The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “You’ve got to be. Mum can’t. She can’t bear to think that the great love of her life ended in tragedy, and every time she tries to speak of my father the tragic memories overwhelm her.”

  It was September. My mother and I had at last retreated from Scotland to London so that she could raid Harrods and assault the auction rooms, but before she could get into her stride we had bumped into an old American friend of hers who had immediately invited her to a nightclub. This was not an unusual occurrence; my mother often met old friends who took her to nightclubs, but this man was much younger than she was and looked like a vulgar version of Clark Gable, and I at once decided such an outing would be most improper.

  “You ought to think of your reputation, Mum,” I said severely later as we returned to the hotel. “I mean, I understand that you wouldn’t do anything vile, but other people might think—” I stopped. It had occurred to me for the first time that other people might be right. To my horror, I realized that my mother fell into the Uncle John category of Married Women (subdivision Merry Widows) and—bearing in mind her self-confessed enthusiasm for copulation—might well be capable of considerable iniquity.

  Misery overwhelmed me. The world suddenly seemed quite unbearable. “I want to go back to Oxmoon,” I said.

  “Oh pet, do buck up and stop being such a blight on the landscape! I know—I’ll ring Julie. Perhaps she can take you out to dinner and cheer you up.”

  I protested with dignity that I was perfectly capable of spending the evening on my own, but I was secretly pleased. After all, Aunt Julie was a real person, not just a cipher in one of Uncle John’s revolting categories, and that meant I didn’t have to shy away from her for fear she might have some sinister purpose in view. She also happened to understand all about the importance of Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace, although this for the moment seemed barely relevant; for me now the most vital fact about Aunt Julie was that she had known my father in the days before he became ill.

  “Be honest with me, Aunt Julie.”

  “Very well. But that means I must start by saying I didn’t like him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t like women. Don’t misunderstand; he was sexually normal—your mother would hardly have been attracted to him if he wasn’t—but I always thought he loved her not because she was a woman but in spite of it.”

  This was so alarming that I said the first thing that came into my head. “But he did love her, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Julie. “He did. And they had the most extraordinary and remarkable relationship.”

  I relaxed. This was exactly what I wanted to hear. “All right, now tell me about these obsessions of his.”

  “Well, my dear, I hardly knew him well enough to provide a comprehensive catalogue, but I could see he had an obsession-prone personality. It was as if life were just one long endless competition in which he always had to win and emerge as top dog. He was an extremely successful man, as you know, but I don’t think his success meant all that much to him. It was merely an exercise in amour-propre.”

  “How peculiar.” I was much intrigued. “So what you’re saying is—”

  “I’m saying his obsessions were all tied up with his desire to be top dog. He couldn’t go to Oxford without wanting a double first. He couldn’t take up politics without wanting to be Prime Minister. He couldn’t take up mountaineering without wanting to climb Mount Everest. And of course, he couldn’t fall in love with your mother without wanting both a grand passion and a fairy tale.”

  “But this is wonderful!” I exclaimed, suddenly seeing my father’s glittering life from an angle that I could completely understand. “He dreamed of perfection and made his dreams reality! He was an idealist—a romantic!”

  Aunt Julie stared at me. “How very perceptive of you,” she said at last. “People thought he was so cold and cynical—but of course there’s no one so cold and cynical as a romantic idealist who’s been deprived of his romantic dreams.”

  “Yes, I can see now just how awful the illness must have been for him. It makes the tragedy more vile than ever.”

  Aunt Julie hesitated. I was aware of her hesitating, and in that moment some sixth sense told me I was within sight of dangerous waters. But before I could turn my back on them Aunt Julie said casually, “The illness was certainly a tragedy, Kester, but it’s not impossible that your father may have seen it as imposing a solution on problems he couldn’t solve.”

  “But surely he had no problems before the illness,” I said. “All his dreams came true.”

  “Not quite all,” said Aunt Julie.

  There was a pause. Then I said, “Which ones—”

  “Oh, your mother would know about that better than I do,” said Aunt Julie. “But I could see he was a troubled man, and I suspect that this was why he staged his massive retreat into mountaineering.”

  “Massive retreat? Wait a minute, I knew he liked climbing but I thought that was just a hobby!”

  “Hardly. He wanted to abandon both his career and his London life in order to devote himself entirely to climbing.”

  “Good God!” I stared at her. I was deeply, powerfully interested. “But that wouldn’t have been the done thing at all!”

  “That wouldn’t have bothered him. He was like a man in the grip of a mystical vision.”

  “How absolutely magnificent!” I now had my back to the dangerous waters and had returned to comfortingly familiar territory. I polished off the rest of my wine. “Well,” I said, “what a hero!” And then a thought occurred to me, just a little thought, not a thought that one would worry about but just a little idea that one might possibly want to cogitate upon at some time in the very remote future, and I heard myself say, “But Mum wouldn’t have liked that at all.”

  “No,” said Aunt Julie. “I’m afraid she didn’t.”

  “Well, never mind,” I said at once. “Despite everything they had this remarkable relationship which cancelled out all the unhappiness, and oh God, how wonderful Beauty and Truth are, redeeming the ghastliness of life and bringing one closer to God—to the divine—to heaven … Lord, I must be drunk! I am sorry! I’ve recently discovered that I get drunk far too easily.”

  Aunt Julie patted my hand and signaled to the waiter for the bill. “I’ll take you back to your hotel.”

  Halfway to Kensington Gardens in Aunt Julie’s little Austin I said suddenly, “Does Mum have affairs with these beastly men who keep taking her to nightclubs?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?” said Aunt Julie. “I’m sure she’d be truthful.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” I said.

  We drew up at the hotel but before I could thank Aunt Julie for her considerable kindness to me that evening, she said abruptly, “Your mother’s had a tough life in some ways, Kester. Her first husband was shot before her eyes; her second took nine years to die; for a long time she never saw Declan; Robin died in that ghastly accident. When you think of all that, does the occasional visit to a nightclub really seem so important?”

  It didn’t. I knew that but could not find the words to tell her so.

  Aunt Julie patted my hand again before adding: “Guard against jealousy—that was a great failing of your father’s. Guard against all those strong violent feelings which gave him so much trouble, and be patient with your mother. I think in the end she’ll be glad you’re like him as well as her—she’ll eventually see it as romantic, and then perhaps the past pain will die a little and it’ll be easier for her to talk to you about him.”

  I kissed her, swore to be patient and tottered away into the hotel to sleep off the unfortunate effects of too much Nuits St. Georges.

  VIII

  “I’ve decided I’ve been very naughty and very silly,” said my mother the next morning as we breakfasted in her room, “and I want to tell you everything about your father.”

  “Oh no,” I said at once. “That’s not necessary.”

  She stared at me. “Not nece
ssary?”

  “No. I know everything I need to know, thank you, so we can consider the matter closed.”

  There was a long, long silence. Presently she lit a cigarette, I poured myself some more tea and we went on sitting there together, watching the rain fall over Kensington Gardens.

  In the end my mother said, “Last night outside the nightclub there was an old busker playing a Strauss waltz, and as I watched him I thought how odd it was that most people hear only the gaiety in Viennese music. But I think Strauss wrote about sadness, and if you listen hard you can hear the melancholy beyond that romantic facade.”

  “I can’t hear it,” I said, “and what’s more, I don’t want to. It’s the romance that’s important, not the melancholy.”

  She smiled suddenly, her dark eyes brilliant with an emotion I could not read. “I’d like to believe that,” she said, “and maybe, despite all the awful things that have happened to me, I still do. That would be a triumph, wouldn’t it? What a victory over disillusionment and despair!”

  “I don’t want to talk about vile things like disillusionment and despair.”

  “No, it’s all right, pet, I understand. We’ll turn it into just another bridge that has to be crossed later, and then for the moment at least we won’t have to bother about it anymore.”

  IX

  It was soon after we returned from London that I began to find my circumstances intolerable. It turned out I’d made a hash of my Higher Certificate; I had done well in English Literature, but I had barely scraped a pass in History and in Latin I had failed altogether. Uncle John said I should have followed Harry’s example by waiting till I was eighteen before taking the examination—and Harry, needless to say, had achieved three superb passes and won an open scholarship to Oxford.

  I loathed him.

  “Well, Kester,” said Uncle John, “you must spend the next year concentrating on your studies—we’ll have to postpone those lessons in estate management, but never mind, I hardly expected you to run Oxmoon single-handed as soon as you turned eighteen.”

  I loathed him too. My magic birthday was fast being reduced to just another day in the schoolroom.

  “But I can have a checkbook, can’t I,” I said, “as soon as I’m eighteen?”

  Uncle John gave me a cool look and said stuffily, “I’m sure some suitable arrangement can be made to reflect both your majority and your apparent inability to live within your allowance. I understand you owe your mother twenty-three pounds seven and six.”

  I had been betrayed. My mother joined the list of the loathed.

  “Damn it, Uncle John, why shouldn’t I owe my mother a few pounds if she’s willing to lend them to me! After all, I am master of Oxmoon!”

  “All the more reason why you shouldn’t get into debt.”

  I immediately wanted to go out and spend thousands.

  My eighteenth birthday was eventually celebrated in ghastly Godwin style by a dinner party for my relatives and various old friends of the family. The one redeeming feature was that Cousin Harry was absent. He was doing so well at Oxford that it was quite impossible for him to tear himself away.

  I was beginning to have very serious reservations about going up to Oxford. Uncle John would use the fact that I was a student to keep me in leading strings for another three years, and besides the last thing I wanted was to be in a place where I would be continually outdazzled by Cousin Harry. Could I go to Cambridge instead? No, because Uncle John would want to know why I refused to go to Oxford and might indeed even humiliate me by guessing the truth. I decided to forgo a university education altogether, even though it might have been fun to live with Anna among “the dreaming spires.” After all, what was university? Just an extended version of school, and Ricky Mowbray had told me that Oxford was full of public-school louts who should have been exterminated on the playing fields of Eton.

  “I hear that pansy Ricky Mowbray got sent down from Oxford,” remarked Thomas to my mother. “What was the trouble? Buggery in the quadrangles?”

  “You’d better be careful, Thomas,” said my mother coldly. “You could be sued for spreading that kind of slander. Ricky came down from Oxford of his own free will, and there’s never been any hint that he misbehaved in the way you suggest.”

  But I knew Ricky better than she did. I was sixteen when Ricky came down from Oxford and confessed to me.

  “The truth was I just couldn’t stand being away from you, Kes. … I was so miserable … missed you so much … I can’t help it, I’m terribly in love with you.”

  A nightmare. I panicked, retreated into brutality. “Gosh, Ricky, if I were going to be in love with a man I’d certainly be in love with you, but I never get physically excited unless I think about Anna.”

  Embarrassment. Agony on both sides. Shame.

  “Don’t betray me, Kes. Promise. I’ll never bother you again, I swear it.”

  “Oh, don’t be so stupid, Ricky! Of course I’d never betray a friend!”

  “Can I still be your friend?”

  “Why on earth not?” I said, feeling desperately sorry for him, but I was relieved when he went away to France for a year to study at the University of Grenoble, and even more relieved when he returned home apparently quite recovered from his humiliating aberration.

  “I am sorry I was such a certifiable oaf, Kes—I honestly think Oxford sent me right round the bend! However all that’s over now and I’ve developed a penchant for blue-eyed blondes. How’s your cousin Erika?”

  Erika, who had been taking a cookery course in London, was back in Gower and nearly dying of boredom. I wished Ricky luck, but was somewhat less than forthcoming when he inquired about Anna. I had decided to tell no one, not even my closest friend, about my unbroken determination to elope as soon as Anna was eighteen.

  She was now seventeen and a half. Six months to go.

  June came. I sat for my Higher Certificate again, but this time I found the papers easy and knew I’d done well. Uncle John began to talk of Oxford but I merely listened politely; I was determined to give no hint that I was about to slash myself free of my leading strings in one grand glorious romantic gesture and celebrate my long-awaited independence in the biggest possible way.

  In July Anna arrived home after her final term at school, and we met the next day at the Blue Rabbit to draw up our final plans.

  She spent her birthday with her parents. We thought that was only fair to them, but on the morning of the twenty-fifth of July we caught the train to London and headed north to Gretna Green.

  5

  I

  BEFORE I LEFT OXMOON, I wrote a note which read: Dear Mum, I’ve gone off to marry Anna. Don’t be too livid. I’m the sort of man who only falls in love once and this is it. Sorry I can’t wait till I’m twenty-five, but I think my father would have married you when he was eighteen too if you hadn’t run off with Mr. Kinsella in order to escape from that engagement to Sir Timothy Appleby. I doubt if he was really all that keen on any of those mistresses you mentioned. I certainly wouldn’t have been. Anyway, remember him and forgive me. Back in six weeks. Much love, KESTER.

  Gretna Green turned out to be a humdrum town, despite its romantic fame as a center of clandestine marriages, but I had plenty of money (my bank manager Mr. Lloyd-Thomas had been most accommodating, such a refreshing change from Uncle John), so at least we were able to entertain ourselves in style as we established our Scottish residency. I hired a motor; every day we explored the pretty countryside, while every evening we would linger over a substantial dinner before drifting upstairs for the night. (Of course we had separate bedrooms.)

  We were just thinking that marriage must surely be an anticlimax after such perfect bliss when we returned from our afternoon picnic to find a familiar M.G. parked in the forecourt.

  “Oh God!” I said in horror as Rory emerged from the hotel with a triumphant expression on his face.

  “What shall we do?” said Anna, panicking.

  “Hold fast! Stand firm!”
I said, resorting to Uncle John’s favorite Imperialist war cry, but I was quailing at the thought of my family conspiring to save me from myself. Halting the car I got out. Rory blazed over to me. “You little fool!” he shouted. “I’ve come to bring you home! You’ve broken your mother’s heart!”

  “Dear me,” I said, “just like Rupert of Hentzau!” And when I heard Anna laugh I felt my courage return.

  “Now look here, my lad—”

  “Oh, shut up, Rory—go back to sponging off your rich wife and leave me alone!”

  Rory stared at me as if I’d grown horns and a tail. I was in ecstasy. I suddenly had a vision of a future in which I would say exactly what I liked to all the members of my family who had so irked me in the past.

  “Will you excuse us, please?” said Rory to Anna. “I’d better talk to my brother on his own.”

  “As far as I’m concerned you’re not my brother,” I said. “If Mum hadn’t gone off her head and married an Irish gangster you wouldn’t even exist!”

  “Christ!” said Rory, scarlet with rage. “My father was ten times the man Robert ever was—”

  “Oh, go and spin your fairy tales somewhere else!”

  “You’re the one who’s spinning a fairy tale if you think your father made our mother happy!”

  I knocked him down.

  Anna gasped.

  Rory was too stunned to speak. He sat on the ground and shook his head rapidly as if to clear his vision. Across the forecourt by the hotel entrance I saw the porter scurry inside to broadcast news of a crisis.

  “Go to hell,” I said to Rory, “and bloody well leave us alone.”

  Rory growled in rage to conceal his humiliation, shouted, “You silly little bugger, I’m going to take you home even if I have to do it by force!” and staggered to his feet to attempt to carry out his threat. He was shorter than I was but broader and heavier. However too much drinking had made him flabby, and I had the youth and agility he lacked. We fought furiously together. Anna jumped out of the car and begged us to stop, but we took no notice and in the end we were separated only by the combined efforts of the hotel manager, both porters and the boot boy.