The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  Perhaps the prosaic explanation of her magic was that she saw farther than most people did. She was always careful to disclaim any psychic powers but she combined her extreme clarity of vision with unusually keen powers of observation. This enabled her to pick up details other people would miss with the result that she often saw a broader spectrum of reality—and this meant that she could talk in concrete terms of matters which other people couldn’t see and therefore assumed to be myths.

  Unable to speak I embraced her, and all the time I was thinking: She went away—but she came back. And I knew my long bereavement was at last at an end.

  Some unknown time later I found myself sitting beside her on the sofa in the drawing room while other people, all strangers in their teens, filtered into the room and made remarks like “Hi—welcome back!” and “Hi—bet you don’t remember me!” Dimly I realized these were my lost siblings. But before I could digest this astonishing fact, an army of small boys pounded in waving Union Jacks and shouting “Daddy! Daddy!”

  I heard Bella say, “They were meant to be in the drive but they locked themselves in the lavatory and couldn’t get out.” I gazed at them. What had happened to all those bundles in rompers? I found myself confronted by a bunch of savage midgets who yelled with a force that would have demolished the walls of Jericho more quickly than the legendary trumpet. I winced at the noise.

  “Shhh, boys—be gentle with Daddy!” begged Bella nervously, but they only fell silent when Bronwen leaned forward and put her finger to her lips. Then she beckoned the smallest thug with a smile. “Come along, Humphrey—this is your special moment.”

  The son I had never seen presented himself proudly for inspection. He looked like the old photographs of myself at the age of two. I was too amazed to speak but when I patted him to make sure he was real he beamed in delight.

  “Daddy, Daddy—”

  I mixed up Charles and Jack who were the same height, but while they were elbowing each other out of the way and trampling Humphrey underfoot, Hal slid past them and sat down beside me on the sofa.

  “Hullo, Hal—no trouble recognizing you!” I said, but I was too exhausted to say more. Vaguely I looked around for Edmund and Teddy, and it was some seconds before I remembered my father telling me they were busy reopening their house in London.

  “Gerry,” said Bronwen to one of the strangers, “could you organize another cricket match?”

  Various people disappeared and the room became blessedly quiet. I was alone with my father and Bronwen at last, and my father was talking rapidly with great animation.

  “… so I wrote to her directly after Constance died—”

  “I wrote back by return,” said Bronwen, speaking to me but smiling at him.

  “—and after that we corresponded. We agreed to meet after the war, but of course even when the war ended transport for civilians was so difficult. However I did have my government contacts—”

  “—so when I said I’d bring the children over for a visit—”

  “—I was able to arrange the journey. Of course I wanted to tell her to sell everything up there and then—”

  “—and I wanted to sell everything up too, but I was so afraid—”

  “—we were both so afraid—”

  “—that we’d find we were strangers with nothing to say to each other!”

  They laughed in delight at this absurd possibility.

  “Anyway,” said my father, “I said yes, come for a visit. But when I met the ship at Southampton—”

  “—as soon as I saw him—”

  “—as soon as I saw her—”

  They laughed again, more delighted than ever by their ridiculously romantic story.

  “So I soon asked her to marry me and she said yes—”

  “No, no, you said, ‘How soon can you marry me?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not doing anything tomorrow …’ ”

  They laughed helplessly, delirious with happiness. Rousing myself at last I assumed the role of the kind useful child and refilled their glasses with champagne. Some time later when I could get a word in edgeways I said to my father, “I assume Teddy decided it was a situation she could fix?”

  “Oh God, yes, that woman’s power-mad. She couldn’t resist the chance to wield the power to forgive and forget, but if she really means well she’ll do something about Francesca. That child’s threatening to cancel the big wedding I’ve arranged for her next month—she says she’d rather marry in a registry office without me if I continue, as she describes it, to insult her mother’s memory.”

  “Poor little Francesca,” said Bronwen.

  But I’d had just about enough of Francesca posing as the wronged heroine, and I decided it was time someone shook her till her teeth rattled. With reluctance I realized that my father was right to be suspicious of Teddy; she wasn’t going to interfere while Francesca voiced feelings which perhaps, deep down beneath all the layers of kindness and generosity, Teddy secretly shared. Teddy was probably willing for Edmund’s sake to display goodwill towards my father and Bronwen now that Constance had been dead for over a year, but her deepest feelings were unlikely to be benign.

  It so happened that I had the chance to intervene on my father’s behalf because three days later Francesca and her fiancé arrived for a weekend at Oxmoon. She had been engaged for six months to a colonel in the United States Air Force called William Q. Coton who belonged to one of the wealthy Eastern Seaboard families in Massachusetts. Francesca had first met him before the war during visits to America with her mother, and after a flirtatious career as a WAAF she probably found his familiarity as attractive as his respectability. He was thirty-two but born to be fifty, and when I met him he wore a worried expression which I hoped meant he realized his fiancée was behaving idiotically about her father’s imminent marriage. Certainly when I asked for a private word with Francesca he guessed what was happening and smiled gratefully at me before bolting from the room.

  Francesca was twenty-one, dark, slim and neat like Constance but with my father’s blue eyes. Before assuming the role of the wronged heroine she had played the vivacious ingenue with great success for many years, and accepting her at face value I’d made no effort to know her better. However now my real acquaintance with my sister was finally about to begin.

  “If you’ve come to speak to me about Daddy and That Woman—”

  “Oh, shut up! For Christ’s sake stop playing Elektra and come down off that stage!”

  Francesca was appalled. No one had ever spoken to her like that before. She was the golden girl, Mummy’s adored only daughter, forever petted by a horde of doting relatives who all thought, according to their nationality, that she was either “cute” or “sweet.”

  “Harry!”

  “Look, Sunshine. Do you love your father or don’t you?”

  “Why, I adore him but—”

  “Then prove it by welcoming this marriage. Now listen to me, my girl. For the past twelve years that man’s made endless sacrifices in order to be a good father to you and yet all you do to repay him is yap like a rabid Pekingese just because he’s at last managed to find some genuine happiness for a change! Well, I think your behavior’s disgraceful and it’s about time someone told you what a bloody unkind ungrateful daughter you’re being!”

  Floods of tears. Disconnected phrases hinted at dark fissures in that outwardly sunlit well-ordered childhood of hers. “I knew Mummy was unhappy … and all because of her … I couldn’t blame darling Daddy, he was so wonderful, so perfect …”

  I saw the problem. It had taken me too a long time to realize that my father had many dimensions to his character and by no means all of them were heroic.

  “He’s no saint, Francesca. He treated your mother very badly after they were married, and what’s more, if my mother had lived he’d have treated her badly too.”

  But she couldn’t accept that. She just sobbed and shook her head and said “No” over and over again.

  Taking her in my arm
s I said, “He was a victim. He was fond of my mother and respected yours, but what use are fondness and respect when there’s a grand passion sizzling in the wings? And grand passions aren’t as they are in the storybooks, Francesca. They put good people through hell.”

  Francesca rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and whispered, “Mummy was certainly put through hell.”

  “They all were, all of them, but it’s over now, it’s finished. Our mothers are dead—they’re out of it and nothing can hurt them anymore. But Father’s still alive and he’s finally got the chance to have a little happiness and if you really love him you won’t be angry, you’ll just be sick with relief that his suffering’s finally at an end.”

  Some minutes passed. Finally she was able to say, “I do see. All victims. I do see. But even so … I don’t know how I can meet her after all I’ve said … I shall feel so embarrassed—”

  “All you need say is hullo and she’ll do the rest.”

  I mopped her up and took her home. My magic lady was in the garden, but as soon as we emerged from the house she waved and came towards us across the lawn. Moving briskly, like some busy housewife anxious to welcome an unexpected guest to her coffee party, she looked as if her greatest worry was whether there’d be enough biscuits to go around.

  “Francesca thought she’d drop in to see Father,” I called as soon as Bronwen was within earshot.

  “Oh good, he’ll be back in a minute—he’s just gone to the village for cigarettes.” She smiled at Francesca. Those razor-sharp powers of observation missed nothing. The smile set all embarrassment firmly aside as irrelevant. Bronwen’s magic was at its most formidable.

  “Have you brought your fiancé?” she said kindly before Francesca could open her mouth. “I hear he’s at Oxmoon with you this weekend.”

  By the time my father returned from the village we were all having coffee in the drawing room. Innumerable photographs of William Q. Coton covered the table, and Francesca, miraculously restored to the role of vivacious ingenue, was telling Bronwen the story of her engagement. Bronwen, to her eternal credit, looked enthralled.

  So much for Francesca. She married her fiancé three weeks later at St. Margaret’s Westminster and sailed away into the sunset to America to live happily ever after.

  Maybe.

  Bronwen didn’t go to the wedding. She said to Francesca: “Of course it’s best if I’m just with you in spirit but you needn’t think the children and I won’t be drinking your health and wishing you well.” She then retired with my Canadian siblings to the Lleyn Peninsula to spend a week with her sister Myfanwy who was still her only relative in Wales. Dafydd hadn’t yet returned from the Far East and Rhiannon had been killed during the bombing of Malta.

  When the time came for her to leave her wedding reception at Claridges, Francesca said to my father: “I hope you have a lovely wedding, Daddy—I’m sorry I can only be with you in spirit but you needn’t think I won’t be drinking your health and wishing you well.” That was when I knew what a deep impression Bronwen had made.

  My father kissed her, thanked her and said yes, he was looking forward to his wedding very much. That must have been the understatement of his life. By that time the whole family could hardly wait for the great romantic wallow of the year, of the decade and possibly of the entire century. We were all agog with excitement.

  In the end they were married, like Francesca, at St. Margaret’s Westminster. Penhale Church would have been suitable from a nostalgic point of view, but the thought of the entire Gower Peninsula turning up to boggle at the sight of John Godwin marrying his mistress was too intimidating. Clearly only London could offer them the quiet wedding they wanted so finally my father said, “Oh hell, I know the ropes at St. Margaret’s at the moment—why don’t we do it there?” and the rector kindly arranged to slip them in between two gross Society weddings.

  On the morning of December the fifteenth, 1945, the family gathered with bated breath at Westminster.

  Bronwen had grown her hair longer since her arrival in England and on her wedding day she wore it up beneath a fashionable saucerlike hat. Her hair was paler than it had once been but still bright enough for the exposed strands to glow in the dim light. She was plumper too but unhappiness had made her too thin in the past and I thought the new curviness suited her. She still had freckles across the bridge of her nose and very white teeth. She was forty-seven. My father was fifty-three. In their extreme happiness they looked as if they had discovered the secret of eternal youth. Everyone kept whispering, “Don’t they look young!” and Teddy, seeing Bronwen in her Canadian silver-fox furs, added to me with an admiration which I knew was genuine: “My, that gal’s got class!”

  What an irony! But it was true. Teddy was using the word in its American sense, but I suddenly saw that this “class” which Bronwen had acquired in Canada had made her by English standards classless. The shy secluded uneducated Welsh nursemaid had gone forever, replaced by a well-dressed self-confident cultured woman whom the English could rank as an acceptable foreigner, someone who had a right to exist beyond the confines of the English class system. Bronwen’s Welsh accent and her inner self had remained unchanged but a more egalitarian society than England had left its mark on her, and the Canadian gloss on her personality was now her passport to freedom.

  I saw then how much easier it would be for my father to join her in creating a new life which bore no outward resemblance to the old. I had been amazed by the changes he had already made but now I realized they were not only desirable but inevitable. He had sold the Rolls-Royce, severed his business links with London and bought a house in a wealthy but undeniably middle-class area of Swansea. When I had last spoken to him on the subject he had even been planning with delight to take up gardening.

  “How handsome your father looks,” whispered Bella as we waited for the service to begin, but I barely heard her. I was listening to Bach’s Wachet Auf, which had begun to stream though my head in defiance of the fool who was trying to play some drivel by Mendelssohn on the organ. However at last the clergyman embarked on his rigmarole and I was sufficiently diverted to glance around at the rest of the family. All the women were dewy-eyed and all the men were grinning foolishly. I was just hastily straightening out my own mouth when Gerry caught my eye and winked. I gave him a cool look. When one is eighteen years old and in the unique position of seeing one’s parents married, one should know better than to wink as if the entire affair were a huge joke. I was relieved to see that my other Canadian siblings were behaving with the solemnity of anthropologists watching an esoteric tribal rite. I eyed them meditatively. I supposed I would have to make the effort to know them better, but the thought was not attractive to me.

  I woke up to the fact that my father was finally putting the ring on Bronwen’s finger. Better late than never. Nearly a quarter of a century after their first meeting at the Penhale Home Farm, twenty-two years after Evan had been conceived, twelve years after Bronwen had gone to Canada and three months after her return to Europe, the deed was finally done.

  Afterwards outside the church Teddy, more American than the Americans as usual, brandished her expensive camera, but my father and Bronwen at first ignored her command to pose for photographs. They were too busy locking themselves in a passionate embrace.

  “Christ!” said Thomas, goggling at them. “Maybe romance isn’t just a load of old balls after all!”

  I felt as if I had heard a lifelong atheist declare his belief in God.

  My father and Bronwen, separating with reluctance, turned to smile radiantly at the camera.

  “Sweet, aren’t they?” said Marian idly, exercising her talent for turning the sublime to the banal. “Darling Bronwen—she looks such a lady in those furs!”

  Kester and I wheeled around on her, snapped “Shut up!” and promptly laughed at our identical reaction. Dear old Kester—how could I ever have thought of him in sinister terms? Absurd! I could see clearly now that he was just a harmless ecc
entric who was as delighted by my father’s marriage as I was.

  “Well, really, darlings!” said Marian, startled by our vehemence. “What are you both getting in such a state about? I’m mad about Bronwen, always have been.”

  “Let’s have a group!” yelled Teddy, interrupting us.

  Groups formed and re-formed. Finally I had the chance to embrace Bronwen and say, “Well done.” Then I shook my father’s hand and said, “Congratulations.” I felt so happy I hardly knew how to contain myself. In my head Toscanini was conducting the final movement from Beethoven’s Seventh.

  “One last picture of John and Bronwen on their own!” shrieked Teddy.

  We stepped aside and as my father slipped his arm around his wife in front of the church door we all fell silent. Beyond the railing the traffic droned around Parliament Square but within seconds even that noise seemed to fade. Westminster Abbey overshadowed us; the Houses of Parliament slumbered in the winter light. Then I heard Bronwen say softly to my father, “It reminds me of that other church, Johnny, in that other time, long ago.”

  He smiled down at her, she smiled up at him, and beyond them, far beyond them on the skyline, Big Ben began to blast out the hour.

  II

  When the wedding was over, when my father and Bronwen had streamed away into the golden sunset of a Cornish honeymoon with a hundred violins sawing away in my head at the theme from Gone with the Wind, I finally had time to wake up and realize that my own marriage was on the rocks. So much for romance. The cold hard facts of my life were that I was heading for the biggest possible mess—again.

  Sex and guilt, as my father had noted with such chilling accuracy, had driven me into marriage, but neither he nor I had understood then the exact nature of that guilt which yoked me to Bella. The bond of sex at least had weakened; in that respect she was now just a pleasant convenience instead of a heart-stopping erotic adventure. However the bond of guilt remained, and the more I realized the impossibility of communicating with Bella on any level but the horizontal the more I realized how absolutely we were still yoked together by that summer of ’33.