The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  My father said nothing.

  “I love her and I’m going to stand by her,” I said. By this time I was frantic for a word of approval. “It’s the right thing—the only thing—to do.”

  “Of course,” said my father politely, and after that the conversation closed.

  There was just nothing left to say.

  VI

  “Oh Harry, please—once I have Melody back I’ll never ask for anything else, I swear I won’t …”

  Poor Bella. I didn’t have the heart to remind her that we could so easily wind up with a fifth boy. I just looked at her, saw the tearstained pink-and-white cheeks, the heavy bosom sagging beneath a coffee-stained blouse, the once-slim hips straining the seams of the shabby trousers I detested. I knew her disordered appearance reflected the inner disorders of her personality and that she was bleeding in her mind just as I had bled in mine during the war.

  “The experience will almost certainly scar her for life,” my father had said long ago in the field with the six cows. “I hope you now realize what a terrible thing you’ve done.”

  I realized. And I realized too that the knowledge had become unendurable. I could bear it no longer and could see only one escape from the pain.

  I said: “I want Melody back too. I want the guilt to finish.” So I stopped using contraceptives and she got pregnant straightaway.

  As soon as the pregnancy was confirmed I regretted it but Bella was radiant, started eating sensibly, going to the hairdresser again, taking an interest in clothes. She couldn’t understand my emotional withdrawal which too often manifested itself in bad temper, and she was angry when she finally realized I wasn’t as delighted as she was.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she said. “Why don’t you want to fuck anymore?”

  “Oh, stop using that sort of language! I’m fed up with my wife talking like a bloody tart!”

  “My God, anyone would think you wanted me to be some kind of bloody virgin!”

  “I want you to be some kind of bloody wife, not an old bag who sits around getting fat and lets those bloody kids murder my piano!”

  Slaps. More slaps. Screams. Tears. Christ, what hell marriage can be.

  It all rubbed off on the children. I could see they didn’t like me, but I wanted peace and order, not affection. That was why when I caught Hal banging at the piano in defiance of my orders I lost my temper and beat him.

  “I hate you!” he screamed when I’d finished. “I wish you’d got killed in the war!”

  That horrified me. I hated myself, tried to comfort him, but he pushed me away. Failure slugged me with the force of a sledgehammer and later the skin broke open on my back as my rash returned.

  I couldn’t face my father to confess another child was on the way so I told Bronwen instead. Bronwen was very sympathetic. I realized then that she knew about Melody, but I wasn’t surprised because it was obvious my father would have no secrets from her.

  “Oh, you mustn’t think your father won’t understand,” she said quickly when I confessed my mixed feelings about the pregnancy. “He knows all about fathering children for the wrong reasons.”

  And when I boggled she explained: “He wanted me to be happy—he was afraid I’d leave him.”

  This was horrific. “And eventually you did leave him—because of the children!”

  “True. But,” said Bronwen, trying to cheer me up, “think what a lot of pleasure the children give us now!”

  I couldn’t imagine getting any pleasure from my children, and such was my trust in Bronwen that I was even able to say so.

  “A little girl will be quite a different matter,” said Bronwen.

  I tried to believe her.

  My father eventually offered some suitable comment on Bella’s pregnancy but I was sure he was thinking: More irresponsible behavior—that boy’ll never make a success of his life. And I felt more bitter than ever.

  Meanwhile up at Oxmoon, poor old Kester, poor old sod, was recovering very nicely from his prewar debacle as he luxuriated with his charming, intelligent, well-educated wife in his beautiful home where no little ruffians broke pianos, wrecked furniture and trailed dirty fingers all over the walls. I rarely went to Oxmoon, but Bella was always popping in and out to bore Anna to tears. She reported that Kester was haunting the salesrooms again although this time he was more careful how he spent his money. Since the war he had employed an agent to run the estate so that he could return to his writing, but although I expected my father to be disappointed he turned out to be merely resigned. Kester could now be dismissed as too old to change his ways. My father had done his best to turn Kester into a perfect Godwin but he had failed. Poor old Father, poor old Kester. Very sad.

  Thomas said the agent was making a balls-up of everything in sight, but then Thomas would. He was having a hard time adjusting to civilian life and had more than once asked my father to push for his reappointment as the Oxmoon estate manager. My father had tried but Kester had procrastinated. My father said gloomily that Kester was probably in the middle of a novel and not in the mood to consider the real world.

  I slogged on in that real world and wished to hell that I too could escape and spend all my working hours listening to music or playing the piano, but it was as much as I could do to get half an hour a day to myself. I was worried about the estate as usual. Growing potatoes had nearly driven me mad, so I’d cut that out and concentrated on the cows. I was now obsessed with silage and was determined that it should solve the winter feed problem. No more bloody mangolds, no more time-consuming uneconomical hoeing. But silage can go wrong. I heard terrible stories. I was nervous. And as if these Home Farm worries weren’t enough I had to take on the problems of Martinscombe which wasn’t quite the paradise for sheep that my father had thought it was. As far as I could gather the sheep were half-starved in winter and all the methods for rearing them were fifty years out of date. Those sheep needed scientific feeding and new hygienic farm buildings, but I couldn’t afford such expenditure. I was already reeling from the builders’ estimates for putting Little Oxmoon in order after the Canadian occupation. More worries. Then to cap it all my car broke down. I knew why. It was because Bella didn’t drive it properly. She wore out the clutch by not using the foot brake and striking a balance instead between the clutch and the accelerator. I kept telling her not to do it but she never remembered, and when the car broke down we had a row—not a big row but certainly a brisk run-of-the-mill shouting match.

  The big rows nowadays were about sex. She wanted it all the time and I liked it three or four times a week—and when I did it, I did it properly. I tried to explain to her that there was more to sex than just slamming away mindlessly every night, but she just said all right, if I preferred gala performances to mindless slamming, why not do the gala performance every night. I tried to explain that the whole point of a gala performance is that it doesn’t happen every night, but it was no good. She hadn’t the brains to be imaginative about sex; she was too childish to see the full possibilities of an adult game.

  In the end I thought, Oh hell, anything for a quiet life, and slammed away every night, but that bored me. If you’re trapped with a woman you dislike your only hope of avoiding tedium is to make an intelligent use of your sexual opportunities, and even then it tends to be an uphill struggle. I wondered how long it had taken my father to exhaust Constance’s possibilities. I was sure now he couldn’t have remained faithful to her, although I was equally sure he would have been gentleman enough to continue sleeping with her as a courtesy.

  “Mummy was so unhappy,” Francesca had wept, and I now knew the unhappiness hadn’t ended with my father’s return. She’d got what she wanted but what a Pyrrhic victory it must have been! All the sex in the world can’t make someone love you. Love can’t be made to order. I wanted to love Bella but I couldn’t, not anymore. All I could do, like my father, was fuck and try to be kind.

  In August I finally succeeded in letting Little Oxmoon to respectable
tenants, and this cheered me up almost as much as Bella’s new habit of going into Swansea once a week with Anna. After my car had cost a fortune to mend I’d forbidden Bella to drive for three months, and it was after this that Anna had generously offered to be her chauffeuse every Thursday in Kester’s Daimler. They would set off after breakfast, have their hair done, lunch at the Claremont and do some shopping in the afternoon before returning home. That got rid of Bella for the whole day and meant I could lunch in peace at the piano.

  The crucial Thursday dawned in early September. There were no premonitions, no portents. I spent the morning at Martinscombe where the vet was advising me about a parasite problem. Anna drove Bella to Swansea for their weekly spree. When I arrived home for lunch I read my Daily Telegraph in peace, told myself how awful the socialist government was and settled down to play the piano. It was such a treat to play when Bella wasn’t around to interrupt me with her inane conversation. Having had no formal musical education I need unbroken concentration when I play because I have to hear each note clearly in my head before I can strike the right keys.

  I enjoyed myself so much that day that I played until half-past two, far longer than I should have done. Then I left for the Home Farm. The rest of the afternoon passed in a flash, and it was after six by the time I returned to the house and found the boys playing Cowboys and Indians all over the drawing room. Nanny, who was obviously on the verge of giving notice, had gone to bed with a migraine and Bella had apparently disappeared.

  “Where’s my wife?” I said to the latest ineffectual nursemaid after I’d lined up the boys and threatened to wallop the first one who opened his mouth.

  “She’s not back from Swansea, sir.”

  I dispatched the bunch to the nurseries and phoned Oxmoon, but Kester had heard nothing from Anna. “I suppose the car’s broken down,” he said worried. “Thank God I’ve rejoined the A.A.”

  I refrained from saying how nice it was that he could afford the subscription. We hung up to continue waiting, and because my unexpected solitude came as a bonus I postponed my bath and sat down at the piano in my work clothes. I was just playing a Mozart rondo when the telephone rang.

  I had had the telephone transferred from the hall to the drawing room so the bell immediately interrupted me. Leaving the piano I grabbed the receiver. “Hullo?”

  “Would this be Mr. Henry Godwin?”

  “Yes.” I didn’t recognize the voice. “Who—”

  “This is the police in Swansea, Mr. Godwin. I’m afraid I’m calling to report a serious accident.”

  At once I saw it all—the coffin, the clergyman, the crowds in black at Penhale Church—I even, in a moment of unforgivable emotional extravagance, saw my children crying at the graveside.

  Shock swept the strength from me so that I had to sink down on the nearest chair. To my horror I realized my prime emotion was relief.

  “An accident?” repeated my voice.

  “Yes, sir. A lorry was coming down the hill and its brakes failed. It caught the car just as the car came round the corner. The car didn’t stand a chance. I’m so sorry, sir, the ambulance came straightaway but—”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Yes, sir. Killed instantly. But the other young lady, the passenger—”

  “What?”

  “—she’s going to be all right. She’s in hospital now and the doctors say—”

  He went on talking and the world went on turning, that messy cruel chaotic world where people died who shouldn’t die and Acts of God bludgeoned those who least deserved them. My unwanted wife had lived. Kester’s cherished wife had died. That was the kind of horror that could drive a man mad.

  Little Anna. Not sexy, not my type, but so bright and intelligent, always so full of interesting conversation, always so kind to Bella who must have bored her to tears, always so friendly to me although I’d made no more than a perfunctory response to her warmth. I thought of her courage. I remembered her walking up to Thomas to plead for Simon Maxwell; I remembered her showing no trace of nerves as she greeted Kester’s guests in an environment that must often have seemed alien and intimidating to her. There’d been no question of Anna not being able to cope with her married life, no question of Anna not understanding her husband or failing to give him the love and support he needed. I thought how the family had looked down on her because she was plain and Jewish and middle-class. I thought how she’d put us all to shame.

  Before I left for hospital I drank some brandy, phoned Bronwen to relay the news to my father and told my housekeeper I’d been called out on business. Then I drove to Swansea. In the emergency ward I found Bella in a drugged sleep. She had a broken arm and pelvis. Something had ruptured or perforated, I forgot which. Of course the fetus had been wiped out.

  I hung around making a nuisance of myself until someone was able to tell me that the lost baby had been female. Another little Melody gone to waste. I knew then that I wasn’t meant to have a daughter.

  There was no point in staying at the hospital since Bella was out of danger and certain to sleep for many hours, so after two more double brandies at the nearest pub I drove to my father’s house. The only person I found there was Lance. Gerry was out being wonderful somewhere, Sian was at the pictures and Evan, my father and Bronwen had gone to Oxmoon to be with Kester. No doubt they had rightly judged his need to be greater than mine.

  “Would you like some tea?” inquired Lance diffidently.

  “Tea? For Christ’s sake, bring me some whisky!”

  As he scuttled away to fetch it I thought of Evan running errands for me long ago. “Good little serf,” I said as Lance returned. I was by this time feeling light-headed with shock and drink. “But aren’t you going to drink with me?”

  “No thanks, I promised Mom I wouldn’t touch liquor till I was eighteen.”

  A serious virtuous little serf—and not so little either. At seventeen he was almost as tall as I was, a thin angular young man, his fairish hair neatly cut and parted, his green eyes respectful behind his glasses. My father and Bronwen had had rows about his education because my father had wanted him to go to Harrow while Bronwen had said that as an unathletic foreigner he would be better off at the local grammar. He was. Having won a place there he already liked it so much that my father had been forced to acknowledge that the world hadn’t ended just because a son of John Godwin’s had gone to grammar school instead of Holy Harrow. Meanwhile the rows about Sian’s education were still going on. I suppose even the happiest marriages have blind spots where the partners have trouble seeing eye to eye.

  “Can I make you a sandwich, Harry?”

  I was touched by this earnest sensitive concern for me and presently found myself confronted by half a chicken stuffed between two slabs of bread adorned with mayonnaise, lettuce and tomatoes. I was touched again.

  “Thanks, Lance. You’re a good chap. Best of the bunch. Not too keen on the others, quite frankly.” That was when I realized I was in a dangerous and indiscreet condition. I bit deep into the sandwich to shut myself up.

  “I wonder what’s happening at Oxmoon,” said Lance at last. I suppose he felt he had to make conversation.

  “Yes. Poor old Kester, poor old sod. Very sad,” I said dutifully, but then I thought of little Anna again and suddenly I had to abandon my sandwich. I drank some more whisky instead. “I’d have liked a wife like that,” I said, and thought: Steady. Watch it. But all the while I was thinking Steady and Watch it my voice was saying: “He had what I really wanted. Same old story. Bloody hell.”

  My new serf was giving me a concerned look. I could see clearly now that he was the child who was like Bronwen. Evan’s resemblance was only skin-deep.

  “Harry, pardon me, but are you sure you wouldn’t like some black coffee?”

  “No, Lance. You’re a good serf and who knows, you may even be magic too, but not even a magic serf can stand between me and my moral duty.” I levered myself to my feet. “I’ve got to go to Oxmoon and tell Kester
how sorry I am she’s dead.”

  Lance looked most alarmed. “But Harry—”

  “No!” I shouted. “Don’t stop me! Must do the done thing. Offer condolences. Imperative.” I poured myself one for the road. “Kester’s grief is my grief,” I said, “because he and I are one person—my cousin Kester, my double image, my other self—and I’m him and he’s me and that’s why I’m grieving now just as he is.” Knocking back the rest of the whisky I headed for the hall.

  “Hold it, Harry,” said Lance urgently behind me. “Let me call Oxmoon and find out if anyone’s there. For all we know they may be heading for a Swansea funeral parlor by this time—don’t Jewish people have to be buried within twenty-four hours?”

  I had no idea but I recognized that this was a sensible, intelligent serf. How lucky I was to have him. “All right, go ahead and phone.” I sat down on the stairs and muttered: “Have to make sure Kester doesn’t turn you into an acolyte.”

  “I’ll use the extension in Dad’s study,” said Lance gently, but after he had disappeared some sixth sense, finely honed by my years of playing the part of Nerves-of-Steel Godwin, told me my new serf was about to stab me in the back. Creeping to the study door I opened it a crack and listened.

  “… gone? Oh God! Gee, listen, Evan, I’ve got Harry here drunk out of his mind and talking of invading Oxmoon to sob on Kester’s shirtfront. When did Mom and Dad leave? If I can somehow keep him talking here till they get back …”

  Traitor. Siding with Evan, another traitorous serf who had switched his allegiance to Kester. I was betrayed. Everyone was against me. Off with their heads.

  I glided away. Lance ran out of the house as I roared off in my car but he was too late.

  I drove to Oxmoon.

  5

  I

  OXMOON LAY WAITING FOR me beneath the stars, those same stars which had apparently conspired to ordain that it would never be mine. Not just the world but the whole universe was against me. Bloody hell. Halting the car I hauled myself out, swayed and steadied myself. I knew I was drunk but I knew too that it didn’t matter because I was benign. I wanted to show poor old Kester that I was a nice chap, just as he was, not merely bloody Cousin Harry who didn’t give a shit. Kester had this coy trick, acquired from his favorite Victorian novelists, of never dropping a family title, and although he called me “Harry” to my face I knew he referred to me sardonically as “Cousin Harry” behind my back.