The Wheel of Fortune (31 page)

I blame the old friendship. I assumed we’d jog along on more or less the same lines after we were married. How spine-chilling it was just now when Robert said the rules of the game had changed! He would put it that way, of course. Typical.

Yes, I’m horrified but never mind, the first year of marriage is notorious for unwelcome revelations, and most partners manage to adjust to the unpleasant home truths in the end. Meanwhile it’s certainly no good prolonging the quarrel. Robert won’t behave as Conor did, seducing me whenever he wanted to get his hands on my money. If Robert doesn’t get what he wants he’ll withdraw from me emotionally, and I couldn’t stand it; I want a loving Robert at my side, not a monster labeled HUSBAND; I want
my friend,
my companion at the strawberry beds and the loyal confederate who lent me the extra pennies to buy that mouth-watering licorice long ago in Penhale. …

I really should have given him more boiled sweets in compensation. I might have known that little mistake would catch up with me in the end.

“I’m sorry I lost my temper, Robert.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Well, I do realize I’ve been very stupid and I do concede you have the right to cancel my credit account. But the trust fund … Robert, that fund is special to me, it comes from my father, and I’m sorry but I really do think a wife shouldn’t be utterly dependent on her husband for money—”

“And I think she should be.”

Another fundamental difference of opinion. I tried not to panic. “I can’t think why,” I said evenly, “we didn’t discuss all this before we were married.”

“We did. I made it very clear what I thought of your extravagance.”

“You never said you thought I should be utterly dependent on you financially!”

“Naturally I had to give you the chance to manage your affairs. I did want to be fair.”

“If you could give me just one more chance—”

“No. It would only lead to another scene like this, and I won’t have it. We’re not going to quarrel all over again, are we, Ginette?”

I shook my head, went to my desk and extracted the hidden bills from Harrods. Then at his dictation I wrote a letter to my bank manager to say that I wished the quarterly income from my trust fund to be paid directly into my husband’s account.

“Thank you,” said Robert. “Now we need never again have a row about money.”

I stared in silence at the blotter. I could not bring myself to ask how much he intended to give me each week. I only prayed it would be sufficient and that I wouldn’t have to beg for more.

Robert was glancing at his watch. “It’ll take me a day or two to survey our expenditure and decide how much you need,” he said, “so we’ll conclude this discussion later. And now if you’ll excuse me I must go to my study and work. I’ve got a lot to do.” And with my checkbook in his pocket he left me on my own in my beautiful but extravagant drawing room.

Robert’s working much too hard. I had no idea he could be so obsessed with his work. How could I possibly sleep with a man for six months and not realize … But I mustn’t start saying that again. The brutal truth is that a love affair puts the partners on their best behavior. It takes marriage to ensure that all the unpalatable truths come sidling out of the woodwork of the happy home.

Robert is now rushing off to his chambers in the Temple at six in the morning so that he can work in peace before all the other barristers and clerks arrive to distract him. At first he used to leave without having breakfast but I put a stop to that by conspiring with Bennett.

Bennett used to be Robert’s man before our marriage, and he’s now our butler, wielding authority with great skill over Cook, the kitchenmaid and the parlormaid. I don’t have a personal maid; they’re usually an awful bore and anyway I learned how to live without one in New York. The trick is not to economize on a laundress and to track down a retired lady’s maid who is willing to come in now and then to attend to the more difficult aspects of hairdressing. I’m good at sewing, thanks to Margaret, so mending presents no problems. When Robert becomes very grand I dare say I shall acquire a maid but meanwhile I manage well enough without one.

Bennett and I get on well, which is fortunate because valets often lapse into paroxysms of jealousy when their masters acquire wives, and when I told him how worried I was by Robert’s increasingly eccentric working hours, he was sympathetic. Eventually we agreed that he would provide an early breakfast and I would coax Robert to eat it, but the trouble is that since this conversation of mine with Bennett, Robert has lost all interest in food and is eating the early breakfast only in order to keep me quiet.

Food isn’t the only subject that no longer interests him. After our social engagements have been fulfilled he retires to his study to work into the early hours of the morning, and when he finally comes to bed he sinks instantly into unconsciousness while I’m left lying awake in the dark and wondering what happened to that lover who won his blue at passion.

Last night I said, “Darling, how long is this peculiar behavior of yours likely to go on?”

This embarrassed Robert but I’m sure I was right to signal to him that in my opinion he’s carrying professional dedication too far. The entire trouble is this wretched murder case which he jokingly told me he took on in order to pay for the honeymoon. His client is accused of murdering his wife, chopping up the body and distributing it in bags deposited at various left-luggage offices all over London. Robert won’t discuss the case with me so I have no idea whether he thinks his client is innocent or not, but I find the whole affair repulsive and can’t imagine why Robert should find it so all-absorbing—not that he spends all his working hours on this case; he doesn’t. He works so hard in order to keep up with his other cases, but I’m beginning to think that the murder alone is responsible for this sinister aura of fanaticism. It’s the first murder case he’s accepted since I came back into his life from America, and he seems to be turning into someone else altogether.

Nothing could frighten me more.

“No, no—stay away from me,
stay away!”
shouted Robert, and I awoke to find him in the middle of a nightmare.

“Darling, it’s only a dream—”

“He was there again, he was coming towards me across the snow—”

“Who?”

“Death.” He slumped back exhausted on the pillows.

I thought: What a vile nightmare. But I judged it tactful to remain silent so after switching on the light I merely slipped my hand into his to comfort him.

He clasped my fingers tightly and seemed grateful for both the light and the silence, but at last he said, “I seem to be in a mess again but I don’t understand why. I thought I’d be cured once I had you.”

I was astonished, “Cured of what, Robert?”

“I’ve got this bloody awful obsession; it’s like a cancer of the personality.”

“Cancer!”

“Don’t be idiotic; I’m speaking metaphorically—oh God, I forgot you were terrified of illness—”

“But what on earth is this obsession of yours?”

“I’m obsessed with death.”

There was a pause. We lay there, our hands clasped; and listened to the silence. I tried to speak but nothing happened. I was too revolted.

“It’s all mixed up with this other obsession—”

“Other obsession?”

“Winning. I have to compete, I have to win, I can’t stop myself. Now I thought this was all the result of my third obsession—”

“
Third obsession
?”

“Yes. You. It was a terrible thing when I lost you, Ginette; it was as if my whole life was dislocated—I kept trying to push it back into position by winning everything in sight. So I won and won and won until the easy victories no longer satisfied me, and then finally I found the challenge I needed, I found a competitor who would give me the most enthralling game of all—”

“And who was that?”

“Death.”

My hand went limp in his but he didn’t notice. He was too absorbed in his explanations.

“I thought,” he said, “that once I had you back, I wouldn’t feel the need to compete anymore. I thought I’d be able to go home again to Oxmoon—”

“
What
?”

“Oh, not literally! I was thinking of the lost Oxmoon of our childhood—I was seeing Oxmoon as a state of mind, a symbol of happiness.”

“Oh, I see. For one moment I thought you meant—well, never mind, go on.”

“But I’m still looking for the road back to Oxmoon, I’m still locked up in a way of life which is fundamentally meaningless to me—”

“Oh come, Robert, don’t exaggerate! You love the glamour and the fame of your life at the bar!”

“No, I’ve come to hate all that. Glamour and fame have become symbols of my imprisonment. I’d give up the bar but—”

“
Give it up
?”

“—but I can’t now that I have a wife and family to support, and besides if I’m to go into politics I must have a lucrative career. But do I really want to go into politics? Won’t Westminster ultimately be just another cage like the Old Bailey? Oh God, how muddled I feel sometimes, how confused—”

“But my dear Robert, surely you don’t doubt that you’re cut out for great political success?”

“But what does that mean?” said Robert. “What’s the point of pursuing a career which has nothing to do with what one’s life should really signify?”

“But what do you think your life should signify?”

“That’s the conundrum. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not at peace. I ought to be; I’ve won you, I’ve cancelled out my loss and now I can be happy—except that I can’t. It’s almost as if I hadn’t won you after all—oh God, what a mystery it is; how bewildered I feel, how despairing, how utterly tormented by the irrationality of it all—”

“Darling.” I finally managed to pull myself together. “The first thing you must do is to stop talking of ‘winning’ me as if I were one of those ghastly silver cups which clutter up your bedroom at Oxmoon. One doesn’t win people—they’re not inanimate objects. The fact is that you’ve married me, which has more to do with existing and surviving than with winning or losing, but never mind, that’s not a disaster, that’s good, because of course I’m going to do my best to help you, just as a good friend should, and I’m sure that together we’ll be able to sort out these horrid problems of yours. But to be quite honest, darling, I think you’re suffering from nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork.”

“You’ve understood nothing.” He got out of bed and groped for his dressing gown.

“I understand that you need a thorough rest!”

“But I can’t rest. That’s the point.”

“Yes, but once this murder case is finished—”

He walked out. I stared after him. Then I jumped out of bed and pulled on my kimono. By the time I reached the dining room he was drinking brandy by the sideboard.

“Robert, I do want to help—you’re not being very fair to me—”

“I’m sorry. That’s true. I haven’t told you the whole story, that’s the trouble. But perhaps I should.” He looked down at the brandy in his glass. Then he said slowly, “This reminds me of the morning when my father talked to me about you. He didn’t start by saying he wanted to talk about you, of course. He said, ‘I want to tell you about my parents and Owain Bryn-Davies.’ It was because he knew that only by talking of his adolescence could he explain why he did what he did to you, and I now feel that only by talking of the mountaineering can I attempt to show you why I feel my present life has very little connection with the kind of man I really am. … Or should I keep my mouth shut? You’re looking appalled. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you by mentioning my father.”

I gave him the only possible response. “Pour me some brandy too, please, and let’s sit down at the table.”

Robert poured me some brandy. We sat down. And then the horrors really began.

“All my life,” said Robert, “I’ve been made to understand that I’m unusually gifted. This has been my father’s attitude to me ever since I can remember. This was the attitude of my teachers at school. And finally at Oxford the tutors at Balliol confirmed that I could have an outstanding career in law and politics, the road to the highest offices in the land—and of course I had no quarrel with this vision. It all seemed so attractive that I accepted it unquestioningly. But I didn’t think, Ginette. Until I saw the mountains I never applied my so-called exceptional intellect to asking the simplest and most important of questions: what did I really want to do with my life? And then I saw the mountains and I knew. I just wanted to climb. Nothing else mattered.

“Afterwards—after it was all over—I told myself I’d undergone a form of insanity which had resembled a cancer on my personality. So I cut out the cancer: I abandoned mountaineering. But now I feel dead. And lately I’ve come to ask myself, Which was the real cancer? The academic life followed by fame and fortune at the bar? Or the climber’s life which I rejected? And I have this terrible suspicion that it’s the life I now lead which is killing me, strangling my personality and blighting my soul.

“Why did I actually give up mountaineering? I’d had a shock, of course. I was stunned not only with grief but with a rage against death—the rage which ultimately led me to the Old Bailey; I found I had to fight death in order to come to terms with the loss of my friends, but I found too that I couldn’t fight death anymore on the mountains, I had to find another theater of war.

“But I know now that I didn’t give up mountaineering just because I’d had a shock. I gave it up because I was a coward—yes, I gave it up because I was afraid, that was the truth of it, afraid of death. And I’m still afraid. Dying is losing. To die is to fail—and to fail utterly because once one’s dead there can be no second chances; one can never go winning again.

“So I turned back to the academic life where there was no risk of dying. I’d been on the brink of wrecking my university career but at that point I realized I could still save it, I could still emerge a winner ready to master this brilliant future which had been forecast for me. So I did it—coward that I was, I did it: I took the easy way out. Back I went up to Oxford to conform, to crucify myself and to win.