The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I looked at Oxmoon and thought, Beauty! Truth! Art! Peace! And Oxmoon seemed to look back with its dark seductive windows and Oxmoon seemed to say to me, At last! The master I’ve been waiting for! And I flung out my arms as if I could embrace it.

  “Well, Kester,” said Uncle John, arriving an hour later, “what have you been doing with yourself?”

  I could hardly tell him I had been lolling in a wicker chair, crying, “Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace!” and mentally embracing my magic house with tears in my eyes.

  “Well …”

  “Time you had another try at learning to ride.”

  “Oh, do I have to?”

  But apparently I did. All masters of Oxmoon had to be able to ride a horse. It was the done thing. (But why bother in the age of the motorcar? I didn’t know and didn’t dare ask.) To my father’s disgust I had hated riding during my first attempt to be an equestrian, but now Uncle John found a pony for me, possibly the most docile pony that had ever been bred in the Gower Peninsula, and when he instructed me himself I was so worried about not doing the done thing that sheer fright alone drove me to master a few elementary skills. I did not fall off. Gradually I became almost fond of my pony and took pictures of him with my new box camera. Uncle John was delighted not only by my riding but also by my aptitude for Welsh (masters of Oxmoon had to be able to understand Welsh; that too was the done thing), and I lived in terror that he might try to improve my cricket, but luckily cricketing skills were not judged essential for a master of Oxmoon so I was spared any torture involving a bat and ball.

  Uncle John did not teach me Welsh himself but he engaged a tutor who came to Oxmoon twice a week from Swansea. Gower, of course, is English-speaking apart from the odd family like the Llewellyns who make a fetish of their Welshness, so it was quite unnecessary for me to learn the language, but it was much more fun than a dead language like Latin and I liked hearing about Welsh history as well. Simon, who was English, had always behaved as if Welsh history didn’t exist. I rather savored the thought that I was learning things Simon didn’t know.

  As I luxuriated in my new home and basked in Uncle John’s favor by doing the done thing with such aplomb, I became aware to my delight that my status had been vastly enhanced in the eyes of the world. Everyone, from the servants to the gentry, fawned on me. After Lady Appleby died there were no longer Applebys at All-Hallows Court (Sir Timothy, a butterfly specialist in Rhodesia, sold it to Dr. Warburton), but the Stourhams, the Bryn-Davieses, the Mowbrays and all the other well-known Gower families dined at Oxmoon and paid my mother lavish compliments about my size, my manners and any other virtue they could dredge up or invent. Fortunately they had no children of my age who could be foisted on me as companions, so to my relief I continued in splendid isolation from my contemporaries. It was true Oswald Stourham’s daughter Belinda was only a year younger than I was, but she was so backward that she could hardly be considered seriously as a playmate. Uncle John tried to interest me in Dr. Warburton’s new stepsons at All-Hallows, but I told him frankly that I considered these children a great bore. Who wanted to play Cowboys and Indians when he could be reading about Richard Hannay and Bulldog Drummond? In my opinion most children simply wasted their childhood on inanities.

  However although I continued to regard my contemporaries with antipathy, their attitude to me became increasingly benign. Marian, who had always been beastly to me, told our cousin Elizabeth, who was visiting Oxmoon with Aunt Daphne: “Yes, he’s much improved—I suppose good breeding always tells in the end,” and shortly after this gracious judgment had been delivered, Harry expressed interest in my stamp collection and invited me to Penhale Manor to see his own album.

  “Marian was right for once,” he said finally after we had made some mutually satisfactory swaps. “You’ve improved. I suppose Papa’s managed to teach you how to be a boy.”

  “I am a boy,” I said coldly. “Uncle John’s simply teaching me how to be master of Oxmoon.”

  My improvement, as it was described so snootily by my cousins, was no doubt real enough and probably sprang from a massive increase in self-confidence. Now that everyone treated me with respect I began to respect myself, and with Uncle John behaving as if nothing could stop me from becoming a true Godwin, I could at last dare to believe that I might be destined for a successful life. My academic reports from Simon became glowing, Uncle John started slipping me the occasional five shillings and my mother even began to boast about me to Rory. Rory and I were equally staggered, and Rory stopped referring to me as a nitwit.

  I even wondered if Declan might begin to curry favor but no word ever reached me from Ireland.

  “However,” I said to Bronwen, “of all my relations—except Mum—I like you the best, because you liked me before I was rich and famous.”

  “You funny little love!” said Bronwen hugging me, and when Evan wanted to follow her example and hug me too I said to him, “And you liked me then as well, didn’t you? You’re my favorite cousin!”

  Evan beamed up at me but when I turned to Bronwen I saw that her eyes shone with tears.

  “Bronwen—”

  “It’s all right, Kester. It’s just that Evan’s so lonely with no one to play with and it means so much when someone’s nice to him.”

  “But I’d love to play with him!” I exclaimed, and soon after that conversation I had the chance to practice what I preached because Evan began to come daily to Oxmoon to share my tutor.

  By that time Evan was six years old and very shy, but I understood all about shyness and ignored it. I read to him. We played dominoes together. I took him on expeditions into the woods by the ruined tower. Soon I saw hero worship glowing in his eyes, and I was touched. I had never been hero-worshiped before and found it a most gratifying experience.

  So as I basked in everyone’s unstinted love and admiration, I would gaze at my fairy-tale palace and think: Kester plus Oxmoon equals bliss but Kester minus Oxmoon equals misery. It was an equation I knew I would never forget, and that was when I knew too that we were bound together, Oxmoon and I, united forever as if married by God—“and those whom God hath joined together,” I said to myself more than once with the most pleasurable romantic fanaticism, “let no man put asunder.”

  IV

  “Is Thomas always like this?” said Aunt Julie when she came to visit us later. “How do you stand it?”

  “I live in the hope,” said my mother, “that he may one day show me his heart of gold. John swears he’s got one.”

  “How deep do you have to sink the mineshaft to get to it?”

  “I’m still sinking. However to give credit where credit is due—what a loathsome exercise that always is!—I have to admit that Thomas does have his good points. He’s got a flair for farming, particularly animal husbandry, he’s businesslike, he’s efficient and John’s convinced he has the makings of a first-class estate manager. John’s training him to manage the Oxmoon farms during Kester’s minority.”

  “Why can’t John do that himself? I should have thought it would be rather up his street.”

  “Oh, John doesn’t want to be too involved with Oxmoon,” said my mother, lighting a cigarette. “He’s too busy accumulating all sorts of business interests in Swansea. As far as I can make out he has only to play a round of golf and another directorship drops into his lap.”

  “That’s because he’s got boardroom as well as bedroom looks!” said Aunt Julie, and they started gurgling together in their usual fashion over the pink gins.

  I sipped my fizzy lemonade (which I now always drank out of a champagne glass) and meditated on the new blot on my sunlit horizon, the new ugly reality which was marring the Truth and Beauty of my fairy tale: Thomas the Tyrant, monster par excellence.

  Thomas was much too unpleasant a character for me to feel sorry for him, but when I was older I could see that his position, when my grandfather died, was an awkward one. He was then twenty-two—old enough to resent that he had no money except the salary Uncl
e John paid him for his work on the Penhale estate, and no home of his own beyond the hospitality that always awaited him at the Manor. He had tried to move back to Oxmoon after my grandfather’s death because he had thought my mother would retire with me to London, and my mother’s decision to be an active mistress of Oxmoon during my minority had infuriated him. In fact he stormed, sulked, ranted and raved to such an extent that Uncle John had been obliged to make a noble gesture in order to appease him; Uncle John not only suggested that Thomas should be trained to run the Oxmoon estate but he also offered Thomas Little Oxmoon as a home and said he could receive the rents from the sheep farm of Martinscombe which was let to tenants. Uncle John was able to do this because of a surprise twist in my father’s will. Instead of leaving Martinscombe Farm and Little Oxmoon to my mother, as everyone had anticipated, my father had left them to Uncle John with the proviso that my mother should be allowed to remain at Little Oxmoon until my grandfather died and I inherited the estate. My father declared in his will that he wanted Uncle John to have his property “as a small token of my respect, admiration and profound gratitude,” and my mother, who had an income of her own as well as various moneys my father had saved, said that no one deserved such a tribute more.

  Uncle John, complex as ever, first of all said he couldn’t possibly accept such a bequest. Then he said maybe acceptance was the easiest way out. Finally he said the whole thing was a great muddle and really, lawyers were the end when they started messing around in their own affairs, and although he was grateful to Robert, it was all most peculiar and embarrassing and he couldn’t think what the right thing to do was. He continued in this vein for some time while my mother and I listened in amazement, but eventually Bronwen sorted him out in her usual down-to-earth fashion by saying, “Johnny, fate’s put Martinscombe and Little Oxmoon into your hands. Don’t worry about how they got there. What’s done’s done. Just look around and see if you can do any good with them.” Bronwen had a genius for seeing the wood from the trees while Uncle John was hopelessly lost in some impenetrable thicket. After she had given her sensible advice Uncle John at once said thunderstruck: “Thomas! I’ll give him a nominal lease just as soon as the bungalow falls vacant!” and that solved the problem of a home for his brother.

  It was reported that Thomas and his cronies did a great deal of hard drinking to celebrate his arrival there, and it was even rumored that girls from Swansea had danced naked on the dining-room table, though since Thomas never had any girlfriends, this mild attempt at debauchery was probably no more than a drunken hallucination. Certainly the drinking was real enough. There was something very old-fashioned about Thomas, whose only ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his forefathers and live a country life in Gower. I often felt he should have been a brutish squire in the days when people daily drank themselves senseless out of sheer boredom, and if anyone ever writes the Godwin family history, I’ve no doubt they’ll turn up one or two eighteenth-century ancestors just like him.

  He had always been hostile to me, but in my new glorious role of master of Oxmoon, with my mother and Uncle John guarding me like twin watchdogs, not even Thomas could afford to display churlishness. He began to say “Hullo!” cheerfully whenever we had the misfortune to meet, and occasionally he would make some oafish remark that could be ranked as a pleasantry. On my thirteenth birthday he even said I could drop the prefix “Uncle” when I addressed him. I was astonished by this concession, but Thomas had by that time fallen in love with Eleanor Stourham and no doubt the prospect of a rich wife had made him mellow. Eleanor was the much older half-sister of my contemporary Belinda, who was the baby of the family at Stourham Hall.

  Bronwen too had a baby girl by this time. She was born at the end of 1931 and named Sian, which I knew was Welsh for Jane. Since Lance was only two, Gerry four and Evan, my admiring acolyte, seven, Bronwen was kept very busy—in fact I often wondered if she was kept too busy, for she looked pale and tired and I heard Uncle John say he was worried about her. There had been a new series of anonymous letters after Sian was born and more nasty messages daubed on the Manor walls. Bronwen was again too afraid to leave the house on her own, but Uncle John used to drive her and the children to Oxmoon so that they could take the baby for walks in the safety of the grounds.

  “You mustn’t worry about it,” I said to Evan, wanting to cheer him up. “The fuss will soon die down and then everything will go on as before.”

  But Evan looked up at me with grave green eyes and said nothing. Evan’s view of the future was already less sanguine than mine.

  Later he began to look forward to going away to school. Harry had spoken to him enthusiastically about Briarwood, and even Bronwen, who had confessed to my mother that she had mixed feelings about boarding schools, had said it would be lovely for him to meet other boys of his own age.

  “Kester,” said Evan once, “why don’t you go to school like Harry?”

  “Well, actually I’m so busy learning how to be master of Oxmoon that I just don’t have the time,” I said airily, but Uncle John had never given up hope of packing me off to school, and as soon as I was twelve in the November of 1931 he began his campaign to persuade my mother to send me to Harrow in the autumn of 1932. By some great mismanagement on my part I failed to eavesdrop on the vital scene (no doubt Uncle John, knowing me all too well by this time, took care to stage it when I was out of the house) but he was so often at Oxmoon in those days that I had no way of distinguishing his vital visits from the trivial ones.

  The truth was that Uncle John was now using Oxmoon as his formal home in order to circumvent the difficulties of the situation at Penhale Manor. After Lance’s birth he decided he could no longer expect people to accept his invitations to the Manor, but since my mother loved to entertain she was able to come to his rescue. Nobody ever refused an invitation to Oxmoon. My mother gave dinner parties, cocktail parties, garden parties—even a dance in the ballroom—and always Uncle John was there to act as host, immaculate in his impeccable clothes and looking, as Aunt Julie once remarked to my mother, the very last man in the world to harbor a socially unacceptable mistress and numerous illegitimate children.

  “Uncle John was here this afternoon, pet,” said my mother soon after my twelfth birthday in 1931.

  Since this was such an unremarkable occurrence I merely grunted and turned a page in my book.

  “He was talking again of toughening you up at school.”

  This horrific news made even the exploits of Ivanhoe fade into mere printed words on a page. “Oh no!” I said aghast. “I thought he’d got over that!”

  “My dear, such a bore but we can’t tell him to mind his own business (a) because he’d be upset and I can’t bear the thought of upsetting him and (b) because it really is his business, and he’s been so marvelous with you since Daddy died that the least we can do in return is consider his point of view.”

  “Mum! You’re wavering!”

  “Well, not exactly—I’d never force you to school against your wishes, but would school really be such a disaster now you’re older? Not everyone there would be like Harry—you might make some friends, and that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either. You’re a bit solitary, darling.”

  “Only because other children seem so boring! I’m mad about grown-ups!”

  “Yes, but I can see why Johnny worries about you. … Listen, pet, if you did go to school I wouldn’t send you to Harrow. I’d send you to a modern enlightened school where they’d encourage all your artistic interests—”

  “Would they allow me at least three hours a day to write?”

  “Well …”

  “I’d cut my throat if I couldn’t write for three hours a day.”

  “But darling, I can’t tell Johnny I’m keeping you at home so that you can scribble in your room! Scribbling’s just not the done thing!”

  “What about Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë?”

  “They weren’t masters of Oxmoon.

  We ar
gued a little longer. Eventually I became so cross that I accused her of wanting to wreck the idyllic life that was absolutely due to me after all my awful early years when no one had cared whether I had lived or died.

  “Well, we won’t talk of that,” said my mother, shifting guiltily in her chair. “That’s over now.”

  “It’s all very well for you to brush it aside in that fashion, but I was miserable and neglected then and I shall be miserable and neglected again if you condemn me to school! And when you’re having a wonderful time at all your sumptuous dinner parties, how will you be able to bear thinking of poor little me, crying night after night into my pillow, bullied, tortured, brutalized—”

  “Oh God,” said my mother.

  I scented victory. “I might even die,” I said, much moved to think of it. “The eldest Brontë sister died at school. And when I die and you’re standing at my grave—”

  “Oh, do shut up, pet, you’ve made your point. But listen, you really do need to be with men—”

  “I am with men—constantly! Uncle John practically lives here and Simon does live here—”

  “That’s true,” said my mother. She puffed furiously at her cigarette. “Actually I’ve always thought you didn’t need to go to school in order to grow up masculine.”

  “I may look sissyish,” I said defiantly. “I suppose I must do since all my most-hated people say so, but I’m very masculine inside my head, I know I am, and when I grow up I shall marry the girl of my dreams and have four children and I’ll be the best master Oxmoon’s ever had.”

  “Darling!” said my mother, folding me in her arms. “I don’t think you look sissyish at all—and no, of course I can’t wreck your happiness by sending you away; you’re such a good boy and you don’t deserve any more misery and I’m going to keep you at home.”

  Uncle John was livid. There were quarrels which took place behind the closed door of the library; I eavesdropped valiantly but could hear next to nothing. An interval followed during which Uncle John stayed away from Oxmoon, but eventually he sued for peace. By Christmas he and my mother were kissing under the mistletoe and all the trouble was over—at least, all my trouble was over.