The Wheel of Fortune (140 page)

“Harry, I know those things are an awful bore for you and I don’t want to keep making you use them, you’re bound to get tired of me if I do, so I’ve decided to get a Dutch cap. Everyone has Dutch caps nowadays and I’ve asked Eleanor and she says they’re easy. Thomas can’t feel if—he doesn’t even know she’s got one. So if I did get a cap … well, it would be much nicer, wouldn’t it?”

This was unarguable but I went with her to the gynecologist to make sure everything was all right. The gynecologist said yes, jolly good idea to have a cap, why not. While the thing was fitted I sat in the waiting room and read an elderly edition of
Country Life.

Bella emerged looking pale but swore all our problems were solved. There was a nice little shelf inside and the cap just slotted in. Easy. A bit messy and tedious, but once it was in you could forget all about it.

I said to the gynecologist, “Are you sure she understands everything?”

He was sure. He had given her the printed instructions he gave to all his patients who adopted this form of contraception, so even if she forgot what he had said she could always refresh her memory.

Bella and I went to the nearest pub and had a gin-and-French apiece.

“Bella, are you quite, quite sure you can cope with this? Because if there’s any doubt in your mind—any doubt whatsoever—we’ll go on as before.”

“Oh no, Harry,” she said earnestly. “I’ve no doubts—I’m happy as a lark and absolutely confident!”

She got pregnant straightaway.

IV

By that time it was the March of 1947 and we were emerging from one of the worst winters in living memory. Many of my sheep had died. The milk yield had dropped. All the pipes had burst in the dairy. In the fuel shortage we had run out of coal. In short, life was a frozen hell and when Bella told me her pregnancy had been confirmed the news seemed like the last straw.

“I might have known you’d never be able to cope!”

“I couldn’t help it, I couldn’t help it—”

“No? Can you swear to me you used the damned thing every single time?”

She swore but I knew she was lying. That was when I lost my temper and she broke down utterly.

“Sometimes I didn’t like to ask you to wait until I’d put in—I was afraid you’d get impatient—go to another woman—”

“I wish to hell I had. Anything rather than this.”

Hysterics. Misery. Rage. Despair.

That demon contraception. That devil reproduction. Wrecking marriages, ruining lives, causing untold agony and suffering.

She refused to go back to the gynecologist, because she was afraid he’d think her a fool. But I somehow got her back to Dr. Warburton. The great advantage of Warburton, who was the best kind of family doctor even though he was getting long in the tooth, was that he knew about Melody. I’d realized by this time that no one who didn’t know about Melody had a hope of understanding what was going on.

“Bella, I do understand, I promise you I do …” Warburton was lean and grizzled, like an elderly greyhound; he had a gentle insistent voice and kind persuasive dark eyes. “… but for your own sake I must advise you not to continue with this pregnancy.”

“I can’t kill Melody. I can’t do it, I can’t.”

I put my arm around her and tried to sound as gentle and insistent as Warburton. “Bella,” I said, “this baby isn’t Melody. Melody’s dead. Even if this baby’s a girl it won’t be Melody. It’s no good risking your life to achieve the unachievable.”

“I’ll be all right. But I must have her.”

This sort of talk continued for some time before Warburton said, “The risk’s too great, Bella, and it’s not fair on the living to take it. Think of Harry and your boys. You don’t want them to suffer, do you?”

Bella began to weep. “I’m not going back to that hospital. I’m not going back to that horrid gynecologist.”

This looked like the thin end of the wedge. Warburton and I exchanged glances.

“Look, Bella”—Warburton spoke with great care—“I think I can arrange this with a doctor I know who’s in charge of a private nursing home in Swansea. I expect you’ve heard of it. It used to be called the Home of the Assumption, but it’s called Assumption House now and it’s not run by nuns anymore. I don’t think you’d find it such an ordeal to be there for a few days and of course no one need know why you’re there—you can just tell your friends that I’d advised you to take a rest.”

“For my sake, Bella,” I said. “Please. I don’t want to end up a widower like Kester.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth I knew she was going to die. I felt the color drain from my face. “Christ, Bella—
please!
You can’t die, you’ve got to live, I couldn’t stand it if you died—”

How would I ever live with the guilt? I’d been criminally irresponsible, assuming she could cope with the burden of contraception, and it was my fault she was pregnant. If she died in childbirth I would have killed her, but I didn’t want Bella dead—it was our marriage, not her life, that I wanted to terminate. I somehow had to keep her alive for the divorce court.

“Bella, I love you—please, please do as Dr. Warburton says—”

“Do you really love me, Harry?” Tears were streaming down her face.

“I love you.”

“Then I’ll do it. You mean more to me than anyone, Harry, more even than Melody.”

I wondered if anyone had ever died from pure guilt before. I felt as if I were fatally ill.

Later I said to Warburton, “She’ll be all right, won’t she?”

“Oh yes, it’s actually a very simple operation.”

But not so simple when your reproductive organs have been messed around by a car smash. Warburton did write a warning letter but after a preliminary examination the doctor at Assumption House decided that the old boy was huffing and puffing about nothing. One does occasionally, hear of these young doctors who fancy a spot of surgery and think they’re God. But this one was due for a particularly vile disillusionment because Bella’s case turned into an abortionist’s nightmare. The operation began but the recent wounds ruptured and while the doctor and the nurses all fought to save her she bled steadily to death on the operating table.

V

Warburton was appalled to hear there had been no blood on hand for a transfusion. He said he’d never have let Bella go there if he’d known. The poor old fellow was beside himself with distress. I felt sorry for him.

“It wasn’t your fault,” I said. “She was fated. I knew she was going to die no matter what we did. I knew it.”

I had sunk into that sodden form of shock which resembles an alcoholic stupor. I was resigned, untalkative, barely aware of my surroundings. Warburton had gone with me to Assumption House. I hadn’t yet got around to thinking I could sue everyone in sight for negligence, but in fact I never did go to law in revenge. There seemed no point. Bella was dead and nothing could bring her back.

Eventually I was taken to see her. No pink-and-white skin anymore. It was an ashen color. But the shining mouse-brown hair was the same. I stroked it. Then I held her hand for a moment but my mind was empty. I was reminded of how I had felt during the war when a comrade had died. The anger and grief came later but at first all one saw was the void.

I was in the void and I had forgotten how bleak it was, with all emotion absent and nothing in my mind except an absolute awareness of the end.

When I left the nursing home the only person I wanted to see was Bronwen so I asked Warburton to drive me to my father’s house. Warburton was worried about me but I said I was used to death, I could manage, I certainly wasn’t going to have a nervous breakdown like bloody Kester. I didn’t say “bloody Kester,” of course. I kept it dignified and said “my cousin.”

Looking more worried than ever Warburton drove away and I was left to find my magic lady.

No one seemed to be at home. Presently I gave up ringing the doorbell and reviewed the list of possible occupants. Evan was away in London reading theology at King’s, Gerry was up at Oxford—naturally he’d won his bloody scholarship—and Sian was away at her new school, Bedales, which represented her parents’ attempt to compromise between a socially acceptable girls’ public school and a progressive coeducational environment. That left Lance, but it was early in the afternoon and he was almost certainly not home yet from the grammar. My father would be out either playing golf or adorning his latest boardroom. That left Bronwen except that it didn’t because she wasn’t there. I sat down on the doorstep to wait, and after five minutes she returned with some dry cleaning.

Some unknown time later I was sitting at the kitchen table in front of my third cup of tea and saying, “I want to grieve. If I grieve it’ll mean I loved her and then I won’t have to feel so guilty. I want to grieve but nothing happens.”

And Bronwen said, “There is no timetable for grief. Grief isn’t a train which you catch at the station …”

She went on talking, and the heavily accented English words sank softly deep into my consciousness like feathers falling from a great height. I couldn’t take in what she said but I liked to listen to the rhythms of her speech because they were so soothing. Then I realized I was understanding more than I thought I was because I could discern the shape of her meaning. I could see the circle of time, and in the middle of the circle a piano was playing, the piano of memory, sending notes ricocheting from one side of the circle to the other.

“… and you’ll hear her echo in time.”

But I was already hearing it. I saw the child who had talked of raising the Devil on Rhossili Downs. I saw us running along the beach and laughing in the dunes and drinking lemonade in the potting shed.

“I suppose I’d have been driven to divorce her in the end,” I said, “but perhaps I could only have faced it if I’d met someone else I wanted to marry … but I never did, did I, and now I daresay I never shall.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh, I’m not very clever with women, Bronwen, not really. I can never work out what to do with them outside the bedroom, I can’t talk to them at all.”

“You’re talking to me.”

“You’re different. You’re magic. I suppose the truth is that I want to marry someone just like you, but how am I ever going to find a second magic lady? I can’t believe she exists.” I was dimly aware that I was talking like a Freudian casebook, since I regarded Bronwen as my mother, but luckily Bronwen never bothered with people like Freud; she was much too busy being sensible.

“I’m not magic, Harry!”

“Oh yes, you are. You’re magic because you know what all this means while I’m floundering around in a black fog and catching occasional glimpses of something unspeakable.”

“Your circle’s clouded,” said Bronwen in her best matter-of-fact voice, “but that’s normal after a tragedy.”

“Perhaps … But Bronwen, I’m haunted by the thought that Bella was fated, that there was nothing anyone could have done to save her, and that’s a terrible thought, isn’t it, because it implies a preordained and inescapable future.”

Bronwen said without hesitation, “I agree Bella was fated, but not in the way you fear. In our lives there are choices which have to be made, and our freedom to choose means we have at least some control over our fate: Bella chose, either consciously or unconsciously, to become pregnant again, and that was
her
choice, not the choice of some cruel god in charge of a preordained future.”

“But she had no real freedom to choose! She made the choice as the result of what happened to her when she was thirteen!”

“Yes, but don’t you see, she didn’t have to live the rest of her life in the shadow of what happened to her when she was thirteen! She could have chosen to live her life differently but the truth was she just didn’t have the will to ring the changes—as I did, for instance, when I went to Canada and escaped from a situation that was destroying me.”

“You mean—what you’re saying is—”

“I’m saying that the circle of time is full of little circles and those little circles can be prisons, people can be locked up in them without the will to force their way out. That’s what happened to Bella. She was locked up in this circle with you, just as you were locked up in it with her. You knew that if she stayed there she’d die but your will alone wasn’t sufficient to save her and so she was fated, fated to remain strapped to the wheel of her fortune and spun on to the death she couldn’t avoid.”

I was mesmerized. This was it. This was my magic lady working at full steam. She spoke in the brisk sensible voice of someone who describes an absolute reality, and even the most hardened cynic would have found it impossible to sneer.

I took another deep breath. “Bronwen, there’s something else I must talk to you about. Bella’s isn’t the only circle I’ve been sharing. I’m sharing another one that’s far, far more sinister.”

“So I’ve noticed,” said Bronwen, “but sharing a circle needn’t be sinister and it needn’t be unusual either, far from it—people live their lives and other people weave in and out and make patterns there. That’s normal.”

“This isn’t normal, not by a long chalk. In fact sometimes it scares me though I’m not sure why it should.”

She looked steadily at me. “You’re talking about the circle you share with Kester.”

“Yes. He doesn’t just weave in and out. He’s there all the time. His circle’s my circle. We’re … how did you put it just now—”

“You’re both strapped to the same wheel of fortune.”

“Yes, it’s as if …” But I couldn’t say it was as if we were one person. That really did sound too neurotic.

“… as if you were one person,” said Bronwen, treating this as a perfectly rational statement. “But no, that’s almost certainly an illusion caused by the fact that you feel the circle’s not big enough to contain you both.”

“But what do I do to expand it?”

“I don’t know, Harry. I’m not a fortune teller. Nor would I dream of telling you how to run your life. The choice is yours.”

We were silent for a time.

“I could go to Herefordshire now,” I said at last. “Now Bella’s dead I could leave Gower and start afresh in a new circle.”

Bronwen said nothing.

“I think I’ll have to give that very serious consideration,” I said. “Yes, very serious consideration indeed. And so I will. But not just at the moment. Later.”