The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Well now, I know what you’re thinking—no, don’t say a word! There’s no need. You’re thinking the moral of this story is to hell with bloody romance. I used to think that. Ma confessed she thought so herself every now and then, but she fought against it, she refused to accept defeat, she battled on like a bloody tank—God, what a woman she was—oh, the nerve of it! The courage! She was outrageous! You couldn’t help but admire her, and I never admired her more than when she came on her last visit to Dublin and confessed to me that she wanted to tack a new ending onto her favorite grand opera. ‘I want to be buried with him!’ she says, eyes bright, cheeks pink, happy as a lark again. ‘It’ll be my final grand romantic gesture!’ Oh, you should have seen her! We’d gone to visit my father’s grave and there we were, standing by his tombstone, and the sun was setting in that unreal way it does in Ireland and the whole scene was just like an opera set. I had to laugh. And then she added: ‘In death I want to celebrate life by commemorating my great romance!’ and she began to talk about my father.

  “Well, you know what old people are like once they get going on the past. The same old stories get trotted out and you have to pretend you haven’t heard them all before, but on that occasion it wasn’t so hard to pretend. I think it was because I admired her so much for her guts—she was such a survivor, and that was romantic, yes, it was, I have to admit it although I’m not much of a one for romance myself, not after seeing my parents go through all those shenanigans. So I didn’t interrupt her as she talked on and on, and finally she said: ‘It was the most romantic moment of my life. I was dancing beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played “The Blue Danube” and I saw Conor in the doorway—he’d come back at last to claim me, and at that moment I knew all my dreams were going to come true.’ And when she said that I forgot all about the awful scenes in New York when she and my father had screamed and fought and damned-near killed each other—I forgot all the horrors that came later. That was all wiped out as if it had never been and all I could hear was ‘The Blue Danube.’

  “So later, when she asked me to make sure she was buried in Ireland, I felt I’d be the blackest villain imaginable if I didn’t make the promise and keep it. That request represents her final triumph over the tragedies of her life, doesn’t it? And once we make her last grand romantic gesture a reality we won’t hear the sadness of that bloody waltz anymore; all we’ll hear is the joy as we celebrate her courage and give thanks for her life.”

  I tried to speak but of course it was quite beyond me. He had crushed out his cigarette and as we both rose to our feet he held out his hands. His clasp was firm, and amidst all my grief I knew comfort.

  “You mustn’t worry,” I heard him say. “All we’ve got to do now is to give her the happy ending she always longed for—only the real happy ending, as you’ll have guessed by now, has nothing to do with romantic burials; the real ending lies between you and me. After all, a grave’s just a grave, isn’t it? But a brother should be far more than a stranger and blood far thicker than water—which reminds me, would you have a little whisper of whisky in this wonderful house of yours? I think I must get discreetly drunk before I can face all your terrible relations.”

  “What a marvelous idea!” I said, shoving the last tears from my eyes, and without more ado we settled down to drain the decanter.

  VIII

  “How do you get on with all those Godwins, Christopher?”

  “Not very well, Declan, to tell you the truth.”

  “Ah, I knew you were a young man of taste and discrimination. What a crowd! The only one I ever liked was old Bobby, and of course he wasn’t English, he was a Welshman who’d never been Anglicized. I’ll bet he picked you out because he could see you were different from the rest!”

  “Honestly, Declan, at the end of his life he was too senile to tell.”

  “Made you his heir, though, didn’t he?”

  “That was due to my father, gunning on my behalf.”

  “Trust Robert to wheel on the big guns. You lucky little sod! It’s not often the youngest of four sons hits the jackpot in the biggest possible way. Christ, I bet those other Godwins are livid!”

  “Well, I don’t suppose they exactly cheered, but Uncle John’s been simply heroic—”

  “Uh-huh. That’s a cool customer, if you want my opinion. What goes on in that Welsh-speaking mind behind that well-oiled English handshake? Jesus, I’ll never forgive myself for not being around to protect you from the lot of them while you were growing up but I couldn’t stand the idea of you, thought you’d be a replica of Robert. What was Robin like?”

  “Awful.”

  “Well, there you are. (God rest his poor little soul.) It was just as well I stayed away; I might have murdered you both in a fit of pique. Have some more whisky.”

  “Rather. Thanks. Oh Declan, I can’t tell you what a strain it’s been, struggling to be a perfect Godwin—”

  “Thank God you failed. Never mind, you’re your own master now and you can do just as you damn well please.”

  “Well, it’s not actually quite as simple as that, Declan. You see, Uncle John—”

  “Ah, bugger Uncle John!” said Declan. It occurred to me then that he was exactly like his own description of our mother wonderful but naughty. As I gazed at him in admiration I realized he was just the kind of brother I had always longed for and he was saying just the kind of things I had always yearned to hear. “You stand up for yourself, Christopher!” he was urging. “You crack the whip and make ’em all shit bricks!”

  The thought of anyone, let alone Uncle John, shitting bricks was enough to make me boggle. I started to laugh.

  “I’m a villain, aren’t I?” said Declan, laughing with me. He had the most charming smile.

  “Yes, it’s wonderful—you’re even better than Rupert of Hentzau!” I said emotionally as he topped up my glass of whisky for the fourth time. “Oh Declan, how I wish I’d met you years ago!”

  “To be sure it was a tragedy you didn’t, but we’ll soon make up for lost time, don’t you worry, and now that we’ve finally met you can be certain I’ll stand by you to the grave and beyond.”

  “Do you really mean that, Declan, or are you just speaking out of a sense of moral duty?”

  “I don’t have a sense of moral duty.”

  “You mean you really do like me?”

  “Why, you poor, poor little bastard!” He gave me a look of astonished compassion. “Has no one ever liked you much before? Those bloody Godwins! I’d like to machine-gun the lot of them! Now listen to me, little Christopher. If ever you need any help in the future, don’t you go anywhere near a shady character like John Godwin who lurks like a shark in murky waters all the time he’s pretending he’s as harmless as a goldfish. You come straight to me and I’ll look after you as you ought to be looked after because the truth is, as I can so plainly see, you’re a rebel after my own heart and nothing could ever induce me now to wash my hands of you unless you went completely off the rails and became a perfect Godwin.”

  We embraced, swore eternal friendship and ended up shedding an emotional tear or two over the empty whisky decanter.

  Uncle John would have been absolutely horrified.

  But I was in bliss.

  IX

  There was a memorial service instead of a funeral in Penhale Church the next day but that same afternoon Anna and I set out for Ireland with Rory and Declan. Uncle John had offered to accompany us, but I knew he was only anxious to do the done thing so I told him not to bother; in my opinion his attendance at the memorial service excused him from any moral obligation to cross the Irish Sea.

  My mother had often mentioned that Ireland was beautiful but I had never listened, just as I had never listened when she had tried to talk to me about Declan, so I was amazed when I first saw the Wicklow Mountains rising above the great curve of Dublin Bay. I found myself remembering the Coolins of Rhum, and in that special peace which I always knew in the presence of great
beauty my mind became calmer at last. The cemetery seemed very foreign, but when I saw Conor Kinsella’s florid grave, I sensed in its unabashed sentiment a touch of the melodrama which had struck such a chord in my mother’s heart.

  “But Mum wasn’t Catholic,” I said troubled to Declan. “Is she entitled to a Catholic funeral?”

  “To be sure she would have turned Catholic in the end in order to be buried with Pa,” said Declan soothingly, “so that would put her in a notional state of grace, to my way of thinking, and I was able to tell the priest with a clear conscience that she’d received the Last Rites. I’m sure God will perfectly understand.”

  All Declan’s Irish relatives and a large number of his friends came to the funeral. I had had no idea my mother had known so many people in Ireland. I had never asked her any questions about her regular visits to Dublin and she in turn had offered no information, but now I learned that she had talked of retiring from Oxmoon and settling near Dublin in a cottage by the sea.

  “She said that once you were married she didn’t want to hang around Oxmoon like some kind of bossy Queen Mother,” explained Declan. “ ‘Time to sever the apron strings!’ she said to me. Time to begin another wonderful new life!’ ”

  I became amazed by how imperfectly I had known her, and as I stood by her grave later in the soft Irish rain, I found there was so much I would like to have asked. Why, for instance, had she never become a Roman Catholic? I thought it would have suited her emotionally; but perhaps she had clung to the memory of her Protestant childhood because it was part of what she had described as the lost paradise of Oxmoon. And how could she ever have thought of severing herself from Oxmoon, which had for so long played Egypt to her Cleopatra? But perhaps not all her memories of Oxmoon had been happy ones. Perhaps my marriage had at last set her free to find a final peace which was unavailable to her there; perhaps it had even come as a relief to know she could retreat forever from her Godwin past and turn, as she had turned once before, to embrace the world of Conor Kinsella.

  I wished too that I could have asked her about him—and of course I wished above all that we could have had that honest conversation about my father; I wished I could have heard her explain in her own words the enigma of that relationship which had somehow kept her at his side.

  “I never thought she’d stick it,” Declan said earlier.

  “Why did she, do you think?”

  “God knows. I never really got to the bottom of that relationship with Robert.”

  “Did she ever try to explain it to you?”

  “Yes, but she couldn’t. She just wound up talking crap about lost paradises.”

  “But Declan, if you had to put forward a theory—”

  He saw how much I longed to understand. “Oh, some very powerful emotion was generated at an early age, there’s no doubt about that, and I’d think it was generated by Robert, who had the kind of single-track mind which converts emotion into a sawn-off shotgun. The true mystery is why he fixed all his emotion on her like that when he was a little kid, but he didn’t like his sister Celia, did he, and apparently when he was small he didn’t get on with that old battle-ax of a mother of his, so Ma wound up being his nearest sympathetic female with the result that he gave her all the devotion he couldn’t unload elsewhere.”

  “But how do you explain Mum’s devotion to him?”

  “Well, she might have been merely mesmerized by his strong personality but I think the explanation has to go deeper than that, and I suspect the clue lies in all that crap she talked about lost paradises. When does the past always seem bathed in a golden light?”

  “The moment anything frightful happens in the present.”

  “Right. I’ve often wondered if something terrible happened to Ma when she was young, something which made the extreme past seem perpetually desirable—and Robert symbolized that extreme past to her.”

  “But what on earth could have happened?”

  “Ah well, the standard disaster for a nubile young girl is seduction or rape, isn’t it, but the only trouble with that theory is that there’s no one here who fits the picture of the wicked seducer. It wasn’t my father, because she rushed into his arms as soon as she could, and it wasn’t yours because he symbolized Eden before the Fall, and it certainly couldn’t have been old Bobby, who was one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. I ought to have asked Ma straight out when she was telling me her life story, but I never did and now we’ll never know. Ah, people are such a mystery, aren’t they? And perhaps one’s own parents are the greatest mystery of all …”

  But I thought of my mother writing in her final letter of my father: He was my friend, and of Conor Kinsella: He was my first love and my last. What did the background mysteries matter when the basic truth was as absolute as that? I found then that I was resigned to the fact that I would never now hear the whole story from my mother’s lips, and with my resignation came acceptance so that the past was unable to hurt me anymore. I saw her buried with her first husband and thought as Declan had thought before me: Yes, it was romantic. The romance was not as I had imagined it to be, but it was there nonetheless, allowing me to preserve all my idealism, allowing me to remember my mother as I wanted to remember her, and as I stood there in the soft Irish rain in that foreign cemetery so far from home I saw again in the glittering grass the chandeliers at Oxmoon and heard once more in my imagination the orchestra that had played “The Blue Danube.”

  6

  I

  AFTER THIS EMOTIONAL IRISH interlude my arrival home was very much a return to the cold hard Anglo-Saxon facts of life. With my mother dead I found myself abruptly brought face to face with a subject I had never troubled to master: the administration of Oxmoon. In the library I opened one of the estate books, but it might have been written in Etruscan, and I was just closing it with a bang when the door opened and in walked bestial Thomas.

  “Oh hullo,” he said. “What are you doing here buggering around with the estate books?”

  My library and I’m asked what I’m doing here. My estate, run by someone I detest.

  I looked at him narrowly and said nothing.

  “How was bloody old Ireland?” said Thomas casually, flicking through some correspondence. “God, what a dump that country is!”

  I knew he had never been there. I went on watching him narrowly and still I said nothing.

  “Oh, by the way,” said Thomas who was much too insensitive to find my silence suspicious and probably only thought I was being deferential, “John rang up yesterday. He’s coming down tomorrow to discuss the future with you. He said he’d stay three days.”

  My house and my uninvited guests coolly tell me how long they intend to stay.

  “Oh yes?” I said without expression, and walked out.

  I felt like wiring Declan to come with a machine gun.

  II

  When I was on my honeymoon I had written a long letter to Uncle John. Of course I had been consumed by guilt that I had not thanked him properly for rushing to Scotland to extract me from jail. How could I have been so hostile and brutal to him when he had been so heroic? Grinding my teeth I penned the required letter of gratitude. Then it occurred to me that since he was already horrified by my un-Godwin-like behavior he could hardly be more horrified if I displayed some new heresy, so I broke the news to him that I had decided not to go up to Oxford. My mother’s death had effectively precluded us from discussing this decision, but before I departed for Ireland he had expressed the wish that we could meet as soon as I returned.

  The thought of another battle with Uncle John sickened me. The thought of Thomas downstairs in the library sickened me. In the privacy of my room I lay on my bed and groaned with nausea and rage.

  “Uncle John won’t force you to go up to Oxford against your wishes,” said my wonderful Anna, who had been such a tower of strength to me during my recent ordeals, “and who knows? Perhaps he’ll be only too delighted that you want to run the estate yourself.”

  T
his was certainly possible, but she had overlooked the core of my dilemma. “Uncle John will never allow me to get rid of Thomas. He’ll say I can’t cope, and the awful thing is he’d be right.”

  “Nonsense!” said Anna roundly. “I’m sure you could learn how to cope in no time—you’re twice as clever as Thomas!”

  “Only twice?” I said, cheering up. Her confidence did indeed put me in better spirits, but that night I lay awake quailing at the thought of Uncle John gliding to my rescue once more in his formidable and repellent Rolls-Royce.

  III

  The next morning, unable to resist the temptation, I unlocked the drawer of the bureau in my old bedroom and took a look at the manuscript which had been untouched since the week before my elopement. I at once felt much calmer. Seduced long since by the works of Miss Christie and Miss Sayers, I was now specializing in the country-house detective story and luxuriating in complicated plots involving corpses galore, alibis by the dozen and an interminable dénouement in the library. My detective, modeled on Lord Peter Wimsey, was passionately in love with an adventuress who was fast becoming much too sexy.

  I wished I could let them go to bed together but I knew that wasn’t the done thing in a detective story, not even when the heroine was an adventuress. It was true that Lord Peter had gone to bed with Harriet, but not until they were husband and wife. Could I marry off my Honorable Jonathan? But then the dramatic suspense of his private life would be destroyed, because he would have to live forever after in uxorious bliss; detective stories never allowed their married heroes any other fate.