The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Well, no,” said my father after a pause, “I didn’t. As a matter of fact I didn’t turn on the wireless.”

  “Why not? Was it broken or something? I can’t imagine you being in a room for hours on end without trying to find some music on the radio!”

  “That’s quite true,” said my father, pouring himself some more scotch. “But of course I was very upset.”

  “All the more reason for you to want some music.”

  “That’s true too. How strange! Let me think for a moment. Why didn’t I turn on the wireless? I’m sure there was some very good reason, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was.”

  “Well, never mind, it doesn’t matter.” I stood up. “And now if you’ll excuse me, Father—”

  “But this is really very puzzling,” insisted my father, becoming so intrigued that he ignored my attempt to depart. “Naturally I wouldn’t have acted out of character! I was just trying to recall that room … yes, I don’t remember the wireless at all; in fact I could swear it wasn’t there. Yet it must have been there because Evan had delivered it the day before—maybe Kester took it up to the bedroom?”

  “That figures,” I said, moving to the door. I was so anxious to escape by that time that I hardly knew what I was saying. “Kester liked absolute quiet while he worked. Well, Father—”

  “Hal, are you quite certain you’ll be all right?”

  “Yes, sure, no problem; I just want to go to sleep now and forget the wholy bloody business but tomorrow I’ll be okay, I know I will; no doubt in my mind whatsoever.”

  “If there’s anything more I can do, anything at all—”

  It was painful how much he cared. I felt as if the weight of his caring were opening up deep cracks in my mind but I managed to say in a calm reassuring voice: “Don’t worry about me—I’ll be all right, I promise.” And then at long last I was able to escape.

  XIX

  FURTHER NOTES ON MY FATHER:

  It’s a brilliant story. But there’s just one thing that worries me: is it true?

  VERDICT: Reserve judgment till my investigations at the Worm are completed tomorrow.

  XX

  I lay awake in the dark.

  At two o’clock in the morning I lit a candle and walked into the main part of the house. It was quiet but not still. I could hear the pitter-patter of mice in the wainscoting.

  The great chandelier gleamed beneath the dust and as I crossed the marble floor of the hall my footsteps sounded curiously muffled by the darkness. The library door creaked as if in parody of a ghost story, but this was no ghost story; I’d made up my mind about that from the start. When all was said and done everything depended not upon my imagination but upon my logic, my courage and my will.

  Did I go on? Or did I say “Mystery solved” and turn aside? I didn’t have to go out to the Worm tomorrow. I could take my father’s word.

  But I couldn’t. Not quite. I wanted to believe him. I did believe him. But I had to be one hundred percent certain that this brilliant witness hadn’t just delivered the most creative testimony of his exceptionally creative career.

  Yet I was afraid to go on. I could see I was afraid. My hand shook as I found the well-remembered book and opened it at the page Kester had so often read.

  “No coward soul is mine,” Emily Brontë had written, “No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven’s glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.”

  I read the last line again. I had no faith in God, but I now had faith in my father. I thought of Eleanor saying, “I’ll never believe your father was the villain of the Oxmoon saga, Hal. I think the real villain was your cousin Kester.”

  Right. All I had to do now to eradicate my fear, safeguard my sanity and terminate the nightmare that encircled me was to prove Eleanor was right.

  Returning to the kitchen I printed in my notebook: NO COWARD SOUL IS MINE. Then I went back to bed and slept.

  I was going on.

  5

  I

  THE SHIPWAY CURVED in a jagged arc beneath a hot cloudless sky. It was a Saturday, and tourist hordes unknown fourteen years before when Kester had died were swarming around the top of the cliffs. The car park was packed. Yet the sands of Rhossili beach remained almost empty, for only a minority of the lazy visitors bothered to clamber down the long steep path to the beach and only the hardiest marched across the headland to tackle the Shipway. Ahead of us a party of hikers were starting out across the rocks. A pack of Cub Scouts was yelling behind us. A courting couple had halted dreamily on our left. It was a very different scene from the sight that would have met my father’s eyes in the May of ’52; but the Shipway at least was unchanged, a huge sweep of wet rocks exposed by the tide, a wilderness of little pools where stranded fish waited for the tide that would liberate them, a lunar landscape baking beneath the June sun.

  “Time for you to receive your briefing,” I said to Caitlin. She was sensibly dressed in jeans, a blue blouse and gym shoes. Her long hair which was finer and darker than her sister’s was scraped back from her face into a ponytail. As I spoke, she looked up at me with obedient intelligent eyes. She had already apologized for seeking my autograph, as if Gwyneth had mercilessly upbraided her for such ingenuous behavior, and I felt sorry for the girl who was undoubtedly a nice child, clean, bright and not unattractive but obviously suffering from the loneliness of adolescence. I hoped she would soon find a steady boyfriend, marry young and have two point three children or whatever the average girl produced nowadays, the kind of girl who was uninterested in winning a place at Oxford, indulging in do-it-yourself psychology and treating men like horseshit. I made an additional resolution to be kind.

  “What I want to do,” I said to her, “is to reconstruct my cousin Kester’s last hours. Never mind why for the moment. I expect you know roughly what happened, don’t you? He came out here and my father followed him. Okay—you’re going to be Kester and I’m going to be my father.”

  She nodded. The Cub Scouts streamed past us and howled around the rocks.

  “Two independent witnesses,” I said, “supported my father’s claim that he and Kester were quarter of an hour apart on the Shipway, so you’re going to start out and I’m going to follow you after fifteen minutes. How’s your knowledge of the Shipway? I advise you to keep to the inside of the curve until you reach the little shingle beach and then flounder on as best you can.”

  She nodded again. “I’ll manage. Do I hurry?”

  That struck me as an intelligent question. “No, this isn’t a race. My father said Kester moved like a man in a dream. Just keep going steadily.”

  “Okay.”

  “When you get to the Inner Head don’t stop. Go on along the path until you’re out of my sight and continue until you see a spur of rock that runs from the path towards the sea. Once you get there, sit down and wait for me. All clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “One thing more: don’t turn around to see how far I am behind you, but at the same time try and glance back surreptitiously to see where I am. In other words, keep an eye on me without me being aware of it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now repeat your instructions.”

  She repeated them. I wished her luck. She set off, and sitting down on the grassy bank at the foot of the headland I wrote in my notebook: 10:16. Caitlin starts out across the Shipway.

  II

  I had forgotten what a large area the Shipway covered, and I had forgotten how sinister it was once one had been swallowed up in it. The hikers were ahead of me but taking a different route far over to the left. The Cub Scouts and the courting couple were lost among the rock pools. There were other people behind me but keeping a steady pace I soon outdistanced them and within minutes I was alone among the tall rocks, my shoes slipping on the seaweed, the barnacles scraping my hands as I scrambled past each hazard. It was like mountaineering on the horizontal.

  After a while I became aware of the special q
uality of the silence. The water of the bay on my right seemed motionless as the tide fell steadily toward low water, and far away on the other side of the Shipway the surf from the Bristol Channel was receding so that the muffled boom of the waves became steadily fainter. I began to feel as if I were journeying through a graveyard packed so densely with tombstones that normal walking was impossible.

  There was the same forlorn atmosphere of abandonment yet the same eerie air of expectancy; the Shipway was waiting for high tide just as a graveyard waits for Halloween, a time when life returns and the horrors begin. I tried to picture the water running many feet over the rocks that towered over me but the vision seemed preposterous. Yet it happened. It happened twice a day. It was unbelievable but it was true.

  In an effort to divert myself from things that were unbelievable but true I began to sing. I had made my name in the music business by picking hits from the American country-music charts and converting them into popular songs which the English public could digest. I thought of it as translation work, moving a song from one culture to another. I liked country music. I did sing rock, but that was just an exercise to warm up the audience. Once the tension was humming I could slip from rock to country-rock with an early Presley number and from country-rock into pop-country and a Jim Reeves song. Having softened up my listeners I could then achieve my goal, a song by the master of country music, Hank Williams. I did write and record my own songs; there was more money in that than in rerecording masterpieces but I was enough of a purist to find my work imitative and unsatisfactory.

  While I was singing it occurred to me what a ragbag of culture the twentieth-century mind was, and as I meditated on my unlikely journey from Emily Brontë to Hank Williams I found myself wondering whether Kester would have liked American country music. He hadn’t been a musical snob and he would have been romantic enough to enjoy all the endless tales of lost love.

  Kester had never talked of sex, only of romance. “My parents had this fairy-tale love story,” I could remember him saying. “They fell passionately in love with each other as they danced beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played ‘The Blue Danube.’ ”

  That sounded like a tall story. I was just mentally chalking it up as one of Kester’s fictions when I reached the shingle beach, and pulling out my notebook I paused to jot down the time. Ahead of me Caitlin had almost reached the Inner Head. I could see her blue shirt and jeans bobbing up and down among the last rocks while her ponytail fluttered in the breeze.

  She never looked back.

  I toiled on.

  Caitlin reached the Inner Head, scrambled up the bank, brushed down her jeans and moved on. Within minutes she was disappearing around the curving path, and although I watched her closely I could have sworn she never once looked back.

  I looked back. I glanced around at the dazzling views of sky and sea, sands and cliffs which stretched away from me on all sides into the heat haze. Anyone communing with nature or sunk deep in a creative dream would surely have stopped to absorb the sights that now met my eyes. To ignore such scenery would have been unthinkable to someone who had elevated the concept of Beauty into a slogan for the Good Life.

  I slithered into a rock pool, cursed, clambered out, trod on a starfish, winced and thanked God I hadn’t broken an ankle. I tried to quicken my pace but the terrain was brutal. I started cursing again.

  A quarter of an hour later, hot, breathless and exasperated by my struggles, I reached the Inner Head and crawled up onto the shallow bank where the springy turf was carpeted with little pink wild flowers. In my notebook I wrote:” 11:03. I reach the Inner Head. The view was so extraordinary that I felt I could classify it as hypnotic. I could have gazed at it for far longer than the ten seconds I allowed myself but I hadn’t toiled across that Shipway just to enjoy the view. Snapping my notebook shut I stowed it away and moved on.

  I saw her soon after I had reached the southern flank. She had found the rocky spur and was perched at one end of it overlooking the sea. She was still a small figure many yards away but there was no mistaking her. Her clothes made a splash of color among the browns and greens of that treeless landscape.

  I shouted: “Kester, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” but she didn’t move. Several seconds elapsed before she turned her head and saw me. I waved, and after noting the time again I walked briskly down the path towards her.

  “Hullo!” she said as soon as I was in earshot. “Was I all right?”

  “Did you hear me just now?”

  “Hear you? No.”

  “And while you were staring out to sea you didn’t see me. So if you hadn’t been expecting me you wouldn’t have been aware of my approach even if I’d called out when I first saw you. … Okay. Now for the big question: Did you look back?”

  “Oh yes, constantly. I kept a close watch on you all the way.”

  III

  NOTES ON THE SHIPWAY:

  The truth is that quarter of an hour apart is a long way and although the big gestures are visible the smaller ones are not. I’m now certain that Kester knew he was being followed, and this explodes the premise on which Declan based his theory. Whatever experiments Declan and Rory conducted here after the inquest, they obviously didn’t bother to keep themselves quarter of an hour apart on the Shipway. This brings us back to Evan who was sure that Kester would have kept going if he knew my father was behind him—but of course Evan was assuming that Kester was innocent of any hostile intentions towards my father. Kester would surely only hang about on the Inner Head if he were masterminding an elaborate plot—and this brings me to my father’s testimony. So far it pans out. I’m now very tempted to believe my father when he says Kester was waiting for him on this spur of rock—that was the point when my father had to make his crucial decision about whether to go on or turn back, and Kester would have made an extra effort to lure him on by allowing him to catch up a little.

  VERDICT: So far so good. But what in God’s name happened next?

  IV

  “What do we do now, Hal?” said Caitlin as I closed my notebook.

  “Just stay there for a minute.”

  I walked down the spur and looked at the sea. There were no cliffs at this point. The land sloped to the rocks at the water’s edge. I was thinking of Declan again and trying to work out the conclusions he had drawn. It now seemed clear that he had visualized Kester lost in thought, gazing out to sea and utterly oblivious of my father’s approach, and bearing that picture in mind I had no trouble imagining Declan’s script: my father had come into view, seen Kester, called out but received no response; at that point he’d suddenly realized he had an opportunity to dispose of his neurotic cousin once and for all, and driven on by a paranoid impulse he had forgotten the witnesses on the Shipway earlier, crept up behind Kester, stunned him with a karate chop and shoved him into the sea.

  I decided that up to this point the script was credible—just—but it then occurred to me to wonder how Declan had visualized the disposal of the body. The tide now was still falling to low-water but back on that evening in ’52 the tide had been on the rise. I knew that the currents around the Worm were fierce but so was the tide crashing up the Bristol Channel, and I thought a body ditched on the southern flank would have been almost immediately washed up again. I wondered how Declan had talked his way out of that one.

  I decided that Declan’s theory couldn’t be made to work even if, against all the odds, Kester really had remained unaware of my father’s presence. And that meant I had now disposed once and for all of the evidence of Declan Kinsella.

  “Okay,” I said to Caitlin as I rejoined her. “Now we’re going to play a rerun of the scene where I come into view, but this time as soon as you see me you get up and start to run.”

  “Is it a race now?”

  “Yes, but for God’s sake don’t break your neck, on the rough stretch that connects the Inner and the Middle Heads—in fact don’t take any risks at all. Kester would have shu
nned acrobatics.”

  “Okay, but Hal, this never happened, did it?”

  “No, my father turned back. But what I want to establish is what Kester thought might happen if my father chased him.”

  Again she showed intelligence. “How can we be sure we’re moving at their pace?”

  “We can’t. But I still think we can arrive at a similar result. Kester had longer legs than you but you’re more athletic. I’m younger than my father was then but he was probably in first-class physical condition. Let’s try the experiment and see what happens.”

  I retreated from her sight. Then I entered the time in my notebook, nerved myself for action and once more headed towards that spur of rock.

  I saw Caitlin. Caitlin saw me. She hared away, and within seconds she was out of sight, following the curve of the path away from the flank to the end of the Inner Head.

  I was my father. I counted to ten to give him time to make up his mind, took a deep breath and began to run.

  I was horrified by how out of training I was. I got a stitch before I reached the end of the flank and I had to bend double for a cure. My father would have done better than that. On recovering I sprinted off again, turned the corner and saw Caitlin still far ahead of me as the path led onto the connecting link between the Inner and the Middle Heads. This was a minor version of the Shipway, but set above the high-water mark. By the time I reached it, Caitlin was nearer but already halfway across.

  This stretch of rough terrain was more puzzling to traverse than the Shipway although it looked easier. I made a false start and had to go back. My father, following Kester the expert, would have done better, but Caitlin was no expert and I guessed she had made a false start too.

  We sweated on. Caitlin finally reached the Middle Head and hared off again along the path. She was obviously in prime condition, much fitter than Kester would have been. With a great effort of will I raised my speed to put me level with my father, and when I top reached the other side of the rocks I raced headlong down the path to reduce Caitlin’s lead.