The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  So the immediate problem was How did I handle Kester with kid gloves? I’d made a good start by behaving as if all saintly Cousin Harry wanted in compensation was Oxmoon for his son, but the trouble was that Kester was going to have difficulty in believing indefinitely in the myth of saintly Cousin Harry. He knew very well that I wanted his money, his house, his way of life—the whole damn lot. I knew he knew. I certainly knew I knew. We might periodically make valiant efforts to cover up the truth by talking of mirror images and Doppelgängers, but this retreat into metaphysical claptrap was prompted by our secret knowledge that we were locked up in a situation which was so absolutely not the done thing that there was no way we could refer to it except by elaborate circumlocution. But if one thrust the metaphysical claptrap aside the stark truth was that I wanted his life, always had, and he was prepared to kill me to keep it.

  For years this potential holocaust had been kept in control because neither Kester nor I had been able to conceive of a situation in which I could legally take over his life. (My father’s presence of course made all thought of an illegal takeover out of the question.) But I’d never given up hope, had I? How clear my past actions now seemed in retrospect! I’d come back to Penhale. I’d stayed on at the Manor. I’d invented all those plausible half-true excuses for refusing to leave. And all the time the unacknowledged truth was that Oxmoon had been pulling me like a magnet, glittering Oxmoon, the symbol of the life of which I’d been deprived; the unacknowledged truth was that I had felt compelled to stay close to Oxmoon, my Oxmoon, in the hope that one day, dispossessed exile that I was, I’d have the chance to go home.

  And now, against all the odds, my chance could be coming. If Kester were locked up, certified insane, the court would have to appoint someone to run the estate, and what better candidate could be found than that hardworking farmer Harry Godwin whose son was Kester’s heir? Who could be more suitable?

  And it would all be perfectly legal. I wouldn’t even have to bump Kester off—not, of course, that I’d ever be stupid enough to kill the sod, but one does occasionally have these idiotic thoughts when one’s under stress. If I could get Kester locked up, Oxmoon was mine. But that truth brought me back to Square One again. How the devil could I get him locked up without ruining myself, causing a first-class scandal and killing my father with grief and shame?

  I couldn’t, that was the short answer. All I could do was wait for Kester to go round the bend again to provide my family with incontrovertible proof of his insanity.

  In other words I had to play a waiting game, but unfortunately my nerves—those rusting nerves of steel—decided they couldn’t tolerate waiting games, and I became ill. Up at Oxmoon Kester, demonstrating the splendid recuperative powers he had inherited from Aunt Ginevra, was soon in the pink of health once more, hiring a passable new agent, continuing to hold his eccentric children’s tea parties and entertaining his family in the Godwin tradition every Christmas and Easter. Kester, as Teddy put it, was doing just fine—and why not? He’d committed murder and got away with it. What a triumph! Having avenged Anna in the most positive way imaginable, he had annihilated the burden of his guilt and was now clearly set to embark on the prime of life by giving a matchless performance of the sane law-abiding landowner thoroughly devoted to his loving and loyal family.

  Meanwhile down at shabby old Penhale Manor, poor old Harry, poor old sod, was racked with insomnia and plagued with eczema as he was obliged to admire his cousin’s splendid recovery and watch Oxmoon receding once more into the distance. I felt fate had dealt me the roughest hand I’d yet encountered, and in my anger and frustration my eczema grew worse. Finally it became so bad that I felt obliged to have sex fully dressed, and that was the end; I asked Warburton if he could refer me to a skin specialist.

  The skin specialist said the trouble was nervous in origin. Stale news. He then stupefied me by suggesting that I saw a psychiatrist.

  “Never!” I was incensed.

  “Very well.” He was unperturbed. “I’ll give you some drugs but they won’t cure you; they’ll just alleviate the symptoms. If you want a cure you must look elsewhere.”

  I didn’t believe him. Then to my horror I found that the drugs had little effect. Meanwhile I was still having sex with my clothes on. Swallowing my pride I crawled back to him and agreed to be dispatched to a psychiatrist.

  By this time it was early in 1951 and I was still recovering from the great family Christmas of 1950. The very sight of Kester sitting at the head of the table in my grandfather’s chair and beaming at everyone in sight had made all the sores break open on my back. Thomas had now been dead for seventeen months, and Kester was as far from a lunatic asylum as the King at Buckingham Palace.

  So much for my daydreams of taking over Oxmoon. So much for all those longings which could never be fulfilled. I was so angry that I didn’t get a wink of sleep for two nights, and by the time I arrived at Dr. Mallinson’s house in Swansea for my appointment I was so thoroughly depressed that I didn’t even feel humiliated that I’d wound up in psychiatric hands.

  A receptionist took my name and showed me into a waiting room where I stared like a zombie at Punch but after five minutes a woman in a white coat looked in and said, “Mr. Godwin? Would you come this way, please?” and I followed her into a light austere room which contained a sparse arrangement of modern furniture. There was a couch which I instantly decided to ignore. Heading for the easy chair by the desk I glanced around expectantly. “Where’s Dr. Mallinson?” I said to the woman in the white coat.

  She said, “I’m Dr. Mallinson. Do sit down, Mr. Godwin.”

  It was the last straw. I was outraged. I stared at her. She was very thin and flat-chested and she had dust-colored hair tightly permed and she might have been any age between thirty-five and fifty. She gave me a cool look from eyes the color of iron bars.

  I said furiously, “I’m not talking to a woman!”

  “Very well,” she said tranquilly without much interest. “We’ll just sit in silence.”

  “If I’d known you were a woman I’d never have come! I don’t need a psychiatrist anyway, and I certainly don’t need a woman psychiatrist!”

  “Really.” She had a well-bred, thoroughly English accent and looked as if she ought to be living in Surrey among the pearls-and-twin-set brigade. As I shook with rage she sat down behind her desk and idly began to sharpen a pencil.

  “As far as I’m concerned women are good for one thing and one thing only!” I shouted, maddened by this intolerable calm. “All they’re fit for is lying on their backs with their legs apart!”

  “I see,” said Dr. Mallinson, and made a neat hieroglyphic on her note pad with her newly sharpened pencil.

  I suddenly realized I was behaving like a lunatic. My God, suppose I was the one who ended up in an asylum! My blood ran cold.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said in a rush. “I do apologize. I must be going crazy.”

  “Well, if you are,” said Dr. Mallinson with a deadpan humor, “you’ve come to the right place.”

  I gave a nervous laugh. She smiled serenely. The next thing I knew was that I had subsided into the easy chair and was facing her across her immaculate desk.

  “If I were to tell you,” I said, “that someone wants to kill me and that the strain’s driving me round the bend, would you certify me?”

  “Not today,” said Dr. Mallinson kindly.

  “Don’t I look sufficiently wild-eyed?”

  “You do look a little anxious, certainly. But mainly you just look tired. Have you been having trouble sleeping?”

  I found this perception thoroughly unnerving. “Well …”

  “When did you last have a holiday?”

  “I don’t have holidays. Don’t believe in them. I’d rather stay at home.”

  “Because you were away for a long time in the war?”

  This time I was so unnerved by her perception that I could only stare at her speechlessly.

  “Well, in that case
,” she said, taking my silence as an assent, “it’s quite natural that you should want to stay at home, but nevertheless why don’t you at least try taking a rest by going away for a few days? It may do no good at all, of course, but I can’t see any harm in giving it a try.”

  I said feebly, “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  “Not even to London? There’s always something to do there, and you look as if you might be an artistic type. You could go to galleries … and the theater … and I believe there are some simply splendid concerts coming on at the Albert Hall.”

  I opened my mouth and shut it again. I gazed at her. Then I tried to say, “Artistic type? Nonsense, I’m a man of action!” but the words that came out were “I love music.”

  “Ah. Yes, I can imagine you playing the piano … you do play the piano, don’t you?”

  I nodded. By this time I could clearly see that she was magic—not Celtic magic like Bronwen, but Anglo-Saxon magic, the kind of magic which invades the jungle, tames the savages, builds an outpost of the Empire and produces tea parties below a flying Union Jack all within the space of six months. I looked at this cool clinical competent woman who was not one scrap sexy and who was almost certainly years older than I was, and I thought: This is it. I’ve found my magic lady. And my relief was so enormous that I’d finally found someone who would sort me out and show me how to be happy that I nearly broke down and wept.

  However I held myself together, as befitted someone who didn’t need a psychiatrist, and said casually, “Are you married?”

  “Yes. My husband’s a neurosurgeon.”

  Bloody hell. Why did I never, never have any luck? I knew I hadn’t a chance of competing with a neurosurgeon.

  “Any children?” I said, trying to pretend this was just a polite social conversation.

  “No.”

  “Oh.” A woman who was probably either sterile or else childless by choice! I sighed. Then I realized I was behaving like a lunatic again so I said briskly as I rose to my feet, “Well, perhaps I will go to London for a few days. Thank you. Of course I shan’t need to see you again, but if I do—”

  “My secretary would be delighted to make an appointment,” said Dr. Mallinson inscrutably.

  “Uh … could I make it now? Before I leave?”

  Dr. Mallinson gave a small, Mona Lisa-like smile and looked professionally satisfied.

  For some hours after this extraordinary interview I indulged in daydreams that the neurosurgeon would drop dead with the result that Dr. Mallinson would be free to iron out my life, but then sanity returned and it slowly dawned on me that I had stumbled into the well-known farcical situation of the patient who falls in love with his psychiatrist. How mad could one get? I at once decided to be sane—much too sane to see Dr. Mallinson again—so I cancelled my next appointment, but I did take her advice to go to London for a week.

  This did me so much good that at the end of the week I bought a postcard of the Albert Hall and wrote on it: Your cure worked, chalk me up on your list of successes, many thanks, H. C. GODWIN. But this sounded too dull so I bought a second postcard of the Albert Hall and wrote: I’m a new man, thanks to you. I must see you again but does it have to be in that damned consulting room? HARRY GODWIN. But I decided I really couldn’t send this so I bought a third postcard and wrote: I shan’t see you again but I’ll never forget how you helped me. With gratitude, H. GODWIN. Then I made an awful mistake—or was it a Freudian slip?—and posted the wrong one, so in the end I sent them all, just to give her something to think about, and resolutely made up my mind to forget her. Like Oxmoon she apparently wasn’t in my stars. Bloody stars, I hated them all.

  VI

  The most important result of my visit to London was that I was at last able to see my problems in perspective. No doubt this was just what Dr. Mallinson had hoped would happen. I’d been in a hellish position which had been made even more hellish because I had become too bogged down in Penhale to see it clearly, but once I had struggled out of the bog to London clarity of vision soon returned.

  Having posted my mad postcards to Dr. Mallinson I walked away from the Albert Hall into Kensington Gardens and eventually sat down by the Round Pond where, long ago, my nanny had boasted to the other nannies that my mother had been one of the Beauties of the Season back in 1914. The weather was uninviting; it was a chilly day in January, but I sat down on a bench and gazed over the tranquil water. I wanted to be sane. Where lay the road to sanity? Herefordshire. Timbuktu. The North Pole. Anywhere, in fact, except Kester’s doorstep. If I wanted to keep myself out of a straitjacket and away from a padded cell, I had to escape from Cousin Kester once and for all, and escaping from Cousin Kester meant giving up all hope that Oxmoon would drop into my lap.

  Which was more important, Oxmoon or my sanity? My sanity. The truth which I now had to face after thirty-two years in the world was that I wasn’t going to get Oxmoon either now or in the future, and it was quite pointless to hang around Penhale on a second-rate estate waiting for something that was never going to happen. My father had always known this, of course. No wonder he had been worried about me! He had had good cause. But never mind, I’d woken up now, I’d faced the unpalatable facts squarely and I’d made up my mind to reorganize my life along more rational lines.

  I allowed myself to brood for one last time on those unpalatable facts but I knew I was powerless to alter them. The truth was that there was nothing I could do about Kester—short of murdering him (ha ha)—and I’d be a fool to continue to crucify myself with frustrated rage just because he’d got away with murder while I, hoist with the petard of my own assistance, had been unable to lock him up. If we’d been characters in one of Kester’s novels, retribution would be waiting in the wings to remove Kester from the scene; murderers never escaped unpunished in novels, but this was messy real life and as far as I could see there was no ghost of retribution on the horizon. Kester wasn’t going to drop dead. Nor was he going to go mad again, I could see that clearly now. He’d obviously been mad when he’d killed Thomas, but with his guilt towards Anna assuaged he’d made a complete recovery, and the odds were he’d live another fifty years in perfect mental health. Probably, now that he was no longer feeling guilty about Anna, he’d even remarry and produce sons.

  Very well. So much for him. Lucky old Kester, lucky old sod, but before I died of jealousy I had to get the hell out of his life.

  I went back to my hotel and telephoned my father.

  VII

  “I draw the line,” I said.

  So I was my father’s son after all, and here we were, right in the middle of this supremely edifying scene which would have warmed the cockles of any Victorian heart and served as an illustration for a story entitled “The Reconciliation”—or perhaps, in true Victorian style, “The Repentance.” If we had belonged to any race on earth but the British we might have shed a pardonable tear or two, but there we were, two Welshmen strangled at birth by the Anglo-Saxon culture, so of course all we could do was grunt dry-eyed at each other and keep a stiff upper lip as we bust our guts to do the done thing.

  “I draw the line, Father.”

  “Finally?”

  “Finally.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Yes. Behaved like a lunatic. Sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. Tricky situation.”

  “Bloody.”

  “Hm.”

  Silence.

  We were sitting working-class style at the table in Bronwen’s kitchen. I had returned home a day early from London to convey my great decision to my father, and was staying the night at his house. Humphrey was already there. I had given Nanny a week’s holiday to coincide with my own and she wasn’t back yet. The three elder boys were all away at school.

  My father and I were alone in the kitchen. After tea Bronwen had lured Humphrey into the drawing room to play Ludo, and all my siblings were absent. Evan was working in a slum parish in Cardiff; Gerry, articled to a Swansea solicitor, and Lance, employ
ed at an engineering works at Port Talbot, were still out at work, while Sian was away in London where she was attending one of the famous secretarial colleges. She was staying with Marian, who for some extraordinary reason beyond my comprehension had resumed her marriage to Rory Kinsella.

  My father and Humphrey had met me at the station. I was very fond of Humphrey, who looked just like me, and I secretly regarded him as my favorite. Charles and Jack were too like the Stourhams, while Hal … But I didn’t understand Hal. I’d thought the music would make a bond between us, but it hadn’t. Whenever I tried to talk to him the right words always eluded me.

  “Daddy, Daddy …” Humphrey chattered all the way from the station to my father’s house, and I listened and smiled and thought what an attractive little beggar he was. But Humphrey wasn’t musical. He seemed to be like me but he had no ear for music, and in my sadder moments I knew that that meant he wasn’t really like me at all.

  However before I could start to feel depressed about the gulf which existed between me and my sons, we arrived at my father’s house and my magic lady came out to meet me. She at once said how much better I looked. Then she turned to my father and asked him if he was all right. My father said, “Yes, yes, yes” impatiently and tried not to walk like an old man. Apparently he had played thirty-six holes of golf in the rain the day before and was now feeling stiff in the legs.