The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I went on.

  As I scrambled down the bank onto the rocks I met two holidaymakers, a man and a woman, who were just completing the ordeal of the return journey, and we all said good evening to each other. The man added some jovial warning to me about the rising tide, and to reassure myself I glanced at my watch. Nearly a quarter to seven. An hour and fifteen minutes of perfect safety—and probably longer. The Coastguard, all too aware of how often people underestimated the time it took to cross the Shipway, was sure to make allowances in its calculations for the misguided and the foolhardy.

  I began to slog across the Shipway. I couldn’t see Kester all the time because the taller rocks often hid him from view, but as time went on it gradually occurred to me how odd it was that he never once looked back. One often had to pause on the Shipway to calculate the best route and it would have been natural to glance back during these routine surveys, but whenever I did catch sight of Kester he was either gazing out to sea or else resolutely confronting the Inner Head.

  Why didn’t he look back?

  But on the other hand, why should he? It wouldn’t do to start being neurotic, although it was hard not to be neurotic in the face of his peculiar behavior. I decided that for my own peace of mind I needed to know what he was doing and why. Could he be luring me on in order to kill me? If I was going to give way to paranoia I might as well give way entirely, but no, the whole point of our situation was that Kester didn’t have to kill me to get what he wanted. I was the one who had to kill him except that I wasn’t going to. That took care of that particular theory but I was still no closer to guessing what the devil he was up to.

  I reached the middle of the Shipway and stood on the little shingle beach where Kester himself had stood a quarter of an hour before. The water of the bay nearby was tranquil but I could hear the surf booming on the other side of the isthmus as the tide swept up from the south. As I paused for breath I glanced ahead at Kester again and at that moment he reached the Inner Head and scrambled up from the rocks onto the grassy bank. Now, I thought, now he’ll look back. One always did when one had finally conquered the Shipway. One looked back not only to see the dazzling view but to pat oneself mentally on the back for crawling the full distance over that nightmarish terrain of jumbled rocks and pools.

  I stood stock-still and waited to be discovered. But discovery never came. He didn’t look back. He drifted on down the path that led away from the Shipway, and soon he had disappeared from sight along the southern flank of the Inner Head.

  Incredible behavior. Could he be quite mad, so mad that he wanted to kill me just for the hell of it even though my murder was unnecessary? I decided that I could believe that—just—but what I couldn’t believe was that Kester would try to kill me by luring me out to the Worm’s Head and tossing me (how?) into the sea. After all, I was the expert in unarmed combat. That would be a great way for me to kill Kester but hardly a great way for Kester to kill me—strychnine in the scotch would be more in his line and a nice grave waiting in the woods, although if the police searched the grounds they’d be bound to discover any newly made grave … No, on second thoughts Kester would favor a murder that could look like an accidental drowning, but hell, it was all quite irrelevant because I hadn’t a shred of evidence that Kester had murder on his mind.

  I just had it on mine. But no, it would be crazy to kill him, those holidaymakers would testify that I’d been chasing Kester out to the Worm and even a policeman with the brains of a louse could see that I had a gargantuan motive for wanting Kester dead. And I wasn’t going to kill him anyway. So that was that.

  Maybe my wisest course was simply to turn back and wait for him on the mainland, but no, I really had to stop being so paranoid and pull myself together—I had to stop picturing either Kester or myself as a drowned corpse, because if there was one certainty about our present situation it was that no one was going to wind up killed on an expedition to the Worm’s Head like—

  My God, yes, like Owain Bryn-Davies back in the Eighteen Eighties.

  I’d never really understood that story. Apparently Bryn-Davies had gone to look at the Penrice flock which was kept on the Worm in those days, but he was a North Gower man from The Welshery and he hadn’t understood about the tides. Why not? He obviously wasn’t a fool. He must have consulted the tide tables—or asked someone to consult them for him. So what had happened? God only knew, but anyway the net result had been that the usurper at Oxmoon had been neatly eliminated and my grandfather Bobby Godwin, the rightful heir, had wound up the undisputed master of his stolen inheritance.

  The usurper had been neatly …

  I swallowed some air in a moment of complete panic, floundered in among the rocks again and clawed my way up onto the spine of the Shipway so that I could see what was happening on the other side, but no, I was still thoroughly safe; the tide, though looking snappish, was still thundering at a distance but as I watched it I knew as absolutely as if I’d seen the family history printed in black-and-white that my grandfather had trapped Bryn-Davies, trapped him and drowned him on the Shipway, because he had seen no other way of removing the usurper from his home.

  Kester wasn’t Bobby Godwin and I wasn’t Owain Bryn-Davies. History never exactly repeats itself. But it reverberates, and as I stood there listening on the Shipway I was nearly overwhelmed by those echoes in time.

  I checked my watch. Could Kester have altered the Coast guard’s notice? Of course not. Impossible. However I came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t very happy right in the middle of the Shipway with the tide coming in, so the big question once again was Did I go back or did I stagger on to the Inner Head to find out exactly what Kester was doing with himself?

  I dithered away and the minutes ticked on. At this rate I’d be drowned through sheer indecision and it wouldn’t even be Kester’s fault. I had to act, and in an effort to marshal my thoughts I found myself again looking at my watch.

  It was five minutes past seven. In less than an hour’s time, at eight o’clock, the Shipway would begin to go under and both Kester and I, unless we were certifiable lunatics, would be back on the mainland because if we weren’t we’d be marooned together on the Worm until the early hours of the morning. That was a hideous thought so the sensible thing for me to do now was go back and wait for him beneath the cliff.

  But on the other hand …

  I considered the other hand. I could go on, confront him and still be back on the mainland before the Shipway went under. The advantage of that was that it would put me in a strong psychological position when it came to striking a bargain with him. Obviously he didn’t know he was being followed; that crap about him luring me on was just me being paranoid. If he now found himself alone in an isolated spot with a trained killer who had a huge motive for wanting him dead, he’d be so unnerved that he’d agree to whatever I suggested and the odds were I’d get a much more favorable compromise. He might even let me keep Hal.

  That settled it.

  I went on.

  V

  I felt as if I were crossing lines, line after line after line, but that was all right because I knew there was always the final line that I’d never cross. Kester had talked of lines when he had told me how he’d killed Thomas; I could remember him gabbling how he’d crossed the last line without being aware of it and then found there was no way back. “Once that die was cast, I’d crossed that line, and then I could only move forward to destruction …” Typical Kester, melodramatic and emotional as always, very stupid. He’d been hysterical, that was the trouble, too hysterical even to see a line, let alone draw one. No one in his right mind, as I was, could cross a crucial line without being aware of it. Impossible. The very idea was ridiculous.

  I reached the Inner Head. The Worm’s three humps all rose high above the sea. The Inner Head was connected to the Middle Head by a rough stretch of rocks not unlike the Shipway but set above the high-water mark, and the Middle Head was connected to the Outer Head by a natural arch known ro
mantically as the Devil’s Bridge. The entire Worm was a mile long and provided endless dazzling panoramas of sea, cliffs and sky, but I was hardly in the mood for sight-seeing that evening so when I reached the Inner Head I didn’t linger to dwell upon the view. I did glance back across the Shipway as usual, but I made the glance a brief one; I was too nervous that Kester might sneak up and tap me playfully on the shoulder when my back was turned, but of course he didn’t and when I swung around to examine the steep treeless flank of the Head I could see no sign of him.

  I paused to consider my position. I now had ten minutes—ten minutes to confront Kester, ten minutes to bargain with him, ten minutes to salvage my future—and then I had to turn back with him to the mainland if we were to avoid Bryn-Davies’s fate on the Shipway. The discussion could be continued on the return journey, of course, but the crucial foundations of our agreement had to be laid during those initial minutes when he would be frightened and pliable. Was I setting myself an impossible task by trying to shake him to the core in such a limited time? Not necessarily. It depended on how limited the time was—and that in turn depended on where Kester was now but I thought it almost certain that he was relaxing just beyond the bend in the path which lay some way ahead of me. I couldn’t believe he’d be heading for the Outer Head and a night in splendid isolation beneath the stars. No, he’d be pausing to rest and then—within the next few minutes—he’d be coming back to the Shipway to begin the return journey.

  Rather than pursue him farther I decided my best course of action was now to conserve my energy, drum up all my courage and wait. Fine. This was where I drew the line and behaved like a rational human being. I’d wait for Kester, give him the shock of his life and then launch myself on some forceful but nonviolent bargaining. Dead simple. What could be easier? What course of action could be safer or more sensible? I’d be all right. He’d be all right. We might experience some nasty moments but we were both going to battle through the meeting without destroying each other.

  I drew the line.

  I waited.

  Nothing happened. No Kester. The sun went on shining, the tide went on rising but Kester didn’t come back.

  I was just looking at my watch for the umpteenth time when such a horrifying thought occurred to me that I nearly passed out.

  Supposing I had, finally, gone off my rocker. Supposing I’d hallucinated and had only imagined that I’d seen Kester ahead of me. My whole pursuit of him had had such a dreamlike quality, a mysterious quest in a setting so beautiful that it might have been a landscape of myth, and Kester had moved as a wraith in my imagination, traveling so steadily, not once looking back, never showing me his face.

  I thought: It’s no good, I’ve got to go on.

  Well, I mean, I really did have to go on, didn’t I? I had to know he was real and not some nightmarish projection of my disordered mind. I couldn’t have stopped myself, not at that stage. I couldn’t possibly have stayed where I was.

  So I took a step forward—and as I did so the die was cast, I’d crossed that line, I could only move forward to destruction. …

  PART SIX

  Hal

  1966 AND AFTERWARDS

  NOT TODAY, O LORD,

  O, not today, think not upon the fault

  My father made in compassing the crown!

  I Richard’s body have interred anew,

  And on it have bestowed more contrite tears

  Than from it issued forced drops of blood …

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Henry V

  1

  I

  OXMOON WAS DESTROYED, the Oxmoon of my childhood, Kester’s shrine to Anna, his monument to beauty and peace. The mid-twentieth century was brutal to houses like Oxmoon. Racked by fiscal assaults and hammered by financial disasters, the estate broke up and the house drifted on towards extinction.

  I went back in the summer of ’66. It was two years since I’d last been there. I’d been trying to escape from the past but escape had proved impossible. I’d realized in the end that I was wasting my time, and when I reassessed my life after my friends died I saw how hung up I was. Yet now I was beyond mere fashionable phraseology. I was determined that there should be no more excuses that I was “hung up” and that Oxmoon was “irrelevant,” no more escaping from reality by bucketing around in a psychedelic minibus on a tidal wave of cheap wine and sweet smoke, no more pretending that the past could no longer touch me. If I was to have any kind of worthwhile future I now had to take time out from the present to exorcise the ghosts that haunted me.

  To my surviving friends I merely said, “I quit.”

  But to myself I said, I’m going home.

  II

  The iron gates were rusted, padlocked against vandals. The wall looked as if it had been freshly crowned with broken glass, but when I left the road and followed the footpath uphill towards Penhale Down I found the wall untouched by the new defenses. The door into the grounds was bolted. I climbed the nearest tree, swung along a branch and dropped down on the far side of the wall without breaking a leg. Picking up my duffel bag I moved on. Brambles tore at my leather jacket. The wet undergrowth drenched my jeans. The path was so overgrown that it was barely visible and above my head the dense foliage of the trees dimmed the light of the gray summer afternoon.

  It was very quiet. When I came to the ruined tower I found that more of the upper walls had collapsed, tearing the heavy creeper apart. I paused to look upon its corpse and suddenly I was so conscious of death that I found it hard to believe I was still alive. I moved swiftly on but at the edge of the woods a dead wilderness stretched before me. The tennis court was a memory, the netting rotted beside the posts. The lawn was ravaged by weeds and littered with rusted croquet hoops. And beyond the lawn was the house, another corpse, its shuttered windows blind to the light, its derelict walls waiting for their inevitable demolition.

  I said one word, an obscenity, and moved on.

  Skirting the terrace, where weeds were growing, I walked around the house to the side door. The frame was rotted. One hard shove broke the lock. I went in. I held my breath and the silence came to meet me, the silence of death and disintegration, the silence of my jail, the past. I had to find a way of living with that silence, but how does one live with death and how does one bear the unbearable?

  I was standing in the passage by the television room, the passage which connected the ballroom to the main part of the house. Turning aside I walked down the corridor to the hall.

  The light was gloomy because of the fastened shutters but I could see a hundred spiders’ webs, intricate and beautiful, linking the posts of the banisters on the staircase. The vast chandelier was caked in dust. I stared up at it and then as I stepped forward impulsively the silence was broken by the echo of my footfall on the marble floor.

  “Ah!” I said, although why I spoke I didn’t know. Echoes vibrated in my mind but when I again paused to listen they fell silent. I walked into the dining room. Little puffs of dust rose from the carpet as I crossed it. The long table and all the chairs were swathed in dust sheets, but the paneling was as ageless as the marble floor of the hall, and on either side of the fireplace the carved swags of fruit and flowers seemed to glow uncannily in the dim light.

  The house was dead but Kester’s treasures were still alive, waiting for the inevitable day when they would be auctioned to pay the death duties, and meanwhile they too were locked up in the past, entombed in that atmosphere of decay.

  Yet when I looked at the carvings again they seemed to pulse with life, and suddenly I heard the echo again, a little louder, a little closer to me in time.

  I went into the drawing room. The eighteenth-century furniture was invisible beneath the dust sheets, but the great Gainsborough painting shone in the twilight and on the mantelshelf the four china cherubs were still holding aloft the dial of time. I found the key. It was still in the vase nearby. I wound the clock. The pendulum needed a nudge, no more, and then the silence was broken at
last as time began to run again for Oxmoon, not time present but time past, the golden past which I had thought lost beyond recall.

  I wound up the clock in the morning room. I was winding time on yet winding time back, and as I turned the key I remembered Bronwen telling me long ago after my mother’s death that time was a circle and that the past could not only coexist with the present but even lie ahead of the present in the future.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, thudded the grandfather clock in the hall, and as I turned away, I saw the dusty chandelier glitter in my mind. I ran back into the drawing room. I ripped aside the dust sheets. The room blazed with blue and gold.

  “Beauty …”

  I was in the dining room again. The dust sheets were swirling to the floor and I saw the great carved chair as I had seen it in my childhood, a chair for heroes, the magic throne of my magician.

  “Truth …”

  I flung wide the library door. The books were all there, just as I remembered. I began to wind the clock.

  “Art …”

  Tick-tock, tick-tock, sang the clock as my fingers closed on Wuthering Heights. Tick-tock, tick-tock, shouted the clock as I pulled out The Prisoner of Zenda.

  “Peace …”

  I was in the ballroom. I saw myself reflected in the clouded mirrors. Sitting down at the piano, I tried to play “Walk Right Back” but the notes were out of tune so I stopped playing and sang instead as the lyric played itself back in my memory. “ ‘I want you to tell me why you walked out on me …’ ” I had sung the lyric so often at one-nighters up and down the country but I had never until that moment connected that song with my past at Oxmoon. “ ‘I want you to know that since you walked out on me, nothing seems to be the same old way …’ ” I broke off and moved to the doors but although I stopped singing, the song went on playing in my mind. “Walk right back to me this minute …” But there could be no walking back.