The Wheel of Fortune

by Susan Howatch

  “Bella, I do understand, I promise you I do …” Warburton was lean and grizzled, like an elderly greyhound; he had a gentle insistent voice and kind persuasive dark eyes. “… but for your own sake I must advise you not to continue with this pregnancy.”

  “I can’t kill Melody. I can’t do it, I can’t.”

  I put my arm around her and tried to sound as gentle and insistent as Warburton. “Bella,” I said, “this baby isn’t Melody. Melody’s dead. Even if this baby’s a girl it won’t be Melody. It’s no good risking your life to achieve the unachievable.”

  “I’ll be all right. But I must have her.”

  This sort of talk continued for some time before Warburton said, “The risk’s too great, Bella, and it’s not fair on the living to take it. Think of Harry and your boys. You don’t want them to suffer, do you?”

  Bella began to weep. “I’m not going back to that hospital. I’m not going back to that horrid gynecologist.”

  This looked like the thin end of the wedge. Warburton and I exchanged glances.

  “Look, Bella”—Warburton spoke with great care—“I think I can arrange this with a doctor I know who’s in charge of a private nursing home in Swansea. I expect you’ve heard of it. It used to be called the Home of the Assumption, but it’s called Assumption House now and it’s not run by nuns anymore. I don’t think you’d find it such an ordeal to be there for a few days and of course no one need know why you’re there—you can just tell your friends that I’d advised you to take a rest.”

  “For my sake, Bella,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to end up a widower like Kester.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew she was going to die. I felt the color drain from my face. “Christ, Bella—please! You can’t die, you’ve got to live, I couldn’t stand it if you died—”

  How would I ever live with the guilt? I’d been criminally irresponsible, assuming she could cope with the burden of contraception, and it was my fault she was pregnant. If she died in childbirth I would have killed her, but I didn’t want Bella dead—it was our marriage, not her life, that I wanted to terminate. I somehow had to keep her alive for the divorce court.

  “Bella, I love you—please, please do as Dr. Warburton says—”

  “Do you really love me, Harry?” Tears were streaming down her face.

  “I love you.”

  “Then I’ll do it. You mean more to me than anyone, Harry, more even than Melody.”

  I wondered if anyone had ever died from pure guilt before. I felt as if I were fatally ill.

  Later I said to Warburton, “She’ll be all right, won’t she?”

  “Oh yes, it’s actually a very simple operation.”

  But not so simple when your reproductive organs have been messed around by a car smash. Warburton did write a warning letter but after a preliminary examination the doctor at Assumption House decided that the old boy was huffing and puffing about nothing. One does occasionally, hear of these young doctors who fancy a spot of surgery and think they’re God. But this one was due for a particularly vile disillusionment because Bella’s case turned into an abortionist’s nightmare. The operation began but the recent wounds ruptured and while the doctor and the nurses all fought to save her she bled steadily to death on the operating table.

  V

  Warburton was appalled to hear there had been no blood on hand for a transfusion. He said he’d never have let Bella go there if he’d known. The poor old fellow was beside himself with distress. I felt sorry for him.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “She was fated. I knew she was going to die no matter what we did. I knew it.”

  I had sunk into that sodden form of shock which resembles an alcoholic stupor. I was resigned, untalkative, barely aware of my surroundings. Warburton had gone with me to Assumption House. I hadn’t yet got around to thinking I could sue everyone in sight for negligence, but in fact I never did go to law in revenge. There seemed no point. Bella was dead and nothing could bring her back.

  Eventually I was taken to see her. No pink-and-white skin anymore. It was an ashen color. But the shining mouse-brown hair was the same. I stroked it. Then I held her hand for a moment but my mind was empty. I was reminded of how I had felt during the war when a comrade had died. The anger and grief came later but at first all one saw was the void.

  I was in the void and I had forgotten how bleak it was, with all emotion absent and nothing in my mind except an absolute awareness of the end.

  When I left the nursing home the only person I wanted to see was Bronwen so I asked Warburton to drive me to my father’s house. Warburton was worried about me but I said I was used to death, I could manage, I certainly wasn’t going to have a nervous breakdown like bloody Kester. I didn’t say “bloody Kester,” of course. I kept it dignified and said “my cousin.”

  Looking more worried than ever Warburton drove away and I was left to find my magic lady.

  No one seemed to be at home. Presently I gave up ringing the doorbell and reviewed the list of possible occupants. Evan was away in London reading theology at King’s, Gerry was up at Oxford—naturally he’d won his bloody scholarship—and Sian was away at her new school, Bedales, which represented her parents’ attempt to compromise between a socially acceptable girls’ public school and a progressive coeducational environment. That left Lance, but it was early in the afternoon and he was almost certainly not home yet from the grammar. My father would be out either playing golf or adorning his latest boardroom. That left Bronwen except that it didn’t because she wasn’t there. I sat down on the doorstep to wait, and after five minutes she returned with some dry cleaning.

  Some unknown time later I was sitting at the kitchen table in front of my third cup of tea and saying, “I want to grieve. If I grieve it’ll mean I loved her and then I won’t have to feel so guilty. I want to grieve but nothing happens.”

  And Bronwen said, “There is no timetable for grief. Grief isn’t a train which you catch at the station …”

  She went on talking, and the heavily accented English words sank softly deep into my consciousness like feathers falling from a great height. I couldn’t take in what she said but I liked to listen to the rhythms of her speech because they were so soothing. Then I realized I was understanding more than I thought I was because I could discern the shape of her meaning. I could see the circle of time, and in the middle of the circle a piano was playing, the piano of memory, sending notes ricocheting from one side of the circle to the other.

  “… and you’ll hear her echo in time.”

  But I was already hearing it. I saw the child who had talked of raising the Devil on Rhossili Downs. I saw us running along the beach and laughing in the dunes and drinking lemonade in the potting shed.

  “I suppose I’d have been driven to divorce her in the end,” I said, “but perhaps I could only have faced it if I’d met someone else I wanted to marry … but I never did, did I, and now I daresay I never shall.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Oh, I’m not very clever with women, Bronwen, not really. I can never work out what to do with them outside the bedroom, I can’t talk to them at all.”

  “You’re talking to me.”

  “You’re different. You’re magic. I suppose the truth is that I want to marry someone just like you, but how am I ever going to find a second magic lady? I can’t believe she exists.” I was dimly aware that I was talking like a Freudian casebook, since I regarded Bronwen as my mother, but luckily Bronwen never bothered with people like Freud; she was much too busy being sensible.

  “I’m not magic, Harry!”

  “Oh yes, you are. You’re magic because you know what all this means while I’m floundering around in a black fog and catching occasional glimpses of something unspeakable.”

  “Your circle’s clouded,” said Bronwen in her best matter-of-fact voice, “but that’s normal after a tragedy.”

  “Perhaps … But Bronwen, I’m haunted by
the thought that Bella was fated, that there was nothing anyone could have done to save her, and that’s a terrible thought, isn’t it, because it implies a preordained and inescapable future.”

  Bronwen said without hesitation, “I agree Bella was fated, but not in the way you fear. In our lives there are choices which have to be made, and our freedom to choose means we have at least some control over our fate: Bella chose, either consciously or unconsciously, to become pregnant again, and that was her choice, not the choice of some cruel god in charge of a preordained future.”

  “But she had no real freedom to choose! She made the choice as the result of what happened to her when she was thirteen!”

  “Yes, but don’t you see, she didn’t have to live the rest of her life in the shadow of what happened to her when she was thirteen! She could have chosen to live her life differently but the truth was she just didn’t have the will to ring the changes—as I did, for instance, when I went to Canada and escaped from a situation that was destroying me.”

  “You mean—what you’re saying is—”

  “I’m saying that the circle of time is full of little circles and those little circles can be prisons, people can be locked up in them without the will to force their way out. That’s what happened to Bella. She was locked up in this circle with you, just as you were locked up in it with her. You knew that if she stayed there she’d die but your will alone wasn’t sufficient to save her and so she was fated, fated to remain strapped to the wheel of her fortune and spun on to the death she couldn’t avoid.”

  I was mesmerized. This was it. This was my magic lady working at full steam. She spoke in the brisk sensible voice of someone who describes an absolute reality, and even the most hardened cynic would have found it impossible to sneer.

  I took another deep breath. “Bronwen, there’s something else I must talk to you about. Bella’s isn’t the only circle I’ve been sharing. I’m sharing another one that’s far, far more sinister.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” said Bronwen, “but sharing a circle needn’t be sinister and it needn’t be unusual either, far from it—people live their lives and other people weave in and out and make patterns there. That’s normal.”

  “This isn’t normal, not by a long chalk. In fact sometimes it scares me though I’m not sure why it should.”

  She looked steadily at me. “You’re talking about the circle you share with Kester.”

  “Yes. He doesn’t just weave in and out. He’s there all the time. His circle’s my circle. We’re … how did you put it just now—”

  “You’re both strapped to the same wheel of fortune.”

  “Yes, it’s as if …” But I couldn’t say it was as if we were one person. That really did sound too neurotic.

  “… as if you were one person,” said Bronwen, treating this as a perfectly rational statement. “But no, that’s almost certainly an illusion caused by the fact that you feel the circle’s not big enough to contain you both.”

  “But what do I do to expand it?”

  “I don’t know, Harry. I’m not a fortune teller. Nor would I dream of telling you how to run your life. The choice is yours.”

  We were silent for a time.

  “I could go to Herefordshire now,” I said at last. “Now Bella’s dead I could leave Gower and start afresh in a new circle.”

  Bronwen said nothing.

  “I think I’ll have to give that very serious consideration,” I said. “Yes, very serious consideration indeed. And so I will. But not just at the moment. Later.”

  And there I went again.

  I could have stopped. But I went on.

  VI

  Bronwen came home with me to help with the children, but she said I had to tell them the news myself. I panicked, said I couldn’t, but she was stern with me and said the one thing I could still do for Bella was to look after her children and try to be a good father.

  That trapped me. I felt myself being locked up in yet another circle, this time with those four wretched little boys, and this time I knew I was never going to have the will to get out. Guilt is an all-powerful jailer.

  Well, we got back and I told Nanny who looked appalled and tried to offer me some conventional words of sympathy but I couldn’t stand that so I got rid of her, rounded up the boys in the nursery and tried to say what Bronwen had told me to say but I got in a muddle and made a mess of it and wound up saying, “Christ, I’m so sorry,” which certainly wasn’t in Bronwen’s script. What a hopeless father I was! In fact I knew now that I’d had no business becoming a father at all. I’d only done it to keep Bella occupied—and to show certain people how successful I was at reproduction.

  Four bright-eyed, pink-cheeked, noisy boys became as quiet as little white mice. Then after a long interval someone gave a sob, and the next moment they were all bawling at the top of their voices. Poor little devils, I was so sorry for them but what did I do next? In despair I shouted for Bronwen, and once she had come to my rescue I retreated at last to the piano to put myself beyond the reach of my pain.

  VII

  The funeral went off without a hitch. I’m good at funerals. My father told me once that Uncle Robert used to survive them by privately reciting classical verbs, and I had always found this a most useful trick for keeping the horrors of ritualized death under control.

  I embarked on the Latin conjugations.

  No point in thinking of Bella dying in her twenties as the indirect result of our childhood tragedy, no sense in thinking of my part in putting her in that bloody coffin burdened with stinking flowers. Better just to say she was fated and recite amo, amas, amat or—more efficacious still since they required deeper concentration—all the tenses of fero, ferre, túli, látum. Once I started remembering how I’d abdicated the responsibility of birth control I might as well have booked myself into the nearest lunatic asylum and asked for its best padded cell.

  Except for Kester all the family dutifully turned up at Penhale Church and admired my performance as the model widower. Kester, who was still living quietly with Declan in Dublin, sent a telegram. It read: LETTER FOLLOWS PLEASE DONT DESTROY IT UNREAD GENUINELY SORRY KESTER.

  I was too busy ordering a coffin to give more than a passing shudder at this threat to communicate with me, but after the funeral a chunky envelope arrived bearing an Irish stamp and addressed to me in Kester’s flowery handwriting. I couldn’t face opening the letter immediately, but after I had collected a prescription from Warburton and after I had taken two of the new soothing pills doled out by the chemist, I summoned my shredded nerves of steel and ripped open the envelope. Inside was a single sheet of large white typewriting paper. I pondered on its significance. Was it indicative of a fantasy, like his novels, or merely of a businesslike approach? I didn’t know but I shuddered irrationally.

  My dear Harry …

  Odd how we all addressed each other as “dear” on paper. Sinister.

  … I’m sorry about Bella. Please accept my sincere sympathy and believe me when I say I’m not using the word “sincere” as a formality. I know better than anyone what it means to lose one’s wife as the result of a tragedy—and this leads me, of course, to apologize for those terrible things I said to you after Anna’s death. The shock and grief had driven me mad, but I’m better now and certainly well enough to hope that you can forgive me. How curious it is that we should lead such parallel lives …

  I dropped the letter and headed for the whisky decanter. Then I remembered that Warburton had told me not to drink when I had taken the pills. Bloody hell. Scrabbling on the floor, I retrieved the letter.

  … parallel lives, both born in the same year, both with older brothers who died young, both marrying before we were twenty-one, both becoming widowers within months of each other. I suppose these coincidences have no deep significance but I can’t help feeling they should draw us together, not drive us apart. Looking back I fear the gulf between us has been largely my fault; I’ve been very unjust to various members o
f my family in the past, but I shall never forget how kind everyone was after Anna’s death. Even you wanted to be kind, I can see that now. In short I think it’s time I abandoned paranoia, turned over a new leaf and gave my poor long-suffering family a respite!

  Anyway, it’s because my attitude to the family has changed that I shall now venture to hope that we may become more at ease with each other in future. Bosom friendship is of course too much to hope for (the very idea no doubt sends identical shivers down our spines) but why can’t we be casual acquaintances who can smile and say hullo to each other without having apoplexy? Let’s dispose of the ghastly charade Aunt Teddy invented in which we meet for a drink and end up talking idiotically about religion in a muck sweat of panic! Let’s instead just accept each other’s presence in the parish of Penhale and talk about how frightful the weather is if ever we bump into each other. I think we could get along very well on that basis; it would certainly take the melodrama out of our peculiar Doppelgänger situation …”

  Doppelgänger. The double. The mirror image. No reader hypnotized by a master novelist ever turned the page so quickly as I turned over Kester’s letter to find out what he had written on the other side.

  … and besides, I’d like to be on speaking terms with you so that I can see your boys now and then. Don’t worry, I’ve got over my jealousy that you’ve got four sons and I’ve got none. Curiously enough it was Anna’s death that helped me to come to terms with this problem, because once I knew I had no wife—and of course I’ll never remarry—I realized it followed as a corollary that I’ll have no children. However I do like children so much, and if you could spare Hal for the odd hour or two occasionally I really would be very pleased.

  I’ll be returning to Oxmoon in time for Easter. I don’t think I’m quite strong enough yet to face a full-scale Godwin reunion, but if you want to drop in with Hal and say hullo I think I can just about manage to say hullo back. You needn’t have a drink if you don’t want to. We don’t even have to talk. We can just exchange greetings and run in opposite directions.