The Wheel of Fortune (8 page)

“It must be exactly as you wish, Papa,” I said. “If you want to talk then I’m willing to listen, but you shouldn’t let Mama dragoon you into a course of action which at heart you’ve no wish to pursue.”

“Your mother thinks you could be a comfort to me,” said my father. “I feel so tormented sometimes by my memories.”

We were strolling together across the heather to the summit of Rhossili Downs. It was a clouded winter day not conducive to walking, but after the ordeal of my grandmother’s funeral we had both felt in need of fresh air. I was twenty-eight but considered myself worldly enough to look older; my father was forty-eight but considered himself lucky enough to look younger; we had reached the stage when we were occasionally mistaken for brothers.

“Yes, I must tell you,” said my father. “I must.”

We paced on across the heather in silence. I waited, but when nothing happened I automatically fell into my professional role of playing midwife to the truth.

“What were they like?” I said, throwing him a bland question to help him along.

“What were they like?” repeated my father as if I had astonished him. “Oh, they were charming, all of them—my mother, my father, Bryn-Davies … Yes, they were all the most charming and delightful people.” He stopped to stare at the skyline and as I watched the color fade from his face he said in a low voice, “That was the horror, of course. It wasn’t like a melodrama when you can recognize the villains as soon as they step on the stage. It wasn’t like that at all.”

“They were just three ordinary people?”

“Yes, they were just three ordinary people,” said my father, “who failed to draw the line.”

I suppressed a sigh at this fresh evidence of my mother’s middle-class Victorian influence over him. It was only the middle classes—and in particular the
nouveaux-riches
middle classes—who made a professional occupation of doing the done thing and drawing moral lines. Anyone of any genuine breeding did the done thing without thinking twice about it and left drawing lines to clergymen who were trained as moral draftsmen.

“It was all a tragedy,” my father was saying. “My poor mother, she was so beautiful. My father wasn’t very kind to her.”

“Because he was a drunkard?”

“He was the most splendid fellow,” said my father exactly as if I had never spoken, “and so fond of children. I was the apple of his eye. Bryn-Davies was very civil to me too. Interesting chap, Bryn-Davies. Strong personality. Just calling him a sheep farmer gives no clear impression of him.”

“But surely,” I said, deciding to risk a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness, “you must have resented Bryn-Davies when he took over Oxmoon after your father died of drink. Surely it became an outrage when he lived openly with your mother and kept you from your inheritance.”

“It was all a tragedy,” repeated my father. “A tragedy.”

I gave up. We walked on across the Downs.

“And afterwards,” said my father, “after Bryn-Davies had had his little accident with the tide tables and drowned on the Shipway, it was all so difficult with my mother but Margaret was wonderful, such a tower of strength, and she found out all about the Home of the Assumption where the nuns were so kind to the insane. Sometimes I wondered if my mother should come home more often but Margaret said no, only at Christmas. Margaret drew the line and of course she was right—because terrible things happen,” said my father, his face bleached, his lips bloodless, his eyes seeing scenes I could not begin to imagine, “when people fail to draw the line.”

I said nothing. The silence that followed lasted some time, but at last he thanked me for listening so patiently and said he was so glad he had talked to me.

But as he and I both knew perfectly well, he had still told me nothing whatsoever.

II

When I related this incident to Ginette in my Christmas letter she wrote in reply:
Poor Bobby, but what defeats me is why he and Margaret make this big mystery out of the past when it’s quite obvious to anyone of our sophistication, my dear, what was going on: the drunken husband developed a penchant for beating the wife, the wife dived into a grand passion in sheer self-defense and the lover, being both naughty
and
greedy, grabbed not only the wife but all the money he could lay his hands on when the husband obligingly died of liver failure. Heavens, such sordid goings-on happen all the time everywhere
—
and as always in such frightfulness, the people who suffer most are the poor innocent children. Really, it’s a wonder some of them survive at all and if they do survive they’re lucky if they’re not scarred for life by their experiences!

And it was then, as I read this passage in her letter, that it first occurred to me to suspect that my father was not a flawless hero but a deeply damaged man.

III

I WAS DAMAGED MYSELF
although at that time I did not admit it. I had enjoyed so much worldly success that the prospect of private failure was inconceivable; it never even crossed my mind that anything could be amiss.

It would be immodest for me to record my achievements at Harrow so I need only say that it was taken for granted that I would achieve a first when I went up to Oxford to read Greats. This made life a little dull; success loses its power to charm if insufficient effort is involved in its acquisition and after I had demonstrated to my contemporaries, my tutors and the various females of my acquaintance that whatever I saw I conquered, I acknowledged my boredom by looking around for a new challenge that would make life more amusing. I had just finished my second year at Balliol when a friend invited me to stay with him in Scotland and for the first time in my life I saw the mountains.

There are plenty of mountains in Wales, but the spectacular ones are in the north, and since my parents never took holidays I knew little of Wales beyond the Gower Peninsula and little of England beyond Central London, Oxford and Harrow. There are no mountains in Gower, only the smooth rolling humps of the Downs, and although I had long been attracted to the spectacular cliffs by the sea, these were so dangerous that my father had always forbidden me to climb them.

However I was now presented with a challenge that no one had forbidden me to accept, and I knew I had to climb those mountains. I had to get to the top. I had to win. I was enslaved.

During the next few months I drove my parents to despair, nearly ruined my career at Oxford and almost killed myself. That was when I first realized something had gone wrong with my life; it occurred to me that when my desire to win had been channeled into academic excellence the compulsion had formed a benign growth on my personality, but when that desire had been channeled into mountaineering it had formed a cancer. I did recover but not before the cancer had been cut out of my life. I gave up mountaineering.

“I shall never come back here,” I said to the doctor who attended me in the hospital at Fort William when I lay recuperating from the accident that had killed my three best friends. “I shall never go climbing again.”

“They all say that,” said the doctor, “and they all come back in the end.”

But I was certain I could stay away; there was a void in my life but I thought I could see how to fill it. I had to fight the opponent I had discovered on the mountains, the one opponent who consistently mesmerized me. It was Death. Death had won my three friends; Death had almost won me. But now I was the one who was going to win—and I was going to win by outwitting Death over and over again.

I then had to decide on the arena best suited for my battles. I toyed with the idea of becoming a doctor but decided it would involve me in the study of too many subjects which I found tedious. I was interested in death, not disease. Then I considered the law, and the law, I saw at once, had considerable advantages. It not only blended with my classical education but it was a profession that could ease my way into public life, and since I knew my father dreamed that I might enter Parliament I thought I could see how both our ambitions might be satisfied.

As the eldest son I was heir to Oxmoon but my father’s youth and the likelihood of him living until I myself was far advanced in middle age made it imperative that I had some occupation while I waited for my inheritance. I also had a very natural desire to be financially independent, and no one denied there was money at the bar for a young man who was determined to reach the summit of the profession.

I won my double first at Oxford in Greats and Law and was called to the bar of the Middle Temple in 1906. To my family I pretended it was sheer chance that I became involved with criminal law; I did not disclose how I had engineered a meeting with a famous K.C. and more or less hypnotized him into engaging me as his “devil”; I did not disclose that I had selected him as my master because a number of his clients ran the risk, in the formal words of the death sentence, of being hanged by the neck until they were dead. While I deviled for him I met the important solicitors and soon I was acquiring a few briefs of my own. Unlike many barristers I did not have to endure briefless years at the bar. I grabbed every opportunity I could and when there was no opportunity I created one. My career began to gather in momentum.

Of course I said it was pure coincidence that I ended up defending murderers who had no hope of acquittal, but the truth was I deliberately sought out the hopeless cases because there was more pleasure in winning a hard victory over Death than an easy one. I pretended to be nonchalant, claiming murder trials were somewhat tedious, but in my heart I loved every minute I spent fighting in court. I loved the excitement and the drama and the perpetual shadow of the gallows; I loved the jousts with Death; I loved the victory of saving people who would have died but for my skill. To compete with Death, as I had discovered on the mountains, was to know one was alive.

It made no difference that sometimes, inevitably, Death won. Some of my clients died on the gallows just as my three friends had died on the mountain, but that only made the next battle fiercer and enhanced my satisfaction when the lucky clients were saved.

My work became an obsession. Although I tried to deny it to myself I was suffering from cancer of the personality again, and gradually I became aware of the familiar symptoms appearing: the fanatical dedication, the withdrawal from other pursuits, the loss of interest in carnal pleasure, the isolation of the soul. I even found myself postponing my entry into politics. Westminster was not the Old Bailey. There was no shadow of the gallows there.

Then one day I saved a client whom I loathed and believed to be guilty, and suddenly I not only asked myself what I was doing but saw the answer all too clearly: I was wasting my life in order to satisfy obsessions I could not master. The cancer was upon me again and I knew I had to cut it out to survive.

That was when I discovered that some cancers spread so deep that no surgery can remove them. My cancer now had such a hold on me that I did not see how I could remove it and retain my sanity; I felt as if I were on the edge of some mental breakdown, but as I struggled to imagine a life in which winning no longer mattered I saw, far away and unattainable, across the abyss of the past and beyond the walls of the present which imprisoned me, the world where I knew I could be at peace. I saw the road to Oxmoon, the lost Oxmoon of my childhood, and Ginette was with me once more in her grubby pinafore as we ate strawberries together in the kitchen garden. I saw a world where winning and losing had no power to drive me because with Ginette’s hand in mine I was always content, and when I saw that world I knew that she alone could cure my cancer because she alone could take me back to Oxmoon and resurrect that lost paradise of my dreams.

But Ginette still wrote regularly of married bliss with Conor Kinsella. Fifteen years after we had danced to “The Blue Danube” she was still living happily ever after in New York, and although time and again I asked myself how I could win her back I knew there was nothing I could do. I was powerless, and as I acknowledged my absolute failure to change my life I felt I must surely be condemned to live unhappily ever after in London, a man rich, famous and successful—yet losing, lost and alone.

IV

I AWOKE VERY SUDDENLY
in the middle of the night, and my first conscious thought was: She’s coming home.

Using one of Cicero’s favorite metaphors I told myself that the Wheel of Fortune of Conor Kinsella had finally spun him into extinction and now my own Wheel of Fortune was spinning me back into life.

I lit the gas and immediately my cold austere masculine bedroom was bathed in a warm sensuous glow. I drew aside the curtain. Below me the formal lawns below King’s Bench Walk were bathed in a powerful white moonlight and far away beyond the Embankment the river glittered beneath the stars. I stood there, transfixed by this vision of an erotic enchanted London, and as I listened to the night I heard the bells of St. Clement Dane’s chime a distant half-hour.

Letting the curtain fall I turned abruptly from the window and decided to take a long cool rational look at the immediate future. Tomorrow—which was in fact today—I would go down to Oxmoon for a protracted weekend. On the following day Ginette would arrive in Swansea on the Irish steamer for an indefinite stay in the Gower Peninsula. We would meet, possibly enjoy one or two quiet passionless talks on our own and then part; I had another important case pending and it was necessary for me to return to London to prepare for it. During the next twelve months further meetings would doubtless occur and, all being well, our platonic relationship would be comfortably reestablished. After that I would have to wait and see what my prospects were, but the one strikingly obvious aspect of the situation was that I could not now descend upon Oxmoon like some overheated knight of medieval legend, fling myself at the feet of the lady I loved and beg her to marry me immediately. I could think of nothing that would irritate Ginette more, particularly a bereaved Ginette who had lost her husband in unexplained but apparently tragic circumstances.