The Wheel of Fortune (164 page)

I sank my teeth into my apple pie to ensure that I kept quiet.

“It’ll be uncomfortable for you to camp out in the kitchens,” said my father, “but of course I know it’s no good asking you to stay here. I expect you’re having a hard time hiding your contempt that I’m obliged to live in a corner of the stables like this.”

“Some corner,” said Pam. “Coffee, Hal?”

Not trusting myself to speak I nodded.

“Anyway,” said my father, “I don’t care if you want to camp out like a hippy; suit yourself, it’s none of my business. And I don’t care either if you want to reexamine the past. Pam says everyone needs to pause and take stock of their lives every now and then. That’s healthy, she says. Well, all right, if you want to talk about, well, about Kester, go ahead, why not, ask whatever questions you like and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Pam says that’s fine, we should have talked it all out long since, she says. Well, of course I would have if you’d asked but you didn’t ask, did you? You never said anything about Kester before, never mentioned his name, so how was I to know what you were thinking?”

“Don’t forget your Vivaldi concert, darling,” said Pam. “Would you like coffee in your room? You know how you hate to miss the opening bars.”

My father ignored her. “I don’t want you to think I’m hostile,” he said to me. “As a matter of fact I’m very touched that you want to disprove the suicide theory and exonerate me from responsibility. When you said that earlier I … well, I couldn’t take it, could I, but that was only because it all seemed so sad and I felt I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear to think of you being tortured as well as me—”

“That’s the point, isn’t it? It’s time the torture stopped. Thank you, Father, it’s very good of you to say you’ll cooperate with me, we’ll talk later. Don’t feel you have to miss your concert.”

“What upsets me,” said my father, “is that I can’t tell you what you want to hear. Kester was very unstable. Everything had gone wrong for him. I’m quite sure he came back to Gower with the intention of dying in the place he loved best. That would have been acting in character.”

“I can think of nothing more out of character than Kester committing suicide.”

“But you never really knew him, did you?”

Pam decided this was the right psychological moment to intervene. “This is the real question you have to answer, Hal,” she said. “What was Kester really like?”

“You must realize,” said my father, “that he had great problems. I mean, I’d never have taken over Oxmoon unless I’d honestly felt he couldn’t cope—although now when I look back I can see this must have aggravated his sense of failure and driven him further along the road to suicide. I shouldn’t have allowed him to give Oxmoon to me—Christ, if only you knew how guilty I feel about that now—”

“Yes.” I drank my coffee. “It’s okay, I understand.”

“I mean, you do believe, don’t you, that Kester gave me Oxmoon of his own free will? I know Declan said—”

“I’m not interested in Irish fairy tales.” I went on sipping my coffee.

There was a silence. Then my father sighed, rubbed the raw patch of skin above the line of his beard and leaned back in his chair for a moment before, he remembered his concert. “Do you want to come and listen?” he asked me as he rose to his feet.

“I’ll join you later.”

My father withdrew, coffee mug in hand, and presently we heard the faint strains of chamber music in his room. Pam began to load the dishwasher. I was busy finishing my coffee and repressing the craving for a cigarette.

“Can I give you some advice?” said Pam presently. “Don’t let your discussions with your father degenerate into arguments. Try listening and making neutral comments. You’ll learn more.”

“Thanks for the tip.”

“I’m quite serious.”

“So am I. I need all the tips I can get.”

Pam gave me one of her thin smiles of approval and closed the dishwasher. Then she said abruptly: “What do you really think about Declan Kinsella’s evidence during the Bryn-Davies lawsuit?”

“The accusation of murder?”

“No, the accusation of extortion.”

“Ridiculous.”

“That’s interesting,” said Pam, sitting down opposite me again. “I can understand why you found the accusation of murder preposterous—in view of the findings of the inquest everyone did. But the extortion’s rather a different kettle of fish, isn’t it? I think many people secretly believe your father extorted Oxmoon from Kester, and bearing in mind your attitude to both those men I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if you told me you believed that too.”

I saw her point. “I still say extortion’s impossible. If you argue that Father obtained Oxmoon by duress what you’re really saying is that he blackmailed Kester, and once you say he blackmailed Kester you imply, that Kester had done something that would render him liable to blackmail. And that’s out of the question.”

“Ah, I see.”

“I suppose that ranks as a neutral comment.”

She smiled. “Perhaps!”

“I know just what you’re thinking,” I said. “You think I’m blinded by hero worship where Kester’s concerned.”

“You don’t see him as a hero?”

“No, of course not. Heroes only exist in myths.”

“Then how would you describe him?”

This was easy. “He was a magician,” I said. “He waved his magic wand and fantasy became reality. Oxmoon was a fairy-tale palace. Home was crude and noisy and boring, all those damned brothers getting under my feet and my father shouting at me, but whenever I went up to Oxmoon Kester led me through the looking glass into another world. He encouraged me to play the piano in the ballroom, he talked to me about books and art and films and the theater. I’d go up to Oxmoon and suddenly life wasn’t boring anymore, life was glittering, and there at the center of it all was my magician, talking of all the values that made life worth living. Of course he was an idealist, but what made him so different from the usual crackpot was that he was strong and brave and he had the guts to stand up for what he believed in, he didn’t compromise his principles just to follow the crowd. There was a line from Byron he used to quote: ‘Yet Freedom! yet thy banner, torn, but flying, streams like a thunderstorm
against
the wind.’ I often remember that line when I think of Kester because he wasn’t afraid to go against the wind. He knew freedom. He kept faith with himself. He was a hero.”

I stopped. Pam said nothing. Presently I managed to say: “Okay, very clever, I congratulate you, you caught me out. I said I didn’t see him as a hero and here I am, describing him as just that. But all I can say is that Kester was one of those rare men who deserve such a description because now I’m grown up I know it’s not easy to maintain one’s idealism, as he did, in a corrupt cynical world. You have to be very strong to go against the wind. I’ve found that out for myself.”

Pam waited a moment before saying: “Don’t think I can’t accept what you say. Obviously Kester was able to show you children who visited him regularly at Oxmoon a very special side of himself, but what kind of a magician was he, Hal? What kind of spell was he really weaving, and for what reasons?”

“Well, you’re the psychiatrist who knows all the answers. You tell me.”

“The day I start believing I know all the answers is the day I need to be certified, but this situation does strongly suggest to me that Kester used you children as an emotional outlet and that the more his fortunes waned the more necessary it became to him that he should have a bunch of little supporters who all loyally regarded him as a hero. In other words I suspect he was on rather a dubious ego trip and his motives were far more clouded than you’ve ever been able to acknowledge.”

“Yes, but—”

“You’re being much too simple about this, Hal, much too ready to see everything in black-and-white. This is a complex case which embraces all the colors of the emotional spectrum. Be careful about rushing to judgment.”

In the pause that followed I was aware of Vivaldi’s music far away, very pure, very precise, a soothingly clear-cut translation of black notes on white paper.

“You don’t want me to get involved in all this, do you?” I said at last.

“No, but I accept that I can’t stop you.”

“Why don’t you want me to get involved?”

“Because I don’t think this quest will help you. Obviously you’ve reached the point where you have to come to terms with Kester’s death before you can go on with your life, but what worries me is that this solution which you’ve invented for yourself will create more problems than it solves.”

“Go on.”

“You seem to think,” said Pam, “that if only you can uncover the truth—
THE TRUTH
, in capital letters—everything will automatically be resolved but in fact this is most unlikely to happen. For a start it’s almost certain that
THE TRUTH
, whatever that is, can never now be established beyond all reasonable doubt. In other words, you’ll get nowhere, Hal, and that won’t solve your problem—quite the reverse. It’ll simply make you as obsessive about Kester as your father is. The real truth—as opposed to
THE TRUTH
in capital letters—is that there’s only one way to come to terms with Kester’s death, and that’s to acknowledge that his absence is something you can’t change. How he died doesn’t matter. All that matters is that he loved you but he’s gone.”

“But I have to prove he didn’t choose to go.”

“You mean you have to prove he loved you and didn’t abandon you voluntarily. You have to prove that his heroism wasn’t a fraud.”

“If you like. It’s all one.” I got up and began to move restlessly around the room. Finally I swung to face her. “What do
you
believe?” I demanded. “Don’t try and tell me you haven’t worked out what happened!”

“The suicide theory can certainly be made to look convincing.”

“But suppose I were to tell you that after he died both Gwyneth Llewellyn and I were convinced he would never have left us like that?”

“I’m afraid I’d reply that this is the classic reaction of a suicide’s bereaved relatives. The terrible truth is that a suicide can and does leave those he loves, and in fact often feels he’s doing them a favor.”

“Give me one good reason why Kester would have thought he was doing us a favor by killing himself!”

“I’d prefer not to at this stage. I don’t think you could handle it.”

“I think that’s the most infuriating thing you’ve ever said to me. If you’re trying to protect me from—”

“I’m trying to save my breath. If I told you my theory you’d ridicule it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it’s not consistent with your picture of Kester.” She too rose to her feet and moved closer to me. “Hal, let me give you one last tip, Be very careful. If you’ve been spellbound by a magician you could be more vulnerable than you realize. You’re like someone on a trip. You could have a hard time coming down.”

It always startled me when Pam used hip phrases but she picked them up during her part-time work at Assumptionsville, the trendy new clinic for drug addicts on the outskirts of Swansea.

“If I’m on a trip,” I said, “it’s got nothing to do with Kester’s spells. I’m not mainlining on magic. I’m mainlining on truth.”

“Then fasten your seat belt,” said Pam, wryly misquoting the immortal line from
All About Eve,
“because I think you’re in for a bumpy ride.”

2

I

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I hitched a ride to Swansea, hired a car and found a shop that sold camping supplies. I had told my father the truth when I’d said I wasn’t short of money. I’d long since blown my legacy from my grandfather, but I had three thousand pounds in a bank in London, not a large sum compared with the fortune the Beatles must have been amassing, but a useful one. It was certainly enough to enable me to live like a hermit at Oxmoon while I sorted myself out.

I chose my supplies, collected some miscellaneous items from Woolworth’s and stopped at a suburban supermarket. When I arrived home the gates were unlocked. I guessed this meant my father had a visitor, possibly the local doctor, so I avoided the mews house and went directly to the old kitchens. I had collected the key of the back door from Pam after breakfast.

I had decided to camp out in the scullery not for its aesthetic beauty but because it offered certain practical advantages. There was water available. There was an outside lavatory near the back door. There were cupboards with shelves where I could stash my supplies. There was even an old wooden table with two broken chairs which Pam had thought too decrepit to donate to charity. After unloading my gear I fixed the chairs with glue and a screwdriver, set a couple of mousetraps and assembled the Primus stove so that I could brew myself some coffee. Then I discovered the water had been turned off. This was no big surprise but I was annoyed when I failed to find the wheel that would turn on the supply, and it was at that point that I glanced out of the window and saw two men standing by the front door of the mews house at the other end of the yard. One was my father. The other was obviously the owner of the white Ford parked nearby, but it wasn’t the local doctor. It was my father’s stepbrother Dafydd Morgan.

I crossed the yard to join them and as I drew nearer they fell silent. They made an odd couple, my father heavily bearded like some middle-aged dropout, Dafydd as morose as a hit man in a modern movie. My father had once said he found Dafydd restful but that was the last word I should ever have used to describe Dafydd Morgan. I found him sinister. It occurred to me to wonder for the first time what Pam thought of their unlikely but profound friendship. It crossed all the normal barriers of class which hamstrung men of their age. They appeared to have nothing in common. But my father, recluse though he was, couldn’t bear to be parted for long from Dafydd while Dafydd, turning up regularly for a cigarette and a cup of tea, apparently couldn’t bear to be parted for long from him.

“Hi,” I called when I was within earshot.

Dafydd grunted an acknowledgment. His sharp little eyes looked me up and down. All he said was “Your father was telling me you were back.” He had an odd accent which wasn’t entirely Welsh. Having spent some years at the village school in Penhale he had more than a hint of the old Gower inflections which were becoming obsolete. In the old days the men of the Gower Englishry had felt closer to Devon than to Wales.