The Wheel of Fortune (3 page)

But I recoiled from her. She was responsible for Lion and Lion was responsible for my humiliation. I turned to my father, and then miraculously the violent stranger vanished as he swung me off my feet into his arms. All he said was, “Don’t you worry about Lion,” and that was when I knew first was still best in his eyes despite all my iniquity; that was when I knew nothing mattered except coming first and staying first, over and over again.

“I’ll be the best pupil Briarwood’s ever had,” I said to him, “and you’ll be prouder of me than you could ever be of anyone else”—and thus I was committed to the compulsive pursuit of excellence and set squarely on the road to disaster.

III

“IT’S GINEVRA’S HUSBAND. HE’S
dead, Robert. She’s coming home,” said my father twenty-three years later, and my immediate reaction was This time I shall come first. This time I’m going to win.

“What an amazing piece of information! Well, I daresay it’ll be rather amusing to see the old girl again.” I was almost unconscious with emotion. I had to lean against the wall to ensure that I remained upright. “When does she arrive?”

“I don’t know. I’ll show you her wire when we meet tonight. …” My father went on talking but I barely heard him. I was only just aware that I was arranging to meet him at the Savile after my dinner party. When the conversation ended silence descended on the hall, but in my memory I could hear the orchestra playing in the ballroom at Oxmoon and see the candles shimmering on the chandeliers.

I thought of my mother saying long ago, “This is no fairy tale, Robert.” But who was to say now that my own private fairy tale could never come true? If I got what I wanted—and I usually did—then I would go home at last to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of my childhood, and Ginette would share my life once more in that lost paradise of my dreams.

The prospect stimulated such a powerful wave of euphoria that I almost wondered if I should become a romantic again, but fortunately my common sense intervened and I restrained myself. This was a situation that called for care, calculation and a cool head. The jilted hero who still yearned passionately for his lost love might possibly seem attractive in a French farce but it was quite definitely a role which I had no wish to play in public.

Thinking of roles reminded me of the living I had to earn, and an hour later, masked by my barrister’s wig and gown, I had slipped back into my familiar role as the hero of the Old Bailey.

But all the time I was thinking of Ginette.

IV

I survived a day that would normally have reduced me to exhaustion and arrived, clear-eyed and fresh, at my father’s club soon after eleven that night. The idea of a widowed Ginette was a powerful stimulant. I felt taut with nostalgia, prurient curiosity, sexual desire and impatience. It was a lethal mixture, and as I drifted through the rooms in search of my father I half-feared that I might be vibrating with excitement like some wayward electrical device, but fortunately all my acquaintances who accosted me assumed I was merely excited by the result of the trial.

When I finally reached the corner where my father was waiting I found he had Lion with him. I assumed a benign expression and prayed for tolerance.

“I hear you won your case, Robert!” my father was saying with enthusiasm. “Very many congratulations!”

“Thank you. Hullo, Lion.”

“Hullo, Robert—I can’t tell you how proud I am to be related to you! Why, I’m famous at the bank just because I’m your brother!” He sighed with childlike admiration, a huge brainless good-natured youth towards whom I occasionally contrived to feel a mild affection. It seemed preposterous to think that I could ever have wasted energy being jealous of him. Graciously I held out my hand so that he could shake it.

“Well, Lion,” said my father mildly when further banalities had been exchanged, “I won’t detain you—as you tell me you have such trouble getting to work on time in the mornings I’m sure you’ll want to be in bed before midnight.”

But Lion wanted to hear more about the trial and ten minutes passed before he consented to being dispatched.

“Stunning news about Ginevra, isn’t it!” he remembered to add over his shoulder as he ambled off. “Won’t it be wonderful to see her again!”

I smiled politely and refrained from comment, but seconds later I was saying to my father in the most casual voice I could muster, “Let’s see this wire she sent.”

The missive was almost criminally verbose. I have come to believe women should be banned from sending cables; they are constitutionally incapable of being succinct in a situation that demands austerity.

DARLINGS
, gushed this deplorable communication,
SOMETHING TOO DREADFUL HAS HAPPENED I HARDLY KNOW HOW TO PUT IT INTO WORDS BUT CONOR IS DEAD I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT ALTHOUGH I SAW IT HAPPEN HE MUST BE BURIED IN IRELAND SO I AM TAKING HIM THERE AT ONCE I CAN’T STAY HERE ANYWAY IT’S NOT POSSIBLE I’LL WRITE FROM DUBLIN ALL I WANT IS TO COME HOME TO OXMOON LONGING TO SEE YOU ALL DEEPEST LOVE GINEVRA.

“Typical,” I said. “She squanders a fortune on a wire but still manages to omit all the relevant details of her predicament. She seems to assume we’ll know by telepathic intuition when she plans to arrive in Wales.”

“My dear Robert, don’t be so severe! The poor girl’s obviously distraught!”

“To be distracted is pardonable. To be incoherent is simply unobliging. However I suppose in due course we’ll get a letter. What was Mama’s response to the news?”

“Well, naturally,” said my father, “her first thought—and mine—was for you.”

I took a sip from my glass of brandy before saying in what I hoped was my most charming voice, “I assume my mother sent you to London to find out exactly what was going on in my mind. Perhaps when you return you could be so kind as to remind her that I’m thirty-one years old and I take a poor view of my mother trespassing on my privacy.”

My father stiffened. I immediately regretted what I had said but he gave me no chance to retract those words spoken in self-defense. With a courtesy that put me to shame, he said, “I’m sorry you should find our concern for you offensive, Robert. I’m sure neither of us would wish to pry into your private life.”

“Forgive me—I expressed myself badly—I’ve had such an exhausting day—”

“Bearing the past in mind we can’t help but be concerned. And of course, as you must know, we’ve been increasingly anxious about you for some time.”

“My dear Papa, just because I’m taking my time about marrying and settling down—”

“I wasn’t criticizing you, Robert. I wish you wouldn’t be so ready to take offense.”

“I’m not taking offense! But the thought of you and Mama worrying about me when I’m having this dazzling career and enjoying life to the full is somehow more than I can tolerate with equanimity!”

“Your mother and I both feel that if only you could come back to Oxmoon—”

“Please—I know this is a painful subject—”

“It’s as if you’ve got lost. Sometimes I think it don’t do for a man to be too educated—or too successful. It cuts him off from his roots.”

“I’m not cut off. Oxmoon’s my home and always will be, but for the moment I must be in London. I have my living to earn at the bar and soon I’ll have a political career to pursue—and it was you, don’t forget, who wanted me to go into politics!”

“I just wanted you to be the local M.P. More fool me. I should have listened to Margaret when she said you’d never be satisfied until you’d wound up as Prime Minister.”

“What’s wrong with being Prime Minister?”

“Success on that scale don’t make for happiness. Look at Asquith. Why does he drink? I wouldn’t want you to end up a drunkard like that.”

“Asquith’s not a drunkard. He’s a heavy drinker. There’s a difference.”

“Not to me,” said my father, looking at his untouched glass of brandy, “and not to your mother either.”

We were silent. There was nothing I could say. My father was the son of a drunkard and had endured a horrifying childhood about which he could never bring himself to speak. No rational debate on drink was possible for him.

At last I said neutrally, “We seem to have wandered rather far from the subject of Ginette.”

“No, it’s all one, we’re still discussing your obsessions. Robert,” said my father urgently, leaning forward in his chair, “you mustn’t think that I don’t understand what it is to be haunted by the past, but you must fight to overcome it, just as I’ve fought to overcome the memory of my parents and Owain Bryn-Davies—”

“Quite, but aren’t we wandering from the point again? Let me try and end this Welsh circumlocution by exhibiting a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness! You and Mama, it seems, are worried in case I now resurrect my adolescent passion for Ginette and embark on some romantic course which you can only regard as disastrous. Very well. Then let me set your mind at rest by assuring you that I’m not planning to conquer Ginette as soon as she sets foot again on Welsh soil.”

“And afterwards?”

“Papa, I’m not a prophet, I’m a lawyer. I don’t waste time speculating about the future on the basis of insufficient evidence.”

“Of course not, but—”

“The one inescapable fact here is that Ginette is now a stranger to me. Who knows what I shall think of her when we meet again? Nobody knows, it’s unknowable, and so in my opinion any attempt to answer such a question can only be futile.”

“That’s true. But all the same—”

“Go home and tell Mama,” I said, “that I no longer believe in fairy tales—and tell her too,” I concluded strongly, “that despite the somewhat dramatic nature of these circumstances I have every intention of behaving like a mature and intelligent man.”

Yet all the while I was speaking in this commendably sensible manner I was listening to the voice in my mind whispering to Ginette as it had whispered so often in my dreams: “Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood. Take me back to Oxmoon and make it live again.”

V

“FRIENDSHIP’S FOREVER!” SAID THE
child Ginette in that lost paradise of Oxmoon when I had no rival for her affections. “I wonder if you can possibly realize how lucky you are to have a friend like me?”

I did realize. During my first term at school I had spent many a homesick night imagining her playing with Gwen de Bracy or Angela Stourham and forgetting my existence. When one is eight and has a friend of ten one is perpetually worrying for fear one may be dismissed in favor of more sophisticated contemporaries.

“No matter how long I’m away at school I’ll always come first with you, won’t I?” I said, anxious to quash any lingering insecurity generated by my absence.

“Always. Here, lend me a penny, would you? I want to buy some of those boiled sweets.”

We were in the village of Penhale, two miles from Oxmoon, and enjoying one of our regular excursions to the village shop. I remember thinking as I stood in the dark cozy interior and gazed at the tall jars of sweets that perfect happiness consisted of returning home from school and finding everything unchanged, Ginette still with the holes in her stockings and the stains on her pinafore, the jars in the village shop still waiting to gratify our greed.

“I wish it could be like this forever,” I said as we walked home munching our purchases.

“I don’t. I’m becoming partial to the idea of growing up and getting married, like Bobby and Margaret. They’re always laughing and behaving as if marriage was rather a lark.”

“But think of all the babies!”

“Maybe they’d be rather a lark too.”

I was silent. My dislike of infants had remained unchanged, although I now took care to conceal this from my parents. I was aloof but polite to Celia. I feigned an Olympian interest in Lion. But I was still quite unable to imagine myself responding to a sibling with genuine enthusiasm.

Then, two years after Lion was born, John arrived in the world.

Lion was livid. That automatically pleased me, and from the beginning I patted John’s head when I made my regular visits to the nursery to inspect him. This delighted my mother but Lion was enraged and tried to block my path to the cradle by flailing his little fists at my knees. My mother became cross with him. Their discord was most gratifying.

Finally, much to my surprise, I realized I was becoming genuinely interested in the infant. He was acute. He talked at an early age, a fact that made communication less of an effort. Although we lived in an English-speaking area of Wales Welsh was my father’s first language, and because he wanted his children to grow up bilingual my mother had followed a policy of employing Welsh-speaking nursemaids. However for some reason although we all grew up with a rudimentary knowledge of Welsh colloquialisms, John was the only one who became bilingual. This impressed me. After Celia and Lion, who were both stupid, I had not anticipated the advent of an intelligent brother. Later, as an intellectual experiment, I taught him a letter or two and found him keen to learn, but before we could advance further into the world of literacy I was obliged to depart for my first term at public school and the lessons fell into abeyance. However when I returned from Harrow for the Christmas holidays, there was John, waiting for me on the doorstep, eyes shining with hero worship.

Here was someone who had realized, even at a tender age, that first was best. My private opinion of siblings underwent a small but telling revision.

“I think that child might turn out reasonably well,” I remarked to Ginette as he waited on us hand and foot in the holidays.

“Isn’t he a poppet? So different from ghastly Lion. Honestly, I can’t think what Margaret sees in that monster. If ever I give birth to something so plain and stupid, I hope I’d have the sense to drown it.”

She was fifteen. I was thirteen. The gap in our ages was widening but I was unaware of it. As far as I was concerned she was still my own Ginette and paradise was still coming home to Oxmoon and finding her waiting to welcome me back; paradise was still riding with her over the Downs or walking to the sea or scrambling across the tidal causeway called the Shipway where long ago Mr. Owain Bryn-Davies had drowned and my grandmother had gone mad and my father had witnessed all manner of horrors which were now enshrined in local myth; paradise was laughing over such distant melodrama and saying how droll it was that dotty old Grandmama should ever have played the role of the tragic heroine. We laughed, how we laughed, and paradise was laughing with Ginette at Oxmoon while we played croquet on the lawn and paradise was suppressing laughter in church as I tried to make her giggle at the wrong moment and paradise was laughing at her latest three-decker novel which she found so romantic and laughing as she tried to box my ears and laughing as we rode to hounds with the West Gower hunt, laughing, laughing, laughing from Llangennith to Porteynon, from Penrice to Oxwich, from Penhale to Rhossili, from Llanmodoc Hill to Cefh Bryn, and paradise was the Gower Peninsula, sixteen miles of heaven on earth stretching westwards into the sea beyond the industrial wasteland of Swansea, and the glory of Gower was Oxmoon and the glory of Oxmoon was Ginette.