The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I drank a little port and eyed the glowing tip of my cigar. When I was sure I had myself in control I said, “An inaccurate survey of my private thoughts—but an amusing one.”

  “Are you denying you still want her?”

  “There are other women in the world.”

  “Women who can match that childhood sweetheart?”

  “Playmate,” I said, “would be a more appropriate word to use, I think.”

  “Little girls don’t stay playmates. Little girls become big girls and big girls become sweethearts.”

  “I was only fourteen when she left home to live at All-Hallows Court.”

  “I started doing all manner of things when I was fourteen,” said Conor Kinsella.

  There was a pause. I said nothing.

  “In fact if I’d had a sweetheart like Ginevra when I was fourteen I sure wouldn’t have let the grass grow under my feet.”

  “I happen to be exceedingly partial to grass. What the devil are you trying to say to me, Kinsella?”

  “You had her, didn’t you?”

  I got up and walked out.

  He followed me to the cloakroom.

  “So I was right,” he said. “Well, cynic that I am, I’ve always found it hard to believe in platonic friendship!”

  “You’re wrong,” I said, “and to hell with your bloody cynicism.”

  “Oh, don’t misunderstand!” he said after only the most fractional pause. “Of course when I married her she was as virginal as three nuns knocking at the gates of heaven—lucky man that I was!—but one can travel far, can’t one, without meddling with virginity, and you can’t blame me for wondering in the circumstances if the two of you had been in the habit of taking long journeys together.”

  I returned to the dining room, signed for the meal, stubbed out my cigar and left the club. He was just putting on his top hat as I emerged into the street. It was raining. I remember the cabs splashing mud and a motorcar sidling along like a noisy crab while nearby a bunch of inebriated young sprigs were trying to sing “Hullo Dolly Gray.”

  “Not a word of this to Ginevra,” said Kinsella, very much the sophisticated older man telling his junior how to behave. “The poor woman wants to think we’re bosom friends—ah, such a romantic she is!—and loving her as we do we’ve no choice but to humor her, have we? But I’ll not bring her back here in a hurry—I wouldn’t trust you not to try and win her when my back was turned. Oh, I know you English gentlemen! You’d lay waste the world to get what you wanted and afterwards you’d claim it was the will of God!”

  And off he sauntered along St. James’s Street on his way back to Claridges and his wife.

  VII

  IT WAS LATE IN the afternoon when the train approached Swansea on that June day in 1913 and John offered a paraphrase of William Blake:

  “Here come the dark satanic mills.”

  The familiar bizarre landscape once more met my eyes. As the full curve of Swansea Bay came into sight we could dimly perceive through the pall of smoke the blue expanse of the sea and the masts of the many ships which crowded those shining, polluted waters. John hastily pulled up the window to keep the smell out as we passed through the copper-smelting area, and we both averted our eyes automatically from the scars of coal mining that marked the industrial wasteland on the ruined east side of the city.

  Yet beyond the east side in the central district lay the Swansea which had provided us with our first experience of urban life, a teeming, tousled town flung against the steep hills overlooking the bay like some Naples of the North. The main streets had English names but Swansea always seemed to me as Welsh as its male choirs. Welsh dynamism pulsed through the busy streets and throbbed daily in the vast market; the Welsh lust for culture was on exhibition at the great library which was one of the city’s finest buildings; the Welsh addiction to music continually floated in some form or another upon the Welsh air where the tang of the sea persisted in mingling with the reek of the smoke. Swansea might have been raped by the industrial revolution but she had survived with her vitality, if not her beauty, intact.

  “I feel such a foreigner in England sometimes,” said my brother John, gazing out of the window at our native land. “I feel so torn between one culture and another.”

  “Well, stitch yourself together again because here comes the station.” I always felt John exaggerated the conundrum of belonging to two countries. Wales was home but England was the center of the world and if one wanted to get on in life one moved freely between the two without making a fuss.

  To our surprise and pleasure we found that my father had dispensed with the services of his coachman and had motored himself to Swansea to bid us welcome.

  “It’s not often you come home nowadays, Robert,” he said as we shook hands, “so I felt this was a special occasion.” Scrupulously fair to John he then added: “And you deserve a royal welcome too after three such successful years up at Oxford!” I might be my father’s favorite, but my father was always most conscientious about not neglecting his other children.

  We retired to my father’s motorcar which, though new, looked elderly because it was covered with white dust from the Gower lanes. My father loved his motorcar with a passion which John shared. The two of them spent much time discussing the merits of this new soulless brute, which was called a Talbot, while I yawned and thought what a bore the subject of mechanics was. A passion for horses I can understand; a horse is an aesthetically pleasing animal with an honorable history of service to mankind, but a passion for a few scraps of metal slapped on four wheels seems to me not only irrational but also indicative of an unintellectual, possibly even of a working-class, cast of mind.

  With my father at the wheel we were soon careering through central Swansea. We roared past the ruined Norman castle, blazed past Ben Evans, the largest store, and swept by the grandest hotel, the Metropole. Other motors hooted in friendly admiration, the carriages and carts jostled to escape and the pedestrians dived for cover. While my father and John laughed, I amused myself by planning how I would defend my father against a charge of manslaughter by motor but presently I was diverted as we ascended the hill out of the city and our pace became funereal. John offered to push but my father said that would be an admission of defeat. We toiled on.

  With the summit of the hill behind us we soon found ourselves on the outskirts of the city, and then with that suddenness which always took my breath away we entered a different world. A wild moorland wilderness stretched before us. Mysterious hills shimmered in the distance. We had crossed the threshold into Gower.

  “Swansea’s secret—the Gower Peninsula!” said my father in Welsh with a smile, and John, exhibiting somewhat showily his parrotlike trick of bilingualism, made a swift response which I failed to comprehend.

  We drove on into an England beyond Wales, into a hidden land, pastoral and idyllic, which basked innocently in the summer sun. Beyond the moorland stretch which bounded the outskirts of Swansea, fields drowsed between English hedgerows and little lanes twisted through the countryside to villages which looked as if they had been transplanted from far beyond the Welsh border. We might have been a thousand miles now from teeming Swansea and a thousand years from that industrial wasteland on the bay.

  “How peaceful it looks!” said John to me, but as soon as he said that I thought of Gower’s lawless past. This was a land where the King’s writ had so often failed to run, a land soaked in the crimes of smuggling, wrecking and piracy, robbery, murder and rape. I have always thought it an irony that we have become so civilized that we can now regard places such as Gower as “romantic” and “colorful.” Personally I can think of nothing more terrifying than to live in a land where law and order have no meaning and violence is the rule of the day.

  On and on we traveled through South Gower, that ancient Norman stronghold, and now on our right Cefn Bryn, the backbone of Gower, rose to form a long treeless line of land beneath the blue sky. To our left the sea at Oxwich Bay flashed far away, so
metimes hidden, sometimes revealed by the gates set in the hedges. And ahead of us at last, shimmering with promise and seemingly beckoning us on into a mythical kingdom, the hump of Rhossili Downs marked the end of the Peninsula and a view that I believed no land in Europe could surpass.

  We turned off before the Downs. The motor picked up speed as we roared into the parish of Penhale. Moors dotted with wild ponies stretched before us again, but we could see the trees of Oxmoon now, and presently the high wall of the grounds bordered the lane on our right.

  “Hurrah!” cried John as we reached the gates.

  Oxmoon lay ahead of us, droll little Oxmoon, an eighteenth-century parody of the classical architecture made famous by Robert Adam. We had arrived. My father halted the motor with a triumphant jerk and as the noise of the engine died I at once felt in a better humor. We had been traveling with the roof closed and all the windows shut in order to keep the dust out, so when we flung open the doors the fresh air came as the most exquisite luxury. I got out, stretched my long legs which had not been designed to suffer gladly fifteen-mile journeys in motorcars, and took a deep breath. The air was fragrant with the scent of new-mown grass mingled with lavender. I could hear the larks singing and suddenly, for one precious moment, I was back in my childhood with Ginette so that when I turned to face my home again I saw not the provincial little country house of reality but the fairy-tale palace of my dreams.

  My mother opened the front door.

  Instantly the past was wiped out and I was left with all my most ambivalent emotions in a highly uncertain present. Assuming an impregnable mask of filial respect I exclaimed with warmth, “My dear Mama, how splendid to see you again!” and moved swiftly up the steps to embrace her.

  “Dearest Robert,” said my mother, regarding me tranquilly with those pale eyes which saw far too far and much too much, “welcome home.”

  VIII

  I WAS AT OXMOON waiting for Ginette. It was seven o’clock on the evening of my arrival and I was dressing for dinner. Fifteen hours to go.

  When I had finished I paused to survey my oldest possessions which, arranged around me on shelves, created a powerful atmosphere of nostalgia. Here were the silver cups I had acquired during the course of my academic and athletic career as a schoolboy. Here were the favorite books of my boyhood, the dog-eared collection of Robert Louis Stevenson’s work, the battered copy of Eric, the haggard edition of The Prisoner of Zenda. Here were my school photographs hanging at regular intervals on the wall above my bed to record my progress from stony-faced small boy to supercilious young man. Why had I kept this amazing collection of trivia? I could only suppose that despite my well-ordered mind I had fallen victim to one of Oxmoon’s most exasperating traditions: everything was hoarded; nothing was thrown away.

  Tucked discreetly behind a cushion on the window seat I even found the toy dog which I had been given in infancy, his white woolly coat worn threadbare and his ears sagging with age. To my astonishment I saw that his tail had recently been repaired. This seemed to indicate either the presence in the house of a demented housemaid or a tension so profound in my mother that she had been obliged to scour the bedrooms for something to sew. I was just picking up the dog tenderly by the front paws and remembering how I had screamed when Ginette had once tried to annex him, when the door of my room was flung open without warning to reveal a small intruder in a nightshirt.

  “You’re wanted, “said my youngest brother Thomas, and seeing the toy in my arms he added, “I want that dog. I took him last week but Papa said I had to ask you if you minded. We had a tug-of-war over it actually and his tail came off. The dog’s, I mean, not Papa’s. Well, Papa doesn’t have a tail. Anyway it didn’t matter because Mama sewed it on again. Can I have him?”

  “No. Who wants me?”

  “Mama. She’s in her room. Why can’t I have Dodo?”

  “Because you haven’t said Please and you didn’t knock before you came in. Run away and learn how to behave.”

  “Yah!” said the infant, sticking out his tongue at me, and stumped off angrily to the nurseries.

  In a large family it is not uncommon to find a sting in the tail and the sting is usually referred to as an “afterthought.” This afterthought, far from being ignored as befits the youngest and least significant member of a tribe, is often most foolishly pampered until he has ideas far above his station. Thomas was six and his ideas of his own importance were so elevated that they probably, like the occupants of the recent record-breaking balloon, needed oxygen to survive.

  How he had come to enter the world was a mystery to me, and not a pleasant mystery, either. In fact I had been much disturbed when in my mid-twenties I was informed that my mother was expecting another child. My feelings arose not because I felt it was in poor taste for my mother to indulge in parturition at an advanced age; at that time she was still only forty-two, a curious but by no means preposterous age at which to embark on pregnancy. The truth was that I was disturbed by the news because it seemed my father had lied to me about his private life.

  I was twenty when I found out he was unfaithful to my mother. There was no dramatic scene. The denouement arose from my observation that he had formed the regular habit of going up to town once a month and staying three or four days at his club. My mother said this was a good idea because he tended to work too hard at home and now that he was older she felt it was important that he should go away to relax occasionally. I thought no more about this reasonable explanation for his absences, but one day during the long vacation when he and I were out riding together I said casually, “What do you do with yourself when you’re up in town, Papa?” and he had answered with regret but without hesitation: “I knew you’d ask me that one day and I made up my mind that when you did I’d be honest with you.”

  He then told me he kept a woman in Maida Vale.

  “Of course,” he said, “your natural reaction will be to think me a hypocrite after all I’ve said to you on the subject of reserving that sort of pleasure for marriage but in fact my views haven’t changed. I don’t like what I’m doing and I don’t ask you to condone it. All I ask is that you should try to understand and not judge me too harshly.”

  He said the intimate side of marriage had become repugnant to my mother and added that this was hardly surprising after so many pregnancies.

  “… certainly I don’t blame her, how could I, she’s the most wonderful wife in the world and I’m the luckiest man on earth and I love her with all my heart, as you know. But … well, on religious grounds your mother don’t hold with anticonception, and as for chastity that’s a gift I don’t possess, not at the age of forty after twenty-one years of perfect married life.”

  He revealed that my mother herself had suggested that he kept a mistress.

  “She said she wouldn’t mind so long as it was a business arrangement conducted a long way from home—she said it would even be a relief to her because the last thing she wanted was to make me unhappy. So … well, we thought London would be best. I didn’t want to go into Swansea. In fact I couldn’t. You see, my father used to go into Swansea and …” He stopped. As usual he could never bring himself to talk about his father but this time I saw to my horror that he was about to break down altogether. There were tears in his eyes. Hastily I gave him my word that I quite understood his predicament and thought none the worse of him for his solution.

  The conversation then closed and I never raised the subject again until he told me Thomas had been conceived.

  “But my dear Papa, I thought you told me that side of your marriage had ceased!”

  He laughed and said quickly, “It was the night of our silver wedding—just an isolated occasion.”

  “But you said my mother—”

  “Oh, now that she’s had a rest from childbearing she’s anxious for one final pregnancy.”

  I was a trained lawyer by that time but an inexperienced one; it was not until later that my professional instincts told me my father had had someth
ing to hide. This fact by itself, however, was neither remarkable nor a cause for alarm for there was no reason why my father should have told me every salient detail of his private life, particularly as any marriage is a very private affair. But what troubled me was that I sensed my father had brought off a tour de force which I could only regard as sinister: I suspected he had blended fact and fiction with the skill of an uncommonly gifted liar.

  As soon as I had formed this judgment I dismissed it as ridiculous, but Thomas always reminded me of it and I knew I was more abrupt with the child than I should have been. Making a mental note to bestow the toy dog on him with my blessing I remembered the message he had brought me. It was time for battle again at Oxmoon. Smoothing my hair I looked in the glass to ensure that my appearance was immaculate, and then I set off to wage war with my mother.

  IX

  “HULLO, DEAR,” SAID MY mother, barely glancing up as I entered the room. She was seated at the dressing table and sifting through one of her jewel boxes for a suitable adornment for her dowdy evening gown. As I closed the door she retrieved a dreary trinket, studded with jet and began to pin it on her ample bosom. “Do sit down,” she added as an afterthought, nodding at the customary victim’s chair nearby.

  I moved the chair back against the wall so that it stood facing her but out of reach of the triple looking glass. Then I manifested nonchalance by sitting down and crossing one leg over the other but immediately she readjusted the far mirror until against all the odds my reflection was recaptured. Embarking on a study of the ceiling I prayed for patience and heartily wished myself elsewhere.

  I wondered not for the first time if she really had told my father to take a mistress or whether my father had invented this magnanimous gesture in order to gloss over the wifely failings that had driven him elsewhere. Anger pierced me suddenly. I sensed she had made my father unhappy, and if she had rejected him I felt I could only find her attitude repellent.