The Wheel of Fortune (135 page)

The car swept past Oxmoon. I had a split-second glimpse of unmarred perfection beyond the gates, and the next moment as I thought of the white piano in the ballroom the music began in my head. It was Mahler’s mighty
Symphony of a Thousand.
I listened. We drove on to Penhale, and Mahler evolved into Elgar. I was back with “Pomp and Circumstance” again, and on cue at the top of the crescendo I heard the chorus of the Hebrew slaves from
Nabucco.

The car turned through the gates of the Manor.

“Welcome home, darling, welcome home …” Bella was kissing me lavishly but I was unable to respond. I was still listening to Verdi and it was only when I got out of the car that the music stopped.

A great silence fell. I paused, struck by its intensity, and as I listened I heard time shifting its gears again; I saw the present splintering to dust before the battering ram of the past, and suddenly as the circle completed itself I knew that my most treasured memory lay not behind me but in front of me once more.

I stood waiting in the drive. I knew it was going to happen but I still didn’t dare believe it. And then as my father shouted cheerfully, “Where’s the reception committee?” the miracle happened, the front door opened and my magic lady came out to welcome me home.

4

I

H
E MARRIED HER SIX WEEKS
later and they lived happily ever after—more or less. Well, it does happen sometimes. Kester hit the nail on the head when he said even the cynics have to admit romance does occasionally triumph; to say no one lives happily ever after is as much at odds with reality as saying that everyone does.

Wonderful. I was ready for a fairy tale. I wanted it all—champagne, golden sunsets, true love, eternal bliss and the theme from
Gone with the Wind
playing endlessly in the background. It was the perfect antidote to drinking, whoring, murdering and going out of my mind.

“Whenever I heard a piano playing the tunes you liked to play,” said Bronwen, “I’d look across the circle and I’d hear your echo in time.”

Quite. Bronwen was above all a resilient practical woman; nobody brings up four children in a foreign country merely by listening to the music of the spheres. But she had this trick of treating fantasies as concrete facts and concrete facts as fantasies. To her it was natural to be a magic lady; she would have described her magic as common sense. It wasn’t, but for Bronwen magic was as normal as common sense, something to be recognized without surprise and even taken for granted.

Perhaps the prosaic explanation of her magic was that she saw farther than most people did. She was always careful to disclaim any psychic powers but she combined her extreme clarity of vision with unusually keen powers of observation. This enabled her to pick up details other people would miss with the result that she often saw a broader spectrum of reality—and this meant that she could talk in concrete terms of matters which other people couldn’t see and therefore assumed to be myths.

Unable to speak I embraced her, and all the time I was thinking: She went away—but she came back. And I knew my long bereavement was at last at an end.

Some unknown time later I found myself sitting beside her on the sofa in the drawing room while other people, all strangers in their teens, filtered into the room and made remarks like “Hi—welcome back!” and “Hi—bet you don’t remember me!” Dimly I realized these were my lost siblings. But before I could digest this astonishing fact, an army of small boys pounded in waving Union Jacks and shouting “Daddy! Daddy!”

I heard Bella say, “They were meant to be in the drive but they locked themselves in the lavatory and couldn’t get out.” I gazed at them. What had happened to all those bundles in rompers? I found myself confronted by a bunch of savage midgets who yelled with a force that would have demolished the walls of Jericho more quickly than the legendary trumpet. I winced at the noise.

“Shhh, boys—be gentle with Daddy!” begged Bella nervously, but they only fell silent when Bronwen leaned forward and put her finger to her lips. Then she beckoned the smallest thug with a smile. “Come along, Humphrey—this is your special moment.”

The son I had never seen presented himself proudly for inspection. He looked like the old photographs of myself at the age of two. I was too amazed to speak but when I patted him to make sure he was real he beamed in delight.

“Daddy, Daddy—”

I mixed up Charles and Jack who were the same height, but while they were elbowing each other out of the way and trampling Humphrey underfoot, Hal slid past them and sat down beside me on the sofa.

“Hullo, Hal—no trouble recognizing
you
!” I said, but I was too exhausted to say more. Vaguely I looked around for Edmund and Teddy, and it was some seconds before I remembered my father telling me they were busy reopening their house in London.

“Gerry,” said Bronwen to one of the strangers, “could you organize another cricket match?”

Various people disappeared and the room became blessedly quiet. I was alone with my father and Bronwen at last, and my father was talking rapidly with great animation.

“… so I wrote to her directly after Constance died—”

“I wrote back by return,” said Bronwen, speaking to me but smiling at him.

“—and after that we corresponded. We agreed to meet after the war, but of course even when the war ended transport for civilians was so difficult. However I did have my government contacts—”

“—so when I said I’d bring the children over for a visit—”

“—I was able to arrange the journey. Of course I wanted to tell her to sell everything up there and then—”

“—and I wanted to sell everything up too, but I was so afraid—”

“—we were both so afraid—”

“—that we’d find we were strangers with nothing to say to each other!”

They laughed in delight at this absurd possibility.

“Anyway,” said my father, “I said yes, come for a visit. But when I met the ship at Southampton—”

“—as soon as I saw him—”

“—as soon as I saw her—”

They laughed again, more delighted than ever by their ridiculously romantic story.

“So I soon asked her to marry me and she said yes—”

“No, no, you said, ‘How soon can you marry me?’ and I said, ‘Well, I’m not doing anything tomorrow …’ ”

They laughed helplessly, delirious with happiness. Rousing myself at last I assumed the role of the kind useful child and refilled their glasses with champagne. Some time later when I could get a word in edgeways I said to my father, “I assume Teddy decided it was a situation she could fix?”

“Oh God, yes, that woman’s power-mad. She couldn’t resist the chance to wield the power to forgive and forget, but if she really means well she’ll do something about Francesca. That child’s threatening to cancel the big wedding I’ve arranged for her next month—she says she’d rather marry in a registry office without me if I continue, as she describes it, to insult her mother’s memory.”

“Poor little Francesca,” said Bronwen.

But I’d had just about enough of Francesca posing as the wronged heroine, and I decided it was time someone shook her till her teeth rattled. With reluctance I realized that my father was right to be suspicious of Teddy; she wasn’t going to interfere while Francesca voiced feelings which perhaps, deep down beneath all the layers of kindness and generosity, Teddy secretly shared. Teddy was probably willing for Edmund’s sake to display goodwill towards my father and Bronwen now that Constance had been dead for over a year, but her deepest feelings were unlikely to be benign.

It so happened that I had the chance to intervene on my father’s behalf because three days later Francesca and her fiancé arrived for a weekend at Oxmoon. She had been engaged for six months to a colonel in the United States Air Force called William Q. Coton who belonged to one of the wealthy Eastern Seaboard families in Massachusetts. Francesca had first met him before the war during visits to America with her mother, and after a flirtatious career as a WAAF she probably found his familiarity as attractive as his respectability. He was thirty-two but born to be fifty, and when I met him he wore a worried expression which I hoped meant he realized his fiancée was behaving idiotically about her father’s imminent marriage. Certainly when I asked for a private word with Francesca he guessed what was happening and smiled gratefully at me before bolting from the room.

Francesca was twenty-one, dark, slim and neat like Constance but with my father’s blue eyes. Before assuming the role of the wronged heroine she had played the vivacious ingenue with great success for many years, and accepting her at face value I’d made no effort to know her better. However now my real acquaintance with my sister was finally about to begin.

“If you’ve come to speak to me about Daddy and That Woman—”

“Oh, shut up! For Christ’s sake stop playing Elektra and come down off that stage!”

Francesca was appalled. No one had ever spoken to her like that before. She was the golden girl, Mummy’s adored only daughter, forever petted by a horde of doting relatives who all thought, according to their nationality, that she was either “cute” or “sweet.”

“Harry!”

“Look, Sunshine. Do you love your father or don’t you?”

“Why, I adore him but—”

“Then prove it by welcoming this marriage. Now listen to me, my girl. For the past twelve years that man’s made endless sacrifices in order to be a good father to you and yet all you do to repay him is yap like a rabid Pekingese just because he’s at last managed to find some genuine happiness for a change! Well, I think your behavior’s disgraceful and it’s about time someone told you what a bloody unkind ungrateful daughter you’re being!”

Floods of tears. Disconnected phrases hinted at dark fissures in that outwardly sunlit well-ordered childhood of hers. “I knew Mummy was unhappy … and all because of
her …
I couldn’t blame darling Daddy, he was so wonderful, so perfect …”

I saw the problem. It had taken me too a long time to realize that my father had many dimensions to his character and by no means all of them were heroic.

“He’s no saint, Francesca. He treated your mother very badly after they were married, and what’s more, if my mother had lived he’d have treated her badly too.”

But she couldn’t accept that. She just sobbed and shook her head and said “No” over and over again.

Taking her in my arms I said, “He was a victim. He was fond of my mother and respected yours, but what use are fondness and respect when there’s a grand passion sizzling in the wings? And grand passions aren’t as they are in the storybooks, Francesca. They put good people through hell.”

Francesca rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and whispered, “Mummy was certainly put through hell.”

“They all were, all of them, but it’s over now, it’s finished. Our mothers are dead—they’re out of it and nothing can hurt them anymore. But Father’s still alive and he’s finally got the chance to have a little happiness and if you really love him you won’t be angry, you’ll just be sick with relief that his suffering’s finally at an end.”

Some minutes passed. Finally she was able to say, “I do see. All victims. I do see. But even so … I don’t know how I can meet her after all I’ve said … I shall feel so embarrassed—”

“All you need say is hullo and she’ll do the rest.”

I mopped her up and took her home. My magic lady was in the garden, but as soon as we emerged from the house she waved and came towards us across the lawn. Moving briskly, like some busy housewife anxious to welcome an unexpected guest to her coffee party, she looked as if her greatest worry was whether there’d be enough biscuits to go around.

“Francesca thought she’d drop in to see Father,” I called as soon as Bronwen was within earshot.

“Oh good, he’ll be back in a minute—he’s just gone to the village for cigarettes.” She smiled at Francesca. Those razor-sharp powers of observation missed nothing. The smile set all embarrassment firmly aside as irrelevant. Bronwen’s magic was at its most formidable.

“Have you brought your fiancé?” she said kindly before Francesca could open her mouth. “I hear he’s at Oxmoon with you this weekend.”

By the time my father returned from the village we were all having coffee in the drawing room. Innumerable photographs of William Q. Coton covered the table, and Francesca, miraculously restored to the role of vivacious ingenue, was telling Bronwen the story of her engagement. Bronwen, to her eternal credit, looked enthralled.

So much for Francesca. She married her fiancé three weeks later at St. Margaret’s Westminster and sailed away into the sunset to America to live happily ever after.

Maybe.

Bronwen didn’t go to the wedding. She said to Francesca: “Of course it’s best if I’m just with you in spirit but you needn’t think the children and I won’t be drinking your health and wishing you well.” She then retired with my Canadian siblings to the Lleyn Peninsula to spend a week with her sister Myfanwy who was still her only relative in Wales. Dafydd hadn’t yet returned from the Far East and Rhiannon had been killed during the bombing of Malta.

When the time came for her to leave her wedding reception at Claridges, Francesca said to my father: “I hope you have a lovely wedding, Daddy—I’m sorry I can only be with you in spirit but you needn’t think I won’t be drinking your health and wishing you well.” That was when I knew what a deep impression Bronwen had made.

My father kissed her, thanked her and said yes, he was looking forward to his wedding very much. That must have been the understatement of his life. By that time the whole family could hardly wait for the great romantic wallow of the year, of the decade and possibly of the entire century. We were all agog with excitement.

In the end they were married, like Francesca, at St. Margaret’s Westminster. Penhale Church would have been suitable from a nostalgic point of view, but the thought of the entire Gower Peninsula turning up to boggle at the sight of John Godwin marrying his mistress was too intimidating. Clearly only London could offer them the quiet wedding they wanted so finally my father said, “Oh hell, I know the ropes at St. Margaret’s at the moment—why don’t we do it there?” and the rector kindly arranged to slip them in between two gross Society weddings.