The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “That wretched child looks like a shrinking violet—cut his hair this minute, Ginette, and stop treating him like a girl.”

  “Shut up, you bloody tyrant, shut up, shut up!”

  My parents’ marriage—if such a word can ever describe such a desperate pain-racked association—was so far from the romantic ideal of what a marriage should be that I came to understand early in life how great a gulf could exist between fantasy and reality—and fantasy, I soon decided, was infinitely the more attractive of the two. I loved fairy tales, particularly the ones where the prince and princess fell blissfully in love and lived happily ever after in the palace of their dreams, and spurred on by my desire to escape from my parents’ bizarre relationship, I learned to read as soon as I could. Then whenever daily life at Little Oxmoon became too frightful I would dive onto my bed and lose myself thankfully between the pages of the most riveting story available.

  I was not alone in this flight from reality. Gradually I came to understand that not only the whole household but all my parents’ friends and relations had joined together in a conspiracy to weave a web of fantasy around the situation at Little Oxmoon. The brutal truth was that my father was dying by inches and that my mother had to spend nine years watching him die, and that truth was so ghastly that those who knew them had to wrap it up in fantasy in order to make my parents bearable people who could be visited or discussed in a normal way. Thus my father became the dying hero of legend, accepting his disaster with a stiff upper lip and unlimited courage, while my mother was transformed into a cross between Florence Nightingale and a Fallen Woman Redeemed by Suffering.

  “What a wonderful marriage! So devoted! Such heroism!” breathed the world in unstinted awe as people locked themselves up in this myth to prevent the full horror of my parents’ ordeal impinging on their sunlit daily lives, but I knew better. I was there, and with the special sensitivity of a child I absorbed every facet of the nightmare, the constant rows, my father’s rages born of frustration and despair, my mother’s drinking and hysteria, the awful nurses who pitter-pattered in and out and gossiped in corners, the wheelchair, the commode, the stench of decay—all the ghastly trappings of that more than ghastly illness. People not only had no idea how much my parents suffered; they did not want to have any idea. Neither did I, but I had no choice. My father became ill soon after I was conceived, and so the moment I was born I was pitched into this atmosphere of inexorable disintegration.

  Yet now, as I look back, I can see that at the heart of this black reality lay the genesis of the legend which people found credible enough to accept. The real truth was that my parents were indeed courageous but their courage lay not in being saintly in the face of adversity (as the world yearned to believe) but in simply struggling on, day after day, and somehow keeping sane. Their devotion to each other, which the world blithely took for granted and which I as a child decided was nonexistent, was in fact, as I now see, very real. It was just that like their courage it was not obviously recognizable. They did not behave as a husband and wife, radiating the traditional marital virtues, but like a brother and sister who were forced to share a nursery under exceptionally trying circumstances, and later I realized that when tragedy had confronted them they had turned for strength not to their marriage, which was of comparatively recent origin, but to the childhood they had shared as cousins at Oxmoon.

  However it took me years to reach this final judgment, and on the day my father died I was merely a child who knew his parents were desperately unhappy and who had prayed night after night for the death which could only be regarded as a liberation. By that time I had no strong feelings about my father. In the past I had dutifully attempted hero worship, but such devotion is hard to sustain unaided and my father gave me no help. At the end of his life he obviously did think more about me but even then his interest was detached, as if I were merely an unexpectedly useful pawn on his private chessboard. He was not interested in me at all; he never made any genuine attempt to find out what sort of person I was, but although I did go through a period of misery when I hated him for his indifference, my mother helped me over that. In fact when I look back on my childhood I can see so clearly how much ghastlier it would have been if I had been deprived of that racy, strong-willed buccaneer of a mother of mine.

  “Oh Lord, pet!” she said briskly when I wept how I hated my father. “Do turn off the waterworks and brace up! Daddy does love you but unfortunately he doesn’t know how to show it because he’s hopeless with children. It’s like you being hopeless at cricket—you try hard but when you keep missing the ball you get cross and lose interest. It’s a question of having the knack, isn’t it? Well, Daddy doesn’t have the knack with you but he can’t help it, it’s just the way he’s made, so you mustn’t mind too much.”

  My mother had the knack.

  My mother was very fat with an enormous bosom and she had flashing brown eyes and a rich purring voice and a come-hither look. Later I decided she looked like the vamp in those marvelous Hollywood Westerns, the lady who goes hipping-and-thighing through the saloon to make all the cowboys drool at the bar. I could picture her with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other as she declaimed Mae West’s immortal line “It’s not the men in my life I like—it’s the life in my men!”

  She didn’t love me half as much as I loved her, but I could see there was some sort of love there, and this was a great consolation to me. When she was in a bad mood I used to hate her as much as I hated my father, but if my mother ever forgot herself so far as to let me know that she considered her unwanted fourth son to be a constant source of irritation, she never failed, once Robin was dead, to make some attempt to compensate me afterwards.

  “Kester, what a beautiful picture you’ve drawn! Darling, what a clever little boy you are and how lucky I am to have you …” All rather exaggerated perhaps, but I was easily appeased and I loved being loved—and God knows, at the start of my life there had been little love circulating in my direction; ever since I could remember the waters of affection in the parental reservoir had been channeled into the canals of adulation that surrounded my brother Robin.

  I have often wondered in retrospect what Robin was really like, but suppose the answer must always be that he died too young to permit any useful analysis of his character. I thought he was a cruel beastly villain, but I was prejudiced. He used to beat me up regularly while Nanny turned a blind eye; how I survived infancy I have no idea, but I was probably assisted by my nursemaid Daisy who let me hide under her bed. No doubt the prosaic truth was that Robin, worshiped by a doting world, was very jealous of me and quite unable to adjust to my arrival in the nursery. There was considerable evidence that he was an infant phenomenon. He could read fluently by the time he was three (this nauseating achievement was regularly drummed into me during my struggles with THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT at the age of four), and if he had lived he would probably have excelled at games as well as academic pursuits. I can remember him skillfully wielding a cricket bat like the perfect little Godwin that he was, but when he was six and I was three and a half, he fell out of a window and, as Cook put it, “sped off to heaven to sit as an angel on the right hand of God.”

  Poor God, I thought with genuine compassion, but I was delighted to have the nursery all to myself and felt sure I would now receive all the doting admiration that had been lavished on Robin. Never had I been more disappointed. I was ignored by everyone except Cook, who was a kindly soul, and my Uncle John, who, anxious to “do the done thing” as usual, arrived to rescue me from the kitchens where I had retreated after the dismissal of Nanny and Daisy. I had shed no tears for Nanny but I had been sorry to lose Daisy and now I did not want to be parted from Cook, but my parents were prostrated and Uncle John thought it best that I should be sent to Stourham Hall at Llangennith. There was a ghastly child there called Belinda, but she had a splendid Nanny who actually kissed me every night before I went to sleep. I was so impressed by this display of affection that in the end
I was almost reluctant to leave Stourham Hall.

  My return home was even worse than I had anticipated because my parents behaved as if they could hardly bear the sight of me. This was standard behavior for my father but I was horrified by my mother’s undisguised aversion, and retreating to the kitchens I clambered onto Cook’s lap and wept copiously against her bosom.

  “Poor little soul!” cried Cook, and added knowingly to Watson the parlormaid: “I expect Madam’s wishing it was him that went to heaven and not Master Robin.”

  I stowed this terrible information far away in the remotest region of my mind, but not long afterwards I concluded some childish tantrum by screaming at my mother: “You hate me because I didn’t get killed—you wish I was the one in heaven instead of Robin!”

  My mother went white. Then she sank down on the nearest chair and burst into tears.

  Naturally I burst into tears as well. I was hysterical with cataclysmic misery. “I’ll go and jump out of the window too!” I sobbed, heading for the window seat. “And when I get to heaven I’ll tell God I’ve come in exchange for Robin, and then you can have Robin back and you need never see me again!”

  My mother gasped, screamed, snatched me back, yanked me into her arms and crushed me so hard against her that I yelped. “You stupid little nincompoop!” she yelled at me. “Killing yourself’s a wicked sin—you’ll end up in hell—you’ll never get to heaven at all!”

  “But at least I’d be dead! Oh, how I wish I was dead!” I cried, but floods of tears overcame me as I visualized myself being roasted by the Devil while Robin went on sitting among the angels, and the next moment my mother too was in floods of tears again and I heard her sobbing, “Oh, God, what a frightful mother I’ve been, oh God forgive me, God help me—” Yet all the while this litany of despair was going on I was snuggling into her arms and feeling much happier because I could see she did care about me even though I fell so far short of the perfection achieved by little Saint Robin.

  After that my mother was so often in my nursery that I almost got sick of the sight of her. However the main result of this incident lay not in her new theatrical displays of affection but in the understanding that developed between us, the understanding that was later manifested in a series of important conversations. My mother not only explained my father’s coldness to me in such a way that my potentially self-destructive hatred was neutralized; she promised me that there was more to life than playing cricket and being a perfect Godwin; she assured me that there was nothing wrong with liking fairy tales or painting pictures or even playing with my secret collection of dolls, which were kept hidden in a box under my bed far from my father’s presence and Uncle John’s conscientiously prying eyes. It was my mother, no slave to convention herself, who helped me believe I was not necessarily doomed to disaster merely because I was the black sheep of the family.

  “Although all the same, Kester,” said my mother just before my father died, “you’re really getting a bit old for dolls now. I won’t take them to the jumble sale just yet, but see if you can’t say goodbye to them nobly, one by one. It would be awfully brave if you could, and I’d admire you enormously.”

  “Oh Mum!” I said, much moved by her patience and tact, “I know I’ll never be as good as Robin, but I promise to make it up to you one day!”

  My mother was greatly irritated. “Lord, Kester, I do wish you wouldn’t dramatize yourself the whole time and make these stupid remarks which always make me want to slap you! You’re just as good as Robin was, but you’re different, that’s all—and that’s good, I’m delighted. I don’t want a second-rate Robin—I want a first-rate Kester, and for once in my life I’ve got what I want!”

  “Oh Mum, that’s so nice of you, so kind; but—”

  “My God, what is it now?”

  “Am I … am I a changeling?”

  “A what?”

  “A changeling. Like in fairy stories and history books. You know—the queen has a baby and it dies and she can’t face the king with the news so her lady-in-waiting gets hold of another baby and smuggles it into the palace in a warming pan—”

  “You read too much,” said my mother. “That’s your trouble. And your imagination’s even more lurid than mine—and that’s saying something! No, pet, don’t be so idiotic! Of course you’re not a changeling! You came out of my tummy and the midwife washed you and wrapped you in a blanket and gave you to me and I said, ‘Very nice indeed! Blue eyes just like his father’s and a little bit of auburn hair just like mine! Thank you, Nurse,’ I said proudly, ‘this will suit very well.’ And then your father came in and he said, ‘Oh, good! A boy for Robin to play with—thank goodness it wasn’t a girl …’ ”

  She went on spinning this fantasy for some time. God only knows what the reality was, but I didn’t care. My mother loved me enough to invent this splendid taradiddle for my benefit, and that was all I needed to know.

  “But Mum,” I said at last when she paused to give her fertile imagination a rest, “if I’m not a changeling, why aren’t I a true Godwin? Why am I so second-rate?”

  My mother’s bosom heaved, her dark eyes flashed and her fury was terrible to behold. “Who says you’re second-rate?”

  Greatly excited by this magnificent display of maternal loyalty, my mind zoomed past frightful Uncle Thomas, beastly Uncle Edmund and brutal brother Rory, zigzagged around stuffy old Uncle John and closed in upon the cousin who had taken Robin’s place at the top of my list of most-hated people.

  “Harry,” I said—not entirely accurately, for Harry had never used the words “second-rate,” but I felt a little inaccuracy was excusable in the circumstances. During our last quarrel he had called me a subhuman idiot who deserved to be laundered, shrunk and kept in a matchbox.

  “Well, you just tell your cousin Harry,” said my mother fiercely, “that you’re twice the Godwin he’ll ever be because both your parents were Godwins—you’re the Godwinest Godwin of them all, and that automatically makes you incapable of being second-rate! You stand up for yourself and don’t be intimidated by that boy just because he thinks going to prep school has given him a license to be bossy and boorish! It’s not his fault he’s such a little troublemaker, of course,” she added hastily, as if she feared she had gone too far by voicing this delectable criticism. “The upbringing’s really been quite impossible, but—well, we won’t go into that. I’m very fond of Bronwen and I won’t hear one word against Johnny and those children will probably turn out all right in the end, but meanwhile there’s certainly room for improvement. Why, I wouldn’t change you for a hundred Harrys! Second-rate indeed! How monstrous!”

  “Oh Mum, you’re so wonderful!” I exclaimed, tears in my eyes.

  “Oh Lord, here we go again!” said my mother exasperated. “Kester, you really must stop being so emotional!”

  “But you’re emotional, Mum! Daddy’s always saying how emotional you are!”

  “Yes, pet, but I’m a woman—women are supposed to be emotional! Men are supposed to be … well, like your father. At least … oh, I do wish you could remember Daddy before he was ill! You’re at a disadvantage there. Well, men are supposed to be like your uncle John—yes, model yourself on Uncle John, darling. Uncle John’s magnificent, so strong and tough, yet so very humane and understanding, and he never cries at funerals and he always does the done thing—well, almost always does the done thing—”

  “But Mum,” I said, driven by the acuteness of my anxiety to interrupt this paean, “the trouble with Uncle John is that he just wants me to be like Harry.”

  “Oh, bother Harry!” said my mother. “Well, I don’t know, Kester, I confess it’s a problem but I’m sure there’s a way you can be perfectly masculine without turning yourself into a replica of Harry.”

  “A replica of Harry—ugh!” I groaned, and then unable to resist wallowing in all the emotion I was supposed to suppress I added: “Oh, Mum, if only you knew how much I loathe that rat—that snake—that villain Harry Godwin …”


  II

  Even if Robin had lived he would have had a hard time outshining Cousin Harry, slinky, slithery, slippery Cousin Harry, glossy in his perfection, the model Godwin. He didn’t look like a Godwin for he was dark, his smooth straight hair ink-black, his narrow nasty eyes velvet-brown, but no one, least of all me, ever doubted that he would grow up to be just as tall and handsome as any self-respecting Godwin had a right to be. I was neither dark nor fair but a mediocre mixture of the two, burdened by springy thick reddish-brown hair which was well-nigh impossible to control, and humiliated by a lily-white skin which gave me the look of a consumptive Victorian heroine. My overall appearance resembled a mutated chrysanthemum. My enormous nose (where on earth had it come from?) I considered little short of a deformity. My one hope was that I would grow up to be tall—not taller than Cousin Harry; that would have been too much to expect but by the time I was eight I had begun to believe I wasn’t doomed to be a dwarf and the thought was comforting to me.

  Perfect Cousin Harry, superbly athletic, excelled at games. From football and cricket to Ping-Pong and croquet, all sport was easy for him. He glittered, he coruscated, he luxuriated in battles which always ended in victory. To make matters worse he had been brought up by Uncle John to display good sportsmanship at all times, so I was even unable to accuse him of arrogance. When he won at Ping-Pong he would always make some gracious remark like “Thanks, old chap. Jolly good game. Bad luck you lost,” but his velvet-brown eyes would harden in contempt before he allowed his thick black lashes to fall like a curtain to conceal his private feelings. Harry and I might fight and quarrel, but never as the result of a game. “Because after all, old chap,” said suave Cousin Harry, “that wouldn’t be sporting, would it? That wouldn’t be the done thing at all.”