The Wheel of Fortune (136 page)

On the morning of December the fifteenth, 1945, the family gathered with bated breath at Westminster.

Bronwen had grown her hair longer since her arrival in England and on her wedding day she wore it up beneath a fashionable saucerlike hat. Her hair was paler than it had once been but still bright enough for the exposed strands to glow in the dim light. She was plumper too but unhappiness had made her too thin in the past and I thought the new curviness suited her. She still had freckles across the bridge of her nose and very white teeth. She was forty-seven. My father was fifty-three. In their extreme happiness they looked as if they had discovered the secret of eternal youth. Everyone kept whispering, “Don’t they look
young
!” and Teddy, seeing Bronwen in her Canadian silver-fox furs, added to me with an admiration which I knew was genuine: “My, that gal’s got class!”

What an irony! But it was true. Teddy was using the word in its American sense, but I suddenly saw that this “class” which Bronwen had acquired in Canada had made her by English standards classless. The shy secluded uneducated Welsh nursemaid had gone forever, replaced by a well-dressed self-confident cultured woman whom the English could rank as an acceptable foreigner, someone who had a right to exist beyond the confines of the English class system. Bronwen’s Welsh accent and her inner self had remained unchanged but a more egalitarian society than England had left its mark on her, and the Canadian gloss on her personality was now her passport to freedom.

I saw then how much easier it would be for my father to join her in creating a new life which bore no outward resemblance to the old. I had been amazed by the changes he had already made but now I realized they were not only desirable but inevitable. He had sold the Rolls-Royce, severed his business links with London and bought a house in a wealthy but undeniably middle-class area of Swansea. When I had last spoken to him on the subject he had even been planning with delight to take up gardening.

“How handsome your father looks,” whispered Bella as we waited for the service to begin, but I barely heard her. I was listening to Bach’s
Wachet Auf,
which had begun to stream though my head in defiance of the fool who was trying to play some drivel by Mendelssohn on the organ. However at last the clergyman embarked on his rigmarole and I was sufficiently diverted to glance around at the rest of the family. All the women were dewy-eyed and all the men were grinning foolishly. I was just hastily straightening out my own mouth when Gerry caught my eye and winked. I gave him a cool look. When one is eighteen years old and in the unique position of seeing one’s parents married, one should know better than to wink as if the entire affair were a huge joke. I was relieved to see that my other Canadian siblings were behaving with the solemnity of anthropologists watching an esoteric tribal rite. I eyed them meditatively. I supposed I would have to make the effort to know them better, but the thought was not attractive to me.

I woke up to the fact that my father was finally putting the ring on Bronwen’s finger. Better late than never. Nearly a quarter of a century after their first meeting at the Penhale Home Farm, twenty-two years after Evan had been conceived, twelve years after Bronwen had gone to Canada and three months after her return to Europe, the deed was finally done.

Afterwards outside the church Teddy, more American than the Americans as usual, brandished her expensive camera, but my father and Bronwen at first ignored her command to pose for photographs. They were too busy locking themselves in a passionate embrace.

“Christ!” said Thomas, goggling at them. “Maybe romance isn’t just a load of old balls after all!”

I felt as if I had heard a lifelong atheist declare his belief in God.

My father and Bronwen, separating with reluctance, turned to smile radiantly at the camera.

“Sweet, aren’t they?” said Marian idly, exercising her talent for turning the sublime to the banal. “Darling Bronwen—she looks such a lady in those furs!”

Kester and I wheeled around on her, snapped “Shut up!” and promptly laughed at our identical reaction. Dear old Kester—how could I ever have thought of him in sinister terms? Absurd! I could see clearly now that he was just a harmless eccentric who was as delighted by my father’s marriage as I was.

“Well, really, darlings!” said Marian, startled by our vehemence. “What are you both getting in such a state about? I’m mad about Bronwen, always have been.”

“Let’s have a group!” yelled Teddy, interrupting us.

Groups formed and re-formed. Finally I had the chance to embrace Bronwen and say, “Well done.” Then I shook my father’s hand and said, “Congratulations.” I felt so happy I hardly knew how to contain myself. In my head Toscanini was conducting the final movement from Beethoven’s
Seventh.

“One last picture of John and Bronwen on their own!” shrieked Teddy.

We stepped aside and as my father slipped his arm around his wife in front of the church door we all fell silent. Beyond the railing the traffic droned around Parliament Square but within seconds even that noise seemed to fade. Westminster Abbey overshadowed us; the Houses of Parliament slumbered in the winter light. Then I heard Bronwen say softly to my father, “It reminds me of that other church, Johnny, in that other time, long ago.”

He smiled down at her, she smiled up at him, and beyond them, far beyond them on the skyline, Big Ben began to blast out the hour.

II

When the wedding was over, when my father and Bronwen had streamed away into the golden sunset of a Cornish honeymoon with a hundred violins sawing away in my head at the theme from
Gone with the Wind,
I finally had time to wake up and realize that my own marriage was on the rocks. So much for romance. The cold hard facts of my life were that I was heading for the biggest possible mess—again.

Sex and guilt, as my father had noted with such chilling accuracy, had driven me into marriage, but neither he nor I had understood then the exact nature of that guilt which yoked me to Bella. The bond of sex at least had weakened; in that respect she was now just a pleasant convenience instead of a heart-stopping erotic adventure. However the bond of guilt remained, and the more I realized the impossibility of communicating with Bella on any level but the horizontal the more I realized how absolutely we were still yoked together by that summer of ’33.

I could only compare my relationship with her to the bizarre comradeship that can develop between men in wartime. When two people go through hell together this comradeship automatically springs into existence; it has little or nothing to do with whether they normally like each other or not. So it was with Bella and me. We had gone through hell together when we were children and Melody, our secret which we had to share for the rest of our lives, had created this indestructible bond which existed independently of our marriage. The marriage I now found shallow, exasperating and profoundly unsatisfactory, but how could I leave her? She depended on me utterly. She relied on me not only to redeem the past—I’d already done that by marrying her and giving her four more children—but to keep on redeeming it by loving her forever, and if I did leave her I had no doubt I would only complete the destruction of her life which I had begun at fourteen. Could I ever be happy if I had to live in the knowledge that I had destroyed her? No. I had to stay.

Having accepted that I saw that my task was to try to remake our marriage in a more satisfactory mold, and if Bella had grown up, as I had, there might have been some hope of achieving this. But Bella had remained little changed from the child I had loved in 1933. It was not only impossible to conduct painful but constructive conversations about our marriage with her. It was impossible to discuss any subject in depth. She didn’t understand, lost interest, started to talk of something else.

I could see she was relieved that I didn’t want to talk about my war experiences. As far as she was concerned I’d come back and that was that. It would never have occurred to her that I was suffering from such a tortuous reaction from the war that I wondered if I’d ever recover. It would never have occurred to her, as I struggled to focus my attention on the estate, that I lived in terror of breaking down and being unable to cope. I worried about everything but I couldn’t talk about my worries to her. I did try to talk about money but she just said, “What does it matter since your father’s a rich man?” and I couldn’t find the words to paint a picture of my father’s Victorian streak, my horror of having to crawl to him to confess further failures and—my biggest nightmare of all—the prospect of one of those Canadian boys turning into a dazzling success and outshining me over and over again.

I wasn’t worried about Evan. My ex-serf was talking of becoming a clergyman and my father had roused Bronwen’s fury by exclaiming, “But there’s no money or future in the Church!” My poor father! It was hardly possible for him to slough off the effects of that chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce overnight, and although he had hastily retracted his remark I suspected he was still disappointed in Evan’s decision.

Lance was a quiet studious boy who wanted to be an engineer. No problem there. My father would always think engineering came low on the list of desirable professions.

That left Gerry, and Gerry, I was beginning to realize with sickening clarity, was all set to play the role of Wonder Boy and transform my normally rational father into a besotted parent. Gerry was handsome. He was personable. He was athletic. He was clever. And most sinister of all, he was ambitious. He had decided to attend a London crammers in the hope of winning a scholarship to Oxford to read law. Naturally my father was as pleased as Punch. In fact he even started talking about Uncle Robert.

The hackles rose on the back of my neck.

I began to have a most unpleasant vision of a future in which I would be compared with Wonder Boy and found wanting. But I didn’t tell Bella that. I didn’t tell anyone that. I merely tucked it away among my private fears and decided not to think about it, but the trouble was I had so many private fears by that time that it was hard to find the space for a new arrival. My rash began to bother me again. I felt demented. I started to drink too much.

“Tricky thing, peace,” said Edmund. “Worse than war in some ways.”

It’s odd how often, when one’s in great trouble, help comes from the quarter you least expect it. I’d always written Edmund off as a benign old fool, but in the end when I was on the verge of breakdown it was not my father but my underestimated uncle who was there at the brink to step between me and the abyss.

Edmund had not only survived the four years of the First War. He had survived the shell-shocked years of peace afterwards. “Don’t worry about the nightmares,” he said when I finally poured out my heart to him about the men I’d killed and the sights I’d seen and my constant terror that I’d go out of my mind. “You’ve wrapped your memories up in a parcel and the nightmares just mean you can’t resist undoing the parcel and having a peep inside every now and then. But eventually the desire to peep will fade away and you can treat the parcel as lost property. You’ll never actually lose it, but it’ll turn into a bundle you don’t care to redeem from the Lost Property Office, and then it won’t matter anymore.”

“It’ll always matter.”

“No, no,” said Edmund placidly. “Not so. In fact the great truth of life is that the things most people think are important aren’t really important at all. Look at John. After years and years he’s finally realized this. Why drive a Rolls-Royce when you can be happier on a bicycle?”

“But Edmund, about the war—”

“The only important thing about the war is that you survived it. Don’t try and make sense of what happened because the world is very far from being sensible and personally I think one gets in far less of a muddle if one simply says to oneself: ‘Yes, the world’s chaotic and ghastly beyond belief—how do I survive it?’ Then you’re more likely to do the right thing for the wrong reasons than the wrong thing for the right reasons.”

We began to talk about survival. I told him all my current problems.

On the subject of money Edmund said, “Stop worrying about the done thing and go to John. He can’t eat you.”

“No, but he could write me off as his favorite son.”

“What of it, old chap? I was never anyone’s favorite but look at me, I’m happy as a lark!”

“Yes, but—”

“My dear Harry, crucifying yourself in order to remain John’s favorite is not the way to survive with your sanity intact. Take crucifixion firmly off your list of desirable activities.”

“Yes, I’m sure you’re right, but … Edmund, I’m not just afraid of being demoted as favorite. I’m afraid that if I ask for money Father will use my penury to boot me out of Penhale to the estate in Herefordshire.”

“Well, what’s wrong with that, old chap? Nice country, Herefordshire. Of course I know how sentimental you feel about this house, but if your financial problems are so acute—”

“Edmund, I couldn’t cope. At least, I could but Bella couldn’t. Here at Penhale she has Anna as a friend and Eleanor to visit now and then, but if we moved to Herefordshire she’d know no one, she’d be utterly dependent on me and quite honestly I just couldn’t stand it, I’d crack, go mad, kill her in a moment of frenzy, wind up on the gallows and oh Christ what would my father say then—”

“I’ll tell you exactly what he’d say,” said Edmund, not batting an eyelid as all this appalling neurotic rubbish spewed out of me.

“He’d say, ‘This is all my fault for forcing that boy to Herefordshire when any intelligent father could see it would drive him round the bend.’ Harry, isn’t it about time you saw your father as he really is? He’s not a heathen god who has to be constantly appeased. He’s a clever man with a broad experience of life and he also happens to be devoted to you. He’ll want to offer help, not mete out punishment!”

“Yes, but what do I say, how do I explain—”

“Just tell him the truth. You have a difficult marriage and a move to Herefordshire would create more problems than it would solve. … Have you considered a divorce?”