The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “What rubbish!” said my mother. “That takes no account of factors like the irresistible chemistry of sexual attraction and the breathtaking thrill of a meeting of the minds!”

  “That’s the sort of remark,” said my father, “which confirms my belief that women really are the stupider sex,” and the conversation had then deteriorated into one of their furious rows.

  I was interested to note that this phrase of my mother’s, “sexual attraction” (not quoted in the dictionary, I discovered to my chagrin), recurred frequently in any discussion of Bronwen and Uncle John, but as time passed people began to agree that this mysterious force could not provide the Whole Answer.

  “It’s bloody sex, that’s all,” said sordid Uncle Thomas. “Do you think either of them would have looked twice at the other if they’d been ugly as sin?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact,” said my mother, “yes. After all this time there’s got to be more to it than mere sexual attraction.”

  On the evening before my grandfather’s funeral Aunt Celia confided to my mother: “I’m terribly distressed that John’s situation is still going on. I really did think he might have recovered by now.”

  I was accustomed to hearing Uncle John spoken of as if he were critically ill, but Aunt Celia made it sound as if he were on the point of death. I stopped thinking how cold I was in my pajamas (I had left my bed to tell my mother I was too excited to sleep) and tiptoed noiselessly closer to the drawing-room door.

  “It’s a much more complicated relationship than you think it is, Celia. John’s a very complicated man.”

  “Then what can he possibly see in a simple uneducated working-class Welsh girl?”

  “Just that: simplicity. Although actually I don’t think Bronwen’s all that simple either—I think she’s the most unusual and intelligent girl, but whatever she is, Celia, there’s no doubt she has some vital message for Johnny which the rest of us just can’t read.”

  “Of course she’s very pretty—”

  “It’s not just sex.”

  “But my dear, surely sex must play a large part—think of those three illegitimate children! Three!”

  “I know.” My mother was uncharacteristically reticent.

  “I think it’s the height of irresponsibility, I really do—and what an example to set Marian and Harry! I’m sorry Daphne couldn’t come to the funeral—she wrote to me last Christmas and said how worried she was about Marian—”

  “I know,” said my mother again, but still she refused to utter one word criticizing Uncle John.

  “What’s the latest arrival going to be called? I was too embarrassed to ask John when I saw him today.”

  “Lance. Short for Lancelot.”

  “Most unsuitable!” said Aunt Celia coldly. “But I suppose they think they’re being romantic.”

  “Oh, yes, I daresay,” said my mother, suddenly unable to keep her tongue in check a moment longer. “No doubt the next ones will be called Arthur and Guinevere, and then all we’ll need is Tennyson to come back from the dead and rewrite Idylls of the King.”

  “But my dear, surely there won’t be any more!”

  “Nothing,” said my mother bleakly, “would surprise me now.”

  And sure enough by the time Lance was eighteen months old Uncle John told us Bronwen was having another baby.

  “How nice,” said my mother as if someone had handed her a bouquet of dead flowers, and there was a small tense pause.

  “Bronwen’s been so depressed,” said my uncle rapidly, examining a speck of dust on one of his cuffs, “and having babies is the one thing that cheers her up.”

  “Quite,” said my mother, and began to talk about estate matters.

  By that time we were living at Oxmoon; the fairy-tale years had begun.

  After my grandfather’s funeral we remained at Little Oxmoon for four months while my mother organized certain alterations to my new home. There was little money to spare at that time for the massive improvements needed, but the roof was mended, electricity was installed and my grandparents’ bedroom was completely renovated—“although I suspect it should really be exorcised,” said my mother darkly, “in order to purge the atmosphere of That Woman.”

  However Mrs. Straker’s presence, far from lingering on the air like the Cheshire Cat’s smile, was purged as soon as my mother commanded in a moment of unbridled femininity that the room should be decorated in pink and white. (Mrs. Straker had definitely not been a pink-and-white person.) My mother’s taste usually veered to bold exotic colors but she said that as this, was the one bedroom in her life where nothing naughty was ever going to happen, the atmosphere must be virginal. A plump white single bed was installed and adorned with white flounces and frills. A modern white dressing table matched the modern white wardrobes; white bedside tables and white chests-of-drawers completed this pristine triumph over a murky past but the room was saved from snowy austerity by the sensuous shade of the matching dusty-pink carpet. My mother thought it was all “rather heaven” but decided a little treasure or two from Christie’s would enhance it so off we went to London to haunt the auction rooms. By a superhuman display of willpower my mother somehow avoided spending thousands and bought two cheap paintings of nudes in the pre-Raphaelite style and a small bronze Edwardian statue of a naked man which, when converted into an ashtray by a local craftsman, she kept by her bed—“as an antidote to the virginal atmosphere!” she remarked gaily to Aunt Julie. My mother was in very high spirits by that time and kept saying what fun life was.

  I agreed with her. Although I had passed through London on various visits to Aunt Daphne in Scotland I had not stayed for any length of time in the city since my infancy, and so now it was as if I were visiting the capital for the first time. I was enrapt. I loved Swansea, but Swansea’s magic was different; Swansea is a large ugly industrial port in a position of such superb natural beauty that the ugliness is transformed into glamour; Swansea, as my mother once said, was like a plain woman with “It.” But London was like a handsome hero. London reminded me of Ruritania, full of soldiers in ceremonial uniforms and fabulous palaces and beautiful parks and grand houses and glittering shops and vast noble monuments commemorating Courage, Valor and Our Glorious Dead which all helped to prove (to the British) that Great Britain represented the pinnacle of human achievement. How fortunate, I thought with relief, that Edward the First had conquered the Welsh! Otherwise I might have grown up excluded from this Land of Hope and Glory.

  Naturally I wanted to go everywhere and do everything, but my mother said we had to be selective in order to avoid wearing ourselves out. So we went to Divine Harrods, which had a very good toy department, and after my mother had bought me some smart clothes we went to a bookshop called Hatchards, which I thought was even more divine than Harrods, and as soon as my mother had bought me three books by Jeffrey Farnol, we were whisked in a thrilling taxi ride around Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square to the Savoy where we had a sumptuous banquet with my mother’s best friend Aunt Julie.

  “I think I could become quite partial to this sort of life,” I remarked as my mother let me have a spoonful of her caviar, and Aunt Julie laughed and offered me a sip of her champagne.

  More glamour was to follow. We went to the theater twice, the Royal Academy once and the National Gallery three times. I fell in love with Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Bellini, Constable, Turner, Renoir and a host of other artistic giants. Then came the thrill of the auction at Christie’s. I nearly expired with excitement. Here I fell in love with Benvenuto Cellini and three Faience cats and wanted my mother to buy a swag of fruit carved by Grinling Gibbons.

  After that Art was always spelled with a capital A in my mind alongside Beauty and Truth.

  “Are you going to have a flat in town now, Ginevra?” said Aunt Julie during our lunch at the Savoy, and I exclaimed at once, “What a topping idea!” but my mother said firmly, “No, I want the estate to be free of encumbrances when Kester inherits at eighteen, and you k
now how naughty I can be about money, Julie—if I had a flat in town I’d just be naughty from dawn till dusk.”

  “What fun!” said Aunt Julie, and they giggled together like schoolgirls.

  “Incidentally,” added Aunt Julie in that peculiar way grownups have of skipping from subject to subject without any apparent connecting link, “how’s Gavin?”

  “My dear, he’s getting married!”

  “No! Do you approve?”

  “Well, I can understand him wanting a more stable life now that he’s nearer fifty than forty.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Worthy and well-upholstered. She’s the widow of a conchie.”

  “What’s that?” I said, becoming interested. I had long since been bored to tears by all Penhale’s devoted interest in Dr. Warburton’s plans to remarry, but this was an item of information which I hadn’t heard before.

  “A conscientious objector, darling—someone who refused to fight in the war. Although actually,” she added to Aunt Julie, “I believe he drove an ambulance for the Red Cross and died a hero.”

  “I think all conchies are heroes,” said Aunt Julie.

  “Tell me more, darling,” said my mother indulgently, and they began to prattle away about men while I ate my roast beef and gazed dreamily out of the window at the river.

  Once Aunt Julie said, “Heavens, should I be saying all this in front of Kester?” and I woke up from my reverie but my mother said, “Oh, it’s all right, that sort of thing just passes straight over his head at the moment, and anyway I don’t believe in treating children like little hothouse plants. Little hothouse plants have a nasty habit of withering at the first frost, and I want to bring my child up to be tough and durable.”

  “Very sensible, darling,” said Aunt Julie. “Would you like to write the Motherhood Column in A Woman’s Place?”

  They gurgled away again, helpless with laughter. A lot of champagne had been consumed by that time.

  “No, I’m giving up all my literary hobbies now that I’m mistress of Oxmoon,” gasped my mother when she could speak. “No more unpublished masterpieces in the style of Elinor Glyn!”

  “Your big mistake was not writing in the style of Ginerva Godwin! I told you that over and over again!”

  “But my dear, it would have been pornography!”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “Naughty stories or pictures, darling, all about sex.”

  “Oh.” I crammed my mouth full of luscious Yorkshire pudding.

  “I think you should keep writing,” said Aunt Julie.

  “But I’ve no time! I’m playing Cleopatra to Oxmoon’s Egypt and it’s simply thrilling, I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying myself! I’m running the house, peeping over John’s shoulder when he deals with the estate, giving audiences to lawyers, accountants and bank managers, making dozens of vital decisions, and—wait for it, Julie—I’ve even got two different checkbooks!”

  This time they shrieked so loudly with mirth that people at nearby tables turned to stare. All Aunt Julie said afterwards as she wiped away a tear was a heartfelt “Poor Robert!” which once again illustrated to me my theory that adults littered their conversation with the most absurd non sequiturs.

  “I’m forty-nine years old,” exclaimed my mother in a burst of joie de vivre, “and a gorgeous new life is about to begin for me!”

  “God knows you deserve it,” said Aunt Julie. “No more terrors about getting in a mess unless you have a strong man to protect you?”

  “Oh, my dear, when you’ve been to hell and back, the odd trivial mess or two no longer has the power to terrify.”

  “Darling Ginevra,” said Aunt Julie, who was very fond of my mother, “I’m so happy for you—and before you leave London you simply must start your new life by meeting this divine friend of my favorite conchie …”

  She did. We went to drinks at Aunt Julie’s flat, which was very smart and sleek and modern, and Aunt Julie wore trousers and smoked a cigarette in a very long holder and looked very smart and sleek and modern herself, like a villainess in a John Buchan novel or perhaps an elderly version of Irma in Bulldog Drummond. The male guests wore peculiar ties and the female guests wore very bright lipstick and everyone chatted about D. H. Lawrence and Five-Year Plans and What Was Wrong With England and International Pacifism and Psychoanalysis and how the BBC was perpetuating Middle-Class Myths. I drank about a gallon of lemonade and ate a sinful chocolate cake and listened. My mother, very curvacious in a skimpy floral frock which seemed to finish in all the wrong places, smoked like a chimney and swilled pink gin and had the time of her life. Her eyelashes seemed to be about six inches long and perpetually fluttering.

  The divine friend of Aunt Julie’s favorite conchie was so entranced that he invited her out to a nightclub on the following evening. I was aghast but Aunt Julie sat at once, “What heaven! That means Kester can come out with me!” and I was so cheered that I forgot to sulk. Aunt Julie even invited me to spend the night at her flat, and this was thrilling as I had never before stayed away from home without either my mother or a nanny to supervise me. At the appointed hour Aunt Julie collected me from our hotel near Kensington Gardens, and after a sumptuous dinner we went to a picture palace where we saw a revival of a film called The Gold Rush. I laughed so much that my sides ached, but the climax of the evening came when Aunt Julie told the taxi driver to take us back to her Bloomsbury flat via Piccadilly Circus so that I could see the lights. At that point I felt so faint with sophistication that I could hardly wait to return to Gower in order to brag about my experiences to my new friend, provincial Cousin Harry.

  However this glamorous expedition to London was only the prelude to my fairy-tale years. In the July of 1929 we finally moved to Oxmoon, and soon afterwards Uncle John took me to each of the farms on the estate and to all the tied cottages in Penhale so that I could be formally presented to every man, woman and child connected with my inheritance. At first I was shy but soon I loved all the fuss that was made of me and listened incredulously as my tenants made remarks like “Such a well-mannered young gentleman!” and “How pleased his poor father would have been!” I blossomed rapidly. By the time I was taken to visit the retired family retainers in the almshouses, I was well accustomed to drinking tea and looking wise as Uncle John chatted about the astonishing good weather and the excellent harvest.

  I was in a way a stranger to Oxmoon. Unlike my father and grandfather, I had not spent my earliest years there, and although Little Oxmoon was built on land that had once formed part of the Oxmoon estate, the estate itself was not deeply familiar to me. Also although Uncle John was probably as successful as any gentleman farmer he had, as I realized later, the kind of executive mind which interests itself in planning and profit, not in the aesthetics and romance of agricultural life; in other words, Uncle John’s attitude to farming was not one which I found easy to assimilate. I looked at the dear little piglets in Uncle Thomas’s piggery and thought what beautiful curly tails they had. Uncle John looked at them and saw profit or loss and a line of figures in an account book. Uncle John made conscientious efforts to interest me in the estate and I made conscientious efforts to be interested, but somehow our minds continually failed to meet so that the mechanics of Oxmoon, the anatomy beyond the glamorous facade, remained a mystery which I was well content not to unravel.

  But the glamorous facade I adored.

  Oxmoon was like a kingdom. In the old days it had been self-supporting, and even now, despite the agricultural depression and the changes of the twentieth century, it retained the trappings of independence. The Home Farm provided nearly all the food, and in the farmyard which lay near the house beyond the stable yard I could see all my agricultural employees going about their daily work. Fewer horses were now used on the estate and the coach house had become a garage but the stables were still impressive. They were linked to the main house by the kitchens, which included the bakehouse, the still room, the wet laundry, the dry laund
ry and sundry pantries and larders. Various daily women came in from the village to help the resident staff run this rabbit warren of domesticity.

  Below the farmyard and the stable yard there stood a slaughterhouse, a sawmill, a disused forge (the blacksmith at Penhale now worked for us at his own forge), a joiners’ shop, the old kennels (disused since the disbandment of the West Gower Hunt), the timber-wagon shed and the Garden House, which overlooked the large walled beautiful kitchen garden. Next to this stood a ravishing orangerie, a temple to the great god Citrus, and inside were all sorts of peculiar bushes and straggling vines. Little grapes the size of peas occasionally appeared and almost instantly withered. No one had ever seen an orange there. Making a camp in the back I planted a Union Jack and pretended I was colonizing the jungle.

  Beyond the orangerie lay the eighteenth-century pleasure garden, part of which during the long reign of my grandfather had been turned into a tennis court and a croquet lawn. On the edge of this vast sward at the point where the pleasure garden dissolved into the woods lay the most captivating summerhouse, which had been built at the instigation of my great-grandfather Robert Godwin the Drunkard. One of my first acts as master of Oxmoon was to take it over as my own special house. I would sit in a wicker chair and stuff myself with fruit purloined from the kitchen garden and gloat as I gazed across the lawn to my inheritance.

  Oxmoon!

  I would gaze and sigh and gaze again. Here I was, a fairy-tale prince, and there, facing me, was the palace where all my dreams were going to come true.

  My nine-year-old eyes saw a great gorgeous colossus of a house, bold, broad and brilliant. The lack of paint, the patched roof, the bedraggled look were of no consequence. That was just reality, but as usual I saw beyond boring dreary old reality to Beauty, Truth and Art. I also, as I sat munching apples in that idyllic summerhouse and gazed across the dazzling sward towards Beauty, Truth and Art, knew Peace. Peace, I discovered, was pure contentment, an acute awareness of perfection, a oneness with Nature, a glimpse of God.