The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  Judicious expenditure might have been sufficient to make the house charming, but the estate required both brains and hard work to master and I spent long hours pondering on the problems it represented. It was not a large estate. There were less than three hundred acres attached to the Home Farm, which lay a mile from the house, but the land had been indifferently farmed by a succession of inadequate bailiffs, with the result that when I took over the farm it was little better than derelict. Much capital investment was required, but that raised no difficulty; I had only to sell off some land in Herefordshire to finance my schemes. Meanwhile I had resolved to manage the land myself with the help of a foreman whom I would install at the Home Farmhouse, and my father, much pleased by this decision, offered to inspect the land with me in order to determine what should be done.

  Having grown up on a thriving estate I had a good general idea of what farming involved, but I had no practical experience of farm management so I knew it was crucial that I found the right foreman. Delighted as I was that my father should be interested in my plans, I thought his enthusiasm would pall if I kept running to him for help when things went wrong, and I was just wondering how I could find the agricultural sage that I needed when my father, who must have feared my inexperience as much as I did, offered me the services of his foreman at Daxworth; apparently the man was ambitious enough to fancy the idea of transferring to a semiderelict farm which would test his skills to the utmost, and certainly I was willing enough to consider him. He was a Welshman from Carmarthen called Meredith, and he was two years my senior. We met, liked each other, shook hands—and in that brief commonplace gesture I sealed his fate, and although neither of us guessed it, he sealed mine.

  However when we first met we did not think in melodramatic terms such as fate because we were much too busy considering my decision to gamble on the new opportunities offered by motor transport. The remoteness of Gower before the war meant that cattle breeding was the type of farming favored and that crops were grown primarily for winter feeding, but with improved communications other avenues of farming could now be explored.

  I decided to continue with the cattle breeding but expand the growth of crops so that the farm would produce a surplus which could be transported by motor lorry to Swansea for sale. Endless cogitation then ensued about which crops would be best to grow, not only for sale but to feed the cattle during the winter. Did I or did I not grow mangolds? How profitable were swedes? What were the pros and cons of potatoes? How much clover should be grown? I became so absorbed with these vital questions that I could hardly tear myself away to inspect my new lorry, but soon my father and I were indulging our passion for mechanics as we examined the lorry’s huge engine together. My father enjoyed himself immensely. He told me more than once how happy he was that I had returned to Gower, and I assured him how delighted I was to be back. After each meeting we parted in a haze of gratification.

  Meanwhile Blanche was settling down well and involving herself in village life. She kept saying how kind my mother was to her and how lucky she was to have such a helpful affectionate mother-in-law. I was deeply pleased. I knew my mother had always approved of Blanche but it was very satisfactory to learn that she also found her so congenial. My mother had never cared for Ginevra and I knew my parents had been disappointed by Robert’s marriage.

  “I think we’re doing well, sir,” said my foreman, Huw Meredith, in the spring of 1921, and I answered, thinking not only of the farm but of my place in my parents’ affections, “Yes, we certainly are.”

  That was before the quarrel and immediately afterwards I was besieged with problems, as if fate had decided to dent my pardonable complacency. First of all we had a problem with a stockman who drank too much and had to be dismissed. Then I had a row with my cousin Emrys Llewellyn, whose sheep had trampled across one of my fields with disastrous results for the crop; he claimed that de Bracy had granted him a right-of-way over the field in the Nineties, but when I asked for the legal evidence of the easement I was informed that none existed. My cousin told me he had merely taken the word of a gentleman although, he added sourly as he looked me up and down, in his opinion all gentlemen farmers, particularly English gentlemen farmers, ought to be abolished and their land redistributed.

  Until that moment the conversation had been conducted in English, for nowadays, apart from the occasional remark in Welsh to my father, this was the only language I permitted myself to speak, but Llewellyn’s gibe made me forget that any betrayal of my Welshness was like a declaration of kinship with my grandmother. I told him in his own language that I was just as Welsh as he was and that he spoke out of jealousy because he secretly wished he himself had been brought up at Oxmoon instead of in his commonplace rural hovel. His jaw sagged at my command of Welsh but he recovered, and for some time we shouted at each other in a thoroughly un-English fashion until he called my grandfather a drunken bastard and I called his grandfather a bloody peasant and we almost came to blows. Fortunately he then started talking about “Aunt Gwyneth the Harlot,” and this reminder of my grandmother pulled me to my senses. I told him in English to keep his sheep off my land and said that if he failed to do so I would sue him. Then I retired, still in a towering rage, to the Home Farm to consult Huw Meredith.

  The hour had come. It was eleven o’clock on the morning of July the eighteenth, 1921, and my perfect life with my perfect family in my perfect world was finally about to unravel.

  II

  The farmhouse was about two hundred years old, a square little building of faded brick with a slate roof. There was no garden in the English manner, merely a vegetable patch on one side of the house and some grass shaded by an oak tree in the front. The farmyard lay at the back, and as I halted my Sunbeam abruptly, I saw two children peeping out of the hayloft above the stables. This surprised me. Meredith was married but childless. I remembered that the new stockman had progeny but could think of no reason why they should be playing at the farm.

  As usual I entered the house by the back door. In the kitchen Mrs. Meredith was scolding the local servant girl, but when I came in she broke off with a smile and told me her husband had just departed for Standing-Stone Field, where Llewellyn’s sheep had been running riot. I said I would go and catch him up. As I turned back to the door I added, “Who are your visitors?”

  “My sister’s here from Cardiff with her children. Ah, here she is! Bronwen, this is Mr. Godwin, whom we talk so much about! Mr. Godwin, this is my sister, Mrs. Morgan.”

  I glanced over my shoulder at the woman who had entered the room, and instantly I knew I had to make a crucial decision: either she was ugly or she was beautiful. I decided that she was ugly. She was pale and thin, with garish red hair which was scraped back from her face into a bun.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Morgan.”

  She murmured something which ended in “sir” and bobbed a brief awkward curtsy, which indicated she had been in service. Her voice was heavily accented like her sister’s but gruffer, somewhat harsh. I thought it most unattractive and found it hard to believe that dark, plump, loquacious Mrs. Meredith, whose vivacity made her pretty, could have such a pallid unprepossessing sister.

  Excusing myself I retreated to the farmyard. The children were no longer visible in the hayloft but I could hear their laughter in the distance, and as I paused for no reason except that I could not remember why I had wanted to see Meredith so urgently, Mrs. Meredith’s voice drifted towards me through the open kitchen window nearby.

  She came from a Welsh-speaking area of South Wales, and now she had reverted to her native tongue.

  “Yes, he’s such a handsome gentleman, isn’t he, and he has this beautiful wife, such a lovely lady, so sweet and kind and unaffected …”

  I walked away.

  Three minutes later I had caught up with Meredith in Willow Lane and was giving myself the pleasure of railing against Emrys Llewellyn to a thoroughly sympathetic audience.

  Meredith was the best kind of Welshman, quick,
industrious and with cultural tastes that would have put an Englishman of a similar class to shame. In truth they even put me to shame, for although I myself was by no means uninterested in intellectual subjects I was still suffering from a reaction to my exhausting labors at Oxford, and nowadays I seldom opened a book more demanding than an Edgar Wallace thriller. Naturally I did not disclose these Philistine’s tastes to Meredith. He believed an Oxford education represented a passport to a perpetual intellectual Elysium, and I had no intention of disillusioning him.

  “Emrys Llewellyn’s reminding me of Pip’s sister in Great Expectations,” he commented brightly. “Always on the rampage.”

  I racked my brains to cap this reference and managed to say, “Well, he’s made a mistake if he thinks I’m going to be as passive as Joe Gargery.” I hastened to divert him from literature. “And talking of sisters, is Mrs. Morgan staying long with you?”

  “Till her husband gets back from the sea. He didn’t leave her enough money and the poor girl’s been turned out of her rooms.”

  “How very unpleasant for her.”

  I dismissed Mrs. Morgan from my mind but three days later I saw her in Penhale. I was driving back from Llangennith where Oswald Stourham, an old crony of my father’s, had been trying unsuccessfully to sell me a horse, and as I passed through Penhale I saw Mrs. Morgan and her children leaving the village stores. She was carrying two full baskets and looked paler than ever.

  I was a gentleman. Though disinclined to burden myself with the company of an inarticulate working-class woman, I drew up the car and offered her a lift.

  She reddened in embarrassment. Indeed she was so overcome with confusion that she was unable to open the door, so suppressing a sigh of impatience I got out to help her. Her little boy shot into the back seat with great excitement but the little girl lingered shyly by her mother.

  “What’s your name?” I said to the child when they were all settled in the back seat.

  “Rhiannon.”

  “Rhiannon!” I remembered the fairy tales spun by a succession of Welsh nursemaids long ago. “After the heroine in the Mabinogion?”

  “No, after my grandmother in Cardiff.”

  I laughed. Mrs. Morgan smiled. I noticed that although she had the true Celtic skin, so white that it was almost translucent, the bridge of her nose was peppered with freckles. Reminding myself that I had always found freckles unattractive, I returned to the driving seat.

  “And what’s your name?” I said to the little boy as I drove off, but he failed to reply.

  “Dafydd doesn’t speak much English yet,” said Mrs. Morgan. “He’s only four and hasn’t started school.”

  “Ah, I see. Do you like motors, Dafydd?” I said in Welsh, and glancing in the driver’s mirror I saw the woman stir in surprise as she realized I spoke her language.

  The little boy said yes, he loved motors but he had never ridden in one before, he had only ridden on a motorbus in Cardiff and on a train to Swansea and in a wagonette to Penhale. I asked him if he had enjoyed the train journey, but before he could reply the little girl said to me, “You speak English like an Englishman and yet you speak Welsh just like we do.”

  “I’m somewhat like a parrot. When. I hear strange sounds I find it easy to copy them.”

  “You don’t look like a parrot,” said Dafydd.

  We all laughed. I noticed that Mrs. Morgan had very white, very even teeth. I wondered if they were false. The dental condition of the working classes was notorious.

  Passing the gateway of the Manor we traveled another hundred yards down the lane before swinging off onto the cart track that led to the farm.

  “And how old are you, Rhiannon?”

  “Six.”

  “Say ‘sir,’ ” whispered her mother. “He’s a gentleman.”

  “My daughter’s nearly six,” I said. “Perhaps you can come to tea in the nursery someday and meet her.”

  Mrs. Morgan said in a rush, “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Godwin, indeed it is, but of course we couldn’t presume—”

  “Nonsense, Marian’s always complaining that she has no little girls to play with.” I felt irritated by her humility but at the same time I realized that I would have been even more irritated if she had failed to be humble.

  We reached the farmyard. As soon as I opened the door of the back seat the children scampered away, the little girl thanking me in a very well-mannered way for the ride, and I was able to lean into the car to draw out the heavy shopping baskets. Mrs. Morgan then emerged awkwardly onto the running board; setting down the baskets, I turned to offer her assistance.

  “Thank you, sir.” Her hand grated against mine. The palm was clammy. It was a hot day, and I was conscious of the heat as we stood there in the sun. Mrs. Morgan was wearing a straw hat which concealed her ugly red hair and shadowed her pallid face as she glanced down at the baskets. “Thank you,” she murmured again, and when she looked up at me the sun shone in her eyes.

  They were bright green in the brilliant light. I was reminded of the color of the sea by the Rhossili cliffs on a midsummer day. It was an extraordinary color, most unnatural.

  I found I was still holding her hand.

  I dropped it.

  “Good day, Mrs. Morgan.”

  “Good day, Mr. Godwin.” As she turned aside, her face immediately fell into shadow and I could see again how nondescript she was. I returned once more to the driver’s seat. She was already walking away with the baskets, but as I drove off I saw in the mirror that she had paused to stare after me. For a second her slim solitary figure remained silhouetted not against the farm buildings but, mysteriously, against some uncharted landscape in my mind, but the second passed and the next moment I told myself it had been forgotten. Treading hard on the accelerator I drove at a breakneck speed down the cart track and hurtled up the lane to the comforting familiarity of my home.

  III

  “We had such a nice nursery tea today,” said Blanche a week later as she put on her diamond earrings. She was wearing a white satin gown and her dark hair was coiled into an elaborate knot on the top of her head. That night we were due to dine at Oxmoon to celebrate Edmund’s twenty-seventh birthday.

  “Nursery tea?” I said vaguely as I wandered in from my dressing room.

  “Mrs. Morgan came with her children—what a good idea of yours that was! Marian enjoyed herself so much, and Nanny said afterwards how very well behaved Rhiannon was for a little girl of her class—and you know how discriminating Nanny is! But I wasn’t surprised the children were well behaved because Mrs. Morgan is a most superior girl, as my dear Mama used to say, so quiet and dignified and polite.”

  “I’m glad the visit was a success. I must say, I did have second thoughts after I’d issued the invitation.”

  “Oh, I don’t think these social differences matter much when children are young, darling. … There! I’m ready and we must go. Do you have Edmund’s present?”

  I retrieved the book on rose growing, which had been beautifully wrapped by Blanche in lemon-colored paper, and five minutes later we set off for Oxmoon. It was a dull summer evening, murky and cool, and Oxmoon had a moody look as I turned the car into the drive. Though built to conform to the classical conventions of architecture popular in the eighteenth century, it somehow contrived to hint that a wild unorthodox streak lurked behind its severe well-disciplined facade, and as I stared at it I thought again, as I had thought so often before: Oxmoon the enigma, the joker in the pack. Then suddenly in a bizarre moment of self-knowledge I realized I was seeing not the house but my own reflection in stone and glass. I was the enigma, the joker in the Godwin pack, and beneath my conventional English manners lay the Welsh stranger I was too afraid to know.

  Edmund came out of the house to greet us. He was looking a trifle more animated than usual but still less than half alive, and once more I was acutely aware that the war had divided me from him, just as it had severed me forever from Lion. I had been becalmed on the Home Front whi
le Edmund had been brutalized in the Front Line, and now an abyss of chaotic emotion lay scrupulously concealed between us; our conversations represented the nadir of social banality.

  “Hullo, old chap. Happy birthday and all that rot.”

  “Thanks. I say, what a beautiful parcel! Almost too good to open!”

  Edmund had a square face with pale blue slightly protuberant eyes and pale brown thinning hair. He had put on weight since he had been invalided home in 1918 but although his limp was now barely perceptible and his general health had improved, he made no effort to leave home. Mild, vague and chronically indecisive, he drifted from one bout of melancholy to the next, so I was particularly relieved to find that evening that he seemed to be in good spirits. Whenever I saw how damaged Edmund was, I hardly knew how to endure my guilt as a noncombatant. Egged on by Robert, who had never known a day’s uncertainty over his decision to remain on the Home Front, I had allowed myself to be persuaded that it was my duty to stay in my exempt position at the Foreign Office, but I had spent the war in such a miserable muddle that several times I had found myself wishing I could have died on the Somme with Lion. My guilt was one of the reasons why the Foreign Office had become intolerable to me; I had felt so debilitated by my self-disgust that I had wanted only to make a fresh start in a world where no one would look at me askance.

  “Daphne wrote to wish me many happy returns,” Edmund was saying, uncannily mentioning our sister-in-law as if he knew I was remembering Lion dying on the Somme. “She’s coming to stay here next month with Elizabeth.”

  “How lovely!” exclaimed Blanche. “Marian will be thrilled! Isn’t that good news, John?”

  I agreed, although in fact I did not care for Daphne, who was one of those bouncy gushing Society girls dedicated to a vacuous life. I had heard from friends in London that she had become rather fast, but I had taken care not to mention this to Blanche.