The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

“Couldn’t you write in Ireland?”

  “No. I tried but I felt mutilated, cut off from my roots … and from Oxmoon. I’m no good without Oxmoon. So I decided to come back, and as soon as I made that decision I knew I was better. A good nervous breakdown’s very therapeutic, you know. I feel better now than I’ve felt for a long time.”

  “Good.”

  “Of course you probably think I’m mad as a hatter. Well, I was, after Anna died—madder than a hatter, in fact. Imagine burning down that summerhouse! Incredible! Oh, and by the way, I’m so sorry I said I wanted to kill you when you burst into Oxmoon that night. Awfully florid of me, wasn’t it! And it wouldn’t have been chic at all if I’d wound up hanged for murder—or would I have been ‘detained during His Majesty’s pleasure’ at Broadmoor? Interesting point. Anyway you needn’t worry—I did want to kill you at the time but that time’s past, thank God, and I didn’t kill you anyway so what the hell, have another gin. I seem to have absolutely wolfed mine.”

  We had another gin-and-French apiece. Kester started chatting about how awful funerals were and we wound up talking of Bella.

  “My God, she was sexy,” said Kester—I think we were on our third gin-and-French by that time—“and I can quite understand why you married her. I bet Thomas often thought he’d picked the wrong sister—Christ, poor old Thomas, no wonder he drinks, do you think he ever gets an erection? I’ll bet he’s too sodden most of the time, but if he ever does I wouldn’t be surprised if he ejaculated neat whisky! Have another drink.”

  “Uh … well …”

  “You’re not really chums with Thomas, are you, Harry? You’re such opposites—he’s all talk and no action while you’re all action and no talk! Poor old Thomas, he’s pathetic, isn’t he? I really feel quite sorry for him sometimes.”

  I tried to picture the size of the apoplectic fit Thomas would have thrown if he had heard this judgment but my imagination failed me. I accepted a fourth gin-and-French. I was beginning to be most entertained by this salty, good-humored stranger who was now my reformed cousin Kester. Who would have thought the old sod was capable of behaving like one of the boys? Wonders would never cease. I could see now that the nervous breakdown had done him a power of good.

  “Of course I’m not chums with Thomas,” I said. “I can’t stand the damned sod. He invades my home, drinks my whisky and drives me up the wall. But Christ, if he ejaculates neat whisky I’d like to know about it, I’d follow him around with a bowl, it’s about time I got some of my own back—although yes, I bet you’re right, I bet he’s usually too pissed to get it up. Ah, to hell with him; I wish he’d drop dead!”

  “Couldn’t agree with you more, old chap,” said Kester, thoroughly sympathetic. “However at least he saves me the bore of looking for an agent. One must be thankful for small mercies, even if the mercy does come in the form of a shit with a pickled cock.”

  We laughed and laughed. It’s amazing what extraordinary things seem amusing after four hefty slugs of gin gingered up with four hefty slugs of French dry vermouth.

  But later when I was sober I thought, Was that Kester talking? And I just couldn’t believe it. There was something odd going on, I knew there was, and I wasn’t just being neurotic either.

  Or was I?

  I dragged out the medical dictionary which I had recently acquired out of a desire to find out more about my skin troubles, and eventually after much thumbing of macabre pages I found the entry PARANOIA. I read it. Naturally I had all the symptoms, but I always did, no matter which entry I read, so this meant nothing.

  A common manifestation of paranoia was that you thought someone was trying to kill you. Well, I’d got over that one. I didn’t seriously think Kester was trying to kill me.

  But just what the hell was he up to?

  No idea.

  6

  I

  OVER THE FOLLOWING months various clues surfaced, but none of them were obvious and all might have escaped the attention of anyone save a certified paranoiac. My suspicions were also lulled by the fact that having shot off his two sinister epistolary masterpieces Kester appeared to sink into a blameless existence. Scribbling made him reclusive and although he managed to face an occasional family gathering, only two cousins turned up at Oxmoon with any regularity. One was my ex-serf Evan, whose idealism Kester found appealing, and the other was Edmund’s son Richard, now twenty-three, a brainless boisterous hulk who held some nominal position in Armstrong Investments. Kester told me that Richard made him laugh. Personally I find buffoonery tiresome but Richard had an indestructibly sunny outlook and I supposed that Kester in his more melancholy moments found this bouncy optimism attractive.

  The only other people who saw Kester regularly consisted of a group of children whom he invited to tea during the school holidays. This group varied in size and composition but Hal was a founding member and so was little Owen Bryn-Davies. Kester also included the eldest Llewellyn child, probably out of sentimentality because she happened to be called Gwyneth. Kester had long been intrigued by the story of our great-grandmother Gwyneth Godwin, née Llewellyn, and after his return to Gower he announced his intention of turning this hoary old family myth into a novel.

  My father was livid. I had long since realized that he was peculiar on the subject of his grandmother, and when Kester now tried to get to the bottom of this peculiarity during one of the rare family gatherings at Oxmoon I found myself listening with bated breath.

  “I have absolutely nothing to say on the subject,” said my father tight-lipped.

  “Why not?” said Kester. “What have you got to hide?”—which was exactly the question I had never had the nerve to ask.

  My father went white, said he had loved his grandmother and was determined to protect her memory from any vulgar inquiries from someone bent on a cheap tasteless exploitation of ruined lives. Kester’s response was to say blandly: “But why should her memory need protecting? What did she do that was so awful—apart from taking a lover and compensating herself for a homosexual drunk of a husband?”

  That rocked the entire family. A gasp rippled around the drawing room and I gasped just as loudly as anyone else because although Great-Grandfather Robert Godwin’s homosexuality was known to us all it was by tradition never referred to. He was Robert Godwin the Drunkard, not Robert Godwin the Pervert, in the family folklore.

  When my father could speak he said, “Let them all rest in peace. It’s no good you trying to turn it into a conventional story with heroes and villains. You’ll simply distort the truth.”

  “And what was the truth?” said Kester. I suddenly realized that where his writing was concerned he was like a tank. Short of blowing him up, no one could stop his inexorable progress towards his goal.

  “The truth about my grandmother and Owain Bryn-Davies,” said my father, “is that they were just two ordinary people who failed to draw the line.”

  “Fascinating,” said Kester, and wrote something in his notebook.

  My father lost his temper. Bronwen and Evan rushed to pour oil on the turbulent waters. The family gathering ended in chaos.

  As the result of this scene Kester said soothingly to my father that he had shelved his novel on Great-Grandmother Gwyneth and had returned to work on another story with which he’d been toying for some time. This novel was never described and personally I didn’t believe it existed. I thought Kester was probably still burrowing away at Great-Grandmother’s legend.

  Well, this was all very normal and even the row could be written off as an overheated example of family bickering, so I was gradually tempted to regard Kester as a harmless eccentric who had a penchant for rattling the skeletons in the family closet. It was only later that I came to recognize the pattern of his behavior; the horrors were always preceded by periods of deceptive normality.

  However as usual I was diverted from Kester by my worries over the estate, although 1947 was a good summer and the Penhale Home Farm did well. But I couldn’t get those bloody sheep right
at Martinscombe. I had to buy new stock to replace the animals who had failed to survive the terrible winter but after I had bought the best sheep available to avoid bringing problems into the flock, the dry summer favored the blowflies with the result that although I dipped and dipped the poor sheep several of them died from infestation. And this was only one aspect of my problems. Prices were rising. So was taxation. The cost of my sons’ education was raising its ghastly head as I made arrangements for Hal to go to prep school in the autumn. I wasn’t exactly wondering where the next penny was coming from but I did spend much time plotting how I could squeeze more money out of my estate by cutting down labor costs—always the most expensive item in farm accounts.

  Then in the summer of ’47 I had a lucky break. Dafydd Morgan, Bronwen’s son by her first marriage, turned up. After being rescued from his Japanese prison camp he had had to spend some months in a Singapore hospital, but eventually he was shipped home and wound up on Bronwen’s doorstep. This was awkward. Dafydd had hated my father ever since Bronwen had become the scarlet woman of Penhale in the Twenties, and it was soon obvious that the two of them couldn’t coexist peacefully under one roof. In an effort to ease Bronwen’s distress I then offered Dafydd free room and board at the Manor in return for his help around the house and garden, and rather to my surprise, he accepted. Perhaps he thought he had made my father uncomfortable enough; or perhaps he was too fond of his mother to want to upset her further; or perhaps after his years as a prisoner Penhale Manor seemed overwhelmingly attractive to him despite its unhappy memories. I had no idea, but he was an extra pair of hands going cheap and so I decided his motives were unimportant to me.

  He was two years older than I was and as small children we had been friends before class and education had raised insuperable barriers between us. He had become surly and solitary and once he was boarded out with his father’s relatives in Cardiff I had seen little of him. But now I discovered his chief virtue: he was a trained mechanic and understood my new tractor far better than I did. Soon I found him so indispensable that I felt obliged to suggest I paid him a salary, but he said for God’s sake no, he might lose some of his state benefits, so that was all right. I assigned him a large room in the attics and he kept himself to himself in the evenings. As time passed I realized he was one of the very few people who never got on my nerves, and considering the state my nerves had been in since the war this was no mean achievement.

  However my nerves did improve later in 1947 when I had my second lucky break of the year and found a club in Swansea where I could meet a steady stream of ex-servicewomen who were all bored with civilian life and longing for a diversion. I diverted them. Probably the less said about this side of my life the better, but I did slowly begin to feel more normal. I had no intention of marrying again until I could find a woman who could communicate with me on levels other than the horizontal but since I myself was apparently unable to do anything with women except fuck them this paragon of womanhood proved to be as elusive as ever.

  I was intelligent enough to know the fault was mine but not brilliant enough to know how I could change myself. Bronwen said all I needed was a little love and understanding. Wonderful. Don’t we all. Meanwhile, as I waited to be loved and understood by some magic lady who didn’t exist, I was grabbing all the sex I could get and becoming so tired of the limited possibilities afforded by the back seat of my car that I began to look around for some simple accommodation. When Dafydd told me a dilapidated cottage in Rhossili was up for sale, I scraped up two hundred pounds from my bank manager and bought it. I thought it would be a good investment for the future, for Gower was becoming increasingly popular with holidaymakers, and having put Dafydd in charge of the renovations I found the result was so successful that I only wished I had the money to invest in similar properties. However as I could now have sex in a decent bed again I was hardly in the mood to grumble just because I was too poor to become a property millionaire.

  Meanwhile, languishing in celibate luxury at Oxmoon, poor old Kester, poor old sod, continued to entertain his little protégés and scribble away at his unpublished masterpieces while Thomas, that first-class manager, did all his hard work for him. But I was trying to swallow my jealousy of his ideal life because Hal, bright intelligent Hal who was doing so well at his piano lessons, was obviously far more congenial to Kester than little Owen Bryn-Davies. I still couldn’t quite believe Kester would make Hal his heir but there seemed no harm in hoping.

  I hoped.

  Well, there we all were, jogging along happily enough, when suddenly at the Godwin family Christmas of 1947 Kester gave me the biggest fright I’d had since the war. He had invited me to his study to hear excerpts from his new record set of The Messiah, and as he changed the needle on the gramophone he asked me if Bella had been fond of music.

  “No, Vera Lynn was her limit.”

  “Ah well, I’m fond of Vera myself—doesn’t do to be a musical snob! Oh, and that reminds me, Harry … talking of Bella …” He paused to pick up a record. “… there’s something that’s been puzzling me for a long time. Did you and she ever have a daughter?”

  A few seconds slid away. He was now looking me straight in the eyes. I looked straight back. Then I raised my eyebrows and did a double take. “What an extraordinary question, old chap! A daughter?”

  “Yes, I realize it sounds mad. After all, if you’d had a daughter you’d hardly have kept quiet about it, would you? Not unless the circumstances were very peculiar.” He casually put the record on the turntable.

  “But what on earth gave you the idea that Bella and I—”

  “It was something Bella said on the phone on the day Anna died—she rang up early to confirm the time that Anna was going to collect her in the car, and as Anna took the call in bed where we were having breakfast I was able to hear both sides of the conversation. Bella said that after their lunch that day she intended to use all her coupons to buy a completely new set of clothes for the coming baby, and when Anna suggested she might use at least some of Humphrey’s old baby frocks again, Bella said, ‘No, they’re all blue and since I’m determined to have another girl the clothes have got to be pink.’ ”

  He paused. At last I said, “Yes?”

  “Well, it was the word ‘another.’ Anna and I both noticed it. She said she’d ask Bella about it later but then … she died. And I forgot all about it until the other day when I saw Humphrey in that blue siren suit he still wears. Then I thought, Yes, that was odd, and since my writer’s curiosity had most definitely been aroused I thought I’d ask you about it. I’m sure,” concluded Kester blandly, “there’s a very simple explanation.”

  “Of course. Either you and Anna misheard, which seems unlikely, or, Bella made a slip of the tongue.” Some slip. “We never had a daughter.” I tried to look as if I were losing interest in the subject.

  “Well, no,” agreed Kester, “I don’t see how you could have done—and that, of course, was what I found so fascinating. If you’d had a daughter she must have been born before you were married yet I remember Bella saying clearly that before you returned to Gower in 1938 she hadn’t seen you since she was thirteen.”

  “That’s right, old chap. Some hellish children’s party at the vicarage. Bella wore a pink dress with a white sash and spent her whole time sulking in a corner.”

  Kester had been about to set the turntable in motion but now he turned to look at me. “Oh, I remember that party,” he said, “but Bella must have been younger than thirteen then—I was only twelve myself. When she was thirteen it would have been 1933, that awful year when Bronwen went to Canada.”

  “Awful’s the word, old chap. Well, maybe I bumped into Bella then but I don’t remember, I’ve blotted that whole bloody time out of my mind. … Now—what are we going to hear first? Spare me the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’!”

  We listened to “Comfort Ye My People.” Or at least Kester listened. I just went through the motions.

  When the record ended, I sai
d musingly, “You know, that remark of Bella’s was really very odd. The only explanation I can offer is that she used to pretend she had a daughter—it was a game we used to play, one of those stupid private jokes married couples so often share, and I suppose it helped to alleviate her increasing disappointment when she had boy after boy. She even had a name for this imaginary daughter. She called it Melody—if you can believe it!—because I was so fond of music.”

  It’s wonderful how an injection of truth makes even the most preposterous story sound convincing. Kester’s expression indicated that he felt the mystery was now entirely solved. “Ah, I see!” he said, turning over the record. “Well, there you are—I was sure there was some very simple explanation. It was stupid of me to get obsessive about the conversation just because it belonged to Anna’s last hours—do forgive me.”

  I assured him he was forgiven, but as I turned away from him to light a cigarette I was hardly surprised to find my hand was shaking.

  It had been a close call.

  II

  That incident was certainly unpleasant but it never occurred to me that it should rank as a warning sign. Yet after this conversation the unpleasant incidents, apparently disconnected, began to occur with increasing frequency.

  It was now the spring of 1948. Thanks to the advent of my new adult serf Dafydd I was beginning to feel I had my life marginally in control, and the only outstanding cloud on my horizon was Thomas who was once again invading my home too often no matter how hard I tried to discourage him.

  We finally had our long-delayed row over his consumption of my whisky and for a short blissful interlude he disappeared from my life; but my father, doing the done thing with lethal results as usual, was determined to reconcile us. Thomas turned up on my doorstep with a bottle of whisky and an apology. I felt morally obliged to be friends with him again but needless to say the friendship didn’t last. To my surprise he accused me of influencing Kester against his son Bobby in order that Hal should be the perpetual guest of honor at Oxmoon. This was laughable. There was nothing wrong with Bobby, who was a pleasant unremarkable boy of twelve with a good eye for a cricket ball, but the truth was that Kester had never favored sporting philistines, and I could quite see why he found my son more interesting. I told Thomas to go away and spin his fantasies elsewhere.