The Wheel of Fortune (166 page)

And that brought me to the horror of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit, the catastrophe which had locked my father into a downward financial spiral and driven him for the second time beyond the edge of sanity into a nervous breakdown. Pam had said to me at the time: “I expect you’re a bit bothered by Declan’s evidence, aren’t you? It would be only natural if you were. Would you like to talk it over?” But I had refused to talk it over. It was easier to refuse to think about it; easier, much easier just to tell myself that Declan Kinsella was a shit and his testimony was a lie.

I drank my Coke and remembered Pam saying to me the night before: “Very few people are strong enough to look unpleasant truths straight in the face.”

But I was now going to be strong enough. The Bryn-Davies lawsuit was an unpleasant fact but it had to be confronted, and picking up my pen again I began to will myself into a cold analytical state of mind by writing down the facts as I remembered them.

VII

KESTER’S DEATH: THE CONSEQUENCES: THE BRYN-DAVIES LAWSUIT.
The Bryn-Davies lawsuit was engineered by Declan Kinsella in order to give himself a public platform from which he could attack my father. His silence at the inquest is probably explained
b
y the fact that he was unable to prove his suspicions of murder and merely wanted to listen to the evidence so that he could take full advantage of it later. Could he have foreseen the lawsuit as early as that? Yes, because the odds were he knew what was in Kester’s last will. Kester had made this will after he had given Oxmoon to my father, and in the circumstances it’s more than likely that he discussed his will with Declan when he discussed the loss of Oxmoon.

The will gave Declan the chance to initiate a lawsuit, and he used Owen Bryn-Davies Senior as a cat’s-paw in his plan. The will represented Kester’s attempt to strike an equitable balance between his protégés, in view of the fact that I was now sure to inherit Oxmoon from my father. After the loss of Oxmoon Kester’s fortune consisted of money invested in various stocks and shares but in addition there was a
pied-à-terre
in London, a fact of considerable importance because it meant that Kester’s will still spoke of real and personal property, even though the bulk of his real property had been ceded to my father. With the exception of a few legacies this personal fortune of Kester’s was devised and bequeathed to my contemporary Owen Bryn-Davies Junior. I received a hundred pounds, all the books in the library at Oxmoon and all Kester’s unpublished manuscripts.

As soon as probate had been granted, Declan swung into action. He convinced Owen Bryn-Davies Senior that my father had obtained Oxmoon by extortion
—
and this meant that Kester’s deed of gift was invalid and that Oxmoon now passed to Owen Junior as the heir to Kester’s real property. Owen Senior decided to go to law on behalf of his son, but when the case got to court it wasn’t the will that was on trial; it was my father.

Declan’s story
—
which was laughed out of court
—
was that Kester had accidentally killed Uncle Thomas in a brawl and had then panicked, summoned my father and with his help covered up the crime by faking the car smash. Later, according to Declan, my father had turned around and used his knowledge of the crime to blackmail Kester. In this way he had extorted Oxmoon.

That covered the extortion theory. Then Declan elaborated his theory of murder. He said that Kester had eventually become so determined to recover Oxmoon that he had been prepared to go to the police and risk winding up in jail for a spell rather than continue to submit to my father’s blackmail. Declan said Kester had returned to Gower to reclaim Oxmoon from my father and my father, facing ruin, had killed him to keep him quiet.

At this point the judge lost patience, mourned the absence of proof and said the case should never have been allowed to come to
c
ourt. He dismissed the case without awarding costs and told the parties to resume their sordid family feud elsewhere. The press had a field day. My father was generally acknowledged to have been exonerated but a lot of mud had been flung at him and some of the mud inevitably stuck.

The Director of Public Prosecutions considered whether the investigations into the deaths of Kester and Thomas should be reopened, but decided against it on the grounds of insufficient evidence. This meant that my father was technically innocent because no one had proved him guilty, but the gossip was rampant and it was then that my father embarked on his career as a recluse. Footing his legal costs also started him on the downward path to financial ruin. So Declan achieved his object. He wanted to crucify my father and he crucified him. Not only that, but my father’s still on the cross and no psychiatrist, not even Pam, can apparently succeed in cutting him down.

So much for the facts of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit. But what do I make of Declan’s evidence?

There are three possibilities here: either it was fact; or it was fiction; or it was a mixture of the two. Whichever possibility is correct, the fact remains that Declan, who knew his brother very well, believed that my father was morally responsible for Kester’s death. Declan may not in fact have believed Kester had been murdered; he may just have propagated that story out of sheer revenge, but if he didn’t believe in murder he must surely have believed my father had driven Kester to suicide. If he thought Kester had died by accident Declan wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to make my father pay.

All this means that if I’m to prove Kester died an accidental death I’ve somehow got to prove that Declan was dead wrong in his interpretation of the tragedy. However, there’s at least one way of explaining why Declan wound up dead wrong: he could have been blinded by rage and grief, unable to reason effectively with the result that he drew a series of false deductions from the facts. I think I might be prepared to concede he spoke sincerely but sincerity is no guarantee that what he spoke was the truth.

Can I forget the preposterous theory of extortion and write it off as an Irish fairy tale? I only wish I could. But I can’t because Declan based his belief that Kester was murdered on the theory that my father extorted Oxmoon from Kester and was then obliged to kill Kester to keep it. In other words, the extortion gives my father a motive for murder. If there had been no extortion then the deed of gift would have been perfectly valid and my father would have been secure in the knowledge that Kester could never get the property back. Murder would have been quite unnecessary. So the way to explode any theory of murder is to explode the theory of extortion, and I don’t see how I can avoid including the subject in my inquiries.

Had Kester done something that would lay him open to blackmail and if he had, what was it? It’s very hard to believe Declan’s story. For instance, if Kester had accidentally killed Thomas, why had he panicked? He’d have been much more likely to hold fast, stand firm, do the right thing and call the police. It wouldn’t have been pleasant but he probably wouldn’t have wound up in jail. And if he had panicked, why call in my father, the one member of the family he couldn’t stand and didn’t trust? And why would my father have lifted a finger to help him stage a car smash? The story just doesn’t stand up at all.

So what does this mean? It means that either Declan invented the whole story to support his extortion accusation or else for reasons of his own he was putting a gloss on some true facts. Maybe there was a crime and maybe it did concern Thomas, but whatever happened didn’t happen the way Declan said it did.

Yet Pam says many people secretly believe in the extortion theory. Does this mean they also, secretly believe my father was a murderer? What in fact do all the witnesses who gave evidence at the inquest truly believe? They may have told the truth as far as possible in the witness box but how close to the real truth is that truth? I shall have to question everyone again and form my own opinion.

One further thought occurs to me. I still can’t believe there was any extortion, but if there was it actually presents a powerful argument against a theory of suicide. If Kester had been forced to surrender Oxmoon he’d never have rested until he’d got it back. He’d have fought to the last ditch. He’d have kept himself alive for Oxmoon, and the last thing he’d ever have done would be give up and throw himself despairingly into the sea.

So I must pursue this issue of extortion. There’s no way I can kid myself it’s irrelevant to my inquiries.

VIII

It was midafternoon, but I wasn’t finished. I still had to make a list of the witnesses I needed to interview but I felt exhausted. Taking a hard look at unpalatable facts is an exhausting occupation, and after eating a bar of chocolate I brewed myself some more coffee before I turned to a fresh page of my notebook.

At once I was faced with the fact that the Kinsella brothers weren’t the only crucial witnesses whom I was now unable to interview. There was another witness too who was permanently beyond my reach, the one witness who had loved both Kester and my father, the only witness who could have had sufficient intuition to grasp exactly what had been going on. Bronwen had only survived my grandfather by four years. Sian had said to me with resignation after her mother died: “She did try to survive but it was too difficult without him. She said the wheel was wrecked beyond repair.”

I thought of Bronwen talking of the Wheel of Fortune.

After Kester’s death she had said to me: “It was fated. He was strapped to a wheel of fortune from which he hadn’t the will to escape,” and when I was grieving that I would never see him again she had said to me: “But you will see him again—and again—and again. You’ll look across the circle and you’ll hear his echo in time.”

But I’d felt I couldn’t bear to hear that echo so I had closed my ears against it and I hadn’t mentioned Kester to Bronwen again. She was the one who had spoken of him in the end. I’d just been expelled from Harrow and I’d gone to visit her in the hospital where she was dying. She had said: “You’re making such a mistake, Hal, by trying to punish your father. He’s suffering enough as it is.” But I’d been only fifteen and I’d no idea what she meant. I was too young then to connect my performance at Harrow with my rage at Kester’s death.

“Forgive him,” Bronwen had said. “Forgive them both. Don’t let them draw you into their shared circle, don’t let them destroy you as they’ve destroyed each other.”

“What circle?”

“The wheel of their fortune, the circle of their lives. … The wheel must be reshaped, the circle redeemed, such a burden to pass to you, you must be very strong, very brave.”

“I don’t understand, Bronwen. I don’t understand a single word you’re saying.”

“Be loyal to your father.” Those had been her last words to me. “Be loyal to your father,” she had said, so I had turned over a new leaf, working hard at the crammers, gaining a place at Bristol University to read classics, trying to help my father as he floundered deeper into debt and despair after the catastrophe of the Bryn-Davies lawsuit.

But my father had been impossible to please. Even Gerry, his favorite brother, had quarreled with him in the end.

“You want to destroy yourself, Harry. You’re not basically interested in survival. You just want to open the floodgates and let disaster pour in.”

Gerry had quit. I’d quit. That was when I’d bummed around Europe and nearly wound up in a Turkish jail. I’d arrived home full of new plans to reform and had found that my father wanted to give Oxmoon to the National Trust in order to preserve it for posterity. He had been too ill to see the Trust’s officials himself, but he had asked me to negotiate with them.

The Trust had been interested but had pointed out that all houses which came to them had to be endowed with a capital sum that would ensure their maintenance. They had wanted four hundred thousand pounds to restore the house and grounds and establish a fund for the future upkeep, but when my father had offered to sell the art collection to raise the money the Trust had recoiled in horror. The officials had said that the art collection was the only reason why they would wish to acquire Oxmoon; as the house was of no great architectural merit, it could be justifiably preserved only as a showcase for Kester’s unique collection of paintings, furniture and
objets d’art.

Although greatly disappointed, my father had also been relieved that he hadn’t been obliged to sell Kester’s treasures. Some psychological bar had always prevented him from sending even the smallest item to the auction rooms despite Gerry’s frantic advice to sell antiques and not land to ease his financial troubles. It was all part of his mental disturbance.

“If I sell any of Kester’s possessions then he’ll never forgive me and then my gift for playing the piano by ear will never come back,” he had said more than once in the past, and Gerry had commented to me: “Mad as a bloody hatter.”

When Gerry and I realized that all our efforts to help were futile, Gerry had told my father to find another solicitor while I had escaped through the Chelsea coffee bars into the music business. Later I had heard from Humphrey that my father was hoping that I’d make the fortune required for Oxmoon’s endowment. If this hope hadn’t been so pathetic I would have laughed. I’d been making good money but nothing on the scale of four hundred thousand pounds. Only the very lucky and the very talented hit the real big time in the music business, and my luck and talent had been merely moderate.

Oxmoon was doomed, that was the truth of it, as ruined and ravaged as my father and just as utterly beyond redemption.

“The wheel must be reshaped, the circle redeemed …” I could hear Bronwen’s voice again, but this time, although her words were still an enigma they seemed to connect in some inexplicable way with my present situation. “Such a burden to pass to you, you must be very strong, very brave,” she had said, and suddenly I could feel the weight of the burden she had seen so clearly. I could not identify it, I could only dimly perceive its dimensions, but I knew beyond doubt it was there.