The Wheel of Fortune (76 page)

“Here I am again, Sister!” said Warburton. “No peace for the wicked!”

“Oh, Dr. Warburton, the things you say!”

This extraordinarily normal conversation was conducted in cheerful tones and even followed by laughter. I could not quite believe I was listening to it, and when the nun took us down the corridor to Dr. de Vestris’ office I could not quite believe either that I was where I was.

I found a little old man with white hair in a pleasant civilized room overlooking a formal garden high above Swansea Bay. He had in his hand several sheets of paper, and he glanced now and then at the fine copperplate writing on the top page as Warburton talked briefly about a family crisis that had made a full knowledge of my grandmother’s condition imperative.

“Quite so, quite so,” said de Vestris soothingly. He had the air of a benign schoolmaster. “Do sit down, both of you. Yes, I looked up our records as soon as we’d finished speaking, Warburton, although of course I remember the case. Such a nice old lady she was, and always so devoted to her family.”

“What was the original diagnosis?” said Warburton.

“An initial derangement caused by an acute nervous crisis followed by periodic bouts of melancholy.”

Warburton turned to me. “Nowadays we would call that a nervous breakdown followed by recurring bouts of depression.” He added to de Vestris: “Did you have any occasion to amend that diagnosis, sir?”

“Yes, I thought there was no real need for her to remain here. She was one of our very mildest cases, always a little inclined to melancholy, but such a normal old lady on her good days.”

“Godwin feared her disorder might be hereditary.”

“Good heavens, no!” said de Vestris. He seemed scandalized by the idea. “There was never any question of that.”

Warburton stood up and said to me, “I’m going to leave you with Dr. de Vestris because I know you’d like to have a few words with him on your own. I’ll be waiting outside in the motor.”

I nodded, tried to thank him and failed. The door closed. I was alone with my bridge to the past in that tranquil room high above the bay.

“This is very singular,” mused de Vestris, filling a pipe. “The relatives usually prefer to forget—what a pleasant change to find one who wants to remember! You should be encouraged! Now, let me see. I know you’re one of the grandchildren, but which one? I can’t recall all their names now, but I know there were a lot of them, and Mrs. Godwin liked to show me their photographs. She had a favorite—a very nice-looking little fellow—damn it, what was his name—something quite ordinary—oh yes, Johnny, that was it. He was the one who grew up speaking fluent Welsh. I remember she said none of the others had an ear for it. Yes, little Johnny was a great joy to her, but she swore me to secrecy because she didn’t want her daughter-in-law to find out. That was one of her eccentricities, you understand. She was abnormally frightened of her daughter-in-law. One often finds these irrational streaks lingering on in a patient who might otherwise be considered fully recovered.

“When I first came here in 1901 I did suggest that Mrs. Godwin was fit enough to live at home with a nurse to look after her, but Mrs. Godwin at once became so terrified that I realized this wouldn’t do, and unfortunately there were no other relatives willing to take her in. I had a conference with her son and daughter-in-law, but they both agreed that it was much better for Mrs. Godwin to remain where she was. They were the most charming couple, I remember, and the young Mrs. Godwin was such a pleasant motherly little figure and spoke so kindly of her mother-in-law that I saw at once how deeply irrational the older Mrs. Godwin was about her. And the son was such a delightful man—and most generous in his donations to the Order which runs the Home—yes, he was a devoted son; he came to see her regularly and always, every Christmas Eve, he would arrive to take her back to Oxmoon.

“Yet there was something odd about their relationship. I tried to coax Mrs. Godwin to talk to me about him because there was no doubt he used to disturb her—although since she always longed to see him and since he always behaved kindly to her when they met, I came to believe she was disturbed not by his visits themselves but by the fact that they reminded her of the past.

“When the melancholy was upon her she used to retreat into the past. She would tell me how happy she had been with—good God, I’ve forgotten his name—oh yes, Bryn-Davies, and sometimes she’d seem to forget he was dead—she’d talk of him as if he were still alive—but I don’t think she really forgot. It was just part of a deliberate effort to blot out the pain-filled present by recreating a past which was bearable. No matter how difficult the past might have been, it was at least finite and, in a peculiar way, safe. She knew where she was there; she couldn’t get lost. But in contrast the present overwhelmed her with its potential for suffering; another of her little eccentricities, you see, was that she feared her daughter-in-law would cut her off entirely from her grandchildren and stop her son’s visits. She was so afraid, poor woman, always so afraid of the younger Mrs. Godwin.

“I tried hard to get to the bottom of her trouble, but I’m afraid I never did. What I did find out, however, was that some huge guilt was constantly present in her mind—but the guilt, strangely enough, didn’t center around Bryn-Davies. It centered around the husband. Yes, it was the guilt which had driven her beyond the edge of sanity, I’m sure of it, although the exact nature of her guilt was never disclosed to me; she took her secrets with her to the grave, and all I can tell you is that she seemed to believe she was responsible for her husband’s death. She said her adultery had driven him to drink and ruined his health, but that couldn’t have been the whole story because when I spoke to her son he said his father had been a drunkard long before the advent of Bryn-Davies. ‘I was a bad wife,’ she used to say, weeping and weeping, poor woman—I can see her now—‘I was wicked,’ she would say, ‘I yielded to evil, I could have stopped but I went on and now I’m paying and paying forever.’ She was very Welsh, you know, very emotional. … But of course, I was forgetting, you knew her, you’re one of the grandsons.

“In the end I decided that the best way to exorcise this guilt over the adultery was to enlist the aid of her son—such a delightful fellow he was!—and I suggested that it might help her if he were to tell her clearly that he forgave her for her past wrongs. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said, charming as ever, but do you know, he never did. That was when I realized what a strange relationship they had. There was unquestionably love on both sides, but it was crippled by a mutual revulsion. I suspect he must have turned against Bryn-Davies in the end … and of course it’s always the children who suffer, isn’t it, when the parents go off the rails.

“Well, I must stop rambling but the case interested me and stuck in my memory. After all, she was Mrs. Godwin of Oxmoon, wasn’t she, and even though the great scandal took place twenty years before I met her, people still talked of it in Gower—well, look at us, talking of it today! The past doesn’t die so easily sometimes, does it, and I can see your grandmother as if it were yesterday, such a nice ordinary old lady; I see her sticking those photographs of her grandchildren in her album and turning page after page after page. … Yes, she loved those grandchildren—but I keep forgetting, you’re one of them, aren’t you? Now, which one would you be? And exactly what can I tell you that will be of help?”

IV

It was almost ten by the time I reached Little Oxmoon again, but although Robert was in bed he was not asleep. Ginevra was sitting with him as they waited for me to return.

“It’s all right,” I said as I entered the room.

“Thank God,” said Robert. “What did I tell you? I always knew it was rubbish to assume they were suffering from the same malaise!”

“You were wrong. The malaise was the same.”

Both he and Ginevra boggled at me. I drew up a chair and sank down on it. I felt exhausted.

“But for God’s sake!” said Robert, outraged by the possibility that he had drawn the wrong deductions from the facts. “What’s the malaise?”

“Guilt.”

They boggled at me again. “What the devil do you mean?” demanded Robert, but I saw that Ginevra had understood. I had noticed by that time that Robert’s broad knowledge of human nature was essentially academic, whereas Ginevra’s intuitive sensitivity gave her the power to comprehend complex emotional truths which lay beyond the reach of his rational analysis. Robert was capable of perceiving intellectually that I was unbalanced on the subject of my grandmother and that I had to be weaned from my melodramatic vision in order to be cured. But it was Ginevra who had the intuition to perceive the exact dimensions of my cure when it came.

“Guilt,” she said. “Of course. They both committed murder.”

Robert was still outraged by this solution which he saw as irrational. “But none of the murderers I ever knew ever went round the bend years after the event!”

“Darling,” said Ginevra, “the murderers you knew were either hanged or locked up or allowed to vanish into the blue. You’ve had absolutely no experience of what happens to people when they’ve been carrying a huge burden of guilt for years.”

“Obviously not all murderers react in this way, Robert,” I said to pacify him. “But the point is that this mother and this son, who were no doubt emotionally similar, appear to break down in the same way when under stress.”

“Exactly,” said Ginevra. “It’s not murder itself that’s important here, Robert—any serious wrongdoing would have the same effect. It’s the guilt they can’t endure.”

“So the thesis is that the malaise is guilt and that Papa inherited his mother’s emotional inability to survive it—and now I suppose you’ll say the madness is hereditary after all!” said Robert, more outraged than ever.

“I could say that, certainly,” I said, “but the point is that this particular madness doesn’t have to be inherited, Robert. What I have to do to ensure my sanity is to avoid the bad decisions which would later drive me out of my mind with guilt—and that means the choice between sanity and insanity will always be mine; it means I’m not at the mercy of an uncontrollable heredity, I’m not strapped to the Wheel of Fortune with no possibility of escape—”

“May I interrupt this emotional monologue,” said Robert, “to inquire if our parents and our grandmother can now be regarded as forgivable?”

I looked at my grand opera but found the stage was in darkness.

“No more fiends?” said Robert. “No more villains busily generating evil?”

“No.” I found myself looking at a different stage. “It’s not that kind of story. You were right at least about that, Robert.” I thought with love and pity of my sad lonely grandmother turning the pages of her photograph albums. I thought with love and pity of my young parents struggling to survive that tragedy which had haunted them. And I knew that the need to blame someone for my past unhappiness was no more. One could blame evil people for evil deeds but not tortured people for tragic decisions; tortured people deserved only compassion, and the compassion, long withheld, was now streaming through my mind. The weight of my old terror was lifted; the burden of my anger was destroyed, and it was at that moment, as I triumphed at last over the past which had so often and so fatally triumphed over me, that I was able to say simply in judgment: “They were just three ordinary people who failed to draw the line.”

V

Later, after we had left Robert to sleep, I said, “Ginevra, there’s something I want to ask you. Straker gave me some advice today and I have a terrible feeling that it may be sound; she says that while I’m waiting for my divorce I should pretend Bronwen’s in my employment—for Bronwen’s sake, of course, not for mine. She’s right, isn’t she?”

“Ghastly Straker!” said Ginevra. “I’m afraid she is. How mortifying!”

“I’m going to have to get rid of Nanny. I suppose I could say that Bronwen’s taken her place.”

“Oh, darling, what a good idea! That’s the perfect solution!”

“Bronwen’s not going to like it.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a lie. And we want to live in the truth.”

“But darling, it won’t be a lie! She’ll be there at Penhale Manor looking after your children, just as a nanny should!”

“Yes,” I said, “and Straker’s there at Oxmoon, managing the house just as a housekeeper should.”

“But that situation’s utterly different!”

“Yes,” I said, “of course. But it’s the same lie, isn’t it?” And leaving the hall, I went out into the night.

VI

“I’d rather live with you without pretense,” said Bronwen.

“Yes. That’s what I want too. But there are cogent reasons against it.”

“The children?”

“The children, certainly. But my main concern is for you. I don’t know how long it’ll take to get this divorce. Obviously nothing can be done until after the child is born, but even then … Constance may be stubborn.”

She looked away.

It was after midnight, and we were sitting in the little front parlor of the Home Farm on a small uncomfortable sofa. Bronwen’s hair was loose. As I caressed her it shone fierily in the candlelight.

“Then there’s my father,” I said. “He’s literally ill with worry. If he knew I was going to keep up appearances and behave according to his rules he’d feel better. I do want to live in the truth, you must believe that, but I don’t want to hurt people.”

She made up her mind. “No. Neither do I. Hurting people can never be right.” She pushed back her hair and turned to face me again. “But we must be truthful with each other in private,” she said. “You must never lie to me again.”

I promised I never would. She was satisfied, and blowing out the candle I took her in my arms.

VII

“He’s very poorly indeed today, dear,” said Mrs. Straker. “He’s searching the attics, although God knows what he’s looking for. What did Robert say about my salary—or did you have second thoughts and decide to take advantage of my offer about the will?”

“I told him. We’ll pay you. But I’ll discuss that later,” I said, detesting her, and headed for the attics in search of my father.