The Wheel of Fortune (128 page)

“I could kill him.”

“Oh, it was all right! He just went bright red, returned to the bedroom and slammed the door in my face. And of course he’s never done anything since. But whenever he and I are alone together now I sort of feel he’s thinking what fun it would be to spank me—”

“I’m getting you out of this house. We’ll get married at once.”

“Oh yes, let’s get married as soon as possible, but don’t worry, Harry. He loves Eleanor, I know he does—”

“Yes, but you’ve got something Eleanor doesn’t have. Maybe he has trouble getting it up with her. Maybe whenever he sees you he has an erection hard enough to bore through a steel plate. Maybe—”

But Bella was now rocking with mirth. “Imagine Thomas drilling through a steel plate with his—”

“God knows I could drill through a steel girder with mine,” I said, grabbing her, and reached for the last sheath. Thomas was really going to be caught short. I pictured him casting around for a thieving housemaid with a passion for contraceptives.

“Oh God, that was heaven!” gasped Bella afterwards. “How soon did you say we could be married?”

“I don’t know but I’ll get a special license,” I said, and then remembered I hadn’t a penny in the world. The thought was the equivalent of a dozen cold showers. I felt very young suddenly, very nervous. I was still some months short of my twentieth birthday.

“I’ll talk to my father as soon as I get back,” I said casually, sweating with dread at the prospect, and ten minutes later I set off for Oxmoon.

XII

“I absolutely forbid it!” said my father, white with rage. No six cows in a field this time and no dead antiques on a beige carpet either. I was being granted a private audience in the morning room at Oxmoon, a little-used corner of the house which still bore witness to my grandparents’ forty-year love affair with junk shops. In my grandfather’s day every square inch of the mantelshelf had been crammed with
bric-à-brac,
but Aunt Ginevra had managed to reduce this to an Edwardian coronation mug flanked by a pair of handsome brass candlesticks.

Keeping my eyes steadily fixed on the coronation mug I said steadily, “Kester’s ten months younger than I am. If he can get married, why can’t I?” My heart was slamming around like a demented hammer. Icy sweat welded my shirt to my spine.

“Kester can afford a wife!” shouted my father. “He’s master of Oxmoon!”

“Yes!” I shouted back. “He’s master of Oxmoon! He’s master because you were too bloody busy doing the done thing to think what that would mean to me!” I had never consciously formed that thought in my mind before, and once the words were spoken I was horrified. I stammered, “I—I didn’t mean that—I—” but the next moment my attempt at an apology was brutally terminated as he struck me hard across the mouth.

I reeled backwards, tripped against the sofa and on my way to the floor bashed into a little sewing table which at once disintegrated. My mind was paralyzed with shock. My father had very occasionally given me a reluctant whack on the bottom when I’d been at my naughtiest as a small child, but he had never struck me like that before.

“Get up.”

I crawled to my feet. But I couldn’t raise my eyes to his face. I couldn’t even look at the coronation mug. I looked at the brass fender around the fireplace but saw only six cows standing in a field.

“Now just you listen to me. There were reasons, good reasons, why my father felt obliged to leave Oxmoon to Kester and reasons, good reasons, why I chose not to interfere. My father did what he felt he had to do. Robert did what he felt he had to do. And I did what I felt I had to do. So what you’ve got to understand and accept is that this situation
could not have been otherwise.
It’s ridiculous to suggest I acted out of some heroic and self-sacrificing desire to do the done thing. I’m no hero. I acted under compulsion. I acted because I felt it would destroy me if I acted in any other way. Now stop behaving like some overgrown spoiled child and never let me hear you refer to the subject again.”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

“I know you’ve always been jealous of Kester. But it’s about time you grew up, Harry. You seem to think you can get away with anything just because you’ve always been my favorite, but my patience is now wearing very thin and I suggest you start to do some very hard thinking. You’re not the only pebble on the beach, you know. I do have three sons in Canada.”

I wondered where my next breath was coming from. All the air seemed to have been permanently removed from my lungs. Three sons in Canada, he had said. I got my lungs working again, God knows how, but I found I could breathe only in shallow gasps. Three sons in Canada. I licked my lips. There was blood on them from his blow on the mouth. I tried to speak but nothing happened.

“You come here to me,” said my father, still in a towering rage, “when you know perfectly well I’m shocked and grieved by Ginevra’s death, and you have the supreme insolence to demand I should finance a marriage which no father in his right mind could possibly approve of—”

“I’m sorry, sir, of course I can see now that I’ve approached this in quite the wrong way.” What an understatement. Why on earth had I made that catastrophic remark about Oxmoon? I’d behaved like a lunatic. “Sir, if you’d just let me explain how I feel about Bella—”

“Explain! I’m not interested in the puerile explanations dreamed up by an immature adolescent in order to excuse a ludicrous fantasy! You want to marry her out of guilt! What could be more obvious?”

“No, there’s more to it than that, sir—I really do love her, I swear it—”

“
Love!
What do you know about love? You stand there, nineteen years old, and think that just because you seized the opportunity to misbehave at Oxford you know bloody well all there is to know—”

“Well, at least I’m not a virgin as Kester obviously was when he got married!” There I went again. Certifiable. Oh God, how on earth was I going to get out of this scene in one piece—

“You should try and take a leaf out of Kester’s book instead of mocking him the whole damn time!” said my father furiously. “He’s known Anna for three years. I still disapprove of him marrying when he’s so young, but at least I think he’s got a better chance of happiness than most people who are deluded enough to marry in their teens. But you! You see that girl today for the first time in five years and on the strength of one meeting you have the colossal nerve to start talking of marriage—”

“Well, it was quite a meeting!” I was now too demented to care what I said.

“Oh, no doubt!” shouted my father. “She’s got no brains, no manners, no charm, no intellectual interests, nothing which could make her worthy to be the wife of a young man of your potential, but one thing she does have and that’s the one thing you’ll be tired of in six months! My dear Harry, if you think that guilt and sex are any foundation whatsoever for a successful marriage, you’re being even more foolish than I thought!”

“Well, what about your marriage?” I yelled at him. “Are you trying to tell me that’s not based on sex and guilt? You’ve no right to preach to me!” And sinking down on the sofa before he could hit me again I covered my face with my hands.

There was a long silence but when I dared look at him I saw his anger had been spent. He was leaning against the mantelshelf as if he hardly knew how to remain upright, and at once I struggled to my feet; I could endure his rage but not his despair.

“Father, it’s not as you think, I really do love her, if it was just sex and guilt I wouldn’t want to marry her but I do want to marry her, I must, we want to have another baby and so of course we must get married, I mean, it’s just no good, is it, having babies without being married—”

He held up his hand and I was silent. Very slowly he sat down. He moved as if all his joints ached. He was gray with exhaustion. All he said in the end was “How glad I am that I don’t believe in a life after death. I couldn’t bear to believe Blanche knew what a mess I’ve made of bringing up her children.”

“I—”

“Shut up. There’s no comment you can make to that statement. Let me think for a moment.” He went on sitting in the chair, his elbows on his knees, his eyes watching his clasped hands, but at length he straightened his back and stood up. “If I refuse my consent now,” he said, “I’ll only have to give way later. You’ll get her pregnant again—deliberately this time—because you know I’d never let a grandchild be born illegitimate. Then we’d have all the scandal of a child arriving seven months after the wedding, and I couldn’t take that again, not after what I went through with Marian.” He paused to consider further. He was calm now, detached. It was as if he were viewing the situation from a great distance.

“Very well,” he said finally. “I will consent. But you must compromise with me. I can’t have you marrying immediately by special license. I must insist for your own sake that you wait until Christmas, and I also insist that you don’t announce your engagement for another two months. That means that if you do change your mind you’ll find it easier to get out of this mess—and I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I do think it’s a mess. However perhaps you’ll do better the next time. Naturally this marriage is bound to end in divorce. I give it five years at the most, no more. In fact,” said my father, suddenly becoming angry again, “I can’t stress too strongly that I think this decision of yours is absolutely wrong from start to finish.”

But I knew that on the contrary, it was the right thing—indeed the only thing—to do.

3

I

T
EN MONTHS AFTER THIS
major row with my father I was walking back in the dark from Oxmoon to Penhale and thinking what a relief it was that poor old Kester, poor old sod, had messed up his relationship with my father as thoroughly as I had messed up mine. Those bills! Incredible. But at least he still had his fairytale palace of a house. And what did I have? Damn all.

I’d have liked to turn Penhale Manor into the perfect house but I had no money. When I took over the estate my father had worked out how much capital expenditure the farm would require during the next twelve months and had added an extra thousand pounds to launch me on my married life. Every single penny of this sum was to be deducted from the twenty thousand pounds of my mother’s money that I was due to inherit at twenty-one. My mother had left no will, and all her disposable fortune had wound up in my father’s hands during her lifetime, but under the terms of her marriage settlement a portion had been kept in trust for her children.

My father refused to advance me the whole amount of my portion. “It won’t do you any harm,” he said, exercising his Victorian streak, “to struggle for a few months.” This was bad news. I was quite prepared to slave at the estate, but the fact was that I was not only a novice at farming, which requires a high degree of experience and flair, but a novice at running my own life. One moment I was little more than a schoolboy living on my father’s charity and the next I had an estate to run, a wife to keep, a new baby on the way and all manner of expenses which I hadn’t anticipated. I knew moments of panic when I felt my life had slipped out of control, but all I could do was beat them back and struggle on.

Somehow I stomached the necessary instruction from Thomas and somehow I maintained a humble respectful attitude towards him so that I could always go to him for help whenever I was desperate. I was desperate very often, particularly in the early days of my new career. I didn’t get on with the foreman at the Home Farm who clearly thought I was just a spoiled rich brat taking up farming for fun. He respected Thomas, who had put the fear of God into him from the start, but I knew I was too young and too inexperienced ever to win his approval. He’d have to go, I realized that, but how would I manage when he left? Besides, Thomas would probably write me off as a headstrong fool if I immediately sacked my foreman, and I had to keep on the good side of Thomas because my survival depended on it.

God, what a nightmare it was. People talk a lot of romantic bilge about what a wonderful life farming is and how living on the land is the only truly satisfying existence for human beings, but farming’s bloody hard work and not one bit glamorous. It was all right for someone like my father, who simply rode around on horseback and made executive decisions—which I now realized probably weren’t all that brilliant—but I wasn’t yet on that level. I had a living to earn. I had to be much more deeply involved in order to work out what I could and couldn’t do. I couldn’t afford to make mistakes and pay for them. Also, although my father was a successful businessman, farming tends to defy a conventional business approach because one’s dealing not with other businessmen but with God, thinly disguised as the weather. God tends to play havoc with the accounts, as my father had often complained, but to my mind my father wasn’t a farmer like Thomas or my grandfather. You can’t seriously call yourself a farmer until you’ve proved to your men that you too can shovel manure and do the bloody hoeing and get up at four in the morning to milk a cow.

Anyway there I was, sweating along, having nightmares about winding up hopelessly in the red and having to crawl to my father to confess my abject failure, trying to learn all I could, struggling to keep on the right side of Thomas—and that was all
before
I was married. After I was married everything was just the same but worse because I was even more worried about money. I did wonder if I could borrow against my expectations but found that even though I was married the terms of the settlement made borrowing difficult before I was twenty-one. Then I inquired about borrowing against Bella’s expectations, but this was even more difficult. I began to feel hemmed in, oppressed. Picturesque Penhale Manor was easy on the eye but old houses are expensive to run. Bella was easy on the eye too, but wives aren’t cheap and pregnant wives aren’t cheap at all. God only knew how much the baby would cost. I did a few estimates involving prams, cots and clothes but gave up in horror. The thought of public-school fees in the remote future was quite beyond contemplation.