The Wheel of Fortune (40 page)

I don’t dare hope too much for fear I might be disappointed but a visit to my kind Dr. Drysdale would surely settle the question in no time. …

“Are you sure?” said Robert.

“Darling,
yes!
Isn’t it wonderful!”

“Wonderful, yes, but how extraordinary! I wonder when—”

“Lion’s death. It’s the only date that makes sense.”

‘That’s more extraordinary than ever! The occasion was so bizarre that the question of reproduction never even crossed my mind!”

“Yes, that was absolutely the last thing I was thinking about too, but oh Robert, isn’t it thrilling! I’m in ecstasy—let’s have some champagne!”

We drank some champagne.

“What a relief it is to see you happy again!” said Robert, smiling at me.

“Oh darling, I’m sorry I’ve been so difficult over the last eighteen months, but our married life will be utterly changed now, I promise you!”

“Splendid!”

I waited for him to say, as Conor would have said, “Let’s go to bed and celebrate!” although why I should have thought Robert would choose that moment to display a belated resemblance to Conor I have no idea.

“Well, I must be off,” said Robert presently, glancing at his watch. “Don’t wait up for me because tonight’s debate may be a long one.”

Then he kissed me. He turned his back on me. And he left me on my own.

I suppose I know what’s going to happen but I can’t face it, so I’m turning the problem into a bridge we can cross later. The only trouble is that Robert and I aren’t good at crossing bridges.

Crossing bridges has become for me a synonym for marital hell.

To divert myself from the crisis that I know is now approaching, I start to read the political news again in
The Times
and soon I realize that Robert has a genuine excuse to avoid me by immersing himself in affairs at Westminster.

They’ve got rid of Asquith at last. Lloyd George has made his bid for power and this puts Robert in a cruel dilemma. He wants to be loyal to Asquith, his original patron, and with Raymond’s memory still in the forefront of his mind his natural inclination is to stand by Raymond’s father, but there’s no room for such sentiment in politics and now Lloyd George is beckoning; the Welsh wizard is weaving his divisive spells. Lloyd George has had his eye on Robert for a long time, and now he’s offering him the prospect of a major role in a glittering future. Robert’s seduced. He’s going to leave the Asquith camp and back the new leader who has emerged from the dramatic
coup d’état.

Nothing can stop Robert’s career now, nothing—except possibly a failed marriage and a session in the divorce court.

But that’s a future I refuse to accept. How could I even think of such a disaster! Pregnancy must be making me unbalanced so I must recover my equilibrium without delay. Perhaps I’ll just fly off to Fortnum’s and buy some more fruit. …

“Robert, are you awake?”

“Barely. What is it?”

“Robert, I know this’ll make you angry because you always like to take the lead in such matters, but
please
don’t be cross—”

“At the moment I’m merely exasperated. Would you mind coming to the point?”

“Yes, well … Robert, are you leaving me alone at night because you think you might harm the baby? If so you needn’t worry—now that the beginning of the pregnancy is over it’s safe until the seventh month.”

“Yes, I did know that.”

“Oh. Well, in that case why—”

“Oh for God’s sake, Ginette! Go to sleep and stop nagging me! Why is it you’re never satisfied? I’ve made you pregnant—isn’t that enough for the time being?”

A long, long time passed while I lay on my side and pretended I was asleep. I made no noise but my pillow was soon sodden. Even though the rejection was not entirely unexpected I still found it very hard to bear.

Then he made a fatal mistake. He too was pretending to be asleep but when I failed to stifle a sob he shouted in a paroxysm of guilt, “I suppose Kinsella wanted it all through your pregnancies!” and I screamed back, “Yes, he did—he wasn’t an overgrown spoiled child who hated babies!”

Our peaceful interlude of friendship was brutally terminated and once more the marital horrors began.

I blundered out of bed, I blundered across the landing, I blundered into Declan’s room. It was a desperate flight through the dark, and when I sank onto the bed I burrowed under the eiderdown as if all thought of light terrified me.

“Ginette.” I heard the click of the switch by the door and felt him sit down on the bed, but when he tried to pull aside the eiderdown I clung to it so fiercely that he abandoned the struggle. As the silence lengthened I knew he was frantically groping for the emotional subtlety that would have reduced the scene to order.

But Robert was capable only of emotional simplicity. He said touchingly but uselessly, “This is our child, yours and mine, and I want it and it has nothing to do, so far as I’m concerned, with those babies I found so tedious at Oxmoon long ago.”

I thought: Yes. That’s the situation as it should be. That’s the situation that you, emotionally color-blind Robert, believe it to be. But that’s not the situation as it really is.

I felt so cold then that I burrowed more deeply beneath the eiderdown than ever to ward off the chill of that terrible truth.

“But the trouble is,” persisted Robert, struggling on, never for one moment allowing himself to believe that any problem could be incapable of a rational solution, “that I don’t find pregnant women desirable. Some men do, some men don’t. I don’t. I don’t know why.”

I said nothing. Pregnancy to Robert meant not being the center of attention. Not being the center of attention meant not winning. And not winning to Robert meant a failure he couldn’t endure.

I knew him so well that I could see so clearly each contorted fold in that powerful mind which his reason was powerless to iron smooth. I was powerless too. I was seeing truths he was too emotionally simple to recognize. I was seeing a gory pattern which had no place in his rational black-and-white world.

“So the truth is this,” said Robert, moving from one statement to another with matchless but impotent logic, “I love you, I want the child but for the moment I can’t express these feelings in bed. Of course,” he added carefully, “all will be well again after the child’s born.”

I no longer had the strength to cling to the eiderdown and he was able to ease it away.

“I’m sorry,” he said rapidly when he saw my face, “but I had no idea beforehand that this would happen.”

I merely waited for him to go but he lingered, fidgeting with the cord of his dressing gown and twisting it continuously between his fingers. At last he said humbly, “Won’t you come back to bed? Despite everything I don’t want to sleep on my own.”

“Don’t you?” I said. “I’m afraid I do. Indeed I’m afraid I must. I can’t go on sleeping chastely with you night after night like this; it’s driving me mad.”

He was too shattered to speak.

“I accept that I can’t change you,” I said, “and I accept that all will be well after the baby’s born, but meanwhile you must let me choose my own way to survive this horrible crisis as best I can.”

He managed to stammer, “But you’ve no right to reject me like that!”

“Why not? You’ve rejected me!”

He crept away without another word.

Robert comes back at dawn in a terrible state and says he’s been quite unable to sleep because he now realizes he’s being a bad husband, failing in his marital duty to make me happy. He says he’s sorry, desperately sorry, he knows he’s deserved every ounce of my anger but please, please could I forgive him because he so much wants to make amends.

But I see only that he’s locked into the most disastrous competition with a dead man and that he can’t rest while he feels he’s coming second.

I beg him to leave it for a night or two. I say I do want him, but we’re both tired and upset and it would be far better to postpone our reunion.

But he can’t listen to me. He daren’t. He’s got to prove himself, he’s got to win, so he gets into the single bed with me and then, inevitably, the worst happens, probably one of the worst things that could ever happen to a man like Robert, and we wind up in a far worse mess than before.

“I don’t understand, I simply don’t understand—”

“Darling, listen for a moment,
listen.
There’s only one thing to do with a nightmare like this and that’s to come to terms with it. We’ve got to accept that our marriage has been dislocated and that the dislocation will last until next spring. That’s ghastly, I agree, but it’s not permanent and fatal, it’s transitory and curable, so we must both make up our minds to endure the present in the knowledge that we can look forward to the future.”

“But why am I failing like this? I just can’t understand it—”

“Well, it’s no vast mystery, Robert! You said frankly earlier that you didn’t find me desirable.”

“Yes, but I want to! I’m willing myself to! So why can’t I succeed?”

“Robert,” I said, “there are certain situations in life which aren’t subject to the power of your will, and very unfortunately this seems to be one of them. Let it be, I beg of you. Let it rest.”

“Was Conor ever like this?”

With horror I noticed the change of name. My first husband was no longer “Kinsella” to Robert, no longer a cipher who belonged to a past which could be conveniently forgotten. He was a rival. He was present. And he was winning.

“Oh Robert,
please
—”

“I can’t help it, I’ve got to know. Did Conor ever fail you as completely as this?”

“Oh God, yes, lots of times!”

“You’re lying, I don’t believe you.”

“Robert, he drank! He drank too much too often! He was often far from perfect in bed—why, I told you that before; I distinctly remember telling you—”

“But was he ever actually—”

“Oh, of course he was impotent occasionally! He wasn’t a machine, he was a man!”

“But what did he do when he suffered from impotence?”

“He usually said ‘Holy shit’ and went to sleep.”

“And at other times? What did he do then?”

“I think you’d call it breaking the rules.”

“You mean—”

“No, Robert, I absolutely refuse to say any more—”

“I don’t mind breaking the rules. I’d never normally suggest such a course to my wife, but if you don’t mind then I don’t care.”

“I do mind—I don’t want to do with you what I did with Conor!”

“Why not?”

“Well, because … because Conor had this knack of making forbidden things come right, but they weren’t the sort of things I’d normally—”

“You mean he was better in bed than I am.”

“No! Oh God, no, no, no—”

“You loved him so much that you didn’t care what he did, but you don’t love me so much so you do care!”

“
No! No, no, no!
”

“You love him—you still love him—you’ll always love him—and you love him better than you’ll ever love me!”

I screamed and screamed in denial but he had already stumbled from the room like someone maimed.

Horrors. Robert’s wrecked, I’m wrecked, the marriage is wrecked, and all the time the little baby is growing millimeter by millimeter, fluttering every now and then to remind me how joyous I should feel.

Of course we’re keeping up appearances, but I’m now in such a state that I’m quite incapable of answering my problem letters, so I telephone Julie with the excuse that my doctor’s advised me to take life at a more leisurely pace until the spring. Julie says never mind, I can always come back to the work later, and how lovely it is to think of someone having a
wanted
pregnancy for a change.

I immediately start weeping into the telephone. Julie says, “Meet me at The Gondolier at one,” and as soon as I’ve controlled my tears I rush off to Kensington High Street.

“What shall I do, Julie? What on earth shall I do?”

“Take a deep breath and calm down. I agree the situation’s awful but you’re going to get out of it.”

I had been weeping all over my steak-and-kidney-pie-with-two-vegetables but when Julie gave me this hope for the future I managed to control my tears again. I knew then that she was the best woman friend I would ever have. Every woman needs a special friend of her own sex with whom she can “have a haircombing” about everything from menstruation to male monsters, and Julie had become that kind of special friend. It made no difference that she had never been married. She was a woman of the world and she had an intuitive sympathy that was almost telepathic in its grasp of a situation. I hadn’t had to regale her with every detail of my horrors; I’d merely sketched the outline and she’d penciled in the rest.

“For a start,” she was saying, “forget about the truth, whatever the truth is. It doesn’t matter which of those two men you love best. All that matters is that Robert should believe it’s him.”

“But what can I say to convince him?”

“Anything. You’ve got to mount a propaganda campaign in his favor. Forget about bed—obviously you can do nothing there at the moment—but treat him as if he’s God and be passionate about him.”

“But won’t he be suspicious and skeptical?”

“Don’t be silly—he’ll be weak with relief and only too willing to believe every word you say!”

“But supposing he drags up the subject of Conor again?”

“I agree Conor’s ghost will have to be exorcised. But Robert’s not going to try—he’ll be much too scared. You’re the one who’ll have to perform the exorcism.”

“Oh God, Julie—”

“No, don’t panic. All you have to do is to convince him that it’s a compliment, not an insult, that you don’t want to do with him what you did with Conor. Tell him you never liked what Conor did when he was drunk, although you wanted to believe out of sheer wifely loyalty that anything he did was right. Then say you simply couldn’t bear the thought of Robert the Greek god feeling driven to descend to Conor’s pagan Irish level. What explanation could be more rational and comforting?”

Hope now succeeded despair and overwhelmed me. Once more I began to weep into my steak-and-kidney pie, but afterwards I felt so encouraged by this conversation that I even had the energy to walk to Harrods to buy a present for Johnny and Blanche’s second baby. It was due to arrive at any moment, and I told myself it would never do if I were so preoccupied by my troubles that I failed to have a gift waiting to welcome the baby into the world.