The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  I cleared my throat as if this would clear my confusion, and slipped the locket into the hip pocket of my jeans. Then I decided that my experiment with ESP had gone far enough. It was time to draw that famous line.

  Walking out of the bedroom I crossed the landing and began to clatter down the stairs. I was just pursing my lips to whistle a Hank Williams song when I heard a sound from the library.

  I stopped dead. My stomach writhed. My heart beat like a rock drummer ricocheting into top gear. I tried to tell myself I’d imagined the noise but I knew I hadn’t. Then I tried to tell myself I’d heard mice, but this was no mild scampering in the wainscoting. I thought one of the candlesticks had been overturned on the library table.

  I tiptoed noiselessly down the last stairs and stood holding my breath in the hall. There was definitely someone in the library. Very, very slowly I turned the beam of my torch towards the half-open door.

  “Kester?” I called softly.

  There was no reply but I felt him pouring his personality into the silence again and suddenly, in a moment that electrified me, I realized that he was in two places at once. I heard another sound in the library but at that exact moment he took my arm and piloted me across the hall until I stood on the library threshold. Then he put my hand firmly on the handle, he helped me fling wide the door and he steadied the beam of my torch.

  ESP ended and reality began.

  An enormous rat was sitting, on top of the library table. He had dislodged the empty inkpot, overturned a candlestick and was busy chewing the leather blotter. As the door banged he looked up at me indignantly and bared a set of vile yellow teeth.

  “Oh my God—”

  My nerve snapped. The disappointment was unendurable. I was out of my mind with rage and pain, and the next moment I’d gone berserk. I turned to the bay immediately on the right of the door and ripping the books from the shelves I began to hurl them across the room. The rat scuttled away but he didn’t escape. I killed him, and long after he was dead I went on throwing the books—all twentieth-century novels—in a fusillade of violence and despair.

  Then amidst the jumbled works of Lawrence, Waugh, Snow, Huxley, Greene, Galsworthy, Graves, Bates, Spring and Du Maurier I sank to my knees and faced defeat.

  The cover of one of the books had come off and was lying nearby. After a while I found myself staring at it. It was the cover of The Man of Property by John Galsworthy. Kester had owned The Forsyte Saga in three volumes, but as I had told Gwyneth earlier, I had never read them; Kester had looked askance at Galsworthy and even later it had never occurred to me to question my magician’s judgment.

  Three volumes by Galsworthy.

  The penny dropped.

  I gasped. Then I grabbed the book which that cover had concealed in my previous searches of the library and saw engraved on its spine not THE MAN OF PROPERTY by JOHN GALSWORTHY but THE CIRCLE OF TIME by KESTER GODWIN.

  XI

  Three seconds passed while I wondered whether I was hallucinating. Then all the strength drained from my fingers and I dropped the book. Immediately it hit the floor a letter fell out and as I picked it up I saw that the envelope was inscribed: For Hal.

  He had written the letter on the eve of his departure for Ireland in 1951.

  It took me a while to read it. My eyes were dim, my hands were shaking, I couldn’t get my mind to concentrate. It was the shock. I had had too many shocks too recently and it was becoming so hard to whip my battered nerves into line.

  My dear Hal …

  The voice from the dead. I couldn’t get over it, couldn’t cope. I sat there like a zombie on the floor.

  Eventually I levered myself into the nearest chair and tried again.

  And this time I was more successful.

  XII

  My dear Hal, I’ve just had these three novels of mine printed privately but let me hasten to reassure you that I’m not in a terminal stage of vanity. I was merely in such a rage when the manuscripts were returned from the umpteenth publisher in the most disgracefully dog-eared condition that I made up my mind to resort to radical measures of conservation (and to hell with all publishers!). Take no notice of the spare copies in the attics. I had to place a minimum order with the printers and that was the result. Bury the copies with me when I’m dead, if you like, because if you tried to circulate them the family would without doubt expire with embarrassment!

  However as I don’t intend to sink into the grave just yet let me now explain what I’m up to. I’m putting my affairs in order because I have to leave Oxmoon temporarily and it may be some time before I can get back. In these somewhat fraught circumstances my prime thought is to safeguard my masterpieces in case I’m run over by a bus in Dublin or perhaps die a hero’s death on a sinking ferry in the Irish sea. I don’t seriously think your father will have a touch of the Nazis and start burning my books, but I’m afraid our relationship at the moment is at such an all-time low that even the most bizarre behavior can’t be ruled out. I’ve toyed with various schemes (giving a set to Evan, taking a set with me to Ireland), but none of these possibilities puts my mind at rest (Evan’s rectory might burn down, the Irish ferry might sink, etc., etc.), and I’ve been determined, Hal, to devise a foolproof way of passing on my work to you.

  I’m now glad to report that inspiration has finally smitten me and I can see the solution. All I have to do is to leave a set of the books on the fiction shelves here in the library. Not only does your father never read novels; he’d never let Oxmoon burn to the ground. Of that I’m fully confident.

  A cloak-and-dagger streak in my nature has driven me to take the extra precaution of hiding my huge failures behind the covers of Galsworthy’s huge successes (by the way don’t bother to look for the Galsworthy novels—I’ve just donated them, coverless, to the Red Cross), and this ruse ensures that although your father will never find my trilogy you most certainly will. You’re bound to want to meet the Forsytes in the end whereas your father till his dying day will probably assume Galsworthy is a market town in Hampshire. I can just see it, can’t you? A population of five thousand and rather a fine twelfth-century church. Early-closing day would be on Wednesdays …

  But now I must be serious. I have every intention of coming back to see you again, but as there’s always the chance that this letter may turn out to be my farewell to you I must now set out my final request.

  I absolve you from making any attempt to publish my work, but please could you preserve my trilogy here in the library in case any future member of the family ever wonders how I spent the happiest hours of my life? You may of course read the books yourself but only if you’re grown up and only if you wish. But I hope you will wish to try them one day. It seems almost too much to hope that you may enjoy them, but if you do—if you enjoy one single paragraph—then I shan’t have written for all these years in vain.

  The one advantage of being childless is that one can choose one’s children and so avoid the bizarre game of chance in which one passes one’s best—or one’s worst—genes to one’s poor innocent offspring. I can’t pass you my genes, good or bad, Hal, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that I can pass you my work and in the end, despite this interregnum of your father’s, I’m going to come back and pass you Oxmoon. Your father has no moral right to transmit your inheritance to you, and I alone can pass on not the legal deeds but the magic of my brilliant house beyond compare.

  My writing is insignificant in comparison; in the long run my books are of no more importance than my genes, but look after Oxmoon, Hal. Love it and keep it in memory of me and of those before us, and when the time comes pass it on as I shall pass it on to you. Despite all the volumes written by learned men on the meaning of life the reality is very simple: all things die except life; despite death life gets handed on.

  I can’t sign myself “your loving father,” but you’ll know as you read this that I think of you as my much-loved son.

  Yours now and always,

  KESTER.
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  XIII

  A long time passed.

  I read the letter many, many times with varying degrees of emotion but in the end one sentence stood out from the rest.

  I’m going to come back and pass you Oxmoon, he had written, and he had kept his word.

  With his books in my arms I said to him, “Rest in peace.” And then I set out on the road to redemption.

  7

  I

  THEN THEY ALL CAME to Oxmoon, the agents from the National Trust, the experts from the Victoria and Albert Museum, the representatives from Sotheby’s. My first task was to seek not only a new valuation of the collection but a new estimate of the endowment required by the Trust before it could accept the house as a gift.

  “Ah yes,” said the Trust, “the little house in Wales at the end of the road to nowhere—yet right on the tourist beat nowadays, of course! Yes, we must allow for increasing inflation but five hundred thousand pounds should see us through. That’s a lot of money but we wouldn’t want to skimp on the restoration—we’d want only the best for Oxmoon …”

  “… so you see how remarkable it is,” said the man from the V&A to his colleagues. “It’s just an old country house, nothing exceptional, but it was renovated by Sir Toby James in ’39 regardless of cost as a showcase for this extraordinary collection …”

  “… and your cousin had no formal training in fine art, did he?” said the expert from Sotheby’s. “What a remarkable man he must have been!” And turning to his subordinate he said, “Take a deep breath. I’m going to show you the Picasso in the lavatory.”

  Then the lawyers came to Oxmoon to discuss how the copyright of Kester’s trilogy should be transferred to the Trust. At first they were patronizing towards me. It was hard for them to believe that three much-rejected novels could ever net a vast sum of money, and of course I couldn’t tell them that those stories represented Kester’s magic wand, restored and renewed. But I silenced their skepticism. I had had my hair cut unfashionably short and for the meeting I wore a new dark suit with my Old Harrovian tie; I had learned long ago how to project a selling image, and I was an old hand at surviving in circumstances in which the survival rate was low.

  Later one of the lawyers said kindly to me, “We do wish you luck in New York—we only hope you’re not disappointed.” But I just answered, “I’m going to take America by storm.”

  My faith never wavered. Doubt and despair belonged to the past and now, as in my dream, the earth was moving, the skies were rolling back and all I had to do to save ruined Oxmoon was to wave the magic wand.

  II

  The novels made over two million dollars in the end. They’re still selling. Kester wrote about people and since human nature doesn’t change his observations hadn’t dated. He also wrote a readable story. When I found myself turning the pages without trouble I was surprised as well as relieved; I’d assumed his rejections had been the result of a lack of technical competence, but Kester had written for over twenty years and his technique had been accomplished. Later I realized that he had probably been rejected because his uncompromising view of life had jarred a postwar readership which had wanted only to escape from the harsher of life’s realities. To my astonishment I found that Kester, outwardly an incurable romantic, had as a writer been obsessed with presenting his characters without regard to romantic convention. It was as if in his private life he had indulged a craving for romance which his professional life refused to permit. In fact as I read the books it occurred to me that he must have suffered some profound disillusionment in the past which while not destroying his passion for the way the world should have been had made it impossible for him not to explore the way the world really was.

  For the first time I sensed the tension in his personality which had driven him to persist with writing beyond the introverted years of adolescence. It was his way of trying to make sense of the world without losing faith in it. For me, a man of the Nineteen Sixties, he had a message which declared itself at once; he was urging that no matter how sordid the world one should keep one’s faith because without faith one becomes as sordid as the world one lives in. The faith was in the value of idealism. A romantic faith? No, realistic. It was a survival kit. Without such a creed one could only long to get permanently stoned in order to escape the ordeal of modern life.

  I thought Kester’s books deserved to sell, and sell they did, but I doubt if they would have sold on such a grand scale if I hadn’t marketed them with a fanaticism which he in his modesty could never have matched. I was helped by the fact that I had a salable product but in the end the victory was mine as well as Kester’s. I was one of the pioneers of the American belief that novels could be marketed like soap, and I conducted one of the biggest selling campaigns the publishing world had seen. I invaded the radio stations, I laid waste the television networks, I blazed like a conqueror across America, I beat that country at its own game. Projecting my selling image, crushing audience after audience beneath the power of my will, I hypnotized, I electrified and I seduced my way from coast to coast. A cold calculating performance? Certainly. But sentimentality has never been one of my strong points. I had a job to do and it was more than a job. It was a mission.

  At the end of it all they said I should rest but that was out of the question. Turning down the free holidays I was offered, I grabbed a plane to London and began my conquest of Britain.

  III

  Years later people said to me, “Once you found the books no doubt success was a foregone conclusion,” but magic can’t operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees. Few people realized how difficult my life became and how hard I had to struggle to endure it. People see only the glamour of success and not the isolated drudgery beneath. I loathed the life on the road, and in the fear that I might crack beneath the increasing pressures I continued to abstain from drink and drugs; that decision ensured my survival but it made life tougher and later when I was wooing Middle America and deciding that no breath of scandal should mar the clean-cut image I was projecting my life became tougher still. Was I a hypocrite? Of course. My so-called “good life” sprang from no deep moral conviction, only from a desire to win. I was a fanatic, and as with all fanatics the end justified the means.

  I had to prove my fanaticism at the start of my American visit when my cousin Geoffrey, who was by this time editor-in-chief of a major publishing house, told me Kester’s work was junk which he’d never touch.

  This was a major setback. Geoffrey was my trump card. A major portion of my optimism had been based on my assumption that he would help me.

  “Geoffrey, you just can’t do this.”

  “Look, buster, I’ve got my living to earn. I can’t take this rubbish on just for sentimental family reasons! What do I care about Oxmoon anyway? What’s that old dump to me?”

  “Oxmoon’s a symbol. It’s got a message for everyone.”

  “Not for me it hasn’t! What did I ever get out of Oxmoon? Fucking all! I was a misfit in that family, I felt like a man from Mars, my American grandfather was the only guy I could ever identify with—”

  “I’m not interested in your identity crisis, I’m interested in your professional judgment. How can you sit there and tell me seriously that these books are unreadable?”

  “Family sagas went out with Galsworthy. Forget it. Give me a good Jewish novel any day.”

  “But Geoffrey—”

  “Sorry. Subject closed. Excuse me, please, I have to go to a meeting.”

  I leaned forward with my hands on his desk and said, “I never want to speak to you again.”

  “You think I’m going to be beating a path to any Godwin door?”

  He walked away. In the outer office his British secretary, smart status symbol of every successful. New York executive, regarded me from behind a curtain of blond hair. “Hey!”

  I stopped.

  She smiled at me conspiratorially. “They were fabulous. I read every word.”

  I cla
ssified the image required: sexual charm with a touch of class. I projected that image. I glided over to her desk. “Did you tell him?”

  “Uh-huh. But he’s hung up. Can’t bear family sagas, says wasn’t it enough that he had to spend all his early life living in one.”

  I smiled at her. It was my special smile, the one I reserved only for the most vital occasions. “So where do I go from here?”

  “My apartment? After work?”

  Those were the days before I started peddling my clean-living image to Middle America.

  The next day she gave me the address of one of New York’s leading literary agents, and after typing a glowing letter of introduction on her employer’s letterhead, she signed it on behalf of my unforgiven cousin, that traitor Geoffrey Godwin.

  IV

  “I’ll take them on,” said the agent, “and we’ll see how the first one goes. I think family sagas could be coming back. The dialogue creaks a bit now and then but don’t worry, there’s nothing a good editor can’t fix. …”

  I didn’t worry. I was too busy savoring my victory. In a town where it was hard to be published without an agent and hard to acquire an agent without having been published I had eliminated yet another obstacle on the long painful road to success.

  Another editor-in-chief, a rival of Geoffrey’s, bought all three books after reading them over a weekend. Later the magazine McCall’s published an excerpt from the first one and the Literary Guild book club made it its Main Selection for the month of publication. At that time publication was still several months away but already the financial omens were glowing with promise and when I returned to New York for the publicity tour Geoffrey was the first to phone my hotel to welcome me back to town.

  “Hal, I just couldn’t be more pleased—”