The Wheel of Fortune (114 page)

By this time I had taken another peek at the estate books. How I now regretted my inattention during Uncle John’s past lecture on the subject! Groaning audibly I made a new effort to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In each book, as I already knew, there were twelve columns. These were headed
PARISHES, TENEMENTS, TENANTS, QUANTITIES, TENURES, ARREARS OF RENT, RENT, TOTAL, ALLOWANCES, RECEIVED, ARREARS DUE AND OBSERVATIONS.
The first column was explained by the fact that Oxmoon was not entirely confined to the parish of Penhale, and the rest by the fact that in addition to the major farms on the estate there were numerous cottages and small holdings all of which had to be accounted for. So far so good. But the trouble was that although Thomas’s entries were neatly inscribed, they meant nothing to me. I had no idea whether the figures were good, bad or indifferent, and as soon as I got to the
OBSERVATIONS
column I was plunged into mystery again be
_:
cause Thomas had used cryptic abbreviations such as
No cow. Month allowed,
or
6 aeres oats
N.G. I looked at the heading
QUANTITIES
, which was divided into two columns. One column was headed £.s.d., so that constituted no problem; even I knew that £.s.d. meant pounds, shillings and pence. But what was A. R. P., the heading of the second column? Obviously Uncle John had once told me, and obviously the translation was very simple, but I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what it was.

Pushing the books aside in exasperation I turned to the correspondence, but here too I was quickly at sea. There were letters from various seed merchants, a variety of bills and receipts, a peculiar communication from a large dairy in Swansea and a convoluted government memorandum about the tuberculin testing of cows. In addition to all these communications which meant nothing to me there were numerous
billets-doux
from tenants, including one from a man who whined that I owed him money for a cart horse. (Why did one still use cart horses in these days of mechanized transport? Perhaps the man was drunk or unstable.) As I toiled on, aware of a sinking feeling which I unerringly identified as boredom, the telephone kept ringing and I realized that all kinds of tedious people were trying to see me. What was I to do? This was obviously the sort of job which not only consumed one’s time completely but reduced one to a nervous wreck within twenty-four hours unless, like Thomas, one had the hide of an elephant and a lust for the trivial.

I began to feel persecuted and frantic.

“I’ve got to write,” I said to Anna, “or I’ll go mad, but how can I abandon Oxmoon until I’m sure it’s in safe hands?” And I added in despair to Ricky when he dropped in later for a drink: “I don’t just need an estate manager, I need a Devoted Factotum—and not merely someone like Simon, whose limit is answering the begging letters and dealing with the vicar. I need someone clever and personable, diplomatic and efficient, someone who gets on well with Simon and Anna, someone I like and trust—” I broke off and stared at him. “Oh God, Ricky—”

“Well, go on! What are you waiting for?”

“Would you—could you—will you—”

“Of course! My dear Kes, I thought you were never going to ask …”

VIII

Enter Warwick Mowbray.

Apart from mentioning that he had passed through a homosexual phase when I was at an age to find such behavior acutely embarrassing, I can see now that I’ve given no clear impression of Ricky. Yet our friendship was so strong that it survived even his horrific declaration of passion and his prolonged absence afterward at the University of Grenoble. The credit for the survival had undoubtedly been his; he had worked so hard to eradicate his mistake that by the time I married Anna I could meet him without embarrassment, and in the midst of my troubles he seemed the ideal person to give me a helping hand.

The Mowbrays were an old Gower family who lived in a pretty Queen Anne house above Oxwich Bay, near Porteynon. They owned no more than five acres of land but there had been one or two useful marriages in the nineteenth century, and since then they had lived comfortably. “A sad anticlimax to the bad old days!” Ricky would comment, and indeed the Mowbrays’ long descent into respectability after a typical Gower history in which they had dabbled in many professions but excelled at smuggling did contain a note of elegiac sadness. Ricky said he was sick of his immediate ancestors who had cared for nothing but horseflesh, and he vowed he was going to inject a shot of glamour into the family tree.

I recognized a kindred spirit.

Ricky and I were alike—yet not alike. His father had been killed in the war, so as in my own case, the paternal influence on his life had been shadowy. But frivolous shallow little Esther Mowbray was very different from my mother, and Ricky’s Uncle Adam, who corresponded in theory to my Uncle John, had taken only a nominal interest in his upbringing. Adam Mowbray, a solicitor in Swansea, was a man who exploded the myth that the legal profession tends to mummify the human spirit. Good-looking, twice divorced and a frequent visitor to the racetrack, he cut a very dashing figure in his snow-white Lagonda. It was reputed he paid his alimony bills by putting the family eye for horseflesh to a profitable account.

“Oh God, don’t let’s bother about that awful old bore Freddy Fairfax, Kes,” said Ricky once he became my Devoted Factotum. “So unglamorous! Let’s rope in Adam to help with your affairs.”

I hadn’t forgotten how Fairfax had offered me only veiled criticism when I had asked him for help in seeking a new estate manager. I decided that once again the ax should fall on the firm of Fairfax, Walters and Wyn-Williams.

“My dear Kester,” said Adam after he had thanked me charmingly for appointing him the solicitor for the Oxmoon estate, “I must confess I think you’re wise to dispense with old Fairfax—he’s a bit over the hill these days, I’m afraid. … An estate manager? Oh yes, nothing easier. I know just the man who’d suit you.”

This was all most gratifying and the huge burden of my anxiety finally began to dissolve. I kept thinking how lucky I was to have a friend like Ricky who could show me how to solve all my problems.

Like me Ricky had not gone away to school; Esther had been unable to bear the thought of being deprived of his company. But unlike me he had been badly taught by a succession of inept tutors before Simon had prepared him for Oxford, and he had resented his poor education. This resentment colored his attitude to his mother whom he blamed for what he considered to be the inadequacies of his upbringing. Although professing to adore her he often told me what a tiresome woman she was and expressed the opinion that all women were little better than certified lunatics. Since my mother was supervising Oxmoon with such success I could hardly agree with him, but I did see that Esther Mowbray’s talents were limited to the occasional scatty game of bridge. Ricky despised such pastimes, judged them “fatally lacking in glamour” and spent much time wishing he could have grown up in the Eighteen Nineties. He once confided to me that he occasionally burned incense in his room while he reread
The Yellow Book.

Five years his junior I found this behavior far more interesting than playing cricket and doing the done thing, and when we were young I hero-worshiped him spiritedly. My admiration was welcome. I can see now that he was lonely and enjoyed having me as an acolyte, just as I myself had once enjoyed Evan’s company. Certainly I brought out the best in Ricky; beneath his brittle catty manner which I found so thrillingly sophisticated he was both kind and sensitive. He wrote poetry. I admired his poems and even Simon, a stern critic, thought they showed promise. But as I grew older it was not this serious side of Ricky which captivated me but his lighthearted irreverence. Life was always more fun when Ricky was around. Life had glamour.

The Gower Peninsula might be a quiet country backwater, but not when Ricky Mowbray was drinking gin-and-lime on the terrace at Oxmoon and quoting the
mots justes
of Oscar Wilde. “ ‘We’re all in the gutter,’ said Oscar, ‘but some of us are looking at the stars.’ You and I, my dear Kes, have our glances riveted implacably on the divine glamour of the Milky Way. Your cousin Harry, on the other hand, and your feral porcine uncle Thomas are face down in the mud and peering through the drain at the sewer.”

But Ricky could keep his catty tongue well in control. He was charming to my mother, who liked him. He was deferential to Aunt Celia, who doted on him. And he was busy playing Prince Charming to Cousin Erika, who had confessed to Anna that she loved him. Ricky had been thinking of marrying her ever since he had returned from Grenoble a year ago in the summer of ’37.

At first I thought this was a splendid idea. Not only did I believe with profound relief that it proved Ricky’s sexual normality, but I felt glad for Erika who in her bovine way was more than worthy of a decent husband. It also occurred to me gradually, so gradually that for a long time the thought was merely an unformulated intuition in my mind, that four was a more comfortable number in the circumstances than three. I was unable to analyze this opinion, but after I was married I found I felt more at ease when Ricky, Anna and Erika were all present than when Ricky and Anna were my only companions. Since the discomfort was so nebulous I said nothing to Anna, not because I wished to hide it from her but because I thought it was unimportant, and I only started to worry actively about the situation when Ricky, after a couple of gin-and-limes, made a remark that I found quite un acceptable.

It was a warm October evening not long after the dramatic severance of my leading strings, and Ricky and Erika had been invited to dinner to celebrate his appointment as my Devoted Factotum. Erika for some reason was late; Anna was still upstairs changing; Ricky and I were alone together on the terrace.

We were discussing the international situation which at that time was gilded in a rosy pacifist glow, and I had just remarked that thrilled though I was by Mr. Chamberlain’s
tour de force
at Munich I couldn’t help thinking the long-term outlook was sinister in the extreme.

“I agree,” said Ricky. “That’s why I think it could be useful to have a German wife. It would be the only hope of ensuring glamour under an army of occupation.”

There was so much wrong with this statement that at first I could only boggle at him but finally I said, “Well, I’m a pacifist, but the last thing I’d ever do would be to fraternize with the army of occupation, particularly if they’d requisitioned my home and taken my wife off to a concentration camp.”

“But my dear Kes, one has to survive!”

“Without Anna and Oxmoon I’d rather be dead. Ricky, you don’t just want to marry Erika because she’s got a German passport, do you?”

“Don’t be absurd! I want to marry her for her divine blond hair—and for her divinely dreary Teutonic mind!”

I boggled again. “Ricky,” I said, “you shouldn’t be catty about your almost-fiancée, you know. Are you quite sure you want to propose?”

“Of course I’m sure! I’m going to pop the question tonight when I take her home! I’ll halt the car and we’ll gaze up at the star-spangled Welsh night and—”

“Ricky, be serious.” I was by now most perturbed. “If you’re not in love with Erika, then why the devil are you marrying her?”

Ricky flushed. This was unusual. He prided himself on being debonair at all times. “For Christ’s sake, Kes, I
am
in love with her! What’s the matter with you?”

When I saw he was sincere I felt more baffled than ever because I could see now with perfect clarity that he wasn’t the least in love, no matter how much he yearned to believe that he was. I was still only eighteen but suddenly it was as if he were my age and I were the one who was twenty-three. My recent experiences had helped me to grow up; my writer’s obsession with character was steadily honing my perception of others; I looked at Ricky then and recognized a man in a muddle who hid all manner of problems behind a pseudo-sophisticated mask.

That evening as soon as the guests were gone I confided in Anna.

“How very peculiar,” she said baffled, but added thoughtfully: “I wonder if he feels that four would be a more comfortable number than three.”

We stared at each other. Then I said, “This gets more bizarre than ever. I certainly feel that. But why?”

“I’ve noticed,” said Anna, “that when the three of us are alone together, he’s the odd one out and although he’s always very nice about it perhaps he minds more than we think. Yet when Erika’s here I naturally spend a lot of time chatting to her and then Ricky has you to himself and doesn’t feel so left out anymore.”

“Oh God,” I said, my fertile imagination combining with my new maturity to form an exceptionally unpalatable vision. “Anna, this is all much more bizarre than we think it is, and particularly since I’m convinced Ricky isn’t acting deliberately.” But before I could explain this judgment I had to tell her about his homosexual declaration when I was sixteen. I would have told her before but a confused compassion mingled with an acute embarrassment had kept me silent; it was simply an incident on which I preferred not to dwell. “… so although he thinks he’s got over these homosexual inclinations,” I concluded rapidly, summing up the present situation, “perhaps he hasn’t, perhaps they’re still there, perhaps his marriage to Erika is all bound up with his feelings for me.”

“Heavens!” said Anna, who had barely heard of homosexuality and could be excused for reacting with amazement to this most convoluted example I was offering her. “But darling, are you sure? You know how often you get carried away by your wonderful imagination—”

“I know I’m right.” And now I saw Ricky not with the eye of friendship but with the eye of a writer bent on detached analysis, the eye that was learning how to strip a man’s character to the bone in an attempt to pry into the mystery of his personality.

“Well, if you really are right,” said Anna, who despite her love of romance had a practical streak which often reminded me of my mother, “I think we ought to stop worrying about Ricky and start worrying about Erika.”