The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  Or could there?

  Fourteen years ago he had walked out on me by committing suicide but now I had finally willed myself to face his memory and against all the odds he was walking right back after all into my life.

  And what did I feel? Rage that he had abandoned me? Contempt that he had taken a coward’s way out? Bitterness that he had proved himself a weak man instead of the hero I’d believed him to be? Yes, but beyond all these familiar emotions I was aware this time of something else. I was aware of a deep-rooted and ineradicable bewilderment, and I knew then that there was an unsolved mystery here that no one, least of all myself, had ever begun to unravel.

  Kester was dead. But by some magician’s trick he was still alive. My father was still alive. Yet it was as if my father were the one who had died.

  I walked back through the house, retrieved my duffel bag and went out through the side door. It had begun to rain but I made no effort to hurry as I walked on past the ruined orangerie and the shambles of the kitchen garden. I felt hot and muddled, and the melody of “Walk Right Back” was reverberating endlessly in my head.

  When I reached the stable block I stopped to stare for there in the far corner, just as Humphrey had reported, lay a new oasis of extreme neatness. Part of the stables had been converted into a chic little mews house. Painted a pristine white which was alleviated only by the black front door, it was adorned with window boxes in which geraniums flourished with military precision. Voile curtains gave the windows a hostile glare. The brass of the door gleamed fiercely. To complete the impression of a siege mentality at work a new car stood in the yard; it was an aggressive red mini which displayed its radiator like a watchdog baring its teeth.

  I had reached my journey’s end. Here in fortified seclusion, separated from his family, alienated from those who had once supported him, racked by ill health and tortured by a personality that was deeply and incurably neurotic, lived the present and as far as I could see the final master of Oxmoon.

  Taking a deep breath I walked up to the front door and rang the bell.

  III

  My stepmother opened the door. She always paid meticulous attention to her appearance to disguise the fact that she was older than my father, and today was no exception; she was fifty but looked forty. Her narrow figure heightened the illusion of youth but as always I found her physically repellent. Her slate-gray eyes saw too far. In her presence one felt perpetually encircled by a powerful mind and placed ruthlessly in deep analysis.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said. “I thought you’d turn up eventually. How handsome you look now you’ve cut your hair.” She made this statement in such a deadpan voice that it became a mere clinical observation. “Come in.”

  I stepped past her into the living area. The architect had employed an open-plan design. I saw a galley kitchen along the far wall and a pine-paneled alcove where four pine chairs were tucked into a pine dining table. The kitchen cupboards matched the furniture. Electrical appliances were lined up by the sink. Everywhere was immaculate, hygienic, sanitized. Nearby a small sofa and two armchairs were grouped around a large television set. On the wall a bookcase displayed bound medical journals and books on psychiatry.

  “Very nice,” I said to my stepmother.

  “Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to like it.”

  The sound of music drifted towards us through an open doorway. I recognized Sibelius’s First Symphony.

  “How’s Father?”

  “Not too bad. I got him out yesterday. We went for a walk on Penhale Down.”

  “Quite an achievement.” My father suffered periodically from agoraphobia. “Will he see me?”

  “I can’t think why not.” She made it sound as if it were normal for a father and son to greet each other nonchalantly after a two-year estrangement. “Sit down and I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  She disappeared through the doorway towards Sibelius’s First Symphony and I sat down in front of the blank television screen. I was remembering Humphrey’s information about this new home of my father’s. There were two spare rooms and a bathroom upstairs, but my father and stepmother lived on the ground floor where in the larger of the two bedrooms my father listened to his radio and conducted his long love affair with his record player. The smaller bedroom, like the living area, reflected only my stepmother’s taste in interior decoration. Humphrey had described the predominating color as iceberg-blue.

  Sibelius’s First Symphony stopped. My stepmother’s high heels came tapping back down the passage.

  “He’ll see you,” she said, very much the efficient doctor deciding that the patient was strong enough to submit to stress. “Second door on the right.”

  I walked past her into a short corridor. On my left an open pine staircase rose to the floor above. On my right the iceberg-blue bedroom reflected the accuracy of Humphrey’s descriptive powers. I shuddered and glanced on past the stairs to the open door of a bathroom. Opposite this another door stood ajar and without knocking I walked in.

  In sharp contrast to the rest of the house this room was chaotic and disorganized. I guessed my stepmother was allowed in once a week to dust, hoover and change the bed linen. The single bed, very disheveled, lay along one wall in silent testimony to my father’s chronic insomnia, and beside the bed a table bore the burden of my father’s pillboxes and ointment jars. Records and books lined the walls. I saw a transistor radio but knew this would be used only for listening to the news. The VHF radio in the corner was tuned permanently to the Third Programme. His record player was the most expensive money could buy and large speakers hung on either side of the curtains. There was no piano. My father never played now. He’d had a gift for playing by ear but he’d lost it when Kester died. Or so he said. The loss existed entirely in his mind but that, as my stepmother pointed out, didn’t make the loss less real. It was her opinion that the gift would come back if he experienced a sufficient improvement in his mental health, but the improvement never came and my father never played. At some stage, after the first nervous breakdown or the second, I forget which, he’d taught himself to read music so that he could follow the notes while he listened to his records, and as I now entered the room I wasn’t surprised to see the score of the Sibelius symphony lying open on the table by the window.

  My father was standing nearby. He wore a creased open-necked blue shirt, faded with age, and a pair of baggy gray flannel trousers which sagged at the waist. He deliberately wore clothes which were too big for him because his skin was so sensitive to pressure. Since he had had warning of my arrival he had had time to button his shirt and pull down his sleeves to hide the eczema that plagued him. Some years ago when a daily shave had become too much of an ordeal he had grown a beard, and although a small patch of eczema was visible on his face it was partially obscured by his heavy sideburns. He wore his hair long at the back, no doubt to conceal other sores, and this hirsute appearance gave him a curiously modern look. In the King’s Road in so-called Swinging London no one would have thrown him a second glance.

  His black hair was streaked with gray; his dark eyes were tense with suspicion. As I approached he stood stock-still, difficulty personified, a perfect example of paranoid parenthood.

  “Hullo, Father, how are you?”

  “What do you want?”

  After a pause during which I successfully kept my temper I said, “Can’t we sit down and exchange a few routine social pleasantries before I tell you why I’ve come?”

  “If you want money—”

  “I don’t. I have plenty.”

  “My God, that’s a comment on our sick society! A young man only has to pick up a guitar, learn a few chords and sing a cheap vulgar song and immediately he has more money than he knows what to do with! How you can prostitute your musical talent by earning a living in a business like that—”

  “I’ve left the music business.” I put my hand on the nearest chair. “May I sit down?”

  “Left the music business? Why? What for?
Are you in trouble? What’s happened?” My father was immediately in such a panic that it was impossible not to feel sorry for him.

  I tried to put him out of his misery. “I’m not in trouble, Father,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

  “Is it drink, is it drugs, is it women, is it—”

  “I’ve given up drink, drugs and sex.”

  “Given up? Given up? But my God, why? What do you mean? What’s going on?”

  “Father, either we sit down and have a rational conversation or I leave. Which is it going to be?”

  We sat down facing each other across the table and my father lit a cigarette with unsteady hands.

  “I’m sorry, Hal. I just worry about you so much. I worry and worry and worry—”

  “Then now’s the time to stop. I’ve made up my mind to live very differently. No, I won’t have a cigarette. I’ve given that up too.”

  “But Hal, for God’s sake, what’s happened?”

  “My drummer killed himself with an accidental overdose of heroin and his girl committed suicide. My friends died,” I said, “but I lived. It made me stop and ask myself what I was doing with my life.”

  “You mean … are you trying to say you nearly killed yourself too?”

  “I’ve never touched heroin, but that’s beside the point. The point is that I’d locked myself up in a self-destructive situation—and not for the first time either. I’ve been locking myself up in self-destructive situations for fourteen years now.”

  “I don’t understand. Are you saying—”

  “I’m saying I’m sick of bucketing down the road to nowhere in a psychedelic minibus, sick of the groupies and the grass and the endless string of cheap hotels. A week before my friends died I wound up in a VD clinic in Brighton getting penicillin shots for clap. People laugh about VD now, think nothing of it, but I didn’t laugh. I started wondering what I was doing. Then came the heroin disaster and I saw the light—and it was no ordinary light either, it was a red warning light, in fact it was a bloody beacon. And at once it seemed crystal-clear to me that I had a choice: I could stop—or I could go on. So I’ve stopped. I’ve turned aside towards another life. I’ve …” I hesitated before using the one cliché that I knew would reach him, and at once he knew what I was going to say. His eyes filled with tears. Like most neurotics my father cried easily and used tears in cheap bids for sympathy. “… I’ve drawn the line,” I said abruptly, and stood up so that I could turn my back on him. I had no patience with his emotional histrionics.

  “But Hal, this other life—the new life—”

  “It’s no good asking me about that, because I can’t tell you anything. I don’t know what I’m going to do ultimately. All I know at the moment is that I’ve got to be at Oxmoon for a while to sort myself out, and I want your permission to camp out in the kitchens of the main house—no, don’t worry, I’m not going to found a commune. I want to be alone. I want to think. I want to work out what’s gone wrong.”

  “Perhaps a psychiatrist—”

  “Good God, no! I don’t share your touching faith in psychiatrists, I’m afraid, Father. In my opinion competent self-analysis is purely an attitude of mind.” I knew we were irritating each other. Obviously the interview had to be brought to a speedy conclusion. “May I have your permission to camp out in the main house?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Thank you. I’ll see you later.”

  “Wait!” shouted my father.

  I waited.

  “You can’t just come back here after two years and walk out after two minutes, it’s not fair, it’s bloody selfish, it’s downright cruel. …”

  Being an atheist I was unable to pray for patience. I shored up my strength with a monumental effort of my will and sat down opposite him again. “Try and understand that I don’t want to quarrel with you, Father, and that everything I do, no matter how selfish and cruel it may seem to you, is done with that simple aim in mind. I’ve had enough of our quarrels. That’s another example of self-destructive behavior which has to be terminated.”

  “Are you suggesting—”

  “Yes, I am. And don’t tell me that you, a fanatical devotee of psychiatry, haven’t an inkling of what’s going on here. Why did I get myself expelled from Harrow? Why did I flunk my O-levels the first time around? And when I finally made up for all that at the crammers and won a place at university, why did I drop out after a year and go bumming around Europe until I damned nearly ended up in a Turkish jail for smuggling hash?”

  “I don’t understand,” said my father, but he did. His eyes were panic-stricken.

  “Okay, I admit I turned over a new leaf after that and did my best to help you with Oxmoon, but why did I walk out two years ago and wind up in the music business which is probably the most destructive business, short of motor racing and boxing, that I could have chosen? Do you really think I did all this for my own pleasure? Okay, yes, I did—I did it for my own pleasure, the pleasure of giving you hell. And why did I want to give you hell? Because—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more,” said my father. He groped his way to his feet and stumbled across the room.

  “I blamed you for Kester’s suicide,” I said. “I haven’t been able to think rationally about Kester before, but now that I’m determined to face his memory, I can see very clearly that what I’ve got to do is bury his corpse—he’s lying around here like an unexorcised ghost; it’s exactly as if he’s still alive—”

  “Pam!” shouted my father. “Pam!”

  “—and so I’m going to bury that corpse, Father. I’m going to prove he didn’t commit suicide because once that’s proved I don’t have to blame you any more for what happened—”

  My father blundered out of the room. I followed him, but not quickly enough. The bathroom door slammed in my face and the key turned in the lock just as my stepmother arrived to reduce our chaos to order.

  I began to hammer on the panels. “Father, for Christ’s sake, I’m on your side! I want to absolve you from all responsibility for Kester’s death!”

  My father pulled the plug of the lavatory to drown the sound of my voice.

  “Father!” I yelled, but it was useless. I stopped battering the panels, gave the door a kick and turned aside.

  “Come and have some coffee, Hal,” said Pam briskly. “Or would you prefer tea?”

  “Fuck off.”

  We retreated to the kitchen. On the counter a jug of coffee had just finished percolating. A delicious aroma filled the room.

  “I’ll have it black,” I said before I could stop myself, and slumped down at the table.

  Pam produced cups and saucers without comment and poured out the coffee. After that we sat without speaking for a while. Psychiatrists are skilled in the art of silence. Pam spent twenty seconds contemplating one of her fingernails. Then she gazed meditatively out of the window. She gave the impression that conversation couldn’t have mattered less and that she hadn’t the slightest curiosity to find out more about the disastrous scene she had interrupted.

  “Okay,” I said at last, unable to stand her professional silence any longer. “You tell me. Where did I go wrong? A conversation that is terminated by one of the participants locking himself in the lavatory can hardly be rated as a triumph of communication!”

  “Why do you think your father locked himself in the lavatory?”

  “Well, of course I upset him! I didn’t mean to—quite the reverse—but obviously he just can’t talk about Kester.”

  “The most interesting thing about that remark,” said Pam, “is that it isn’t true. Your father’s quite capable of talking about Kester—but not to you. And why do you think that is?”

  “Well, because … look, what the hell are you getting at?”

  “He sees that the subject upsets you, Hal. It’s not your father who gets distressed when he talks of Kester. It’s you.”

  Silence fell again. I drank some coffee. When I had myself sufficiently in con
trol I said, “Things have changed. I’m now going to talk about him rationally and unemotionally in an attempt to prove he didn’t commit suicide.”

  “That sounds like an interesting project. How long have you been skeptical of the suicide theory?”

  “The doubts began recently, after my friends died and I tried to work out what was going on in my life. I got as far as realizing I was trying to pay Father back, and then it occurred to me that I might be blaming him for a suicide which might never have happened. After all, I was just a child when Kester died and I was so shocked that I accepted the suicide theory without questioning it—and then later it was too painful to think of it at all. But if I can now drum up the nerve to play Sherlock Holmes—”

  “Hm.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing in particular. It could be a good idea of yours, it could be a bad one. We’ll have to see.”

  “I thought psychiatrists were all in favor of people confronting the truth and straightening out their hang-ups?”

  “That depends on the truth. And it depends on the hang-ups. Very few people are actually strong enough to look unpleasant truths straight in the face.”

  “What makes you think this particular truth’s bound to be unpleasant?”

  “What makes you think it won’t be? Someone you loved very much died, and he didn’t die a natural death. That’s a situation impregnated with a grief which apparently you’ve always found hard to handle, and discovering the truth isn’t a guarantee you’ll find the problem any easier.”

  “I disagree. If I can prove the death was an accident—”

  “But suppose you wind up proving it was a suicide?”

  “I’m certain now that Kester didn’t kill himself. A short while ago I was in the main house and remembering him talking of Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace. He would have seen suicide as a negation, an ugliness.”

  “Yet your father, who knew Kester very much better than you did, finds the suicide theory utterly convincing.”