The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  God, what a nightmare it was. People talk a lot of romantic bilge about what a wonderful life farming is and how living on the land is the only truly satisfying existence for human beings, but farming’s bloody hard work and not one bit glamorous. It was all right for someone like my father, who simply rode around on horseback and made executive decisions—which I now realized probably weren’t all that brilliant—but I wasn’t yet on that level. I had a living to earn. I had to be much more deeply involved in order to work out what I could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes and pay for them. Also, although my father was a successful businessman, farming tends to defy a conventional business approach because one’s dealing not with other businessmen but with God, thinly disguised as the weather. God tends to play havoc with the accounts, as my father had often complained, but to my mind my father wasn’t a farmer like Thomas or my grandfather. You can’t seriously call yourself a farmer until you’ve proved to your men that you too can shovel manure and do the bloody hoeing and get up at four in the morning to milk a cow.

  Anyway there I was, sweating along, having nightmares about winding up hopelessly in the red and having to crawl to my father to confess my abject failure, trying to learn all I could, struggling to keep on the right side of Thomas—and that was all before I was married. After I was married everything was just the same but worse because I was even more worried about money. I did wonder if I could borrow against my expectations but found that even though I was married the terms of the settlement made borrowing difficult before I was twenty-one. Then I inquired about borrowing against Bella’s expectations, but this was even more difficult. I began to feel hemmed in, oppressed. Picturesque Penhale Manor was easy on the eye but old houses are expensive to run. Bella was easy on the eye too, but wives aren’t cheap and pregnant wives aren’t cheap at all. God only knew how much the baby would cost. I did a few estimates involving prams, cots and clothes but gave up in horror. The thought of public-school fees in the remote future was quite beyond contemplation.

  To make matters worse it soon became clear that Bella had no idea how to run a house, and what was worse still it soon became clear that she was never going to be able to learn. This needn’t necessarily have been a disaster; Bronwen had never managed the house either but my rich father had been able to afford a first-class housekeeper. The most I could afford was a cook, a parlormaid and a daily woman from the village, none of whom seemed to do more than drink endless cups of tea. I tried firing them but the replacements went to pieces in the same way. It was because Bella didn’t care about anything except the new baby that was on the way. She never seemed to notice the chaos and the dirt and the rotten cooking. I didn’t mind a bit of muddle in my home; a bit of muddle’s natural, indicative of a flourishing family life, but I found this chronic disorganization was very depressing.

  However fortunately the human brain can cope with only so many worries at a time, and I quickly decided I couldn’t afford to get in a state about the house. My prime concern was my father. I had to impress him. I had to prove I had done the right thing by choosing a career in agriculture. I had to make a success of that farm.

  II

  I’ve no intention of describing the secret struggles for power that ensued between me and my foreman, the endless debates about the pros and cons of arable farming in stock-breeding country, my growing determination to grow oats in Standing-Stone Field, my rows with Jasper Llewellyn over his bloody sheep, the recalcitrant engine of my tractor, my decision to do more dairying now that there was a good supply of piped water, the horror of cows with split udders, the nightmare of bovine infertility, the cowman who went off the rails, the dairymaid who went on strike when the cows developed lice, the cat that ate the chickens and all the other incidents which formed the backbone of my rollicking bucolic life. Suffice it to say that I had a farm of some two hundred and eighty acres which I thought would drive me crazy.

  At first I decided it should be primarily arable; the rest of the country might have gone back to grass but the mild climate of Gower encouraged me to sustain an interest in crops. However I was lured into flirting with dairying (a) because it can be very profitable if everything goes right and (b) because I had some juicy water meadows which might have been designed by God as a paradise for lactating herbivores. But dairying is soul-destroying work. Those bloody cows need attention all the time and if you haven’t got a saint for a cowman you may as well cut your throat.

  I didn’t have a saint. I had a drunk who split udders during a hangover. God, what a nightmare. The vet’s bills nearly prostrated me. Thomas got me a new cowman but even so I did much of the work myself. I got to the point where I never wanted to see an udder again but luckily the men respected me for proving I could work as hard as anyone I employed and even my foreman was becoming mellow, so I went on slogging away and resisting the temptation to exterminate everything in sight—men, beasts, the lot. Farming romantic? Don’t make me laugh.

  All the same, in its own peculiar way it was rewarding. When I saw my crops waving in the breeze just before the harvest, I did experience that unique sense of accomplishment which can come only when a job’s been done well, and I realized that although I was being trained in a hard school it was going to be worth it because I was going to end up as successful as my grandfather, a farmer who’d worked his way up the ladder until he could combine astute estate management with living a relaxed gentleman’s life. Of course I’d never live at Oxmoon so I couldn’t follow exactly in his footsteps, but all the same …

  I saw myself living a pleasant life at Penhale Manor after my father had died (which God forbid) and left me most of his money. I’d have the farms in Herefordshire to run and the Penhale Home Farm mastered and perhaps I could even buy some more land somewhere to add to my empire … Idly I tried to calculate Oxmoon’s current market value, but gave up. There was no point, I told myself severely, in indulging in futile fantasies, so instead I trudged off through the farmyard sludge to supervise the mixing of the cattle feed. Kester was probably at that moment drinking champagne at Oxmoon in his Savile Row suit while he listened languidly to that sick-making Second Piano Concerto by Rachmaninoff.

  Poor old Kester, poor old sod …

  Ugh! How I hated him.

  III

  The one redeeming feature of this stark postwedding landscape was that Bella and I were very happy together whenever I wasn’t being driven mad by the estate or the servants or the chaotic state of the house. I certainly didn’t regret my marriage. What I most regretted was the estrangement from my father but as the months passed and he saw how hard I was trying to master my new life, he became kinder and I thought he would bury the hatchet once his new grandchild arrived. He treated Bella gently always, as if she were a mental defective who needed compassion. She wasn’t mentally defective, of course. She just wasn’t bright enough to care about learning anything but most people aren’t, are they? Highly educated people like my father think anyone who never opens a book is an imbecile, but the majority of the human race have no interest in reading, and no one could argue that this huge segment of humanity is entirely lacking in brains.

  It was true that all Bella liked to do was eat, drink, make love, chat and thumb her way through trashy fashion magazines, but I found I rather liked this magnificent mindlessness. It made me feel protective towards her. She was always nice-natured too, and this I found constantly endearing; the other women who had briefly appeared in my life hadn’t been nice-natured at all. Also I knew she loved me; she was much too ingenuous to be deceitful, and this made me feel blessedly secure. In fact her strong childlike devotion meant even more to me than her talent for sex, although a talent for sex isn’t to be sniffed at. Far from it. I like sex. In fact apart from playing the piano I can’t think of anything I enjoy more.

  My father was relieved to see that Bella and I were happy, and this too mellowed his attitude towards us so that by the time Kester went round the bend in the July of 193
9 I regarded my father and myself as wholly reconciled. Because of this improvement in our relationship it came as a particularly rude shock to me when he resurrected the specter of the Herefordshire farms that night at Oxmoon and tried to boot me out of Gower. I knew that he had always regarded my occupancy of the Manor as a temporary measure, but I did think I had at least five years, the length of my lease, before he attempted to push me into exile. No wonder I was horrified when he suggested I should leave Penhale so soon! And as for all that rubbish about how I was lurking at the Manor in order to pounce on Oxmoon …

  My father was really very odd sometimes. Most peculiar. Of course I occasionally thought how nice it would be if Kester dropped dead and the Oxmoon title deeds floated within reach of my father’s checkbook; but we all have our little pipe dreams, and no one but a certifiable lunatic goes around believing every little pipe dream has a hope of coming true. By this time I had absolutely accepted that Oxmoon would never be mine. I was a hardheaded realistic man of action—the diametric opposite of poor feeble dream-ridden old Kester.

  Or was I?

  I thought of the eerie moment that morning at Oxmoon when I had crossed the threshold and seen his glittering dream for the first time.

  I had heard of the renovations but no one had described them coherently to me because the only news I had received from Oxmoon for some time had been in the form of village gossip. So I had had no true idea what the place would look like. Perhaps I had visualized another version of Eaton Walk, groups of dead antiques littered on beige wall-to-wall carpets, but how wrong I was. When I saw the transfigured hall I heard in my head not the “Dead March” from Saul, as I so often did at Eaton Walk, but one of the most rampantly emotional and exuberant pieces a British ear can ever hear: Elgar’s march “Pomp and Circumstance Number One.” It nearly deafened me. I came in at the point where the orchestra, having darted around like a horde of lost bumblebees, finally gathers itself together and goes crashing up the scale towards that overpoweringly banal melody line “Land of Hope and Glory.” Fortunately, I pulled myself together just in time to terminate the performance, but that bloody crescendo had obviously opened the emotional floodgates because the next moment I was floating into the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Verdi’s Nabucco. How could I have been so florid? But what a powerful nostalgic beautiful tune Verdi wrote, and what a powerful nostalgic beautiful sight lay now before my eyes.

  I just stood there, listening to the chorus of the Hebrew slaves, and for a moment I knew reality, the only kind of reality that truly mattered, and that reality was all the music I had never learned and all the beauty which had been denied me and all the days of that other life which I had never been allowed to lead.

  Then I turned to face Kester, my cousin Kester, and I saw not my opposite but my double—my mirror image, my other self. It was an extraordinary moment. What I shall never forget is the horror but the horror defied analysis. It had no name. I felt I had seen something quite outside the range of normal human experience—but of course this was just a neurotic illusion, for I hadn’t seen my double at all; I’d just seen Kester through the distorted glass of my jealousy.

  I had conformed to my father’s standards and now I felt mutilated. Kester had defied them and known liberation. He, the fantasist, had lived in the truth. I, the realist, had been living a lie. I wanted his fantasy, I wanted his life, I wanted my true self, and the symbol of all my longings was Oxmoon, shining radiant Oxmoon, my dream as well as Kester’s, my fairy tale which could never come true.

  Well, I thought hours afterwards as I walked back through the night to Penhale, so much for that. It was time to get the world—the real world—back into focus. In the real world I was slowly but surely making a success of my life while Kester was now a failure on a colossal scale. Poor old Kester, I did feel genuinely sorry for him this time, I really did.

  At the gates of the Manor I paused to stare at the long, low line of the house. Its tall Elizabethan chimneys were black against the night sky. Very nice. I loved my home. I was content. No more hankering after the world of might-have-been.

  I went into the house. The drawing room, which needed a coat of paint, a good clean and new loose covers on the chairs, suddenly seemed unspeakably drab so to divert myself I instinctively headed for my mother’s piano and began to play the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco.

  Pitter-patter, pitter-patter, Bella scampered in looking like a Mabel Lucie Artwell drawing, all pink-and-white complexion, shining hair and wholesome chubbiness.

  “Harry, why don’t you come straight up to bed? What are you doing playing the stupid old piano at this hour of the night?”

  I reluctantly allowed myself to be led upstairs.

  “Was it an awful bore at Oxmoon?” said Bella.

  “Awful, yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, nothing much.”

  “What’s he done to the house?”

  “Tarted it up a bit.” I began to hear the Hebrew slaves again but she wiped them out by chattering about her latest visit to Dr. Warburton.

  “… and so I said I wanted a girl to replace Melody. Oh, it’s so nice that Dr. Warburton knows and I can talk to him about her!”

  “Hm.”

  “You want a girl too, don’t you, Harry?”

  “I keep telling you, Bella—I don’t mind what it is so long as it’s healthy and you’re all right.” God, as if I hadn’t enough problems without worrying about the baby’s sex! I gave up trying to hear the music and mechanically shed my clothes.

  “Oh Harry, how are we going to manage without sex for weeks and weeks before and after the birth?”

  “How are we going to manage when the war comes and I go off to fight?” I snapped, suddenly fed up with her constant preoccupation with sex.

  “Oh, there won’t really be a war, will there? I thought Mr. Chamberlain and Hitler got on so well at Munich.”

  Hopeless. Of course she never read a paper. We got into bed and started to fuck. After a while I was able to tell myself her ignorance was really rather sweet. She reached a climax. Thank God. I finished and presently she fell asleep. Thank God again. Lying on my back in the dark I listened once more to Verdi and tried hard not to think of the approaching war.

  The last thing I wanted was to go away and fight. What I really wanted to do was stay at home and be a pacifist like bloody Kester.

  But of course that wouldn’t have been the done thing at all.

  IV

  Inevitably I messed myself up in the war by doing the done thing and becoming a hero, but for once this was entirely my fault and my father was in no way to blame. During one of his regular visits to Oxmoon to supervise the mopping-up operations, my father made his views crystal-clear to me.

  “You must follow your conscience, Harry, and do not what you think I believe to be right but what you believe to be right. I got myself in an awful muddle over the last war when I didn’t fight although now when I look back I’m strongly inclined to think Robert was right when he urged me to stay at the Foreign Office. A war is fought on many fronts. Ideally one should contribute in the way in which one is best suited, so if you honestly feel you’d serve your country better by trying to stay out of uniform, for God’s sake don’t think I’d disapprove.”

  That was very fair and very kind. It made me feel close to him again, but the trouble was that this speech did nothing to sort out my confusion. In fact my confusion was so extreme that I would almost have been glad if he had said “Fight for your country or never darken my door again.” Then at least I would have had no choice and my agonizing debates with myself would have been terminated.

  This conversation took place in the October of 1939. Some months before I had joined a territorial unit to convince myself I had every intention of fighting the war as a soldier, but I was still waiting to be siphoned into the war machine and meanwhile I could do nothing but wrestle with my ambivalence. It would have been much easier if I could have told
myself I honestly subscribed to pacifism but I couldn’t. I believed we’d been right to declare war. I wanted to serve my country by fighting for it. But I hated the thought of leaving my home, hated it. I was being dispossessed again, this time by Hitler. I could have disemboweled him.

  Again and again I toyed with the idea of applying for an exemption from the services so that I could devote myself to reorganizing my land to produce the maximum amount of food, and if I’d been Thomas, who was thirty-two, I might have got away with it. But I was twenty and prime material for cannon fodder. I didn’t think I’d get away with it, and whether I did or not everyone was certain to look at me askance and I couldn’t stand the thought of collecting enough white feathers to stuff a pillow. Pacifists like Kester were in a different boat. They had the excuse of their moral principles. I had no excuse except a juvenile and selfish desire to stay at home. No, I had to fight, no choice, but Christ, what a nightmare it was. Meanwhile Thomas, whom everyone expected to join the Home Guard and stay on the land, was lusting to enlist in the army and go overseas. Typical. What an irony.

  I was diverted from this tortuous and morbid state of mind by the arrival of my son at the end of October. By a miracle everything was ready in time for him—nursery, nappies, nanny, the lot. My father, who was becoming almost softhearted, had given me the money to employ a nanny instead of a mere nursemaid because he said he didn’t think Bella realized how tiring newborn babies could be.

  There spoke the voice of experience. My father had begotten seven children—eight if one counted my brother John who had died at birth in 1917—and the memory of Bronwen sweating away in the nurseries at Penhale was no doubt permanently engraved on his mind. If he said newborn babies could be tiring even for an enthusiastic mother like Bella, I had no doubt he was right.