The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Darling!” said my mother richly. “As you can guess, I decided to kill the fatted calf!”

  We embraced. I was aware of a gust of perfume, a flutter of long lashes against my cheek and her almost tangible air of satisfaction as she perceived my happiness.

  “Oh, I’m wild about fatted calf!” I said. “I hope it’s dressed up as a bottle of champagne!”

  We laughed. My mother turned to my wife.

  “Anna … my dear …” There was an emotional embrace. “Dear child!” said my mother, releasing her. “At least I can’t complain you’re a stranger to me!”

  I gave her an extra kiss to show her how grateful I was for her determination to let bygones be bygones, and to my surprise she swayed, almost losing her balance.

  “Mum! Are you all right?”

  “Yes—sorry, darling. No, don’t worry, I’m not tight! I’ve had a couple of dizzy spells this weeks—old age and too much pink gin catching up with me at last, I fear!” said my mother laughing and turned to welcome the Steinbergs as I moved past her into the house.

  In the drawing room I found Rory standing sheepishly by the fireplace.

  “Now then, you two!” said my mother, much as Mae West, playing the owner of a Wild West bordello, might have addressed two rebellious cowboys. “Shake hands and be friends—no more fights! It doesn’t matter who your fathers were—all that matters is that I’m your mother and don’t you forget it!”

  “She’s right, you know,” Rory said as we shook hands.

  “Of course. She always is.”

  We looked at her as proudly as if we had created her unaided.

  “Open the magnum, Lowell!” purred my mother.

  The magnum opened with a well-bred explosion, and a pale gold liquid was soon frothing in six of the best Godwin glasses. As Lowell withdrew, we all stood in a circle and waited for my mother to propose the toast.

  “To Kester and Anna—may you live happily ever after!” said my mother conventionally enough, but then exclaimed as if she were a pagan priestess flinging a defiant challenge at the gods: “Long live romance!” and drained her glass to the dregs.

  It was a wonderful moment. I can see her now, cancelling out her past tragedies by that last indomitable toast. What a finale! What a triumph! And what a note on which to end.

  “Romance!” we all cried in admiration, but even before we could raise our glasses to our lips she had gasped, staggered sideways and collapsed unconscious upon the floor.

  God might have dealt my mother a rough hand more than once in her life, but at least at the end He was kind.

  V

  She was fifty-eight, glamorous to the last in her purple tea gown, but afterwards I thought not of the end of her life, when she had played her final triumphant performance as mistress of Oxmoon, but of the other days which stretched far back into my memory. I saw her in the library with Uncle John, a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth as they examined the estate books together; I saw her relaxing on the terrace with a romantic magazine in one hand and a pink gin in the other, I saw her greeting guests, marshaling servants, coping with tenants, sparring with Thomas, receiving fawning bank managers, lawyers and accountants. At an age when most women would have chosen to live quietly on their past memories, my mother had surged into a dynamic new life of hardworking independence. Aunt Julie had been right. The visits to the nightclubs had been of no importance. In the end my mother had been no one’s mistress but her own.

  I accepted her death yet could not quite believe I would never talk to her again, and the tears which had always sprung to my eyes with such humiliating ease now refused to come.

  “The best mother a man ever had …” That was Rory, being emotional just like me, except that my emotions refused to be released. As he wept I found it possible to believe for the first time, without boggling, that we had shared the same mother.

  “Kester darling, too tragic—I am sorry …” That was Marian, not caring, merely embarrassed by her husband’s failure to keep a stiff upper lip. Even Thomas was more sincere than she was. “Ginevra was a bit of a bitch,” he said subdued, “but I was fond of the old girl in my way.”

  A crowd of people arrived from London. Once more the drive was clogged with Bentleys and Rolls-Royces.

  “Oxmoon will never be the same again,” whispered Uncle Edmund, and Aunt Teddy exclaimed, touching me with her spontaneity, “What a gal! I can’t believe she’s gone.”

  “We all wish to express our most heartfelt condolences,” droned Aunt Constance, but I never heard the end of her set speech because the next moment I was confronted by Uncle John.

  Here was someone who grieved. Here was someone who looked at me and saw far back into the remote past long before I was born. He said one word, my name, and that was all. There was no need for him to say more for no words could have expressed the bereavement reflected in his face and no words could have told me more clearly than the clasp of his hand how absolutely we were connected by our loss.

  Everyone was amazed by my composure as with Anna’s help I arranged the funeral. Of course I had known at once that my mother had to be buried with my father, her childhood sweetheart, in order that romance could finally triumph over all the ghastly realities she had had to endure, and because of this the burial had become immensely important to me. Although my father had been cremated in Swansea his ashes had been interred in the churchyard at Penhale, and I wanted my mother to be buried beneath the stone that commemorated him.

  The telephone started to ring.

  I remember that telephone ringing. It was like the bell heralding the final act of a familiar play. But this time, when the curtain went up, I was to find that someone had rewritten the ending.

  Lowell took the call in the hall just as I emerged from the library. Rory was already running down the stairs and I knew what that meant. He was expecting a call from Declan.

  Declan had left Ireland. Declan had been due to arrive in Swansea that day. Declan was probably now telephoning from the Claremont Hotel, where he had arranged to stay, to confirm that his journey had gone according to plan. He had neither written nor spoken to me and I had neither written nor spoken to him. I had thankfully left all communication to Rory. I knew Declan would have to attend the funeral but I could hardly wait until he had retreated to Ireland and I could shovel him out of my life once and for all.

  “Be reasonable!” Rory was saying urgently into the phone.

  “How the hell can I possibly pave the way for you by breaking the news?” He looked guiltily over his shoulder, saw me, jumped and looked guiltier than ever.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. My stomach felt as if I had just stepped off a cliff. “What’s going on?”

  Rory thrust the receiver into my hand. “You talk to him. He’s got something to tell you.”

  I thrust it back. “I don’t want to talk to him! What is all this?”

  Rory said panic-stricken into the receiver: “He’s here but he won’t speak to you. What shall I do, what shall I—” He stopped. The line had gone dead. “Bloody hell!” said Rory. He replaced the receiver and turned to face me. “He’s on his way over here. He says he has to speak to you without delay.”

  “What about?”

  “Well I … Jesus, I … well, I’m damned if I know how to put this, but—”

  I gripped him by the shoulders and started shaking him. “What does he want to talk to me about?” I shouted.

  “The funeral. It’s got to be cancelled. Ma wanted to be buried with my father in Ireland.”

  VI

  So in the end it was not I who went looking for the truth but the truth which came looking for me. I knew, of course, by that time that there was some profound truth lying around which I had not quite grasped, but somehow it had always seemed so much more comfortable not to identify it. Now it had seized me by the scruff of the neck and I was terrified. I felt as if all the myths that had sustained me during my growing up were being wiped out, and i
n my terror, I panicked. Blundering into the drawing room where my family were assembled I shouted: “Declan wants my mother to be buried in Ireland with Conor Kinsella but I want to announce to you all that this is absolutely not going to happen under any circumstances and if necessary I’ll go to law to prevent it!”

  Everyone stared at me in appalled silence. I ran up to my room, locked myself in and broke down. I kept saying aloud between sobs, “My poor father, my poor father,” as if I had somehow assumed the burden of his past suffering.

  “My mother lied to me,” I said to Anna, who eventually came tapping at the door to offer comfort. “She never loved him. It was all a romantic myth.”

  “Oh, but Kester—”

  “If she’d loved him,” I said fiercely, “she wouldn’t have wanted to be buried with Kinsella. This request means she loved Kinsella best. It means … oh, it was all lies, all of it, there was no romance with my father, no grand passion, just a bloody unhappy marriage with nothing, nothing to redeem it, and vile reality’s triumphed, vile reality’s made even those last words of hers a hideous mockery, vile reality’s laid waste my beautiful dream and I can’t bear it, I feel absolutely destroyed and defiled and contaminated—”

  “Darling—”

  “All that rubbish about how she fell in love when she was dancing beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played ‘The Blue Danube’—all lies, all false—‘It was the most romantic moment of my life,’ she used to say, but that wasn’t true, that couldn’t have been true because all the time she never loved him, she loved that vile vicious vulgar adventurer who everyone agrees was an absolute bastard—”

  “It can’t be true, Kester. Your mother wasn’t like that.”

  “I feel as if I never knew her,” I said, and suddenly I heard her voice saying years before, when Uncle John had so inexplicably returned to Aunt Constance: “We know so little about even those who are closest to us. We know so little of what really goes on in other people’s lives.”

  Far away in the hall Rory called my name.

  “Oh my God,” I said, “Declan’s here.” I peered at my reflection in the looking glass. My eyes were red. “I can’t see him, can’t face him, I can’t, I can’t—”

  “I’ll see him and say you’re not well,” said Anna at once, and marched bravely to the door with her head, held high.

  When I looked again in the glass I saw a despicable coward cringing behind his wife because he wasn’t man enough to face facts he couldn’t alter. A line of much-loved poetry instantly flashed through my mind and gave me courage. I thought of Emily Brontë writing: “No coward soul is mine,” and the words linked me again with my father who had chosen the poem for his funeral service.

  “Wait,” I said to Anna. I went to the basin, dashed some cold water over my face, combed my hair and adjusted my tie. “I must face him,” I said, “and I shall … If he can represent his father, then the least I can do is represent mine.”

  We left the room and crossed the landing. Everyone seemed to be milling in the hall but I did not look down immediately. I descended the steps to the half-landing before pausing at the turn of the stairs to survey the scene below.

  “… and I’m only sorry that we meet again under such sad circumstances,” Uncle John was saying courteously.

  The stranger at his side looked up and saw me. A hush fell upon the hall.

  I saw a tall powerfully built man in his late thirties. He wore a well-cut black suit and exuded a subtle aura of self-confidence. His dark hair was glossy, his features heavy but regular. I searched for some resemblance to my mother but could find none.

  I began to descend the remaining stairs and as I did so I knew that he too was searching for resemblances, although his face betrayed nothing. His soft dark eyes were sinister in their expressionlessness.

  “Ah, here’s Kester,” said Uncle John, clearly deciding that the best way to handle the situation was to pretend that everything was normal.

  I descended the last stair and stood upon the hall floor. I drew myself up to my full height. I looked the stranger straight in the eyes. I took a deep breath. And I spoke. I said, “My mother is being buried tomorrow in Penhale churchyard, and I refuse to alter that arrangement merely on the strength of your unsupported hearsay evidence that she wished to be buried elsewhere.”

  Declan said nothing. But very very slowly his hand moved to the inside pocket of his jacket, and very very slowly he extracted an envelope. He held it out to me. To my horror I saw my mother’s monogram on the flap.

  Anna suddenly slipped between us. “How do you do,” she said, offering Declan her hand. “I’m Anna. I’m sorry this is all so difficult. Will you excuse Kester for a moment, please? He always likes to read his letters in private. Uncle John—”

  “Yes,” said Uncle John, rushing to the rescue, “come into the drawing room, Declan. How was the journey from Ireland?”

  The next thing I knew I was alone in the library and trying to open the envelope. My fingers were as mobile as lead. When I tore the letter in my efforts to rip aside the flap I nearly succumbed to the impulse to destroy it altogether, but of course that was impossible. I had to read it. I had to see how my mother had attempted to justify her request.

  The date suggested that the letter could barely have reached Declan before Rory had telephoned with the news of her death. So this was no old whim which she might have outgrown. This was her final wish.

  Darling Kester … A band seemed to be tightening around my chest. It was a moment before I could go on … I hope it’ll be simply aeons before you read this, but since your wedding I’ve been making all sorts of plans for the future and thought I simply must sort out my death—John told me once I should leave clear instructions if I wanted to avoid any misunderstanding among my heirs, and so I’ve decided to leave this letter for you with Declan. He’ll be able to cope if by some ghastly chance I waft up to heaven on a cloud of pink gin before I can explain everything to you. Poor darling Rory couldn’t cope at all.

  Kester, when I die I don’t want everyone I love keeping a stiff upper lip, doing the done thing and generally crucifying themselves in traditional English fashion. I want a gorgeous Irish funeral with everyone weeping all over the place and not a British stiff upper lip in sight. I’ve always loved the Irish, and during my recent visits to Ireland to see Declan and Siobhan and the children I’ve always felt so at home there. It brings me closer, I know, to that other life I had long ago before you were born, and closer too to the man whom you never knew but whom I’ve never been able to forget.

  I want to be buried with Conor. When I look back on my life I can see so clearly that I really only had one husband. Robert and I had the most unique relationship but it had nothing to do with marriage, and to be quite frank our marriage was a disaster. Robert was my friend, not my husband. But Conor was my first love and my last, and so it’s Conor I must be with at the end.

  Darling, I’m not going to apologize to you because I think once you’ve recovered from the shock you’ll realize that no apology is necessary. You see, this is romance triumphing over ghastly old reality—this is an affirmation of everything you and I have always longed to believe. Talk to Declan. He understands and he’ll explain. I would have explained it all to you myself but you signaled so clearly that you weren’t ready and I knew I had to wait until you were.

  All my love, darling, and never forget how precious you are to me, my living reminder not only of Robert, who was the finest friend anyone could wish to have, but of that lost paradise which he and I once shared at Oxmoon, your Oxmoon, that magic house which you’ll have always in memory of us.

  A long time passed. Then when I was sure I had myself absolutely in control I rang the bell and sent for Declan.

  VII

  “She was a wonderful woman,” said Declan, lighting a cigarette, “but naughty. Very naughty. I’m not surprised you’re well-nigh destroyed with shock because I was well-nigh destroyed myself when I fir
st found out how naughty she was—oh yes, I’ve been where you are now and I’ve stood in your shoes! She brought me up to believe my father was the love of her life and then before he was cold in his grave she was sleeping with Robert. How do you think I felt when I found that out? No, you don’t have to answer. You know how I felt. I felt the way you’re feeling now—bloody awful, bitter, betrayed. Murderous, even. I’m only surprised I was never certified. It took me years to get over it all.”

  Declan spoke with a spurious public-school accent laced with Irish mannerisms. I learned later that his accent varied greatly, depending on his surroundings, and could range from a New York twang to a stage-Irish brogue. He had a smooth, silky baritone voice which wrapped itself winningly around his words, and a powerful charm of manner which radiated a rapier-sharp intelligence. He was obviously quite unlike any Godwin I had ever met. I was mesmerized.

  “So there’s no denying her naughtiness,” he was saying comfortably, idly waving his cigarette at the ashtray, “but oh, what a wonderful woman she was with all that passion and melodrama slopping around inside her head! Jesus, living with her in New York was like living in a grand opera; someone was always shrieking with rage or roaring with laughter or threatening to commit suicide. And my father was just as bad as she was—oh, just imagine the two of them together, both so naughty and both so wonderful, Rory and I had such an exciting life, a little too exciting sometimes, but whenever Ma saw our hair standing on end she’d say, ‘Darlings, this is grand passion! Isn’t it thrilling!’ and we knew she was as happy as a lark even when she was screeching at my father that she’d like to bloody castrate him for running after other women and gambling away all her money. Christ, what an opera it was! Covent Garden’s never seen anything like.

  “Anyway …” He shed ash carelessly into the tray again with another casual flick of the wrist. “… the curtain came down on the grand opera and she went demented; she couldn’t stand the silence. Result: panic. Then she remembered Robert and thought: He’ll sort me out. Famous last words, but at the time it seemed to her like a brain wave because she thought she could get her grand opera running again with a different cast. ‘Romance conquers all!’ sings Ma, thinking herself back in business—but she’d made one fatal mistake. Your father didn’t like grand opera. To put it in English terms, it wasn’t his cup of tea at all.