The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  Gerry had quit. I’d quit. That was when I’d bummed around Europe and nearly wound up in a Turkish jail. I’d arrived home full of new plans to reform and had found that my father wanted to give Oxmoon to the National Trust in order to preserve it for posterity. He had been too ill to see the Trust’s officials himself, but he had asked me to negotiate with them.

  The Trust had been interested but had pointed out that all houses which came to them had to be endowed with a capital sum that would ensure their maintenance. They had wanted four hundred thousand pounds to restore the house and grounds and establish a fund for the future upkeep, but when my father had offered to sell the art collection to raise the money the Trust had recoiled in horror. The officials had said that the art collection was the only reason why they would wish to acquire Oxmoon; as the house was of no great architectural merit, it could be justifiably preserved only as a showcase for Kester’s unique collection of paintings, furniture and objets d’art.

  Although greatly disappointed, my father had also been relieved that he hadn’t been obliged to sell Kester’s treasures. Some psychological bar had always prevented him from sending even the smallest item to the auction rooms despite Gerry’s frantic advice to sell antiques and not land to ease his financial troubles. It was all part of his mental disturbance.

  “If I sell any of Kester’s possessions then he’ll never forgive me and then my gift for playing the piano by ear will never come back,” he had said more than once in the past, and Gerry had commented to me: “Mad as a bloody hatter.”

  When Gerry and I realized that all our efforts to help were futile, Gerry had told my father to find another solicitor while I had escaped through the Chelsea coffee bars into the music business. Later I had heard from Humphrey that my father was hoping that I’d make the fortune required for Oxmoon’s endowment. If this hope hadn’t been so pathetic I would have laughed. I’d been making good money but nothing on the scale of four hundred thousand pounds. Only the very lucky and the very talented hit the real big time in the music business, and my luck and talent had been merely moderate.

  Oxmoon was doomed, that was the truth of it, as ruined and ravaged as my father and just as utterly beyond redemption.

  “The wheel must be reshaped, the circle redeemed …” I could hear Bronwen’s voice again, but this time, although her words were still an enigma they seemed to connect in some inexplicable way with my present situation. “Such a burden to pass to you, you must be very strong, very brave,” she had said, and suddenly I could feel the weight of the burden she had seen so clearly. I could not identify it, I could only dimly perceive its dimensions, but I knew beyond doubt it was there.

  I thought: Suppose redemption’s not just a word, not just a matter of semantics, not just a philosophical concept which has no true existence in reality. Suppose redemption’s a tangible burden, a profound psychological ordeal, a reshaping of the past achieved only by pain and suffering.

  I shuddered with revulsion and then it occurred to me that the real question which lay unanswered—the challenge beyond the challenge and the mystery beyond the mystery—was not whether I could solve the riddle of Kester’s death but whether I would be strong enough to shoulder the tragedy I had inherited and re-form the circle which had been destroyed.

  I shuddered again but Kester’s voice urged in my memory: “Hold fast! Stand firm!”—and then at last, as I looked across the circle, I was nearly deafened by his echo in time.

  IX

  I suddenly realized that I was still facing a blank page of my notebook, and at once I pulled myself together. It was most unlike me to give way to metaphysical meanderings and superstitious speculation, and I could only conclude that remembering Bronwen had catapulted me down mental avenues which had no place in my rational world of hard facts and cool analyses. Writing WITNESSES TO BE INTERVIEWED at the top of the page, I turned aside from the dead, as represented by the Kinsellas and Bronwen, and embarked on a survey of the living.

  I began by noting the names of Evan and Richard, both of whom had seen Kester in those three days before his death. Evan was a clergyman in Cardiff. Richard was a jet-setter; after Uncle Edmund’s death Aunt Teddy had moved back to Boston, Richard’s brother Geoffrey had emigrated to New York and Richard himself spent much time bouncing backwards and forwards across the Atlantic in the company of Beautiful People. There had never been any shortage of money in that branch of the family, although since Aunt Teddy’s inheritance was locked up on trust, no large capital sum was available to help my father.

  I was unable to add Bronwen’s name to the list of people who had seen Kester before he died, but I did add Sian’s. Sian and her mother had been close, the only two women in a family of men, and I thought it likely that Sian could provide me with some hearsay evidence as well as some interesting opinions of her own. In the hope of hearing more interesting opinions I added the names of her brothers. Evan was already on the list but I wrote down Gerry and Lance.

  Then casting my net wider I noted Aunt Marian’s name, not because she’d been close to Kester but because she’d been married to Rory and might be another source of hearsay evidence. I thought of Siobhan Kinsella, Declan’s widow, but I’d never met her and I decided that I should start my investigations by interviewing the people I knew. I added my Aunt Eleanor’s name. She’d been married to Thomas and was bound to have a relevant opinion on the subject of Declan’s evidence.

  But the most important name was still missing. I wrote down FATHER and sat looking at it.

  A liar, an extortionist, a murderer? An innocent victim, a helpless neurotic, a good man crucified by ill luck?

  Who was my father? I didn’t know. To me he was just a source of pain labeled PARENT. I considered him a hopeless father and I knew very well he had been a bad husband to my mother. I could remember how he had shouted at her and made her cry. I knew it was wrong to believe he’d killed her; Bronwen had told me not to believe that so I hadn’t, but I had to blame someone for her death and who else was there to blame but him? Even if he’d done everything he could to save her—and Bronwen had sworn that he had—the fact remained that he’d set in motion the chain of events which had led to her death. She couldn’t have got pregnant without his help and obviously he’d been criminally irresponsible. That indicated selfishness and callousness on a large scale but I didn’t think that was incompatible with what I knew of my father. I saw him as selfish and callous. He’d always acted as if his children were millstones around his neck. That sort of man shouldn’t be allowed to father four children. Such things should be banned by law.

  I remembered Dafydd saying I was the apple of my father’s eye. Dafydd wasn’t usually given to flights of fancy, and suddenly I found myself remembering that alibi he had given my father, the alibi which was apparently tough enough not to crack under pressure. Dafydd was so uncommunicative that I felt an interview with him would be useless but I wrote on my list: Dafydd—check his evidence with maximum care when I reread the inquest report. The word FATHER continued to hold my attention. “Be loyal to your father,” Bronwen had said. Of course. One had to be loyal to one’s father. That was the right thing to do as well as the done thing. But who was really my father here?

  “Sometimes I feel I’ve got two fathers, Kester.”

  “Then make the best of both of us!”

  My magician.

  “This is the real question you have to answer, Hal,” Pam had said to me. “What was Kester really like?”

  I tried to see Kester but all I could see was his magic wand and then suddenly, miraculously, I was back again at Oxmoon, the lost Oxmoon of my childhood, and Gwyneth was moving to meet me once more in the fairy-tale palace of our dreams.

  My last crucial witness. I’d nearly forgotten her. I wrote down GWYNETH LLEWELLYN, and as I sat staring at the name of the cousin who had been my childhood friend a voice in my head said: Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood. Take me back to Oxmoon and make it live again.<
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  3

  I

  IT WAS HALF-PAST FOUR. Driving into Penhale I shut myself in the call box by the church hall and phoned my three uncles. Gerry I arranged to meet at the Claremont Hotel that evening at six. I forgot to ask him for Lance’s number at work but when I called Lance’s house his wife Jean obligingly invited me to dinner. She also gave me Evan’s new number in Cardiff but he was out; I told his wife I’d call back later.

  When I emerged from the booth I saw the Swansea bus draw into the village and as it halted by the green, four girls dismounted. They were dressed in the uniform of the Swansea Grammar. Gwyneth, I knew, had won a place at the grammar school and I thought it likely that her younger sister had followed in her footsteps. I accosted the nearest uniformed figure.

  “Excuse me—was Caitlin Llewellyn with you on that bus?”

  “She’s just going up the lane,” said the girl, pointing over her shoulder, and as she stared at me in amazement I knew I’d been recognized. Television is death to anonymity.

  “Thanks.” I broke into a run. “Caitlin!” I shouted, and sprinting across the green I caught up with her by the wall of the churchyard. When she turned to face me I recognized her as the child I had known some years before. She must have been about seventeen. She bore no resemblance to Gwyneth; she was taller, slimmer, prettier, probably much less intelligent, and as she too recognized me I realized I had seen girls like her in a hundred audiences. They had shining hair and screamed in all the right places. There was nothing to set her apart from the crowd.

  “Wow!” she said. “It’s Hal Godwin!” She went bright pink.

  “Hi, how are you,” I said with a routine smile, and added without pausing for her reply: “I want to get in touch with Gwyneth but as you probably know, I’m not one of your father’s favorite people. Can you tell me where she is?”

  The child made a supreme effort to compose herself. “She’s got a flat in Swansea. She’s teaching at Abbeybrook. I can’t remember her phone number offhand, but—”

  “That’s okay, I’ll get in touch with her through the school. Thanks.” I turned to go.

  “But Hal—she’s coming out here tomorrow for the weekend. Aunt Dilys is visiting us from Bettws-y-Coed and Mum’s staging a family reunion.”

  “Great. Tell Gwyneth I want to see her and that it’s very urgent. I’ll be in the churchyard tomorrow evening at eight.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell her.”

  I gave her the smile I kept for autograph hunters and wound up the interview with a formal “Many thanks—I really appreciate that!” She looked dazzled. I added the empty words “So long, good luck” and walked away. It was a bleak moment. I had waved my magic wand by projecting my public image, and this had called forth a response that had no relation to reality. Her adulation was not for me; it was for someone who didn’t exist, and beyond the myth I remained my troubled self, a private person who hid behind glittering images in an attempt to escape from truths too hard to face.

  I thought of Kester, perhaps another private person who hid behind glittering images, and remembered Pam implying that he had fed his ego with the adulation of children in order to keep his inadequacy at bay.

  “We know so little about even those who are closest to us,” Kester had said to me once. “We know so little of what really goes on in other people’s lives.” He had been talking about a project of his, a novel based on the story of my great-great-grandmother Gwyneth Godwin and her lover Owain Bryn-Davies, and trying to explain how difficult it was to perceive the whole truth about any situation, past or present. I could hear him saying, “I suspect all we know now about those two is little better than a distorted myth. Time has transformed their story into a golden romance with a beginning, a middle and an end, but I’m more inclined to believe their affair was a cataclysmic event with repercussions we’re still experiencing.” And he had talked of a stone breaking the surface of still water and sending ever-widening ripples flowing outwards to the remotest banks of the pool.

  I stood on my remote bank and looked across the pool to my great-great-grandmother, but I was unable to see how I could have been affected by her tragedy. And then it struck me that I was about to begin interviewing her descendants in an attempt to solve the enigma of yet another catastrophe in time. Who was to say where the rhythms of causality ended? I felt as if I were about to weave the final strand in some immensely complicated pattern, but of course that was irrational rubbish and I had to curb any desire to be fanciful. My job was to nail reality, not nurture myth.

  Returning to my car I drove to Swansea to interrogate my first witness.

  II

  Gerry was waiting for me in the bar of the Claremont. He was wearing a well-cut gray suit with a striped blue shirt and a plain blue tie that toned with the stripes. To conform with current fashion he had grown a pair of sleek sideburns, but this was a mistake; they made him look more like a car salesman than a solicitor. The Americans have a word for men like Gerry. He was a wheeler-dealer. Floating acquisitively in the upper reaches of the Swansea business world he had accumulated various interests in property and had slithered onto the boards of various companies which operated under the Bryn-Davies flag. He was thirty-nine, twelve years my senior.

  “So how are you, old chap?” he was saying as he snapped shut his silver cigarette lighter and glanced around the bar to see if there was anyone of importance who ought to be acknowledged. His carefully cultivated public-school accent always managed to sound phony, but nowadays when most public-school boys were doing their best to sink into a midatlantic twang his phoniness only made him fashionable. “Wonderful to see you again! By the way, my girlfriend’s rather a fan of yours—buys all your records and watches you on television …” Gerry was famous for the beautiful girls he escorted, kept for a time and then casually dusted out of his life. He was always saying he would marry one day but I doubted he would ever find a woman who didn’t bore him after six months. I sensed he wasn’t fundamentally interested in women. Gerry was an egoist. The only person he was interested in was himself.

  “Gerry, I need to talk to you about Kester,” I said after playing the good listener for some minutes. Then after explaining that I wanted to straighten out the past by gathering the frank opinions of those who had been closely connected with the tragedy, I said abruptly: “Okay, let’s have it—how do you really think Kester met his death?”

  And Gerry said without a second’s hesitation: “Oh, it was an open-and-shut case, old chap. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind whatsoever that he committed suicide.”

  III

  “This is the way it was,” said Gerry. “Poor pathetic old Kester was just a burnt-out case, very sad, I really did feel bloody sorry for him. Well, I mean, it was obvious he couldn’t cope with Oxmoon, it was literally driving him round the bend, and because he loved the old place so much he made up his mind to do the noble thing and pass it on to someone who could cope better than he could—he did it for Oxmoon’s sake, you see. I know he didn’t like Harry, but let’s face it, Harry was the best man for the job and damn it, you were the heir anyway. It all made perfect sense to me, and if Declan Kinsella had kept his big mouth shut it would have made perfect sense to everyone else too, but of course once that smooth bastard started spinning his Irish fairy tales everyone got flustered. All a lethal rumor needs to take off, mate and multiply is one whopping big lie from a polished crook like Declan Kinsella. …

  “Extortion? Don’t make me laugh! Old chap, my sense of self-preservation was, believe me, very keenly developed even back in the early Fifties and if I’d known Harry had committed a criminal act I’d have run a mile in the opposite direction. Of course he didn’t cover up a crime and of course Kester didn’t commit one! The whole idea’s ludicrous. Kester gave Oxmoon away of his own free will and was afterwards relieved and delighted that he’d done so—well talk to Evan if you don’t believe me! Kester told Evan just before he died that he felt liberated without Oxmoon and had t
aken on a new lease of life. …

  “Okay, yes, so he terminated the lease unexpectedly. I agree that looks like an inconsistency, but you see, it was a manic mood swing, old chap, very common in cases of depression. The rock-bottom truth was that Kester was a failure, couldn’t get published, couldn’t cope with Oxmoon, couldn’t even face life itself. Hell, even Harry felt sorry for him! Although to tell the truth, Harry was the one I always felt sorry for. Wish we could patch up that estrangement. I’m very fond of Harry. …

  “Oh, I know you never liked him, I know you were one of Kester’s fans, but the truth, Hal—the real honest-to-God truth—is that your father’s the hero of this story and he’s had the bloodiest luck imaginable. Mind you, I haven’t always thought of him as a hero. I didn’t like him much when I came home from Canada, thought he was a bit of a cold-blooded snob, standing on his Old School tie and his legitimacy and all that crap—well, of course I was more insecure then than I am now, I was mixed up about a lot of things and there was no one I could talk to, not really, I didn’t get on with my father too well, he was a tricky kind of guy—chap, I mean—stuffy, you know? All hung up about morality, and Christ, what had he got to be so stuffy about, treating my mother like a tart, wrecking her life and then, my God, walking back in a cloud of romance after playing dead for twelve years and having the nerve to think he could pick up where he left off! I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe she’d take him back, but of course she was useless, too besotted with him to think straight, Christ, women are bloody odd sometimes! Well, I didn’t get on well with my mother either, to be honest—it’s all very well Harry talking sentimentally about magic ladies, but damn it, she was tough as old boots and she was all hung up on morality as well except that she dressed it up in that way-out Celtic mysticism—my God, it was impossible to have a straight talk with either of those two. …