognize the villains as soon as they step on the stage. It wasn’t like that at all.”

  “They were just three ordinary people?”

  “Yes, they were just three ordinary people,” said my father, “who failed to draw the line.”

  I suppressed a sigh at this fresh evidence of my mother’s middle-class Victorian influence over him. It was only the middle classes—and in particular the nouveaux-riches middle classes—who made a professional occupation of doing the done thing and drawing moral lines. Anyone of any genuine breeding did the done thing without thinking twice about it and left drawing lines to clergymen who were trained as moral draftsmen.

  “It was all a tragedy,” my father was saying. “My poor mother, she was so beautiful. My father wasn’t very kind to her.”

  “Because he was a drunkard?”

  “He was the most splendid fellow,” said my father exactly as if I had never spoken, “and so fond of children. I was the apple of his eye. Bryn-Davies was very civil to me too. Interesting chap, Bryn-Davies. Strong personality. Just calling him a sheep farmer gives no clear impression of him.”

  “But surely,” I said, deciding to risk a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness, “you must have resented Bryn-Davies when he took over Oxmoon after your father died of drink. Surely it became an outrage when he lived openly with your mother and kept you from your inheritance.”

  “It was all a tragedy,” repeated my father. “A tragedy.”

  I gave up. We walked on across the Downs.

  “And afterwards,” said my father, “after Bryn-Davies had had his little accident with the tide tables and drowned on the Shipway, it was all so difficult with my mother but Margaret was wonderful, such a tower of strength, and she found out all about the Home of the Assumption where the nuns were so kind to the insane. Sometimes I wondered if my mother should come home more often but Margaret said no, only at Christmas. Margaret drew the line and of course she was right—because terrible things happen,” said my father, his face bleached, his lips bloodless, his eyes seeing scenes I could not begin to imagine, “when people fail to draw the line.”

  I said nothing. The silence that followed lasted some time, but at last he thanked me for listening so patiently and said he was so glad he had talked to me.

  But as he and I both knew perfectly well, he had still told me nothing whatsoever.

  II

  When I related this incident to Ginette in my Christmas letter she wrote in reply: Poor Bobby, but what defeats me is why he and Margaret make this big mystery out of the past when it’s quite obvious to anyone of our sophistication, my dear, what was going on: the drunken husband developed a penchant for beating the wife, the wife dived into a grand passion in sheer self-defense and the lover, being both naughty and greedy, grabbed not only the wife but all the money he could lay his hands on when the husband obligingly died of liver failure. Heavens, such sordid goings-on happen all the time everywhere—and as always in such frightfulness, the people who suffer most are the poor innocent children. Really, it’s a wonder some of them survive at all and if they do survive they’re lucky if they’re not scarred for life by their experiences!

  And it was then, as I read this passage in her letter, that it first occurred to me to suspect that my father was not a flawless hero but a deeply damaged man.

  III

  I WAS DAMAGED MYSELF although at that time I did not admit it. I had enjoyed so much worldly success that the prospect of private failure was inconceivable; it never even crossed my mind that anything could be amiss.

  It would be immodest for me to record my achievements at Harrow so I need only say that it was taken for granted that I would achieve a first when I went up to Oxford to read Greats. This made life a little dull; success loses its power to charm if insufficient effort is involved in its acquisition and after I had demonstrated to my contemporaries, my tutors and the various females of my acquaintance that whatever I saw I conquered, I acknowledged my boredom by looking around for a new challenge that would make life more amusing. I had just finished my second year at Balliol when a friend invited me to stay with him in Scotland and for the first time in my life I saw the mountains.

  There are plenty of mountains in Wales, but the spectacular ones are in the north, and since my parents never took holidays I knew little of Wales beyond the Gower Peninsula and little of England beyond Central London, Oxford and Harrow. There are no mountains in Gower, only the smooth rolling humps of the Downs, and although I had long been attracted to the spectacular cliffs by the sea, these were so dangerous that my father had always forbidden me to climb them.

  However I was now presented with a challenge that no one had forbidden me to accept, and I knew I had to climb those mountains. I had to get to the top. I had to win. I was enslaved.

  During the next few months I drove my parents to despair, nearly ruined my career at Oxford and almost killed myself. That was when I first realized something had gone wrong with my life; it occurred to me that when my desire to win had been channeled into academic excellence the compulsion had formed a benign growth on my personality, but when that desire had been channeled into mountaineering it had formed a cancer. I did recover but not before the cancer had been cut out of my life. I gave up mountaineering.

  “I shall never come back here,” I said to the doctor who attended me in the hospital at Fort William when I lay recuperating from the accident that had killed my three best friends. “I shall never go climbing again.”

  “They all say that,” said the doctor, “and they all come back in the end.”

  But I was certain I could stay away; there was a void in my life but I thought I could see how to fill it. I had to fight the opponent I had discovered on the mountains, the one opponent who consistently mesmerized me. It was Death. Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win—and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again.

  I then had to decide on the arena best suited for my battles. I toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor but decided it would involve me in the study of too many subjects which I found tedious. I was interested in death, not disease. Then I considered the law, and the law, I saw at once, had considerable advantages. It not only blended with my classical education but it was a profession that could ease my way into public life, and since I knew my father dreamed that I might enter Parliament I thought I could see how both our ambitions might be satisfied.

  As the eldest son I was heir to Oxmoon but my father’s youth and the likelihood of him living until I myself was far advanced in middle age made it imperative that I had some occupation while I waited for my inheritance. I also had a very natural desire to be financially independent, and no one denied there was money at the bar for a young man who was determined to reach the summit of the profession.

  I won my double first at Oxford in Greats and Law and was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1906. To my family I pretended it was sheer chance that I became involved with criminal law; I did not disclose how I had engineered a meeting with a famous K.C. and more or less hypnotized him into engaging me as his “devil”; I did not disclose that I had selected him as my master because a number of his clients ran the risk, in the formal words of the death sentence, of being hanged by the neck until they were dead. While I deviled for him I met the important solicitors and soon I was acquiring a few briefs of my own. Unlike many barristers I did not have to endure briefless years at the bar. I grabbed every opportunity I could and when there was no opportunity I created one. My career began to gather in momentum.

  Of course I said it was pure coinci
dence that I ended up defending murderers who had no hope of acquittal, but the truth was I deliberately sought out the hopeless cases because there was more pleasure in winning a hard victory over Death than an easy one. I pretended to be nonchalant, claiming murder trials were somewhat tedious, but in my heart I loved every minute I spent fighting in court. I loved the excitement and the drama and the perpetual shadow of the gallows; I loved the jousts with Death; I loved the victory of saving people who would have died but for my skill. To compete with Death, as I had discovered on the mountains, was to know one was alive.

  It made no difference that sometimes, inevitably, Death won. Some of my clients died on the gallows just as my three friends had died on the mountain, but that only made the next battle fiercer and enhanced my satisfaction when the lucky clients were saved.

  My work became an obsession. Although I tried to deny it to myself I was suffering from cancer of the personality again, and gradually I became aware of the familiar symptoms appearing: the fanatical dedication, the withdrawal from other pursuits, the loss of interest in carnal pleasure, the isolation of the soul. I even found myself postponing my entry into politics. Westminster was not the Old Bailey. There was no shadow of the gallows there.

  Then one day I saved a client whom I loathed and believed to be guilty, and suddenly I not only asked myself what I was doing but saw the answer all too clearly: I was wasting my life in order to satisfy obsessions I could not master. The cancer was upon me again and I knew I had to cut it out to survive.

  That was when I discovered that some cancers spread so deep that no surgery can remove them. My cancer now had such a hold on me that I did not see how I could remove it and retain my sanity; I felt as if I were on the edge of some mental breakdown, but as I struggled to imagine a life in which winning no longer mattered I saw, far away and unattainable, across the abyss of the past and beyond the walls of the present which imprisoned me, the world where I knew I could be at peace. I saw the road to Oxmoon, the lost Oxmoon of my childhood, and Ginette was with me once more in her grubby pinafore as we ate strawberries together in the kitchen garden. I saw a world where winning and losing had no power to drive me because with Ginette’s hand in mine I was always content, and when I saw that world I knew that she alone could cure my cancer because she alone could take me back to Oxmoon and resurrect that lost paradise of my dreams.