The Wheel of Fortune (90 page)

“When I was a child,” said my father, “Oxmoon was a magic place. I grew up there with your mother and we were like the prince and princess in a fairy tale. And then we parted and went away to lead other lives for years, but always I dreamed of coming home and putting the magic back into Oxmoon so that my fairy tale could live again. I shan’t do that now but you’re going to do it instead of me. You’re going to put the magic back into Oxmoon and live the life I should have had.”

I was so enrapt that for once I forgot to be frightened of him. I said simply: “I shall make it the best magic house in the world and I shall grow up to be a hero, just like you, and I shall marry a heroine, just like Mummy, and we’ll live happily ever after, just as you would have done if you hadn’t fallen ill, and then you’ll look down from heaven and see your dream come true and be very, very pleased with me.”

My father could not smile because his facial muscles were paralyzed but he gave a short laugh and my mother said warmly “Darling!” and gathered me to her bosom for one of her generous maternal hugs.

Later I said to her, “Was it really like a fairy tale when you were children? When did Daddy first realize he was in love with you?”

“Oh, that was the climax of the whole fairy tale, darling. There was a great ball at Oxmoon to celebrate my eighteenth birthday and Daddy and I danced to ‘The Blue Danube’ and that was when he fell in love with me. He was two months short of his sixteenth birthday.”

Instantly in my imagination I saw it all: the glittering chandeliers, the glowing flowers, the glamorous guests, the gorgeous sweep of the violins, my ravishing parents plunged into passionate love, the drama, the romance and the sheer fairy-tale splendor of that magic paradise they had shared long ago. I felt then that the ugly reality of my father’s illness could no longer touch me because I could see beyond it to what I unerringly recognized as Beauty and Truth. Beauty and Truth (spelled always in my mind with capital letters) made up in general for life being so absolutely awful. Truth spelled with a capital T was not in this case a synonym for reality; far from it. It stood for the way things ought to be, not the way things really were. My father might be dying and my mother might drink too much and they might continually quarrel with each other, but the Truth lay not in that reality but beyond it; the Truth, which utterly redeemed all the horrors of the present, was that they had fallen passionately in love with each other in the ballroom at Oxmoon while the orchestra played “The Blue Danube,” and that their lives would undoubtedly have continued in this romantic vein if vile reality had not so catastrophically intervened.

However an unpleasant thought cast a temporary shadow over this gilded vision. “But Mum,” I said, “after all that why did you go off and marry someone else?”

“Oh that,” said my mother. “Well, pet, I was in rather a muddle at the time. You see, in those days a girl had to get engaged as soon as possible but Daddy was two years younger than I was so of course he wasn’t old enough to propose. Then Timothy Appleby asked and he was so sweet that I said yes but later I regretted it and got in a panic so it seemed best to elope with Conor.”

“But you did love Daddy all the time?”

“Robert was always very special to me,” said my mother, “and I was always very special to him.”

“And you did have your happy ending after all,” I said satisfied, “when you finally married him.”

My mother smiled faintly but could not speak. Obviously she was too moved by the memory of her fairy-tale romance, just as I was now moved by the thought of my fairy-tale inheritance.

I was particularly thrilled to hear I was to inherit Oxmoon because I had thought it inconceivable that I could ever do so. It was a family myth that Oxmoon had passed from eldest son to eldest son (all mythically named Robert) since the Norman invasion of Gower, but any casual perusal of the family tree revealed that this was far from being the case. Eldest sons had died; younger sons (Geoffrey, Raymond, Piers, Alfred, Arthur, Edward) had periodically inherited; the occasional cousin in the female line had once or twice scooped the pool and graciously changed his name to Godwin to satisfy his childless benefactor. One or two eldest sons had been disinherited, one or two had been lunatics, one or two had disappeared in the Colonies. The truth was that as far as the Godwin family was concerned primogeniture was a guideline but not a strict rule, and my grandfather was under no obligation to leave Oxmoon to me. The general opinion among the servants was that it would go to Uncle John, and when Harry spoke of being a landed gentleman I knew he had every reason to believe that Oxmoon would one day drop neatly into his lap. Quite apart from being the son of the probable heir he was a great favorite with my dotty old grandfather, far more so than I was. Harry used to get tipped five shillings now and then on visits to Oxmoon. I never got more than half a crown.

“You’re quite sure,” I said uncertainly to my mother after she had broken the news of my great expectations, “that Grandfather won’t leave Oxmoon to Uncle John and Harry?”

“Positive, darling. Daddy’s the heir, you see, so he must have the final say in whom the heir’s going to be once he’s dead. That’s only fair and Grandfather knows it.”

“Gosh!” I finally allowed myself to believe in my good fortune. “I say!” I gazed out of the window at a world that had been miraculously transformed. “Gosh!” I said again, overcome with awe at the magnificence of my fate, but then suffered one last pang of anxiety. “But Mum,” I said uneasily, “what does Uncle John think?”

“Your heroic Uncle John,” said my mother, “wants your father to have his way about this. He thinks it would be the done thing.”

“How absolutely ripping!” I said with enthusiasm, and finally abandoned myself to the most ravishing daydreams. I saw myself as grown up, very tall (could I possibly be taller than Cousin Harry?) and miraculously handsome. At my grandfather’s funeral my upper lip would be stiff as a board, and afterwards, in the dining room at Oxmoon before the assembled guests I would walk slowly and majestically to the great carved chair that stood at the head of the table. At that point Uncle John, speaking on behalf of all the family, would beg me to forgive them for their past behavior towards me, and after considering this request I would help Uncle Thomas to rise from his knees (he had of course been groveling at my feet) and graciously pronounce a general pardon before taking my place in my grandfather’s chair.

This vision of the future was so delectable that after my father’s death I said hopefully to my mother, “Do you think Grandfather might die soon?”

“I don’t know, pet,” said my mother. “He’s a bit dotty but physically he’s as fit as a fiddle and might live forever. Don’t start counting your chickens before they’re hatched.”

Counting chickens! Ever since she had told me my fate I had been counting rooms, furniture, paintings,
objets d’art
and every piece of silver that I could remember. In my mind I had even arranged my books in the library. I found myself quite unable to stop dwelling on my great expectations, and once my father died and Oxmoon moved closer to me I dwelled on them more passionately than ever.

My father was cremated in Swansea, and by his own wish there was no religious service, only readings from the works of his favorite authors. Simon showed me these readings afterwards. There was a rather sinister passage from a philosophical work by a Late Latin gentleman called Boethius, a cheerful paragraph from Cicero on death (obviously written when he had felt in the pink of health), an excerpt from Plato’s
Phaedo
which hinted that my father might not have been so much of an atheist as he wished to be, a casual salute to Shakespeare (“O God! that one might read the book of fate …”), Horace’s advice
“Carpe diem”
(to add a cheerful note) and finally a stunning choice of a poem by Emily Brontë, stunning because my father had always appeared to believe English literature had been composed entirely by men, stunning because its strongly mystical streak seemed alien to my father’s personality and stunning simply because the poem itself was stunning. I was only eight years old and too young, despite my literary precocity, to have embarked on the work of the Brontë family, but here in clear, brave simple language was a poem that spoke to me as it must have spoken to my father. “No coward soul is mine,” I read. “No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere: I see Heaven’s glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.”

“That was Emily Brontë’s last poem,” Simon said to me. “Robert couldn’t quite share her faith but he admired her courage in facing death.”

Simon had been very affected by my father’s death, but my mother had arrived home after the funeral in great spirits and got tight on pink gin with Uncle John. Uncle John never got tight but after a pink gin or two he became human. Dr. Warburton, who had been diverted by an emergency call, joined them later and stayed on for an hour or two after Uncle John had left. Apart from Uncle John no one had been closer to my parents during their ordeal than Dr. Warburton. He was a thin energetic bright-eyed man in his mid-forties with a canine look. With only the slightest effort of my vivid imagination I could picture him on all fours, wagging a tail and careering headlong after a fox. He lived a bachelor life in a smart new house that had been built in the grounds of All-Hallows Court, and everyone wondered why he had never remarried, but his housekeeper told the village with relish that he was still in mourning for his young wife who had died at the end of the war.

“Darling Gavin,” said my mother, kissing him warmly as she finally showed him off the premises (my mother was always calling people darling and kissing them warmly), “do let me know how Bobby is and tell me if you think I ought to call.”

For after my father’s death my grandfather had become ill, just as he always did when something upset him, and for some days he had remained isolated, attended only by Dr. Warburton and Mrs. Straker. Mrs. Straker, popularly supposed to be a witch, was reported to be curing him with herbal brews and black magic.

“Champagne and bloody bed more likely,” said my disgusting Uncle Thomas, but Uncle John saw me sitting quietly in the corner with my ears twitching and he told Thomas in no uncertain terms to moderate both his conversation and his language. By this time I was staying at Penhale Manor. Uncle John had insisted that my mother went away for a month’s rest after the ordeal of my father’s last days, and she had decided to go to Ireland with Rory; after my father’s death was announced in the
Times,
her long-lost eldest son, my unknown brother Declan, had written to ask her to visit him.

“Darling Declan!” said my mother shining-eyed, although why she should have wanted to speak of him with affection after the disgraceful way he had treated her I had no idea. Detesting her marriage to my father he had walked out on her long before I was born and had refused to answer any of the letters she had sent to his aunt’s address in Dublin. I knew little about him—my mother had built a wall around her private grief by never mentioning his name—and such facts as I did know I had acquired by eavesdropping when Rory talked of him occasionally to other members of the family.

However now it seemed I was to hear of him
ad nauseam.
I learned that he was twenty-nine years old, had fought for the IRA and was now a respectable member of the parliament in Dublin. He was married. His wife had some unspellable Irish name. There was even a baby six weeks old. My mother, tears in her eyes, rushed off to Ben Evans, the famous store in Swansea, and bought rattles and baby frocks. Rory came down from town with a bottle of champagne to celebrate both her coming reunion with Declan and the arrival of her first grandchild, but although my mother radiantly offered me a little sip from her glass, I declined. I was feeling most put out. I had become so accustomed since Robin’s death to my status as an only child that I had unconsciously formed the opinion that my half-brothers were of no consequence, the product of a marriage undertaken when my mother was too young to know better. Apart from telling me that she had eloped while in a muddle, my mother had never spoken of it; the general opinion in the family was that Conor Kinsella had been an Irish bounder and that her marriage had been a hopeless
mésalliance;
I had always thought it quite irrelevant to me. Yet now I saw how mistaken I had been to assume it was unimportant. Once my father was dead, Conor Kinsella seemed to return to life. Rory, who had an awful reputation and whom my mother had been happy to keep at arm’s length in London, now started behaving very possessively towards her, and to make matters worse my mother loved it. She kept saying how lovely it was to be going to Ireland with him, and when I saw her hugging this redheaded stranger, I suddenly realized that this man was not just a bore who had to be tolerated at Christmas but
my brother.
I felt that my small secure world in which I had been the center of my mother’s attention had slipped alarmingly out of focus, but although I was cross, frightened, baffled and resentful, my mother remained blissfully unaware of my distress.

“Imagine darling Declan being an M.P.!” she exclaimed to Rory. “Except that he’s a T.D., he says, because the Irish don’t have M.P.s, and I must call the Irish Parliament the Doyle, not the Dayle, even though it’s spelled D-A-I-L. How like Conor he is, so proud of being Irish—oh Rory, let’s look at all my old photographs of your father!”

Rory thought this was a wonderful idea. Trailing after them with incredulous honor, I stood by in silence while the excavated photographs revealed a shady-looking individual who boasted sly eyes and a smirk. I found my mother’s inevitable rhapsodies the height of impropriety.

“Well, what’s the matter with you, little Kessikins?” demanded Rory, catching sight of my expression and laughing heartily. “You look as if you’re about to say, ‘For shame, you wicked woman—and my father not yet cold in his grave!’ ”

That remark both pulled my mother to her senses and underlined to me how brainless my half-brother really was. He was supposed to have charm but I could never see it. In my opinion that carrot-topped nonentity with his beer drinker’s paunch had about as much charm as a lump of lard.