The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  GODWIN: Very unlikely, yes, but I was watching him very closely and although the lie of the rocks on the Shipway occasionally prevented me from seeing him, I never once saw him look back when he was within my field of vision.

  CORONER: Most bizarre, yes; very strange behavior indeed. I can quite see why you were perturbed. Very well, Mr. Godwin—thank you, you’ve been most helpful.

  VII

  NOTES ON MY FATHER’S EVIDENCE AT THE INQUEST: It seems even more of a tour de force than I remembered. I suppose now I’m older I can better understand how brilliantly plausible he must have been, talking of doing the done thing and adopting a martyred air about his servants. This was 1952 and despite the war, class and privilege were still capable of dazzling everyone in sight.

  He certainly had an answer for everything, and what answers they were! Each one fitted so smoothly into his story and sounded so rational, so right. Is there any part of his evidence that could be a lie? Yes, of course, but how does one start to separate fact from fiction when they’re woven together with such skill as that? Lance said that the really consummate liars of this world always use the truth as far as they possibly can, but he was talking about Kester, spinning yams for Declan. It seems unfair to suspect my father of being a consummate liar just because he was so brilliantly plausible in the witness box, but I know why that thought’s crossing my mind—and not just crossing my mind; it’s scaring me shitless. Now that I’m seeing my father as the hero of this story the ultimate nightmare would be if I proved that my father was the one telling lies while Declan was the one telling the truth. I’m a long way now from those days when I could dismiss Declan’s stories out of hand and refuse to think about them. I now see more clearly than ever that if I’m to have any peace of mind I’ve got to explode his murder theory—but to explode it I must first understand why he reached his conclusions.

  And this is where my father’s evidence is unexpectedly helpful. I’d forgotten how positive he was that Kester had never looked back, but of course in the light of that testimony I can now see why Declan became so convinced that my father could have beaten the tide by achieving a quick murder on the Inner Head. If Kester really didn’t know my father was behind him then he might well have sat down and enjoyed the scenery once he reached that southern flank. It was a clear evening. Perhaps North Devon and Lundy Island would have been visible. In fact I can easily see Kester sitting down to recover from the Shipway, enjoy the sunset and savor the stupendous view. If he thought he was quite alone this would be the natural thing to do.

  I still think my father would have been hard-pressed to kill him and get back over the Shipway in time, but I have to concede it’s technically possible. I’ll have to go out to the Worm, there’s no getting away from it. I’ll have to stage a reconstruction just as Declan and Rory did.

  Bearing Declan’s theory in mind, the big question now becomes this: Is it really possible that Kester never looked back? I remember Evan thinking this was so unlikely that he had no trouble constructing his own theory on the premise that my father had been mistaken. And Evan’s not alone here; the coroner thought it was unlikely; my father thought it was unlikely; I think it’s unlikely. But why on earth should my father lie on this point? In fact it would help his story more if he said Kester was looking back repeatedly and behaving like a man on the run—then my father could have said, “It became obvious that I hadn’t a hope of catching him up,” and his decision to turn back would have seemed more logical than ever.

  If my father was mixing fact and fiction, this seems to have been one of the occasions when he thought to himself: “The truth here can’t hurt me; it supports my story that Kester was behaving oddly, so why not sling it in and give the jury food for thought?”

  But if my father is indeed telling the truth about this, what does it mean? Why did Kester never look back? Can one really explain his behavior, as Evan did, by saying he was on a creative high?

  VERDICT: The coroner was right. My father was right. The entire incident’s very bizarre.

  VIII

  It was five o’clock. Since I’d skipped lunch, I knew I should eat so I found a café by Victoria Station and ordered baked beans on toast and a glass of milk. It was quarter to six when I left the city and quarter to seven when I reached the car park on top of the cliffs at Rhossili. The rush-hour traffic had been heavy and the journey had taken longer than usual.

  Rhossili Bay lay ahead of me, a vast arc of sand below the cliffs and the unspoiled Downs. The sea, reflecting the sky, had a grayish cast. Leaving the car park, I walked past the hotel to the end of the road and moved down the track to the three cottages that belonged to the Coastguard.

  One of the coastguards was pottering around his garden. In answer to my inquiry he told me that low water would be around twelve thirty in the afternoon on the following day, and the Shipway would be passable at ten.

  I walked out to the tip of the headland and twenty minutes later I was standing on the edge of the cliffs that faced the Worm. The Shipway was a whirlpool of waves shot with angry flecks of foam. The three humps of the Inner, Middle and Outer Heads, ringed with white water, rose from the sea like a monster; I could clearly see how the Worm had earned its name which had once meant “the Dragon,” and as I stood there, Saint George on a cliff top, I felt as if I were contemplating the ordeal that would make me a legend. All I needed now to complete the myth was the maiden and in less than an hour’s time Gwyneth Llewellyn was due to keep her appointment with me in Penhale churchyard.

  Not even Saint George could have asked for more.

  I retraced my steps to the car.

  IX

  The lych-gate creaked beneath my hand. I walked up the path to the church. Here was old, old age indeed, weathered stones, ancient glass, enduring slate—all representing a profound peace which mocked the vapid transience of twentieth-century values. This church had seen many fashions come and go and had outlived all of them. The ideology it represented was a closed book to me but I respected its permanence.

  Glancing up at the tower I remembered how Kester had donated the money to have the clock restored. He had arranged for a new chime, melodious and discreet, and the villagers, who for decades had been battered by the clanking of the old chimes, had been well pleased.

  It was almost eight o’clock. I looked in the porch. There was no sign of her but when I moved around the tower I saw her at once by the Godwin graves. She was sitting by Kester’s tombstone and tugging at the grass with abrupt restless movements of her fingers. Her long brown hair, dead straight, fell like a curtain so that I could barely see her profile but as I moved towards her she looked up.

  I saw the face I remembered. She sprang to her feet but I came to a halt, and above us, far above us in the belfry, the church clock began to whisper the hour.

  X

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Do we shake hands or just smile at each other?”

  “Neither,” she said in a voice I didn’t remember. Three years up at Oxford had eliminated all trace of her Welsh accent. “I see no point in formality and I’m not in the mood for simpering. What a very arrogant message you sent me! I suppose you’re used to women rushing to meet you whenever you toss out a summons!”

  “I wanted to see you and I thought you’d want to see me—and here you are so I was right. How come you’re so uptight? I’m not interested in making it with you—I got over all that when I was sixteen.”

  “Super,” she said drily. “Well done.”

  We moved past Kester’s grave to the iron bench beneath the ancient yew tree.

  “Are the flowers from you?”

  She shook her head. “No, but there are often flowers on his grave nowadays—he seems to have become rather a cult figure. The older people regard him as a symbol of the good old days when everyone kept their hair short and went to church on Sunday, and the younger people think of him as a real cool guy who did his own thing.”

  “Kester
would have been tickled pink!”

  “My God, yes, I believe he would!” she said, and the next moment we were both laughing.

  Then we paused and took a long look at each other. I saw a woman of twenty-six, very much shorter than I was. I’m six feet two. She was no more than five feet three. She had a rich heavy curving body which she had penned up in a prim navy-blue dress with a starched white collar. Her lower lip was full but the thin line of her upper lip held it resolutely in a straight uncompromising line. She had a square pugnacious chin and a high wide intelligent forehead below the center parting of her hair. Her eyes were bright blue, just like my grandfather’s, and this eerie resemblance to one of my own relatives reminded me of the nineteenth-century connection between the Llewellyns and the Godwins. My great-great-grandfather had married her great-great-great-aunt. Kester had drawn up an elaborate family tree to show that we were fourth cousins.

  It was a long time since we had last met.

  After Kester died various circumstances had combined to drive us gradually apart. I was away for most of the year at school; we were both on the verge of adolescence with all its accompanying constraints; perhaps most important of all we each reminded the other of Kester and as time passed we came to shun the pain of remembering him.

  Then when I was fifteen and she was a few months younger we had met by chance in Swansea. I had recently been expelled from Harrow, and my father had found a tutor in Swansea who was trying to prepare me for my O-levels. I used to meet Gwyneth in a coffee bar every afternoon when she finished school.

  When we discovered how much we were still haunted by Kester we had decided to look up the report of the inquest in an attempt to face the facts of his death squarely. Singly we had never been able to drum up the courage to do this, but together we had given each other the strength.

  Because of its sensational nature the inquest had been reported with exceptional fullness in the local press and we read every word we could find. By this time, three years after Kester’s death, the public had almost forgotten the tactful verdict of the coroner’s jury that Kester had died by accident and it was the firm opinion not only of the majority of my family but of hers that Kester had committed suicide. Consequently neither Gwyneth nor I seriously queried that he had killed himself. We regarded it as unarguable, and although we noted Evan’s evidence of euphoria we discarded it: Gwyneth thought Kester had been happy because he had come back to Gower in order to die in surroundings of great beauty and peace. I just thought he had been putting on an act so that Evan wouldn’t worry about him. Neither of us believed that Kester had been on the brink of beginning a new book. “He never mentioned it to me,” said Gwyneth, who had seen him on the morning of his death. “Obviously it was just something he invented to make sure everyone thought he was normal.” We both assumed that the loss of Oxmoon had been responsible for his suicide. We told each other that without Oxmoon and Anna he would have been unable to write or to see any purpose in continuing to live.

  This resurrection of our mutual grief drew us still closer together, and I began to see her at weekends. Not being a virgin I was soon sure what I wanted. Being a virgin she wasn’t so sure as I was. In the end, as we were struggling together in a time-honored fashion in the nearest haystack, she lost her temper and screamed, “Leave me alone—you’ll never measure up to Kester!” and that was that. Jasper Llewellyn arrived on the scene seconds later but by that time it was all over.

  Later she wrote: I’d like to be friends with you but you make it impossible. Why can’t you be more like Kester? He was sensible about sex—he just regarded it as something married people do and I’m quite sure he would never have let it spoil a perfect friendship. If you can measure up to Kester, then I want to know you. If you can’t I’d rather we didn’t meet again.

  I never wrote back. We never met again.

  She did well at school and won a place at Oxford to read English. Kester would have been proud of her. When she had her degree she spent a year acquiring a teacher’s diploma, and that was the last I heard of her before little Caitlin told me of the job in the big private girls’ school in Swansea.

  “I hear you’re a huge success,” she said as we sat down together on the bench beneath the yew tree. “I can’t stand that kind of music myself, but I’m glad you’re doing well.”

  “I’m not doing well. And I’m not a success. But things are going to change,” I said, and I began to talk of my past and my present.

  She kept a sizable space between us on the bench as she listened, her legs firmly crossed, her hands folded primly in her lap. Here indeed was the maiden of myth, a virgin bound to the stake of chastity and guarded by the magic dragon of the past.

  The urge to play Saint George stole over me again. To combat it I too crossed one leg over the other and folded my hands primly in my lap. My jeans began to feel as close-fitting as a second skin.

  “… and so there it is,” I heard myself say at last. “I’ve quit on drugs, booze and sex and I’m living like a hermit at Oxmoon while pursuing a career as Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “Women go mad over reformed rakes. You’ll soon be besieged—probably much to your relief.”

  “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about you, do I? Or are you making it with six different guys on the grand scale?”

  “Mind your own business.” She got up and wandered towards Kester’s grave.

  That meant no. I followed her. “Gwyneth—”

  “Oh Hal,” she said, suddenly dropping her defenses as she swung to face me, “how I wish I could help you!”

  “What do you mean? Why do you say it like that?”

  We stood by his grave and stared at each other.

  “Do you think I haven’t tried to prove to myself it was an accident?” she said. “Do you think I haven’t been where you are now?” Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes.

  “You mean—”

  “It was suicide,” she said. “He really did kill himself. I know he did. I know it.”

  XI

  “It all began,” said Gwyneth, “when I went up to Oxford and met this man who said I was hung up on sex. I wasn’t sure he was right, but because I liked him very much I found myself being forced to think hard again about Kester, and that was the first time I’d made a serious adult attempt to analyze my feelings for him. I knew I loved him very much but since I was nineteen by that time and not stupid I had to acknowledge that my feelings were very far from unambivalent. I felt he’d betrayed me by committing suicide, and as soon as I’d faced up to the anger I felt I wondered if I’d been subconsciously venting my resentment on all the men I’d met since his death.

  “Well, this amateur psychology was all very well, but just sitting around thinking wasn’t going to cure me and I knew I had to do something constructive. That was when I made up my mind to prove that Kester hadn’t committed suicide; like you I felt that once I’d proved he’d died by accident I wouldn’t have to be so angry with him anymore.

  “So the next time I came home to Gower I roped in my brother Trevor and we went off to the Worm together. What I wanted to prove was that it was possible for Kester to have fallen into the sea by accident, but Hal, we spent the whole five hours between tides crawling over that bloody peninsula and we both agreed afterwards that the possibility just didn’t exist. Kester wasn’t athletic. He wouldn’t have taken any risks. There are only three places where an accident of that kind might have happened: first there’s that rough stretch between the Inner and Middle Heads, but I’m sure he would have kept clear of the edge that falls sheer to the sea; second there’s the Devil’s Bridge, and third there’s the blowhole on the Outer Head, but I can’t see him falling down the blowhole which is such a famous hazard. In fact I can’t see him ever getting as far as the Outer Head because I can’t see him making the effort to cross the Devil’s Bridge.

  “You know the Bridge. There’s basically nothing dangerous about it—it’s wider than it looks fr
om a distance—but it’s a nightmare to anyone who’s afraid of vertigo and Kester wasn’t keen on heights. I know he did cross the Bridge on our expeditions to the Worm, but it was an effort he made to show us we didn’t need to be afraid, and I think if he’d been on his own he wouldn’t have bothered. And even if he had bothered I can’t see him suffering such an attack of vertigo that he reeled into the abyss. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he’d ever actually had an attack of vertigo. His dislike of heights was debilitating but not disabling.”

  She stopped talking. A few yards away the flowers on Kester’s grave trembled in the faint breeze.

  I thought of Evan’s theory which I had found so plausible but all I said was “And the Shipway?”

  She looked at me in surprise. “Oh, but we know he couldn’t have drowned there! Why, I don’t believe I ever raised the possibility with you when we read the inquest report—I just assumed we both knew a disaster on the Shipway was quite out of the question!”

  I could feel the palms of my hands sweating as I clenched my fists. “But is it?”

  “Of course! Hal, Kester would never, never have made a mistake about the Shipway. For God’s sake, don’t you remember? He crossed it, recrossed it, photographed it, mapped it and watched it sink over and over again when he was writing that novel about Gwyneth Godwin and Owain Bryn-Davies. Kester was the world’s expert on the Shipway. He could have seen at a glance exactly when it was due to go under.”

  XII

  There was a silence. Then I said, “Well, I suppose all investigators have their blind spots and that was certainly mine.” I groped for my notebook, found a clean page and wrote: NO ACCIDENT. While I was writing my voice said, “But of course you can’t rule out the possibility of a freak wave.”