The Wheel of Fortune (102 page)

It was
The Prisoner of Zenda.

“Yes, miss?” said the waitress.

“Fizzy lemonade, please,” said the girl, “and a currant bun.” She spoke in a rich somber contralto with a tragic foreign accent and sounded like Greta Garbo.

I nearly bit clean through my straw.

The girl, I now saw, was young, perhaps a little younger than I was. She had dark hair, rather lank, a sallow skin and a nose that was large, like mine. Her dark eyes were set wide apart in a heart-shaped face. Opening the book with a sigh of content she settled down to read.

I knew just where she was. I recognized the width of the pages before and after her place and managed to read a few of the words upside down. The hero Rudolph Rassendyll had just clashed finally but inconclusively with the villain Rupert of Hentzau, and Rupert was riding off into the blue. “Thus he vanished,” said the voice in my memory, “reckless and wary, graceful and graceless, handsome, debonair, vile and unconquered.”

“Oh!” said the girl involuntarily, devastated to think she wouldn’t meet Rupert again. Her eyes filled with tears, just as mine once had. I knew she was enjoying herself hugely.

“I say,” I said before I could stop myself, “don’t worry—there’s a sequel.”

“
Is there
?” I had made her day.

“Yes,—it’s called
Rupert of Hentzau.
”

She almost fainted with delight.

“I read both books when I was eight,” I said, “but I was much too young then, and although I was fascinated I only understood about one word in twenty. However I reread them when I was twelve and I’ve been rereading them ever since. I’m mad about Ruritania.”

“So am I!” said the girl.

This was so promising that I couldn’t resist saying: “You sound as if you come from Ruritania yourself! Do you live in Strelsau?”

“No—Zenda!”

We laughed uproariously. Life was suddenly gay, vivid, thrilling.

“Actually,” said the girl, “I come from Berlin. We left last year after Hitler came to power. My father’s a doctor and my name’s Anna Steinberg.” She looked down into her lemonade as if she were shy. “I’m Jewish.”

“Gosh, how exciting!” I said. “I’ve never met anyone Jewish before. My name’s Kester Godwin. Kester’s short for Christopher and it’s spelled K-E-S-T-E-R. I’m fifteen years and one month old and I live out in Gower, near Penhale. I like reading and my favorite Shakespeare play is
Antony and Cleopatra
and I admire Tennyson, Wordsworth and Elizabeth Barrett Browning—but not to excess, of course. I’m wild about the entire history of art, and I like music too—my favorite composers are Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss the Younger—oh, and Rachmaninoff; I’ve worn out two sets of records of his
Second Piano Concerto
and I hope to get a third set for Christmas. I’m quite interested in God too, and philosophy and all that sort of thing, and I like to meditate on Nature, like Wordsworth—I love watching the sea crashing on the rocks at the Worm’s Head and swirling across the sands of Rhossili Bay. In short I believe in Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace, and if there’s ever another war, which God forbid, I shall be a conchie because I don’t believe war can ever be justified. I think that’s all. Oh, I do write a bit, I have to tell you that, but you needn’t worry because I’ll never talk about it. Could you come to tea tomorrow?”

She gazed at me. Then she closed
The Prisoner of Zenda
with a bang, took a deep breath and said, “How do I get there?”

V

“Mum!” I cried triumphantly, surging into the Claremont Hotel ten minutes later. “I’ve just met the Princess of my Dreams!”

“Darling,” said my mother, “I never for one moment doubted that you would!” Her bosom rose with maternal pride. “Sit down, pet, and tell me all about her.”

My mother looked a little anxious when I reported that Anna was Jewish, but said quickly that she had met many charming Jewish people when she had been living in New York. As I rattled on I could almost hear her purring with pleasure.

“Wait till I tell John!” was her final comment. “This proves a boy can be educated at home and still be normal!”

“Oh, but this has nothing to do with sex,” I said hastily. “I like this girl so much that I’d like her even if she were a boy. It’s a meeting of the minds—bodies just don’t come into it.”

“Quite right too at your age,” said my mother. “I wholeheartedly approve.”

So did Dr. and Mrs. Steinberg, who must have raised their eyebrows when informed by their daughter that she had been picked up in a tea shop by the master of Oxmoon. After Mrs. Steinberg and my mother had cautiously ratified my invitation by telephone, all three Steinbergs arrived at Oxmoon in their Armstrong-Siddeley; no doubt Dr. and Mrs. Steinberg wanted to make quite sure that Anna was in no danger of being whisked into white slavery. My mother insisted that they all stayed to tea and the obligatory tour of the house and grounds followed, but finally Anna and I managed to snatch quarter of an hour alone together in the music room, where I played her as many sides as possible of Rachmaninoff’s
Second Piano Concerto.
Every time I turned over the record we paused to discuss how tragic life was. I was in bliss.

My bliss was then terminated by Anna’s departure, but was resumed a week later when I went to tea at the Steinbergs’ modest but comfortable new house high up on one of the hills above the city. (“One of the nicer new middle-class areas,” said my mother to arch-snob Aunt Celia.) Anna said that from upstairs there was a view of Swansea Bay but as I never went upstairs I never saw it. I heard that in these forbidden quarters there were three bedrooms, a maid’s room, a box room and a bathroom. Downstairs there was a long room which ran from the front of the house to the back and was called a “lounge”; drawing-room furniture was arranged at one end of the room and dining-room furniture was kept at the other, while sliding doors divided the room into two whenever necessary. (Mrs. Steinberg always insisted that the doors should be kept open six inches if Anna and I retreated to talk on our own.) The rest of the ground floor consisted of a kitchen, a cloakroom under the stairs and Dr. Steinberg’s study; his surgery was built on at the side of the house and had a separate entrance by the garage. There was a tiny garden which Mrs. Steinberg had made pretty. I thought Anna had a splendid little home and decided that contrary to what I had always heard from my family it must be great fun to belong to the middle classes.

“But oh, how I love Oxmoon!” said Anna. “I think it’s better than any castle at Zenda!”

“Well, Mum and I have improved it a bit,” I said, “but when I come of age I’m going to make it a monument to Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace.”

We had long since agreed that Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace were the only things that mattered in the world. In fact we agreed on everything, and having found the perfect friend I was in such ecstasy that I even survived the ghastly Godwin Christmas reunion without feeling emotionally flattened. In the new year Anna came to lunch at Oxmoon and we had an enthralling debate on God as we walked over Harding’s Down. By the time we returned home we had agreed that God definitely existed and that the proof of this lay in the finest forms of art which represented man’s struggle to reach upwards to an immortal perfection.

“In other words,” said Anna, “through Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace it’s possible to know God.”

“Well … glimpse Him, perhaps. Actually the Christian mystics were divided on whether it was possible to know God at all.”

“Who were the Christian mystics?”

“Well, there was a wonderful down-to-earth motherly woman called Julian of Norwich, and there was the author of the book called
The Cloud of Unknowing,
which I think is the most marvelous title …”

We began to discuss marvelous titles. Of course there was no question of interrupting these earnest intellectual conversations in order to hold hands.

The following week I had lunch with her at her home, but then the moment came when I had to say goodbye to her for eleven weeks. Anna attended boarding school at Eastbourne. The spring term was about to begin.

I wrote long, long letters twice, sometimes three times a week. So did she. Somehow we survived until the end of March and suddenly it was spring, Anna was arriving on the Swansea bus and we were walking down the road to Oxmoon, a large red umbrella sheltering us from the romantically misty drizzle. More visits were exchanged, and at the end of the holidays I summoned all my courage to ask Mrs. Steinberg if I could take Anna to the cinema.

“A matinée, of course,” said Mrs. Steinberg.

“Oh yes!” I said, horrified that I could have been suspected of favoring anything so sinister as an evening performance.

Permission was granted. We went to the Plaza, and armed with a box of chocolates we settled down in the front row of the dress circle to enjoy
Clive of India.

Halfway through the breathtaking Battle of Plassey, Anna whispered to me, “Isn’t it exciting?”.

“
Thrilling!
”

She sighed, I sighed and overwhelmed by the sheer drama of our mutual enjoyment I grabbed her hand. It was the most breathtaking moment in all my fifteen and a half years. Her fingers gripped mine shyly—that may sound like a contradiction in terms, but her initial warm response was at once followed by a slackening of pressure, as if she feared she was being too forward—and for one fleeting moment, as my body became locked into the most extraordinary chain of physical reactions, I had a glimpse of a future which embraced rather more than matinees at the cinema and theological ruminations on Harding’s Down. I dropped her hand as if it were a hot cake but then decided I liked hot cakes. God knows what the rest of the film was about. I was too delirious to care.

The abominable summer term began soon afterwards and lasted twelve weeks, each week seeming as long as a decade. One day in Swansea after a visit to the Library I was passing a jeweler’s shop off Wind Street on my way to the Blue Rabbit when I saw a little locket displayed. It was Victorian but I was prepared to overlook that because the silver heart was engraved romantically with roses. I counted my pocket money, an idle exercise since I knew I could afford the purchase, but Uncle John was forever lecturing me about the evils of extravagance and if I counted my money carefully before each rash expenditure it gave me the illusion that I was being prudent.

In fact I was becoming rather tired of Uncle John lecturing me about money. Someone who glides around in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce should keep his thoughts on financial extravagance to himself, and besides, I was aggrieved because I considered my allowance was too small. Refusing to raise it Uncle John had pronounced that I should learn to manage money by finding out how I could best husband my resources, but I thought this was mean and was constantly yearning for the glorious financial independence of my eighteenth birthday.

I gave Anna the locket and afterwards she wore it always. Everyone thought this was very touching, particularly my mother who was behaving well about Anna even though she couldn’t resist referring a little too often to “Kester’s girlfriend” during conversations with the family.

“Well, personally, Ginevra,” said Aunt Celia, “I don’t see why you should be quite so smug about such an unsuitable friendship. I shouldn’t care at all for Erika making friends with someone Jewish.”

“Don’t worry, Celia darling,” said my mother. “I’m sure anyone Jewish would think twice before they tried to make friends with Erika.”

My mother was very tired of Aunt Celia by that time. She had finally managed to ease Aunt Celia from Oxmoon to Little Oxmoon (vacant since Thomas’s promotion to Penhale Manor), but Aunt Celia, whose favorite occupation was talking of trivialities, was always turning up at Oxmoon for a gossip. This greatly irritated my mother, who was a busy woman, but some spark of compassion for poor old Aunt Celia gave her superhuman patience, and she usually managed to keep her temper.

Meanwhile Erika was improving. Her English was better, her figure was slimmer and in a formal awkward way we tolerated each other’s company. She became more tolerable after Anna and I had launched a Be Nice to Erika campaign. Anna said it must have been horrid for Erika to have had to leave her home in Germany, and even more horrid to have a father who had run off with a Hungarian.

“And imagine having a mother like Aunt Celia!” I added, still seething that my friendship with Anna should have been dismissed so waspishly as “unsuitable.”

Erika was fourteen and had two years to fill in before she could go to finishing school, but Aunt Celia had dithered about her education, hiring a governess but dismissing her, sending Erika to a private school in Swansea but then removing her because Erika disliked it. Finally Aunt Celia asked Simon to tutor Erika in English literature and history, and Simon, driven on by my mother, found he had no choice but to agree. His reluctance arose because he already had his hands full in the schoolroom; not only did he have to prepare me for the school-certificate examinations, but he also had to coach Ricky for Oxford.

“Warwick Mowbray’s an eligible young man,” said Aunt Celia, who spent most of her time sizing up young men as potential husbands for Erika. I think she had even sized me up before I had been so “louche” as to acquire a Jewish girlfriend.

“Christ!” said anti-Semitic, fascist Thomas halfway through the summer holidays. “Is Kester still seeing that German Jewess?”

At first I thought Thomas and Aunt Celia were the only people who could possibly disapprove of my friendship with Anna, but as the summer passed I realized there were other people who looked askance at my situation.

“Write to me at Oxford,” said Ricky, “but do try not to mention Anna more than ten times per letter, there’s a good chap. I hate to say it, but I’m becoming simply flagellated by
ennui
as soon as I hear the hallowed name.”

“You mustn’t let Anna put you off your work,” said Simon when we resumed lessons in September. “Perhaps we could have fewer letters to Eastbourne and more time spent in study?”