The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  This letter comes with best wishes for a happier future from your reformed (!!!) cousin KESTER.

  My prime reaction was relief. I had been expecting hysterical effusions but instead I had received this calm, sensible, amusing and eminently rational letter. Incredible. Those psychiatrists in Dublin had evidently administered some sort of mental enema so maybe Teddy was right and psychiatrists weren’t just a bunch of quacks. Paranoia. That was an arresting word. Obviously the medical term for a persecution complex. I made a mental note to look it up in the dictionary.

  I liked the idea of him taking an interest in Hal. Well, why not? Of course Kester was never going to leave Oxmoon to any son of mine, but … Or would he? Maybe if I made an all-out effort … I was so carried away by the idea of Hal inheriting Oxmoon that I seriously contemplated bosom friendship with my reformed cousin Kester.

  This fantasy lasted some hours, and the rash on my back quietened to such an extent that I took no more pills and was able to pour myself a drink before dinner. I was just adding soda to my glass when I heard Thomas’s Hillman careering up the drive.

  I had become very, very tired of Thomas. Since his reinstatement as manager of Oxmoon he had formed the tedious habit of dropping in at Penhale Manor regularly to drink me out of house and home as he conducted a monologue on estate management. I was continually tempted to tell him frankly that I couldn’t afford to pay for his alcoholic excesses, but I didn’t want a row. That would have meant trouble with my father, and trouble with my father was always a disaster which had to be avoided at all costs.

  On the salver the water jug was empty, and filling it with whisky I hid it behind the curtain. That left the decanter one-fifth full and I could say it contained all the whisky I had in the house.

  “Harry!” Thomas came bursting into the hall as I opened the front door. “Christ, old boy, what do you think’s happened?” He was already heading for my study and the inevitable offer of a drink. “You’ll never guess, never in a thousand years!”

  Preparing for some story of a sow who had produced two dozen piglets in one litter, I showed a clean glass the decanter and reached for the soda siphon to conceal my sleight of hand.

  “Make it a double,” said Thomas, perhaps dimly aware that I had formed the habit of shortchanging him. “My God, I need a double after the shock I had this morning!”

  “What happened?”

  “I had a letter from Kester.”

  I nearly dropped the glass. I gaped. And somewhere, far away in the distance, the warning bell rang to tell that indefatigable survivor Nerves-of-steel Godwin that something unpleasant lay lurking below the horizon.

  I said abruptly, “Why on earth should he write to you?”

  Thomas at once produced a sheet of typewriting paper covered in flowery handwriting. “Read it,” he offered, and added benignly: “Poor old Kester, perhaps I was a bit too hard on the sod in the past.”

  This was the equivalent of Hitler saying Churchill was a nice old chap when you got to know him. Too stunned to speak I read: My dear Thomas, I feel that now I’ve recovered I should formally express my sincere thanks to you for looking after the estate in my absence. Uncle John informs me you’ve done your usual first-class job and I wouldn’t like you to think that I’m not deeply grateful.

  My experiences since Anna’s death last summer have made me realize how lucky I am to have such a loyal devoted family, and consequently I can’t help but see I’ve done you much less than justice in the past. However perhaps we might meet on more friendly terms in the future because I can now frankly acknowledge that we’re in a position where we can do each other a favor. You want to continue running the estate; I want to live in peace without having to worry about Oxmoon. So will you be awfully decent, bury the hatchet and agree to stay on permanently as manager after my return at Easter? I can see so clearly that my only hope of a tranquil life in future lies in giving you carte blanche with the running of the estate.

  Of course you must have an increase in salary, that goes without saying, and if you feel you can accept my proposal I’ll ask Uncle John to act as a mediator in negotiating a new figure. Meanwhile I send my best wishes and look forward to seeing you again soon. Yours, KESTER.

  Looking up I found Thomas beaming at me with such childlike naivety that he seemed more like a schoolboy of fourteen than a hard-drinking thug past thirty-nine.

  “Isn’t that incredible?” he said sunnily as I handed the letter back to him.

  “Incredible.” Unlike him I spoke literally. I was thinking: One fattens pigs before sending them to the slaughter. But I checked that thought before it could blossom into paranoia. It would never do if I fell victim to persecution mania.

  Nasty word, paranoia.

  “Of course he’s mad as a hatter,” said Thomas, unaware of my neurotic thoughts, “but what the hell? So long as I’m running the place I don’t even care if he ends up as gaga as my father—although of course Kester, being a secret queer, couldn’t get up to all the tricks my father got up to. Did I ever tell you what John and I found in his bedroom after Milly ran off in ’28?”

  “Yes. Three times. But you usually wait till you’re drunk before you trot it out.”

  “Christ, do I? I must be getting senile myself! Poor old Papa, I was damn fond of the old bugger … hey, what’s this? I asked for neat whisky, not neat pissing soda water!”

  I somehow got rid of him but before I could meditate further on the situation I was diverted by the boys. It was their bedtime and Bronwen had suggested that I read them a story every night to prove I was still there even if Bella wasn’t. This was something I could do. I couldn’t sustain a nursery-level conversation but I could read. I sat on a bed, Humphrey on one knee, Jack on the other, Charles glued to my left side, Hal glued to my right. Everyone except me sucked his thumb, and I was almost tempted to suck mine too, just for old times’ sake, to see if it had a soothing effect on me.

  That night, the bedtime story concluded, I dined alone as usual and retired to the drawing room. Then I put my feet up, listened to Stravinsky and tried to work out what the devil my reformed cousin Kester was up to.

  I knew that Thomas’s letter was rubbish from start to finish. Kester, clever Kester, had judged his reader to a nicety and fed him no sentiment he couldn’t swallow whole, but I wasn’t Thomas and that taradiddle stuck in my gullet. In fact the very thought of Kester in his new role of family saint made me want to puke. How lucky I am to have such a loyal devoted family! he had scribbled with such winsome hypocrisy, and I can’t help but see I’ve done you much less than justice in the past, he had added, fawning on the uncle I knew he would always despise.

  So what was going on? Thomas might have no trouble dismissing Kester as an addled eccentric but I was beginning to see him as a very clever, highly unstable man, unstable enough to have abnormal thoughts and clever enough to conceal them. He was up to something, I had no doubt of that, and I was just wondering in incredulity how Thomas could have accepted his letter at face value when I suddenly realized that every one of the sentiments Kester had expressed there had been expressed—though much more subtly—in his letter to me.

  Hurrying to my study, I grabbed the letter from my desk. Yes, here we were—the fond reference to the family, the humble plea for a new friendly relationship—but served up this time with the good-humored honesty which had so readily annulled my suspicions. The letter now struck me as being immensely clever. I told myself: “Never forget that this man’s a writer.” Like the rest of the family I had never taken Kester’s scribbles seriously but perhaps we’d all made a big mistake. He was twenty-seven, twenty-eight in November, and he’d been scribbling away since he could hold a pen. Even if his stories were rubbish the likelihood was that by this time he would have acquired certain technical skills which enabled him to use words much as a ballet dancer uses music.

  I remembered going to the ballet at Sadler’s Wells. I remembered the sweeping leaps and bounds which had caught m
y eye, but in between these set pieces, as Constance had pointed out, lay the footwork so intricate that the audience was aware of little but a graceful flowing movement. Yet it was this subtle footwork which made the big leaps possible.

  I took a look at Kester’s footwork. I noticed the spare expression of condolences which floated effortlessly into the apology for our quarrel. I noticed how this apology, immaculately phrased with not a single misplaced word that might have upset me, blended seamlessly into the remarks on our parallel lives which he knew would lure me on into his further apology for our past estrangement. Liquidly, with an almost sensuous ease, the apology melted into an amusing paragraph in which he expressed the hope that we could re-form our relationship. How cunning! No mawkish talk, no rich sentimentality which he knew would alienate me. The whole paragraph was immaculate in its emotional discipline, and then at the end came the mention of the Doppelgänger to send me rushing over the page into the most mysterious paragraph of all—the lines in which he led me to believe, without actually promising anything, that he wanted to take a significant interest in Hal. After that he had tossed off a witticism or two in the penultimate paragraph in order to restore the good-humored tone which he knew I would find irresistible, and then produced another seamless blending, this time into a final farewell.

  A masterpiece. But what did it mean? What in fact could it mean? Even if it meant he had some mad purpose in mind the doctors would hardly have let him out of the mental hospital if they had thought he was dangerous.

  All the same …

  A clever but unstable man. A neurotic.

  Not to be trifled with under any circumstances.

  Then I thought: Who am I talking about?

  And when I glanced in the mirror at my reflection for one split second I saw Kester looking back.

  Mad as a bloody hatter. I took two pills, drank two brandies, went to bed and passed out.

  VIII

  Kester arrived home a week later. I gave him two days to settle in and then I called at Oxmoon to say hullo, just as he’d suggested. Naturally I no longer believed he had any sinister purpose in mind—that was just me being neurotic—but I felt I had to see him to reassure myself that he was benign.

  I took Hal with me, not merely because Kester had asked to see him but because Bronwen had said he needed special attention. He had been ill, vomiting and running a high fever. Warburton had said it was gastric flu but Bronwen had said it was grief and Bronwen was the one I believed.

  I wondered what it could be like to be ill with grief at the age of seven. It was bad enough being ill with guilt at the age of twenty-eight. Despite the pills my rash was giving me hell again, and although I knew sex would soothe my nerves I shied away from it for fear it would make me feel guiltier than ever. One really can’t go sleeping with other women directly after one’s wife’s funeral. Only a hopeless degenerate could be capable of such behavior.

  As we arrived at Oxmoon I asked Hal how he was feeling but he assured me he was all right. Poor little devil. Ill with grief. I glanced at the shining mouse-colored hair and the fresh-looking skin he had inherited from Bella but it was at that moment, as concern drove me to examine his face intently, that I realized how unlike her he was. Bella had had a round chubby face with blunt heavy sensual features. Hal’s face was thin, fine-drawn, and although he had my dark eyes his bone structure was different from mine. There was something about his jaw which reminded me of someone. Couldn’t think who. Curious, those old likenesses which run through families like recurring trademarks. I knew I looked like my mother, but Hal was more like my father, more of a Godwin.

  There had been no butler at Oxmoon since Lowell’s death during the war, but a bossy parlormaid admitted us as though she regarded our call as an intolerable intrusion on her time and we were shown into the morning room. With a shudder I noticed that the Edward VII coronation mug had been placed in the most exquisite eighteenth-century curio cabinet. Perhaps the mug was Doulton or Worcester. Kester would hardly have retained it if it had been junk.

  It was cold in the room and I was just starting to worry about the possibility of Hal developing pneumonia when Kester walked in. He looked well. His curious face with its lean masculine bones and soft feminine mouth was relaxed, and not for the first time I found myself thinking that with a better nose he would have been good-looking. There was something about that jaw inherited from Uncle Robert …

  That jaw. Christ Almighty—

  “Hullo, Harry! How are you?”

  Had to pull myself together.

  “Absolutely splendid, old chap. How are you?”

  A strong, well-made but much too well-kept hand was being offered to me, and I saw the writer’s callus on his middle finger, the emblem of the soft life I’d been brought up to despise.

  “I’m feeling marvelous!” said Kester as we shook hands. “Couldn’t be better!” Then he laughed and said with great charm, “Whew! Thank God we’ve got that over—now we can start talking about how awful life really is!” He stooped over my son. “Hal, I was so sorry to hear about your mum—I did feel for you so much because I could remember how frightful I felt when my own mum died. I cried and cried—imagine! And I was eighteen years old!—but I was glad I did because afterwards I felt better.”

  I expected Hal to find this speech as nauseating as I did but no, Hal was smiling painfully, and there was a grateful expression in his eyes.

  “I felt better too after I’d cried,” he confided, “but then I started being sick and I felt awful again.”

  “But you’re well enough now for a treat, aren’t you? My brother Declan has American friends who send him luscious chocolate biscuits, and I’ve brought some home with me.”

  “Real chocolate?”

  “Real chocolate. One day, Hal, probably when you’re quite old, rationing will end and you’ll be able to buy as many sweets as you like and the shops will be full of fascinating things like pineapples and bananas—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard of them. Is the chocolate milk chocolate or plain chocolate?”

  We adjourned to the drawing room where to my relief I found a fire blazing. Kester and Hal were deep in a discussion about whether it was more stimulating to lick the chocolate off the biscuits first or whether the biscuits should be crunched up without being stripped. I could now see just how smoothly my serf must have been purloined in the past, and I had to tell myself very firmly not to feel jealous because poor old Kester, poor childless old sod, could talk to my son better than I could. Of course I could see by this time that I’d imagined the resemblance in the jawline. That was just me being neurotic again.

  “Gin-and-French, Harry?”

  I couldn’t tell Kester that I was temporarily on the wagon because of my neurotic skin troubles. I had given up the pills but Warburton had told me that alcohol, heating the skin, could only act as an irritant, even though the immediate effect was to soothe the nerves.

  “Wouldn’t mind a quick one, old chap,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. Now Hal, what would you like to do while I have a chat with your father? Read? Write? Draw? I don’t mind, it’s up to you.”

  But Hal just sighed in bliss, his left hand clutching his glass of orange squash, his right hand already oozing chocolate, and said with a yearning I had never once anticipated, “Is there still a piano in the ballroom?”

  IX

  So he was like me after all, never mind the jawline and never mind damned Kester standing by to transform him into an acolyte. I at once resolved that he should have piano lessons at school. Why hadn’t I thought of it before? It had never occurred to me. I’d just thought he banged the piano to give me hell, whereas all the time … I pictured endless discussions on the subject of Bach. I saw us at the Albert Hall, Sadler’s Wells and Covent Garden. I envisioned myself as a battered bedridden old man with Hal being the perfect son and making sense of all that hell I’d gone through with Bella. In my head an emotional contralto accompanied by the full o
rchestra of the Royal Opera House was singing some richly sentimental piece of nonsense—“Softly Awakes My Heart” from Samson and Delilah perhaps, or else an aria from some horror by Puccini.

  “Here’s your gin-and-French,” said Kester, recalling me to reality as Hal rushed off to the ballroom.

  “Thanks.” Still dazed at the thought of what a musical son might mean to me I forgot where I was and sniffed the glass, just as I had sniffed drinks in Italy during the war. Some of that Italian wine would have taken the paint off cars.

  “It’s all right,” said Kester amused. “I’ve run out of cyanide so murder’s not on the agenda today.”

  “Oh, don’t be so bloody ridiculous!” I snapped, and then realized I’d sounded just as uncomfortable as if I really had suspected him of a poison attempt. I tried a lighthearted laugh but only sounded sheepish.

  “Sorry!” said Kester breezily. “I didn’t mean to drown you in facetiousness! Let’s change the subject. Well, I’m all agog—what did you think of my letter?”

  “Brilliant. So was your letter to Thomas.”

  Kester looked startled. “I didn’t realize Thomas rushed to show you his correspondence!”

  “No; I didn’t think you’d anticipated that. Never mind, you’ve got us both eating out of your hand and thinking, Good old Kester, not such a bad old sod after all. But what happens next? Or aren’t I supposed to ask?”

  Kester laughed. “With any luck nothing will happen at all—I’ve got to write and that means I must have absolute peace. Hence the white flag waving feverishly on all fronts. I simply can’t waste any more time being upset and unable to write just because I’m in a state about my family.”

  This was a very simple, thoroughly plausible explanation. I could feel myself relax.