The Wheel of Fortune (7 page)

There was much talk about what could be done to preserve Ginette’s fortune but the debate soon lapsed as her well-wishers acknowledged their impotence to alter her fate. Before long general opinion favored treating the disaster as a
fait accompli
and making the best of it. No one knew how Kinsella was earning his daily bread, but later, when the lines of communication had been renewed, Ginette’s letters indicated a life of affluence with no sign of an apocalyptic retribution hovering in the wings.

Timothy Appleby was dispatched on a world cruise to recover from the catastrophe and had all manner of adventures before meeting a rich widow in Cape Town and settling down in Rhodesia to make a study of the butterflies of Africa. Ginette’s defection was undoubtedly the best fate that could have overtaken him, but the more I heard people remarking on his lucky escape the more I wondered how Ginette could have treated him so badly. The situation had no doubt been abnormal but her deliberate entanglement with a man who meant nothing to her continued to puzzle me and when we had drifted into a faultlessly platonic correspondence I asked her outright for an explanation. In reply I received a typical letter, full of romantic hyperbole and feminine flutter, which I knew meant she was still struggling with her guilt and remorse: …
yes, I know I behaved like a
serpent,
and believe me I’ll have poor Tim on my conscience till my dying day, but the truth is quite simply that I was mad. Aunt Maud drove me mad, intercepting my letters from Conor and lecturing me about chastity and sending me to that ghastly place in Germany which was just like a prison
—
or worse still a convent
—
so in the end I saw clearly that my only hope of escaping her was to marry and the only man (or so I thought) who wanted to marry me was Timothy. I knew I’d still have to spend part of the year at All-Hallows but at least I would have been my own mistress instead of Aunt Maud’s prisoner and at least I would have been able to spend most of the year in London where I would have met all sorts of exciting people and had a simply heavenly time.

So that was why I decided to marry Tim. I had no way of communicating with Conor and (thanks to Aunt Maud) I’d given up all hope of hearing from him.

And then
—
just after my engagement had been announced
—
Conor finally managed to outwit my jailer! He sent over from Ireland the most extraordinary gentleman called Mr. O’Flaherty
w
ho posed as a jobbing gardener and managed to smuggle a letter to me by seducing the second housemaid
—
my dear, I can’t tell you how romantic it was and the housemaid had a thrilling time too
—
and then I told Mr. O’Flaherty about the ball at Oxmoon and Conor sent word that I was to leave a packed bag beforehand with the second housemaid who would take it to Mr. O’Flaherty who would be waiting in the grounds of All-Hallows by the ruined oratory
—
my dear, I was simply
ravished
by excitement, in fact when the orchestra was playing “The Blue Danube” and I saw Conor had finally arrived I’m only surprised I didn’t swoon in your arms! At least when I die I’ll be able to say: well, never mind, I’ve
lived.
Oh, but what a nightmare it was before Conor came, thank God I’ve escaped, thank God the ghastly old past can’t touch me anymore. …

Years afterwards when she and Kinsella paid their first and last visit to England I said to her, “If All-Hallows was such hell, why didn’t you come back to Oxmoon?”

“But my dear!” she exclaimed as if astonished that I could be so obtuse. “Margaret would have been just as bad as Aunt Maud! Can’t you imagine all the homilies on drawing the line and doing the done thing?” And we laughed together, just two platonic friends, just first cousins once removed, just two strangers who had been childhood playmates long ago in a little Welsh country house in the back of beyond, but I wanted her then as strongly as I had ever wanted her and although I concealed my feelings I knew that they had remained unchanged. It was as if they had been frozen in time by the shock of her sudden desertion; it was as if, so far as my deepest emotions were concerned, I was still dancing beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played “The Blue Danube.”

This should have been romantic. However in reality—the reality I had to master when I was sixteen—it was both inconvenient and bewildering. I had read enough novels by that time to know that a hero in my position had to yearn for his lost love in impeccable chastity and perhaps hunt big game in Africa to relieve his feelings, but I had no interest in game hunting and no interest, as I presently discovered to my horror, in being chaste.

It took me a few months to realize this, but when I returned home for the summer holidays I found I finally had to face the prospect of Ginette’s permanent absence. In other words, for the first time in my life I had to live with the concept of losing.

I did not know where to begin. Then I gradually became aware that I wanted to conquer this new world of carnality and prove I was still capable of coming first. At that point I should have confided in my father but two factors inhibited me. The first was that I was so obsessed with acting my charade of indifference towards Ginette that I shied away from any conversation which would have betrayed my true feelings, and the second was that I could so clearly remember my father talking of the dangerous sea of carnality and telling me a good marriage was the only answer.

I struggled on in silence, utterly confused, utterly miserable, but then one morning I got up early and on wandering downstairs I found a very junior housemaid polishing the floor of the drawing room. Immediately I recalled my recent letter from Ginette on the subject of the erring housemaid at All-Hallows, and immediately I saw what possibilities had confronted the mysterious Mr. O’Flaherty. One thing led, as I fear it so often does, to another until at last, to put a turgid episode in the shortest, most salutary sentence, she stooped, I conquered and we both fell from grace. I was back at school by the time my father was obliged to make a financial provision for her and I was still at school when to the relief of all concerned she miscarried and emigrated to Australia, but when I returned home for the Christmas holidays I found a most unpleasant reception awaiting me.

It was my mother who had found out. Her chilling expression was bad enough but the worst part of the affair was that my father was entirely at a loss. He was stricken. His expression of bewilderment, his painful halting attempt to reprimand me, his air of misery all formed more of a punishment than any violent demonstration of rage, and in an agony of shame I begged his forgiveness.

“I’ll turn over a new leaf, sir, I swear I will,” I added desperately, and on this edifying note of repentance the conversation ended, but I knew, as soon as I had left him, that my problems remained unsolved. I was just wondering in despair if I could secretly ask the local doctor for a drug that would suppress my carnal inclinations and was just trying to imagine the celibate future studded with cold baths that lay ahead of me to the grave—for of course I could never marry if I could not marry Ginette—when Lion banged on the door and shouted that my mother wanted to see me.

She was making a blouse for Celia and her worktable was littered with various pieces of material, but my mother herself was, as I had anticipated, sitting at her dressing table in front of the triple looking glass. Her box of assorted buttons was open before her and she was sifting through the collection in search of a suitable set for the blouse.

“Sit down, dear,” she said, not looking up. “I’ve just been talking to your father.”

I sat down. The chair was cunningly angled so that I was reflected in all three mirrors, and as I noticed this unnerving multiplication of my guilty image I felt a queasiness form in the pit of my stomach.

“Your father,” said my mother, poking away busily among the buttons, “is capable of considerable eloquence, but when a conversation is of a painful nature he often finds it difficult to be as explicit as he would wish. I have spoken of this to you before and attributed this characteristic to his Welsh temperament but we must also never forget that he was not brought up to speak English by his Welsh mother and his Welsh nursemaids and that in times of stress he thinks more easily in their language than in ours.”

Poke-poke-poke among the buttons. A swift glance into the far mirror.

“So I thought,” resumed my mother tranquilly, “that I should see you for a moment to … clarify your father’s statements in the unlikely event that you might be feeling a trifle bewildered or confused.” She paused, glanced into all three mirrors and then returned to the buttons before adding: “Now, I want to talk to you briefly about your grandmother and Mr. Bryn-Davies—your father has not, I think, yet broached the subject with you in any detail.”

I was so startled that it took me a moment to answer, “No, Mama.”

“Well, that’s as it should be. Your father is the best judge of when you should hear the whole story, but I think a word or two from me now wouldn’t come amiss, especially as the case seems strangely … pertinent to what I have to say.” She toyed with a large red button. Then putting it aside she continued with the same tranquil fluency: “Let me start with your grandmother. Now, you may be surprised to hear that I do not entirely condemn poor Grandmama for her liaison with Mr. Bryn-Davies. She loved him. Her husband had treated her vilely. She certainly deserved a little happiness. Of course her conduct was immoral and wrong, that goes without saying, but,” said my mother, deciding to look at me directly, “everyone in this world is subject to temptation and since very few people are saints, most people cannot always succeed in living as they know they should live. So Grandmama’s lapse was, in that sense, pardonable; she was guilty primarily of human frailty. However,” said my mother, finding two more red buttons, “where Grandmama made her cardinal error was that she abandoned all attempt to keep up appearances. A secret liaison conducted with discretion would have been socially acceptable. A public performance as a harlot destroyed her. Remember that, Robert. Discretion is everything. And it has nothing to do with morality. It’s a question of good taste, common sense and consideration for those you love and who love you. Have I made myself entirely clear?”

“I—”

“There are standards of immorality as well as standards of morality, Robert. Make sure yours are high. You may not end up a saint—I’m not at all sure I would want a son who was a saint—but at least you’ll end up with an ordered civilized private life. Oh, and of course—though it’s hardly necessary for me to add this—an ordered civilized private life doesn’t include seducing family servants and causing extreme embarrassment to the parents who love you. There are to be no more seductions beneath this roof, Robert. I draw the line. What you do elsewhere is entirely your own affair and I neither expect nor desire to know anything about it—you should ask your father for further advice on the subject, and when you do you must
insist
that he’s explicit with you. It is not a mother’s provenance,” said my mother, “to advise her son on subjects of a carnal nature.”

After a pause I said, “No, of course not, Mama.”

We looked at each other for one brief telling second in the triple glass. Finally I managed to add, “Thank you.”

“Oh, there’s no need to thank me,” said my mother. “I’m merely clarifying what your father said—or what he would have said if he hadn’t been subject to linguistic difficulties when distressed.”

The interview was concluded. At first I was conscious merely of an overpowering gratitude towards her for reprieving me from a lifetime of cold baths, but later my attitude became more ambivalent. I was aware that in some nameless competition which I could not begin to define she had come a highly commendable first while my father had come a most ineffectual second, and this truth which instinct urged me to deny but which my intellect forced me to acknowledge ran contrary to my most deeply entrenched beliefs not only about my parents but about the male and female sexes. In the world in which I felt most comfortable men were always first and best, heroes were always more important than heroines and the father who idolized me could do no wrong. But my mother had unwittingly opened a window onto another world, the world which Ginette had shown me when she had eloped with Kinsella, the real world which I secretly knew I had yet to master and which I secretly feared I might never master to my satisfaction. In my dread of coming second there I resented that world and above all I resented the women who had shown it to me. I still loved Ginette—but there were moments when I hated her too. I loved my mother—but there were times when I resented her so much that I could barely keep a civil tongue in my head when I addressed her.

My mother’s understanding should have brought me closer to her but in adult life I found we were estranged. We were each faultlessly polite whenever we met but nothing of importance was ever uttered between us, and later when my considerable success had deluded me into believing I had mastered the real world, my attitude mellowed from resentment into an affectionate contempt. Poor Mama, I would think, so plain, so dumpy, so unfashionable, so provincial—what did she know of life when she had barely ventured from her rural backwater since the age of sixteen? The only crisis she had had to surmount had been her mother-in-law’s determination to live in sin with a sheep farmer, and even that droll little inconvenience had been smoothed aside by my father who had played the hero and visited his mother regularly in her Swansea asylum.

My father never did tell me the whole story about his mother and Owain Bryn-Davies, but the older and more sophisticated I became the less curious I was to hear about this amusing slice of Victorian melodrama which I felt sure by Edwardian standards would be judged tame. In my late twenties when I became involved with defending criminals of the worst type I quickly reached a state of mind in which no human behavior could shock me, least of all a little indiscreet adultery in South Wales in the Eighties, and when my father said after my grandmother’s funeral that my mother had been urging him to talk to me of the past, it was all I could do to suppress a yawn and assume a look of courteous sympathy.