The Wheel of Fortune (173 page)

“Well, now that you’ve crossed it,” I said, trying not to imagine the state of mind that had driven him to conquer his phobia, “have some coffee.” I somehow got the Primus alight.

“No, thanks. I was really just wondering how you were getting on.”

“Not too badly.”

“Ah.”

There was a pause. I looked at him and for the first time saw the wall between us, the cruel wall conjured up by my magician.

I grabbed the words to smash it. “Tell me about her.”

“
Her?
Who?”

“My mother.”

“Your mother? But what’s that got to do with Kester?”

“Absolutely nothing. But I don’t want to talk about Kester, not now, not at this particular moment. I want to talk about my mother. We’ve never talked about her either, have we? We never talk about anything. What was she like to be married to?”

He stared. Then he pushed back his hair, scratched his neck and groped for a cigarette. At last he said carefully, “She loved me. I was lucky to have her.”

“No, no, I’m not interested in sentimental platitudes. Tell me what it was like for you, an intelligent cultivated man, to be married to a girl who never opened a book, couldn’t tell Mozart from Beethoven and had an emotional age of thirteen.”

“Who says your mother had an emotional age of thirteen?”

“Eleanor. Isn’t it true?”

“I’m not saying one word against your mother.”

“Why? Because you’re afraid of upsetting me?”

“Because to me she meant something very special.”

“What was it? Come on, for Christ’s sake, wake up, look at me, I’m grown up, I’m not a child anymore and I’ve got a bloody right to know how I came to be in the world. Why did you marry her?”

“Sex.”

“That all?”

“More or less.”

“How much more and how much less?”

“My God, what an inquisitor you are!” cried my father, rubbing his forehead fiercely with his hand. “You’re like a bloody tank!”

“I need to be a bloody tank to get through to you. Now sit down and tell me what was going on. Why did my mother have this obsession with reproduction? My mother had four sons who all loved her, so why wasn’t she satisfied with us? What went wrong?”

“She wanted a daughter.”

“Yes, but—”

“We had a daughter but it died.”

In the pause that followed I turned off the Primus and emptied the saucepan of water into the sink. Then I moved back to the table.

“When?”

“Long before we were married. It was all hushed up. Bella was neglected; no one really cared about her. I was very unhappy because Bronwen had left. It was … well, I suppose it was a tragedy, although tragedy’s such an overworked word it hardly seems worth using, but whatever it was we never got over it. We were both haunted by a compulsion to put right what had gone wrong. I found I had to marry her. She found she had to bring Melody back.”

“Melody?”

“The baby. Bella called her Melody because she knew I was so fond of music.”

I thought of my mother. I could just picture her saying ingenuously to my father: “I called her Melody because I knew you were so fond of music.” I suddenly found I had to sit down.

“She did love you boys,” said my father, “but she idealized that dead child. My God, if only you knew how. I came to hate that pathetic banal name—even today, if I listen to a talk on music and hear the word ‘melody,’ I find myself cringing with horror—”

“But this must have been a nightmare.”

“Yes. It was. I’m afraid we didn’t make each other very happy, and afterwards, when she died, I thought I’d go mad with guilt. However at least I could try to do my best for you children. That made me feel better. Of course I made a complete hash of fatherhood, but—”

“You never thought of walking out?”

My father looked shocked. “Oh, I couldn’t possibly have done that. You were all so young, you depended on me. Fathers can’t go around palming off their children on someone else and disappearing into the blue.”

“But they can,” I said. “They can and they do. They do it every day.”

We stared at each other.

“Well, I suppose that’s true,” said my father at last. He sounded confused. “But I never considered that such an option was open to me.”

I thought of him sticking it out when he could have walked out. I thought of him doing his best when he could have done his worst. No child had the right to ask more of a parent than that.

“I wonder what I would have done if I’d been in your shoes,” I said, “but on second thoughts I’d prefer not to think. I’ve spent so much time running away from my problems. Probably I’d have run away from that one too.” I got up. “I must be off. I’ve planned to spend the afternoon in Swansea.”

“Doing what?” called my father sharply as I opened the door.

“Rereading the report of the inquest,” I said, and escaped into the yard to my car.

II

NOTES ON MY FATHER:

So Eleanor was right. My father was the war hero whose heroism really began when he came home from the war. So was Eleanor also right about Kester? Not necessarily. The point about Eleanor is probably not that she was a hundred percent right but that she was a hundred percent certain which side she was on.

However, competent investigators don’t take sides. They stick to the facts and don’t get emotionally involved.

But the most important fact to me at the moment is that some people suspect my father of murder, and I’m involved enough to know I have to acquit him once and for all.

III

I drove out of the car park among the sand burrows of Llangennith where I had been scribbling my disjointed note, and headed finally for Swansea. I spent the drive thinking of my mother. I could remember her hugging us, playing with us, giggling with us, spoiling us. Yet all the time she had been yearning for that dead child. “But I love you all just the same, darling!” Of course. We were all the same to her because her favorite was the child who had been lost.

That knowledge didn’t destroy the past; I knew I would continue to love the mother I remembered. But it put the past in a radically different focus. I could see my mother now as a troubled woman, someone who had made my father unhappy, and in his unhappiness I saw the genesis of the bleak home which had driven me to my magician.

Just as Kester had slipped out of focus, so I could now see my father with unprecedented clarity. Memories flickered through my mind in kaleidoscopic patterns. I saw my father in uniform, in work clothes, in evening dress, in lounge suits, sportswear and pajamas; I saw him shouting, smiling, cursing, laughing, sane and insane, calm and hysterical, whole and destroyed; I saw the stranger I had never cared to know.

I thought of him seated at the piano. I was musical but my talent was a mere shadow of my father’s. My father was an artist. I could remember him saying to me after playing the piano in the ballroom at Oxmoon: “I love to play the piano here and think of Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace. …”

But now my memory was playing tricks. My father had never spoken Kester’s famous slogan. Or had he? How hard it was to be sure. The two of them seemed to be merging in my mind, and suddenly as I remembered Evan talking of metaphysical phenomena I felt the darkness which had no name. It was very heavy and it was bunched on my back. I could feel the weight on my spine. It was making me breathless. I had to stop the car. I was on the outskirts of the city by that time and as I drew the car into a parking area, I found myself beside a promenade of suburban shops. Women wandered around with shopping bags and pushchairs. Children screamed. A dog was running around lifting his leg against every lamppost. I saw normality but I was outside it and at once I knew I had to get in.

I went into the nearby newsagent’s shop and bought some chewing gum. That made me feel better. I was back inside a normal world again, chewing gum and checking the gauge on the dashboard to see if the car needed petrol. So what was the explanation of that moment of horror I had just experienced? Diagnosing a bout of irrational panic I told myself severely: “Nerves. Stress. Pull yourself together at once.” And closing my mind resolutely against the incident, I drove on to the city center and headed for the newspaper files in the library.

IV

CORONER:
I assume the deceased had been in touch with you, Mr. Morgan, about the kitchen tap which needed a new washer.

MORGAN:
No, sir. Mr. Richard Godwin reported the dripping tap to my stepbrother. Mr. Richard had met Mr. Kester off the ferry and taken him to the cottage in Rhossili.

CORONER:
But you were responsible for the maintenance of the cottage—why did you let three days elapse before you attended to the problem?

MORGAN:
I didn’t have a washer among my supplies and I knew I’d have to go to Swansea to get one. I was going there later that week to see my mother so Harry said it would be okay if I waited till then. The problem wasn’t urgent.

CORONER:
I see. So you did the job directly after your visit to your mother. Did you warn the deceased that you’d be coming out to the cottage that evening?

MORGAN:
No, sir. The cottage has no phone.

CORONER:
Might it not have been more convenient for the deceased if you’d waited till morning before arriving unannounced?

MORGAN:
Oh no, sir. Mr. Kester would be working at his writing in the mornings. I knew the evening would be the best time.

CORONER:
Very well. Now, you had a lift, I understand, from your mother’s house to the cottage. What time did you arrive?

MORGAN:
Around eight twenty. Maybe eight twenty-five.

CORONER:
And what exactly did you do on arrival?

MORGAN:
I got my toolbox out of the garage, went into the kitchen and set to work.

CORONER:
And what time did your stepbrother come in?

MORGAN:
Soon afterwards. Perhaps five minutes later.

CORONER:
Now, Mr. Morgan, can you tell us, please, what happened when your stepbrother arrived?

MORGAN:
He said to me that Mr. Kester had marooned himself on the Worm. I could see he was worried. Mr. Kester’s health wasn’t good and Harry was afraid that this latest behavior might mean Mr. Kester was off his rocker again.

CORONER:
What was the story as you understood it?

MORGAN:
Harry had seen Mr. Kester crossing the Shipway. Harry knew from the Coastguard’s board that the tide was on the rise and he thought that going out to the Worm at that time was the oddest thing to do. So he decided to go after him and make sure he was all right. But he never caught him up and finally he had to turn back to beat the tide.

CORONER:
And what was your opinion of the deceased’s behavior, Mr. Morgan?

MORGAN:
Off his rocker, sir. He’d just spent the past few months having another of his nervous breakdowns, and it was well known he acted peculiar at times.

CORONER:
All right. Now, what happened after your stepbrother told you what had been going on?

MORGAN:
I finished changing the washer. Then Harry and I sat talking for a while in the living room. I was trying to reassure him, but he decided to stay on at the cottage to make sure Mr. Kester returned safely at dawn. I saw that this was the best way to put his mind at rest so I didn’t argue. At around nine I packed up my tools, put them back in the garage and left.

CORONER:
And after that?

MORGAN:
Harry came back to Oxmoon at dawn, woke me up and said there was still no sign of Mr. Kester. I went back with him to Rhossili and when we found the cottage was still empty we went to the Coastguard.

CORONER:
Thank you, Mr. Morgan.

V

NOTES ON DAFYDD:

The story’s very convincing, right down to the explanation of why he called to do the job in the evening and not the morning. Small wonder that Declan thought he’d never be able to crack the alibi and decided instead to incorporate it in his theory.

How does one bust an alibi that’s as unbustable as that? Of course, it’s possible that Dafydd’s visit to the cottage was just my father’s lucky break but how does one prove that my father was never there when Dafydd says he was? One turns up a witness who saw my father stagger back at dawn the next morning
—
but obviously the police failed to do this, so that’s a dead end. Or alternatively one turns up some other detail which shows that my father was never at the cottage that night, but how does one ever do that? That has to be a dead end too.

VERDICT:
Dafydd’s evidence means I’m driven to follow in Declan’s footsteps: I can’t get around that alibi, since there’s no indication whatsoever that it was faked, so I now have to see if there’s any evidence to support Declan’s theory that my father killed Kester, beat the tide and got back to the cottage in time to meet Dafydd. This means that once again I have to ask myself, just as Declan must have done: What really did happen when my father reached the Inner Head that night?

VI

CORONER:
Very well, Mr. Godwin, there you were on the Inner Head. What happened next?

GODWIN:
I paused for about a minute, not only to recover my breath—that Shipway’s a terrible haul—but because I was convinced that Kester would be coming into view at any moment to begin the journey back to the mainland. I just couldn’t believe he’d want to be cut off. However when there was no sign of him returning I couldn’t stand the suspense so I took the path around the bend onto the southern flank of the Inner Head; The time was running out but I still had a few minutes to try and discover what on earth he was doing.

CORONER:
May I direct the jury to look at their Ordnance Survey maps of the Worm’s Head. Thank you. Yes, Mr. Godwin.