The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “I’ve got a photograph,” said Evan, and produced a picture of a smart attractive housewife who looked as if she might advertise soap powder in magazines. I knew then how right I was not to want to know about Bronwen. My magic lady had died and a transatlantic robot had taken her place.

  “What’s happened to Rhiannon and Dafydd, Evan?” I said abruptly, trying to turn the conversation into more bearable channels.

  “They both joined the navy. Rhiannon’s at Malta, but Dafydd was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore.”

  A cold shadow fell across the room as we thought of the Japanese. Kester said rapidly, “Tell us about Canada, Evan—every detail.”

  “Well, we’ve got this pretty five-bedroom home in a nice suburb of Vancouver, and …”

  Evan’s mild Canadian voice droned on and on as he described the house, the garden, the furniture, the car, the dog and the cat. I tried not to listen to him. For a time I managed to tune in to the Third Brandenburg Concerto in my head but Evan kept interrupting the flow of notes.

  “But Bronwen—tell us about Bronwen!” begged Kester.

  “Well … she’s pretty busy. As soon as we were all in school she took some courses in English literature and history and then she took a course in stenography but she didn’t like that so she gave it up and did nothing for a while—at least, she did plenty, bringing us up, joining the Ladies’ Guild, making loads of friends—”

  I thought of my sad solitary magic lady imprisoned in Penhale Manor.

  “—but in the end she got restless so she enrolled in college part time—well, she’s still at it, she wants to be a librarian, we think it’s great, we’re so proud of her. We all help run the house so that she can have time to study, but she still does the cooking because she likes that. There’s a lot of cooking to do too because we’re always bringing our pals home but she never minds, she just says the more the merrier, so we’re pretty sociable … hey, Kester, are you okay?”

  “Sorry, yes. I was just thinking … Oh Harry, isn’t it wonderful that everything worked out so well for them?”

  I agreed it was wonderful but knew nothing had changed. Bronwen was still lost and would never come back.

  Late in the afternoon my father arrived and when Edmund reported that the Rolls-Royce had been sighted in the drive I immediately hurried to open the front door. It would never do to let my father think I was sulking in a corner.

  “Hullo!” I called cheerfully as he jumped out of the car. “Welcome to the grand reunion!”

  Evan stepped past me. I went on looking at my father, and as I watched I saw the serious formidable Englishman dissolve into the man in blue dungarees who had joked in Welsh with Bronwen.

  I thought: So the dead do come back sometimes. My father had died but now he was alive again, smiling joyously and stretching out his arms.

  But not to me.

  The Prodigal Son stumbled down the steps. “Dad—oh Dad—”

  “Evan—”

  I turned away.

  XI

  They spent some time on their own in my study, but eventually they joined the rest of the family for tea. Everyone chatted and laughed and talked at the top of their voices. The air was heavy with nostalgia. After gnawing a cucumber sandwich I declined a slice of the new sugarless butterless cake which represented Cook’s latest wartime triumph and concentrated on making the occasional appropriate remarks.

  “Harry,” said Evan shyly at last, “will you play the piano for us? I had this dream of sitting here with Dad while you played ‘The Blue Danube’ for him, just like in the old days.”

  I dutifully played “The Blue Danube.” It’s tempting to dismiss that piece as hackneyed rubbish but in fact Johann Strauss the Younger was a most accomplished composer, and although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “The Blue Danube” is worthy of a concert hall I do think it deserves to be played in the finest ballroom in the world. Instantly I remembered the white-and-gold piano at Oxmoon. One day, if Kester ever invited me to his home for more than a strained whisky-and-soda, I was going to play that tune, complete with all the codas, in the ballroom—and this time I’d make sure bloody Thomas wasn’t around to interrupt me by yelling for “The Black Bottom.”

  After I’d finished playing my father smiled at me and said, “You remind me of your mother.”

  That was a curious remark to make when we all had Bronwen on the brain, but before I could wonder what was going on in my father’s mind Kester exclaimed, “Heavens, that tune reminds me of my mother! I say, isn’t it time we opened some of that champagne I’ve lugged over from Oxmoon?”

  I settled down to get discreetly drunk. Everyone kept saying it was a simply wonderful evening.

  XII

  Evan and I both had to leave for London the next day, so my father took us up to town in his Rolls-Royce. None of us talked much. We were all too aware of the war, all too conscious that we might never meet again. The partings at the Manor had been harrowing. Bella had tried to be brave but had dissolved into floods of tears, and Hal had cried too, probably to see her upset. He was too young to realize I could go away and never come back, but I told myself I knew I was going to see him again. I had to tell myself that. Had to. Only line to take. But God, what hell it all was.

  We left Evan at Waterloo to catch his train to Surrey, and as my father got out of the car to shake hands with him I didn’t hear what was said at the end. Afterwards we traveled to Belgravia in silence. I was due to spend the night at Eaton Walk before reporting for duty the next day.

  “I didn’t tell Constance about Evan,” my father said at last as the car halted outside the house. “I just said Edmund needed my advice urgently, but don’t worry, I’m not asking you to lie for me. I’m sure Francesca’s been busy creating havoc in the name of honesty. I didn’t realize she’d be quite so intractable.”

  “That’s a charitable word for being bloody-minded!”

  “Damaged children need charity,” said my father.

  The car halted. We got out. Without waiting for the butler to open the front door my father used his own key, and as he entered the hall Constance came sobbing down the stairs. She had obviously forgotten that I would be accompanying my father, and she was so distressed that she never saw me in the shadow of the porch. I hesitated embarrassed but my father just said to me with resignation, “Wait in the library, would you please, Harry?” so I withdrew thankfully to his sanctum nearby. As I helped myself to a whisky-and-soda I tried without success to imagine their dialogue. Would he be obliged to take her to bed to shut her up? What an ordeal after a two-hundred-mile drive and a parting from a Prodigal Son! I wondered how on earth he would get an erection.

  Half an hour passed. Eventually he appeared looking haggard and I saw that the man in blue dungarees had died again to allow the unhappy Englishman to take his place. Pouring himself a double scotch he drank it neat. Then he poured himself a second double, added soda and sank down in the chair opposite mine.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll be better in a minute. Poor Constance, she’s so insecure. I’ve just been trying to convince her I’m not on the brink of using my government influence to get a passage to Vancouver.”

  “Too bad Francesca can’t see the results of her phone call.” I was thinking that tough, obstinate little Francesca was far more like her mother than I had ever realized.

  “No sense in being bitter,” said my father. “Bitterness can drive a man—” But he could not say the word “mad.” “—to drink,” he said, looking down at the glass in his hand. Madness always frightened him but as he was normally an abstemious man, he could regard alcohol without fear. “The trouble is that Constance is incapable of a rational conversation on the subject of my past with Bronwen so it proved quite impossible to explain my true feelings about Evan’s reappearance to her. But perhaps I can explain them to you. Perhaps you secretly feel exactly the same as I do. Perhaps you too are wishing that he’d stayed away.”

 
I was transfixed. All I could do was clutch my glass. God knows why it didn’t shatter in my hand.

  “I don’t want to think of Bronwen alive in Canada,” whispered my father. “I can only bear it if I think of her as dead. That boy … that photograph … I just … couldn’t … bear it.” And he covered his face with his hands in despair.

  I was on my knees beside him. I put my arm around his shoulders and my free hand on his nearest forearm. Naturally I said nothing. Nothing to say. Words are useless in that sort of situation, any Englishman knows that, even two Welshmen who are only English by education.

  “I was glad you played ‘The Blue Danube,’ ” said my father after a while. “It was such a relief to remember Blanche, such an escape.” More time passed. Then he said suddenly, “I was so fond of Blanche. She was a very … sensitive person. She would have understood at once about Evan if she’d been in Constance’s shoes—but then of course she would never have put herself in Constance’s shoes. She’d have given me a divorce.”

  He stopped speaking. Nothing happened. But a voice in my head said: Wait a minute. This is my mother you’re talking about. My mother.

  A multitude of muddled emotions assaulted me but as I thought of those old photographs of the laughing exquisite girl whom I couldn’t quite remember, I was suddenly glad she had died when she did.

  Pain loosened my tongue. I said, “Was Bronwen your mistress before—”

  And he said “No” without letting me finish.

  “How soon after Mama’s death did you start the affair with Bronwen?”

  My father finished his drink and stared down into his empty glass. “Blanche was dead. That was all that mattered.”

  I thought: So he didn’t wait long. Whatever the done thing was he didn’t do it. He bucketed around, messed up two women at once and finally walked out on his pregnant wife to live in sin with his mistress. What a bastard. Incredible. Why hadn’t he drawn his famous line? Because it hadn’t suited him to draw it. He had temporarily lost the chalk that drew the lines. What a hypocrite. And how typically Victorian.

  But of course I couldn’t think thoughts like those, not just because they weren’t the done thing but because I loved my father, the hero of my childhood, and I wanted to forgive him everything, even the divorce from my mother which had never happened. But all the same …

  “I loved Bronwen so much,” said my father. “I used to get in such muddles but she always saw things clearly. She was the way, the truth, the life I longed to lead.”

  Quite. Here was the Welsh romantic spouting sentiments which the cynical English side of him would undoubtedly have described as rubbish. But what a mess! What a tragedy! And of course the moral of the whole story was to avoid grand passions like the plague.

  “I’m sorry you’ve been so unhappy, Father,” I said, suddenly finding I could forgive him by making Grand Passion the scapegoat. I decided it had driven him out of his mind after my mother’s death and rendered him not responsible for his actions.

  “I’m all right now,” he said. “I can keep on an even keel by leading a useful life, but sometimes I can’t bear the thought of more unhappiness. Harry …”

  I knew intuitively that he was telling me not to get killed. In fact what he was saying was that he really did feel God should draw the line somewhere and not make him suffer too much for his past wrongs. I agreed with him. I didn’t see the world through his Victorian eyes but I did think it was about time retribution took a back seat in his life.

  “If Kester survives,” I said, “I’ll survive. We’re plowing parallel furrows in time.”

  My father stared at me. “What an extraordinary thing to say.”

  He was right. I had voiced the sort of wild, crazy, highly peculiar thought which should never have been allowed to escape from my brain. I was so horrified that I even felt myself blushing in embarrassment.

  However my father, still indulging the Welsh romantic side of his personality, was fortunately in a mood to take my eccentricity in his stride. “You’ve been reading Dunne!” he said with a smile.

  “Who the hell’s he?”

  My father smiled again but all he said was “I hope that when the war’s over you’ll want to plow your furrow in a different field from Kester’s.”

  “I daresay I will,” I said, wanting only to leave him in a happy frame of mind, but instinct told me that if I survived the war I was going to come back to Cousin Kester. And once I’d come back I suspected I’d have a hard time busting apart the parallel lines of our mirrored lives.

  XIII

  I’ll never know how I survived.

  I was sent to Kabrit in North Africa where Colonel David Stirling had recently been told by the Middle East Commander-in-Chief General Alexander to expand his S. A. S. detachment into a full regiment of the British Army. S.A.S. stood for Special Air Service, but that name had been invented to deceive the Germans; the S.A.S. had nothing to do with the air although they did spend much time blowing up planes on the ground. In fact they blew up damned nearly everything in sight in order to be a thorn in the enemy’s side, and apart from a recent disaster at Benghazi they’d been highly successful. However Montgomery regarded Stirling with a jaundiced eye, so when Stirling set about building his regiment up to full strength he wasn’t allowed to annex any of Montgomery’s men. Consequently he was driven to cast his net elsewhere, and thanks to a meeting with his brother Bill in London I wound up as a new recruit. Arriving in North Africa I found Stirling in charge of a motley assortment of fanatics which included the remnants of Middle East Commando, and at once I realized that hair-raising times lay ahead.

  Well, we dynamited our way along the coast of North Africa and prowled around behind the enemy lines, often with disastrous results, and somehow I managed to escape being killed or captured, God knows how. Hitler had given orders that saboteurs like us were to be shot on sight but that nice chap Erwin Rommel took no notice, so when Stirling was eventually captured by the Italians he lived to tell the tale after the war. After his capture I secretly hoped life might become a little less crazy, but the S. A. S. merely continued undaunted with their preposterous heroics. I only pretended to be heroic, but that was all right because I was used to pretending to be something I wasn’t. I’d survived Harrow by pretending I was a public-school success story, and now I was only playing a madder version of the Great English Public School Game.

  I pined for the clean cool air and fine lines of Gower. Couldn’t say so, of course. I had to act as if war were a huge adventure, but to my mind my activities only proved how bestial human beings can be when they’re running around killing each other. War brings out the best in men? Don’t make me laugh, Machiavelli.

  I used to dream that I was playing the piano at Oxmoon and all the windows of the ballroom were open so I could smell the freshly cut grass on the lawns. Everywhere was sunlit and serene. Magic Oxmoon someone had called it once, and now more than ever it was the symbol of a life which lay utterly beyond my reach. It was the symbol of Peace—Peace with a capital P—Peace, Beauty, Art, Truth … No, I hadn’t got that quite right. Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace—yes, that was it. Someone had waffled about all that a long time ago in another world and I had thought such abstractions formed a nauseous quartet, but now I knew that on the contrary they represented the way, the truth, the life I longed to lead. … Someone else in that other world had talked about ways and truth and longed-for lives, but I could no longer remember who it was. The other world was so far away, and I was on a different planet, my whole being concentrated upon staying alive. But although I was now just a Machiavellian stereotype I knew that after the war I’d go home and Oxmoon would redeem me. It lay there at the end of a hellish rainbow to compensate me for the horrors of war.

  I didn’t get back to base often but when I did there were always several letters waiting for me. It was odd to hear news of the other world, as odd as receiving proof that heaven really did exist, complete with celestial choirs all singing Bac
h’s B Minor Mass.

  Darling Harry, all well here, how are you I am well, quite recovered from the birth now, I think Humphrey’s going to be dark like you, Hal and Charles are still fighting all the time, God I do have my hands full but I do so wish they were full of you …

  … so everything’s in order here now—I was a bit worried about the hoeing, such an awful job, but those two land girls work like Trojans so I’m sure we’ll manage. Teddy says she’ll write soon but you know what Americans are like—the telephone ruined them. Your very affectionate uncle, EDMUND.

  … and anyway, honey, don’t have nightmares that Bella’s running around with those god-awful Canadians at Little Oxmoon because with four boys under five all she can do is put her feet up whenever she gets the chance …

  … and Constance sends her love. She’s just improved our air-raid shelter with matchless American efficiency—this has stopped her from worrying about Francesca who looks much too attractive in her WAAF uniform. I’ve no news of your other sister since she and Rory parted—she’s still at Swansea with the Bryn-Davieses. Must stop now, no more room. May God, however unimaginable He is, be with you. Your devoted father, J. G.

  My dear Harry, don’t faint. It’s me. I don’t know whether you read letters from pacifists but on the chance that you don’t immediately consign this to the nearest oubliette I thought I’d send a cousinly line to congratulate you on your latest medal. I expect war’s all enormous fun really, just as Machiavelli says it is, although I must say I still blanch when I remember he modeled his hero on Cesare Borgia! And now from the Borgias to the Godwins (a thought-provoking transition!). Visited Uncle J in London last week—you should see Aunt C’s air-raid shelter! Fit for a ten-year siege—Priam’s six-gated city pales in comparison. Francesco’s in love with three men, reported blissful. Marian has a new lover. Also reported blissful. Teddy and Edmund still Darby and Joan, Anna and I ditto, Bella and boys flourishing but missing you, I’m running out of space, yours, KESTER.