The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I no longer assured her that I wanted to be cut off. I merely said with truth: “I doubt that we can solve this problem by moving away because wherever we go people would eventually find out we weren’t married, and then the trouble would begin all over again.”

  She said nothing. The silence deepened and suddenly I was so afraid that I could bear it no longer. Grabbing her to me so fiercely that she cried out with shock I shouted, “You mustn’t go away, you mustn’t leave, I won’t let you go, I won’t!”

  She burst into tears again and said she couldn’t. For a while we were silent, embracing each other, but still, as we both knew, nothing had been solved.

  At last I said, “Tell me what I can do to make life more bearable for you. I’ll do anything, anything at all.”

  “Do you truly mean that?”

  “You know I do. I swear it.”

  She whispered, “I want another baby.”

  Conversation ceased again. As I released her and turned away, the silence was broken only by the rain drumming on the windowpane and the fire crackling in the grate.

  “I wouldn’t mind all the difficulties then,” said Bronwen at last. “I’d have someone for Evan to play with, someone who would be there later when … when Evan goes away to school. Rhiannon and Dafydd will leave just as soon as they can, I know that now. They hate it here. I’m so worried about Dafydd that I’m even thinking of asking Gareth’s family if he could board with them and finish his schooling in Cardiff. It would be better. He doesn’t like you, he resents you because of the life we have to lead. … It’s all so upsetting …” She paused but managed to check her tears. Presently she added: “Myfanwy’s offered to have Rhiannon at the farm, and that might be better too. I’d hate it but I’d still see her every day and Rhiannon would be happier It’s Marian, you see. Marian isn’t always very kind.”

  “Oh, Marian’s quite impossible,” I said. “I’m well aware of that.” I began to move around the room.

  “You won’t want another child, of course,” she said, sensing my thoughts. “Why should you? You don’t need one. You have your work, your friends, your weekends at the golf club. You’re not lonely, you’re not isolated, you’re not forced to watch your children growing away from you.”

  “No,” I said, “I’m not. But if we have another baby that means we live openly together, and if you think we have difficulties now, all I can say is that they’re nothing in comparison with the difficulties we’ll have then.”

  “I shan’t mind. If I have another baby I shan’t mind anything, and anyway things couldn’t be worse than they are now.”

  But I thought of Harry and Marian, no longer able to shelter behind the convention that Bronwen was their nanny. “I disagree,” I said.

  Bronwen lost her temper. A terrible interlude followed during which the full range of her misery and despair was finally revealed. She even said that although she was unable to imagine living without me, she was again tempted to emigrate to her cousins in Vancouver.

  “Be quiet!” I shouted, overpowered by panic again as my worst suspicions were confirmed. “Don’t you threaten me like that!”

  “Then let me have a baby!”

  “Oh, stop being so bloody selfish!”

  We were a very long way now from those golden sunsets in St. Ives.

  “You’re the one who’s being bloody selfish—all you can think of is what people will say if we live openly together—you’re just a bloody upper-class snob after all!”

  “Don’t you talk of class to me and don’t you call me a snob either! Have I ever complained that I can’t dine at a civilized hour? Have I ever complained because you won’t use the reception rooms and we have to spend all our time in this bloody bedroom which has come to look just like a bloody working-class parlor?”

  She hit me. Then she screamed that she hated me.

  I sank down on the bed. I was blind with pain but eventually I realized that she was sobbing, clinging to me, begging me to forgive her.

  “For what? I’m the one to blame for your misery. It’s all my fault.” I opened the drawer of the bedside table, removed the contraceptives I kept there and walked to the door.

  “Where are you going?” she said fearfully.

  “To flush these down the lavatory.”

  Our second son was conceived less than a month later.

  II

  The hardest part to bear was the reaction of my family.

  “Good God!” said Robert in disgust. “Is it too late for an abortion?”

  I assume you don’t want any congratulations, scrawled Edmund in reply to my letter, so I won’t offer any.

  Edmund tells me some truly appalling news, scribbled Celia from Heidelberg. I am sorry—heavens above, just think what dearest Mama would have said. …

  “Well, we won’t talk of it,” said my father. “The less said the better. You’ll be quite ruined now, of course, but we’ll pretend I know nothing about it. I don’t want to see Mrs. Morgan or her children anymore. Come to see me as usual on Sundays but only bring Harry and Marian with you.”

  “Christ, John,” said Thomas, “imagine an old hand like you being caught out! What happened? Did the French letter break?”

  There was only one answer I could make to all these comments and I made it. I said, “We wanted the child. It’s not our fault we can’t be married and now we’ve decided to live together without resorting to subterfuge.”

  After that my family somehow managed to preserve a tactful silence but Milly said to me, “You’ll crucify that girl yet, dear. I’m surprised at you. I thought you had more sense.”

  I was so depressed by this comment that although Ginevra had just returned from a visit to London, I avoided Little Oxmoon because I felt unable to face yet another adverse reaction to the news of Bronwen’s pregnancy. But the next morning Ginevra arrived to see us, her arms full of flowers, and Ginevra, brave Ginevra living always with death, cried radiantly, “Darlings—so exciting—another life coming into the world, I adore it!” and after she had kissed us both she looked me straight in the eyes and said, “Let me go back to London as soon as I can to talk to Constance. Let me see if there’s anything I can do.”

  III

  It was by that time the spring of 1927, and London was beginning to seem as remote to me as the moon. I no longer bothered myself with the parliamentary reports in the Times. I had lost interest after the General Strike the previous May. When that fizzled out I knew Britain would never change in my lifetime. There would be no revolution; class would be perpetuated—and this was obviously what the British wanted. People get the government they deserve, and now the Conservatives were firmly back in power.

  I was a divided man again, “cleft in twain,” visiting my estates in Herefordshire, playing the gentleman farmer restlessly at Penhale, writing to my stockbrokers about my investment portfolio—and living like a radical freethinker, defying the society in which I lived and hating its cruel conventions. Driven by the subtle but searing pressures of my divided life, I began to read as I had not read since leaving Oxford: voraciously and compulsively. To escape from the baffling and intractable nature of my problems, I trekked through history, I dabbled in philosophy, I even meddled futilely with religion, but all the time I knew there were no answers, and when Ginevra did go to London to see Constance I knew she had no hope of bringing unity to the two halves of my troubled life.

  “That’s an impossible woman, darling, truly awful,” she said when she returned. “So dreary, no sense of humor and now she’s gone all religious, saying God will punish you for breaking your sacred vows. Then she had the nerve to say: ‘You’re such a loyal and devoted wife—surely you must be on my side!’ How I curbed my hysteria I can’t imagine, but I did manage to point out soberly that loyalty and devotion can’t flourish when the marriage is a prison, and when marriage is a prison it’s no marriage at all. However that cut no ice, of course, and she just said it was her moral duty to be faithful to you until death
: Julie says Constance is wallowing in religion in order to sublimate her sex drive—isn’t that fun! Darling Freud, how did we all live without him in the old days …”

  I thanked her for trying to help and then realized that she had more news, although she was uncertain how to impart it. “I saw Francesca—such a poppet though not much like either of you yet,” she said tentatively at last. “But you should see Edmund’s Richard! Such a look of Lion, really quite extraordinary … oh, and talking of Lion, darling, that reminds me: I saw Daphne in London.”

  “Oh yes?” I said, trying not to sound hostile. I knew Ginevra was fond of Daphne, and at once I could picture them having tea at the Ritz, discussing my situation and trying to work out what on earth could be done to save Marian.

  “I told her,” said Ginevra carefully, “that Harry would stop doing lessons with Kester and go off to prep school this autumn now that he’s eight, and Daphne said she was going to send Elizabeth away this autumn too—to St. Astrith’s in Surrey. Apparently it’s such a good school and the girls have such a jolly time there and Daphne’s sure Elizabeth will adore it—like me Daphne herself hated being educated at home with a governess, so she’s just as keen as I am on boarding school for girls, and … well, suddenly, darling, we had this very exciting idea: why doesn’t Marian go with Elizabeth to St. Astrith’s? You know what friends they are, and it would be such fun for them … and let’s be honest, Johnny, wouldn’t it be better from your point of view as well as Marian’s? I remember how I felt about Declan and Rory when I was first married to Robert. I adored them but whenever they appeared on the scene Robert and I were quite wrecked: I know school was a disaster for Declan, but Rory loved it in the end and it really was the best solution—for everyone.”

  “Yes,” I said. I found I could say nothing else.

  “You’re in favor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I have a word with Marian for you?”

  But I knew I had to tell Marian myself. I thought she might make a fuss, but after allowing herself one grand tantrum during which I was accused of wanting to get rid of her in order to wipe out her mother’s memory, she was prepared to believe I did have her welfare in mind.

  “How nice it’ll be to mix with girls of my own sort at last!” she said satisfied. “All the girls I know at school at the moment are really rather middle-class, you know, Papa, but I’m sure things will be quite different at a lovely posh boarding school. I wonder how many titled girls there’ll be in my form?”

  “Probably none. They’ll all be at home with their governesses.”

  “Divine for them,” said Marian, borrowing as effortlessly from Ginevra’s speech mannerisms as she did from Daphne’s. “But then I don’t suppose they come from homes where the nanny and the master of the house sleep in the same bedroom and have babies without being married.”

  She stood there, not yet twelve years old, blond, blue-eyed and outwardly the picture of innocence. My one thought, as I fought back the desire to strike her, was how horrified Blanche would have been if she could have seen us.

  “I’m afraid I can’t allow you to pass that sort of remark, Marian,” I said politely at last, “and I’m only surprised that you should have seen fit to make it. I would have expected you to shun such vulgarity.”

  “Aunt Daphne thinks it’s a wonder I’m not more vulgar, considering the example I’ve been set.”

  I did not seriously believe that Daphne had passed such a remark in Marian’s presence, but I had no doubt I was hearing an accurate reflection of her sentiments.

  “Marian, is it really your intention to make me very angry?” I said, but I knew it was. Marian was angry herself and wanted the chance to scream and shout at me. However it was not until the baby was born that she egged me into losing my temper.

  The baby was healthy and good-looking for a newborn infant, pink-and-white with dark hair and a soft bloom on his cheeks. We both wanted a Welsh name so Bronwen chose Geraint. Marian said the name was quite ghastly and very common (that was when I lost my temper with her), and Harry said he hated it and would call the baby Gerry instead. We tried to persuade him to retain the hard Welsh G but he refused, and soon we found that our English-speaking acquaintances were following his example.

  “Well, at least he won’t be christened Gerry,” said Bronwen. That was before she realized there would be no christening. Anstey the vicar had christened Evan without a murmur because he had believed him to be Gareth Morgan’s son, but I knew he could not condone my union with Bronwen by christening its patently illegitimate offspring. I did talk to him but Anstey had a stubborn streak beneath his inoffensive manners, and he pointed out that if he were to perform the ceremony the entire population of Penhale would be outraged.

  “Well, if that’s Mr. Anstey’s attitude,” blazed Bronwen, “I don’t want the baby christened at all!”

  “Neither do I,” I said strongly, but I knew she was upset, just as I knew that more upsetting events were sure to follow.

  A stream of abusive anonymous letters were followed by an act of vandalism; someone daubed in red paint on the wall by the gates: BROTHEL—WHORES AND BASTARDS ONLY. Because of my private life I had not volunteered to be a magistrate, but I made sure the bench handed out a stiff sentence when the village constable and I succeeded in tracking down the vandals responsible for the outrage.

  Two maids had to be sacked for insolence but Mrs. Wells stood by us and prevented a collapse within the household. Eventually the village quietened down but by this time the scandal had traveled to the far end of Gower and when I next entered the golfclub bar all conversation abruptly ceased.

  I had become a pariah again. This made me feel particularly bitter because I had been on the point of being offered a directorship in a shipping firm and I knew now the offer would never be made. It made me realize too how much I had been looking forward to returning to the world of commerce. 1927 had turned into another disastrously wet year, and to make matters worse the spring months had been abnormally cold. I saw the ruin of my cereal crop again and I was thoroughly disillusioned with farming.

  In an effort to divert myself from the knowledge that I was trapped in a way of life which was failing to satisfy me, I embarked on a restless search for occupations that would fill my hours of spare time. I arranged for electricity to be installed in the house. Then I studied the subject of electricity so that I would know what to do if the power failed. I read more voraciously than ever. But despite these diversions the time that meant most to me was the time I spent with Robert. I had always called on him every day but now I found myself staying longer because he alone could assuage the loneliness which for Bronwen’s sake I struggled to keep concealed.

  “I despise myself for caring what people think of me,” I said when I told him I had become a pariah again, “but what I care about is not so much being cut off from the company of my own sort but being cut off from any hope of leading a more interesting life in my working hours.”

  “I’ll have a word with Alun,” said Robert. Alun Bryn-Davies had been a contemporary of his at Harrow. “He’s on the board of Suez Petro-Chemicals as well as the Madog Collieries. Maybe he can help.”

  So I lunched with Bryn-Davies at the new Claremont Hotel, and after I had made sure the luncheon was a success, he asked me to play golf with him. Following the game we adjourned to the bar and this time no one cut me; in fact when Bryn-Davies bought me a drink the members realized it was still possible to treat me as normal, and later, when I was offered a directorship of Aswan Products, which was a subsidiary of Suez Petro-Chemicals, they even accepted that I was employable. Yet the directorship was modest, demanding my presence only on one afternoon a week at the company’s headquarters in Swansea, and I still found myself wrestling too often with boredom and frustration.

  “How naive I was,” I said to Robert one day as I spooned up his food for him, “to imagine that Bronwen could solve all my problems. I’m beginning to realize my major problem
is that I’ve never found my true métier.”

  “Your métier,” said Robert, “is organization and making executive decisions. It probably doesn’t matter much what business you wind up in so long as it’s large and challenging.”

  In acknowledgment of the shrewdness of this observation I said depressed, “Well, you always said I was unsuited to a rural backwater, and how right you were.”

  “You’re certainly unsuited for confinement in a rural backwater but that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying you’re unsuited to country life. Ideally, I suspect, you should be able to fuse your country background with your talent for executive management—maybe your true métier is indeed to be a farm manager, but on a large twentieth-century scale.”

  “You mean I should have about ten small estates and roam around supervising them all?”

  “Ten small estates,” said Robert, “or one big one.”

  We fell silent as the image of Oxmoon slipped between us. Food dribbled from his mouth but I quickly mopped it up with a napkin. When I had finished he said, “Can’t you combine managing Penhale Manor with a more active management of your farms in Herefordshire?”

  “Not without leaving Bronwen on her own frequently, and as things stand at present that’s quite impossible.” I tried to change the subject. “But don’t let’s talk of the present,” I said. “Let’s go back into the past.” For we spent much time now talking of the times that were gone, not the near past of the war but the extreme past, the golden past, the fairy-tale past of Edwardian Oxmoon. We talked of the dances in the ballroom and the tennis parties on the lawn and the expeditions to the Downs and the sea and the village shop in Penhale, and although in the past the ten years’ difference in our ages had separated us, we now found that time had encircled us so that his experiences could fuse with mine.

  “ ‘In my beginning is my end,’ ” said Robert.

  “Who said that?”

  “It was the motto of Mary Queen of Scots. My motto would be to reverse those words and say, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ I feel so strongly that when there’s no more future the present fades away and only the past is real.”