The Wheel of Fortune (6 page)

“Yes, of course she’s got to have a husband to look after her, I quite understand that, but as far as I’m concerned there’s only one possible solution: I must marry her myself. Now, I do realize I’m a little young at present, but—”

“I concede,” said my father, “that I married at nineteen and it turned out to be quite the most fortunate thing that’s ever happened to me, but I’m afraid I could never consent to you marrying while you’re still in your teens.”

“But this is an emergency!”

“I think not. I recognize that you feel a very deep affection for Ginevra, but you in your turn should now recognize that it’s fraternal.”

“Oh no, it isn’t!”

“I’m sorry. I know you’re jealous. I know you’ve been unhappy since she left Oxmoon. I know this is all a nightmare for you, but you must try to be grown up, try to be sensible, try to accept that this is something you can’t change.”

This maddened me beyond endurance. “I’d like to kill him!” I shouted in a paroxysm of rage. “That would change things soon enough!”

The next moment my father was slamming me face down across the writing table and the scene had dissolved with terrifying speed into violence.

IX

HE NEVER DID IT.
He never beat me. I cried out in shock and the cry paralyzed him. For five seconds he held me in an iron grip but then with a short painful intake of breath he released my arm which he had doubled behind my back. As he walked away from me he said, “Never, never say such a thing again.” He spoke in Welsh but as it was a simple sentence I understood it. However a moment later, realizing he had used the wrong language, he repeated the order in English. The English was broken, a foreigner’s attempt at an unfamiliar tongue. He sounded like a stranger. I was terrified.

“We don’t talk of murder at Oxmoon,” said my father.

“Forgive me, I didn’t mean what I said—”

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself, behaving like a spoiled child all over again—and to think you have the insolence to talk of marriage! It’ll be a long time before
you’re
fit for marriage, indeed it will—all you’re fit for at the moment is the nursery!”

“I’m sorry but I’m just so damnably unhappy—”

“
Unhappy!
Don’t talk to me of unhappiness, you don’t even know what the word means! My God, when I was your age—”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please don’t be angry with me anymore, please—”

“Then sit down at that table and stop whining like a pampered puppy! That’s better. Now take a sheet of notepaper and write as follows.” My father hesitated before continuing with appropriate pauses: “ ‘My dear Ginette, I must apologize for not writing earlier to send my best wishes to you on your engagement, but I’m very much looking forward to celebrating the news with you at your birthday ball at Oxmoon. After all, I’d be a poor sort of friend if I couldn’t share your happiness! I shall be writing separately to Timothy to congratulate him but meanwhile please do give him my warmest regards. I hope you will both be very happy. Yours affectionately’—or however you close your letters to her—‘Robert.’ ”

I finished writing. My father read the letter over my shoulder and said, “Yes, that’ll do,” but on an impulse I scrawled beneath the signature:
P.S. Make sure you save a waltz for me at the ball!
I wanted a waltz not because it would give me the opportunity to hold her in my arms but because I knew she liked waltzes best and I wanted my dance with her to be a dance she would remember.

“Well, I don’t care,” I said as I watched my father seal the letter. “Let her marry whom she likes. My friendship with her will outlast any marriage.”

My father said tersely, “Even if you’d been older your mother and I could never have approved of you marrying her. She’s too alluring and you’re too jealous. She’d make you very miserable.”

But I was miserable enough already and my misery had hardly begun.

X

THE BALL TO CELEBRATE
both Ginette’s engagement and her eighteenth birthday was held on the twenty-third of April, 1898. That was when my life finally began. The previous fifteen years and ten months had been merely a rehearsal.

All Gower came to Oxmoon for by that time my parents were famous for their lavish hospitality. It was their weakness. Everyone, after all, must occasionally have a holiday from hard work, self-help, drawing the line and doing the done thing, and my parents were in many ways a very ordinary Victorian young couple. My mother specialized in what she called “little dinner parties for twenty-four,” but her English talent for wielding power with implacable attention to detail was only truly satisfied by giving balls for a hundred. My father, displaying an inborn Welsh inclination to hospitality, seized the chance to abandon the austerity which he had been compelled to practice for so much of his life, and glide down the glittering road of extravagance. The result of their combined efforts to entertain their neighbors was unbridled sybaritic luxury served up with a shattering military precision.

At first I had no intention of making more than a brief appearance; I not only loathed the prospect of seeing Ginette with her fiancé but in my misery I knew another of those moments when I was overwhelmed with the drearier aspects of adolescence. Once again I was undergoing a bout of rapid growth; I looked ridiculous in my evening clothes, and as I stood before the looking glass I thought I had never seen a youth who looked more unappealing. There was even a spot on my chin. I never normally had spots. I did not believe in them. But now I found myself obliged to believe, and the next moment I was noticing what a distasteful color my hair was. In childhood it had been pale yellow and attractive. Now it was mud-brown and repellent. My eyes were blue but not bright blue like my father’s; they were light blue, unendurably anemic. It suddenly occurred to me that my looks were second-rate. I would never be classically handsome. A sense of failure overpowered me. I was in despair.

Then my mother looked in to see how far I had progressed with my preparations and when she saw me she said briskly, “This won’t do, will it?” and hustled me along to her room where my father, golden-haired, classically handsome and every inch a hero was somehow contriving to look elegant in his braces.

He lent me some evening clothes and life began to seem fractionally less hopeless. Finally I ventured downstairs. The house seemed to be throbbing with a powerful emotion and so strong was the aura of glamour that I did not at first realize that this powerful emotion lay within me and was not some mysterious miasma emanating from the walls. All the main rooms were adorned with flowers from the garden and the hothouses. In the ballroom the scent of lilies, very pure and clear, drifted faintly toward me from the bank of flowers around the dais where the gentlemen of the orchestra were busy tuning their instruments. No amateur trio scraped out the music whenever all Gower danced at Oxmoon; my parents imported a dozen first-class musicians from London. I glanced up at the chandeliers. Every crystal had been washed, every candle replaced. The room was mirrored. Perhaps Regency Robert Godwin had dreamed of Versailles, and as I stood in what I later realized was such a quaint provincial little ballroom I saw reflected in those mirrors the fairy-tale prince of my personal myth.

The guests began to arrive. The music began to play. The room began to hum with conversation and still I remained where I was, saying her name again and again in my mind as if I could will her back from the brink of her great catastrophe and deliver us both to the happy ending of a traditional nursery fairy tale.

I was in the hall when she arrived at last with the Applebys.

Through the open front door I saw their carriage coming up the drive and although I wanted to retreat to the ballroom in order to pretend I was barely interested in her arrival, my feet carried me inexorably past the staircase, through the doorway and out into the porch.

I saw her and for the first time in my life I found myself old enough to recognize feminine perfection. I was reminded of the silver cups which I regularly collected at school in my compulsive quest for excellence. She was a prize. She was waiting to be awarded to the man who came first, and when I finally realized this I knew I had to have her; I knew I had to win.

True to the conventions of the fairy tale I was instantly changed. The long tedious journey through adolescence was terminated as abruptly as if my fairy godmother had waved a magic wand, and at that moment childhood lay forever behind me and only manhood was real.

“Robert! My dear, isn’t this thrilling!
What
a birthday treat …” She swept on, radiantly oblivious of my transformation, and disappeared into the ballroom. Presently I found I had to sit down. Then I found I could not sit down but had to stand up. I was beside myself. All the famous love poetry which I had previously dismissed as “soppy” and “wet” now streamed through my brain until even the rhythm of the iambic pentameters seemed impregnated with a mystical significance. Like the author of the Book of Revelation I was conscious of a new heaven and a new earth. I stumbled forward, broke into a run and hared after her into the ballroom.

“Ginette, Ginette—”

She heard me. I saw her turn her head idly and give me a languid wave with her fan. “Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten!” she called. “I’ve saved the first waltz after supper for you!” And she began to dance away from me in Sir William Appleby’s arms.

Some sort of interval passed which I can only presume I spent dancing with the girls I was supposed to dance with and behaving as I was supposed to behave. I must have shown some semblance of normality for no one inquired anxiously after my health. Did I eat any supper? Possibly. I have a dim memory of sipping a glass of champagne but giving up halfway through because I was afraid I might go mad with euphoria.

“Oh good, this is your waltz, isn’t it, Robert? Thank goodness, now I can relax! I never before realized how exhausting it must have been for Cinderella having to be radiant to everyone in sight … Lord, I’m in such a state, Robert, does it show? I feel so excited I don’t see how I can possibly survive—in fact maybe I’m already dead and this is what it’s like in heaven. … Oh, listen—Johann Strauss—yes, that proves it, I
am
in heaven! Come on, Robert, what’s the matter with you? Let’s dance!”

And that was the moment when we danced together beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon as the orchestra played “The Blue Danube.”

“Oh, this is such paradise!” exclaimed Ginette, echoing my thoughts word for word but glancing restlessly past me to the doors of the ballroom as if she could hardly wait to escape. “I’ll remember this moment forever and ever!”

“I’ll remember it till the day I die. Listen, Ginette, wait for me, you’ve got to wait—”

“What? I can’t hear you!” The orchestra was blazing into a new coda and as we whirled by the dais I saw her again look past my shoulder at the open doors in the distance.

“I said you’ve got to wait for me because—”

She left me. The orchestra was still playing “The Blue Danube” but as she ran the full length of the ballroom all the couples stopped dancing to stare at her. She ran swiftly and gracefully, her feet seeming barely to touch the ground, and suddenly there was a flash of diamonds as she pulled off her ring, tossed it aside and carelessly consigned her engagement to oblivion.

He was waiting for her in the doorway. As I have already mentioned, I had no trouble recognizing Conor Kinsella. He was smiling that charming Irish smile of his and as she flung herself into his arms he kissed her with appalling intimacy on the mouth.

The music stopped. No one moved. A great silence fell upon the ballroom and then in my mind’s eye I saw the mirrored walls darken, the chandeliers grow dim and my fairy tale turn to ashes to foul the perfumed festering air.

2

I

S
O MUCH FOR ROMANCE.
Later I considered it fortunate that this early experience had granted me immunity, and I was never troubled by such irrational behavior again.

After the ball life went on. I admit I did wonder at the time how it could but it did, and presently the natural human instinct for self-preservation nudged its way to the forefront of my mind. I suddenly saw that no one must know how I felt. Sweat broke out on my forehead at the thought of people pitying me. Horrifying visions smote me of a future in which my unrequited love made me an object of derision throughout Gower, and in panic I realized that my only hope of avoiding such humiliation lay in exercising an iron will and concealing my feelings behind the facade of my quasi-fraternal friendship. If I followed this course I could permit myself a certain amount of fractious moping because it would be expected of me, but I had at all costs to beware of extremes; I had to keep eating, talk to people, go about my daily business. Eventually I would have to pretend to recover and this would be a formidable challenge, but sheer pride alone made it imperative that I should succeed.

I began to rehearse a series of appropriate remarks which I could use later to deceive my parents. “Ginette? Oh yes, I suppose I was a trifle possessive, wasn’t I—rather amusing to look back on that now. …” Endless scenes in this endless charade of indifference slipped in and out of my mind. My inventive powers impressed me but unfortunately they were unable to relieve my misery whenever I thought of Ginette with Kinsella. My imagination, never normally intrusive, was now a torment to me. So was my sexuality. Together the two demons destroyed my sleep, gave me a consumptive look and did their best to destroy the grand illusion of resignation which I was trying so hard to propagate.

Meanwhile, as I floundered in the toils of my adolescent’s nightmare, Kinsella had taken advantage of everyone’s paralyzed stupefaction to sweep Ginette off on horseback to Swansea, our nearest large town, and bear her away by rail to Scotland where the lax matrimonial laws had long been God’s gift to clandestine lovers. There he had married her despite the fact that she had been made a ward of court, and afterwards they had evaded legal retribution by slipping into Ireland on a ferry from Stranraer to Larne. They had sailed to America from Cork a week later.