The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

I inwardly quailed but somehow managed to give him a brilliant smile.

  We were browsing through the Sunday papers on a snowy day at the end of January. Outside in our little walled garden which stretched to the mews, the morning light was bleak but in our drawing room the fire was burning in the grate and all was warmth and coziness.

  I was very pleased with our house in Ebury Street. I would have preferred something bigger and more positively Belgravia, but I recognized that there was no sense in thinking in those terms without a substantial private income, so I had done my best to find an attractive house and make it as charming as possible. I had succeeded, but sad to say, such a success could hardly have been achieved without generous expenditure.

  Robert had approved the cost of the renovations to the main reception rooms but had urged economy on redecorating the rest of the house, so I had made up my mind to skimp wherever possible. But of course the hall and stairs had to look well, to match the standard of the drawing room and dining room, and of course some alterations were essential in the kitchens, which were positively medieval, and of course I couldn’t skimp on the boys’ rooms because I did so long for Declan and Rory to be happy in their new home. I was sure Robert would understand the need for this additional expenditure so I didn’t ask his permission beforehand, and anyway I planned to pay for the boys’ rooms out of my own income—but something seemed to have happened to my quarterly payment (could I really have spent it all in advance?), and then I had some bills from Harrods which I thought I would be wise not to open, so I hid the unopened envelopes at the back of my desk and said to myself, “I’ll think of all that later.”

  However I kept thinking of those unopened bills, so to divert my mind from this little awkwardness I took a stroll along the Brompton Road, and I was just drifting past Harrods—of course I never intended to buy a thing—when I saw in the window this dressing table which was quite exquisite and I couldn’t help thinking how ravishing it would look in our bedroom where I’d skimped and saved until it looked no better than a monk’s cell. Frankly, I’m not too keen on monk’s cells. Anyway I bought the dressing table but then I found I couldn’t rest until I’d bought one or two other items to go with it. Well, three or four. Or five or six. What does it matter, the point was that our bedroom suddenly became divinely exciting and I adored it. I knew I’d been naughty but in my opinion the result made my liberality (what a much nicer word that is than extravagance!) worthwhile.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” I said glibly to Robert in the hope of forestalling his complaints. “I’m going to reform.”

  Robert tossed aside his newspaper, stood up and moved to the window to watch the falling snow. He looked very tall, very authoritative and very menacing. Then turning to face me he said, “I had a letter from Harrods yesterday and I’ve decided it would be better for our marriage if I have complete control over our financial affairs. Otherwise quarrels over money will be a recurring feature of our married life.”

  “You mean—”

  “I want your credit account terminated and the income from your trust fund assigned directly to me.”

  Silence.

  “Let me reassure you,” said Robert, pleasant but implacable, “that I intend to be generous in the amount I shall give you to cover the cost of housekeeping and your general expenses.”

  Another silence.

  “So you’ll have no cause for complaint,” said Robert, still speaking in a pleasant voice, “and in fact I’m sure you’ll find such an arrangement will make life much easier for you. The truth is it’s no good expecting a woman to balance a checkbook. The feminine mind is quite unsuited to even the lower forms of financial management.”

  I at once thought of Conor telling me how clever I was as I eked out the housekeeping money to cover his disaster at poker.

  “You were always hopeless with money,” said Robert, slicing through my memories. “Right from the beginning you were always borrowing the odd penny from me to buy extra humbugs and then forgetting to pay me back.”

  “Licorice. I never liked humbugs. And I always paid you back!”

  “No, you didn’t! Oh, I admit you gave me the occasional boiled sweet, but—”

  “I borrowed money from Celia to pay you back!”

  “Exactly. You borrowed from Peter to pay Paul, as the saying goes, and you’re doing exactly the same thing now with appalling results. I’m sorry, Ginette, but my mind’s made up. I’m your husband and I can’t allow this situation to continue.”

  “But Robert—”

  “You want order in your life, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Well, this is it. This is order; this is freedom from chaos. Now run along like a good girl and fetch your bills so that I can see the exact dimensions of your latest mess.”

  “How dare you talk to me like that!”

  “What do you mean? I’m your husband, aren’t I?”

  “That doesn’t give you the right to talk to me as if I were a mentally deficient schoolgirl!”

  “And being my wife doesn’t give you the right to behave like one! Now pull yourself together and face reality. We’re married now, the rules of the game have changed and it’s my absolute moral duty—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “—to look after you in as kind, as considerate and as generous a way as possible, and it’s your absolute moral duty to be loyal and obedient and to do as I say in all matters regarding the welfare of our marriage. I know perfectly well you have an inclination to be strong-willed and independent, but I’m going to be the boss of this marriage, and I think the time has come—”

  “If you talk of drawing lines I shall scream.”

  “—to make it clear exactly what I will and won’t tolerate. Now, I know this is difficult for you. Our old friendship gets in the way here because you can still look at me and see the small boy two years your junior whom you used to order around, but—”

  “What! I never ordered you around! You were ordering me around as soon as you could talk! ‘Ginette, do this, Ginette, do that’—all the time, every day, God knows how I ever stood it—”

  “I’m sorry, I realize women can seldom resist the urge to digress but I must recall you to the subject under discussion. As your husband, I—”

  “Oh, be quiet! You’re not behaving like a husband, you’re behaving like a jailer! Oh, how dare you treat me like this, how dare you—”

  “I’ll tell you exactly why I dare. Because you’re no good with money. Because I’m ultimately responsible for your debts. Because you asked me to stop you getting into messes. Because I care about our marriage and rows such as this are something we have to avoid in the future at all costs.”

  “If you care about our marriage you’ll treat me as an adult woman ought to be treated!”

  “I am,” said Robert.

  I stormed out and slammed the door.

  I’ve married a male monster. Is this a fatal mistake? Not necessarily. Male monsters can often be absolute pets. I’ve flirted with a number of delicious ones in the past and I’ve adored feeling that I’m the only chink in their antifemale armor, but I’ve always thought what a bore they would be as husbands and my God, now I know I was right.

  However I’m not a feminist. I’m enjoying myself much too much being a first-rate woman to want to be a second-rate man, and I’ve no quarrel with the way the world’s arranged. I don’t care whether I have the vote or not. Certainly I would never bother to chain myself to the railings of Number Ten Downing Street; I’m much too busy wondering when I’m going to be invited to dine there. But despite my indifference to feminism there’s one belief I hold very strongly and no one can talk me out of it: women are not born inferior to men. They’re born different, but not inferior. And I resent, deeply resent being treated as if I were something less than a normal human being.

  Why did I never realize Robert could be like this? Because he was playing the game according to the rules and making no attempt to be a
male monster until he became my husband and acquired (he thinks) the right to be one. He did give me inklings, though; I can remember him saying the law was right to class married women with lunatics and children, but I just wrote that off as male arrogance, something to be taken with a pinch of salt. However I can’t take the loss of my income with a pinch of salt. I’ll need a huge indigestion pill to enable me to absorb an outrage like that, but for lack of alternative I’d better start swallowing one.

  Is there really no choice but to acquiesce? I must try to be dispassionate; I must ask myself what the truth of this situation is, and the truth is that Robert is my husband. He can cancel my credit account and if I refuse to assign the income of my trust fund, my life soon won’t be worth living.

  Let me now try digesting that very unpalatable verdict. Well, the first fact which stands out like a sore thumb is that rationally Robert’s right—as usual. I’ve been very naughty and very extravagant. No more using that delightful word “liberality” now; I must confront my problem. I’m not incapable of handling money but I can’t blame Robert for deducing that I am. I should also admit that Robert’s not taking an unusual line here; plenty of husbands refuse to let their wives buy goods on credit, and plenty of husbands refuse to let their wives have checkbooks, and this may even be good for their marriages, particularly if their wives have the brains of a cotton reel.

  Yet the fact remains that although Robert’s logically right he’s emotionally wrong. That trust money is mine. It was left to me—me—by my father. I may be only Mrs. Robert Godwin in the eyes of the world, but to my bank manager I’m still an individual, not merely an extension of my husband—I’m the recipient of those funds, a human being who deserves to be treated with respect, not an idiot wife who can expect no better fate than to be the target of remarks like “the feminine mind is quite unsuited to even the lower forms of financial management.” I have this horrid feeling that if I assign the income from my trust fund there won’t be any me anymore, and I’ll be diminished in some way quite impossible to describe to someone like Robert.

  I feel wretched about this, and not merely because I’m furious with myself for not anticipating the severity of Robert’s reaction. I feel wretched because I know our marriage now has another problem. I can manage; I can cope with a male monster if I have to, but the fact that Robert and I have different notions of what marriage should be like is hardly going to make life easier. I believe marriage should be a partnership aided by a reasonable amount of give-and-take and based on mutual respect and trust. Robert apparently regards it as a variation of a master-servant or parent-child relationship. Why on earth didn’t I realize this before? How can one sleep with a man for six months without discovering this fundamental difference of opinion?

  I blame the old friendship. I assumed we’d jog along on more or less the same lines after we were married. How spine-chilling it was just now when Robert said the rules of the game had changed! He would put it that way, of course. Typical.

  Yes, I’m horrified but never mind, the first year of marriage is notorious for unwelcome revelations, and most partners manage to adjust to the unpleasant home truths in the end. Meanwhile it’s certainly no good prolonging the quarrel. Robert won’t behave as Conor did, seducing me whenever he wanted to get his hands on my money. If Robert doesn’t get what he wants he’ll withdraw from me emotionally, and I couldn’t stand it; I want a loving Robert at my side, not a monster labeled HUSBAND; I want my friend, my companion at the strawberry beds and the loyal confederate who lent me the extra pennies to buy that mouth-watering licorice long ago in Penhale. …

  I really should have given him more boiled sweets in compensation. I might have known that little mistake would catch up with me in the end.

  “I’m sorry I lost my temper, Robert.”

  “I’m sorry if I upset you.”

  “Well, I do realize I’ve been very stupid and I do concede you have the right to cancel my credit account. But the trust fund … Robert, that fund is special to me, it comes from my father, and I’m sorry but I really do think a wife shouldn’t be utterly dependent on her husband for money—”

  “And I think she should be.”

  Another fundamental difference of opinion. I tried not to panic. “I can’t think why,” I said evenly, “we didn’t discuss all this before we were married.”

  “We did. I made it very clear what I thought of your extravagance.”

  “You never said you thought I should be utterly dependent on you financially!”

  “Naturally I had to give you the chance to manage your affairs. I did want to be fair.”

  “If you could give me just one more chance—”

  “No. It would only lead to another scene like this, and I won’t have it. We’re not going to quarrel all over again, are we, Ginette?”

  I shook my head, went to my desk and extracted the hidden bills from Harrods. Then at his dictation I wrote a letter to my bank manager to say that I wished the quarterly income from my trust fund to be paid directly into my husband’s account.

  “Thank you,” said Robert. “Now we need never again have a row about money.”

  I stared in silence at the blotter. I could not bring myself to ask how much he intended to give me each week. I only prayed it would be sufficient and that I wouldn’t have to beg for more.

  Robert was glancing at his watch. “It’ll take me a day or two to survey our expenditure and decide how much you need,” he said, “so we’ll conclude this discussion later. And now if you’ll excuse me I must go to my study and work. I’ve got a lot to do.” And with my checkbook in his pocket he left me on my own in my beautiful but extravagant drawing room.

  Robert’s working much too hard. I had no idea he could be so obsessed with his work. How could I possibly sleep with a man for six months and not realize … But I mustn’t start saying that again. The brutal truth is that a love affair puts the partners on their best behavior. It takes marriage to ensure that all the unpalatable truths come sidling out of the woodwork of the happy home.

  Robert is now rushing off to his chambers in the Temple at six in the morning so that he can work in peace before all the other barristers and clerks arrive to distract him. At first he used to leave without having breakfast but I put a stop to that by conspiring with Bennett.

  Bennett used to be Robert’s man before our marriage, and he’s now our butler, wielding authority with great skill over Cook, the kitchenmaid and the parlormaid. I don’t have a personal maid; they’re usually an awful bore and anyway I learned how to live without one in New York. The trick is not to economize on a laundress and to track down a retired lady’s maid who is willing to come in now and then to attend to the more difficult aspects of hairdressing. I’m good at sewing, thanks to Margaret, so mending presents no problems. When Robert becomes very grand I dare say I shall acquire a maid but meanwhile I manage well enough without one.

  Bennett and I get on well, which is fortunate because valets often lapse into paroxysms of jealousy when their masters acquire wives, and when I told him how worried I was by Robert’s increasingly eccentric working hours, he was sympathetic. Eventually we agreed that he would provide an early breakfast and I would coax Robert to eat it, but the trouble is that since this conversation of mine with Bennett, Robert has lost all interest in food and is eating the early breakfast only in order to keep me quiet.

  Food isn’t the only subject that no longer interests him. After our social engagements have been fulfilled he retires to his study to work into the early hours of the morning, and when he finally comes to bed he sinks instantly into unconsciousness while I’m left lying awake in the dark and wondering what happened to that lover who won his blue at passion.

  Last night I said, “Darling, how long is this peculiar behavior of yours likely to go on?”

  This embarrassed Robert but I’m sure I was right to signal to him that in my opinion he’s carrying professional dedication too far. The entire trouble is thi
s wretched murder case which he jokingly told me he took on in order to pay for the honeymoon. His client is accused of murdering his wife, chopping up the body and distributing it in bags deposited at various left-luggage offices all over London. Robert won’t discuss the case with me so I have no idea whether he thinks his client is innocent or not, but I find the whole affair repulsive and can’t imagine why Robert should find it so all-absorbing—not that he spends all his working hours on this case; he doesn’t. He works so hard in order to keep up with his other cases, but I’m beginning to think that the murder alone is responsible for this sinister aura of fanaticism. It’s the first murder case he’s accepted since I came back into his life from America, and he seems to be turning into someone else altogether.

  Nothing could frighten me more.

  “No, no—stay away from me, stay away!” shouted Robert, and I awoke to find him in the middle of a nightmare.

  “Darling, it’s only a dream—”

  “He was there again, he was coming towards me across the snow—”

  “Who?”

  “Death.” He slumped back exhausted on the pillows.

  I thought: What a vile nightmare. But I judged it tactful to remain silent so after switching on the light I merely slipped my hand into his to comfort him.

  He clasped my fingers tightly and seemed grateful for both the light and the silence, but at last he said, “I seem to be in a mess again but I don’t understand why. I thought I’d be cured once I had you.”

  I was astonished, “Cured of what, Robert?”

  “I’ve got this bloody awful obsession; it’s like a cancer of the personality.”

  “Cancer!”

  “Don’t be idiotic; I’m speaking metaphorically—oh God, I forgot you were terrified of illness—”

  “But what on earth is this obsession of yours?”

  “I’m obsessed with death.”

  There was a pause. We lay there, our hands clasped; and listened to the silence. I tried to speak but nothing happened. I was too revolted.