The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Keep your pleasure,” I said. “You’ll need it when everyone in New York dines out on the story of how you turned down Kester Godwin.” And I hung up on him without waiting for his reply.

  V

  And they all came to Oxmoon, the builders and the stonemasons, the carpenters, plumbers and electricians, the sewing experts who were to restore the fabrics, the metalwork craftsmen who were to repair the wrought-iron gates. The roof was replaced, the chimneys were rebuilt, the leaning outside wall of the ballroom was shored up and underpinned. After the dry rot had been removed the timbers were replaced and after the wet rot had been conquered the damp course was introduced. Rewired and re-plumbed, Oxmoon resembled a hospital patient, wheeled from the operating theater to the intensive-care unit where it could be nursed devotedly back to life.

  My father couldn’t bear the invasion of people and the constant noise of the restoration work so he retreated to a rented house on the outskirts of Swansea. Pam was pleased; she thought she might be able to coax him into group therapy once he was so much nearer the city but he stubbornly resisted, never going out, never seeing anyone, his health varying from poor to indifferent. Like many disturbed people he often gave such an impression of normality that it was hard to remember how ill he was. I often had trouble connecting the apparently rational man, who could conduct sensible conversations, with the man who was afraid to go out and had such a horror of the outside world that he refused to answer the front door. As time went on I became steadily more distressed that he couldn’t talk of Oxmoon. Pam said he didn’t dare believe in its resurrection for fear some disaster might occur at the last moment, but the more I tried to calm his irrational fears by talking of new alarm systems and caretakers, the more he seemed determined to believe in an inevitable catastrophe.

  Yet I found it impossible to say nothing of Oxmoon’s progress.

  “Father, all the gardeners came today, the horticultural experts, the landscape architects, the laborers—they’ve all come to Oxmoon now. They’re going to lay out the old pleasure garden just as it was in the eighteenth century and the orangerie’s going to be rebuilt—”

  “I don’t want to think of it.”

  “But for God’s sake, why not?”

  “It’s too painful.”

  “Why is it painful?”

  “Because it can’t help me. You think that by redeeming Oxmoon you’ll redeem me but you won’t. I’m beyond that sort of fairy tale.”

  “Well, if you want to be beyond it I can’t stop you,” I said exasperated, “but you’ve bloody well suffered and you’ve bloody well repented so why shouldn’t you bloody well be redeemed?”

  “Redemption’s just a word and as I’m not a Christian it means nothing to me. If restoring Oxmoon helps you to live with what Kester and I did, then I’m glad for your sake but don’t expect it to help me.”

  “People were talking about the cycle of birth, life, death and resurrection long before Christ hit the scene,” I said, playing down the religious angle to counter his argument, but of course I came to Christianity in the end. I write “of course” because it must have seemed inevitable to the people who kept hearing me speak of redemption, but it took me some time before I realized that I was in the grip of an experience which was intractable to rational analysis. I was living not on reason but on faith. No rational man would have believed that I could save Oxmoon. But I’d done it, and in doing so I had passed through some gateway of the mind into another way of looking, as Pam would have put it, at a given situation.

  No doubt reformed rakes are particularly prone to religious conversion. Evan started talking to me of Donne and Sian mentioned the poet Rochester and Humphrey said religion, any religion, was the big new trend nowadays and look at the Beatles in India.

  “Do be careful, Hal,” said Pam, who spent much time worrying in case my mysticism led me into murky psychiatric waters. “You’ve got exactly the right temperament to be a religious fanatic.”

  “I’ll let you know when I order a hair shirt,” I said, but in fact I wasn’t fanatical about Christianity. I merely found it more intellectually satisfying than the occult, more positive than Buddhism, more British than Islam and less depressing than psychiatry.

  “Maybe you’ll wind up in a monastery,” said my father gloomily, but I knew there was no possibility that I might become a monk. My feelings for Caitlin made perpetual chastity unthinkable.

  I turned to Caitlin in the end, of course, and again I write “of course” because it must have seemed inevitable to those who knew me well that I would return to Caitlin just as time after time I returned to Oxmoon: to rest, to recuperate and to spend a few precious hours with my true self before continuing my crusade behind a variety of selling images. For a long time I didn’t see her, but the ordeal on the Devil’s Bridge linked her with me in my memory, and often, particularly when I was alone in some hotel room, I would remember her gentleness when she had thought I was in the grip of vertigo, her sensitivity in never pestering me for information and her intelligence which had told her when to stay silent as well as when to ask the right questions. As I battered my way across America her memory became increasingly precious to me until she became a symbol of someone unspoiled and of a normal world to which I prayed I might one day return.

  She took her secretarial course and the diploma in farm management. We corresponded. Eventually we were reunited. One day at Rhossili beach she tried to teach me Welsh and as she spoke in that language I couldn’t understand I knew that she was telling me she loved me.

  “Say that in English, Cait!”

  “The cat sat on the mat.”

  “Now teach me to say that in Welsh!”

  She taught me. I said it. She blushed. We embraced. Finally I said, “I could make all manner of fine speeches but I’m too cynical about fine speeches to sound sincere.”

  “I don’t want fine speeches.”

  “I’m really a very simple man—”

  “That sounds like the beginning of a fine speech.”

  “—so all I shall say is: Will you?”

  “That’s too simple. In this day and age, that sort of question can mean almost anything.”

  After we’d picked the date for the wedding she said, “Did it take you a long time to get over Gwyneth?”

  “Yes, but I’m at peace with the past now.”

  “She was a symbol of the past, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes. The past created the illusion that we were suited to each other but of course she was much too independent for me. Marriage with her would have been a disaster.”

  “Does that mean you expect me to be a robot with no mind of my own?”

  “Certainly not. Marriage isn’t about either independence or dependence—it’s about interdependence. I’m not afraid of a woman who wants to be a person in her own right but Gwyneth’s kind of person wasn’t my kind of woman.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Thank God, yes—at least that’s one self-destructive future I’ve managed to sidestep,” I said, and once more took her in my arms.

  VI

  And they all came to Oxmoon, magic fabled Oxmoon, they all came to see the house that was rising from the grave.

  The BBC arrived to make a television documentary, and I was interviewed on the newly mown lawn of the pleasure garden as the stonemasons worked on the repair of the terrace and the painters paused on their scaffolding with the brushes in their hands. Publicity has its disadvantages. There were always tourists at the gates now and the National Trust was finding it an increasingly strenuous task to keep the hordes of well-wishers at bay. Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon it seemed that all Gower cruised down the road to Penhale for a glimpse of the miracle, and as the waiting world hovered at its bedside Oxmoon emerged from the intensive-care unit into the recovery ward on its long journey back to health from the illness which everyone had believed to be terminal.

  Then one day I came home to Gower and found the fairy-tale palace of Keste
r’s dreams, the outer walls washed, the paint gleaming, the new roof of Welsh slate shining in the sun. The shutters were still closed for conservation purposes; the fabrics needed the minimum dose of light, but inside the house the main rooms dazzled the eye, the upholstery repaired, the furniture polished, the wallpapers cleaned, the carpets restored, every item of the collection glowing and cared for, and in the hall the cleaners were washing every crystal of Kester’s famous “celestial” chandelier. Beyond the house the gardens were trim and tended again. The orangerie had been reconstructed, and in the renovated stable block the broken-down old carriages, relics of another age, had been painted and repaired for display to the public.

  Even the kitchens had been transformed. The main kitchen had been restored to its original Georgian design, but the scullery, the stillroom, the laundry rooms, the larders and the pantries had been converted into a restaurant and shop. An army of cleaning ladies was cleaning up after the builders. Mops, pails and scrubbing brushes seemed to be ceaselessly on the move.

  “The exterminator’s paid his last call,” said the land agent of the Trust. “All the rats have gone.” And his colleague said, “We’re almost home.”

  I drove straight to my father’s house in Swansea.

  “If you’d only come and see it, Father—you’ve never seen anything like it—you couldn’t imagine such a resurrection!”

  “I can’t travel. I can’t go out.”

  “But you must! Please! Be with me on the day of the opening!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Be patient, Hal,” said Pam afterwards in private. “You’re only upsetting him by haranguing him like this.”

  “But how can he refuse to be there at the opening? I know the Trust owns the place now but he’s still the master of the house!”

  “No, Hal. He was never the real master, was he? Kester passed it on to you, and this triumph is yours and yours alone.”

  VII

  And so the great day dawned and everyone came to Oxmoon—or so it seemed—all Wales, all England, all the world made the pilgrimage from Swansea into Gower to that “little house on the road to nowhere.” The celebrities came from London with the BBC and ITV news crews; the journalists and photographers swarmed at my heels; the tourists, the sight-seers and the well-wishers streamed through the gates and among them were the members of my family, all of them except Geoffrey whom I’d ordered to stay away. My aunt Francesca came from Boston, my unknown cousin Erika emerged from Germany, Sian came with her viscount from a holiday at Juan-les-Pins, Aunt Marian breezed along saying everything was too divine, Richard arrived in a psychedelic helicopter with a crowd of Beautiful People, Gerry came with his latest sexy mistress, Lance turned up with his wife and two little girls, Evan appeared in his clerical collar and my three brothers, trying not to look jealous, all presented themselves to me to pay their respects.

  Haunted by the memory of Pam’s story of sibling rivalry I made a great effort to be friendly. Charles talked rubbish about Kester’s collection but I made no attempt to contradict him; Jack made idiotic remarks about the media coverage but I merely smiled kindly; Humphrey said with deceptive cheerfulness: “I suppose you must feel as if you’re God, old chap—issued any trendy commandments lately?” but I reminded myself he was probably aggrieved that he had been usurped as The Favorite. I shook his hand and patted him on the back and told him how glad I was to see him, but although he returned my smile I could tell he was skeptical. My brothers were going to demand hard work on my part in the future, but I refused to regard our relationship with pessimism. If I could conquer America I could conquer my siblings; all that the conquest required was the right attitude of mind.

  At that moment I was diverted from my family, for Royalty had come to Oxmoon to declare the house open to the public. Royalty was very gracious, saying all the right things, but I think Royalty was genuinely impressed by Oxmoon, so many centuries of Anglo-Welsh history encapsulated in that little house on the road to nowhere.

  “… and so,” said Royalty at last, addressing the television cameras, the celebrities, the Beautiful People, the sight-seers, the tourists, the natives of Gower and all the other people within range of his microphone, “it gives me the greatest pleasure …”

  Oxmoon was declared open.

  Royalty shook my hand and said, “Well done!”

  My loyal friends at the National Trust followed suit, and after them came the rest of the world, shaking my hand until it was swollen at the joints.

  “So what are you going to do now, Hal?” shouted NBC-TV’s news correspondent, thrusting a microphone under my nose.

  “Get married and live happily ever after.”

  Everyone cheered.

  “And after that?”

  “I’m going to write a rock opera called The Saving of Oxmoon,” I said to shut them up, but for the first time I wondered if I might go into the Church.

  VIII

  Oxmoon was opened on a Saturday, and to allow both Caitlin and me time to recover the wedding had been arranged for the following weekend. The day after the opening we went to church and lunched at the farm with a crowd of Llewellyns, but eventually, longing for seclusion and impatient with the never-ending questions about our wedding plans, we withdrew to my father’s house in Swansea.

  “How are you, Hal?” said Pam who now lived in terror that I might crash into depression after the all-time emotional high of seeing my dream come true, but before I could reassure her my father came out of the living room with the. Sunday paper in his hands.

  “Have you seen the pictures of Oxmoon?”

  “Uh-huh.” I’d decided to be reticent on the subject in his presence so a neutral comment was all I was prepared to offer in response to his question.

  But Caitlin said to him, “It’s such a very lovely place—and so quiet and peaceful once the crowds have gone.”

  “It looks well,” said my father. “Kester would have been pleased.” He disappeared again into the living room.

  We all looked at one another. Pam whispered to me: “Don’t press him. Let him work his way round the problem by himself.”

  “Are you saying he might—”

  “Why are you all whispering in the hall?” shouted my father furiously.

  “We’re not sure how far you want to discuss Oxmoon, darling,” said Pam, leading the way into the living room. “It’s perfectly natural that Hal should want to know.”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “Okay.” Pam turned back to us. “Do you two want to stay for supper? I’ve got a large shepherd’s pie I can heat up.”

  Before we could reply my father said, “When does Oxmoon close its gates to the public?”

  “Six.”

  We all looked at the clock above the fireplace. The time was quarter to seven.

  “I’m not hungry,” said my father.

  “Never mind,” said Pam. “The pie will keep. We don’t have to eat it now.”

  “Are you two hungry?” said my father.

  Caitlin and I denied hunger.

  My father turned to Pam. “I want to get dressed. I’m tired of this bloody dressing gown.”

  “Fine,” said Pam. “I’ll find a clean shirt for you.”

  They disappeared. We sat down and waited. He took a long time to dress and when he came back we saw why. He was wearing his best suit, which smelled faintly of mothballs. A venerable silk tie glowed in faded splendor against his snow-white shirt. Pam had polished his shoes. He had trimmed his beard. He looked neat, ordered—but not composed. He was in such a state that I saw at once that speech was beyond him.

  “You go on ahead of us,” said Pam to me. “Your father’s taken some medication and it needs time to work.”

  I drove Caitlin back to Oxmoon and while we waited I began to pray.

  IX

  So in the end we all came home to Oxmoon, resurrected Oxmoon, which belonged now to neither Kester nor my father nor me but to everyone who chose to turn to th
e symbol which the National Trust had intervened to preserve. The Sunday crowds had long since departed by the time Caitlin and I reached the stable yard, and after a word with the caretaker we savored the pleasure of having the place to ourselves.

  Oxmoon basked in the summer-evening light, ravishing Oxmoon, still a fairy tale and perhaps in the late twentieth century more of a fairy tale than even Kester in his most romantic dreams could have imagined. Caitlin and I sat down to wait on the front steps and eventually Pam’s mini brought my father home.

  His pallor had a grayish tinge but he was better as soon as he stepped indoors. He sat down for a moment to recover from the ordeal of the journey and as we allowed him the time he needed Pam and I chatted idly about the attendance figures.

  Finally he said, “I’m ready now. Let’s have the guided tour,” so I took him through the main rooms slowly while Pam and Caitlin followed at a distance. I noticed that Pam always made the right casual comment whenever the silence threatened to become too deep.

  “Very nice,” said my father awkwardly at last, but he managed to add in a more natural tone of voice: “Not what I expected.”

  I was surprised. “What did you expect?”

  “Kester’s 1939 renovations. But the Trust have gone beyond that, haven’t they? Much of this is new.”

  “It’s new yet it’s old. Robert Godwin the Renovator would have recognized this as his Oxmoon.”

  “That’s right. Eighteenth-century Robert Godwin. No one we ever knew. All quite past.”

  “And all quite present.”

  “It’s like a miracle,” said my father as we recrossed the hall on our way to the ballroom. “No, I’m sorry—what a stupid thing to say. It’s not like a miracle, it is a miracle.”

  I opened the double doors into the ballroom and saw myself in the long mirrors, a tall lean figure in my jeans and my OXMOON LIVES! T-shirt, a man of the Nineteen Seventies, an anachronism in that room which was so very symbolic of the past. But my father in his formal dark suit looked less out of place. He stood silent, spellbound, gazing up at the chandeliers.