Naturally I wasn’t at the docks to meet the ferry, but Richard the court jester was loafing around at the Bryn-Davieses’ house and he bounced along to give Kester a hero’s welcome. If Richard hadn’t been so patently ingenuous I’d have thought him a slippery customer, supporting my takeover of Oxmoon at one moment and rushing off to fawn over Kester the next, but his extreme lack of brain made it impossible for me to be angry with him. He gave Kester a lift to Rhossili where I’d left the keys at the hotel, just as Kester had requested. Dafydd had prepared the cottage and everything was in order except for one of the kitchen taps which had started to drip. Richard reported it when he bounded over to Oxmoon to tell me that Kester was safely installed and happy as a lark.
“Let it drip,” I said morosely to Dafydd afterwards. “It might rank as a form of Chinese water torture.”
“I’ll get a new washer on Thursday when I go into Swansea—or do you want me to get it earlier?”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t make a special trip!”
Odd how so much depended in the end on that dripping tap. Like that nightmarish nursery rhyme about the lost nail from the horse’s shoe which resulted in the loss of a kingdom. That kind of causality can make strong men weep and drive sane men mad.
“Why are you going into Swansea on Thursday?” I asked Dafydd as an afterthought.
“It’s my day for seeing my mother.”
In fact Bronwen came out to Gower to see Kester before then but we didn’t find that out till later. Evan also called on Kester and unlike Bronwen he visited Oxmoon afterwards to tell me how happy Kester was now that he was able to devote himself single-mindedly to his writing.
“He even said,” Evan added, “that relinquishing Oxmoon was turning out to be one of the best moves he had ever made! So all’s well that ends well, and I hope we can be friends again, Harry.”
Hm. Very edifying. But did I really believe we were all destined to live happily ever after in a glowing aura of brotherly love? I was quite willing to consider such a fantastic possibility, but at that moment I happened to be distracted by two problems. The first was that the Inland Revenue were trying to tell me that I had cut a couple of my past corners too fine and that I still owed them a considerable amount of money. What a bloody jungle income tax is! It’s a wonder we don’t all go on strike and refuse to pay.
My second problem turned up three days after Kester’s arrival when my mistress wrote to say I’d become absolutely impossible and she’d had enough, thanks very much, and she’d got a new man in her life now and was I sure my skin trouble wasn’t catching.
I stormed over to the guesthouse she kept on Oxwich Bay and made a scene. I wasn’t crazy about the woman but she was very convenient and I just couldn’t stand the prospect of trying to find someone new at that particular moment. I spent much time nowadays wishing I had that unsurpassably convenient sexual accessory, a wife, but I never found anyone who measured up to the magic Dr. Mallinson who was still living with her neurosurgeon. Every time a new telephone directory was printed I checked to see if he was still alive, but he always was. Often I thought it ironic that a man such as I, accustomed to having any woman he fancied, should be afraid to pursue a woman because she had brains and a husband, but I was afraid she would at once reject me as an undesirable womanizer, and I couldn’t bear the thought of how much I’d mind. Better to love her hopelessly from a distance than to involve myself in an affair which might tear me to shreds.
Meanwhile my current mistress was trying to tear me to shreds but I put a stop to that by having sex with her—which was a bad idea because by the time I arrived home in the middle of the afternoon I was so exhausted that I fell asleep on the drawing-room sofa. That meant I would find it impossible to sleep that night, and when my housekeeper woke me by bringing in tea and the afternoon post, my first reaction was to slip into a disgruntled mood.
But the next moment I had forgotten about being disgruntled. I had discovered that the afternoon post consisted of two bills and another familiar white envelope addressed to me in flowery handwriting.
Dropping all the letters on the floor I headed at once for the decanter and poured myself a double brandy.
II
My dear Harry, Kester had written, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying the cottage and the view is so stimulating to my fevered imagination, but alas! I’ve come to the conclusion that it wouldn’t be at all comfortable here in winter when the gales start to blow, so I think, if you don’t mind, I’d like Oxmoon back. I hope this won’t be too inconvenient for you but Declan did tell me how you’d promised the family that if I wanted Oxmoon back all I had to do was ask—jolly decent of you, old chap, I always knew you were a nice fellow despite our little differences of opinion! Anyway, why don’t you drop in and see me soon so that we can talk the matter over? I feel in the mood for a sociable, benevolent, eminently rational chat! Yours ever, C.G.
I crumpled the letter, stuffed it into my pocket and knocked back a second brandy. I was quite calm. I had wanted Kester to show his hand and now, thank God, he’d shown it and put an end to all my agonizing uncertainty. He wanted Oxmoon back. Right. Well, at least I now knew where I stood. And where was that? In the biggest mess of all time.
I panicked. I wanted my henchman but it was Thursday and he was in Swansea with Bronwen. He paid this visit once a month so I knew what the form was: they would go to the cinema together and afterwards she would cook him a high tea. No Dafydd, not for several hours yet. I felt vulnerable without, him, vulnerable and lonely. One grows lonely when one has secrets no one else can share; I’d found that out long ago and no doubt Kester had discovered it too.
Kester.
I had to think what I was going to do about Kester but I was in such a state that rational thought was beyond me. All I could think of was that Kester was going to crucify me. He’d call my bluff, accuse me of murdering Thomas, claim that I’d terrorized him into relinquishing Oxmoon, and our horrified family would flock to his side. The charge of murder might remain non-proven but that charge of duress was sure to stick, and that would be my final curtain. I’d have no home and no money—unless Kester decided to be generous with me, and did I seriously think Kester was going to be generous? No. Kester was going to hang, draw and quarter me—the traditional death for a traitor, and yes, that was how I’d look to my family, a traitor to my father’s principles, a traitor to the Godwin honor and good name.
But it wasn’t true, was it? I’d just been trying to right a wrong, avenge Thomas’s murder and protect myself from my dangerous cousin. I was the hero of this story but Kester had cast me as the villain in his brilliant script and now I was going to wind up thoroughly damned, the usurper who had earned his annihilating retribution.
“Justice seems to have gone adrift,” my father had said just before his death.
My God, if my father could see me now …
But he couldn’t. Or at least I hoped he couldn’t. Had to believe he couldn’t. Had to.
To calm myself I began to walk around Oxmoon, my Oxmoon, the inheritance that would have been mine if only … what had my father said? Something about Uncle Robert and Grandfather, something about my great-grandmother and Owain Bryn-Davies … Mad. What the hell could he have meant? Should have asked him. Why hadn’t I asked him? Because all I’d been able to think about at that particular moment had been the future, the future when I was going to draw the line and retire to Herefordshire, the future that might have been, the future that was now lost beyond recall.
I should have drawn the line.
Never mind, I’d draw it now. Better late than never. The best way out of my mess was undoubtedly to kill Kester, but of course I’d never do it. Thank God there was at least one line left to draw! All right, no murder today, thank you, but what’s the alternative? Damn all. No, think. Think. Have to compromise. Try to bargain with him. I’ll have to give up Oxmoon, of course, that goes without saying, but I must find a way to stop Kester disemboweling
me. If I were to offer him something of my very own which I know he wants …
Hal.
Well, it was a chance, wasn’t it? Better than nothing. If I let him adopt Hal he might—for Hal’s sake—be lenient with me. Hal wouldn’t mind being adopted by Kester, of course. In fact he’d be delighted. In Hal’s opinion I was just a dead loss.
Tears burned my eyes. Shameful. Disgusting. Had to put a stop to that sort of behavior at once. Dashing the tears aside I went out to the stable block to my car—Kester’s car, the shining black Daimler which he had bought just before I’d forced him to Ireland. I’d enjoyed driving that Daimler. Didn’t want to give it up. Didn’t want to give anything up, that was the trouble—the Daimler, Oxmoon, Hal … No, I couldn’t give Hal up, couldn’t. Strange how for years I’d made Humphrey my favorite as if favorites could be chosen by a mere exercise of the will. But one doesn’t choose favorites. They choose you. That sort of powerful emotional connection has nothing to do with the will at all. No, Hal was my real favorite, not Humphrey, I knew that now, just as I knew I was going to have to give him up. Losing Hal was to be the price I had to pay for my extortion; losing Hal was to be the penalty for my cheating and my lies.
More tears. Disgraceful. I was getting just like Kester, weeping at the drop of a hat, but of course I was Kester, I’d become him, and now there was just this other stranger who wrote me debonair notes and who sounded just like me, using that bloody awful public-school phrase “old chap” and being so cool and suave the whole damned time. Yes, I was Kester now and he was me, he was the “other side of my personality, the artist I’d always suppressed, and now as he tried to eliminate me I had to kill him to stay sane. …
No. Steady, as Dafydd would say, don’t go off your rocker. Negotiate with Kester and get the whole hellish dilemma resolved peaceably as soon as possible.
I drove to Rhossili. It was early on a brilliant May evening and I drove out to Rhossili to confront my double image, my other self.
Several times I thought: I’ll go back. But each time I kept going. Well, I always did, didn’t I? Story of my life.
I could have stopped—but I went on.
III
I reached Rhossili. The bay was a dazzling azure blue and long white waves creamed languidly upon the miles of empty sands far below. In the clear evening light the Downs seemed deceptively close and I felt I could almost reach out to touch the old Rectory as it basked in its sunlit isolation far away at the head of the beach.
By the little green a lane led down to my cottage and when I arrived I parked the car in the barn which Dafydd had converted into a garage. The lane was too narrow to permit a car to be parked outside the cottage, and there was no verge by the dry-stone wall nearby.
Instinct told me Kester was out. I paused. I could hear the sea. It was very faint and far away like a dream of happiness. I glanced across the fields towards Rhossili but the tourist season had barely begun and there was no one about. I remember noticing the stunted steeple of the church silhouetted against the brilliant sky.
The front door was locked but he hadn’t bothered to bolt the back door so I walked in. “Kester!” I called in the front room at the foot of the stairs, but there was no reply. I took a quick look around and noticed that in one corner he had parked his sophisticated wireless which Evan had evidently returned to him on his recent visit. The wireless had been one of the few possessions that Kester hadn’t left at Oxmoon and he had given the set to Evan for safekeeping before leaving for Ireland.
The dial was tuned to the Third Programme, just as my wireless always was. Perhaps we listened to the same music; perhaps his musical taste was now exactly the same as mine. In revulsion I glanced around for evidence of the main difference between us, but there was no sign of any manuscript and the typewriter stood covered on the table.
Shuddering irrationally I wondered what to do next. Obviously he had gone for a walk before dinner. I looked at my watch. Five past six. Various choices lay before me. I could go back to Oxmoon but no, I couldn’t, I had to see him and get the scene over with or I’d lie awake all night in a cold sweat—in fact I might well go mad with tension. I could wait where I was in the quiet living room but I thought that might well send me mad with tension too. Or I could go looking for him. There were no trees on the headland at Rhossili, and if I went past the Coastguard station I thought there was a good chance I could track him down.
I decided to walk out to the tip of the headland. Any activity seemed better than none, and so although I could have remained where I was I didn’t.
I could have stopped—but I went on.
IV
By the church a farmer drove past me in his tractor and the normality of his cheerful wave was soothing to me. Moving on down the street I passed the hotel at the road’s end and headed down the track past the car park and the Coastguard’s cottages. Automatically, responding to a lifetime’s experience of Gower, I checked the board where the Coastguard set out information about the state of the tides and saw that the Shipway was safe for another hour and fifty minutes. I was hardly planning an expedition to the Worm, but I thought it possible that Kester might be pottering around down on the rocks if the tide was favorable. I could remember him gazing into a pool there when we were children and declaring how ravishing the seaweed was. I’d been collecting dead starfish at the time.
With my mind still deep in the ragbag of the past, I drifted on past the Coastguard’s cottages before veering to the edge of the cliff to check the beach below. But there was no one down there who looked like Kester. I did wonder if he might be hiding in a cave but I could think of no plausible reason why he should be.
I went on.
The most likely solution to the mystery of his disappearance was that he had strolled to the end of the headland and then veered south along the top of the cliffs. It was a reasonably level walk and not too arduous. I couldn’t quite see Kester trekking down to sea level and back after a busy day, but when I approached the end of the headland and glanced along the cliffs to Porteynon there was no sign of him and when I finally reached the point where I could look down upon the Shipway I saw him immediately.
He was loafing around a rock pool not far from the bottom of the cliffs.
Surprising but not, as far as I could see, either extraordinary or bizarre. I stood watching him and for a moment I thought he’d looked up but he hadn’t, he was just pushing the hair out of his eyes as he straightened his back. It would have been useless to call out. The clear evening light was creating the optical illusion that he was close to me but the cliffs were high, the sea was droning away and we were probably at least ten minutes apart in time. I hesitated, not sure what to do. I glanced at my watch. Half-past six. The Shipway would remain exposed for well over an hour and even though Kester was bound to come back eventually up the cliff path to the summit where I was now lying in wait for him, it was possible that he could be mooning around gazing soulfully into rock pools for some time. Could my nerves stand the wait? No. Better to go down and confront him.
I set off down the path.
The path zigzagged and I wasn’t watching him all the time, but before I was halfway to the bottom of the cliff I noticed that he was on the move. I stopped to stare at him. He was heading out across the Shipway. At first I thought I might be mistaken because the Shipway is such a jumble of rocks that no one who traverses it can travel in a straight line, but as I watched I knew I was right. He wasn’t hurrying; he was moving casually, but he was keeping up a steady pace and he was no longer pausing to look at the rock pools.
Now, this was bizarre. I glanced at my watch again. I even listened to it to make sure it hadn’t stopped but it was ticking away normally enough, and as I’d set it right by the one-o’clock news I knew it couldn’t possibly be more than a minute slow. Could Kester be making some sort of balls-up? No, he was Gower-bred, just as I was, and he too would have looked at the Coastguard’s notice on his way out. So that meant he knew what he was
doing, but what the hell was it?
If he was going out to the Worm he was mad—not suicidal; he had plenty of time to get there and back before the tide turned nasty; but just plain mad. Crossing the Shipway was a hard slog. It took half an hour to get from the foot of the cliffs to the Inner Head, the first of the Worm’s three humps, and the terrain was terrible nearly all the way. No one in his right mind would battle across the Shipway at the end of the day in order to twiddle his thumbs for a few minutes before being obliged to start the journey back.
I went on, driven by curiosity, and by the time I reached the grassy bank at the bottom of the cliffs he was a long way ahead. In fact he was halfway across. He was standing on that little shingle beach in the middle of the great tilting C formed by the Shipway, and gazing out across Rhossili Bay. It was hard to judge distances in that seascape of optical illusion, but if he was on that beach I calculated we had to be at least a quarter of an hour apart; I had dithered on the cliff while he had been striding out so he had gained a few minutes on me. Was he aware of my presence behind him? He gave no indication of it. I had half-wondered if he had seen me and was running away, but he showed no sign that he was unnerved—rather the reverse. He looked like a disciple of Wordsworth absorbed in the wonders of nature.
Most odd.
So what did I do? I decided to stay where I was because at any minute now he was sure to turn back; I just couldn’t believe he’d slog on across the Shipway. But he did. He stopped gazing across the bay and went on.
Extraordinary. What did it mean? I glanced at my watch again. Plenty of time. No danger. He could get to the Worm and he could certainly get back, no problem about that, but what the hell was he up to? I had no idea, but if he was mad enough to trek across the Shipway for no reason on a fine spring evening I supposed I could be mad enough too. At least a trek over rough terrain was better than sitting on the bank beneath the cliff and going crazy wondering what the hell he was doing.
The Wheel of Fortune Page 126