The Wheel of Fortune (168 page)

“Oh, I know you never liked him, I know you were one of Kester’s fans, but the truth, Hal—the real honest-to-God truth—is that your father’s the hero of this story and he’s had the bloodiest luck imaginable. Mind you, I haven’t always thought of him as a hero. I didn’t like him much when I came home from Canada, thought he was a bit of a cold-blooded snob, standing on his Old School tie and his legitimacy and all that crap—well, of course I was more insecure then than I am now, I was mixed up about a lot of things and there was no one I could talk to, not really, I didn’t get on with my father too well, he was a tricky kind of guy—chap, I mean—stuffy, you know? All hung up about morality, and Christ, what had he got to be so stuffy about, treating my mother like a tart, wrecking her life and then, my God, walking back in a cloud of romance after playing dead for twelve years and having the nerve to think he could pick up where he left off! I couldn’t believe it, I just couldn’t believe she’d take him back, but of course she was useless, too besotted with him to think straight, Christ, women are bloody odd sometimes! Well, I didn’t get on well with my mother either, to be honest—it’s all very well Harry talking sentimentally about magic ladies, but damn it, she was tough as old boots and
she
was all hung up on morality as well except that she dressed it up in that way-out Celtic mysticism—my God, it was impossible to have a straight talk with either of those two. …

“Yes, they were an odd pair all right—people talked so much romantic drivel about my parents’ marriage when it finally happened, but what the hell do you think it was like trying to live with a middle-aged couple who were so taken up with each other that they weren’t plugged into reality at all? Grand passion isn’t designed to incorporate a bunch of kids, that’s the unromantic truth—Christ, the rows over our education! However, my parents have nothing to do with Harry and Kester, have they, although as a matter of fact I often wonder, looking back, what effect my parents’ catastrophic mess of a love affair had on those two—I think that grand passion affected more people adversely than my parents could ever bring themselves to admit. … But that’s life, isn’t it? Unless you live like a hermit, you can’t help affecting other people in some way or other, and hell, I was very fond of my parents really, they just drove me up the wall, that’s all, but most people feel that way about their parents, don’t they? I know you feel that way about Harry. …

“Ah, yes, Harry—I was going to tell you how good Harry was to me when I was a kid. Yes,
he
talked to me,
he
held out a helping hand when I was lonely and insecure and just plain bloody miserable, he was a good brother to me, he listened, he cared, he was there when I needed him. He was a fine man, Hal, the best. And yet all the time up at Oxmoon, living in the house Harry should have had, living the kind of life Harry deserved to lead was this creep, this phony, this bloody hypocrite talking about beauty, truth, art and peace—my God, all that crap about pacifism! Kester was no pacifist! He was as tough and aggressive as they come. He had it in for Harry; he went after him with no holds barred—do you remember how Kester grabbed Little Oxmoon and Martinscombe? That was a naked act of aggression if ever I saw one. Okay, maybe Kester did have a case for annexing them—God knows what the legal position was on that land—but the point was that Kester wanted to ruin Harry and drive him out of Gower. He was ruthless and unscrupulous, he stopped at nothing—

“What was that, old chap? How do I reconcile that picture of Kester with Kester the pathetic old has-been who jumped off the Worm and drowned himself? Okay, good question, but it’s not so hard to answer. Kester was nuts, that’s all—nuts enough to want to destroy Harry and nuts enough to want to destroy himself later. Just because he could be tough doesn’t mean he was incapable of cracking up. After all, look at your father. He was the toughest guy in Gower and look at the way he cracked up! But Harry was a good decent guy who had lousy luck and went to pieces whereas Kester was in pieces to start with, and every time he put himself together he was mayhem on wheels. That’s the truth, Hal. That’s the way it really was. He was a nut case who suicided. What else can I possibly say?”

IV

NOTES ON GERRY:
He could give no concrete reason why Kester should have committed suicide. Did Kester in fact suffer from a clinical depression which could have given rise to manic mood swings? It’s a convenient theory for explaining the suicide but it rings false. However this may be because Gerry’s personality is so synthetic that nearly everything he says does ring false. He was sincere when he talked about Father, though, and I think he was sincere when he talked of Kester as being ruthless and unscrupulous.

What do I make of his story that Kester grabbed the Martinscombe lands in order to drive my father out of Gower? That bears little relation to the story Kester told me in one of the last letters he wrote to me at school before Father stopped the correspondence. Kester said he’d found out that legally the lands belonged to him and that he’d reluctantly decided to reclaim them as he needed every extra penny he could get in order to cope with rising costs and taxation. This seemed reasonable enough
—
a tough break for my father, of course, but Kester was only claiming what was his by right.

But now think again. Kester tries to grab the Martinscombe lands
—
and what happens directly afterwards? My father gets Oxmoon, all of it, the lot, including the disputed property. Was it given or did he grab it? If Kester’s trying to grab lands at one moment why should he give the whole lot away the next? Can this merely be explained away by saying he was a crackpot at the mercy of manic mood swings? No, extortion’s the answer
—
and Declan’s evidence begins to seem just a little more than an Irish fairy tale.

Gerry denied the extortion theory, but he would, wouldn’t he? If extortion existed and he, as my father’s lawyer, knew of it, of course he’d have to lie to the back teeth to say it never existed
—
and of course he’d have to back up my father over the suicide theory. Never forget that if extortion exists it gives my father a motive for murder.

VERDICT:
Not to be trusted, but his picture of Kester as a tough man who cracked up is intriguing. He made Kester and my father seem like mirror images of each other, although that’s ridiculous because I know they were radically dissimilar. Or do I? I’m tempted to wonder if I know anything at all, but I mustn’t get discouraged just because Gerry proved a slippery unsatisfactory witness.

Soldier on.

V

Lance lived in the comfortable Swansea house which had once belonged to my grandfather and which Lance had inherited after Bronwen’s death. Evan hadn’t needed it; Gerry, who preferred plush modern apartments, hadn’t wanted it; Sian had already been married with a home of her own. Like Vershinin in
The Three Sisters,
Lance had a wife and two little girls. Probably he hoped to have more children in time. The large house suited him.

His little girls were long since in bed and his wife had tactfully retired to the living room, to watch television, but Lance and I were lingering over our coffee at the kitchen table. The kitchen was as warm and friendly as it had been when Bronwen was alive, and although at first I had attributed this impression to Jean’s good cooking and the relaxed nature of the company, I was beginning to sense that Lance was reminding me of his mother, mysteriously re-creating that atmosphere of intuitive sympathy which I could remember from my visits to the house as a child.

Lance was only ten years my senior, tall and thin, lanky and bespectacled, casual and nonchalant, an engineer who dabbled with inventions. He struck me as being a profoundly contented man, and despite his vagueness it occurred to me that evening that he was a much better-balanced personality than Gerry, kind, sensitive and unselfish. I remember thinking as I embarked on my set speech that he would be a better witness too, more perspicacious, more truthful and possibly more detached. He hadn’t been close to either Kester or my father.

“… so that’s the position, Lance. Now tell me honestly: what do you think was going on?”

“God only knows, Hal,” said Lance, shattering my assumption that he would have a clear-cut opinion to offer. “I could never make up my mind.”

VI

“There was something weird going on,” said Lance, “that’s for sure. But I don’t know exactly what it was. In retrospect I think the weirdest feature of the story is that as soon as my father died those two men went straight to pieces. That seems to prove they were so neurotic about each other that without a strong man keeping the peace between them their paranoia at once rocketed out of control. … No, I’m not exaggerating. They really were paranoid about each other. For instance, after Anna died Harry bust his way into Oxmoon to offer condolences and Kester wanted to kill him because he thought Harry had come to gloat. How paranoid can you get! And then there was a bizarre scene in 1949 when Harry and Thomas both thought Kester meant to humiliate them before the family and they refused to turn up at a big Oxmoon lunch party. Nothing happened, of course—Harry was imagining the whole thing, but even my father was in a hell of a sweat at the thought of Kester creating some thoroughly unpleasant scene. … You didn’t hear about any of this? Well, of course you were pretty young then. But there was a long sequence of hostilities between Kester and Harry, although in the end it was Thomas who came to be the real problem to both those two. Harry couldn’t stand him and Kester couldn’t stand him either—apparently Thomas had insulted Anna back in 1939 and Kester never forgot.
…
No, I wasn’t surprised when Kester tried to fire Thomas on the night of the car smash—nor was I surprised to learn that Thomas had got roaring drunk and crashed up to Oxmoon to make a scene. Given the people involved, anyone could have anticipated that particular script. But afterwards …

“Well, this is where we get to Declan Kinsella, isn’t it? I know his story seems implausible but the truth is it’s not impossible—Kester could well have killed Thomas in a drunken brawl, and if Harry had been there and was perhaps involved in some way which we don’t know about, it’s not beyond belief that he could have taken part in a cover-up. I know in retrospect we can say it would have been an idiotic thing to do, but people do do idiotic things in the heat of the moment when they’re under stress … yes, I can see why Declan thought he could capitalize on that story. I don’t suppose it happened just as he said it did, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if his story had a factual basis—the real five-star liars of this world always use the truth as far as they possibly can. … Declan a five-star liar? Oh no, that wasn’t what I meant at all. After all, it wasn’t Declan’s story, was it? It was Kester’s.

“You see, Hal, there’s only one way you can satisfactorily explain the evidence of Declan Kinsella, and that’s to say he was a front for Kester’s paranoia. Declan was in his own way a distinguished man. I don’t believe he’d have deliberately perjured himself in the witness box; I think he believed in the truth of every word he was saying, but where did his facts come from? Well, he had only one source, didn’t he: Kester. And Kester was a writer. He’d spent years and years perfecting the art of storytelling and only a practiced storyteller could have hoped to deceive a cynical politician like Declan.

“What makes me think Declan got the extortion story straight from the horse’s mouth? Oh God, Hal, we all knew that for a fact! Has no one ever told you about the great scene at Oxmoon when Harry called a family council to explain his takeover and Declan gave a dress rehearsal of his performance in the Bryn-Davies lawsuit? Well, no, on second thoughts perhaps that’s not so surprising—it was such a vile scene that I think we all tacitly agreed not to talk about it afterwards, least of all to the child you were at the time. But Declan accused Harry of extortion, and as Kester was at that time alive in Dublin, the inference was that Declan had been briefed by him. And yet …

“And yet that doesn’t actually prove anything, does it? Not when you remember that Kester was a neurotic, paranoid about Harry. Kester might well have felt so ashamed that he’d given Oxmoon away because he couldn’t cope that he invented the story of extortion in order to present himself to his brother in a less humiliating light. …

“No, I’m not trying to protect you. I’m just telling you I don’t know whether Declan was speaking Kester’s truth or Kester’s lies; I’m just telling you I don’t know how or why Kester died; I’m just telling you I don’t know whether Harry extorted Oxmoon or not but even if he did that still doesn’t prove he murdered Kester. In fact I don’t think you can prove anything here, Hal—I don’t think we’ll ever know what really happened, no matter how hard you play the private eye. … And by the way, aren’t you being rather romantic, acting the crusader on the white horse in pursuit of the Holy Grail of Truth? And aren’t you being just a little dishonest? This cold dispassionate inquisitorial air is an act. You care about those two men. If you didn’t care you wouldn’t be here, asking all these questions. Don’t deceive yourself, Hal, or you’ll wind up crucifying yourself over this. …

“Okay, so you’ve been on the cross and now you’re trying to cut yourself down by working out who’s the hero and who’s the villain of this story, but that’s another false trail, because it’s just not that kind of story. If you want a really way-out opinion, I’d say they were both mad. I think they were in the grip of some peculiar psychiatric condition—perhaps even an occult condition—for which there’s no name. I think their relationship was sinister in the extreme and so lethal that it resulted in the destruction of their personalities. Stay away from it, Hal, let it be. I’m sorry I can’t help you, I’ve done my best, but I really have nothing more to say …”

VII