The Wheel of Fortune (183 page)

“I don’t need to elaborate on the war, do I? Kester the pacifist, Harry the war hero, each of them envying the other and feeling inadequate. Harry was quite unsuited to the S.A.S., of course, but as Kester was making a success on the home front Harry felt compelled to go out and do the done thing as glamorously as possible. What a disaster—but not quite such a disaster as the second malign coincidence which occurred when their wives died within months of each other.

“Kester gives the classic performance of the bereaved widower complete with nervous breakdown and Harry pretends to be contemptuous but he’s not. He’d like to have a nervous breakdown too—he’s riddled with guilt about your mother—but of course it’s not the done thing so he can’t. More repressed emotion. It never occurs to him that Kester might also be feeling guilty—not only about Anna but about his breakdown. I’m sure he envied Harry’s stiff upper lip and apparently effortless adjustment to the single life—although the truth is that Harry’s made a most unsatisfactory adjustment; he’s just seducing every woman in sight in an attempt to stave off a breakdown.

“However Kester can’t see that. Perhaps he’s thinking that he too would like some kind of sex life, but Anna’s the only woman he’s ever had and maybe he secretly lacks confidence in himself. After all, he must have thought, how could he ever match that glittering Casanova, Cousin Harry? Safer not to compete at all.

“Nevertheless Kester longs for affection so it’s quite natural for him to turn to children and particularly to little Gwyneth Llewellyn who even at an early age promises to be a miraculous fusion of Bella and Anna—clever, charming
and
sexy. An attraction to a child is a sign of sexual insecurity; a child is less of a threat than an adult. However Kester’s not a willing pedophile; he’s quite prepared to wait till Gwyneth’s grown up before he makes any sexual move but at the same time he’s intelligent enough to know that this could be a dangerous relationship for him, so although he invites her to Oxmoon he always has her chaperoned by other children.

“So the children’s tea parties have their dark underside, but Harry never sees that. All he sees is that Kester’s captured you, and now Harry’s the one who’s feeling inadequate again, seeing himself as a complete failure while Kester exhibits this undeniable talent for children … and so it goes on.

“Then finally—into this deeply disturbed and thoroughly unstable relationship between these two deeply disturbed and thoroughly unstable men—comes the catalyst, Thomas, which sets them on the road to tragedy.

“Now, to me, the outsider, the figure of Thomas is at this point almost as intriguing as the figure of John. For what have we here? We have a third man who regards John as a father figure. And if you look beyond Thomas’s bombastic manners you finally see the man who fits the mold John’s held up to those boys as ideal. Thomas conforms. He’s very, very conventional. He works successfully on the land, just like his father before him, he’s made a good marriage, he has a son to whom he’s devoted, he did well in the war and thoroughly enjoyed being a soldier. He may be and probably is a far more mixed-up person than he seems, but the point is that he’s projecting an approved image and although his hard drinking would indicate this isn’t entirely easy for him, Harry and Kester aren’t aware of any conflicts that would help them identify with him. Harry and Kester look at Thomas and they can’t stand what they see—he’s intolerable to them. Yet a lot of people seem to have been rather fond of old Thomas. That nice woman your Aunt Eleanor, for instance, still speaks warmly of him even now after all these years.

“But for Harry and Kester, who have both in their minds failed John, Thomas is anathema. Most of the time Harry’s in a position to conceal this because he too is outwardly conforming to the right image, but no such pretense is available to Kester. Kester loathes him—and what he loathes, of course, isn’t Thomas himself but what Thomas represents. Thomas’s success in wearing the Godwin straitjacket underlines Kester’s failure. Kester may appear to revel triumphantly in his unconventional life, but in his mind he always feels guilty that he’s never managed to conform as his powerful—and probably much-loved—father figure wanted and expected him to do.

“In other words Thomas stimulated Kester’s neurotic conflict just as Harry did, but because Thomas was a much more abrasive personality it was he and not Harry who finally lit the fuse to the keg of dynamite. If Anna had survived I think she could have put out the fire before the explosion; she would have had the intelligence to spot any abnormality before it got out of control and persuade Kester to seek help. But Anna was dead and so Kester was alone in this unbalanced state which inexorably deteriorated to the danger point.

“Kester believed he was avenging Anna when he went after Thomas, but I’m certain there was much more going on in his mind than that. I’m sure Thomas was indeed monstrously rude to Anna in 1939 and I’m sure Kester did want to avenge her, but I think in the end this was just the excuse he used to justify his behavior to himself. In my opinion what Kester really wanted to do was to kill this living reminder of his guilt and his inadequacy. In the disturbed mental state that followed his bereavement he found he could no longer live with this walking symbol of his failure to achieve what he believed to be a successful manhood.

“So he killed Thomas—and by killing him he locked himself up with your father in the downward spiral that led them both to the Worm’s Head on that May night in 1952.

“You should ask your father to tell you the whole story of Thomas’s murder. It would do him good to talk about it and I think it would be best for you now to know all the facts. That’s a story where Kester really was the villain and your father just an innocent bystander. And yet …

“It’s not so simple as that, is it? Words like ‘villain’ and ‘hero’ are so overworked that they have no meaning, and the truth is they explain nothing here. The explanation of this story lies in the past, perhaps even in the remote past, in the vast complicated web of personal relationships and interrelating circumstances that made those two men what they were. Your father, mirroring John, sums it up by saying, ‘We were just two ordinary people who failed to draw the line.’ Well, let him see it that way. Why not? It’s an interesting point of view. But to my mind those two men weren’t ordinary. They were two severely maladjusted people who failed to avert tragedy by resolving their neurotic conflicts. I’m a psychiatrist so naturally that’s the way I see it, but what we have to do now is to work out how
you’re
going to see those two men. We have to work out a way you can live with all this and go on to lead a normal life—no, I don’t think we should start now. You’re too tired and you won’t be thinking clearly. We’ll talk again tomorrow. Do you think you can sleep now? Or are you still reluctant to relax your grip on your mind?”

I said, “I’m going to be okay,” and she kissed me and said gently, “Yes, you are.” Then she took out her knitting and started clicking her needles again.

Ten minutes later I was asleep.

XIV

He came to me in my dreams, not the glittering hero of my childhood but a bedraggled magician with a broken wand in his hands. “Help me,” he said. “Help me.” But although I knew I had to perform an act of magic, I couldn’t see how to mend his broken wand.”

Then I remembered I was Saint George so I realized I had to find the dragon and kill it. The dragon, I now saw clearly, was the villain of the story and my father and Kester were its innocent victims. Drawing out my sword I rode my white horse across the Shipway but time and space were so fluid that when I reached the Inner Head I found myself at the gates of Oxmoon.

Then I saw it. I saw the dragon. It was the house. It was that brutal decayed monster with the shuttered sightless windows. Vile Oxmoon, not fit to live, destroying those I loved.

I made a Molotov cocktail and tossing it through the open front door I watched the house burn to the ground. But later as I walked through the charred ruins I found my father grieving with Kester and beyond them a man in an eighteenth-century wig said to me, “Look what you’ve done to my dream.”

Then Evan said, “Let us pray for an act of redemption,” and as I sank to my knees I was a medieval knight again and a church clock was thundering the hour. It struck twelve. I looked up. The sun was pouring down on me from a brilliant sky and as I rose to my feet my soldier’s sword shone in my hand. I stared at the blade, and suddenly I realized it wasn’t a sword at all but Kester’s magic wand, restored and renewed.

I turned to face ruined Oxmoon. The earth was moving, the skies were rolling back, and at last in that electrifying moment of revelation my strength returned to me, I raised my sword above my head and
I waved his magic wand.
…

XV

“I had this dream,” I said to Pam, “but I’m not going to tell you about it because I always vowed I’d never sink low enough to tell my dreams to a psychiatrist.”

Pam laughed. “I’m glad to see you exhibiting characteristic behavior! I can see that unlike your father you really do have nerves of steel.”

We were sitting in the dining area over the remains of breakfast. My father had reclaimed his room and was listening to chamber music. I had drunk three cups of coffee and eaten an egg I didn’t want. My untouched toast lay on a nearby plate.

“I’m all right,” I said to Pam. “I was all right as soon as I knew that everything could be explained rationally. They were just two guys in need of a shrink, that’s all, and I don’t have to condemn them, you don’t condemn the mentally ill, you just say ‘That’s tough’ and feel sorry for them. So that’s okay, isn’t it, I don’t have to be divided after all, I can just say ‘That’s tough’ and be compassionate—to both of them. It’s a kind of forgiving and I have to forgive, don’t I, because if I go on trying to decide which one to blame I’ll go nuts. Okay, fair enough, I forgive them. And now I can get on with my life and think about the future.”

“Uh-huh,” said Pam.

We were silent for a time. She was idly finishing a cigarette. I began to fidget with my cold toast. First I broke the bread up and then I tried to reduce the fragments to crumbs. Finally my voice said, “But they did such terrible things,” and the next moment I was breaking down again.

This time I did mind crying. I minded it very much. I stumbled outside into the yard but it was raining. I ran across to shelter in my scullery but when I reached the back door I couldn’t face opening it so I ran back. On reentering the mews house I found Pam was still sitting at the kitchen table.

I sat down and said, “I’ve got to put it right. It’s as if they’ve passed me the burden of their guilt and I have to find some way of setting that burden aside. I can’t live with the situation as it is; I’ve got to put right what went wrong.” And I told her about my dream.

“I see them as crucified,” I said, “and Oxmoon—today’s ruined Oxmoon—reflects that crucifixion. And the only way to wipe out a crucifixion is to stage a resurrection, so that’s what I’ve now got to do. I’ve got to wave the magic wand and restore what’s been destroyed, because only then, when Oxmoon’s been redeemed, can I live in peace with what they’ve done.”

Pam said simply, “How are you going to do it?”

“I don’t know.” I crumbled some more toast. Then I said irritated: “Aren’t you going to analyze my dream?”

“You seem to have done that rather ably yourself. What you have to do now is to find the magic wand—your instrument of redemption.”

“I suppose you find redemption a very emotional word loaded with religious overtones.”

“Oh, I’m not hung up on religion,” said Pam mildly. “To me it’s just another way of looking at a given situation. I could say you’re looking for a satisfactory adjustment to an unpalatable set of facts, but why bother? Redemption’s a good word. It means to buy back, doesn’t it, and you want to buy back the past so that you can reshape it in a way that’ll fit your present. That all seems very reasonable to me.”

“But how do I find my magic wand?”

“Ah. Well … Where did you get the idea of a magic wand from?”

“From Kester. My magician.”

“And what was
his
magic wand?”

“I suppose you’d say it was a phallic symbol.”

“I could certainly argue that it had phallic overtones for Kester, but we’re not concerned with symbolism at the moment, only with reality. What was the wand that Kester waved day after day with the most unquenchable determination?”

I saw the light. “His pen.” I hit the table with my fist. “That’s it—his novels!” I leaped to my feet. “I’m going to sell his novels and raise the money for the endowment the National Trust needs to take over Oxmoon!” I kissed her. “You’re a genius! Thank God I’ve got a psychiatrist for a stepmother!”

“Hm,” said Pam. Of course she knew a manic mood swing when she saw one.

“Novels make millions nowadays! Think of Geoffrey’s publishing stories! I’ll take the novels to New York, enlist Geoffrey’s help, make a fortune and resurrect Oxmoon from the grave!” I was shouting in my ecstasy. After hours of appalling pain I had finally achieved a miraculous relief. I was going to put the magic back into Oxmoon, I was going to recapture the lost paradise of my childhood, I was going to wipe out all the tragedy and ruin, I was going to make my two fathers live again.

“Sit down, Hal,” said Pam gently. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

I humored her. I was already planning my drive to Swansea to collect the inevitable bottle of champagne.

“I had to lead you through all that,” said Pam, “because I knew you’d eventually work out the full meaning of your dream for yourself and I thought it was better if you did so in my presence. Hal, it’s a lovely idea, and certainly the perfect answer to your desire for redemption, but very unfortunately it’s not an option that’s available to you.”

I stared at her. “Why the hell not?”

“Now, don’t worry—I’m sure we can find another way of coming to terms with this problem—”

“
Pam, for Christ’s sake tell me what the hell you’re getting at!
”