The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

II

  Aunt Constance’s father the American millionaire had died three years before his daughter’s reconciliation with her husband, so there had been no obstacle to prevent Uncle John gliding back to work in the Armstrong empire. As Aunt Celia once remarked to my mother, Uncle John always seemed to fall on his feet financially. Aunt Constance saw that he was put in charge of the charitable trusts and given a seat on the board of Armstrong Investments, and presently Uncle John was busy launching a new educational trust which was aimed at giving working-class children a better education. Having resigned his Swansea directorships he soon found himself offered new ones in London, and it was generally assumed he made plenty of money in addition to his private income from his Herefordshire estate. Aunt Constance, as everyone knew, was rich as Croesus in her own right, thanks to the Armstrong fortune, and so, there was certainly no shortage of material comfort in Uncle John’s new life. In fact it would have seemed to any casual observer that he had everything a man could want.

  Unlike Uncle Edmund and Aunt Teddy, who rattled around in a slapdash way between their house in London and their estate in Kent, Uncle John and Aunt Constance adhered to a meticulously planned schedule. Every May Aunt Constance would take Francesca and the governess to Boston to see her American friends and relations. Uncle John refused to cross the Atlantic, as if he feared he might start heading for Vancouver as soon as his feet touched North American soil, but he always took Aunt Constance on her own to the Riviera for two weeks every winter as if to compensate her for this spring absence from her side. The family holiday with Francesca took place in August, when they visited Aunt Daphne in Scotland for the grouse shooting. For the rest of the year they occupied themselves by dining with the right people and visiting the right country houses at weekends. Aunt Constance was good at this. In fact Aunt Constance led the model life of a rich married woman in London. She interested herself in the right charities, patronized the right arts, entertained the right guests and even attended, with Francesca, the right church every Sunday. Uncle John, who otherwise did the done thing as religiously as his wife did, never accompanied them.

  The Armstrong mansion, inherited by Aunt Constance from her father, was a massive cream-colored monstrosity which in Victorian times had been inhabited by an obscure member of Disraeli’s cabinet. Behind the opulent facade the house was a monument to dreariness. Nothing was vulgar; Aunt Constance had weeded out every one of her father’s nouveau-riche excesses, but her scrupulous refurbishings, all technically correct, were somehow, mysteriously, disastrous. Uncle John didn’t care and even if he had he lacked the aesthetic taste which would have stopped that mansion evolving from a vulgar museum into a lifeless stately home. Formal arrangements of flowers were placed to emphasize carefully hung, meticulously lit paintings. Objets d’art were painstakingly grouped according to age and nationality; modern wall-to-wall carpets in dull beige screamed ANACHRONISM to overwhelmed groups of antiques. Some of the paintings were good; there was an excellent portrait by Sargent of Aunt Constance and Aunt Teddy as girls, but there were too many English landscapes featuring cows looking glumly over hedges. My mother thought the entire place was as cheerful as a morgue and often speculated how Uncle John managed to survive there without cutting his throat.

  However Uncle John’s throat showed no sign of damage when he and Aunt Constance received us in the drawing room on that January evening, and there with them we found dear little Francesca who danced up to give me a hug and declared I had to meet her new kitten. My mother had spent some time speculating whether Aunt Constance would produce another child to celebrate her triumphant recapture of Uncle John, but no child had appeared. Aunt Constance was rumored to be disappointed by this, but what Uncle John thought, of course, no one knew.

  At first time slipped by very pleasantly as I chatted to Francesca about her Persian kitten, but at length Francesca’s governess arrived to spirit her away and my temporary reprieve was terminated. A butler resembling an undertaker announced that dinner was served. We descended to the dining room (elephantine banqueting table, grossly overdecorated Gothic sideboard, cows on every wall and a horrified Chippendale mirror reflecting the lot). Valiantly we toiled through mulligatawny soup, poached trout and roast duck while Aunt Constance discussed the financial appreciation of fine art and my mother talked (fruitlessly) of aesthetic values. Finding no common ground here, and no longer able to retreat into a discussion of the Abdication crisis which had been so sadly resolved the previous month, they sought refuge in a consideration of their one mutual passion: Harrods. Uncle John listened politely with half an ear and then, smothering a yawn, embarked with me on a discussion of the Oxmoon estate.

  By the time we had finished pudding (heavy apple charlotte sunk deep in the gloom of a flagellated cream), I had been forced to reveal a woeful ignorance and Uncle John was trying to restrain himself from uttering a criticism that would have soured the remainder of the evening. In the end he merely said, “You really should take more interest, Kester. What I can’t understand is what you do with yourself when you’re at leisure. I know you’re a conscientious student, but surely you must still have a great deal of spare time?”

  “Well …” This was dangerous ground indeed.

  “I’m certain you could find the time to take more interest in the estate. … You’re not still painting pictures, are you?”

  “Oh no, Uncle John!” I said with relief. “I gave up painting years ago!”

  “Good—and does that mean you’ve also stopped scribbling stories?”

  “Uh … well, more or less. … Very occasionally I do pen the odd line or two—”

  “Kester, now you’re seventeen you should put all such childish pursuits behind you and find a more constructive use for your spare time. Let me have a word with Thomas. I really do think you should start having some lessons in estate management.”

  “Uncle John,” I said, blushing as I always did when I tried to oppose him, “I’m sorry but I couldn’t take large doses of Thomas on a regular basis.”

  Uncle John did not ridicule this statement. Now that I was older I was dimly beginning to realize that his power over me was increased because he was capable of being nice. If he had always been thoroughly nasty I could have loathed him without guilt, but unfortunately for me, although I moaned and groaned about him and privately called him a stuffy old bore, I knew I was being ungrateful and hated myself accordingly. The kinder and more understanding he was, the more I hated myself. He could reduce me to pulp merely by a smile and a sympathetic comment. He reduced me to pulp now.

  “I do realize,” he said, “that Thomas isn’t the easiest of men. Very well, I’ll see if I can come up with a better idea.”

  I thought how utterly beastly I was, being so difficult when I had this wonderful uncle who only wanted to be helpful to me. Then I hated him for making me hate myself. In short I was already in a chaotic emotional state even before my true ordeal had begun.

  Meanwhile the women were declining dessert and cheese. Aunt Constance said, “Ginevra, shall we leave the men to their port? I’m just dying to show you the new pearls John gave me for Christmas …” and the next moment the two of them had disappeared in a flurry of silk and satin.

  Uncle John passed me the port decanter as the servants withdrew. “My father never permitted his sons to drink port until they were eighteen,” he said, “but if we’re to talk as if you’re already eighteen perhaps I should now treat you as an eighteen-year-old. Have you ever drunk port before?”

  “No, sir.” I took a sip and hated it.

  He gave a short eloquent lecture on port as he lit a cigar. I found myself taking another sip out of sheer nervousness. Then I decided port wasn’t so bad after all. Declining the cigar he offered me I clutched the stem of my glass and tried to repress the urge to rush upstairs to the drawing room to listen to Aunt Constance discussing the financial appreciation of pearls.

  Uncle John began by talking most kindly and with genuine interest abou
t Anna. We agreed that Hitler’s policy towards Jews was absolutely wrong, we agreed that Jewish people were often charming and cultivated, we agreed that England would be a poorer place without its small Jewish population. We agreed that Anna was a thoroughly nice girl who would undoubtedly make an excellent wife and mother one day. We agreed on everything. By that time I was so nervous that I had finished all my port and was pouring myself a second glass.

  “Your mother tells me you’re anxious to marry Anna when you’re eighteen,” said Uncle John at last, casually tapping aside the ash from his cigar. “You have of course considered the difficulties of marrying out of your religion, your culture and—most vital of all—your class?”

  “Anna and I are above those divisions, sir,” I said boldly. “They don’t seem important to us.”

  “Then may I suggest that they should? Marriage is very, very difficult, Kester, and the divisions I’ve just mentioned can only exacerbate those difficulties. Indeed I think if you were to marry at eighteen they would present an intolerable burden to you—and to Anna too. And you wouldn’t want that, would you, Kester? I’m sure you care enough about her to want to put her welfare above your own.”

  I drank some more port and tried to stop my hand shaking as I replaced the glass on the table.

  “You mustn’t think I’m unsympathetic,” said Uncle John, each kind word a nail in the coffin of my composure. “You make a mistake if you forget that I’m no stranger to powerful emotions—don’t think for one moment that I can’t understand what you’re going through. You’re in love and when one’s in love one loses touch with time. Everything seems eternal yet everything is now, everything is present. I think that’s the most dangerous delusion passion can provide because one can’t conceive of time making any changes; the future is literally unimaginable—yet that doesn’t stop the future from existing, and that doesn’t mean time doesn’t go on ticking away, slowly making changes all the while you believe so passionately that nothing will ever alter.”

  He paused. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him tap the ash from his cigar again. Then he said, “No relationship is immutable. You’re seventeen and in love and time is meaningless to you. But you’ll grow older. You’ll see more of the world. Time will change you almost without you being aware of it, and when you’re thirty years old will you really be the same person as the young man I see before me now? And will your love for Anna have survived these inevitable changes? I think not.”

  “My love for Anna,” I said, “will survive till the end of the world.” The port was warm and fiery now, giving me the courage I so badly needed. I drank a little more.

  “I expressed similar sentiments myself,” said Uncle John, “when I married my first wife. However the truth was I didn’t know what I was talking about. I did genuinely care for Blanche and to this day I remember her with affection and respect, but I was emotionally immature and quite unfit for marriage—as I believe you are at this moment.”

  “But Anna’s the Bronwen of my life, not the Blanche!” I exclaimed passionately, and then realized I had uttered the name forbidden in his presence. Blushing with horror I poured myself a third glass of port and drank half of it straight off. “I’m sorry,” I stammered; “I didn’t mean—”

  “If Anna’s the Bronwen of your life,” said Uncle John steadily, “I feel sorry for you. You’ll have noticed that my relationship with Bronwen hasn’t survived the ravages of time.”

  “But that was only because Aunt Constance wouldn’t—”

  “We’re not here to discuss my past. We’re here to discuss your future. As you’ll have guessed by now, I think it would be a disaster for you to marry someone from an utterly dissimilar background—and a disaster too if you married without previous sexual experience. You’ve never been to bed with anyone, have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yet obviously you feel tempted to go to bed with Anna or you wouldn’t be talking of marriage. Come into the library for a minute. I think you’ve had enough port.”

  Draining my glass I stumbled after him into the hall.

  III

  The library was the best room in the house because Uncle John had exterminated all trace of the Armstrong dreariness by installing his favorite possessions from Penhale Manor. Beyond the large oak desk the matching pair of eighteenth-century bookcases displayed not the leather-bound editions that had once been ordered en masse by Harley Armstrong (they were now serving as wallpaper in a distant morning room) but Uncle John’s own books, which ranged from fishing to Froissart and from Beowulf to John Buchan. This wildly eclectic, curiously unfocused literary taste had recently struck me as being odd. I felt it suggested a spiritual as well as an intellectual restlessness, a ceaseless quest for escape by a disturbed mind from a reality which was inescapable, and perhaps it was then that I became dimly aware for the first time of his extreme complexity. An image took shape in my mind of a man who lived one life but longed for another, a man who said one thing yet did something else, a man who outwardly worshiped order yet inwardly grappled with chaos. But the next moment the impression had vanished; I was still too young to attempt to understand him, and anyway at that moment I had enough complex problems of my own.

  I glanced feverishly around the room in an effort to calm myself. On the shelf above the chimneypiece Victorian bric-à-brac jostled with golf trophies and old family snapshots of my grandparents, my father and Uncle Lion, while on the desk a studio portrait of Harry, looking impossibly handsome, reminded me that at least I had been spared his presence that evening; he was away visiting a friend in Norfolk and was not due home until the last week of the holidays.

  Turning my back on the photograph of perfect Cousin Harry, who was doubtless conducting his private life with matchless efficiency while I bucketed bruised from one hostile relative to the next, I dredged up the strength to resume my battle for independence.

  “Excuse me, Uncle John,” I blurted out, “but I think there’s some sort of misunderstanding here. I don’t want to marry Anna just because I’ve started to feel I’d like to go to bed with her; in fact I don’t particularly want to go to bed with her at all. I want to marry her because we’re soulmates who believe in Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace.” I was by this time, of course, thoroughly drunk.

  “If you don’t want to go to bed with her,” said Uncle John, putting me in the position that I was damned if I did but equally damned if I didn’t, “it would be the height of cruelty to marry her. I think I’d better come down to Swansea to talk to her parents. It’s quite obvious that you two children should be protected from each other.”

  “I didn’t mean—of course I would like to go to bed with her—but that would be the result of being married and not the reason for it—”

  “Sit down, Kester.”

  I sank down on the armchair by the fireplace but Uncle John, clever Uncle John who was well experienced in the art of wielding power, chose to remain standing.

  “Now—” I was very conscious of him towering above me as he rested his hand lightly on the mantelshelf. “—let’s find out what that romantic and emotional mother of yours has told you about the realities of life. Before we go any further we must make sure you know what going to bed with a woman really means.”

  A horrible conversation ensued in which the basic facts of copulation were established beyond dispute. An even more horrible conversation followed when Uncle John proceeded to divide the female half of the human race into categories. Females, I was told, consisted of nice girls, fast girls, married women, kept women, sluts, tarts and the dregs. The last three categories existed only for the dubious benefit of degenerates and/or the working classes who were so desperate to alleviate their boredom and misery that they were incapable of taste and discrimination. However for a young gentleman nice girls were for marriage, fast girls were for flirting with and married women were for seduction. (Kept women were the preserve of older men with money to burn and tedious wives to tolerate.)

&nb
sp; I was warned to be especially careful of fast girls, who could include anyone from an amoral debutante to a foolish housemaid, because they had a disastrous habit of getting pregnant. (There was an embarrassing moment here as we both tried to pretend Cousin Marian couldn’t have been further from our minds.) I was also advised to be wary of married women with bad reputations, because unfortunately venereal disease wasn’t confined to the working classes, and indeed even the purest of married women could contact it from a straying husband. Therefore it was essential that a young man should look after himself at all times, but luckily an item could be purchased which guarded against not only disease but fatherhood as well.

  “A perfect example of how to kill two birds with one stone,” said Uncle John with a humor which for one brief, poignant moment reminded me of the lost hero who had laughed with Bronwen, and added as an afterthought: “I assume you’ve heard of venereal disease?”

  “Oh yes, sir,” I said, lying to preserve my dignity, but I had already realized that this was obviously one of the few subjects which had eluded my genius for eavesdropping. I wished I hadn’t drunk my third glass of port.

  “Do you know what the symptoms are?”

  “Well, actually … no. Not really.”

  Uncle John began to talk of syphilis and gonorrhea. I lasted exactly thirty seconds. Then I stood up, lurched to the fireplace and vomited all over the grate. How I failed to put out the fire I’ll never know.

  To make matters infinitely worse Uncle John was so nice to me. If he had lost his temper and roared that I was a squeamish idiot I could somehow have made a dignified recovery, but to my horror he was kindness personified.

  “My dear Kester, forgive me—please believe I meant well and only wanted to help—”

  I recoiled from him. I felt as if my nose were being rubbed in the mud. I wanted my dignity, I wanted my independence, I wanted to behave like a man and yet here I was, crying in front of him like a child, utterly humiliated, thoroughly sickened and feeling absolutely defiled by everything that had been said. I wanted to think of Anna to steady myself but I was too afraid of contaminating our perfect love by my new sordid insight into the sheer frightfulness of the adult world.