The Wheel of Fortune (132 page)

VIII

My little serf had found his way home. He had no connection with the Canadian billet at Little Oxmoon. He was based in Surrey. This was his first forty-eight-hour leave since his arrival in England, and after catching a night train from London he had snatched a couple of hours’ sleep on a bench at the station, walked off into the Gower Peninsula and thumbed a lift to Penhale on a passing farm cart.

He knew nothing. I had never been sure whether to believe my father when he had told me he had no communication with his family in Canada, and his threat to me about his three sons there had made me suspect that some form of contact was being maintained but now I found out that the contact was only financial, money transferred through banks, just as my father had said. Evan had thought my father was still living at Penhale Manor. He had had no idea that my father had resumed his marriage, and I could see that the news was a bad shock to him. His sensitive serious face acquired a bleached look. He said, “In that case he won’t want to see me, will he.”

“Nonsense!” I said, feeling sorry for him; I had really been very fond indeed of my little serf. But as I spoke it occurred to me that my father might well be anxious to avoid a drama in which Evan turned up on Constance’s doorstep and gave a star performance of the Prodigal Son.

“Sit down and relax, Evan,” I said. We were in the drawing room and I had dispatched Hal to the kitchens to find Bella. Evan was now in a state of shock. He stared around with a glazed expression in his eyes while I tried to tell him I had married old Oswald Stourham’s daughter, but at last he managed to say, “I’m sorry, it’s that piano … I remember you sitting there and playing. ‘The Blue Danube’ and teasing Dad because it was the only tune he ever recognized. … Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m in pieces, I can’t get a hold of myself at all. … Who did you say’s living here now?”

“My wife and I, my three sons, Uncle Edmund and Aunt Teddy. Richard and Geoffrey are away at Harrow.”

Evan nearly passed out. “Teddy? That’s the sister, isn’t it? I must go at once.” He leaped to his feet. “I’ll go to Oxmoon. I know Aunt Ginevra wouldn’t mind if I turned up.”

I grabbed him. “Steady, Evan, she’s dead.”

“Dead!”

“Yes, Kester’s living there now with his wife.”

“Wife? Kester’s married too? Gee, didn’t you both marry young! Is she nice? I guess she must be if Kester married her. Oh, I can’t wait to see Kester again! Kester was the great hero of my childhood—he used to call me his acolyte—”

“
What?
Here, wait a minute—
I
was the great hero of your childhood! You helped me with my experiments in the potting shed—you collected all those conkers for me every autumn—”

“Oh sure—but you were away at school most of the year and anyway you didn’t really want me around, you just put up with me. But Kester spent hours and hours playing with me, even though I was so much younger than he was—”

The door opened. In walked Teddy, gorgeously clad in a scarlet kimono and attended by Bella, Hal, Charles and Jack. Edmund, a notoriously late riser, was no doubt still snoozing upstairs.

“Hi, fellas,” said Teddy. “What’s all this about a Prodigal Son?” Intelligent little Hal had obviously repeated my message verbatim: Tell Mummy my brother Evan’s turned up from Canada.

What a scene! Evan’s bleached look returned and he was too paralyzed with embarrassment to speak. Bella’s eyes were as round as saucers. God knows what I looked like but I felt wary to say the least. Teddy had told my father after his return to Constance that she was willing enough to let bygones be bygones; but I thought a bygone was rather more than a bygone, when it turned up in a Canadian uniform hoping to find its father.

“This is my brother Evan, Teddy,” I said for lack of anything better to say. “Evan, this is Mrs. Edmund Godwin.”

“Right,” said Teddy, thriving on the opportunity to “fix” a problem that would have defeated anyone born without American dynamism. “Now, before we all have the vapors and start passing out right, left and center, let me call a spade a spade so that we can relax and say What the hell. Okay, young man, you know who I am, your father made me very angry once, but that’s all over now, he went back to my sister and he’s still with her and that’s that. Finish. Now, you look like a nice clean-cut well-mannered boy to me, and you’re Harry’s brother which must definitely rank as a big plus, so maybe you and I could get along. Why not? I get along with most people, don’t I, Bella honey?”

“You’re wonderful, Teddy!”

“See? She says I’m wonderful. Okay, I’m going to be wonderful. We’ll get Kester and Anna to come over with all the champagne they’ve still got and then we’ll have the time of our lives killing the fatted calf. Harry, go call John and tell him to get the hell down here at once in that god-awful Rolls-Royce.”

So that was that. Leaving Evan looking utterly shattered, I went to the telephone in the hall and placed the call to London.

IX

“Good God!” said my father, but he wasn’t as surprised as I’d anticipated. He added: “I wondered if something like this would happen one day.”

“Teddy’s being wonderful,” I said. “She’s almost adopted him.”

“Ah yes,” said my father, and revealing the antipathy towards Teddy which he usually managed to conceal he added cynically: “Another Armstrong exercise in power.”

“It was she who suggested you should come down at once!” I protested, automatically defending her against the slur of insincerity.

“Of course. Power’s no fun unless you can maneuver people all over the board. All right, thank you, Harry. Put the boy on the line, would you? I assume he’s there beside you.”

“No,” I said, but then I found that he was. Passing over the receiver I retired to the far end of the hall but somehow I couldn’t quite persuade myself to step out of earshot. I was thinking of Evan being Kester’s acolyte. An
acolyte
! What a nasty pansyish word, redolent of emotional melodrama. Typical Kester. And I didn’t like the way he was encroaching on my family, purloining the odd member here and there whenever my back was turned. My little serf—an acolyte! I felt as outraged as a conservative historian who had seen his subject rewritten by a Marxist.

“Yes, she said I must be sure to look you up, but I was too nervous to make a phone call or write a letter—I thought it would be better if I just turned up. … Well, I guess I was scared you mightn’t want to see me, but I thought that if I stopped by without warning at least I’d see you …”

Pathetic. Poor old Evan, poor old sod … Three sons in Canada. Maybe they were all Kester’s acolytes. How would I know?

“… yes, she’s very well, thank you. … Yes, we’re all well. … Oh, that would be wonderful—I don’t want to cause any awkwardness but of course I’d love to see you …”

Poor little devil, he was so pleased. In fact it was really rather touching, if one was prone to be touched by that sort of thing.

“Okay. ’Bye,” said Evan, and hung up. He turned to me, his face transformed with happiness. “He’s coming,” he said as if he hardly dared believe it. “He’s coming right away.”

“That’s absolutely marvelous, old chap,” I said warmly. “I couldn’t be more pleased!” But although I knew that the muscles of my face never betrayed me, I felt the knife of jealousy revolve below my heart.

X

The grand reunion began. The only blot on the sentimental landscape was Francesca, who flatly refused to meet Evan and said she would stay secluded at Oxmoon until he had left the neighborhood.

“Best let her be,” said Teddy soothingly, but Kester was most upset and said he did hope Francesca would change her mind.

Kester had arrived directly after breakfast.

“Kester!”

“My acolyte!”

Damn it, they even embraced. I can’t stand to see grown men embracing. Disgusting.

“Evan, you look so like Bronwen now you’re grown up! It’s the cheekbones!” said Kester, fawning over the boy as if he were a pet dog.

“Oh Kester, I’ve thought so much about those wonderful times you gave me at Oxmoon—I’ll never forget how you used to call it Magic Oxmoon and talk about Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace …”

More embraces. The conversation continued in this sick-making vein for some time before Kester said, wallowing in emotion as usual, “Now, Evan, you’ve got to tell us all about Bronwen—I’m sure Harry’s already asked you, but I can’t help that, you’ll just have to repeat yourself all over again.”

But I hadn’t asked. I’d wanted to but couldn’t. It was easier to think of her as dead. It was the best way to bear the pain of her absence.

“Ah; I did love Bronwen … I cried when she left …”

That was Kester speaking. Not me. Kester. And as I again looked at him and saw my double image, I suddenly had a vision of our lives running side by side in time. That made my blood run cold, although why I didn’t know. There’s nothing sinister about parallel lines—unless they defy the laws of geometry and graze against each other. Maybe I was going mad. I certainly felt mentally disordered. It was as if the world I knew had slipped out of focus and was about to disintegrate before my eyes.

“I’ve got a photograph,” said Evan, and produced a picture of a smart attractive housewife who looked as if she might advertise soap powder in magazines. I knew then how right I was not to want to know about Bronwen. My magic lady had died and a transatlantic robot had taken her place.

“What’s happened to Rhiannon and Dafydd, Evan?” I said abruptly, trying to turn the conversation into more bearable channels.

“They both joined the navy. Rhiannon’s at Malta, but Dafydd was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore.”

A cold shadow fell across the room as we thought of the Japanese. Kester said rapidly, “Tell us about Canada, Evan—every detail.”

“Well, we’ve got this pretty five-bedroom home in a nice suburb of Vancouver, and …”

Evan’s mild Canadian voice droned on and on as he described the house, the garden, the furniture, the car, the dog and the cat. I tried not to listen to him. For a time I managed to tune in to the
Third Brandenburg Concerto
in my head but Evan kept interrupting the flow of notes.

“But Bronwen—tell us about Bronwen!” begged Kester.

“Well … she’s pretty busy. As soon as we were all in school she took some courses in English literature and history and then she took a course in stenography but she didn’t like that so she gave it up and did nothing for a while—at least, she did plenty, bringing us up, joining the Ladies’ Guild, making loads of friends—”

I thought of my sad solitary magic lady imprisoned in Penhale Manor.

“—but in the end she got restless so she enrolled in college part time—well, she’s still at it, she wants to be a librarian, we think it’s great, we’re so proud of her. We all help run the house so that she can have time to study, but she still does the cooking because she likes that. There’s a lot of cooking to do too because we’re always bringing our pals home but she never minds, she just says the more the merrier, so we’re pretty sociable … hey, Kester, are you okay?”

“Sorry, yes. I was just thinking … Oh Harry, isn’t it wonderful that everything worked out so well for them?”

I agreed it was wonderful but knew nothing had changed. Bronwen was still lost and would never come back.

Late in the afternoon my father arrived and when Edmund reported that the Rolls-Royce had been sighted in the drive I immediately hurried to open the front door. It would never do to let my father think I was sulking in a corner.

“Hullo!” I called cheerfully as he jumped out of the car. “Welcome to the grand reunion!”

Evan stepped past me. I went on looking at my father, and as I watched I saw the serious formidable Englishman dissolve into the man in blue dungarees who had joked in Welsh with Bronwen.

I thought: So the dead do come back sometimes. My father had died but now he was alive again, smiling joyously and stretching out his arms.

But not to me.

The Prodigal Son stumbled down the steps. “Dad—oh Dad—”

“Evan—”

I turned away.

XI

They spent some time on their own in my study, but eventually they joined the rest of the family for tea. Everyone chatted and laughed and talked at the top of their voices. The air was heavy with nostalgia. After gnawing a cucumber sandwich I declined a slice of the new sugarless butterless cake which represented Cook’s latest wartime triumph and concentrated on making the occasional appropriate remarks.

“Harry,” said Evan shyly at last, “will you play the piano for us? I had this dream of sitting here with Dad while you played ‘The Blue Danube’ for him, just like in the old days.”

I dutifully played “The Blue Danube.” It’s tempting to dismiss that piece as hackneyed rubbish but in fact Johann Strauss the Younger was a most accomplished composer, and although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that “The Blue Danube” is worthy of a concert hall I do think it deserves to be played in the finest ballroom in the world. Instantly I remembered the white-and-gold piano at Oxmoon. One day, if Kester ever invited me to his home for more than a strained whisky-and-soda, I was going to play that tune, complete with all the codas, in the ballroom—and this time I’d make sure bloody Thomas wasn’t around to interrupt me by yelling for “The Black Bottom.”

After I’d finished playing my father smiled at me and said, “You remind me of your mother.”

That was a curious remark to make when we all had Bronwen on the brain, but before I could wonder what was going on in my father’s mind Kester exclaimed, “Heavens, that tune reminds me of
my
mother! I say, isn’t it time we opened some of that champagne I’ve lugged over from Oxmoon?”

I settled down to get discreetly drunk. Everyone kept saying it was a simply wonderful evening.

XII

Evan and I both had to leave for London the next day, so my father took us up to town in his Rolls-Royce. None of us talked much. We were all too aware of the war, all too conscious that we might never meet again. The partings at the Manor had been harrowing. Bella had tried to be brave but had dissolved into floods of tears, and Hal had cried too, probably to see her upset. He was too young to realize I could go away and never come back, but I told myself I knew I was going to see him again. I had to tell myself that. Had to. Only line to take. But God, what hell it all was.