The Wheel of Fortune (151 page)

“Ah. Yes, I can imagine you playing the piano … you do play the piano, don’t you?”

I nodded. By this time I could clearly see that she was magic—not Celtic magic like Bronwen, but Anglo-Saxon magic, the kind of magic which invades the jungle, tames the savages, builds an outpost of the Empire and produces tea parties below a flying Union Jack all within the space of six months. I looked at this cool clinical competent woman who was not one scrap sexy and who was almost certainly years older than I was, and I thought: This is it. I’ve found my magic lady. And my relief was so enormous that I’d finally found someone who would sort me out and show me how to be happy that I nearly broke down and wept.

However I held myself together, as befitted someone who didn’t need a psychiatrist, and said casually, “Are you married?”

“Yes. My husband’s a neurosurgeon.”

Bloody hell. Why did I never, never have any luck? I knew I hadn’t a chance of competing with a neurosurgeon.

“Any children?” I said, trying to pretend this was just a polite social conversation.

“No.”

“Oh.” A woman who was probably either sterile or else childless by choice! I sighed. Then I realized I was behaving like a lunatic again so I said briskly as I rose to my feet, “Well, perhaps I will go to London for a few days. Thank you. Of course I shan’t need to see you again, but if I do—”

“My secretary would be delighted to make an appointment,” said Dr. Mallinson inscrutably.

“Uh … could I make it now? Before I leave?”

Dr. Mallinson gave a small,
Mona Lisa
-like smile and looked professionally satisfied.

For some hours after this extraordinary interview I indulged in daydreams that the neurosurgeon would drop dead with the result that Dr. Mallinson would be free to iron out my life, but then sanity returned and it slowly dawned on me that I had stumbled into the well-known farcical situation of the patient who falls in love with his psychiatrist. How mad could one get? I at once decided to be sane—much too sane to see Dr. Mallinson again—so I cancelled my next appointment, but I did take her advice to go to London for a week.

This did me so much good that at the end of the week I bought a postcard of the Albert Hall and wrote on it:
Your cure worked, chalk me up on your list of successes, many thanks,
H. C. GODWIN.
But this sounded too dull so I bought a second postcard of the Albert Hall and wrote:
I’m a new man, thanks to you. I must see you again but does it have to be in that damned consulting room?
HARRY GODWIN.
But I decided I really couldn’t send this so I bought a third postcard and wrote:
I shan’t see you again but I’ll never forget how you helped me. With gratitude,
H. GODWIN
. Then I made an awful mistake—or was it a Freudian slip?—and posted the wrong one, so in the end I sent them all, just to give her something to think about, and resolutely made up my mind to forget her. Like Oxmoon she apparently wasn’t in my stars. Bloody stars, I hated them all.

VI

The most important result of my visit to London was that I was at last able to see my problems in perspective. No doubt this was just what Dr. Mallinson had hoped would happen. I’d been in a hellish position which had been made even more hellish because I had become too bogged down in Penhale to see it clearly, but once I had struggled out of the bog to London clarity of vision soon returned.

Having posted my mad postcards to Dr. Mallinson I walked away from the Albert Hall into Kensington Gardens and eventually sat down by the Round Pond where, long ago, my nanny had boasted to the other nannies that my mother had been one of the Beauties of the Season back in 1914. The weather was uninviting; it was a chilly day in January, but I sat down on a bench and gazed over the tranquil water. I wanted to be sane. Where lay the road to sanity? Herefordshire. Timbuktu. The North Pole. Anywhere, in fact, except Kester’s doorstep. If I wanted to keep myself out of a straitjacket and away from a padded cell, I had to escape from Cousin Kester once and for all, and escaping from Cousin Kester meant giving up all hope that Oxmoon would drop into my lap.

Which was more important, Oxmoon or my sanity? My sanity. The truth which I now had to face after thirty-two years in the world was that I wasn’t going to get Oxmoon either now or in the future, and it was quite pointless to hang around Penhale on a second-rate estate waiting for something that was never going to happen. My father had always known this, of course. No wonder he had been worried about me! He had had good cause. But never mind, I’d woken up now, I’d faced the unpalatable facts squarely and I’d made up my mind to reorganize my life along more rational lines.

I allowed myself to brood for one last time on those unpalatable facts but I knew I was powerless to alter them. The truth was that there was nothing I could do about Kester—short of murdering him (ha ha)—and I’d be a fool to continue to crucify myself with frustrated rage just because he’d got away with murder while I, hoist with the petard of my own assistance, had been unable to lock him up. If we’d been characters in one of Kester’s novels, retribution would be waiting in the wings to remove Kester from the scene; murderers never escaped unpunished in novels, but this was messy real life and as far as I could see there was no ghost of retribution on the horizon. Kester wasn’t going to drop dead. Nor was he going to go mad again, I could see that clearly now. He’d obviously been mad when he’d killed Thomas, but with his guilt towards Anna assuaged he’d made a complete recovery, and the odds were he’d live another fifty years in perfect mental health. Probably, now that he was no longer feeling guilty about Anna, he’d even remarry and produce sons.

Very well. So much for him. Lucky old Kester, lucky old sod, but before I died of jealousy I had to get the hell out of his life.

I went back to my hotel and telephoned my father.

VII

“I draw the line,” I said.

So I was my father’s son after all, and here we were, right in the middle of this supremely edifying scene which would have warmed the cockles of any Victorian heart and served as an illustration for a story entitled “The Reconciliation”—or perhaps, in true Victorian style, “The Repentance.” If we had belonged to any race on earth but the British we might have shed a pardonable tear or two, but there we were, two Welshmen strangled at birth by the Anglo-Saxon culture, so of course all we could do was grunt dry-eyed at each other and keep a stiff upper lip as we bust our guts to do the done thing.

“I draw the line, Father.”

“Finally?”

“Finally.”

“Thank God.”

“Yes. Behaved like a lunatic. Sorry.”

“No need to apologize. Tricky situation.”

“Bloody.”

“Hm.”

Silence.

We were sitting working-class style at the table in Bronwen’s kitchen. I had returned home a day early from London to convey my great decision to my father, and was staying the night at his house. Humphrey was already there. I had given Nanny a week’s holiday to coincide with my own and she wasn’t back yet. The three elder boys were all away at school.

My father and I were alone in the kitchen. After tea Bronwen had lured Humphrey into the drawing room to play Ludo, and all my siblings were absent. Evan was working in a slum parish in Cardiff; Gerry, articled to a Swansea solicitor, and Lance, employed at an engineering works at Port Talbot, were still out at work, while Sian was away in London where she was attending one of the famous secretarial colleges. She was staying with Marian, who for some extraordinary reason beyond my comprehension had resumed her marriage to Rory Kinsella.

My father and Humphrey had met me at the station. I was very fond of Humphrey, who looked just like me, and I secretly regarded him as my favorite. Charles and Jack were too like the Stourhams, while Hal … But I didn’t understand Hal. I’d thought the music would make a bond between us, but it hadn’t. Whenever I tried to talk to him the right words always eluded me.

“Daddy, Daddy …” Humphrey chattered all the way from the station to my father’s house, and I listened and smiled and thought what an attractive little beggar he was. But Humphrey wasn’t musical. He seemed to be like me but he had no ear for music, and in my sadder moments I knew that that meant he wasn’t really like me at all.

However before I could start to feel depressed about the gulf which existed between me and my sons, we arrived at my father’s house and my magic lady came out to meet me. She at once said how much better I looked. Then she turned to my father and asked him if he was all right. My father said, “Yes, yes, yes” impatiently and tried not to walk like an old man. Apparently he had played thirty-six holes of golf in the rain the day before and was now feeling stiff in the legs.

In the kitchen the kettle was on the boil, my favorite cake was on the table and we settled down to relax. I was so happy I ate like a horse. So did Humphrey, and when he looked afterwards as if he regretted his third slice of cake Bronwen suggested the game of Ludo to divert him.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Johnny?” she said over her shoulder as she left the room. My father had drunk two cups of tea but had eaten nothing.

“Stop nagging me!” said my father crossly.

Bronwen made an acid-sounding comment in Welsh and withdrew.

“If I want to play thirty-six holes in the rain I’ll damn well play thirty-six holes in the rain!” shouted my father after her in English.

The door banged.

I allowed him a couple of minutes to recover from this little exhibition of marital normality but finally launched myself upon a monologue declaring my intention to reorganize my life. I confessed my neurotic preoccupation with Oxmoon. I confessed my mind-destroying jealousy of Kester. I confessed that I’d reached the end of an exceptionally disastrous road. My father listened and listened and sagged deeper and deeper in his chair with relief. When I finally reached the point where I could utter his famous phrase I knew quite well there was a lump in his throat. There was certainly a lump in mine. How we both managed to sustain a few more seconds of fractured conversation I have no idea.

After the inevitable silence while we both took the necessary time to restarch our upper lips, I managed to say: “I’ll be all right now.”

“Yes. I know you will. But all the same …” My father leaned forward with his forearms on the table and clasped his hands. Then he said violently, taking me by surprise: “How I resent you being driven into exile like this! I feel …” He stopped to choose his words. “I feel,” he said slowly, “as if there’s some terrible injustice here somewhere but I can’t quite work out what it is.”

That shook me. I said nothing. My one unbreakable resolution was that he should never know the truth about Thomas’s death.

“It was justice that Oxmoon went to Kester,” said my father. “Your grandfather … But no, let his memory rest in peace. That’s all over now … my poor father, I was so fond of him. But although it was justice that Oxmoon went to Kester, justice somehow seems to have gone adrift here … Why should you have to suffer like this? I suppose it must somehow be my fault because—”

But I couldn’t have him blaming himself for anything, not when he was entering old age and entitled to an unflawed happy ending.

“No, this isn’t your fault, Father! Absolutely not!”

“But I allowed you to grow up feeling shortchanged about Oxmoon—I never gave you the real explanation of my father’s motives for passing you over. I wanted to protect my father, protect myself from all those painful memories. … You see, it was all to do with my grandmother—my grandmother and Owain Bryn-Davies—”

“Father, that’s past. It’s irrelevant.”

“No, that’s where you make your big mistake. My grandmother’s tragedy made my father the man he was—and if my father hadn’t been the man he was he wouldn’t have put himself in a position where he was so guilty about Robert that he allowed Robert to dictate to him about his will—”

I couldn’t cope. “Father, I’m sorry but if I start dwelling on chains of causality I’ll go round the bend with rage and frustration. I’ve got to concentrate on the future now if I want to stay sane.”

“I don’t want to think of the past either, but I do. Where did I go wrong with you two boys? What did I do? I made rather a success of bringing up Thomas—with his appalling home background in early adolescence he could well have turned out to be completely delinquent, but he did well for himself, settled down happily, excelled at his job … until it all ended in tragedy. Harry, talking of Thomas—”

“Father if you start blaming yourself because Thomas smashed himself up while drunk I swear I’ll have a complete nervous breakdown. For Christ’s sake—”

“I sometimes wonder,” said my father, not looking at me, “whether the whole story of Thomas’s death was ever known.”

Batten down the hatches. Lock up the truth.

“Father, I was there at Oxmoon. I watched him weave drunkenly away in his Hillman. Why would I lie? What possible motive could I have for suppressing any facts?”

My father judged this question to be unanswerable and sagged with relief again. “I’m sorry, I know I’m being irrational, but sometimes I lie awake at night—”

“Well, don’t. Stop it. Pull yourself together.” It’s a bizarre fact of life that after a certain span of time the parent-child relationship slowly reverses itself and the child begins to assume the parental role.

My father smiled as if he were glad to see me assuming his role so ably, but then he pressed his hand against his forehead in pain.

Father—”

“Yes, it’s a bloody nuisance, but I’m going to have to give in—obviously I’ve got a chill. In fact I think I may even have a temperature.”

“I’ll call Bronwen.”

“No, wait,” he said. “Wait.” I shall always remember his tone of voice when he said that. It was one of extreme disbelief. “Harry, can you come and help me? Something seems to have happened to my legs.”

They were paralyzed.

He had polio.

He died four days later.