The Wheel of Fortune (56 page)

“So do I,” said Edmund.

I turned to him. “You’ll come and stay with me at the Manor, of course.”

“Thank you. Yes, I couldn’t possibly condone such an insult to Mama’s memory by staying here.”

“Thomas,” I said, “you must live with me too. Papa’s not fit to look after you anymore.”

Thomas stared at me. His face had a white pinched expression. He looked very young and very frightened.

“There, there, Thomas,” said my father, putting his arm around him again. “It’s all right. They can’t take you away from me. Don’t let them upset you.”

“I find it hard to believe, sir,” said Robert, “that you—a man who’s always taken such care in the upbringing of his sons—can be blind to the effect of your conduct on Thomas.”

“Don’t talk such bloody rubbish,” said my father. “What do you know about bringing up children? A fine mess you made of those stepsons of yours!”

“And a fine mess you’ll make of Thomas!” I shouted.

“Be quiet!” my father shouted back. “Thomas has just lost his mother, but he’s not going to lose his father too! Children need love, not damned preaching! Now get out, the whole bloody lot of you, and leave me and Thomas alone!”

“That’s the first sensible suggestion you’ve made for some time,” said Robert, “and I’m sure we’ll all be delighted to oblige you, but before we go I’d just like to say this: I shan’t cut myself off from you because frankly I don’t think you’re fit to struggle on with only the support of Thomas and Mrs. Straker, but you should understand that I find your conduct very hard to condone and I certainly deplore the way you’ve deepened our bereavement by making a painful situation well-nigh intolerable. John—Edmund—”

We lifted the wheelchair from the floor of the summerhouse and carried it down the step to the lawn. Edmund began to push the chair away, but I found I had to make one last attempt to talk to Thomas.

“If you change your mind,” I said to him, “don’t forget you can always have a bed at the Manor.”

“Go away!” yelled Thomas, his face streaked with tears. “I’m staying with my father!”

Glendower barked as if to underline the statement, and as my father exclaimed, “Damn you, leave the boy alone!” something snapped inside me.

“Your father’s a filthy disgusting old man!” I shouted to Thomas. “And the sooner you realize that the better!”

My rage carried me all the way across the lawn in my brothers’ wake, but by the time I reached the house I was gripped by my next all-consuming problem: I was wondering how on earth I was going to break the news to Blanche.

4

I

I
TOLD BLANCHE AS
soon as I returned to Penhale Manor. We were in the long drawing room which with the dining room next door had once formed the old medieval hall; it faced south over what had once been a moat and was now a rose garden. All the mullioned windows were open, and as I stood with Blanche beside her grand piano I could feel the warmth of the late-afternoon sun and hear the buzzing of the bees in the shrubs that clustered against the ancient stone walls of the house. Blanche had been arranging some white roses in one of the French crystal vases that had been given to us as a wedding present. No matter what time of year it was the drawing room never seemed to be without flowers.

“I hardly know how to tell you this,” I said. “If there was any way of keeping it from you I would, but unfortunately the scandal will soon be notorious.”

“Scandal?” said Blanche, pausing with a white rose in her hands. Her dark eyes, which slanted above her high cheekbones, were disturbed but trustful as she waited for me to continue. Naturally she knew that any incipient scandal could not possibly relate to me.

Rigid with embarrassment I told her that my father was planning to keep Mrs. Straker at Oxmoon. I could not tell her he proposed to sleep with his mistress on the night of his wife’s funeral. I was too ashamed, too angry. As it was I had a hard time keeping my voice unemotional.

“… and so we shan’t be calling at Oxmoon once that woman’s there. I refuse to condone such immorality.”

“Of course,” said Blanche. She fell silent, her face grave as she considered the situation. She was still holding the white rose. “How very sad it is,” she said at last, and added more to herself than to me: “Your poor father.”

I was shocked. “I really think sympathy’s uncalled for, Blanche!”

“But obviously he’s unhinged by your mother’s death.”

“That’s no excuse! He has an absolute moral duty to his family not to degrade himself in this fashion!”

“Oh, I agree the immorality’s dreadful,” said Blanche rapidly as if she feared she had given me offense. “You mustn’t think I’m arguing with you, darling. But my dear Mama used to say that it was easy to condemn sin but hard to be compassionate—to be Christian. I’d like to think I’d always try to be compassionate, even if the fault was very hard to understand.”

“Well, no understanding’s possible in this case,” I said, “and I’ve used up all my compassion.” But I kissed her to show how much I admired her goodness, and dropping her white rose on the top of the piano, she put her arms around me comfortingly.

“You look so tired, John—I do wish you’d rest.”

“No, I’m too upset. I’m going for a walk.”

“If there’s anything I can do—”

“No, there’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing.” And before I could break down and distress her with every detail of the sordid scene in the summerhouse I left her, a slender oddly forlorn figure beside her bowl of perfect roses.

II

I walked down the drive to the gates. The Manor stood on the edge of Penhale village, less than a quarter of a mile from the church but more than a mile from Oxmoon, which lay farther south along the road to Rhossili.

I headed into the village. It was a typical settlement of the Gower Englishry, complete with cottages grouped in traditional English fashion around a green, but it had a tousled casual air which an English visitor would have found alien. There was the usual village shop, which also served as the post office, and beyond the green lay the forge which still refused to cater for the motorcar. The church had been built on the orders of the two medieval warlords, Gilbert de Bracy and Humphrey de Mohun, and was resolutely Norman in design; the square tower was not a common feature among the churches of Gower. In contrast the interior was a monument to the excruciating taste of the Victorian de Bracys who had conducted renovations while my grandfather Robert Godwin the Drunkard had been too preoccupied with his troubles to care what was going on. The church had caused endless rows between the two families in previous centuries, for although the de Bracys had treated it as an extension of Penhale Manor, the living of the parish had been in Godwin hands. The poor vicars must have had a hard time surviving in the cross fire.

I hesitated in the shadow of the lych-gate. Then I walked around the tower, sat down on an iron bench and stared at the dying flowers on my mother’s grave.

I wanted to forget my father by grieving for my mother, but again conventional grief eluded me, and rising to my feet in an agony of restlessness I began to walk in a clockwise direction around the Godwin tombstones. Then I turned and completed a circle anticlockwise. After that I realized I was beside myself not with grief but with a chaotic mess of emotion which I could not begin to subjugate, so I sat down again, put my head in my hands and gave way to uncontrolled despair; my father had failed to draw the line and beyond that line, as I knew so well, lay misery, madness and death.

I saw him following inexorably in my grandmother’s footsteps, and at once I found myself wondering if some hereditary weakness could exist which might condemn a man to moral degradation against his will and his better judgment. That was a terrifying thought. I recalled my own sexuality and shuddered. At least I had it in tight control. But perhaps my father too had had his sexuality in control at the age of twenty-nine.

I rubbed my hand across my eyes as if I could wipe out my vision of intolerable possibilities, and suddenly I missed my mother. I wanted to hear her say, “Here I have my standards—and here I draw the line.” But my mother’s voice had been silenced, and although I was repeating her words the magic had gone from the incantation which warded off all evil, and now no one was listening to them.

I moved to the grave, stooped over the wreath of white roses which Blanche had made and pulled out the card which I myself had written.
In loving and devoted memory,
I read,
John, Blanche, Marian and Harry.
I spoke the words “loving and devoted” aloud, and at last I recognized an emotion that resembled conventional grief. Slipping the card into my breast pocket, I immediately felt better. I was now thinking not of whether my mother had loved me but of how much I had loved her for continually keeping hell at bay. I had been loving and devoted, just as the card had said. That was real, that was true. Then I remembered at last how my mother had embraced me on the night of her death and said, “Dear John, how good and kind you really are,” and I knew those words had been spoken from the heart. “To think that
you
should be the one who loves me enough to say that,” she had said, overcome with remorse for her past omissions when I had praised her, and suddenly I felt that whatever had been wrong had been put right. I too had spoken from the heart, and after years of dutiful formality we had at the end achieved an honest conversation during which love had undoubtedly been present.

I sank down on the bench again, shed a tear, stole a furtive glance around the churchyard to make sure I was unobserved and then cried for thirty shameful seconds. That cured me. I felt I had arranged my memory of my mother into an acceptable pattern which could be fitted into the script of my life; I felt I could now be, without difficulty, the devoted son of a loving mother.

That night I was so exhausted that I thought I would sleep as soon as my head touched the pillow, but I was wrong. Obsessed by the thought of my father sleeping with his mistress on the night of his wife’s funeral, I tossed and turned in misery until dawn.

III

“I saw Mrs. Morgan today,” said Blanche a week later.

“Oh, yes?” I said. I had just had a row with Edmund and was feeling distracted. “Which Mrs. Morgan?” Morgan is a very commonly encountered name in Wales.

“Mrs. Meredith’s sister. I asked her if Rhiannon would like to play here again, but unfortunately they’re all returning to Cardiff. It seems Mr. Morgan has returned from the sea and secured new accommodation for them.”

“Oh yes?” I said again. “Well, I daresay that’s for the best—we don’t really want Marian becoming too friendly with a working-class child, do we. Darling, listen, I’ve just had the most appalling row with Edmund …”

In the week that had elapsed since my mother’s funeral Mrs. Straker had been installed as housekeeper directly after the departure from Oxmoon of Aunt Ethel and her tribe. The entire parish of Penhale was now throbbing with a prurient delight, lightly masked as scandalized horror, and I was aware of the villagers observing me compassionately as if I were suffering from some monstrous affliction. From Llangennith and Llanmadoc in the north to Porteynon and Penrice in the south, from Rhossili in the west to Swansea in the east, the gossip was reverberating through Gower, and I was just telling myself that matters could hardly be worse when Edmund, who had been staying at Penhale Manor, announced his intention to return to Oxmoon to condone my father’s conduct.

Edmund’s argument—which was Robert’s; Edmund was incapable of developing such a closely reasoned approach—was that if we were all to behave as if everything were aboveboard the gossiping tongues would at least be handicapped, if not silenced.

“That may be true,” I said, “but I refuse to compromise my moral principles by condoning Papa’s conduct.”

“Oh, don’t be so bloody pigheaded, John! Why don’t you be sensible and give in for the sake of all concerned?”

“I might have known you’d take the line of least resistance!”

“I beg your pardon,” said Edmund, “but it wasn’t I who stayed safely in London throughout the war.”

We did not speak again before he returned to Oxmoon, but when I next called on Robert he was very severe and said I had made Edmund utterly miserable.

“Well, what the devil does he think he’s made me?”

Further protracted argument followed about the, situation at Oxmoon.

“Intellectually what you say is right, Robert. But morally you’re dead wrong, and I’m sticking to my principles. I draw the line.”

“Well, I’m all for drawing lines,” said Robert. “God knows nothing would be more boring than a world of unbridled excess where nobody bothered to draw any lines at all—sin would quite lose its power to charm. But has it never occurred to you that you might be drawing your lines in the wrong places?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!”

“You’re the one who’s being ridiculous, drawing this brutal line between yourself and Edmund, who’s actually showing great courage in a very difficult situation.”

I was too guilty when I remembered the war to hold out for long against a reconciliation with Edmund, and on the following Sunday after church I offered him the olive branch of peace. My father had not returned to the church since my mother’s funeral but had asked Edmund to take Thomas to Sunday Matins.

Edmund was pathetically pleased by my suggestion that we should end the estrangement. “If you knew how much I’ve regretted that bloody awful remark about—”

“Quite,” I said, “but let’s forget it. Least said soonest mended and all that rot.”

The next night he came to dine at Penhale Manor, and after Blanche had left us alone with our port I asked him how he was getting on at Oxmoon.

“Well,” said Edmund, welcoming the opportunity to confide and lowering his voice cozily, “it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. The best part was that Papa was so pleased when I come back—honestly, I don’t know how we each managed to maintain a stiff upper lip—”

“Spare me the sentimental drivel about how you and he almost sobbed in each other’s arms. What about Straker?”