The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

“No,” said my father, “Mr. Armstrong telephoned to inquire where you were, and afterwards I telephoned your house and spoke to the children to make sure they were well. Marian said they were so pleased with all your postcards.”

  Unsure what to say next I sat down opposite him, and we faced each other across the writing table. My father, behaving like a model parent, made no attempt to pry or criticize but merely waited for me to confide.

  “I’m supposed to be proposing to Armstrong’s daughter,” I said, “but after three weeks in Cornwall with another woman I don’t see how I can.”

  “When in doubt, don’t,” said my father with what Robert would have described as Welsh hardheadedness and good sense.

  “Yes. Quite.” I was silent.

  “Suppose that would put you in difficulties with Armstrong,” said my father at last, helping me along.

  “Not only me. Edmund.”

  “Edmund’s old enough to fend for himself. And as far as Armstrong’s concerned—”

  “He’s offering me such extraordinary prospects.”

  “Well, I’ve no doubt you can live with the prospects, John. But can you live with the woman?”

  “Oh, she’d be a perfect wife, I’m certain of that.”

  “But if that’s true then what were you doing in Cornwall with someone else?”

  I was unable to reply. My father suddenly leaned across the table. “What good are extraordinary prospects if you can only get them by making yourself miserable?”

  “I’m afraid I’d be even more miserable without them.” Out of his sight, below the surface of the writing table, my fists were clenching. I stared down at them and said, “I’d give up my prospects in London tomorrow if I knew I had prospects here. But Robert tells me I have none.” I raised my eyes to his. “I’ve come to find out whether that’s true. I’ve got to find out, I must know—”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Robert says he’s going to use your old quarrel with him, whatever that was, to insist you leave Oxmoon to Kester. Is that true? Or is it just a story Robert’s invented because he feels it’s his duty to drive me back to London?”

  My father’s face was at once painfully fine-drawn. Several seconds passed before he was able to say: “Robert’s said nothing to me.”

  “But would you make Kester your heir?”

  “Ought to. Tradition. Eldest son to eldest son.” He was now so white that his face had a grayish tinge.

  “But that’s rubbish. There’s no entail. And there’s not even a strict tradition of primogeniture. What about the eighteenth century when Robert Godwin the Renovator took over from the cousin who turned out to be an imbecile? You’re under no obligation at all to leave Oxmoon to Kester!”

  “But if that’s what Robert wants,” said my father, “then that’s what Robert must have. That’s only fair.”

  “Not to me!” I shouted, springing to my feet. Somehow I managed to get a grip on myself. Sinking down in my chair again I said in a level voice, “I’m sorry. Please do forgive me but the main reason I’m so distressed is because I find this quite impossible to understand. If you could only tell me what happened between you and Robert—”

  “I can’t,” whispered my father. “I would if I could, but there are other people involved besides me and Robert, people I can’t possibly betray.”

  I waited till I was sure I had myself well in control. Then I said, “Very well, I’ll say no more.” And leaving him abruptly I returned in desperation to Little Oxmoon.

  X

  “Do you understand, Robert?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you tell me?”

  Silence.

  “If I know,” I said, “I’ll be all right.”

  Another silence.

  “You’ve got to tell me, Robert. You must. You owe it to me. Please—I beg of you—”

  “Yes. Very well. Sit down.”

  I obeyed him. I was rigid with tension and so was he, but his face was expressionless and his voice was unemotional. When I was seated he said, “It concerns Ginevra,” and the name he never used made his statement sound flat and impersonal. “He seduced her when she was sixteen.”

  Some seconds passed. I began to wonder if in my disturbed state I was hallucinating. “I’m sorry, Robert, but obviously you can’t mean what you seem to be meaning. Perhaps if you could be a little more specific—”

  “He fucked her.”

  That was certainly specific. Several more seconds trickled by. Finally I said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “I found out in 1913 when I wanted to marry her. Naturally Mama made sure I knew the truth.”

  “My God. Oh my God, my God—”

  “He wrecked Ginette’s adolescence and in wrecking hers he wrecked mine. Of course after the seduction she was prepared to do anything to stay away from home, and so I lost her because of him—and even later when I got her back the past … soured everything. I wanted to forgive and forget but I never could. I used to look at him and hate him. Sometimes I still do. I came back to Gower because it suited me financially to do so, because I wanted Robin to grow up on the estate and because if one’s going to spend a long time dying one may as well do it in the place one loves best, but that father of ours has been a continuing blight on the landscape. Fortunately he doesn’t come here too often. He knows I prefer him to stay away.”

  “But Robert …” I searched for the words to express my revulsion, and when they eluded me I could only say in despair: “How could he have done such a thing?”

  “Oh, he’s so bloody muddled up he’s capable of anything! Christ, what Mama must have suffered!”

  “Don’t.” I covered my face with my hands. Then I said, “Right. That solves that. Of course there’s nothing else that can possibly be said on the subject. Oxmoon goes to Kester to atone for what Papa did to Ginevra—and to you.” I stood up to go.

  “Promise me,” said Robert, “promise me—”

  “Oh, of course I’ll never tell a soul. That goes without saying.”

  “—promise me you won’t think any the worse of Ginette.”

  “How could I? For the first time I feel I’ve come within a thousand miles of understanding her.” I stooped to cover his hands with mine and said, “I’m very grateful to you, Robert, for telling me. Forgive me for being such a bloody nuisance and putting you through hell.”

  All Robert said was “Make it up to me by proposing to Constance as soon as you arrive in London.”

  But I could not reply.

  XI

  I was in the library of Armstrong’s house on Eaton Walk. Armstrong was shouting at me. He was a heavy man of medium height with silver hair, which gave him a look of spurious distinction, and a mouth like a steel trap. The scene was such a nightmare that I had ceased to be upset and was regarding him with detachment, as if he were a stranger who was determined to embarrass me by making an unpleasant exhibition of his bad manners.

  “… and sure I always knew you’d be the kind of guy who’d keep some woman or other on the side, but Jesus, what a way to behave, leading Constance on, leading me on and then vanishing without trace for three weeks in order to get an ex-mistress out of your system …”

  I let him rant away for a while. When he finally paused for breath I said, “Look, sir, I still admire Constance very much but I’m in a great muddle and I speak with her best interests at heart when I say that I must have more time to consider whether or not I want to marry her.”

  “Your time’s expired, sonny! Marry or quit! What kind of a man do you think I am? I don’t let any man on earth mess me around like this and get away with it!”

  “But—”

  “You want more time? Okay, I’ll give you more time. I’ll give you ten minutes—ten minutes to remind yourself just what a mess you’re proposing to make of your life if you don’t wise up right away. I’ve got friends in this town now. I’ll spread it around that you’re not to be trusted, and then you’ll never get another jo
b that isn’t a dead-end street. As far as Edmund goes, forget it. I can smash up that little romance if I put my mind to it, and Teddy will soon recover and fall in love with someone else. But Constance won’t. Constance is a single-minded, serious girl who’s one hundred percent devoted to you, and that’s why if you jilt her now I’m going to blast you off the map—and don’t think I’d be weak and sentimental just because I’ve been thinking of you as a son! The truth is I can only go on thinking of you as a son now if you marry my daughter, so make up your mind: do you want to be a success in the only way that matters a damn in this world or do you want to be washed up and plowed under before the year’s out? Okay, let me leave you to think about that.” He took out his watch, synchronized it with the clock on the chimney-piece and said, “You’ve got ten minutes starting from now.”

  XII

  “Here I have my standards,” said my mother, “and here I draw the line.”

  I thought: I’ll be all right if I draw the line.

  But I wasn’t sure what line I was supposed to draw or where I was supposed to draw it. My head was throbbing. It was hard to think coherently. I felt as if I were on the brink of madness—but of course I wouldn’t go mad, couldn’t, because I’d draw the line and keep myself sane.

  “You’ll play your cards better than I ever have,” said my father. “I know you will. I know it.”

  I shuddered as I remembered how my father had played his cards. No drawn lines there. I thought of him seducing Ginevra—I thought of blighted lives, of good people suffering—and suddenly as I heard my grandmother screaming and my father shouting about the wages of sin, the past smashed its way into the present again and tore my mind apart with glimpse after glimpse into hell.

  Chaos, anarchy, madness and death—looking down at the cards in my hand I asked myself only how I could play them and survive.

  Oxmoon had gone, I saw that at once. Oxmoon, Wales, a country life—all those cards had been wiped from the pack, and when I looked at the cards which remained I saw LONDON written on them all. Then I tried to imagine Bronwen in London but the possibility was unimaginable. She would be like a lark penned up in a cage. I pictured her cut off from her country, severed from her culture, blaming me for her misery, wishing we had never met. And was I seriously proposing to keep her in London as my mistress while I married Constance to secure my future? Not only was the idea ludicrous—Bronwen would never have debased herself in such a fashion—but it was also unworkable. If I had Bronwen in my life there would be no room for Constance. The marriage would be a sham which I would never be able to sustain.

  Bronwen and Constance were both present in the hand of cards that I had been dealt and one of them would have to be discarded, I could see that, just as I could see that I favored discarding Constance, but if I discarded Constance I discarded London and this was a move I knew I could no longer make. I had to retain London. How else could I compensate myself for what had happened? Robert had said the life Armstrong was offering was the life that was owing to me, and now of course, having lost Oxmoon forever, I could so clearly see that he was right.

  It was time to be honest with myself. To marry out of one’s class was one of the quickest roads to marital misery available. I could instead keep Bronwen discreetly as my mistress, but what sort of life would that be for her? The truth was that I would crucify her if I did marry her and crucify her if I didn’t—and whether or not we were married, I’d crucify myself by terminating all my prospects in London. Bronwen was the most exceptional woman and I loved her but how could I choose any course of action that would ruin us both? To pursue a grand passion without regard for the consequences was the road to self-destruction and catastrophe, that was the truth of it—and that was the truth my grandmother had never been able to face.

  But I was facing it. I was on the rack but I was facing it. I felt as if I were being beaten and brutalized, but I was facing it.

  I drew the line.

  XIII

  That night I wrote to Bronwen. My final draft was completed at dawn.

  I spent a long time trying to decide how to begin the letter. Any endearment, Welsh or English, seemed too cruel in view of what I had to say so in the end I merely plunged into the first sentence without addressing her. I wrote in English: I can’t think how to begin this except to tell you that I love you, but that will only seem a mockery when I tell you also, as I must, that I can’t see you again. I know this will make you unhappy but all I can say is that if I continued to see you I would make you very much unhappier. I’m deeply sorry and wish I could undo all the unhappiness. I see now I was wrong to take you to Cornwall, wrong to treat you so selfishly and wrong to pretend we could have any kind of future together. I loved you so much I couldn’t help myself. But it was wrong.

  I’m now doing what I believe is right and committing myself to my life in London. You’ll realize what this means, so I shan’t explain further. I don’t ask you to understand and I certainly don’t expect you to forgive me, so there’s no need for you to reply to this letter, but I had to tell you my decision before you heard of it from someone else. I shouldn’t close by telling you I love you but in fact that’s all I have left to say.

  I signed the letter JOHN to match both the English words on the paper and my decision to be an Englishman, and posted the letter at once before I could change my mind.

  I did wonder if she would reply, despite my assurance that no reply was necessary, but she never wrote. Later when word reached me that she had returned to Cardiff I sent a check to the Home Farm to be forwarded, but the check found its way back, torn in two, and there was no covering letter.

  My father wrote to me as soon as the engagement was announced. He usually wrote brief colloquial letters which said nothing of importance, but this time he had taken trouble. When I pictured him laboring over several drafts, as he undoubtedly had, and looking up every trying example of English spelling in the dictionary, I was touched—or at least in other circumstances I would have been touched. However after Robert’s revelations I felt so angry that I could barely bring myself to open the envelope.

  My dear John, my father had written. Allow me to congratulate you on your engagement. I am delighted that you should be on the threshold of yet another match which by worldly standards must undoubtedly be judged as splendid. I have heard nothing but good of Miss Armstrong and I hope it will not be long before I can come up to town and have the honor of meeting her.

  However, mindful of your recent confidences to me on the subject of your future, I feel I must add that I have been very worried about you and that my worries are by no means allayed by your good news. I trust you are quite certain that you wish to marry this girl, because if you have any remaining doubts I would most strongly counsel you against marriage. It is the greatest possible mistake to marry in pursuit of worldly ambition alone—as my mother did. Perhaps you might be comforting yourself with the thought that I too married for worldly reasons, and indeed I did marry for money, but I liked your mother so much even before I began to love her. She was so jolly and sensible and I liked the way she made me laugh. Do you like Miss Armstrong? Love can come later but liking won’t. And does she make you laugh? Marriage is often so difficult that one needs to laugh every now and then.

  Please do not take offense at this letter. I am well aware that you are a mature man of thirty-one, and if you have no doubts about your decision I have absolute confidence that it is the right one. I remain ever your most devoted and affectionate father, R.G.

  I thought of him putting my mother through hell by his abuse of Ginevra and setting in motion the chain of events that had deprived me of Oxmoon. In my opinion he was quite unfit to lecture anyone on the necessary ingredients of a happy marriage, And I tore up his letter without rereading it.

  Just before the wedding Robert said uneasily, “Are you still in touch with Mrs. Morgan?”

  “Good God, no,” I said. “That’s all over and I’m completely recovered.”

/>   I knew as I spoke that the words formed the biggest lie of my life, but I knew too that it was quite impossible for me to acknowledge it. My future, the future I had to have in order to be at peace with myself, depended on my ability to forget Bronwen, so I fought against her memory with every ounce of willpower I possessed and day by day, as I battled successfully against the truth, I moved deeper and deeper into my disastrous lie.

  XIV

  Armstrong gave his daughters a sumptuous double wedding on a mild sunny day in December at St. George’s, Hanover Square. It was one of the biggest Society weddings of the year, and after the service the reception for five hundred at Claridges set the seal on the day’s perfection. Guest after guest said what a romantic occasion it was, two ideal weddings between two ideal young couples with all parties blissfully in love.

  “This is the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me,” confided Edmund misty-eyed over the champagne, and he was right: it was. I shook his hand and said how happy I was for him. Overshadowed by his brothers, brutalized by the war, bludgeoned for so many sad years by his melancholy, Edmund at the age of twenty-nine had emerged into the light of a dazzling good fortune. Falling in love had made him vivacious. He sparkled. He made Lion-like “naughty” remarks. Straight-backed, bright-eyed, glowing with health and happiness, he told me I was the best brother a man ever had and he would never forget all I had done for him.

  “… and I’ll be grateful to you till my dying day, and I only hope you’ll be as happy with Constance as I shall be with my wonderful, my divine, my celestial—”

  “Isn’t he gorgeous?” demanded Teddy, appearing from nowhere to gaze up at him in adoration.

  I looked around for Constance but she was on the other side of the room. I felt tired. Acting is an exhausting profession and that day had required a gala performance. It was then that I realized how tired I was going to be in the future. I had told myself that everything would be well after the wedding; I had argued that once the deed was done and no further possibility of escape existed I would be able to relax, accept my situation and enjoy married life for I had become fond of Constance, fond enough to convince myself that I would love her once the strain of the engagement had given way to the relief of matrimony. But now at the reception it occurred to me that matrimony was not going to bring relief. The ordeal was going to go on but with the difference that escape was no longer possible. A door had been locked and I was trapped irrevocably behind it.