The Wheel of Fortune (2 page)

“—and I wonder if I should tell you over the telephone or whether I should wait till I see you—”

“My God, it’s not Mama, is it?”

“What? Oh no, she’s fine, in capital form, sent you her love and so on—”

“Then what is it? What’s happened?”

“Well, it’s about Ginevra. She—hullo? Robert?”

“Yes, I’m still here. Go on.”

“What?”

“
What’s the news about Ginette
?”

“Well, there’s no need to shout, Robert! I may be on the wrong side of fifty now but I’m not deaf!”

“God Almighty, I swear I shall go mad in a moment. My dear Papa, could you kindly tell me with as much speed as possible—”

“It’s Ginevra’s husband. He’s dead, Robert. She’s coming home.”

II

IN MY DREAMS
I
always said to her, “Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood. Take me back to Oxmoon and make it live again.”

How seductive indeed were the memories of my youth, and the older I grew the more alluring they became to me until they assumed the gilded quality of myth. If romance is the opiate of the dissatisfied, then surely nostalgia is the opiate of the disillusioned, for those who see all their dreams come true and find themselves living in a nightmare. The present may be ungovernable, crammed with questions that have no answers, and the future may be unimaginable, obscured by doubt and bewilderment, but the past thrives with increasing clarity, not dead at all but running parallel to the present and often seeming, in my memory, more real than the reality of my daily life in 1913.

At the beginning of my life there were my parents, who were hardly more than children themselves, and at Oxmoon with my parents was this grubby little girl who talked to me, pinched me, played with me, slapped me, helped me to walk and generally made herself useful. She was somewhat stout and vain as a peacock; she was always standing on tiptoe to examine her ringlets in the looking glass. For the first few years of my life I found her full name impossible to pronounce, but she was gracious and permitted me to use an abbreviation, a favor that was never granted to anyone else.

I seem always to have known she was not my sister. “You’re not my sister, are you?” I said to her once, just to make sure, and she exclaimed, “Heavens, no—what an idea!” and was most offended. She knew I disliked sisters. Later she explained to me, “I’m Bobby’s cousin,” although when I asked her how that could be possible when my father was so much older than she was, she snapped, “Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies,” which meant she had no idea.

I thought that if this story was true she should call my father “Cousin Bobby” but in truth my father, still resurrecting his bankrupt estate from the grave, hardly had the time to concern himself with a minor detail of family etiquette. Later when my mother had recovered from the nightmare of her first years at Oxmoon she became more strict about what she called “doing the done thing,” but even then Ginette usually forgot to address her guardian as “Cousin” so the exact nature of the relationship between us was never stressed.

Eventually I discovered that her father and my grandfather had been half-brothers; her father, the child of a second marriage, had been the younger by twenty years, a circumstance that meant he belonged more to the generation of his nephew, my father, than to the generation of his half-brother, my grandfather. He had spent his early childhood at Oxmoon and in later life long after he had removed to the English Midlands, he and my father had remained good friends. My father had even borrowed money from him when the reconstruction of the Oxmoon estate was begun, so presumably the ties of affection which united them had remained strong; that those ties survived unimpaired despite the borrowing of money was demonstrated when my great-uncle drew up a will in which he named my father the guardian of the infant Ginevra. Within a month he had died of typhoid, and his young widow, who must have been a tiresome creature, went into a decline and eventually managed to starve herself to death on the nearest picturesque chaise longue.

I was nine months old when Ginette came to live with us, and Oxmoon was barely habitable at the time. My parents pretended to occupy the entire house but in fact lived in three rooms on the ground floor. However despite my parents’ straitened circumstances it never crossed their minds that they might make some other provision for Ginette and they always treated her as if she were their daughter. No doubt my father’s affection for her father made any other course of action unthinkable to him, while my mother too would have felt bound by an absolute moral duty.

“Poor little me!” said Ginette later when she reflected on her predicament. “But never mind, all the best heroines are beautiful orphans, abandoned to their fate, and the one thing that’s certain about my situation is that I’m going to be a heroine when I grow up.”

“Can I be a hero?”

“Well, I suppose you can try. But you’ll have to try very hard.”

I can remember that moment clearly. My parents had by that time reoccupied the whole house, but we had left the nurseries to escape from the smell of boiled milk and wet nappies and were heading for the kitchen garden to rifle the strawberry beds. Ginette wore a white pinafore with an egg stain on it, and there were holes in both her stockings. She must have been about eight years old.

“I don’t think you’re at all likely to be a heroine,” I said, aggrieved by her pessimism on the subject of my heroic potential.

“Why, what impertinence! Here I am, being constantly noble by devoting all my time to you even though you’re two years younger and a boy and do nothing but drive me wild! The truth is that if I wasn’t a heroine I wouldn’t do it. I think I’m wonderful.”

We gorged ourselves on the strawberries in silence, but eventually I said, “Heroes have to marry heroines, don’t they.”

“Of course. But actually I don’t believe I’ll marry anyone. Think of all the nasty smelly babies one would have to have!”

We shuddered.

“Friendship’s best,” I said, “and friendship’s forever because no baby can come along to spoil it.” And when I grabbed her hand she laughed and we ran off down the path together to our secret camp in the woods.

We had decided while my sister Celia was an infant that babies were undesirable. Unfortunately in our family a new baby arrived every eighteen months but to our relief they all, apart from Celia, failed to survive. Charlotte lived a year but succumbed to measles. William breathed his last within a week of his birth and Pamela faded away at the age of six months. Only Celia flourished like a weed, whining around our ankles and trying to follow us everywhere, but I took no notice of her. I was the male firstborn and I came first. That was a fact of nursery life, as immutable as a law of nature.

“First is best, isn’t it?” I said to my father as we walked hand in hand through the woods past the ruined Norman tower, and he smiled as he answered, “Sometimes!”—which, as I knew very well at the age of eight, meant. “Yes, always.”

“First is best, isn’t it?” I said to my mother in the housekeeper’s room after my eighth birthday when she decided to increase my pocket money by a ha’penny a week. In the affable atmosphere generated by this gesture I had decided the time was ripe to seek reaffirmation of my privileged status.

“What, dear?”

“I said first is best, isn’t it?”

“Well, that depends,” said my mother. “I was the second in my family and I always thought
I
was the best—but then my father spoiled me abominably and gave me ideas quite above my station. In fact I think that for a time I was a very horrid little girl indeed.”

That was when I first realized the most disconcerting difference between my parents: my father told me what I wanted to hear and my mother told me what she felt I ought to hear. Resentment simmered. I sulked. When Lion was born a month later I knew straight away that I was outraged.

I waited for him to die but soon I realized that this was not the kind of baby who would oblige me by fading away into the churchyard at Penhale. I tried to ignore him but found he was not the kind of baby, like Celia, who could be ignored. He was huge and imperious. He roared for everyone’s attention and got it. My mother began in my opinion to behave very foolishly indeed. I felt more outraged than ever.

“Robert dearest,” said my mother after overhearing my declaration to Olwen the nursemaid that I had no intention of attending the christening, “I think it’s time you and I had a little talk together.”

My mother was famous for her “little talks.” Her little talks with servants were conducted in the housekeeper’s room and her little talks with children were conducted upstairs in the large bedroom that belonged by tradition to the master and mistress of the house. My mother had a table there where she did her sewing, but when she had an arduous interview to conduct she always sat at her dressing table and pretended to busy herself with rearranging the pots, jars and boxes lined up below the triple looking glass. My mother seldom glanced directly at her victims while she spoke, but watched them constantly in the cunningly angled reflections.

“Now, Robert dearest,” she said, emptying a jar of pins and beginning to stick them with mathematical precision into a new pincushion, “I know quite well you think of yourself as a little prince in a fairy tale, but because I love you and want the best for you”—a quick glance in the mirror—“I think it’s time someone told you a few home truths. The first truth is that you’re not a prince, and the second truth,” said my mother, turning to look at me directly, “is that this is no fairy tale, Robert.”

She paused to let me digest this. I contented myself with assuming my most mutinous expression but I took care to remain silent.

“I thought life was a fairy tale once,” said my mother, resuming her transformation of the pincushion. “I thought that until I was sixteen and came to Oxmoon—and then, when I found myself face to face with what really went on in the world, I felt angry with my parents for failing to prepare me for it. However,” said my mother, glancing into the far mirror, “now is hardly the time for me to talk to you about the ordeal your father and I endured at the hands of his mother and Mr. Bryn-Davies. You’re too young. Suffice it to say that the world is a very wicked place and that one has to be very resolute to lead a decent orderly life—and you do want to lead a decent orderly life, don’t you, Robert? People who have no self-discipline, who are perpetual slaves to all their weaknesses, are inevitably very unhappy indeed. In fact I would go so far as to say,” said my mother, pinning away busily, “that tragedy inevitably lies waiting for Those Who Fail to Draw the Line.”

“Yes, Mama.” It took a great deal to cow me but I was cowed—not by this familiar reference to drawing the moral line but by the mention of the Great Unmentionable, my grandmother and Mr. Bryn-Davies. Even though I was only eight years old I knew that Oxmoon had not always been a pastoral paradise where little children wandered happily around the kitchen garden and feasted at the strawberry beds.

“So we must always reject morally unacceptable behavior,” said my mother, tipping the rest of the pins from the jar and aligning them between two scent bottles, “and one kind of behavior that is morally unacceptable, Robert, is jealousy. Jealousy is a very wicked emotion. It destroys people. And I won’t have it, not in this house—because
here I have my standards,
” said my mother, facing me again, “
and here I Draw the Line
.”

I opened my mouth to say, “I’m not jealous!” but no words came out. I stared down at my shoes.

“There, there!” said my mother kindly, seeing I had fully absorbed her homily. “I know you’re a good intelligent boy and I now have every confidence that you’ll behave well towards Lionel—and towards Celia—in the future.”

I retired in a rage. When I found my father I said, “Mama’s been very rude to me, and if you please, sir, I’d be obliged if you’d tell her not to be so horrid in future.” But my father said abruptly, “I won’t hear one word against your mother. Pull yourself together and stop behaving like a spoiled child.”

I ran away and hid in a basket in the wet laundry. I realized that my father, who normally never said a cross word to me, had been suborned into sternness by my mother, while my mother, normally affectionate enough, had been rendered hostile by her irrational desire to place the infant on an equal footing with me. I felt I was being subjected to a monstrous injustice. Vengeance should be mine; I decided to repay.

Leaving the wet laundry, I prowled around the house to the terrace and found two of the estate laborers installing a new pane of glass in the dining-room window. The previous pane had been cracked when a sea gull had flown into it in an indecent haste to return to the coast which lay a mile away beyond Rhossili Downs. When the laborers had retired I remained, eying the new pane meditatively. Then I extracted a croquet ball from the summerhouse, returned to the terrace and took a quick look around. No one appeared to be in sight but unfortunately the new pane was reflecting the light so that I could not see the maid who was setting the table in the room beyond. When the croquet ball crashed through the window she dropped six plates and ran screaming to my mother.

My mother went to my father and my father lost his temper. This was a great shock to me because I had not realized he had a temper to lose. Then he beat me. That was an even greater shock because he had never laid a finger on me before; he always said he had a horror of violence. Finally he summoned my mother and when he told her it was high time I was sent away to school, my mother agreed with him.

I cried. I said they wanted to get rid of me so that Lion could be first and best. I told them they were making a very big mistake and that they would both live to regret it.

“What rubbish!” said my father, still in a towering rage, but my mother, whom I had thought so implacable, knelt beside me and said, “There, there! You always knew you’d be going off to Briarwood when you were eight—you can’t pretend now that you’re being sent away to make room for Lion!”