The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  But Ginette still wrote regularly of married bliss with Conor Kinsella. Fifteen years after we had danced to “The Blue Danube” she was still living happily ever after in New York, and although time and again I asked myself how I could win her back I knew there was nothing I could do. I was powerless, and as I acknowledged my absolute failure to change my life I felt I must surely be condemned to live unhappily ever after in London, a man rich, famous and successful—yet losing, lost and alone.

  IV

  I AWOKE VERY SUDDENLY in the middle of the night, and my first conscious thought was: She’s coming home.

  Using one of Cicero’s favorite metaphors I told myself that the Wheel of Fortune of Conor Kinsella had finally spun him into extinction and now my own Wheel of Fortune was spinning me back into life.

  I lit the gas and immediately my cold austere masculine bedroom was bathed in a warm sensuous glow. I drew aside the curtain. Below me the formal lawns below King’s Bench Walk were bathed in a powerful white moonlight and far away beyond the Embankment the river glittered beneath the stars. I stood there, transfixed by this vision of an erotic enchanted London, and as I listened to the night I heard the bells of St. Clement Dane’s chime a distant half-hour.

  Letting the curtain fall I turned abruptly from the window and decided to take a long cool rational look at the immediate future. Tomorrow—which was in fact today—I would go down to Oxmoon for a protracted weekend. On the following day Ginette would arrive in Swansea on the Irish steamer for an indefinite stay in the Gower Peninsula. We would meet, possibly enjoy one or two quiet passionless talks on our own and then part; I had another important case pending and it was necessary for me to return to London to prepare for it. During the next twelve months further meetings would doubtless occur and, all being well, our platonic relationship would be comfortably reestablished. After that I would have to wait and see what my prospects were, but the one strikingly obvious aspect of the situation was that I could not now descend upon Oxmoon like some overheated knight of medieval legend, fling myself at the feet of the lady I loved and beg her to marry me immediately. I could think of nothing that would irritate Ginette more, particularly a bereaved Ginette who had lost her husband in unexplained but apparently tragic circumstances.

  As promised in her wire she had written to my parents but still she had not clarified the mystery of Kinsella’s death; indeed she had begged them not to inquire about it. Having wound up her New York life with extraordinary haste she had sailed to Ireland with her two sons within a week of Kinsella’s death, and after the funeral she had resolved to leave her sons temporarily in the care of her husband’s family while she visited Wales. She did not explain this decision in her letter to my parents. Perhaps she felt it would be better for the boys to remain with their father’s family instead of being swept off into a milieu where their father had been disliked; perhaps she had simply wanted to be alone for a while; perhaps her decision represented a combination of these reasons, but whatever her motives the fact remained that she was due to arrive alone in Swansea on the morning of Friday, the twentieth of June, and that she had begged that no one, absolutely no one, was to meet her at the docks except my father’s coachman with the family motorcar.

  I want to fulfill a dream, she wrote to me in response to the brief formal letter of sympathy I had sent to her in Dublin. I dreamt I was coming home to Oxmoon and all the family were lined up on the porch steps—it was like an old-fashioned photograph, I could even see the sepia tints! So don’t be at the docks to meet me. Be at Oxmoon with the others and make my dream come true.

  I found her letter and turned up the gas to reread it.

  So Ginette too had her dreams of returning to Oxmoon.

  The bells of St. Clement’s sang faintly again on the night air and beyond the window the sky was lightening but I could not sleep. Cicero’s metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune had captivated my imagination, and moving to the bookshelves I found the volume written by that later philosopher who had restated the ancient metaphor for the men of the Middle Ages who had known little of Cicero. From King Alfred to Chaucer, from Dante to a host of other Continental writers, all medieval Europe had been mesmerized by Boethius, writing in The Consolation of Philosophy about the sinister Wheel of Fortune:

  I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion. …

  I thought of Ginette abandoning me for Kinsella in the ballroom at Oxmoon.

  But now Fortune herself was speaking; the monster was making her classic statement about her notorious wheel:

  I was inclined to favor you … now I have withdrawn my hand. … Inconstancy is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever-changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top. Yes, rise up on my wheel if you like, but don’t count it an injury when by the same token you begin to fall as the rules of the game will require. …

  I saw myself facing a new opponent in the game of life. Death had been replaced by Fortune. I was riding upwards on her wheel at last but this time when I got to the top I was going to stay there. I was going to beat that Wheel of Fortune and bend Fortune herself to my will.

  A variety of erotic images teemed in my mind. Then, thinking how appropriate it was that Fortune should be represented as a woman, I returned to bed and dreamed of conquest.

  V

  I LEFT BENNETT AT my chambers in London, just as I always did when I went home. It would have been pretentious to take a valet to Oxmoon where under my mother’s regime shirts seemed to wash, iron and starch themselves and where my father’s man was always on hand to attend to any detail that defied the laundress or my mother’s omnipresent needle. Bennett, who was a Cockney, never minded being left in London. No doubt he enjoyed the respite from ironing The Times and performing all the other minor rites which must have made life with me so tedious. As he handed me a perfectly packed bag to take to Oxmoon I made a mental note to give him an increase in wages.

  My brother Lion had threatened to accompany me on the train journey to Swansea, but fortunately he had been dismissed that week from the bank where he had been pretending to earn a living and had already bounded back to Gower to resume his favorite occupation: the pursuit of idleness in pleasant surroundings. Justice compels me to add that Lion was not vicious, merely a young man of twenty-three with a limited intellect and an ingenuous disposition. In my opinion such people are much better suited to life in the country and should leave places like London well alone.

  However despite Lion’s absence I did not travel on my own to Swansea that day. My favorite brother John was at Paddington Station to meet me; he had recently taken his finals at Oxford and had been spending a few days with friends in London to recuperate. Term had ended, his rooms had been vacated, his possessions had been dispatched to Gower. He was, in short, in that pleasant limbo when one successful phase of life has ended and another is yet to begin, and he looked as if he had been finding the hiatus enjoyable. Having made some aristocratic friends up at Oxford he was fresh from sampling the pleasures of the London season from a base in Belgrave Square.

  “How’s the decadent aristocracy?” I said as we met on the platform.

  “You sound like an anarchist!” He laughed to show he was redeemed from priggishness by a sense of humor but I suspected he was mildly shocked. John would not have approved of anarchists. Nor would he have approved of any decadence among the members of the aristocracy, for in our family John represented the final triumph of my mother’s nouveau-riche middle-class values. With an apparently inexhaustible virtue he dedicated his life to drawing lines and doing the done thing.

  He was twenty-one, ten years my junior, better looking than I was but not so tall. Neither was he so gifted athletically and academically. This meant that jealousy would have been quite un
called for on my part, and indeed I had never seen any reason why I should be other than benign towards this intelligent sibling who always behaved so respectfully in my presence, but occasionally—perhaps once every two or three years—I did wonder how he avoided being jealous of me. Lion did not compete. Neither did Edmund, my third brother, who was two years younger than John and a mere lackluster version of Lion. My fourth brother Thomas was at present too juvenile to take seriously but showed every sign of growing up stupid. But John had brains, and John, I knew, was ambitious, and John was just the kind of young man who might resent an older brother who always came first. However, he had apparently found some solution to this dilemma because I could tell he still hero-worshiped me. Perhaps he merely told himself that jealousy was not the done thing.

  “It’s so good to see you again, Robert! It seems ages since we last met—of course I know you’ve been uncommonly busy—”

  “I should never be too busy to deny myself the opportunity for civilized conversation,” I said at once. I felt guilty that although he had been in London for some days I had been too preoccupied with my obsessions to see him. “It’s the fools, not the intelligent men, whom I find impossible to suffer gladly.”

  John relaxed. “Talking of fools, I suppose you know Lion’s been sacked? I saw him at a ball last weekend and he told me how thrilled he was. He was rather squiffy and trying to teach some married woman the Paris tango.”

  “I trust you gave him a wide berth.”

  “The widest, yes. I spent an hour discussing the Marconi scandal with three elderly bores and praying that no one would ask me if Lionel Godwin was a relation of mine. …”

  We found an empty first-class compartment, paid off the porters and settled ourselves opposite each other while John talked earnestly of the Marconi scandal and the absolute necessity for a strict morality in politics.

  “Quite,” I said, and to steer him away from the subject of morality which so entranced him I added, “So much for politics. Tell me about yourself. Met any interesting girls lately?”

  John liked girls. For some years I had waited for him to ask my advice on the vital subject of premarital carnal satisfaction, but evidently my father had improved on his discourse on the shining sea of carnality because the appeal for useful information had never come.

  “Well, I met this most fascinating suffragist at a tea dance—”

  “Oh my God!”

  “—and she knew the woman who threw herself under the King’s horse at Epsom the other day—”

  “If you ask me The Times’ leader put the entire matter in a nutshell by saying the woman showed a thorough lack of consideration for the jockey.”

  “—and did you realize, Robert, that the woman had actually won a first at Oxford?”

  “Then that woman’s suicide is the best argument I’ve yet heard against higher education for women. All women should be educated at home by a governess—as Ginette was.”

  The name was out. I, who prided myself on my immaculate self-control, was apparently reduced to dragging in the name of my beloved at every conceivable opportunity as if I were some addlepated schoolboy who had fallen in love for the first time.

  “I say!” said John, so young, so innocent, so utterly unaware of my chaotic thoughts. “Isn’t it splendid to think that Ginevra’s coming home! How long is it since we last saw her? Four years?”

  “Five.” The train lurched forward at last and my heart lurched with it as the station began to recede before my eyes.

  “It was a shame she only managed to visit us once during her marriage but I don’t think Kinsella liked us much, do you? Robert, now that he’s dead, do tell me—what was your final opinion of Conor Kinsella?”

  “I’ve been educated as an Englishman. The English don’t have opinions about the Irish. They have prejudices,” I said, determined to repel all memory of Conor Kinsella, but the next moment the view from the train window had faded and in my mind I was once more drinking port with him five years ago at Brooks’s, once more longing to smash my glass against the nearest wall.

  VI

  “I’M CLEAN OVERPOWERED BY the honor you’re doing me!” said the villain. “Dining in a famous London club with a true English gentleman! I never thought I’d ever rise so high—or sink so low, depending on which side of the Irish Sea you’re standing!”

  “I’m a Welshman.”

  “To be sure you are—a Welshman with one of the most famous Saxon names of all time! Wasn’t it Earl Godwin’s son who fought William at Hastings?”

  How does one talk to such people? If they somehow avoid talking about religion then they talk of race, and all the time they drag in history by its hind legs as if the past were a recalcitrant hero who obstinately refused to die.

  Of course I had been obliged to ask him to dine. I had wanted above all to perpetuate the myth that I no longer cared about Ginette’s marriage so I knew I had to make some demonstration to convince her husband that I wished him well. But beyond my compulsion to shore up my pride with such a charade I was aware of a terrible curiosity to examine my successful rival at close quarters. I think I hoped I could write him off as a failure, someone who was patently inferior to me despite his achievement in winning Ginette.

  During our dinner I tried to size him up but this was difficult. I found myself increasingly aware that he came from a part of the British Isles that I had never visited, and because it was such an alien part I found it impossible to place him against any background that was familiar to me. The Welsh may be Celts as the Irish are but they are a different kind of Celt. To know the Welsh well was no passport to understanding that mysterious race which lay on the other side of the St. George’s Channel.

  To make matters still more confusing I sensed that the life he now lived in New York had little connection with the life he had led in Ireland. Ginette had told me his father had been the manager of a small shipping firm in Dublin, a fact which implied that Kinsella had come from a respectable middle-class home, and she had also told me that Kinsella himself had received a Catholic education, whatever that meant, in a reputable Dublin school, but as I faced him across the table at Brooks’s that night it seemed to me that he had discarded both his religion and his respectability a very long time ago. Despite the fact that he dressed well and knew how to behave I sensed that he was a criminal. He had the kind of soft dark eyes which I often found among my clients, eyes that could watch iniquity with indifference. He drank too much without any noticeable effect. And in his well-kept hands and in the occasional turn of phrase I saw the cardsharper and heard the gambler speaking.

  “Cards on the table!” he exclaimed at last after the waiter had brought us our port. He had a variable accent which in one sentence could range from Dublin to New York and back again. “We’ve been watching each other like hawks throughout the meal—why don’t we now strip off the mask of courtesy and exchange our true opinions of each other?”

  I had no objection. Far from it. I seized the chance to annihilate him with my perspicacity. All I said was, “Who goes first?”

  “We’ll toss for it!” said the gambler and flicked a florin in the air.

  I called heads and won. With a smile I said, “I’m to be entirely frank in giving my opinion of you?”

  “Altogether and entirely—with no offense given or taken on either side!”

  “Very well.” I lit a cigar. “I think you’re the black sheep of your respectable Dublin family. You say you own two restaurants in Manhattan but I think your money comes not from the dining rooms but from the gambling halls—and worse—upstairs. Perhaps you have other interests too which are equally dubious because I think you’ve got the nerve and the flair and the sheer amoral greed to sail dangerously close to the wind in your business ventures and emerge unscathed. Some men are born criminals. I believe you’re one of them. Crime really does pay for men like you. You have the well-oiled veneer of a man who’s constantly on the receiving end of glittering dividends.”


  He roared with laughter and drank a glass of port straight off. “Oh, for shame!” he said. “And me an innocent man who goes to Mass every Sunday!” Then he poured himself some more port and leaned forward with his forearms on the table. He was still smiling. “And now,” he said, “we come to you.”

  I was unperturbed. What could he say? I was impregnable behind the massive walls of my success, and it was inconceivable that he could reduce them to ruins.

  “I look at you,” said this gambler, this criminal, this personification of all my misery, “and what do I see? I see a tough customer who’s made a career of grabbing what he wants and profiting out of it. You have as much amoral greed as I have but you cover it up by masquerading as an English gentleman—ah yes, you may be Welsh by birth, Robert Godwin, but it’s an Englishman you are through and through and like all Englishmen you think you should be top dog. And being top dog means getting what you believe is owing to you—money, power, fame, fortune … and women. But you don’t think of women as women, do you? You see them as prizes—glittering dividends, if I may quote your own phrase against you—but the prize you’ve always wanted, Robert Godwin, is the prize you can never win, and that’s why you’re sitting there, God help you, hating my guts and wishing I was dead. Ah, to be sure it’s a terrible tragedy you’ve suffered! To lose your best prize to another man would be enough to break your heart—but to lose your best prize to an Irishman must be enough to destroy your English soul entirely! How can you dine with me and feign friendship? I swear I’d find your pride contemptible if I didn’t already find it so pathetic!”