The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Knowing Kester well is obviously no guarantee of infallibility here. After all, look at Declan Kinsella. He thought Kester was murdered.”

  “True.”

  “Oh, of course that was all balls; the inquest proved conclusively that Father wasn’t a murderer and Declan’s opinion was laughed out of court later in the Bryn-Davies lawsuit—I know quite well that no murder was involved. But if I could prove Kester’s death was an accident—”

  “Well, have a go,” said Pam. “Why not? If you feel so strongly it would be wrong to oppose you. … Heavens, look at the time! I must put the potatoes on. I presume you’re staying at least one night with us?”

  “If Father can stand it. Otherwise I’ll go to the pub.” I was curt because I sensed I was being handled with kid gloves and I disliked being treated like a psychiatric patient.

  “Harry can certainly stand it and he’d be mortified if you went to the pub. Now, give me the dirty washing in that duffel bag and I’ll run it through the machine while I peel the potatoes.”

  I turned over the dirty washing in sullen silence and thought how I detested bossy, managing, overefficient women.

  “Why don’t you choose one of the bedrooms upstairs?” she was saying. “All the beds are made up and the water’s hot if you want a bath.”

  “Maybe I’ll stay at the pub after all.”

  “Seriously?” said Pam, turning to look me straight in the eyes. “You surprise me. I thought you’d decided to stop running away from your problems.”

  Wishing all psychiatrists could be instantly exterminated I tramped upstairs, invaded the nearest bedroom and loudly slammed the door.

  IV

  Sitting down on the bed I wondered what Pam really thought of my determination to play the detective. I suspected she was horrified even though she saw no alternative but to acquiesce; Pam would always want to protect my father, and my father’s mental health was too delicate for him to welcome prolonged inquiries into a past that was painful to him.

  After my father married her Pam had gone to great trouble to explain his problems to his children with the result that instead of reacting to him like delinquents we had merely said instead, “Poor old Father, poor old sod” and accepted that he was a cross which we had no alternative but to bear with patience. According to Pam, my father blamed himself for Kester’s suicide, and this fact, combined with a rough war and years of nervous strain during the subsequent peace, had represented the straw which had broken the camel’s back. Realizing Kester was behaving oddly on the night of his death, my father had followed him out to the Worm’s Head, but had then turned back in order to avoid being cut off by the tide. If he had gone on he would have caught up with Kester and saved him. Kester would hardly have committed suicide in his presence.

  Pam had then explained that although my father and Kester had long been enemies they were at the same time deeply connected emotionally, as deeply connected as twin brothers, and as soon as Kester was dead my father had been so overwhelmed that he had been unable to adjust to his loss. I would have laughed at this but it had chimed with Bronwen’s view of my father’s breakdown, and my trust in Bronwen had been absolute. She too had insisted to me that my father had been deeply bereaved.

  Kester had never talked to me in detail about my father, but he had been loyal to him. Once I had made a disparaging remark but he had said at once, “I’m your father’s stand-in whenever you come to Oxmoon, Hal, so if you abuse him you abuse me.” And naturally I had never abused my father in his presence again.

  I could remember being alone with the two of them at Oxmoon after my mother died. They had been charming to each other, friendliness personified, but with a child’s special sensitivity I had felt the loathing crackle between them, and I had escaped as soon as possible to play the piano in the ballroom. Yet Kester had said to me later as if he sensed that I’d been disturbed, “You mustn’t worry—Harry and I understand each other. That’s why we can share you with never a cross word,” and that uneasy peace had lasted until Kester gave up Oxmoon. But once my Father had become the master we had all rocketed to hell in double-quick time.

  Moving to the window I looked out across the stable yard to the kitchen wing of the house.

  “I put the magic back into Oxmoon,” said Kester’s voice in my memory, and suddenly I was there again, back in the lost Oxmoon of my childhood, and Gwyneth Llewellyn and I were racing down the path in the kitchen garden to raid the strawberry beds.

  I wondered what had happened to Gwyneth Llewellyn.

  I went to the bathroom. It was still a luxury to be able to urinate without taking ten minutes and two shots of scotch to face the pain, and as I relieved myself I wondered how long it would be before I felt obliged to acquire another girlfriend. However one of the unexpected results of that one-night stand when a passing groupie had given me so very much more than I’d bargained for was that it had come as a relief to abstain from sex. I had even had the heretical thought that I’d been promiscuous merely to follow the crowd. Mindless hedonism had been the done thing and I hadn’t had the courage to do the right thing and be different. Kester would have been ashamed of me. “Hold fast! Stand firm!” he would have said if he could have seen me floundering around in the quicksands of immorality like a demented satyr. The truth was that cheap thrills were just that: cheap. I supposed I could make the effort to develop more expensive tastes but the emotional extravagance of romance held no appeal for me. I had only ever been in love once but that had all ended at sixteen when Gwyneth had turned me down.

  “I don’t want any of your boys messing around with my daughters!” Jasper Llewellyn had shouted at my father. Jasper had never liked my father but he had admired Kester, saying that Kester had been a true Welshman, devoted to the arts, a talented remarkable man. My father, who unlike Kester spoke no Welsh, had been too successful a farmer, too pushy and ambitious, to give Jasper, a successful farmer himself, much peace of mind. Their lands had bordered each other, and there had always been quarrels over rights-of-way, straying sheep and first-class laborers poached by the lure of higher wages.

  After Jasper complained about me my father had summoned all his sons and delivered one of his fevered lectures about how no one should indulge in sex before the age of eighteen. My father was fanatical on the subject of morality. “You have to know where to draw the line!” he would thunder, and we would all look at each other in despair. Kester too had talked of drawing lines, but unlike my father Kester hadn’t been guilty of hypocrisy. Kester had lived a good decent life, loyal to the memory of the wife he had adored. My father had been a notorious womanizer. I thought he was peculiarly ill suited to give us such straitlaced lectures on morality but since the breakdown of his health my father had read nothing but books on philosophy and religion and he had become more rigid in his outlook than any clergyman. Naturally he had made rakes of us all at an early age and we had spent our adolescence trying to keep him in ignorance of our adventures.

  In fact lies and disillusionment, rage and estrangement had been the standard fare of our family life until Pam had arrived to sort us out. Ruthlessly she had pulled us one by one from the mire of misery my father had created at Oxmoon, and once extracted we had been dusted down, sanitized and reduced to order. Pam had made order attractive. We had soon seen that if we played our cards right we could live comfortably in pleasant surroundings; all we had had to do was avoid upsetting our father, and so long as we observed this basic rule Pam had made sure we were comfortable. Good behavior had suddenly seemed worth the effort. Family life had improved, and Pam had been hailed on all sides as the miracle worker who had civilized a hopeless neurotic and four hooligans.

  She had come to know my father well when she attended him during his first nervous breakdown after Kester’s death, but they had met some time before that while her first husband was still alive. However he had conveniently died a month before Kester in the spring of ’52, and as soon as my father met Pam again he had propos
ed to her. Pam had refused to marry him until he had been well for six months, a move that gave my father a powerful incentive to recover, and he had somehow stayed well for the required amount of time. During his second nervous breakdown which had followed the Bryn-Davies lawsuit he had been obliged to see other psychiatrists, but they had never done him any good and eventually in defiance of medical etiquette his wife had taken over his case again. At once he had become well enough to leave hospital, but this time he had never made a full recovery and had only been able to lead a quiet existence at home. Pam had again coaxed him to see other psychiatrists and again they had done no good. After making the decision to abandon the main house, sell off the remaining farmland and retire to a corner of the stable block on what remained of his fixed income, he had lived like a recluse, seeing no one except the immediate family.

  The real mystery, as I had said once to my brothers, was not why he had married Pam; obviously he had to live with a psychiatrist in order to stay on the rails. The real mystery was why she had married him. It had been very inconvenient for her. She had had to give up her full-time work and turn to part-time consultations. She had had to cope with the disintegration of Oxmoon, my father’s increasing incapacity and four respectful but privately hostile stepsons. Various explanations for her decision had been put forward, ranging from wealth and social position to my father’s notorious appeal to the opposite sex, but Pam was no ordinary woman and I doubted that her motives for marriage had been ordinary either. I had come to the conclusion that she had fallen in love with my father because she found him of absorbing psychiatric interest. Certainly she was devoted to him. He was devoted to her. My brothers and I had spent much time saying how bizarre their devotion was, but we had nevertheless dimly realized that she was the best thing to have happened to my father for a long time. Without her he’d probably have killed himself. In his worst depressions he was always suicidal.

  He had been very different once. He had been strong, striking, physically fit. But that had been before he took over Oxmoon.

  Oxmoon had killed him, that was the truth of it. Oxmoon the monster, not Kester’s Magic Oxmoon anymore but Malevolent Oxmoon, draining my father of money and strength, beating him to his knees. Oxmoon was like a dog who had loyally served a much-loved master and had turned vicious after his master’s death. Oxmoon belonged to Kester and my father had never mastered it. And Oxmoon, as I’d realized in the house that afternoon, was Kester’s still.

  I opened the window and as I did so I saw my reflection in the swinging glass. The reflection was transposed upon the house beyond, and in that moment I realized that Oxmoon was just the mirror in which I saw myself reflected. I was the dog who had turned vicious when deprived of his much-loved master. It was I who had belonged to Kester and whom my father had never mastered. And as I looked back across the past to the magician of my childhood I knew I was Kester’s still.

  I leaned out over the sill. Downstairs my father was playing Verdi’s Requiem. At the other end of the yard a black cat was walking elegantly across the cobbles with a mouse in his mouth. Below me in the windowboxes the geraniums were nodding gently in the summer breeze.

  To Kester I said: “I’m going to bring you back.”

  And to myself I said: I’m going to win.

  V

  I survived dinner by eating so steadily that my mouth was always too full to argue. The food was first-class. Pam had taken to cooking late in life but had mastered it with typical skill. I ate my way through two large helpings of lamb stew, new potatoes and fresh peas while my father pushed a chunk of meat around his plate and talked incessantly of his worries. He apparently had no intention of referring to our previous conversation.

  He started by grumbling about his health. This was standard behavior, although curiously he never spoke of his eczema, the one complaint that merited sympathy; perhaps that was because his skin troubles genuinely frightened him. Instead he grumbled about various pains in his legs and the fatigue arising from insomnia. I acknowledged these complaints by grunting at intervals. Pam looked thoughtful but could have been meditating on anything from tomorrow’s shopping list to my father’s new tranquilizers.

  After he could find no more to say about his health my father complained about the state of the world, the state of the nation and the Youth of Today and judged them all diabolical. However this led to a grudging tribute to my brothers Charles and Jack who wore white shirts, kept their hair short and held steady jobs in London. Charles worked in the Current Affairs Department of the BBC, and Jack was an agent in some import-export firm based at Heathrow Airport. Humphrey, the only brother I had kept in touch with during my two years on the road as a singer, was racketing around as a medical student but since he was my father’s favorite he was referred to as “ambitious” and allowed to be mildly eccentric. Nevertheless even Humphrey had to be careful, cutting his hair before his visits to Gower and leaving his striped shirts behind in London, but no doubt he considered these sacrifices a small price to pay for maintaining his position as the favorite.

  I didn’t like my brothers but adverse circumstances had bound us together. When I was very young I had been annoyed with my mother for refusing to concede that I was the best of the bunch. “But I love you all equally, darling!” she had protested. Later that had struck me as unnatural. Parents always have favorites. I was the cleverest and the best. Why wasn’t I the favorite? I’d become cross with her for being too stupid to see how first-rate I was. My father had been too busy treating me as a nuisance for breaking his piano so I’d known I’d never get preferential treatment from him and besides it had been plain he was soft about Humphrey. Humphrey had looked just like him. I hadn’t looked like anyone. I’d felt a changeling, misunderstood and unappreciated. And then Kester had taken me by the hand, my magician had waved his magic wand, and suddenly I’d been special, I’d been privileged, I’d come into my own at last.

  “First is best, isn’t it, Kester?” I had said to him once, forgetting he had been the youngest of four sons, and Kester had said, smiling at me, “Sometimes—but not always!”

  “… Hal?”

  I jumped. “Sorry, Pam, I wasn’t listening.”

  “More apple pie?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I must say,” said my father, concluding his grudging tribute to my brothers as he lit a cigarette, “it’s a great relief to me that three out of my four sons are doing well. It makes up for the way you’ve steadily wasted your opportunities. However if you want to turn over a new leaf we’ll say no more about that.”

  I sank my teeth into my apple pie to ensure that I kept quiet.

  “It’ll be uncomfortable for you to camp out in the kitchens,” said my father, “but of course I know it’s no good asking you to stay here. I expect you’re having a hard time hiding your contempt that I’m obliged to live in a corner of the stables like this.”

  “Some corner,” said Pam. “Coffee, Hal?”

  Not trusting myself to speak I nodded.

  “Anyway,” said my father, “I don’t care if you want to camp out like a hippy; suit yourself, it’s none of my business. And I don’t care either if you want to reexamine the past. Pam says everyone needs to pause and take stock of their lives every now and then. That’s healthy, she says. Well, all right, if you want to talk about, well, about Kester, go ahead, why not, ask whatever questions you like and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Pam says that’s fine, we should have talked it all out long since, she says. Well, of course I would have if you’d asked but you didn’t ask, did you? You never said anything about Kester before, never mentioned his name, so how was I to know what you were thinking?”

  “Don’t forget your Vivaldi concert, darling,” said Pam. “Would you like coffee in your room? You know how you hate to miss the opening bars.”

  My father ignored her. “I don’t want you to think I’m hostile,” he said to me. “As a matter of fact I’m very touched that you want to dis
prove the suicide theory and exonerate me from responsibility. When you said that earlier I … well, I couldn’t take it, could I, but that was only because it all seemed so sad and I felt I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear to think of you being tortured as well as me—”

  “That’s the point, isn’t it? It’s time the torture stopped. Thank you, Father, it’s very good of you to say you’ll cooperate with me, we’ll talk later. Don’t feel you have to miss your concert.”

  “What upsets me,” said my father, “is that I can’t tell you what you want to hear. Kester was very unstable. Everything had gone wrong for him. I’m quite sure he came back to Gower with the intention of dying in the place he loved best. That would have been acting in character.”

  “I can think of nothing more out of character than Kester committing suicide.”

  “But you never really knew him, did you?”

  Pam decided this was the right psychological moment to intervene. “This is the real question you have to answer, Hal,” she said. “What was Kester really like?”

  “You must realize,” said my father, “that he had great problems. I mean, I’d never have taken over Oxmoon unless I’d honestly felt he couldn’t cope—although now when I look back I can see this must have aggravated his sense of failure and driven him further along the road to suicide. I shouldn’t have allowed him to give Oxmoon to me—Christ, if only you knew how guilty I feel about that now—”

  “Yes.” I drank my coffee. “It’s okay, I understand.”

  “I mean, you do believe, don’t you, that Kester gave me Oxmoon of his own free will? I know Declan said—”

  “I’m not interested in Irish fairy tales.” I went on sipping my coffee.

  There was a silence. Then my father sighed, rubbed the raw patch of skin above the line of his beard and leaned back in his chair for a moment before, he remembered his concert. “Do you want to come and listen?” he asked me as he rose to his feet.