The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

In the kitchen the kettle was on the boil, my favorite cake was on the table and we settled down to relax. I was so happy I ate like a horse. So did Humphrey, and when he looked afterwards as if he regretted his third slice of cake Bronwen suggested the game of Ludo to divert him.

  “Are you sure you’re all right, Johnny?” she said over her shoulder as she left the room. My father had drunk two cups of tea but had eaten nothing.

  “Stop nagging me!” said my father crossly.

  Bronwen made an acid-sounding comment in Welsh and withdrew.

  “If I want to play thirty-six holes in the rain I’ll damn well play thirty-six holes in the rain!” shouted my father after her in English.

  The door banged.

  I allowed him a couple of minutes to recover from this little exhibition of marital normality but finally launched myself upon a monologue declaring my intention to reorganize my life. I confessed my neurotic preoccupation with Oxmoon. I confessed my mind-destroying jealousy of Kester. I confessed that I’d reached the end of an exceptionally disastrous road. My father listened and listened and sagged deeper and deeper in his chair with relief. When I finally reached the point where I could utter his famous phrase I knew quite well there was a lump in his throat. There was certainly a lump in mine. How we both managed to sustain a few more seconds of fractured conversation I have no idea.

  After the inevitable silence while we both took the necessary time to restarch our upper lips, I managed to say: “I’ll be all right now.”

  “Yes. I know you will. But all the same …” My father leaned forward with his forearms on the table and clasped his hands. Then he said violently, taking me by surprise: “How I resent you being driven into exile like this! I feel …” He stopped to choose his words. “I feel,” he said slowly, “as if there’s some terrible injustice here somewhere but I can’t quite work out what it is.”

  That shook me. I said nothing. My one unbreakable resolution was that he should never know the truth about Thomas’s death.

  “It was justice that Oxmoon went to Kester,” said my father. “Your grandfather … But no, let his memory rest in peace. That’s all over now … my poor father, I was so fond of him. But although it was justice that Oxmoon went to Kester, justice somehow seems to have gone adrift here … Why should you have to suffer like this? I suppose it must somehow be my fault because—”

  But I couldn’t have him blaming himself for anything, not when he was entering old age and entitled to an unflawed happy ending.

  “No, this isn’t your fault, Father! Absolutely not!”

  “But I allowed you to grow up feeling shortchanged about Oxmoon—I never gave you the real explanation of my father’s motives for passing you over. I wanted to protect my father, protect myself from all those painful memories. … You see, it was all to do with my grandmother—my grandmother and Owain Bryn-Davies—”

  “Father, that’s past. It’s irrelevant.”

  “No, that’s where you make your big mistake. My grandmother’s tragedy made my father the man he was—and if my father hadn’t been the man he was he wouldn’t have put himself in a position where he was so guilty about Robert that he allowed Robert to dictate to him about his will—”

  I couldn’t cope. “Father, I’m sorry but if I start dwelling on chains of causality I’ll go round the bend with rage and frustration. I’ve got to concentrate on the future now if I want to stay sane.”

  “I don’t want to think of the past either, but I do. Where did I go wrong with you two boys? What did I do? I made rather a success of bringing up Thomas—with his appalling home background in early adolescence he could well have turned out to be completely delinquent, but he did well for himself, settled down happily, excelled at his job … until it all ended in tragedy. Harry, talking of Thomas—”

  “Father if you start blaming yourself because Thomas smashed himself up while drunk I swear I’ll have a complete nervous breakdown. For Christ’s sake—”

  “I sometimes wonder,” said my father, not looking at me, “whether the whole story of Thomas’s death was ever known.”

  Batten down the hatches. Lock up the truth.

  “Father, I was there at Oxmoon. I watched him weave drunkenly away in his Hillman. Why would I lie? What possible motive could I have for suppressing any facts?”

  My father judged this question to be unanswerable and sagged with relief again. “I’m sorry, I know I’m being irrational, but sometimes I lie awake at night—”

  “Well, don’t. Stop it. Pull yourself together.” It’s a bizarre fact of life that after a certain span of time the parent-child relationship slowly reverses itself and the child begins to assume the parental role.

  My father smiled as if he were glad to see me assuming his role so ably, but then he pressed his hand against his forehead in pain.

  Father—”

  “Yes, it’s a bloody nuisance, but I’m going to have to give in—obviously I’ve got a chill. In fact I think I may even have a temperature.”

  “I’ll call Bronwen.”

  “No, wait,” he said. “Wait.” I shall always remember his tone of voice when he said that. It was one of extreme disbelief. “Harry, can you come and help me? Something seems to have happened to my legs.”

  They were paralyzed.

  He had polio.

  He died four days later.

  VIII

  He died in hospital, and although only Bronwen was in his room at the end all his children except Francesca were waiting nearby for the recovery that never came. Marian and I, Evan, Gerry, Lance and Sian were bunched together in the corridor like a group of dazed sheep, and with us was Kester whom my father had treated as a son. Kester said, soft mouth trembling, “He was more of a father to me than my own father was,” and tears ran down his cheeks. Disgusting. Evan had to mop him up. No one had to mop me up, thank God, although the tenses of the Latin verbs became tangled in my head when everyone went to pieces around me, everyone except Bronwen who said calmly that she would grieve later. Fine. At least there was one member of the family who was behaving sensibly, and by God I was going to be another. I herded my flock of dazed sheep into the bleak white room where my father lay dead. After all, we had to say goodbye, didn’t we, each of us in his own way. That was the right thing to do—except as usual I couldn’t do it. I was too afraid of breaking down and all I could think was what hell it is for the survivors when death slams into life without warning and smashes every fixed point on the emotional map. It makes one realize how fragile human beings are, how absolutely at the mercy of that fate they can postpone but never escape.

  Morbid thoughts. Doesn’t do to think about death. But what else can one think about when one’s in a room with a corpse? I wondered if I’d contracted polio myself. Maybe within a month I too would be dead. That would solve all Kester’s problems neatly. …

  Kester.

  He was facing me across the bed, facing me across all the horrors of the past and the horrors still to come, and suddenly I knew with a terrible certainty that I wasn’t going to be able to escape after all from our shared circle of time. Wherever I now went, wherever I ran to, he’d follow and try to kill me because I was the living reminder of his madness, the living witness of his crime. I represented the side of his personality he couldn’t bear to live with and he had to cut me out of his life in order to stay sane. I was his nemesis, his evil genius; I was his double image, his other self. In the tragedy our minds had merged to become as interchangeable as our personalities, and now it was as if our two bodies had at last been united in a single indivisible soul.

  Outside the hospital he even said to me, “This has united us, hasn’t it?” and I said, “Yes, it has,” but none of the others realized what we meant. They all thought we were acknowledging a new bond of amity, but Kester and I were moving deeper into our metaphysical nightmare and the new bond was the old horror that had no name.

  We looked at each other and knew we were finally alone in our circle.
My father was dead—and that, for Kester and me, could have only one meaning: it meant there was no one left to stand between us. It meant there was no one left to draw the line.

  8

  I

  WELL, I GOT OVER ALL that—of course the shock of my father’s death had temporarily unhinged me—but it was not until I saw Kester at the funeral that I realized just how paranoid I’d been. Kester was only poor old Kester, poor old sod, sniveling away because he’d lost his father figure. Out to kill me? Ridiculous! I began to fear seriously that I was unbalanced on the subject. In fact there was no doubt I had to pull myself together very firmly, and the sooner I left Gower and settled in Herefordshire the better.

  However first of all I had to organize my father’s funeral, and that was difficult because as soon as I got home from the hospital I went to pieces. Awful. Less said the better. God knows what I would have done without Dafydd. He sat up with me all night while I wept and drank myself into a stupor and said what a rotten son I’d been and how I’d failed to live up to my father’s standards and didn’t know how I was going to live with my guilt. How Dafydd stood such disgraceful emotional self-indulgence I don’t know, but he listened and chain-smoked and occasionally held my hand and at the end of it all he just said, “But you put everything right, didn’t you? You told him you’d drawn the line.”

  That made me feel better but the next moment my grief had veered from guilt to rage and I was shouting how bloody unfair it was that he had died before he was even sixty and what had he ever done to deserve it and what did it all mean anyway and how could people think there was a God who allowed such unfairness—and Dafydd nodded and made me some tea and went on listening patiently as I ranted and raved like a lunatic.

  “All that bloody business of doing the done thing, and where did it get him? To a middle-class house in Swansea, the local golf club and a bunch of civic-committee meetings—oh, and five years at the end with Bronwen, five years only! He should have had fifty years with her and died master of Oxmoon—oh, bugger the done thing, fuck it all, wipe it off the map! My father wasted his life, wasted it, and what does it all mean?”

  “Nothing,” said Dafydd. “Life’s meaningless. Accept that and you’ll feel better.”

  I couldn’t. I didn’t. I raged on and on and on; but the rage died at the funeral. It was as if someone were slowly turning off a tap in my mind. I left my father’s house with Bronwen for the long drive to Penhale, and as we drove deeper into Gower I noticed that we were one of many cars all traveling in one direction. In fact beyond Oxmoon the road became so choked with traffic that it took us some time to reach the village, and I was relieved when I found that Dafydd had saved a space for our car by the church. The green was packed with silent crowds. So was the churchyard. A bell was tolling quietly in the tower.

  Then I began to realize that people had come from all over the world to pay their last respects to him—Francesca and her husband from America, Declan Kinsella and his wife from Ireland, even my lost cousin Erika had emerged from Germany—and beyond the family were the people from London, from Scotland, from Wales itself—all those whose lives he had touched, rich and poor, young and old, everyone who believed his life had meant something special to them. And when I saw those crowds I realized how wrong I had been to judge his life a failure when his success had been greater than I had ever imagined. What had Oxmoon mattered in the end to my father? For him it had become merely another symbol, like the house at Eaton Walk, of the worldly success which had made him so unhappy. How meaningless it was to judge a life by its outward affluence or by its length! It was the quality of life that counted. Five years with Bronwen at the end—fifty years—it was all the same. The point was that he had achieved more happiness with her than most people achieve in a lifetime, and his fifty-nine years in the world represented a more powerful statement than many lives lived far longer than his.

  I groped for a Latin verb. No good. I tried Greek. A blank. All I could remember was that extremely morbid quote from Shakespeare “Bid me not remember mine end.” Henry the Fourth Part Something-or-other. I could remember quoting it in some far-off exam. Glancing around feverishly to divert myself I became aware of Marian, sitting next to me and weeping soundlessly into a dainty black lace handkerchief. Poor Marian, she had her guilty memories, just as I did. I took her hand in mine.

  Well, I got through all that but even then the ordeal wasn’t over because an endless stream of people came up to me after the service to shake my hand and tell me what a great man my father had been. Splendid. I was delighted. But I could barely hear what they were saying, all the words seemed to blend into a single repetitive monologue, and I didn’t dare to listen too closely in case I began to grieve.

  I was frightened of grieving, frightened of breaking down, frightened of not living up to my father’s standards. Awful. A nightmare. How I survived that funeral I’ll never know but I did and later, much later at Penhale Manor, I encountered Edmund, the lone survivor of his generation, a balding stout elderly man with clouded blue eyes. He and Teddy were staying at Oxmoon with their sons but all the family had gathered at the Manor after the funeral; as the eldest son I had felt obliged to offer the necessary hospitality and save Bronwen from yet another harrowing ordeal.

  Evan had taken Bronwen back to Swansea immediately after the service. She had wanted only to be alone.

  I wanted to be alone too so when I saw Edmund in the rose garden my first instinct was to avoid him. But I couldn’t. I went up to him and touched his arm.

  “Edmund.”

  “Oh hullo, Harry, I was just thinking how I replanted part of the rose garden when I lived here after your mother died. John couldn’t stand those white roses and wanted another sort put in. Funny how clear it all is in my mind, exactly as if it had happened yesterday … but that’s what happens when you’re old, isn’t it? The past seems clearer and closer than the present. My father lived a lot in the past but in the worst possible way—John was always afraid, you know, that he’d end up like him but he didn’t, I knew he wouldn’t, I always knew John was much tougher than my father was.”

  He paused as if meditating on this toughness. Then he said, “Yes, there’s a tough streak in our family and it came from my mother who was tough as old boots—my God, you should have heard her on the subject of doing the done thing! But then you’ve got to be tough to do the done thing the whole damn time, haven’t you, tough, ruthless and a bit of a bastard … like John—yes, I’m rather horrified that everyone’s trying to canonize John now he’s dead, he wouldn’t have liked that at all. He knew his own faults better than anyone and he knew he wasn’t a saint, far from it, he was human, he was real, he was my brother John. … And now there’s no one left,” said Edmund, looking past me down the garden, “who remembers the old days at Oxmoon as I do, the summer days long ago in another century when we had tea on the lawn and my mother presided over the silver teapot and my father played tennis with Robert and Celia showed me her pressed wild flowers and Lion and John talked of what they would do when they grew up and Thomas was still unborn. … And then later I can see Thomas spilling milk over Glendower and Ginevra crossing the lawn with Robert—that was when she came home after her first husband was killed—and we all thought how gorgeous she was, how ravishing, how beautiful … and now she’s dead and they’re all dead except me and suddenly it seems—”

  “Unbearable.”

  “No. I can bear it. Have to, don’t I? No choice. But it’s sad all the same … and lonely,” said Edmund, “very lonely to have a past no one else can share.”

  After that I got drunk, and some unknown time later I wound up saying to Teddy: “I’ve met this wonderful woman and she’s a psychiatrist and she practices Anglo-Saxon magic and I send her postcards of the Albert Hall …”

  Teddy somehow steered me upstairs.

  “… and her name’s Dr. P. Mallinson and she has a husband and a flat chest and eyes the color of battleships.”

 
“Well, that’s not the usual description of a sexy woman, honey,” said Teddy, helping me take off my jacket, “but hell, why should you follow the crowd?”

  “Next time I marry,” I said, slumping onto the bed, “I’m going to marry a robot with a high I.Q. I want someone utterly different from—from—”

  “Poor Bella,” said Teddy. “But she could be such a sweet little girl.”

  I cried. But not for my father. I cried for Bella. They were the first tears I’d shed for her since her death.

  “There is no timetable for grief. Grief isn’t a train which you catch at the station. …” Was that me talking? No, that was Bronwen talking in the past but the next moment I was beyond both past and present. Kissing Teddy I closed my eyes and finally succeeded in escaping into oblivion.

  II

  I could feel Kester meditating about me but I didn’t meditate about him. My mistake. But the trouble was that even with the funeral behind me I remained thoroughly preoccupied with the aftermath of my father’s death.

  The main problem was the will.

  It was a complex document but that was only to be expected; my father had been a complex man with a complex family situation. What no one had expected, however, was his paranoid distrust of his beneficiaries, but I believe men who are clever with money often feel their heirs are bound to make a balls-up of their inheritance unless the testator takes firm steps to prevent it. My father had no doubt told himself he had an absolute moral duty to save his children from self-inflicted penury. The result was a disaster.

  With a few exceptions, everything was tied up on trust. The main exception was a disgracefully large hunk of the Armstrong fortune that was willed, in a faultless Victorian gesture, to charity. Even Francesca, who had a rich husband, was piqued, and as for Rory Kinsella, who had obviously returned to Marian in the belief that he could look forward to a luxurious old age, he was so livid when he discovered he couldn’t get his hands on her legacy that he stormed off again to live with his latest mistress. Marian was livid too—not because of Rory’s desertion but because my father had treated her like a mental defective who couldn’t defend her own bank account. In fact my father succeeded in infuriating just about everyone. The chorus of complaint increased. I felt sorry for us all—and in particular I felt sorry for myself. I received the freeholds of Penhale Manor, Martinscombe and Little Oxmoon, just as my father had promised, and as this represented a generous inheritance I was duly grateful, but the trouble was I didn’t get what I needed most; I didn’t get those vital lands in Herefordshire.