The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I worked on, toiling through the detritus of the nineteenth century, and as I worked those blue eyes followed me around the room.

  “Hal?” It was the other Gwyneth, twentieth-century Gwyneth, recalling me to the present. As I heard her footsteps on the back stairs I glanced at my watch. The time was half-past eight.

  “I’m in here!” I shouted, and listened to her footsteps echoing in the corridor. As she walked in I almost expected to see her in a Victorian evening gown but she was wearing a navy linen suit with a frilly white blouse and looked as if she were about to lecture the Upper Sixth on some tiresome corner of English literature—Lamb’s Essays, perhaps, or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I could now clearly see that the resemblance to the other Gwyneth was minimal. The only link was the color of the eyes.

  “Oh look!” she exclaimed, seeing the picture. “It’s the Harlot! I’d forgotten how sweet she looked, all togged up like that! Poor girl, how tough it must have been for her, marrying into another culture—and how terrible to think she became so unhappy that she went mad at the end.”

  “Oh, everyone goes mad at Oxmoon in the end,” I said. “That’s standard behavior. I’ll go mad myself if I don’t find these three novels.” And as I brought her up to date with the details of my search my jeans once more began to feel like a straitjacket around the groin.

  “How odd about the private printing,” said Gwyneth, “but I bet those three novels were his trilogy. The trilogy was the one work he felt was really good.”

  I paused. “I do remember him mentioning a trilogy—didn’t it incorporate that novel about Gwyneth Godwin and Owain Bryn-Davies?”

  “Yes, it was a family saga, although I don’t know how closely he stuck to the true story. But I do know why he wanted to write it. He told me once that he didn’t like Galsworthy and wanted to prove he could do something better than The Forsyte Saga.”

  “I can remember him being cutting about Galsworthy. In fact he put me off so much that I never read any of the Galsworthy novels.”

  “Neither did I. Elizabethan literature was my specialty up at Oxford.” She walked over to Robert Godwin’s memoir which I had left on top of Kester’s trunk of mementos. “What was your final verdict on Kester’s death?” she said, glancing at the book. “Accident or suicide?”

  “I came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter. What matters is that he’s dead, and death was a solution, whether he chose it or not, to problems which had led him into hell.”

  She went on turning the pages of the book.

  “He did care about us,” I said, “but we were only a small part of his life. I don’t feel anymore that he deserted me. Or if I do still feel that, I can forgive him.”

  On and on she went, flicking through the pages, not looking at me, her face in shadow.

  I took the book from her hands.

  “Forget him,” I said.

  I can’t.

  I had hoped her willingness to come to Oxmoon that evening had signified that she was ready to try casting off her shackles but I realized now that I had been mistaken. Unbeatable Kester, fourteen years dead, and still winning a race I seemed forever destined to lose. I knew this was the moment when I should abandon all hope of winning her from him, but the trouble was that I wasn’t the kind of man who found it easy to abandon all hope. The thought of failing was intolerable to me.

  “All right,” I said, “then if we can’t forget Kester, let’s remember him.” I headed for the door. “Let’s take a stroll through the house and see if we can pick up some vibes.”

  She said surprised, “You believe in ESP?”

  “No. But you talk as if you do. If Kester’s ghost is alive and well for you then here’s where you can best achieve a paranormal reunion.”

  “You shouldn’t joke about such things.”

  “I’m not joking. I’m all for recalling Kester. I want you to compare the two of us and realize that I’m the better man.”

  She said nothing. That was when I realized how confused she was. As I started to hope again she put her hand impulsively to her throat and the next moment I saw Anna’s silver locket glinting between her fingers.

  “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs and meet him.”

  “Shut up. You’re frightening me.”

  “A modern girl like you with a high I.Q.? Don’t make me laugh!”

  “Haven’t you ever felt frightened when threatened with something that can’t be rationally explained?”

  Now it was my turn to fall silent. We descended the back stairs.

  “Okay,” I said as we reached the floor below. “We’ll rule out a paranormal reunion. Let’s just think of him and remember.” And I led the way to the bedroom which by tradition had always belonged to the master of the house.

  At first I thought she wasn’t going to follow me but she did. She moved with extreme reluctance, as if driven by a compulsion she recognized but couldn’t master. The furniture in the room was under dust sheets. The shutters were fastened. In the twilight the brass of the bedstead gleamed dully through the layers of tarnish.

  Turning to face her I found she had stopped halfway across the room and when I moved back to join her she seemed lost in some memory that put me far beyond her reach. I touched her arm but she failed to respond. She was as lifeless as stone.

  “Gwyneth. … Life’s for living, not for mourning. He’s dead. I’m alive. Live in the present, not the past.”

  She slowly looked up at me. “But that’s what I want,” she said. “I want to live again in the past.” Then she cried out: “Oh Hal, take me back! Take me back, take me back, take me back—”

  And then we saw the road to Oxmoon, the lost Oxmoon of our childhood, and our magician was raising his wand once more in that fairy-tale palace of our dreams.

  My mouth closed on hers.

  Then shoving all romantic thoughts aside I unzipped my jeans, pulled her down on the bed and embraced the rock-bottom realism of requited lust.

  VIII

  We never paused to remove the sheet but lay naked amidst the layers of dust. I kissed her and kissed her. The bloody locket got in the way so I wrenched it out of sight around her neck until it was lost in a mass of tangled hair. I was out of practice but it didn’t seem to matter. Of all the sports sex is the only one in which the unpracticed can travel a long way on sheer desire alone. I had long since decided that one couldn’t seriously describe sex as more than a pleasant pastime but I had always conceded that among pastimes it was unique.

  This experience was certainly unique. And suddenly I realized that sex was capable of being rather more than just a pleasant pastime. Though physically experienced I had apparently remained an emotional virgin and now I was losing my virginity. I was conscious of a raging possessiveness. I felt I wanted to make love to her every night for the rest of my life and kill any man who tried to stand in my way. Obviously I was mad. Then I remembered that love was often defined as madness. I felt dimly horrified but was too overcome by the physical side of my condition to attempt further analysis. Analysis was the pastime of the rational and the cold. I felt like an ice cube that had just been chucked into the fire. There was no way back to the refrigerator. All I could do was dissolve mindlessly in the flames.

  “Christ …” I was in such a state I hardly knew what I was doing. I seemed to be on the brink of serving as an illustration for a sex manual’s chapter on premature ejaculation, but on the other hand I was in such mental chaos that I was equally afraid of subsiding into impotence as the result of a total failure of nerve. “Christ,” I said again.

  “It’s okay,” she said, thinking I was nervous about her virginity, but in fact I’d forgotten it. Now I remembered. Somehow I managed to stop myself saying “Christ!” a third time. That would have been too much.

  Suddenly she whispered: “I expect I should keep my mouth shut but I’ve just got to tell you—”

  “Forget it, I don’t need flattery.”

  “—that I’m so ha
ppy,” she said, and smiled at me through her tears.

  That fixed me up. I could see she spoke straight from the heart and the next moment I’d forgotten the sex manuals and overcome my panic. I caressed her. She gave me the response I wanted. I got myself together. I went in.

  The glove fitted. It was a glove like no other I had ever worn, a glove that might have been tailor-made for me by some master craftsman. But there was just one thing wrong with it. I knew straightaway it had been worn before.

  Everything died. Potency, lust, love, romance—everything. The next thing I knew I was sitting bolt-upright on the edge of the bed and shuddering from head to toe.

  “Hal—” She tried to take me in her arms.

  “Shut up.”

  “But what happened?”

  “We achieved that paranormal reunion after all! He seduced you, didn’t he? When you went to see him at the cottage on that last morning, he didn’t just burst into tears, he—”

  “No! My God! For Christ’s sake, have you gone mad? Of course he didn’t, how could he, he wouldn’t, it’s unthinkable! All right, so I’m not a virgin, but do you honestly think I haven’t at least tried to love someone else? Why, I told you about him—I told you about that man I liked so much up at Oxford—his name was Paul, he was reading modern languages, he came from Cheshire, he liked classical music and Lauren Bacall films and he had pictures of Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus on the walls of his room, oh God, what can I tell you, how can I make you believe—”

  “Forgive me.” I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and covered my face with my hands. After a long time, I said: “I do believe you. Kester would never have done it. Never.”

  “No. He wanted to, I can see that now, but he never did, I swear it.”

  I turned to her and said: “I wish he had. Then I know I could get the better of him. But as it is …” I got up and began to pull on my clothes. “As it is,” I said, “I’ll never be able to beat the man who made love to you in your imagination. That’s one battle I’m always going to lose.”

  “But Hal—”

  “Sorry, but I don’t like coming second. I never did and I never will.”

  “But surely we can give it a try!”

  “No, you’d drive me mad. We’d both wind up in hell.”

  We dressed in silence. She took longer than I did and I went out onto the landing to wait for her because I couldn’t bear to remain in that room. I felt wiped out. My mind was blank. I wanted to grieve but couldn’t.

  When she joined me she said, “Surely we can at least be friends?”

  “Friends?” I said. “How could we ever manage that? Sexual desire has to be dead as a doornail before a man and a woman can be genuinely at peace in a platonic friendship.”

  “You’re just running away because you’re so hung up about coming first!”

  “No, I’m turning aside because you’re so hung up on a dead man! What a disastrous combination of hang-ups—that’s a ticket for a bad trip if ever I saw one, and there’s no way I’m ever going to take it. I’m not putting myself in competition with a bloody ghost!”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts!”

  “Ghosts, unshriven souls, psychological hang-ups—they’re all the same. They all exist in the mind to put people through hell—they’re just different ways,” I said, remembering Pam’s phrase, “of looking at a given situation.”

  She started to cry. As usual I had no handkerchief, but when we reached the scullery I tore off a strip of paper towel and handed it to her.

  “I do love you,” she said when she had finally mastered her tears.

  “Not enough.”

  “My God, what a bastard you are!”

  “Shut up! I love you so bloody much more than you’ll ever love me!”

  “Then why the bloody hell don’t you do something about it instead of shying away and making excuses?”

  “Because I’m through with self-destructive behavior.”

  She tried to hit me, and as we struggled with each other in a paroxysm of rage and grief the last light was fading from the evening sky outside. We wound up on my camp bed. That was what she wanted. But naturally I was impotent. That was what I wanted. Afterwards we both knew it was quite over so we were able to achieve a civilized farewell.

  I saw her out to her car.

  “Bloody men!” said Gwyneth, trying to smile. “Sometimes I feel I hate them all.”

  “Your God slipped up. She should have created just one sex, women, and arranged for reproduction by cloning.”

  She somehow managed to laugh. As she opened the car door she said, “Let me know if you find the books.”

  “When,” I said. “Not if.”

  She drove away. I went back into the scullery, slumped down on the camp bed and wished I could get stoned out of my mind. I was in such pain that I couldn’t even remember my Emily Brontë poem. I just lay there in despair in that dark sordid room until at last, well over an hour later, I heard the click-clack of Pam’s heels in the cobbled courtyard and knew that once more I had to nerve myself to go on.

  IX

  “Sorry, Hal,” said Pam as I opened the back door. “I can see I’m interrupting some vital meditation, but I thought I must tell you Gwyneth’s on the phone again. She says it’s urgent.”

  That jerked me out of my inertia quickly enough, and I followed her across the yard to the mews house. The living room was empty but the faint sound of music from my father’s room told me he was still up!

  “Hullo?” I said into the receiver.

  “Hal, sorry to be a drag but I was just undressing for bed when I realized I’d lost Anna’s locket. I’ve searched the flat and checked the car but it’s not there and I think it must be at Oxmoon—probably in the bedroom. Some of the links in the chain were thin, and perhaps when you twisted it round my shoulder—”

  “I remember. Okay, don’t worry, I’ll go and look for it straightaway and call you back.”

  She gave me her number and then said, “Hal, I do appreciate this—I know I’m making an awful fuss, but you know how much that locket means to me.”

  “Give me ten minutes,” I said and hung up. Turning to Pam I explained what had happened and asked if she had a torch I could borrow.

  She had. As she gave it to me she commented, “I don’t envy you hunting for a locket in a house the size of Oxmoon.”

  My mood was so black that I just said to her, “We had sex. She thinks the locket’s in the bed. I’m sure you’ll be delighted to hear that I’ve been behaving so normally.”

  “Well, never mind what I think about your behavior,” said Pam. “The important question is What did you think of it?”

  Cursing all psychiatrists I walked out on her and slammed the door.

  X

  He was waiting for me in the dark as soon as I entered the scullery. He was so distressed because of Gwyneth and he wanted to comfort me. Or, to look another way at a given situation, I was so distressed because of Gwyneth and I thought he should want to comfort me. I turned the beam of the torch around the room but naturally, there was nothing there. Walking steadily through the kitchens I listened to the echo of my footsteps and when I reached the other side of the green baize door I switched off my torch and listened again.

  He was still with me. On clicked the torch as I walked down the corridor to the hall. The marble floor glowed in memory of him but although the beam of the torch swept from side to side there was still nothing to see. Then the green baize door bumped shut, making me jump, and as I stood there by the stairs the faint draft from the closing door made the crystals of the chandelier shiver above me in the shadows.

  I had not told Gwyneth the entire truth when I had denied my belief in extrasensory perception. I was indeed willing to believe that a sixth sense could exist dimly in a select group of sensitive people, but what I doubted was my own receptivity to the paranormal; an unimaginative man with an obsession for hard facts is hardly a likely candidate for a m
ystical experience. However by that time I was so revolted by hard facts and so repulsed by the negative realities of the present that I did something I would never normally have done. I made a conscious effort to wipe my mind clean of skepticism so that it resembled a blank slate. Then I turned off my torch again and waited.

  Into the silence, by some exceptionally clever trick which defied description, my magician poured his personality and wrote his monogram, no more, on the blank slate I was holding out to him.

  He was there.

  He was benign. Terror was absent. I felt his loving concern, just like my father’s, and I knew that just like my father he was so anxious about me and so eager to help.

  I kept my mouth shut. I knew that the moment I started talking to him was the moment I became certifiable; but I felt comforted. As I switched on the torch and began to mount the stairs I thought how intriguing it was that one could project one’s emotions so subtly that they bounced back off the memory of someone who was dead. The wonders of the human mind impressed me. I made a note to offer the story later to Pam, complete with rational explanation, as a peace offering for my recent rudeness.

  On the upstairs landing I didn’t pause again but moved straight to his bedroom. I saw the locket at once. It was glinting in a fold of the dust sheet, and as I straightened my back with that precious memento in my hands I felt him struggling to write again on the clouded slate of my mind.

  This time I spoke aloud—not to him but to myself, to shore up my link with reality. I heard myself say in the shadowed room as Oxmoon held its breath: “ ‘No coward soul is mine’ ”—and at once I knew he was urging me on. “No coward soul is mine …” Had I really said that aloud? Or had he? Had the words been spoken at all? Or had he merely written them soundlessly in my mind?