The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “That’s odd.” I stared at him. “Didn’t you think at the time that it was odd?”

  “Yes, but what struck me as even odder was why he’d arranged for the private printing. He never distributed any of the copies—I asked both Evan and Richard but they knew nothing about it at all.”

  “Maybe he planned to distribute the copies later—the date he paid the bill suggests he could only just have received them before you turned him out.”

  “Even so,” said my father, “I still think it’s odd that he never mentioned the printing to the members of the family who were closest to him. If an author goes to the expense of having even a small number of copies of his work printed the inference must surely be that he intends to circulate them.”

  “Perhaps he got cold feet about the idea. Kester was reserved about his work—and modest. In fact this whole flirtation with the vanity press is hard to understand.”

  “I agree it seems out of character, but it did happen.”

  “Yes—and what I’d like to know,” I said, “is what happened to those copies which he didn’t classify on the invoice as ‘spare.’ ”

  I returned to the library and subjected the nonfiction shelves to the same intense scrutiny which I had given the bays of novels, but there was nothing my father had missed. Still puzzled I resumed my examination of the family papers.

  Pam offered to help but I saw through that ruse and realized she only wanted to signal sympathy so that I shouldn’t become alienated from her. No doubt, anticipating the failure of my quest, she thought I was heading for a mental crash of catastrophic dimensions and she wanted to ensure that I had an easy retreat available into psychiatric care. As I drew near the end of my search of the library she encouraged me to tackle the attics. I could see her thinking that this would occupy me for at least another week and give her more time to help me find a “satisfactory adjustment” to my problem.

  Despite my father’s protests I had returned to lead an independent life in the scullery, but to appease him and to show Pam that I appreciated her misguided concern for my mental health I agreed to join them for dinner each night. I also reasoned that I would function better if I were fueled at least once a day with an adequate supply of cooked food.

  I abandoned the library. I began to search the attics for those printed copies of the three novels which I felt sure still existed. And in the diary I was now keeping to relieve my troubled mind I found myself once more writing, Soldier on.

  IV

  I met him on my fourth day in the attics. I had never met him before because eleven years had separated his death from my birth and I had never before seen a close-up photograph of him taken in those brilliant glamorous days before he had become ill.

  I met my great-uncle Robert Godwin, Robert Godwin the Winner. I met the family hero whom Kester had glorified in myth. I could remember Kester saying, “My father was this wonderful man, brilliantly clever, classically handsome, utterly charming, hugely successful, matchlessly brave—someone who always aimed at perfection, someone who had the courage and dedication to make all his dreams come true, someone who was a romantic, an idealist, a hero in every possible respect …” Kester had laid on the praise with a shovel but then he had been talking to children who liked larger-than-life heroes. Later when I was more cynical it occurred to me that he could never have known his father well; Great-Uncle Robert had died when Kester was eight. Nonetheless he had left a powerful legend behind him and the legend hinted at a powerful personality beyond the florid phrases of Kester’s hyperbole.

  I had just stumbled across another trunk of Kester’s and once again I thought I’d struck gold because beneath the love letters from Anna, all bound with pink ribbon, I found two books with the name GODWIN on their spines. But the author wasn’t Kester; it was his father. One book was a memoir about Lloyd George and the other was an account of various murder trials in which Robert had played a starring role as counsel for the defense.

  When I had recovered from my disappointment I wondered why these books hadn’t been on the library shelves but then I realized that these copies, personally inscribed to Great-Aunt Ginevra, were special. They would have been so precious to Kester, admiring his father as he did, that he would have preferred to keep them alongside his other sacred mementos of the past.

  On the dedication page of the Lloyd George memoir the printed inscription merely read: FOR MY WIFE, but underneath this Robert had written: For my dearest Ginette in memory of happier days—when we danced together beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played “The Blue Danube.” My love now and always, your devoted friend, ROBERT.

  My first reaction was So they really did do it. It’s always a shock when a story that one has cynically regarded as apocryphal turns out to be true, and in this case I found it was also a pleasant surprise. It’s not often one finds documented evidence of a fairy tale. The discovery cheered me. Since I was bent on achieving a fairy tale myself it was good to know that fairy tales occasionally did happen.

  The date of publication was 1921, when Kester was only two and Robert had already fallen ill, and on rereading the inscription I was struck by the curious substitution of the word “friend” for “husband.” I turned to the murder-trials anthology to see if he had been consistent and found that he had. Then flicking over the page to the photograph at the front of the book, I found myself face to face with Robert Godwin at the zenith of his legal career.

  This was not the invalid in the wheelchair I remembered from my father’s old photographs, and this was not the indistinct figure in any of the Edwardian family groups which my grandfather had loved. This was a formal studio portrait of a man a few years my senior. Contrary to Kester’s romantic propaganda he was not classically handsome. He looked a thug, tough as nails. There was a fanatical cast to those light eyes and a brutal set to his strong straight mouth. His brown hair was ruthlessly parted and severely cut. Kester had inherited the jaw and the high broad cheekbones and the paleness, if not the hypnotic setting, of those bold unnerving eyes.

  I propped the book open at the photograph and as I continued my examination of the trunk I occasionally looked at him. He looked back. After a while he began to look as if he knew all about me and after a longer while I looked back and felt I knew all about him.

  I completed my search of the trunk. Then snapping the book shut I tucked it under my arm and went off to the mews house for dinner.

  V

  “I don’t see the resemblance,” said my father obstinately. He could never bear to think I was more like Kester’s side of the family than like his own. Evan had remarked once on the slight physical resemblance. So had Great-Uncle Edmund.

  “Look at the bone structure of the face.”

  “That’s like your grandfather.”

  “No, Granddad was handsome and distinguished. This guy’s just a thug with sex appeal.”

  “This,” said Pam, abandoning her cooking, “I have to see.”

  She took one look at the photograph and said: “An obsessive personality—almost certainly treated women as sex objects—possibly needed psychiatric help.”

  “You see?” I said to my father. “Just like me.”

  Even my father had to laugh. He took another look at the photograph. “I never knew Robert well,” he said. “I just remember him as a bad-tempered bastard but of course with that illness one could hardly have expected him to be a ray of sunshine. But my father was devoted to him, absolutely devoted, and used to visit him every day.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I wish I could have talked to John,” said Pam, returning to her pan of chicken Maryland, “but all psychiatrists have their stories of the one who got away.” Turning the chicken she added over her shoulder: “To me, Hal, the big mystery of the whole story is why your great-grandfather left Oxmoon to Kester when the obvious and very much fairer solution would have been to leave it to John, the family saint. If you come across any explanation during your searches, do let me
know.”

  This riveted me. I stared at her. “My God, how different everything would have been if Kester hadn’t inherited Oxmoon!”

  “Exactly. Bobby had a strong motive to break with any family tradition of primogeniture. So what happened?”

  “I don’t see your problem,” said my father. “Bobby obviously felt so sorry for Robert that he fell over backwards to grant Robert’s dying request.”

  “I agree that the answer must lie in Bobby’s relationship with Robert,” said Pam, “but is Robert’s illness really sufficient to explain this mystery? I wonder. The trouble is that we don’t know enough about Bobby to figure out what might have been going on in his mind. All we know for sure is that he was the child of an unhappy marriage and had to lock up his mother in a lunatic asylum. Now, there’s a nice trauma for you! And to my mind that mental disorder at the end of his life was never satisfactorily diagnosed—”

  “You can see why we married,” my father said to me. “She was seduced by our family’s unsolved psychiatric problems.”

  This sort of frivolous conversation successfully carried us through dinner. I was very much aware of their tact in not asking me how I was getting on with my search.

  After coffee I said, “I’d better be getting back,” but Pam thought it was time to prescribe some therapeutic relaxation, so she answered, “No, don’t go yet—now that we’re in a nostalgic mood let’s get out the family albums,” and I thought it wiser not to argue with her. Besides by this time I was more than willing to escape into the past.

  Opening the first photograph album I was immediately transported back more than fifty years into another world. I saw THE FAMILY, headed by a good-looking cheerful paterfamilias who towered above a plain dumpy woman labeled MARGARET. Grouped around this ill-assorted couple were four young men, a girl of uncertain age and a sulky cherub labeled THOMAS. I read the names of the young adults from left to right ROBERT, CELIA, LION, JOHN, EDMUND. The date was 1913.

  Pam and my father had drifted into an argument over group therapy but I interrupted them by saying, “What was Lion’s real name?”

  “Lionel.”

  “Oh, I see. I thought he might have been nicknamed Lion the way some people are nicknamed Tiger.” I turned the page and saw another photograph of the family but this time Celia was missing, presumably operating the camera, and her place was taken by a gorgeous piece who was batting her eyelashes at Robert. Six years before Kester’s birth Great-Aunt Ginevra was already hell-bent on setting the tragedy in motion by seducing her childhood sweetheart, although Robert, looking straight ahead, was inscrutable.

  “… well, I’m absolutely opposed to group therapy—I think it’s a load of rubbish.”

  “All right, darling, you can live here in splendid isolation forever as far as I’m concerned, but I just thought I’d mention this new group in case …”

  I was looking at wedding photographs, pictures of Robert and Ginevra, Lion and Daphne, John and Blanche. All the couples looked as if they were thinking noble thoughts on true love. I wondered what it could have been like to marry a girl without sleeping with her first.

  “… and the last thing I want is to sit around with some neurotic middle-aged executives and listen to them whining about their sex lives—”

  “Father, were your parents happy?”

  “What? Yes, of course—devoted. Now, look here, Pam—”

  “All right, darling, you stay in your room and listen to music twenty hours a day and never speak to a soul. If you’re happy the last thing I want is to make you miserable …”

  My grandmother Blanche was beautiful. I recognized my dark eyes in the face so different from mine and suddenly I wished I could have known her. And yet here she was in the present, just as Robert was, and in a way I was meeting her after all.

  “Father, why didn’t Granddad marry Bronwen straightaway after your mother died?”

  “Bronwen was married to Morgan. And anyway, men of his class didn’t marry women of her class in those days—it’s probably hard for you to understand but back in the Twenties this country was a different planet. Marriage between the classes was practically banned by law, like marriage between blacks and whites in South Africa today.”

  “The culture of the classes was so different, Hal,” said Pam more rationally, “that the only common ground on which their representatives could meet was in the bedroom. That’s why John’s first instinct would have been to keep Bronwen as his mistress—he wasn’t just being selfish, he was being realistic. Marriage would, have been very difficult if not downright impossible.”

  “Marriage is always very difficult if not downright impossible,” said my father.

  “Oh Harry, for God’s sake forget I mentioned the group therapy! Run off and listen to a string quartet!”

  I continued turning the leaves of the album. I saw Aunt Marian, pigtailed, with a shy-looking girl labeled RHIANNON. I saw Bronwen and various babies. I saw Dafydd, a chunky boy of twelve, holding up a fish on the end of a line.

  “Father, why do you get on so well with Dafydd?”

  “… and anyway I couldn’t face the journey to Swansea, you know quite well I won’t leave this house. … What, Hal? Oh, Dafydd’s like Bronwen; he understands more than most people do—and he’s like Pam; I can rant and rave at those two as much as I like but they never lose patience with me, God knows why. Well, Pam loves me, but as for Dafydd—”

  “He loves you too,” said Pam.

  “Don’t be absurd! Dafydd’s not queer, he’s just not interested in copulation. Christ, all you psychiatrists think about is sex—sex, sex, sex, sex, sex ….”

  Great-Uncle Edmund flitted by with Great-Aunt Teddy and a juvenile Richard and Geoffrey. There was a bright studio portrait of my aunt Francesca who lived in America, but no photographs of her mother Constance. However my grandfather reappeared again and again, aging steadily until he became as I remembered him, silver-haired and distinguished, with Bronwen still smiling at his side.

  “… and Thomas used to say all queers should be castrated—”

  “A highly suspicious remark,” said Pam, “but I’ve long since added Thomas to the list of Godwins I wish I’d met.”

  “I know what you’re thinking but for once you’re dead wrong. Thomas wasn’t queer. My God, when I remember him wrecking that cottage with his heterosexual horseplay—”

  “Well, of course the homosexuality was repressed—”

  “Balls!”

  There was a photograph of Thomas with Eleanor at my parents’ wedding but I barely noticed him. I had eyes only for my mother. It was the first time I had seen her since my father’s revelations. I looked at the fresh-faced girl in the white dress and thought of her calling that secret baby by that childish pathetic name.

  “… and anyway I think he fancied Bella although he never actually made a play for her. But then any man would have fancied Bella so I mustn’t be too tough on poor old Thomas. No, Kester’s sex life was more debatable than Thomas’s—oh, and by the way, Hal, you won’t find any photographs of Kester in that album. I chose the photos when I was in therapy at the hospital, and selecting pictures of Kester was the point where I drew the line.” I didn’t answer. I had found a photograph of a blond stout baby clutching a beer bottle and looking outraged. The caption read: HAL, 1940.

  I closed the book. “How strange it is,” I said, more to myself than to them, “that I should be in the same album as long-extinct people like Great-Uncle Lion—how strange that I should be so absolutely connected to so many people I never met or barely knew. When I save Oxmoon it won’t just be for Kester and Father. It’ll be for all of them.”

  There was a silence. I had referred to the great “unmentionable subject, my dream of redemption which was coming to a sticky end. As my father looked at Pam for help I realized that his inconsequential bickering had been his way of-concealing his frantic anxiety.

  The telephone rang. We all jumped. It rang four times before Pam answere
d it.

  “Oh hullo,” she said in a pleasant voice. “Yes, he’s just here.” She turned to me and held out the receiver. “It’s Gwyneth Llewellyn.”

  VI

  “I’m calling you as an old friend,” said Gwyneth tentatively.

  “Sure. In what other capacity could you possibly call?”

  “Don’t be hostile.” It was a plea, not a reproof. “I’ve been thinking so much about our meeting. Have you got any further in your investigations?”

  “I’m on a different tack. I’m trying to track down Kester’s last manuscripts so that I can get them published.”

  “Great! But aren’t they in Ireland?”

  I turned my back on my father and Pam, who were trying to pretend they had no interest in the conversation. “The majority are lost,” I said, “but he had his three favorites privately printed, and I’m sure there’s a surviving copy of each one of them somewhere at Oxmoon.” I paused for no more than a couple of seconds. “Why don’t you come over tomorrow and join the search?”

  She never even hesitated. “I couldn’t make it till the evening.”

  “That doesn’t matter, it’s light till well after nine. I’ll be in the attics—come in through the scullery,” I said and hung up. Then I stood looking at the phone in disgust. I knew quite well it wasn’t help with the search that I wanted. I wanted to divert myself from the coming failure which I hadn’t the guts to face.

  VII

  Some time after lunch on the following day I found the oil painting which Kester had hung on the half-landing of the staircase but which my father had returned to its old home in the attics—probably because it reminded him of someone else who had drowned at the Worm’s Head.

  The painting showed a beautiful woman with the blue eyes that had become one of the family’s recurring trademarks. She was wearing an elaborate evening gown but there was an earthiness about her which suggested she hadn’t always spent her time lying on a chaise longue to conform with the Victorian image of desirable womanhood. I wondered what the Llewellyns had been like in those days. They could hardly have been on a social par with Anglo-Welsh gentry like the Godwins, but they must have been a cut above the usual Welsh families in Gower.