Wandering dazed through the house some unknown time later I found that work had been completed in the ballroom. It was a mirrored paradise of white and gold, and tears came to my eyes because it was so beautiful. Then because I knew Robert Godwin the Renovator was beside me I said to him, “You never saw the ballroom, did you, because it was built by your grandson Robert Godwin the Regency Rake, but look how wonderful it is, how glorious, how perfect …”
A hand touched my arm. I had not been speaking aloud but I had been so absorbed in my conversation with Robert that I hadn’t noticed Toby fluttering into the room at a brisk pace. When he touched me I jumped. Then I felt extraordinarily confused, because I knew I was in two centuries at once. I glanced out of the window and saw it was summer—but which summer? I had become so accustomed to traveling in other dimensions that it was hard for me to pin myself to an exact point in time and space.
“Dear boy, lovely to see you again! Someone tells me you’re about to produce a new masterpiece of English literature—God knows one was long overdue—but I wonder if we could have just the tiniest word about some payment on account?”
“What?” I said.
Ricky appeared at my elbow. “Kes, bad news. Lloyd-Thomas is on his way over here—I tried to put him off, but he hung up.”
It was the summer of 1939. Hitler was at his zenith and Europe was on the brink, but of course I had no idea. I hadn’t opened a newspaper for weeks. The remote myths of Nazi Germany had seemed irrelevant and only Jonathan and Penelope’s disastrous romance had been real.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Lowell, “but a deputation of your tenants headed by Mr. Emlyn Vaughan is in the drive and Mr. Vaughan is asking to see you.”
“Kester,” said Simon, “Adam Mowbray’s on the telephone.”
If I’d been Robert Godwin the Renovator any Mowbray I talked to would have been a smuggler and probably a pirate as well.
I went to the twentieth-century telephone.
“Kester,” said the pirate, “I’m afraid you can’t go on ignoring the writ from that London property company about the nonpayment of rent on your Park Lane flat. However, it just so happens that I’ve found another firm of moneylenders who’ll give you credit …”
Did they shoot pirates? Or did they hang them?
“Kester? Kester, are you there?”
I somehow slotted myself back into the summer of ’39. “Adam, Lloyd-Thomas is about to arrive and all the tenants are on the warpath—please, please drop everything and come to the rescue!”
The pirate never even paused for breath. He had sailed dangerously close to the wind and now he had to run before the storm. “Terribly sorry, old man, but I’ve got a vital appointment with a titled client and it’s absolutely impossible for me to break it.”
Half an hour later Mr. Lloyd-Thomas was telling me in no uncertain terms that there was only one man in the world who could now save me from ruin and that man was my Uncle John.
8
I
I WOKE UP. AT FIRST I COULD not remember where I was or what was happening. Then I saw the sweep of headlights beyond the uncurtained library windows and remembered that after my third brandy I had switched out the light because my eyes were hurting so much. I stood up, moved to the window and saw the black shadow of the Rolls-Royce drawing to a halt in the moonlight. Then I remembered everything. Eighteenth-century Robert Godwin was dead. My father was dead. Jonathan and Penelope were just secret patterns I had made with my typewriter’s keys. I was broke, humiliated and shamed, just another unstable youth of nineteen who had gone off the rails, and only Oxmoon, ravishing Oxmoon, remained to bear witness to my brief moment of glory when I had conquered time and seen eternity.
I went out into the hall. I had sent Anna to bed because I knew there would be things said which I preferred her not to hear, and after giving me a brief but loving kiss she had faded away into the shadows upstairs, my little Cinderella slipping back into her rags after her fabled evening at the ball.
I opened the front door. I was thinking how quiet it was now that all the worlds in my head had come to a stop. And how flat real life was, devoid of those extra dimensions of the imagination, how narrow, how profoundly unattractive. I felt stifled too by the straitjacket of a single personality. When one has been many people for a long time and particularly when one has been roaming casually among the centuries, the torture of reinhabiting one’s own personality at a fixed point in time resembles being shut up in a small box.
And what a box. I was Kester Godwin on July the twelfth, 1939, and I was walking out into the porch to meet a man who, unlike my father, was absolutely incapable of understanding me. This man was like my mother. The only passion he recognized was sex.
He was speaking to his chauffeur as he got out of the car: “Leave it here, Bridges, for tonight. Just bring my bag in, put it in the hall and go to the servants’ quarters.” Turning to me, he said abruptly without any preliminary greeting, “I assume arrangements have been made for my chauffeur?”
I had forgotten to remind Lowell. That was bad. Not the done thing. One always had to think of the servants. I swallowed and said, “I’m sure Lowell’s remembered.”
Uncle John said to his chauffeur, “If there’s no one waiting up for you, Bridges, come back to me. I’ll be in the drawing room.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said the chauffeur.
Uncle John walked past me up the steps without a word and reached the threshold of the hall. Now, I thought, now he would see the vision which justified my folly. The marble floor glowed richly before my eyes. The jade Chinese horses reared ravishingly atop a wafer-thin Sheraton side table. Romantic pictures, mostly of beautiful women, adorned the walls, and at the half-landing on the stairs, radiant in the light from Toby’s celestial chandelier, shimmered the portrait of the most beautiful woman of all, a Welsh woman, romance personified, my doomed great-grandmother Gwyneth Llewellyn restored at last to a place of glory in the house where she had once been mistress.
Uncle John said nothing but he seemed to turn a shade paler. He walked on across the hall, entered the drawing room and paused again to survey the transformation. I saw him glance at the Gainsborough but it meant nothing to him. He looked at the exquisite walnut chairs and settees but they meant nothing to him either; no doubt he merely thought they looked uncomfortable. Still refusing to speak he moved to the marble-topped table by the window, removed the stopper from the Waterford decanter and poured some whisky into one of the heavy cut-glass tumblers. In helping himself to a drink without my permission he assumed the reins of power by little more than a flick of the wrist.
I thought: If he tries to take Oxmoon away from me I’ll kill him.
But that was a mad thought which showed how deep I was in misery. Anna would have said it was wrong. Wonderful Anna, keeping me sane by loving me so that in her love I could see myself reflected as the man I longed to be, the greatest master Oxmoon had ever known. Anna and Oxmoon were the twin pillars of my sanity, and so long as I had them I could survive even the crudest humiliation at the hands of a man who would never understand what I had done.
He turned to face me. His blue eyes had never seemed emptier, and in their emptiness I glimpsed the dark side of his personality which he had always concealed from me and sensed a hard, powerful man, disillusioned, embittered, enraged. In that second I saw beyond the myth of “my heroic Uncle John,” and just as my mother’s final request had shattered for me the myth of her second marriage, so this glimpse of a hitherto unimagined reality seemed to wipe out all the fixed points of reference that represented stability in my life. I felt all was anarchy and chaos. It was as if there were no rules, no morals, nothing. I was looking into a bottomless pit. It was a vision of hell.
But then I saw him draw the line to shut it out. He looked away as if he knew his eyes were betraying him, and as I saw him pull down the shutters over the dark side of his personality I saw just how strong he was, disciplining the violent emotions,
clamping down on the unacceptable thoughts, harnessing the power which in a lesser man could so easily have harnessed him. Then I saw he was heroic, not because he was a born hero but because he wasn’t; he was heroic because although he was human enough to hate me he was still determined to do what he believed to be right. So the myth survived—but what a myth! I thought it would crush me utterly. I didn’t see how I could survive his hatred and stay sane.
But as he stood there, tall, gray-haired, effortlessly distinguished, I remembered all his many kindnesses to me, all the gestures of affection, all the times he had proved how much he did care, and then I saw that he loved me as well as hated me—I saw that he felt towards me exactly as I felt towards him, and I recognized that love loaded with ambivalence, that genuine devotion laced with resentment, that true affection riddled with antipathy. Why does no one ever admit that hatred and love can exist side by side, each emotion genuine but only one ever acknowledged as real? Uncle John and I were locked up in a padded cell hating each other, but there was no escape because our love bound us together. There was only one retreat and that was into misery, guilt and despair.
“Uncle John—”
He held up his hand to cut me off. “Spare me the craven apologies,” he said brutally. “Simply start at the beginning and go all the way through to the end. No lies, no omissions. I want the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and by God I intend to have it.”
Sick with humiliation, my throat tight with grief, my whole body feeling as if it were being lacerated with shame I somehow managed to conquer my tears and start talking in a calm level dignified voice.
II
“You were writing? Writs were being served on you, your servants’ wages were unpaid, your tenants were being subjected to the grossest extortion and you were writing?”
“Well, when I’m writing … nothing else seems to matter—”
“Then I suggest you either give up writing or give up Oxmoon! Oxmoon can’t afford a master who lives in a pathetic fantasy world!”
“I’ll never give up Oxmoon!” I shouted. “Never!”
There was a silence. Then Uncle John turned his back on me and poured himself some more whisky.
I blundered forward impulsively, “If you could only understand what I’ve done—”
“I see exactly what you’ve done! You’ve damned near ruined yourself all within the space of a year! How could you have behaved with such criminal irresponsibility? Give me one simple sentence of explanation!”
I could not talk of visions of perfection or glimpses of eternity. Nor could I talk of the secret fears which signing checks annulled. I groped in my mind for a concept he could understand. “I wanted to pay my debt to Oxmoon. Oxmoon made me. Before I had Oxmoon I was nothing—people despised me, thought I was stupid and pathetic—”
“Well, God knows what they’ll think of you now,” said Uncle John.
Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. I put up my hands to hide them.
“Stop that! Pull yourself together! My God, are you really so incapable of behaving like a man?”
Black violent emotions erupted in my consciousness, annihilating my self-control. “Damn you, I am a man!” I shouted. “I’ve got this wonderful wife who loves me and I’ve created this great—this magnificent—this mighty vision of a house, and I’ve got guts, I’ve got courage, I’ve got more guts and courage than you’ll ever know. You think I’m weak because I’m a writer, but how the bloody hell do you think it feels when a manuscript comes back from the publishers? I feel suicidal, I feel murderous, I feel absolutely crushed and wrecked, but do I give up? No, I bloody well don’t! I’ve been rejected over and over again, but I don’t stop sending out my manuscripts, I keep on trying, I live all the time with the most shattering sense of failure, but I won’t give in, I’m a fanatic, I’ve got a will of iron, and if you think I’m weak all I can say is you don’t know, you can’t know and you’ll never know just how bloody strong I really am!”
“Rubbish. You’re deceiving yourself. The truth is you’ve been too weak to face reality—you scribbled fairy tales while Oxmoon went to the wall, and that’s not behaving like a man! That’s behaving like an immature child!” I tried to interrupt him but he outshouted me. “Be quiet! The tragedy’s all the more intolerable to me because I really thought before Ginevra died that you were developing into a young man of considerable promise. But now! Consorting with queers, dressing up Oxmoon like some vulgar Hollywood film set, abandoning your responsibilities to that insolent young devil Mowbray, palming off your tenants on an inexperienced agent who was often so drunk he could hardly ride—”
“Sasha’s qualified—Adam Mowbray recommended—”
“Adam Mowbray! That gambler! That crook! My God, I’ll see he’s struck off the rolls for what he’s done to you!”
“But Uncle John, I’m sure he’s done nothing wrong—”
“He set you up with the moneylenders, didn’t he? And of course he’s arranged with them to take a percentage on the deal! And what sort of bills has he been sending in while you’ve been too busy writing to care?”
“I—”
“If Lloyd-Thomas hadn’t pursued the interest on the bank loans so vigorously this mess could have gone on for much longer, but fortunately Lloyd-Thomas decided to allow you no latitude—oh, he’s had trouble before with an incompetent master of Oxmoon, and he resolved he wasn’t going to turn the same blind eye to you as he turned to my father! Thank God my rough treatment of him back in ’28 taught him a lesson which has now proved to be your salvation, but Christ, how I wish I hadn’t been foolish enough to humor you when you told me to keep out of your affairs! However there’s no point in further recriminations. Now just you listen to me. I’ll stand by you. I’ll pay your debts. I swore to my brother that so long as I lived I’d see you were master of Oxmoon, but if you want me to save you now you’ll damned well have to consent to being master on whatever terms I see fit to lay down.”
This was it. Not death but emasculation. I hung my head, clenched my fists behind my back and tried not to shudder with pain.
“You must surrender control of the estate to trustees. You may continue to live in the house but you’re not to have a bank account. I’ll bring down my own lawyers and accountants to sort out the mess once I’ve taken a look at it myself, and I’ll supervise the reconstruction, but unfortunately it’s quite impossible for me to spend more than the minimum amount of time here. I’m a busy man. I could only take over Oxmoon,” said Uncle John, pouring himself another whisky, “if you wished to abandon it altogether but since that’s not going to happen we must adopt some other arrangement. The first thing I intend to do is to reinstate Fairfax as the Oxmoon solicitor. He can be a trustee with me—and perhaps Edmund can be a trustee too because I think the more members of the family we involve here the better. It’s obvious you need the support and stability which only a loyal family can provide.”
“Uncle John—”
“And that brings me to Thomas. He must, of course, be the estate manager again.”
“No,” I whispered. “Not Thomas. No.”
“I’m sorry, but I insist. He’s not only a Godwin who’ll help you out of family loyalty, but he’s the best manager I know.”
“But he hates me! It would be unbearable!”
“Nonsense! As you won’t be running your affairs you’ll barely see him—he’ll report directly to Fairfax. And if for some reason he fails to behave as he should, your remedy’s simple—pick up the phone and let me know.” He abandoned his glass of whisky and headed for the door. “I’m very tired—I must get some sleep. Which room have you put me in?”
“The blue room—at least, it’s not blue anymore—”
“Lion’s old room. Yes. Very well.” He walked out into the glory of the hall.
“Uncle John—” I stumbled after him.
“No more, Kester. Both my strength and my patience are exhausted. Good night.” And picking up t
he bag which his chauffeur had deposited by the front door, he ascended the stairs without a backward glance.
I waited till I was sure he was in his room before I tiptoed after him to the floor above.
Anna was lying awake in the dark and later to comfort us both, I tried to make love to her.
But I was impotent.
III
The barbarians were at the gates, poised to rape the city and defile everything they touched.
“Christ,” said Thomas, “I told you you’d get yourself in a bloody mess, didn’t I? Of course I’m not one bit surprised.” He swaggered over the threshold and boggled at the hall. “My God, look at this! Look at it!”
Cousin Harry, sleek in a dark suit, reached the porch.
“Sorry about all the trouble, old chap,” he said charmingly, shooting me a glance of utter contempt, “but of course when Father suggested I might lend a temporary hand in the emergency, I dropped everything straightaway. Got to stick together, haven’t we? Family solidarity and all that—”
“Here—Harry! Look at these bloody awful changes he’s made!”
Cousin Harry looked into the hall and stopped dead.
“Did you ever see anything like it?” shouted Thomas. “He’s tarted it up like a bloody gin palace!”
But Cousin Harry never heard him. Cousin Harry was gazing at the Italian marble. Cousin Harry was gazing at Toby’s celestial chandelier. And Cousin Harry, my mirror image, was reflecting me, my other self.
Our glances met and in a split second of inexplicable horror we each saw a macabre enigma which had no name.
Harry spoke and at once the horror vanished, but I never forgot that sinister moment in the hall at Oxmoon when Harry and I formed a single personality and he saw my vision as his own.
“Rather amusing, old chap,” said my double, slipping back behind the mask that made him my opposite. “Nice to see the old shack get a face lift. Makes a change.”
The Wheel of Fortune Page 93