The Wheel of Fortune (124 page)

Her pink-and-white skin looked very smooth, very fresh. She had no spots.

We stood there in silence, neither of us sure how the ritual of parting could be best observed, but at last Bella said suddenly, “I like you.”

“I like you too.”

“Even if we can’t make the Devil appear tomorrow, could we still be friends?”

“All right. I mean, yes. Of course. I don’t have any special friend here at the moment.”

“I’ve never had a friend,” said Bella. She held out her hand. “ ’Bye. See you tomorrow. Same time?”

“Same time.”

We shook hands and parted.

Stumbling down from the ridge I ran all the way to Sweyn’s Houses where I collapsed in a heap to sort out my thoughts: The wild ponies eyed me strangely but went on browsing without moving away. To them I was no doubt just another mad human, nothing to be excited about, just another crazy boy who’d gone completely round the bend.

But although I thought I would feel guilty I was in fact aware only of relief. The pain had eased. So had my utter despair. I thought, I shan’t mind anything now; I’ll just shut it out and forget.

Walking back to Oxmoon dry-eyed I even faced damned Kester with a smile.

I was going to survive.

III

We used to meet on Rhossili Downs or, if the weather was unpromising, we’d bicycle to Penhale Manor and meet at the potting shed. After we’d made love we’d drink fizzy lemonade and eat biscuits and talk all about our awful families and how rotten life was. I even told her I hated Harrow.

“… and all I really want to do is play the piano.”

“All I really want to do is fuck.”

Bella’s governess returned but lessons took place only in the mornings and in the afternoons Bella was allowed to go off on her own. The governess was obviously only too pleased to be rid of her and naturally never dreamed that a thirteen-year-old girl might go astray in such a tranquil rural backwater. On the fine days we would meet at the “fuck rock,” as Bella called it, and scramble down to the beach to explore the sands. If it was warm enough we bathed, and afterwards among the sand burrows we’d make love and talk and make love again.

Once she said, “Why are you so dark when the rest of your family are fair?” and I told her about my mother.

“I feel angry with her for dying,” I said. “Because she died there’s no one who understands how I feel about the piano.”

“But she couldn’t help dying! My mother walked out on me when I was three months old and disappeared into the blue with an American sailor, and she jolly well could help it! How do you think I feel about that?”

“About a hundred times angrier than I ever do. What about your father? Is he nice to you?”

“Oh, he’s gaga, poor old thing, can’t speak since his last stroke. What about your father? Is he much good?”

“Wonderful. Best father in the world.”

“You’re jolly lucky. I’ve only got Eleanor and beastly old Aunt.”

Back at Oxmoon my appetite returned. I unpacked my possessions and sorted them out. I even found it easy to make the correct responses when people talked to me.

“Now, Harry, we must get down to this ghastly business of packing your school trunk! I expect you’re looking forward to going back, aren’t you?”

“Oh yes, Aunt Ginevra! Can’t wait!”

I was dreading it.

“I’ll write, of course,” I said to Bella at our last meeting. “But will your aunt try to read your letters?”

“Don’t worry, Annie-May’s walking out with the postman. I’ll arrange something with them. When will you be back?”

“December the sixteenth.”

“It’ll be chilly in the potting shed! Maybe I could lock my governess in the lavatory, drug Aunt’s tea and smuggle you up to my room!”

We both laughed at the thought of Miss Stourham lying in a drugged stupor as the incarcerated governess screamed for help.

“Oh Harry, it’s been such fun! I’ll miss you. I’ll write too, of course, but I’m not good at writing so don’t expect too much.”

I expected far too much but I wasn’t disappointed. Every word she wrote, no matter how illiterate, was precious to me. I used to carry her letters around inside my vest next to my skin, no mean feat when one considers the amount of time one spends at school changing into and out of games clothes. I kept each letter till the next one arrived but I didn’t dare hold on to them indefinitely; I was too afraid some sadist might discover them and tell the world I was being peculiar by having a correspondence with a girl. That would have been the last straw.

Dear Harry,
said one of Bella’s letters,
how are you, I’m all right but bored, bored, bored, Miss Frensham says my work is terrible and Aunt says I’m impossible but who cares. Oh, here’s some news, Eleanor’s fallen in love with your uncle Thomas, she says she hasn’t but she’s had her hair permed and she’s stopped wearing trousers and she says maybe some men aren’t so bad after all, so what are we to think? How did all this happen, you’ll ask, well, Farmer Llewellyn had a pig to sell and Eleanor and Thomas both wanted it and they bid and bid against each other and got very fierce but Eleanor gives way and Thomas is pleased and so he buys her a drink and they suddenly find they’ve got a lot in common and who knows, maybe they’ll get married, after all they’re pretty old and they might as well. Thomas looks at me as if I’m a pig that definitely ought to go to market but he says he knows what hell it is being the youngest of a grown-up family, so perhaps he’s not so bad. But you’re a hundred times better. I miss you I miss you I miss you, lots of love,
BELLA.

This sort of letter arrived every week until the beginning of December, when I received a short note which read:
Dear Harry, I’m ill with flu, can’t write, doctor about to arrive, love
B.

This alarmed me. People could die of flu. I grabbed a pen and wrote:
Dear Bella, I was very sorry to hear you’re ill. Please write the instant you’re better—or if you’re too weak just tell Annie-May to put “Still alive” on a postcard and send it to me. I shall worry about you all the time until I hear from you again.

But I heard nothing. Anxiety gnawed me but before I could begin to be seriously worried; my housemaster sent for me to say that my father was coming to Harrow to take me out to lunch. By that time the end of the term was only a week away.

I immediately forgot Bella. I was beside myself with hope and joy. There could be only one reason why my father was making a special journey to Harrow when the end of the term was so near. Bronwen was coming back. He wanted to tell me the good news in person.

Outwardly calm but inwardly seething with excitement, I ran to meet him as he arrived in his car.

He didn’t bother to get out. He just said, “Hullo—jump in,” as if the extraordinary visit were the height of normality, so taking my cue from him I feigned nonchalance and slid briskly into the passenger seat. I thought, He’s saving the news up as a surprise! And I marveled at his superhuman self-control.

I hazarded a remark or two about rugger, but when he replied in monosyllables I realized he was uninterested in sustaining a conversation. I supposed his excitement was too great. I was just wondering if jugged hare would be on the menu again at the inn when the car swerved abruptly off the country lane, turned through an open gateway and came to a jerky halt in a field. I was so startled that I never even gasped. I just stared at my father in disbelief and wondered what on earth was going on.

He switched off the engine and turned to face me. His striking eyes were expressionless yet when I looked at them I turned cold.

“Harry,” said my father in the calmest voice he could manage, “I’ve come to talk to you about Belinda Stourham.”

IV

How did I survive? I don’t know. How did he survive? I don’t know that either.

I remember that beyond a wire fence which divided the field six cows stood chewing cud. The December sky was gray; the nearby hedgerow was a mass of black spikes; the field was streaked with mud. And there were six cows. One, two, three, four, five, six. I counted them over and over again.

The inevitable disaster had happened. Dr. Warburton had arrived at Stourham Hall to treat Bella for flu and had become suspicious. Bella hadn’t realized, or hadn’t wanted to realize, that a pregnancy existed; perhaps she had hoped it would go away.

Six cows in a field. One—two—three—four—

“No, don’t trouble to deny you’ve had carnal knowledge of her,” said my father, terminating my mechanical arithmetic. “I can see from your face that you have.”

Carnal knowledge. What an extraordinary phrase. Victorian. Puritan. Peculiar. And this was a man who had kept a working-class mistress and fathered four illegitimate children. I had a sudden terrifying glimpse into a divided personality, of a complex stranger who existed secretly beyond the shining mask of the hero I loved. Fear paralyzed me. I couldn’t speak.

“How often did this happen?”

Six cows in a field. One—two—

“Harry, answer me. I must know when and how often. You see, perhaps there was someone else. Perhaps this has nothing to do with you after all. When did it first happen?”

I somehow managed to answer, “Three days after I came back home from school for the holidays,”

“And after that?”

“Oh, every day till I went back.”

Silence. I couldn’t look my father in the face but I saw his knuckles whiten as he gripped the wheel. At last he said, “And during all that time there was no sign of menstruation?”

“What’s that?”

“Oh my God,” said my father. “Oh my God.” He put both hands on the wheel and buried his face in his forearms.

We sat there together in the field with the six cows. I felt very ill. A long time passed before my father was able to whisper: “Didn’t you realize this might happen?”

Didn’t I realize this might happen. Had to answer that. He seemed to expect an answer.

“No, sir.” I swallowed, made a great effort. “I thought girls couldn’t have babies till they were grown up. I don’t really know how girls work, sir. In fact I’m not too sure how boys work either. Of course I sort of knew what to do—all the jokes at school—but … well, no one ever told me, you see. No one ever explained.”

My father said with great difficulty: “You didn’t feel … it never occurred to you … that you could ask me to explain things to you?”

“Oh no, sir. I thought you might be upset.”

“But what the devil do you think I am now?”

I couldn’t stay in the car a moment longer. Scrambling out I took great gulps of the cold harsh country air and began to count the cows again.

“How could you behave like this,
how could you
?” The door slammed as he too left the car. “I still can’t believe—can’t accept—can’t imagine how this could have happened. … Give me one good reason why you felt driven to behave in such a way!”

There was only one answer to that. “It seemed the right thing—the only thing—to do,” I said, and leaning against the side of the car I broke down and began to cry.

V

“Oh God Almighty,” said my father, “oh Jesus Christ, what a bloody nightmare, oh God, what am I going to do.”

“Papa …” It was six years since I had called him by that outmoded Victorian name. The boys at prep school had laughed at me for calling him that, so I had quietly scrubbed it from my vocabulary and called him Father instead. But now I was a child again, the lost little boy who had misbehaved in the railway carriage, and this time there was no magic lady waiting to save me at my journey’s end. “Papa, don’t hate me, I couldn’t bear it, you’re all I’ve got, everyone else has been wiped out, if you turn against me I’d want to kill myself, I’d want to die—”

Awful neurotic melodrama spewed out of me like the blood of a terminal hemorrhage. I don’t know which of us was more shocked. Kester was the only one who was ever allowed to be so disgustingly histrionic; one black sheep’s enough for any family.

“Be quiet. Stop that at once. Pull yourself together.”

I choked, gasped for air but still felt as if I were suffocating. “Help me,” I sobbed. “Help me—”

He gripped my shoulders and gave me a shake. “Hold fast. Stand firm. I can’t help you if you’re hysterical. I’m here, I’ll help you but you must be calm.”

I tried to be calm. I watched the cows, who were placidly chewing their cud, but I couldn’t count them, not anymore. It was beyond me. The numbers wouldn’t come.

My father said it was cold and he made me sit in the car again. When he was back behind the steering wheel he waited until he was sure he was in control of himself and then said, “No one knows about this except Gavin Warburton, Angela Stourham and me. And no one’s going to know about it. I’ll see if we can arrange an abortion.”

“What’s that?”

“The baby’s removed in an operation.”

“Would it be alive afterwards?”

“No.” My father paused. “If it’s too late for an abortion,” he said, “I’ll have to pay for Angela to take the girl abroad for a few months. However, there are two dangers. First, the governess—she’ll have to be dismissed and it’ll be up to Angela to think of a plausible excuse. Second, Eleanor—she’ll want to go with them. Or will she? No, there’s just a chance she won’t. If she’s in love with Thomas …” He let that thought trail off before concluding: “All we can do is hope for the best. Then after the baby’s born it can be adopted and that’ll be that. Of course you must never see the girl again.”

I didn’t dare look at him. I didn’t dare speak. But tears filled my eyes as I mourned my lost friend.

“You’ve done a terrible thing to that child, Harry. The experience will almost certainly scar her for life. I hope you realize now just what a dreadful thing you’ve done.”

I nodded. No point in trying to speak. I went on crying soundlessly.

“But of course,” said my father, “you’re not really responsible. You’re just an ignorant child. The true responsibility for the disaster must lie elsewhere.”

I looked at him dumbly.

“I’m the one who’s to blame,” said my father, trying to light a cigarette, and then to my horror I saw he couldn’t go on.