The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I looked at Thomas. “Poor old Kester,” I said, signaling that I had no intention of arguing. “Poor old sod. Very sad.” The words “brains,” “determination” and “courage” were still drilling holes in my consciousness.

  “Well, John,” said Thomas, “if you say we have to give Kester our unstinted support, then of course I’ll obey orders, but now that he’s down and out couldn’t you insist that he turns poor old Oxmoon over to us? As I see it, that’s the only real solution to the problem.”

  “It would certainly be a solution,” said my father, “but it’s not available to us. Kester will never voluntarily surrender Oxmoon.”

  “Yes, but John, you’re paying his debts. You could force him to—”

  “No, I couldn’t—and not just because that would break my promise to Robert. I couldn’t do it because it would be the most idiotic thing I could possibly do. The only self-confidence Kester has derives from the fact that he’s master of Oxmoon. If we take that away from him God alone knows what would happen, but whatever did happen I wouldn’t like to feel I was responsible for it. My God, haven’t we got enough trouble on our hands without looking for more? No, Kester stays master and we have to do everything in our power to build up his confidence in himself until he’s mature enough to conquer his problems. It’s the right thing—indeed the only thing—to do.”

  Thomas and I looked at each other again, and again I thought how bizarre it was that I should feel so deeply connected to this bastard I couldn’t stand. But connected we were. There was no man on earth we respected more than my father, and we both knew it was useless to argue with him once he started drawing lines and doing the done thing.

  The only trouble was that as far as I could see the done thing invariably turned out to be a disaster.

  II

  I spent the rest of that day making myself useful in a number of minor ways. After Lloyd-Thomas arrived I was authorized to go to his bank in Swansea to cash my father’s check for the Oxmoon servants’ wages, and by the time I had done this and distributed the money beyond the green baize door it was almost one o’clock. I retraced my steps to the hall. No one was in sight. Behind the library door my father and Thomas were still deep in their postmortem with Lloyd-Thomas and Fairfax. For one long moment I gazed upwards at the vast chandelier which had transformed the commonplace entrance hall into a palatial foyer. Then I skimmed down the corridor past the music room and eased open the ballroom doors for a quick peep.

  My God.

  I was transfixed. I walked in, jaw sagging, legs going through the motions of walking like a couple of addled pendulums. The mirrors had been cleaned, and as I paused I saw myself reflected with a dazzling clarity: tall, dark, poised and radiating brains, charm, muscular Christianity—I had only to imagine a virtue and I immediately shimmered with it. But then I moved closer. I walked right up to the nearest mirror, and a youth of twenty walked to meet me, a white-faced shattered young man with black eyes bright with tears.

  Steady on, Harry. Take it easy, old chap. Poor old Kester, poor old sod, is the only one in this family who goes crashing around in an artistic trance and behaving like a pre-Raphaelite poet at full throttle. But the room was so beautiful. Oxmoon, as we all know, is just a plain quirky little house with character, a Welshman’s pie-eyed attempt at eighteenth-century classicism, but now suddenly it was unique, it was ravishing, it was—

  My God, look at that piano.

  It was a white-and-gold Steinway grand. It was the kind of piano I had imagined my mother playing when I was very young and believed she’d gone to heaven. Of course I could clearly see this was a very stupid, pansyish, tarted-up piece of nonsense, and of course I knew I wouldn’t be seen dead playing it, but all the same. …

  I raised the lid. The keys seemed to be yearning to lose their virginity. They lost it. I was playing a Chopin polonaise but it was too beautiful, too beautiful to bear, and after a moment my hands were still.

  Groping for equanimity I reminded myself what a tragedy Kester’s demented extravagance was. Poor old Kester, poor old sod, had wandered around in some half-baked dream and squandered his money on a little Welsh country house in the back of beyond. What could be more pathetic?

  But what a house. And what a dream.

  It was very quiet. I sat listening to the silence, and as I listened I heard the truth I couldn’t afford to hear. For nine months Kester, risking ridicule and ruin, had defied convention and lived the life he wanted to live. Kester—poor weak feeble Kester whom I had always taken such scrupulous care to pity and despise—had somehow discovered the courage that I’d never been able to find. Walking to the nearest mirror again I no longer saw a youthful hero radiating all the traditional virtues. I saw a coward, a failure and a fool.

  I blundered out of the ballroom.

  In the hall a passing maid told me that “the other gentlemen” had gone into the dining room for lunch but the thought of food was repulsive to me, so I retreated to the cloakroom until I’d pulled myself together. It took me less than two minutes before I could start thinking Poor old Kester, poor old sod, again but when I emerged I still couldn’t face the dining room so I took another peek at the library. Most of the new books, I now discovered, turned out to be novels. I don’t read novels. I do read, but only for information. When I want to escape from how bloody awful life really is I don’t open a book; I play the piano.

  My glance roamed along the shelves. Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës. All very orthodox stuff. Hadn’t these people been in the library before? Maybe not. Robert Godwin the Renovator had stocked the place with the usual junk in Latin and Greek as well as numerous tomes of philosophy; the son who had predeceased him had left in the library no mark which anyone had been able to discover; Robert Godwin the Regency Rake had added bound sermons after his religious conversion; Robert Godwin the Drunkard had apparently read only Ruskin, and Robert Godwin the Survivor, otherwise known as Grandfather Bobby, hadn’t read at all; so it had been left to Kester to import fiction on the grand scale. I saw yards of Trollope, acres of the Waverley novels, a wasteland of Meredith and a morass of George Eliot. Then came the poetry—Tennyson, both Brownings and a pre-Raphaelite poets, all on cue. Typical. The shelves were awash with morbid romance. But what was this? The Prisoner of Zenda bound in calf! Now I’d seen everything! Yet I rather liked the old Prisoner of Zenda. It was one of the few novels which I’d read without having been forced to do so by a schoolmaster. Seeing that I was at a loose end at Oxmoon after Bronwen left, Aunt Ginevra had told Kester to lend me a couple of his Anthony Hope novels to cheer me up and I’d read both The Prisoner of Zenda and its sequel Rupert of Hentzau.

  I took the book off the shelf and began to flick through the pages.

  Ah yes. Ruritania. An imaginary kingdom but somehow very real. I remembered the story now; it was all coming back to me. There was this English hero, Rudolph Rassendyll, who was handsome and charming, radiating all the traditional virtues, and he took the place of the King of Ruritania—for the purest possible reasons, of course. He and the King were doubles, interchangeable. The King was weak, though, and Rudolph was so much more suited to rule Ruritania that he almost yielded to temptation and stayed on to make his temporary impersonation a permanent one. But he didn’t. He drew the line and did the done thing and rode away into obscurity—except that the author couldn’t bear that and brought him back for another round in the sequel. It all ended in tragedy—I couldn’t quite remember how. One got the impression that Anthony Hope respected the conventions but was too much of a realist to believe any hero could follow them to the letter, but of course heroes, literary heroes, just don’t go around grabbing kingdoms that don’t belong to them, so poor old Rudolph had to go.

  Well, there we are. We all have to do the done thing, even Rudolph Rassendyll, or else we go to hell in double-quick time. Stale news. I knew all about going to hell in double-quick time. Shoving the book onto the shelf, I set off for the dining room in order to
do the done thing by eating lunch.

  The dining room was magnificent, ablaze with rich paneling, and on either side of the new fireplace huge swags of carved fruit and flowers cascaded down the walls like a Renaissance man’s vision of Eden. It took me a greater effort than usual to behave like a twentieth-century philistine and give the splendor no more than a passing glance, but I managed it somehow. I’d had twenty years of hard practice, and where there’s a will there’s a way.

  Poor old Kester was absent, probably still sobbing in his room, and Anna was absent too but my four fellow saviors of Oxmoon were all chatting away briskly over the lamb cutlets about agricultural economics. The international situation was by that time so grave that it was considered a breach of taste to make more than a casual remark about it.

  I hid my cutlet under a cabbage leaf and wished I could ask for a double whisky. Lloyd-Thomas and Fairfax were drinking claret but my father never touched alcohol before six so Thomas and I felt morally obliged to share his jug of water. Thomas, normally a hard drinker, never missed the chance to demonstrate to my father how well he had his drinking in control.

  After lunch Lloyd-Thomas and Fairfax retired to Swansea, and it was time for the pacification of Emlyn Vaughan, the leader of the Oxmoon tenants who had been soaked by the Mowbray cabal. Leaving his Rolls-Royce at Oxmoon in deference to Vaughan’s sensitive socialist soul, my father rode off on horseback to Daxworth but still managed to look like an aristocratic survivor of some proletarian guillotine.

  Once we were alone Thomas and I retired to the library, where Thomas embarked on the task of decoding the chaotic estate books and I began to make a list of Kester’s personal expenditures during the past year. We toiled away for some time, Thomas cursing under his breath as he made notes in his surprisingly neat handwriting, I suppressing gasps of disbelief at the sight of so many astronomical bills. Each time I came across a new monster I felt as if I’d been hit on the head with a hammer.

  At half-past three Thomas said, “Christ, this would drive a saint to drink,” and rang for the whisky decanter. When it arrived he generously inclined it in my direction. “Want some, Harry?”

  “No, thanks, old chap.” I was panting for it, but I was afraid he might tell my father. Drinking whisky at half-past three in the afternoon wasn’t the done thing at all.

  “Of course I don’t usually drink in the afternoon,” said Thomas, swigging away, “but my God, what a day this has been! How are you getting on?”

  “Well, if anyone died of sheer amazement I’d be six feet under by now. Thomas, just what is Kester’s annual income?”

  “That’s a question only John can answer, old boy. Only John knows the scope of the private income in addition to the estate.”

  “But you must have an approximate idea!”

  “Well, I’d guess about ten thousand.”

  “Ten thousand a year?”

  “Must be, old boy. At least. It would be still more if Kester managed all the farms himself, as my father used to do, and didn’t waste money on agents and lettings. Now, if Oxmoon belonged to me—”

  “But I thought Grandfather frittered away most of his private income on Milly Straker!”

  “He certainly tried to but luckily he went mad before he could complete the job and after that clever old John beavered away for over ten years to recoup the losses. You’ve only got to give John a stock and a share and they immediately mate and multiply.”

  “But even so … Grandfather must have had much more capital than I thought!”

  “Well, the capital didn’t all come from the little flutters on the stock exchange. It came from my mother’s share of the bloody pottery works in Staffordshire. Aunt Ethel got the work, but under the terms of her father’s will she had to pay my mother off. Good old Ethel, what a character she was! She used to send my hand-knitted socks every Christmas with a pound note tucked in each toe.”

  But I had no interest in Aunt Ethel, the family gorgon. I was much too interested in Kester. “So in spite of all this lavish spending the old sod’s probably still nowhere near bankrupt?”

  “No, but he’d reached the point where he would have had to start selling land to meet his bills, and of course that would have been the writing on the wall. Once you start selling off land in a place like Oxmoon you get yourself locked in a downward spiral of diminishing returns.”

  “Poor old Kester,” I said, “poor old sod, what a catastrophic balls-up! Very sad.” And as I was speaking I thought, Ten bloody thousand a year. At least. I didn’t dare think of my own bank balance in case I started to remember I didn’t have one.

  “What do you make of all this, Harry? Of course John’s doing the right thing, we both know that, but do you really think that bloody idiotic little pansy’s ever going to add up to much?”

  “No idea, old chap. Anyone’s guess.”

  “What do you think he got up to with Ricky?”

  “Damn all. Too busy being mad about Anna.”

  “Can’t think why. Can you?”

  I thought of brave loyal little Anna chatting happily away with such unaffected intelligence about Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. “No idea, old chap. No idea at all.”

  “Personally I can’t imagine Kester ever having a good fuck. The whole thing’s a complete mystery. Maybe he just waves his cock around and pretends, and the girl’s too innocent to know nothing’s happening.”

  “God knows, old chap. Personally I’m too busy waving my own cock around to care.”

  Thomas broke into loud guffaws of laughter and said I was a man after his own heart and that he could see we absolutely understood each other. I was just wondering how much longer I could stand his company when he added: “By the way, what do you think of the way Oxmoon’s been buggered up? If you want my opinion—”

  “Yes, it’s terrible, old chap, absolute rape. Never seen such a lot of pansyish rubbish in my life—there’s even a white-and-gold piano lying around in the ballroom.”

  Thomas thought that was the last word in effete taste. Telling him I had to go to the lavatory, I left him still swilling his whisky and staggered outside for an essential breath of fresh air.

  III

  At six my father returned after seeing the leading tenants and asked if we wanted to continue working. Both Thomas and I, anxious to impress him, expressed a longing to continue so after a quick drink we all retired to the library where my father could survey our progress. I had by this time reached the estimates for Oxmoon’s renovation.

  “Is all the work contracted for, Harry?”

  “Looks like it, yes.”

  “Damn, that means endless negotiations with the decorator while we try to get out of what hasn’t yet been done.”

  The three of us dined alone, a circumstance which made Thomas suggest that perhaps Kester and Anna had committed suicide, but this wishful thinking was terminated by my father who had seen them upstairs before dinner was served. Thomas and I had already telephoned our wives to warn them we would be returning late but my father made no effort to phone Constance. She was the one who telephoned when she realized he wasn’t going to call.

  “Oh hullo, darling,” we heard him say pleasantly as he took the call in the hall.

  “The old girl’s checking up on him!” whispered Thomas. “She doesn’t trust him an inch!”

  I said nothing.

  “Christ, it’s odd about John,” muttered Thomas who had by this time had a large amount to drink. “What the devil made him go back to that bloody cunt, Harry? Any idea?”

  “Not a clue, old boy. Absolutely none.”

  “Of course I can see him telling himself it was the right thing to do but even so … Anyway John doesn’t do the right thing with women, does he? That’s the whole bloody point. Where women are concerned he does what he likes and I’m all for it, I hate to think of him being bogged down in Belgravia with that bitch … How many mistresses does he keep? Or does he just sleep with anyone who happens to be convenient?�
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  “Why ask me? He doesn’t send me a telegram every time he has sex.”

  “Thought he might have confided in you—”

  “Good God, no.”

  “—because after all, you’re very close to each other, aren’t you? Never knew a father and son get on as well as you two do, it’s bloody marvelous, I take my hat off to you both.”

  “… yes, all right, darling,” my father was saying casually. “No, I’ll be back by then. … What? … No, he hasn’t installed central heating. I doubt if the aesthetics of plumbing would interest him. … I said I doubt if—oh, never mind. Look, darling, I’m afraid I really must ring off now. … Yes, I will. Yes yes, of course. Yes, I’ll ring you tomorrow. All right, darling, love to Francesca—and to you. … Yes. … ’Bye.” He finally managed to sever the connection, and when he returned to the library he was glancing at his watch. “Well,” he said abruptly, not bothering to comment on the call, “I think we’ve done all we can do today. Thomas—” He took care to smile at his brother to disguise the fact that he was getting rid of him. “—I can’t thank you enough for all your hard work and loyal support—I don’t know what I’d have done without you. You’ll be back at nine tomorrow?”

  “On the dot,” said Thomas, greatly pleased by these obligatory words of praise, and turned, beaming with good humor, to me. “Can I give you a lift, Harry?”

  I declined, saying I fancied some exercise after sitting down all day, and he departed. As the front door closed, my father and I eyed each other in exhaustion.

  “My God, Father,” I said at last when I could dredge up the energy to speak, “are you sure you know what you’re doing, giving that bastard free rein at Oxmoon?”

  “Come into the drawing room, Harry,” said my father. “I want to talk to you.”