The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  The door opened as my father reentered the room. “Margaret—”

  “I’m all right now,” said my mother. “I’m better. And so’s John. I’m sure he’s willing to drink a lot of black coffee, and so there’s no need for him to leave yet.” She rose to her feet, she squared her shoulders, she set her mouth in its familiar determined line. “We must all go to the drawing room,” she said, “and we must all keep up appearances. Whatever happens that’s always the right thing—indeed the only thing—to do.”

  V

  “Are you all right, darling?” said Blanche, in our bedroom later. “When Thomas returned to the drawing room he mentioned something about a quarrel.”

  “Oh, that was nothing, just a little difference of opinion.”

  I was so anxious to put an end to these questions and so overwhelmed by my desire to forget, for a few precious minutes, the hellish evening I had just endured that I started to claim my marital rights while the light was still burning. Blanche never complained about anything I did but this time she did whisper, “Darling—the candle,” and I had the grace to mutter, “Oh, God, I’m sorry” before I clumsily extinguished the flame.

  I had once heard up at Oxford that a surfeit of alcohol damages a man’s performance in bed, but all I can say is that exactly the opposite now happened to me. Under cover of darkness I stripped off my pajamas and almost asked Blanche to remove her nightdress, but fortunately I had not drunk four cups of black coffee in vain, and I somehow managed to restrain myself. Then I found I was obsessed by the desire to prolong the episode beyond five minutes. Usually I tried to restrict myself to three or four. I also had other desires which are without doubt better left unrecorded. I was appalled by myself but at the same time hopelessly engulfed in pleasure. Blanche tolerated it all like a saint, God knows how. I loved her so much for her tolerance that I finally, after an interval which I fear was at least ten minutes, managed to conclude the episode and spare her further embarrassment. Pleasure ended. Self-hatred and guilt began. I begged her to forgive me, but she said she loved me so nothing mattered. At that point my alcoholic excesses caught up with me and I sank mercifully into unconsciousness.

  I dreamed I was a dog chained up in a backyard but someone was calling to me from a long way away and suddenly I longed to be free. Slipping my collar I sprang over the wall of the yard, and there ahead of me was a vast space where Edmund’s voice echoed, “I think it’s that attractive girl with the red hair.”

  Then a rope encircled me and began hauling me back to my kennel. An anxious little voice kept saying, “John! John!” but I took no notice because John was no longer my name. I was Johnny again, Welsh-speaking Johnny who got into scrapes with Lion and lived adventurously at Oxmoon. I could see Oxmoon clearly now and it was Welsh, all of it, every brick beneath the creeper, every slate upon the roof.

  “John, wake up! Darling, it’s three o’clock in the morning and the telephone’s going on and on and on—”

  I scrambled back over the wall, pounded to my kennel, dragged the collar of my Englishness over my head and woke up. Pain immediately shot through my head and made me gasp. My mouth was desert-dry. Far away in the hall the telephone was shrilling like a demon.

  “Good God, who the hell can that be?” I woke up further, apologized for my language and crawled out of bed. To my horror I realized that I was stark naked. I groped frantically for my pajamas as Blanche lit the candle.

  “I’ll go,” Blanche said, seeing that I was hopelessly befuddled, and slipped out of bed.

  “Lord, I’m sorry.” I struggled into my discarded pajama trousers and plunged next door for my dressing gown. I was then delayed because I thought I was going to vomit. A stream of embarrassing memories threatened to overwhelm me but I shut them out, and when vomiting proved impossible I raced to the head of the stairs just as the demonic bell ceased to ring in the hall.

  “Penhale three,” said Blanche anxiously. “Who is it, please?”

  I hurried down the stairs. During the pause that followed I saw her become rigid with shock. “Oh, Edmund,” I heard her whisper. “Edmund …”

  I was beside her. The phone was cold as I seized it from her hands.

  “… and there’s no doubt about it,” said Edmund’s frantic voice at the other end of the wire. “She’s dead, Blanche, Mama’s dead—oh Christ Almighty, what in God’s name will happen to us all now?”

  3

  I

  OXMOON WAS IN, DARKNESS. My headlamps raked the opaqueness of the night and shone on the black windows. When I emerged from the car the darkness seemed suffocating. There was no moon and the distant woods formed a sinister mass beneath the sky.

  The front door opened. Edmund stumbled down the steps.

  “Johnny—” The old nursery name trembled on his lips, and I did not need to see his face to know that the semblance of normality which he had assumed for the dinner party had been destroyed.

  “Where’s Papa?”

  “Upstairs—with her.” He began to sob.

  “Tell me exactly what happened.” I grabbed the lamp from his hand and led the way into the house.

  “Papa woke me. He’d just come back from Mrs. Straker. He asked me to telephone Warburton because he thought Mama was ill. He was so odd that I went with him to their room, and of course as soon as I saw her I realized—”

  “Yes. Very well, telephone Warburton. Telephone Robert. Wake Bayliss. Get dressed.” I headed for the stairs.

  “I can’t,” whispered Edmund. “I can’t.” He was crying again. “Oh Johnny, I did so want to make it up to her, and now I never shall—”

  “Make what up to her?”

  “The fact that I survived instead of Lion.”

  I recoiled from him. Then I said savagely, “Don’t talk such rubbish. I’m sure she was only too glad you weren’t both killed,” and I rushed up the stairs to escape. On the landing I looked back and saw that he had sunk down on the bottom step and was weeping helplessly, a pathetic figure in his faded dressing gown. Guilt gnawed me. I wanted to console him but I knew my father must come first.

  I reached my parents’ room and tried the handle but the door was locked, and although I banged on the panels there was no response. Visions of suicide gripped me. Lighting one of the candles arrayed on the landing table, I stumbled down the corridor to the door of my father’s dressing room. It opened. With lightning speed I moved to the door that led into the main chamber.

  “Papa!” The childish name which even in adult life none of us had had any inclination to change suddenly sounded ridiculous. I thought of my contemporaries who referred to their fathers with antipathy as “the governor,” but my father had never been a mere figurehead at the top of the family dining table. I saw him as he had appeared to me in the early years of my childhood, tall and tranquil, gentle yet authoritative, a golden double image of father and hero.

  “Papa!” I shouted. “It’s John! Let me in!”

  The key clicked in the lock. The door swung wide. The old memory disintegrated as I faced the complex stranger I feared.

  He was fully dressed and unmarked by grief. His eyes were a brilliant empty blue.

  “Not so much noise,” he whispered disapprovingly. “Your mother’s asleep.”

  I groped for my diplomatic skills. “I heard Mama was unwell,” I said, obediently keeping my voice low. “Perhaps I could see her for a moment.”

  “Did Edmund telephone Warburton?”

  A reassuring affirmative seemed necessary. “Yes,” I said, and edged my way into the room. All the candles had been lit, and I could clearly see my mother in bed, her head tilted to one side, her hair gray against the pillows.

  “I found her like that,” said my father, “when I came home. After all the guests had gone, I walked to Penhale and visited Milly. Have you met Mrs. Straker, John? I can’t remember.”

  “No. I was in London during that brief time she was employed at Oxmoon.” My mother’s face was pulled down on one side. I kne
w she was dead but to make sure I carefully reached for her wrist. There was no pulse.

  “Milly’s husband was killed at Jutland,” said my father. “He came from these parts and he met Milly in London—a wartime romance—they didn’t have long together. After he was killed she had no money so she came down to Swansea to stay with his sister and she worked in a munitions factory, awful it must have been, I don’t know how these modern women do it. But after the war she went back into service. A wonderfully efficient parlormaid she was—Margaret said she was the best we’d ever had. ‘Straker’s got the brains to be a housekeeper,’ she said; I can clearly remember her saying that. Margaret was sorry she had to dismiss her after only three months, but there we are. Got to stick to the rules. Terrible things happen to people who fail to stick to the rules.”

  On the dressing table lay the jet brooch which my mother had worn that evening. Opening the jewel box, I put the brooch away.

  “I closed her eyes,” whispered my father. “I didn’t think it was right that she should sleep with her eyes open, like a sleepwalker.”

  I took a deep breath. “Papa …” I began but it was no use. Speech was too difficult. I waited, then tried again. “Papa, I’m afraid there’s nothing Warburton can do.”

  “Nonsense, he’s a very clever doctor and so good with Robert. Make sure you tell him how cold she is. I held her in my arms to warm her up but it was no use so she’ll have to have an injection.”

  I waited again before saying, “Come downstairs with me and I’ll fetch you some brandy.”

  “Oh, I never drink brandy,” said my father firmly, but allowing himself to be led from the room. “Never. My father used to start drinking brandy after breakfast and he’d be dead drunk by noon. But when he was sober he was the most charming fellow, I wish Margaret could have met him, but of course he died before I knew her. She met Bryn-Davies. He was nice to her, much nicer than my mother was. My mother wasn’t kind to Margaret, such a mistake, Margaret never forgot. I was very fond of my mother, though, devoted to her, and Bryn-Davies was the most remarkable fellow in his way. A pity about Bryn-Davies, but I made amends by befriending his son and helping him marry that heiress, although luckily Owain the Younger’s not in the least like his father, and anyway he was a victim just as I was so it was easy to be friends with him. Of course he never knew the truth. I just told him it was a little accident with the tide tables.”

  We were on the landing. Down in the hall, Edmund dragged himself to his feet and looked up at us. His face was blotched with weeping.

  “Yes,” said my father meditatively, “Margaret was the one who thought of the tide tables, but as soon as she mentioned them I saw it was the right thing—the only thing—to do. Margaret always knows what the right thing to do is. That’s why I couldn’t possibly live without her. You do see that, don’t you, John? I couldn’t live without Margaret. Impossible. You must explain that to Warburton, but doctors are so clever nowadays and Warburton’s such a delightful chap and I’m sure he’ll know just what to do.”

  “Edmund,” I said, “take Papa to the library and sit with him while I make the telephone calls. I’ll wake Bayliss and ask him to make tea.”

  “Oh, I don’t want tea,” said my father. “I want champagne. Ask Bayliss to bring a bottle from the cellar.”

  I could see that Edmund was about to lapse into hysteria, so I said crisply, “Very well” and led them to the library. My father at once began to tell Edmund the well-worn family legend of how he had found the means of saving Oxmoon as the result of encountering a rat chewing a candle on the library table.

  “… and I flung book after book at the bloody rat before I succeeded in killing him, and then when I went to the space on the shelves where the books had been I found my grandfather’s records showing exactly how he had managed the estate …”

  Returning to the hall I unhooked the telephone and began the lengthy task of recalling the postmistress to the village switchboard.

  II

  Ginevra answered the telephone at Little Oxmoon. I wanted to tell her that my father was demented, but since I knew the postmistress was eavesdropping with an excitement that just failed to be breathless, I confined myself to the fact of my mother’s death. I had expected Ginevra to become hysterical, but to my surprise although she was shocked she remained calm. She said she and Robert would be at Oxmoon within half an hour.

  With relief I then summoned Warburton, but afterwards I found I was too exhausted to wake Bayliss. Taking the cellar key from the board in the butler’s pantry I retrieved a bottle of champagne and headed for the dining room where the glasses were kept in the sideboard. While there I helped myself to a double brandy from the decanter. I remembered hearing at Oxford that the best cure for a hangover was another drink, but this was the first time I had been obliged to put this repellent piece of folklore to the test.

  In the library I found my father telling Edmund all about his courtship of my mother.

  “… and her father was a wonderful old tyrant, no manners or breeding but a great personality, called a spade a spade and stood no nonsense. He’d built that pottery business up from nothing, and he was in Swansea because he wanted to explore the possibility of shipping china clay across the Bristol Channel from Cornwall. All the copper ore used to come that way in the old days to be smelted. Anyway he was out drinking somewhere and feeling fed up with the Welsh when he ran across Bryn-Davies, who had just sold some sheep at the market for a great price and was celebrating in his usual way. Well, they got on like a house on fire and Bryn-Davies invited him to Oxmoon—Bryn-Davies was master by that time—and as soon as Mr. Stubbs saw Oxmoon he realized he had an opportunity to marry one of his daughters into the gentry—”

  “Do you want some champagne, Edmund?”

  Edmund said, “No. Whisky,” and disappeared in search of it.

  “—and of course he thought Ethel would do, she was the eldest, but I didn’t fancy her, she was stuck-up, pretentious, I knew she’d be a bore. The younger girl May was only fourteen so she didn’t count. That left your mother but that was all right because she was down-to-earth and sensible and I liked the way she laughed. Afterwards, after Bryn-Davies had drowned and my mother was in the asylum, Margaret and I stood in the ruined hall at Oxmoon and I said, ‘I want to hear you laugh.’ She said, ‘My God, what a thing to say at a time like this!’ and sure enough we both laughed. And later I said, ‘In the future we’re going to laugh all the time, I’m going to make you happy even if it’s the last thing I ever do,’ and years later when we held our first ball at Oxmoon I gave her a red rose and we drank champagne, just as we’d promised ourselves we would, and then we opened the first dance beneath all those glittering chandeliers while the orchestra played ‘The Blue Danube.’ ”

  “Here’s your champagne, Papa.”

  “Thank you, John. Delightful! Yes … I can remember Ginevra dancing to that tune years later, how terrible it was about Ginevra, but Margaret says we mustn’t talk of that anymore. Dear me, John, you don’t look at all well! Here—take this glass you brought for Edmund and have a little champagne—yes, I insist! Do you good. There you are. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Ginevra. Yes, it was terrible when Robert married her, terrible how he cut himself off from us, but I accepted it, it was retribution. Margaret didn’t accept it, though, Margaret hated it, blamed Ginevra, but poor Ginevra, I didn’t blame her, Margaret’s so hard sometimes, but never mind, Robert’s always uncommon civil to me, he makes such an effort that I think perhaps he might still be a little fond of me after all … Sorry, did you say something?”

  “I said, ‘You’re not making sense.’ ”

  “Am I upsetting you? Well, we won’t talk about it. We must never talk of things that upset us—I said that to Oswald Stourham after that tart of a second wife of his had run off with the American sailor. All he could do was sob ‘Belinda’ into his brandy, but I told him to stop thinking about her, wipe her clean out of his mind and then he’d be all rig
ht. He shouldn’t have remarried so soon after his first wife’s death—and of course he shouldn’t have married a girl young enough to be his daughter, silly old chap, a platinum blonde, I knew it would never do. Margaret didn’t even want to receive her but I said Oswald was one of my oldest friends and I had to stand by him … Where are you going?”

  “I must just see what’s happened to Edmund,” I said, and escaped.

  In the dining room Edmund had emptied the whisky decanter and was seated sobbing at the table.

  “Edmund, you’ve got to pull yourself together—”

  “Fuck you, why the bleeding hell can’t you leave me bleeding fucking alone?” bawled Edmund in the language of the trenches, and tried to hit me.

  I retreated, paced up and down the hall, looked in on my father, listened to some more disconnected monologue and then escaped again to the front doorstep, where I spent some time peering into the dark. At last I heard the sound of a motor. Robert or Warburton? I waited, straining my eyes to pierce the gloom, and finally recognized the old Talbot which my father had ceded to Ginevra after buying his new Bentley. Leaving the front door open, I returned to the library.

  “Papa, Robert’s here.”

  “Robert! But what a wonderful surprise!” He sprang to his feet. “Get another glass from the dining room!”

  “Papa, you mustn’t—you can’t go on pretending like this—”

  “Don’t argue—if Robert’s come all the way from London he must certainly be offered champagne!”

  My nerve snapped. I pushed past him into the hall just as Ginevra, white and tired in a black coat, hurried through the open front door.

  “Johnny—can you give Bennett a hand with the chair … Bobby—darling—I’m so very sorry—”

  I ran outside. Bennett had helped Robert into the chair and was standing beside him at the foot of the steps.