The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Darling,” said my mother, “I never for one moment doubted that you would!” Her bosom rose with maternal pride. “Sit down, pet, and tell me all about her.”

  My mother looked a little anxious when I reported that Anna was Jewish, but said quickly that she had met many charming Jewish people when she had been living in New York. As I rattled on I could almost hear her purring with pleasure.

  “Wait till I tell John!” was her final comment. “This proves a boy can be educated at home and still be normal!”

  “Oh, but this has nothing to do with sex,” I said hastily. “I like this girl so much that I’d like her even if she were a boy. It’s a meeting of the minds—bodies just don’t come into it.”

  “Quite right too at your age,” said my mother. “I wholeheartedly approve.”

  So did Dr. and Mrs. Steinberg, who must have raised their eyebrows when informed by their daughter that she had been picked up in a tea shop by the master of Oxmoon. After Mrs. Steinberg and my mother had cautiously ratified my invitation by telephone, all three Steinbergs arrived at Oxmoon in their Armstrong-Siddeley; no doubt Dr. and Mrs. Steinberg wanted to make quite sure that Anna was in no danger of being whisked into white slavery. My mother insisted that they all stayed to tea and the obligatory tour of the house and grounds followed, but finally Anna and I managed to snatch quarter of an hour alone together in the music room, where I played her as many sides as possible of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Every time I turned over the record we paused to discuss how tragic life was. I was in bliss.

  My bliss was then terminated by Anna’s departure, but was resumed a week later when I went to tea at the Steinbergs’ modest but comfortable new house high up on one of the hills above the city. (“One of the nicer new middle-class areas,” said my mother to arch-snob Aunt Celia.) Anna said that from upstairs there was a view of Swansea Bay but as I never went upstairs I never saw it. I heard that in these forbidden quarters there were three bedrooms, a maid’s room, a box room and a bathroom. Downstairs there was a long room which ran from the front of the house to the back and was called a “lounge”; drawing-room furniture was arranged at one end of the room and dining-room furniture was kept at the other, while sliding doors divided the room into two whenever necessary. (Mrs. Steinberg always insisted that the doors should be kept open six inches if Anna and I retreated to talk on our own.) The rest of the ground floor consisted of a kitchen, a cloakroom under the stairs and Dr. Steinberg’s study; his surgery was built on at the side of the house and had a separate entrance by the garage. There was a tiny garden which Mrs. Steinberg had made pretty. I thought Anna had a splendid little home and decided that contrary to what I had always heard from my family it must be great fun to belong to the middle classes.

  “But oh, how I love Oxmoon!” said Anna. “I think it’s better than any castle at Zenda!”

  “Well, Mum and I have improved it a bit,” I said, “but when I come of age I’m going to make it a monument to Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace.”

  We had long since agreed that Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace were the only things that mattered in the world. In fact we agreed on everything, and having found the perfect friend I was in such ecstasy that I even survived the ghastly Godwin Christmas reunion without feeling emotionally flattened. In the new year Anna came to lunch at Oxmoon and we had an enthralling debate on God as we walked over Harding’s Down. By the time we returned home we had agreed that God definitely existed and that the proof of this lay in the finest forms of art which represented man’s struggle to reach upwards to an immortal perfection.

  “In other words,” said Anna, “through Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace it’s possible to know God.”

  “Well … glimpse Him, perhaps. Actually the Christian mystics were divided on whether it was possible to know God at all.”

  “Who were the Christian mystics?”

  “Well, there was a wonderful down-to-earth motherly woman called Julian of Norwich, and there was the author of the book called The Cloud of Unknowing, which I think is the most marvelous title …”

  We began to discuss marvelous titles. Of course there was no question of interrupting these earnest intellectual conversations in order to hold hands.

  The following week I had lunch with her at her home, but then the moment came when I had to say goodbye to her for eleven weeks. Anna attended boarding school at Eastbourne. The spring term was about to begin.

  I wrote long, long letters twice, sometimes three times a week. So did she. Somehow we survived until the end of March and suddenly it was spring, Anna was arriving on the Swansea bus and we were walking down the road to Oxmoon, a large red umbrella sheltering us from the romantically misty drizzle. More visits were exchanged, and at the end of the holidays I summoned all my courage to ask Mrs. Steinberg if I could take Anna to the cinema.

  “A matinée, of course,” said Mrs. Steinberg.

  “Oh yes!” I said, horrified that I could have been suspected of favoring anything so sinister as an evening performance.

  Permission was granted. We went to the Plaza, and armed with a box of chocolates we settled down in the front row of the dress circle to enjoy Clive of India.

  Halfway through the breathtaking Battle of Plassey, Anna whispered to me, “Isn’t it exciting?”.

  “Thrilling!”

  She sighed, I sighed and overwhelmed by the sheer drama of our mutual enjoyment I grabbed her hand. It was the most breathtaking moment in all my fifteen and a half years. Her fingers gripped mine shyly—that may sound like a contradiction in terms, but her initial warm response was at once followed by a slackening of pressure, as if she feared she was being too forward—and for one fleeting moment, as my body became locked into the most extraordinary chain of physical reactions, I had a glimpse of a future which embraced rather more than matinees at the cinema and theological ruminations on Harding’s Down. I dropped her hand as if it were a hot cake but then decided I liked hot cakes. God knows what the rest of the film was about. I was too delirious to care.

  The abominable summer term began soon afterwards and lasted twelve weeks, each week seeming as long as a decade. One day in Swansea after a visit to the Library I was passing a jeweler’s shop off Wind Street on my way to the Blue Rabbit when I saw a little locket displayed. It was Victorian but I was prepared to overlook that because the silver heart was engraved romantically with roses. I counted my pocket money, an idle exercise since I knew I could afford the purchase, but Uncle John was forever lecturing me about the evils of extravagance and if I counted my money carefully before each rash expenditure it gave me the illusion that I was being prudent.

  In fact I was becoming rather tired of Uncle John lecturing me about money. Someone who glides around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce should keep his thoughts on financial extravagance to himself, and besides, I was aggrieved because I considered my allowance was too small. Refusing to raise it Uncle John had pronounced that I should learn to manage money by finding out how I could best husband my resources, but I thought this was mean and was constantly yearning for the glorious financial independence of my eighteenth birthday.

  I gave Anna the locket and afterwards she wore it always. Everyone thought this was very touching, particularly my mother who was behaving well about Anna even though she couldn’t resist referring a little too often to “Kester’s girlfriend” during conversations with the family.

  “Well, personally, Ginevra,” said Aunt Celia, “I don’t see why you should be quite so smug about such an unsuitable friendship. I shouldn’t care at all for Erika making friends with someone Jewish.”

  “Don’t worry, Celia darling,” said my mother. “I’m sure anyone Jewish would think twice before they tried to make friends with Erika.”

  My mother was very tired of Aunt Celia by that time. She had finally managed to ease Aunt Celia from Oxmoon to Little Oxmoon (vacant since Thomas’s promotion to Penhale Manor), but Aunt Celia, whose favorite occupation was talking of tr
ivialities, was always turning up at Oxmoon for a gossip. This greatly irritated my mother, who was a busy woman, but some spark of compassion for poor old Aunt Celia gave her superhuman patience, and she usually managed to keep her temper.

  Meanwhile Erika was improving. Her English was better, her figure was slimmer and in a formal awkward way we tolerated each other’s company. She became more tolerable after Anna and I had launched a Be Nice to Erika campaign. Anna said it must have been horrid for Erika to have had to leave her home in Germany, and even more horrid to have a father who had run off with a Hungarian.

  “And imagine having a mother like Aunt Celia!” I added, still seething that my friendship with Anna should have been dismissed so waspishly as “unsuitable.”

  Erika was fourteen and had two years to fill in before she could go to finishing school, but Aunt Celia had dithered about her education, hiring a governess but dismissing her, sending Erika to a private school in Swansea but then removing her because Erika disliked it. Finally Aunt Celia asked Simon to tutor Erika in English literature and history, and Simon, driven on by my mother, found he had no choice but to agree. His reluctance arose because he already had his hands full in the schoolroom; not only did he have to prepare me for the school-certificate examinations, but he also had to coach Ricky for Oxford.

  “Warwick Mowbray’s an eligible young man,” said Aunt Celia, who spent most of her time sizing up young men as potential husbands for Erika. I think she had even sized me up before I had been so “louche” as to acquire a Jewish girlfriend.

  “Christ!” said anti-Semitic, fascist Thomas halfway through the summer holidays. “Is Kester still seeing that German Jewess?”

  At first I thought Thomas and Aunt Celia were the only people who could possibly disapprove of my friendship with Anna, but as the summer passed I realized there were other people who looked askance at my situation.

  “Write to me at Oxford,” said Ricky, “but do try not to mention Anna more than ten times per letter, there’s a good chap. I hate to say it, but I’m becoming simply flagellated by ennui as soon as I hear the hallowed name.”

  “You mustn’t let Anna put you off your work,” said Simon when we resumed lessons in September. “Perhaps we could have fewer letters to Eastbourne and more time spent in study?”

  Finally in December shortly before Anna was due home, Uncle John said to me, “You’re a little young to single out one special girl for attention, Kester. Perhaps you should try seeing other girls as well.”

  “Oh, let him be, John!” said my mother good-naturedly. “They’re not getting up to any mischief! It’s just an innocent romantic friendship and I think it’s splendid!”

  Uncle John merely looked at her as if he could not believe she could be quite so foolish. I was becoming very tired now of this stuffy Uncle John who had emerged, like some malign butterfly from a tainted chrysalis, after his reconciliation with Aunt Constance. Fortunately he seldom came to Oxmoon, but when he did he always made me ride out with him to visit my tenants and he always gave me boring lectures about how it was my moral duty to take an interest in their welfare. This annoyed me. I was fully prepared to take an interest but not when it was so unappetizingly described as my moral duty. In fact when the tenants united that November to protest against a rise in rents I coped so well, riding out to meet them and promising that all their demands would be met, that my mother proudly declared I had proved myself a true chip off the Godwin block, but Uncle John said I had no business making rash promises and that the tenants’ demands should be the subject of a prolonged negotiation. He then proceeded to wreck my liberal and humane tour de force by revising the settlement in a most conservative and autocratic manner.

  I was now sixteen years old, quite old enough to resent having my authority undermined in such a fashion, although not quite bold enough to tell him so to his face. For Uncle John, grave intimidating Uncle John, was no longer the man who had laughed and joked with Bronwen. Proud, dignified and impeccably correct, he would demolish my self-confidence merely by raising an eyebrow; in his presence I became a little boy again, and I hated it. By this time I was six feet tall and still growing. I had irregular but thrilling encounters with a razor. My voice had finished breaking and, by one of those curious quirks of heredity, was now as deep as Uncle John’s. (Harry was a tenor.) In short I was almost grown up, and every time Uncle John glided down to Oxmoon in his Rolls-Royce to treat me like a child, I was livid.

  I was particularly maddened when he suggested I should stage some form of retreat from Anna because by that time I was working myself into a frenzy as I planned my first kiss. Anna was coming to lunch on Christmas Eve, and the only problem was where to hang the vital mistletoe. I tried out half a dozen places before settling for the doorway of the music room, where the gramophone was kept, and then I shaved, dressed in my best suit and tried not to chew my fingernails while I waited. Eternity passed. The Steinbergs arrived. Detaching Anna, I hustled her down the corridor to the music room.

  “Gosh, look at the mistletoe!” said Anna, forestalling my carefully prepared remark about the stunning relevance to modern life of ancient pagan customs. “How pretty!”

  I muttered some wild inanity like “Got to kiss—no choice,” and for one infinitely precious second my lips touched her cheek before I sprang aside and headed dazed for the gramophone. My euphoria was so overpowering that the “Ode to joy” section of Beethoven’s Ninth nearly wound up smashed on the floor.

  “My mother thinks I’m seeing too much of you,” said Anna at the end of the Easter holidays.

  “Has she been talking to Uncle John?”

  “Heavens, no, she wouldn’t dare! She thinks he’s sure to disapprove of us.”

  “Well, he might, but if Uncle John was anti-Semitic he’d never, never show it. It wouldn’t be the done thing.”

  “I wasn’t just referring to us being Jewish. I meant that he’d disapprove of us for being foreign and middle-class and having only one live-in maid and not enough lawn for a tennis court.”

  “But that’s ludicrous! Who’s going to choose their friends according to the size of their lawns?”

  “Mutti thinks you will in the end. She says it’ll all end in tears and you’ll fall in love with some smart aristocratic English girl who’s been presented at court—”

  “Like Cousin Marian. God, what an awful fate!”

  “—and anyway, she thinks I ought to start being nice to Lester Feinstein.”

  “Lester who? Oh, you mean that wet rag I met at your house the other day!”

  “Yes, but he’s Jewish and I’m supposed to like him—it’s the done thing, as you’d say—”

  “This is exactly the sort of adult madness which makes one wonder if it really is worth growing up. As far as I’m concerned all men are equal—Christians and Jews, the County families and the middle classes, the aristocrats and the workers—and if they’re not equal they ought to be!”

  “Yes, I know and I do so agree, but meanwhile, what am I going to say to my mother about Lester Feinstein?”

  We resolved to placate all these demented adults by behaving even more immaculately than before, and for some time after that we slaved away at being spotless. I took trouble with Mrs. Steinberg and gave her flowers on her birthday. (That was the end of her preference for Lester Feinstein.) I invited the Steinbergs to dine at Oxmoon with the more rational members of my family (Uncle Edmund, who would cheerfully have dined with cannibals if the claret was good, and Aunt Teddy, who always radiated a splendid American tolerance). Apart from her parents Anna had no relatives in Wales, but I did meet some of the Steinbergs’ friends and tried hard to give a good impression.

  This behavior was all very admirable and our critics were duly soothed but being spotless is a very boring occupation and to console ourselves we fell into clandestine habits which we confided to no one. That summer I wrote to her every day, although I told everyone I was still writing only twice a week. I sent her sonnets, boo
ks, sweets and cuttings from The New Statesman. She sent back inspiring excerpts from The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and pressed wild flowers which she had gathered during walks on Beachy Head. When the holidays eventually came, we fell into the habit of organizing secret trysts so that no one would guess we met almost every day. Gallons of fizzy lemonade were consumed in countless tea shops. We haunted the Market; we languished beneath the castle walls, we wandered along Wind Street, we meandered up and down Kilvey Hill, we met in the Library, the Royal Institution, outside the Grand Theatre, at the conservatory in Victoria Park. When we had more time to spare we took the Mumbles Railway around the curve of Swansea Bay or the bus to Rhossili where we could walk hand in hand along the romantic lonely beach. Once we even clambered across the Shipway to the Worm’s Head, and as we gazed dreamily into the beautiful rock pools I told her how my great-grandmother’s lover, Owain Bryn-Davies, had met his tragic fate more than fifty years before when the Worm’s Head had been almost unknown and the Gower Peninsula had been a mere secret wilderness beyond Swansea.

  “A grand passion!” said Anna. “How thrilling!”

  That seemed a good moment to kiss her so I did. I only kissed her very occasionally, however, because I was nervous of displaying some gross physical reaction which would have alarmed Anna and marred the perfection of our friendship.

  Before she went back to school I gave her a red rose and told her I loved her. We were in the summerhouse at Oxmoon, and when Anna blushed I thought it was the most romantic place, a haven which might have been specially designed for two people who had to hide their love from a tiresome and thoroughly unsympathetic world.

  Two months later I was seventeen, and it was soon after this, when Anna returned for the Christmas holidays, that I began to talk casually of marriage.

  First of all I made remarks like “Later when we’re married we can go to London every month,” and when she gave no hint that marriage was unthinkable to her, I became bolder and began to speculate whether we could have two weddings, one in a church and one in a synagogue. This was heady stuff indeed, and driven on by the urge to bring our dreams closer to reality, I borrowed some money from my mother to buy Anna an antique garnet ring for Christmas. She said she would wear it secretly until we made our engagement public, and at that point we began to wonder when we dared make the announcement. We knew everyone would say we were too young, and although I did not tell her, I trembled at the thought of Uncle John.