The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  He stopped again. I waited but when he clearly found it impossible to continue, I said in the neutral voice I used to clients when I was playing midwife at the birth of some terrible truth, “As time went on you found Margaret alone couldn’t help you forget.” I used my mother’s Christian name deliberately to foster the illusion that I was a mere lawyer who bore no personal connection to my client or anyone he knew.

  “Yes,” said my father. He had stopped caressing the dog and now he closed his eyes as if the truth were a physical presence which he could not bear to see. “But I’m afraid I haven’t been very honest with you about that, Robert. I’m afraid I lied to you about the past. You see—” He opened his eyes again but he could not look at me. “—I wanted you to go on thinking of me as a hero. I couldn’t endure to think you might be disillusioned.”

  “I understand. But now—”

  “Yes, now I must tell you—I must—that it wasn’t your mother’s fault that I was driven to adultery. I lied when I implied it was. I know your mother’s a stickler for convention but as a matter of fact she’s very down-to-earth about marital intimacy, I always thanked God I didn’t marry some well-bred lady who hated it. Your mother and I always got on well in that respect and she wanted children just as much as I did so there was no conflict. Actually I liked her being pregnant and she liked it too so that never created any difficulties either—rather the reverse, if anything. But then … I couldn’t help it … I just had to go elsewhere as well—”

  “Did you really discuss the problem with Margaret? Or did you lie when you told me you did?”

  “Oh God, of course I discussed it with her, how could I avoid it? I was beside myself with horror, I couldn’t face what I’d done, she helped me get through it all, she saved our marriage—”

  “You mean when it all began?”

  “Yes,” said my father, “when it all began.” He paused before saying, “My infidelity had begun a long time before you found out about it.” And after another pause he said, “You were fourteen and away at Harrow when it all began.”

  “I see,” said the lawyer, a model of neutrality and detachment. “I was fourteen, you were thirty-four, Margaret was thirty-one—”

  “—and Ginevra was sixteen,” said my father, and covered his face with his hands.

  II

  “Of course,” he said at once, letting his hands fall as he swiveled to face me, “I didn’t seduce her, never, never think I could be capable of such wickedness, but … I was foolish. And the direct result of that foolishness was that I went to London and committed adultery for the first time with a woman I met there.”

  Several seconds passed. When I could finally trust myself to speak I said, “This … this incident with—”

  “Incident, yes, that’s all it was—utterly appalling, utterly wrong, but just a little incident in the music room—”

  “How did it happen?”

  My father seemed to relax. I had seen criminals relax like that when they thought they were past the most harrowing section of their story. He started to knead Glendower’s golden coat again.

  “I was out riding one day with Oswald Stourham,” he said conversationally, “and we were just chatting about women as we so often did when Oswald said to me, ‘By Jove, Bobby, that little cousin of yours is turning into quite a peach!’ and I said, ‘Oh yes? I can’t say I’ve noticed’—which was true because I still thought of Ginevra as a child—and as a daughter. Well, Oswald laughed so hard he nearly fell out of his saddle. ‘By Jove, Bobby!’ he says again in that hearty voice of his. ‘A man would have to be a second Oscar Wilde not to appreciate the charms of your little cousin Ginevra!’

  “I said nothing but I couldn’t forget that gibe about Wilde. Then a disastrous thing happened: Margaret had to visit her sister and once she was gone I found I was thinking continually about Ginevra … I suppose it became an obsession. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I kissed Ginevra one afternoon when she was practicing her piano in the music room. She was upset and, I saw at once, very frightened. I tried to reassure her, swore I wouldn’t do it again, but I suppose she felt she couldn’t trust me and that was why soon afterwards she rode to Porteynon and tried to elope with Kinsella—she wanted to run away from Oxmoon … and from me … But her action took me wholly by surprise. I didn’t know she’d been having clandestine meetings with him ever since Margaret had left.

  “Well, I was in a terrible state but as soon as I’d confessed to Margaret she sorted everything out. She sent me to London to get me out of the way for a while, and then using Kinsella as her excuse she arranged for Ginevra to go to the Applebys. … Oh God, Robert, if only you knew how wretched and ashamed I felt—”

  “You went to London.”

  “Yes. For two weeks.”

  “And there you committed adultery for the first time, you said.”

  “Yes. I was in an appalling state and kept remembering all I didn’t want to remember—my father—Bryn-Davies—the little accident with the tide tables—my mother raving—Oswald talking about Oscar Wilde, it was all jumbled up together, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I tried drinking but I was so frightened of getting drunk, I thought that too would mean I was ending up like my father—”

  “So you found a woman and managed to forget. When did Margaret find out?”

  “Oh, I told her as soon as I got back,” said my father. “Of course.”

  I suddenly found I was on my feet.

  He looked up. His very blue eyes were bright with fear. He had to struggle to stand.

  “Oh God, Robert, forgive me—oh my God, my God, what a retribution this is—”

  “You told my mother,” I said, “and what did my mother say?”

  “She said she could understand but no one else would so it had to be kept absolutely secret. She said I must do what I apparently had to do but it must always be done in London.”

  “So she sanctioned the adultery. And eventually, I suppose, she took you back.”

  “Oh, we were never estranged. We always shared a bed.”

  “You mean … I’m sorry, I think I must have misunderstood. You’re surely not trying to tell me—”

  “Yes. She never rejected me. She knew I’d have gone to pieces utterly if she’d done that.”

  After a moment I managed to say, “I see. So everyone, it seems, then lives happily ever after—until Ginette comes home and you and Mama realize that I’m still dead set on a marriage which you can only regard with horror. No wonder you were driven to approach Ginette last night when you saw the light was still burning in her room! You were under a compulsion to find out how far I’d gone with her!”

  “No, you misunderstand. By that time your feelings were no mystery but what I had to find out was how Ginevra felt. If she just wants to be your mistress then I don’t think Margaret will interfere, but if she wants to be your wife—” He covered his face with his hands again.

  “Quite.” I looked across the sparkling dew-drenched lawn to Oxmoon, shining in the morning light. The maids had now drawn back all the curtains on the ground floor.

  “But at least now I’ve spoken to you,” said my father. “At least now I can tell Margaret you know everything and that there’s no need for her to tell you herself. And perhaps eventually … after you’ve thought over all I’ve said about my parents and Bryn-Davies … you might find it in your heart to understand … and make allowances … and possibly one day forgive me for … Oh Robert, if only you knew how much I regret that past foolishness with Ginevra—”

  “Quite,” I said again.

  He was crying. My clients, both male and female, usually cried at the end. The birth of truth can be so painful. I was well accustomed to witnessing such ordeals, so accustomed that the sight of the emotional aftermath had long since lost its power to move me.

  “I must thank you for confiding in me, sir,” I said. “Please don’t think I’m unaware of the considerable strain such confidences have imposed upon you. And
now I have only one question left to ask: did you tell my mother that you found me in bed with Ginette last night?”

  He simply looked at me. The tears were still streaming down his face. I shrugged, turned my back on him and walked away.

  III

  SODOMY, ADULTERY AND MURDER; robbery, madness and lust. The Greeks would no doubt have considered this catalogue standard fare at the table of life. I thought—I tried to think—of the Oresteia. I felt that if I could reduce my father’s story to the remote status of Greek tragedy, I would somehow transform it into a saga I could contemplate with equanimity—or if not equanimity, at least with an ordered mind, the mind which I had applied at Harrow to translating Aeschylus. But my nerve failed me as I remembered my father’s appalling understatements.

  Just a little accident with the tide tables. Just a little incident in the music room. The phrases rasped across my consciousness, and as I recalled that voice speaking of the unspeakable I knew I had no defenses against the horrors he had revealed.

  I was in the woods by Humphrey de Mohun’s ruined tower. I was in the woods thinking of sodomy, adultery, murder, robbery, madness and lust but I dared not think of guardians who abused a position of trust. There my courage failed me. I thought only of the evil which existed in the realms of Greek literature—although such evil was more commonplace than civilized people dared believe; I knew that well enough. Had I not always seen the Gower Peninsula not as the pretty playground eulogized in the guidebooks but as the lawless land soaked in blood where the King’s writ had so often failed to run? It was the peace and order of my parents’ Oxmoon that were unusual; the nightmare of the Eighties had merely represented Gower running true to form.

  I now fully understood my parents’ obsession with setting standards and drawing moral lines. Having been to hell and back their central preoccupation lay in keeping hell at bay, and as far as they were concerned they believed that observing the conventions was the best way to stop hell encroaching. Within the fortress of their self-imposed morality they could feel they were safe, but after their experiences neither of them could doubt that beyond the fortress walls lay violence and madness, perpetually hovering to destroy all those who failed to draw the line.

  I thought of my parents fighting from their moral fortress but not, as I had always supposed, winning the battle against the forces which besieged them. I saw now that they were slowly but inexorably losing as my father, my desperate damaged father, sank ever deeper into the mire of his guilt and his shame.

  Trying at last to consider my father’s disastrous weakness rationally, I told myself that he was a victim and that any civilized man could only regard him with compassion.

  I waited for compassion to come but nothing happened. Then into the void which compassion should have filled I felt the darker emotions streaming, emotions which I knew I had to reject. But I could not reject them. I was too upset. In fact I was very upset, very very upset indeed, more upset than I had ever been in my life, and my thoughts were spiraling downwards into chaos.

  “Just a little incident in the music room …”

  I was trembling. I gripped the ivy that clung to the walls of the ruined tower, and above me the jackdaws beat their sinister wings and cawed as if in mockery of my collapse.

  I was thinking of Ginette at last. I tried not to, but I could no longer stop myself. I knew she should have told me but I knew too that it would have been impossible for her to confess. I decided I could not blame her. There was only one person I could blame and that was my father.

  I went on gripping the ivy as first rage and then hatred overpowered me. That kiss in the music room had set Ginette on the road to Conor Kinsella, the road which had led to the destruction of my adolescent dreams and the blighting of my adult life. How farcical to think that during all those years I had continued to regard my father as a hero! As I could see now with blinding clarity he was no hero; he was a lecher, a cheat and a fool.

  I vomited. Afterwards I still felt ill but I was mentally calmer, as if my mind had rebelled against the violence of my emotions and forced my body to make a gesture of expulsion. As a rational man I knew I had to forgive my father, that victim of past tragedy, and I did indeed believe I would eventually forgive him—but not yet. And perhaps not for a long while.

  Washing my face in the stream I tried to pull myself together by considering the immediate future, and at once I saw how imperative it was that no one should know I was so distressed. In other words, my father was now not my immediate difficulty; I could deal—or try to deal—with him later. My immediate difficulty lay in summoning the strength to return to the house, change into a suit, appear at breakfast and later go to church with the rest of the family as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.

  I vomited again. Then, disgusted by such an exhibition of weakness and humiliated by my loss of control over my emotions, I forced myself to leave the woods, return to the house and face the full horror of my new grand charade.

  IV

  BREAKFAST WAS NOT UNTIL nine on Sundays so I had plenty of time to prepare for my ordeal. I wondered whether my father would ask my mother to read the customary prayers before the meal, but I came to the conclusion that this was unlikely. He too would be bent on hiding his distress by keeping up appearances; he too would have decided, just as I had, that no other course of action was available to him.

  I thought of us both saying to ourselves: No one must ever know. No one must ever guess.

  I found myself quite unable to think of Ginette now. I knew that at some time in the future I would have to talk to her about my father, but that future was apparently beyond my power to imagine at that moment. In my room as I washed and changed I told myself I could cope with only one ordeal at a time, and my first ordeal without doubt was surviving the family breakfast in the dining room.

  I set off downstairs to the hall.

  When I arrived at the foot of the stairs I found to my dismay that my watch was five minutes slower than the grandfather clock which traditionally marked the correct time at Oxmoon. That meant I was late. That also meant a bad start to my charade, and I was still staring at the clock in futile disbelief when far away in the distance I heard the dining-room door open.

  A second later my mother was bustling into the hall.

  “Ah, there you are!” she said with satisfaction. “Come along, we’re all waiting—you mustn’t miss prayers!”

  But I was transfixed. I looked at her and could not speak for suddenly I was seeing her not as the woman who was so familiar to me but as the unknown girl of sixteen, brought up in a cheerful moneyed home and catapulted into the moral and financial bankruptcy of a terrifying alien world. I thought of her standing by my father in the beginning when a lesser woman might have run sobbing home to her parents; I thought of her sticking by him through thick and thin; I thought of her mastering crises that most women would have found not only insuperable but unimaginable. And I thought how I had misjudged her, dismissing her as narrow and limited when in truth the narrowness and limitation had been all on my side. I saw her helping me at that crucial moment in my adolescence when she realized my father had failed me; I saw her trying to talk to me although I had always been too proud to listen; I saw her understanding me far too well for my own conceited contemptible comfort, understanding me as my father never had and never could. In my memory I heard her say, “You’re like me—you really have very simple emotional tastes,” and for the first time I realized what she must have suffered from that complex man she had married and whom she had apparently loved, as single-mindedly as I had loved Ginette, from the age of sixteen.

  “Come along!” she was repeating briskly. “You mustn’t keep your father waiting!” But hardly had she finished speaking when I was stepping forward to take her in my arms.

  For a brief interval she was silent. Then she patted my back and said kindly, “There, there. We’ll sort it all out later. Now come along and let’s do what we’re supposed to do.”
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  Still mute I followed her to the dining room.

  V

  I NOTICED AT ONCE that Ginette was absent. That disturbed me. By this time I was so obsessed with the desire to pretend that everything was as it should be that any small deviation from the normal was unnerving.

  “Are you feeling better, Robert?” inquired John when the prayers were finished.

  “Better?” I said blankly.

  “Your sunstroke, dear,” said my mother. “I nearly sent a tray up to your room this morning, but then your father told me you were quite recovered. I’m so glad.”

  “Mama decided to spoil Ginevra instead!” Lion informed me. “And incidentally, Mama, how tired do I have to be before I’m allowed to miss family prayers and have breakfast in bed?”

  After the laughter had subsided I accepted coffee, fried eggs, bacon, sausages and toast and sat toying with my knife and fork. My father chose bacon alone and managed to slip it slice by slice to Glendower. At the other end of the table my mother had cunningly ordered a boiled egg, and since no one could see through the shell no one could tell how much of it she ate. She drank two cups of tea and looked tranquil.

  Meanwhile an animated postmortem on the dinner party was being conducted. I had forgotten what a noise large families make but although I winced periodically I was glad of the opportunity to remain silent.

  “Well,” said my father, making a great business of pulling out his watch, “there are one or two things I have to do before church, so if you’ll all excuse me—”

  The door of the dining room opened and in walked Ginette.

  VI

  “GINEVRA!” CHORUSED MY BROTHERS in delight.

  “Darlings!” said Ginette radiantly to them. “I simply couldn’t stay in bed, it made me feel too guilty!” She looked down the table at my mother. “Margaret, it was so kind of you to send up a tray but I really did feel I wanted to join the family for breakfast. I’m sorry I missed prayers.”