The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Oh darling, you can’t take them seriously, you really can’t! When all was said and done they were just two hard-drinking Irishmen trying to avenge their brother’s death by scraping up some mud to fling at poor darling Harry—by the way, how is poor darling Harry? I must send him a little something from Fortnum’s when I’m next up in town. I suppose Pam’s still being a saint—such a funny woman, I can’t make her out at all, but I’m sure she’s charming when you get to know her. After all, she must have something to attract Harry, mustn’t she, and there really isn’t much else. If my bosom were that flat I’d have silicone injections … Listen, Hal darling, I simply must rush now because I’ve got six people coming to lunch and I haven’t even stuffed the avocados, but it was too sweet of you to phone and yes, of course Kester committed suicide, I know he did—in fact ever since Anna died I’d always felt he was willing himself, my dear, absolutely willing himself towards the most sensational tragic ending …”

  XXI

  NOTES ON AUNT MARIAN:

  Back comes Declan Kinsella, the recurring nightmare.

  What am I going to do with him? He’s not going to go away. He won’t conveniently drop out of this story. Rory might have been a fool but Declan wasn’t, far from it, and if he went out to the Worm and came back convinced my father could have killed Kester I’ve got to take him seriously, even though I’ve just convinced myself that murder’s more or less out of the question.

  How did Declan think it had been done? Presumably he visualized some sort of fight taking place on the southern flank of the Inner Head, out of sight of the mainland. My father admitted he had gone round the bend onto the southern flank before turning back. If Kester was waiting there, I suppose my father did just have time to kill him, toss the body into the sea and rush back to beat the tide, but it would have been a close call and is it really very likely? It seems more probable to me that if my father had killed Kester in a fight he would have been so shattered that he would have been unable to nerve himself to make a rapid retreat across the Shipway in the face of the rising tide.

  But the real problem with Declan’s theory is that I can’t see why Kester would wait for my father to catch him up. It’s hard to disagree with Evan’s opinion that Kester would have had every reason to keep going.

  VERDICT: Any theory that my father killed Kester, whether accidentally or on purpose, gets bogged down in implausibilities, and I don’t believe Declan could have solved the basic mystery of how and why the killing could have happened.

  Soldier on.

  (Why do I keep writing that?)

  XXII

  I flicked back through my notes. They were a model of detachment, the conversations on the subject of my investigation reported with my own dialogue filleted from the record, my notes reflecting no emotion as they commented on the meaning of each interview. I had recorded reality and offered a gloss on that reality—and yet all the time another reality had been running parallel to this controlled careful record, the reality of an increasing involvement and mounting anxiety. “This cold inquisitorial air of yours is an act,” Lance had said, and I knew now that he was right. The reality of what was going on in my mind lay not in the neat well-ordered handwriting in front of me but in the muscles which ached with tension and the knuckles which shone white as I gripped the phone.

  From now on my interviews could no longer be recorded coldly as monologues. My detachment was slipping away from me and as I realized I could no longer play the neutral investigator, I felt as if I were being drawn inexorably into the black mouth of a tunnel in pursuit of two men who formed an enigma which menaced me.

  However that was an absurd thought, irrational and neurotic, so I had to wipe it from my mind.

  I did. I believed in the power of the will, so naturally I wiped the thought from my mind and applied myself to the task of calling my next witness.

  But my knuckles still gleamed white as I gripped the phone.

  XXIII

  “Wowee, man—great to hear you!” crowed my cousin Richard in his best midatlantic accent, and again I was amazed that so many men in early middle age were struggling to climb aboard the fashionable bandwagon of youth. Richard was nearly forty-two. He had been married twice with dire results and was now bounding around with shoulder-length blond curls, flowered shirts and flared trousers. Cushioned by the Armstrong money he had long ago decided not to waste his time earning a living, but always told inquiring strangers that he was “in investments.” Con men regularly tried to fleece him but with mixed results. Although he was foolish he had a keen sense of self-preservation and had developed a certain low cunning over the years. I knew, for instance, that he kept off hard liquor and used only soft drugs.

  “… and it’s all happening!” he was saying breezily. “I’m just off to Paris for lunch!”

  “Seems a long way to go for a hamburger. Listen, Richard, before you dive into the private jet, can I send you on a trip into the past? Like back to 1952?”

  “Nineteen—my God, that’s not history, that’s prehistory! Was there a 1952?”

  “You were flourishing at Oxmoon as Kester’s jester.”

  “Not in 1952. That was when Kester died. And I only went to Oxmoon once or twice after Harry took over. There was this incredible family powwow when Declan Kinsella blew his mind—”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about that but I want to ask you about the other guy who apparently blew his mind. Do you think Kester committed suicide?”

  “Yes, in the sense that Depression was his middle name and no, in the sense that he had the plot of a terrific new book in his head and I was surprised he took the ultimate trip before committing the inspiration to paper.”

  Here we went with the corroboration of Evan’s evidence.

  “You’re sure about the book, Richard?”

  “Sure I’m sure! When I met him off the ferry three days before he died I saw straightaway he was sunbathing on Cloud Nine!”

  “And he actually mentioned the book?”

  “Yep—said he had a great new plot brewing and he hadn’t felt so creative since before Thomas died.”

  I felt as if a routine piano sonata had been interrupted by the clash of the cymbals. I remembered writing in my notes that before I could start believing wholeheartedly in Declan’s story of extortion I needed another piece of evidence that would link Thomas’s death squarely with some form of neurotic or peculiar behavior on Kester’s part, and this unexpected reference to Thomas’s death seemed to give me a lead I couldn’t ignore.

  “Kester mentioned Thomas’s death in the context of his work? But what a curious thing to do!”

  “What’s so curious? I remember all too well what dear old Kester was like in the months before Thomas died—scribble, scribble, scribble—wow, how high he got on creativity! And how we used to laugh together in the evenings once he’d finished work! He’d have me in stitches by inventing crazy plots. ‘Let’s play murder!’ he’d say, and off we’d go with bodies in the library and Miss Snooks shooting the butler with an arrow dipped in curare—you know those fantastic Agatha Christie-type plots which everyone thinks are so cute nowadays. Kester was great at it—way out—boy, what an imagination! Jesus, the plots he dreamed up—they were fantastic, they really were!”

  I felt sure this was important although at that moment there wasn’t time to work out why. But instinct pushed me to pursue this line on Kester’s work.

  “Richard, when you met him off the ferry did he say what this new book was going to be about?”

  “No, but that wasn’t unusual because he never discussed his work in detail. All he did say was that he couldn’t write it anywhere except at Rhossili.”

  This again struck me as a curious remark—and again Richard seemed to find it unremarkable. Reminding myself that he had known Kester better than I had I tried to dig a little deeper for the rational explanation.

  “Wait a minute, Richard, let me recheck that statement. Did Kester actually say to you: ‘I ca
n’t write this book anywhere except at Rhossili’?”

  “Right on. No. Wait. Cancel that. He said something more like ‘I’ve been inspired by the Worm’s Head and I can’t start to write till I get back there.’ ”

  “Did he normally have to write in the place where he’d set his story?”

  “Well, put like that it sounds crazy, but I knew what old Kester meant. He liked to write in a beautiful setting and he thought the Worm and Rhossili beach would be guaranteed to turn on the creativity taps. Poor old Kester—Lord, how I miss him! It’s godawful to think he suicided when he was so happy, but I gather that’s not uncommon with depression. I had a friend like that once—one evening he was being the life and soul of the party and the next moment he’d jumped off the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Did Kester in fact suffer so heavily from depression?”

  “Oh sure. It was because he couldn’t get published. I asked Geoffrey to help him but Geoffrey just said Kester had to submit his manuscripts in the orthodox way. I think Geoffrey found it embarrassing to work for publishers and have a struggling writer in the family. … Incidentally, Hal, what happened to Kester’s manuscripts? He left them to you in his will, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, but they weren’t in the attics, so he must have taken them to Ireland when he left Oxmoon. My father never bothered to recall them for me—typical!—but now Declan’s dead I must get in touch with Siobhan Kinsella and arrange for their return. They’re probably stashed away in her own attic and she doesn’t realize she has them.”

  “How come you yourself never bothered to recall them?”

  “I couldn’t face any contact with Declan.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised, considering how he wowed them in the High Court, but actually I always flipped over Declan Kinsella. He was a real groovy guy. … Hey, look, Hal, I’d better go and grab that plane, but give me a call when you’re next in town and we’ll freak out together, okay?”

  “Richard, I’ve given up drugs and booze and I’m hooked on chastity. But thanks for the offer—I’ll see you around,” I said, and hung up as he began to bellow in horror for an explanation.

  XXIV

  NOTES ON RICHARD:

  The suicide theory’s in shreds. Kester would never have killed himself if he was on a big creative high, and I have two witnesses testifying that he was. Even if he’d suffered a manic mood swing he’d have beaten it back merely by sitting down at the typewriter.

  What do I make of Richard’s spontaneous linking of Thomas’s death with Kester’s previous period of exceptional creativity? Logically nothing. Or is there in fact some kind of logical progression going on there? Kester enjoys a period of exceptional creativity in 1949—and Thomas dies. Kester hits another period of exceptional creativity in 1952—and another death follows. But all that has to be just a coincidence. How can it be anything else? But the word “murder” keeps cropping up. Richard says Kester invented murder plots as some kind of bizarre parlor game.

  Supposing … No. Not possible. Kester couldn’t have dreamed up a plot to kill Thomas during a creative high—I must be going nuts even to think of such a thing. It’s one thing to plot murder as a parlor game; it’s quite another to plot murder and act out the plot. If Kester behaved like that he’d be a certifiable lunatic; but he wasn’t.

  Yet just what the hell was Kester up to? And who was Kester anyway? An artist, a man of peace? A killer, a man of violence? A hero, a villain, a lunatic? A saint, a magician, a fraud?

  Stop. I’m getting irrational and—worse still—emotional. I must believe only what is proven and avoid this sort of melodramatic speculation like the plague.

  Soldier—No, not “soldier on.” I can’t flog myself along with that phrase any longer, not now, I must pause, I must rest. I’ve gone a little too far, a little too fast, and it’s time to fall back and retrench.

  VERDICT: Richard provided my most disturbing interview yet. But what does his evidence really mean? There was some sort of revelation going on there, but was the revelation truth or fantasy? And Kester’s slipped right out of focus. I can’t see him clearly at all.

  XXV

  I left some money to pay for the phone calls but I rejected the idea of relaxing for an hour at the nearby beach to soothe my nerves. I drove back to Oxmoon because it was lunchtime and although I wasn’t hungry I thought eggs and bacon would have a beneficial effect on my psyche. Protein was good for the brain.

  Parking the car in the stable, yard I walked into the scullery and picked up the matches to light the Primus but then I paused. The tap was dripping in the main sink and suddenly I remembered the tap dripping at Aunt Eleanor’s flat when she had talked of my parents.

  Four small boys, constant money worries and a wife who couldn’t cope with any of them.

  I went on standing there with the matches in my hand, and gradually I knew I’d never be able to eat. I was too distressed. I thought of my father struggling in the dark, I saw Kester coruscating in the light and for the first time in my life my magician seemed sinister to me.

  The truth shifted focus, reality altered its course and the cherished certainties of childhood began to disintegrate. A dark unnamable emotion gnawed at my consciousness, and as I saw the rack of my ordeal defined at last I knew it could tear me apart. Kester was on one side of the rack my father was on the other and I was impaled between them.

  I tried to wipe my mind clean again by the usual exercise of my will, but this time nothing happened and I was still struggling with the image of that rack when I heard the knock on the door.

  Immediately I guessed that Pam had come to invite me to lunch but Pam was the last person I wanted to see at that moment. I didn’t want to be placed in deep analysis as soon as my distress became obvious to her. I tried to drum up an excuse for escape.

  The knock sounded again on the door.

  Gritting my teeth I got up and flung the door wide, but the moment I did so I realized that Pam wasn’t after all the last person on earth I wanted to see. The very last person I wanted to see now stood revealed on the threshold and I knew at once that no escape was possible.

  “Forgive me for interrupting you,” said my father, “but I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

  4

  I

  “I’M FINE,” I SAID TO MY father. I abandoned the Primus, picked up the saucepan and moved to the sink. That gave me time to compose myself. “And you?”

  “Oh, I’m all right.” His eyes were red-rimmed with tiredness. Above the beard his face was grayish-white, and suddenly I had a picture of myself, equally pale, equally tense, partnering him in this dialogue of noncommunication. I searched for the words to pull the scene together but before I could find them he added, trying to be cheerful: “No problem crossing the yard today” and glanced back at the open space which so often frightened him.

  “Well, now that you’ve crossed it,” I said, trying not to imagine the state of mind that had driven him to conquer his phobia, “have some coffee.” I somehow got the Primus alight.

  “No, thanks. I was really just wondering how you were getting on.”

  “Not too badly.”

  “Ah.”

  There was a pause. I looked at him and for the first time saw the wall between us, the cruel wall conjured up by my magician.

  I grabbed the words to smash it. “Tell me about her.”

  “Her? Who?”

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother? But what’s that got to do with Kester?”

  “Absolutely nothing. But I don’t want to talk about Kester, not now, not at this particular moment. I want to talk about my mother. We’ve never talked about her either, have we? We never talk about anything. What was she like to be married to?”

  He stared. Then he pushed back his hair, scratched his neck and groped for a cigarette. At last he said carefully, “She loved me. I was lucky to have her.”

  “No, no, I’m not interested in sentimental platitudes. Tell me what it was
like for you, an intelligent cultivated man, to be married to a girl who never opened a book, couldn’t tell Mozart from Beethoven and had an emotional age of thirteen.”

  “Who says your mother had an emotional age of thirteen?”

  “Eleanor. Isn’t it true?”

  “I’m not saying one word against your mother.”

  “Why? Because you’re afraid of upsetting me?”

  “Because to me she meant something very special.”

  “What was it? Come on, for Christ’s sake, wake up, look at me, I’m grown up, I’m not a child anymore and I’ve got a bloody right to know how I came to be in the world. Why did you marry her?”

  “Sex.”

  “That all?”

  “More or less.”

  “How much more and how much less?”

  “My God, what an inquisitor you are!” cried my father, rubbing his forehead fiercely with his hand. “You’re like a bloody tank!”

  “I need to be a bloody tank to get through to you. Now sit down and tell me what was going on. Why did my mother have this obsession with reproduction? My mother had four sons who all loved her, so why wasn’t she satisfied with us? What went wrong?”

  “She wanted a daughter.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “We had a daughter but it died.”

  In the pause that followed I turned off the Primus and emptied the saucepan of water into the sink. Then I moved back to the table.

  “When?”

  “Long before we were married. It was all hushed up. Bella was neglected; no one really cared about her. I was very unhappy because Bronwen had left. It was … well, I suppose it was a tragedy, although tragedy’s such an overworked word it hardly seems worth using, but whatever it was we never got over it. We were both haunted by a compulsion to put right what had gone wrong. I found I had to marry her. She found she had to bring Melody back.”