The Wheel of Fortune (73 page)

More terrible vistas opened up into the future. As Nanny became scarlet in the face with startling rapidity, I dredged up the dregs of my strength and once more prepared for battle.

IX

“What beats me,” said Edmund that evening at Brooks’s, “is how you can do this to your children—and I don’t just mean Harry and Marian, although God knows how they’ll turn out if you live openly with your working-class mistress. What about Constance’s child? How are you going to face it in future when you walked out on it before it was born? No, I’m sorry but I think this decision of yours is absolutely disgusting and your behavior makes me sick.”

“Edmund—”

“How could you be such a fool? I mean, I’m a jolly broad-minded chap, and God knows if I had your looks I’d be rolling in the hay with everything in sight, but at least even
I’d
have the brains to keep that sort of woman in the hay where she belongs. Why the devil can’t you just keep her quietly somewhere and visit her now and then like any other decent civilized fellow?”

“Edmund, I don’t want to quarrel. I know that in the circumstances this couldn’t be more awkward for you, but please try and accept that there’s nothing else I can do.”

“No, I bloody well can’t accept it! Can’t you at least stay with poor Constance until after the baby’s born?”

“It would be pointless. What sort of an atmosphere do you think there’d be if I stayed on now? It would be unendurable for us both, you must see that!”

“Well, don’t expect me to stay on speaking terms with you. I’ve got my own wife to think about, and I don’t want her to be more upset than she is already.”

“I understand. But I hope later you’ll feel differently.”

“Good God, you don’t think Teddy or I would ever receive that woman, do you?”

“I certainly hope that when she’s my wife—”

“She’ll never be your wife, John! I don’t know why you keep behaving as if Constance doesn’t mean what she says about a divorce!”

“She means it at the moment. But she’s bound to change her mind.”

“Don’t you believe it! Hell hath no fury and all that. She’ll hang on. And meanwhile you’ll be in the biggest possible mess. Christ, how can you conceivably explain to those two children that you plan to live in sin with a woman who’s barely fit to be their nursemaid?”

“That needn’t concern you,” I said, and walked out on him without another word.

X

“I told Papa,” said Robert when I telephoned him later.

“What was the reaction?”

“Unmitigated horror. You’d better come down here first thing tomorrow morning, John.”

“I can’t! The children are safe with Daphne but I’ve got appointments with accountants and lawyers and bank managers—”

“They can wait. Papa can’t. I mean that, John. I can’t say any more on the telephone, but get that train tomorrow because I’ve got to talk to you without delay.”

XI

The next morning I caught the earliest train to South Wales, and some hours later I was traveling around the great curve of Swansea Bay. The industrial approaches to the city seemed as grotesque as ever, but a stillness had fallen since the war on that ravaged landscape and the numbness of despair was paralyzing its people. Mining was a depressed industry. Brave buoyant Welsh Swansea, bunched on its hills above the sea, was limp with the dole queues and sodden with the misery of the unemployed.

I stepped off the train in my Savile Row suit, a visitor from a world those unemployed millions would never know, and found my caretaker waiting, his cap respectfully in his hand as if to exacerbate my guilt that I should be privileged. To negate it I reminded myself of the world I was rejecting, and as we drove beyond the outskirts of the city I thought of all the moneyed people I knew, dancing and drinking themselves to distraction to distance themselves from the war and its aftermath—and then it seemed to me that their lives were so far removed from reality that I wondered how I could ever have shared their futile illusions created by the two-faced glamour of affluence. We drove on into Gower, and when I saw the sunlit fields and the secret valleys and the sparkling sea flashing in the distance, I felt as if I were recovering from some illness which had nearly proved fatal.

At Little Oxmoon, I told my caretaker to drive on to the Manor with my luggage and then I joined Robert in the drawing room.

“Do you want a drink?” said Robert. “Or some food? There’s a cold buffet laid out in the dining room.”

“I don’t think I could eat and I’m quite sure I shouldn’t drink. Tell me the worst.”

“I went to see him yesterday morning and said my piece, but he couldn’t take it in—or, to be accurate, he took it in but couldn’t face up to it. He became disconnected with reality again.”

“Oh
God.
Robert, I think I will have a drink after all.”

“A wise decision. Help yourself. You haven’t heard the worst part yet. When it became obvious that I wasn’t going to get a word of sense out of him, I yielded to the inevitable and summoned Straker. She was so competent that my suspicions were aroused. I thought to myself, Hullo, she’s been here before, so after she’d led him off to rest I summoned Bayliss and cross-questioned him till he broke down, poor loyal old man, and confessed that the only reason why he was continuing to endure Straker’s dictatorship was because he was so worried about ‘The Master’ that he couldn’t bear to leave him. He hadn’t planned to confide in me, since I was ill, but he had planned to write to you if things got worse—which they now have. In other words, John—”

“Papa’s been deteriorating for some time but Straker’s hushed it up.”

“Exactly. And you can see why. If Papa has a complete mental breakdown we have a legitimate excuse to interfere in his affairs, and naturally the last thing Straker wants is an intervention which curtails her power.”

I swallowed some whisky and said, “What do we do?”

“First we must help him over this present crisis. You must give him the reassurance he so obviously needs, and with luck that will restore his equilibrium.”

“But what the devil’s going on, Robert? Why’s he like this? What’s at the bottom of this instability?”

“That leads me on to what I was going to say next. As soon as he’s rational we must coax him to see Gavin Warburton. We can’t let him drift on like this without seeking medical help.”

“But do you think—”

“No, I don’t. There’s no need for you to look as if we’re all in the middle of your recurring nightmare. I’m convinced we’re not dealing with hereditary madness here.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’m sure because I don’t think Grandmama was mad—at least, not in any sense that would be accepted today. It was Ginette who gave me that idea. She was mad as a hatter after Robin died, but that was just a temporary nervous breakdown and now she’s her old self again.”

I swallowed some more whisky. After a while, I heard myself say, “I can’t cope with this crisis, Robert; I just can’t face it, it’s too much for me.”

“That’s exactly why I’m trying to drill it into your head that Papa’s derangement, such as it is, has nothing whatsoever to do with Grandmama. I know perfectly well that you’ve got a bee in your bonnet about Grandmama, insanity and the Home of the Assumption.”

“I can’t talk about that.” I got up and began to pace around the room. “I’ve nothing to say.”

“Maybe not,” said Robert, “but I have. It seems to me—after much speculation on the subject of this peculiarity of yours—that you’ve translated the past into some Gothic nightmare which has very little to do with reality.” He paused to let that sink in before adding in his most soothing voice: “After all, what actually happened? Mama had an unusually awkward problem with her mother-in-law. With Papa’s consent she took advantage of Grandmama’s nervous breakdown to install her at the Home of the Assumption, a reputable asylum, where Grandmama was apparently well treated. Grandmama then submitted—perhaps out of some desire to be punished to our parents’ decision that she should remain there. The situation was tragic, I admit, but hardly worthy of a horrific poem by Poe.”

“What can be more horrific than shutting up a sane woman in a lunatic asylum? No, I refuse to believe our parents would do anything so fiendish!”

“Those parents of ours were capable of anything.”

“No!” I shouted. “Grandmama was insane and they were the innocent victims of her evil!”

“There you go again, translating a mere melancholy ditty into a raging grand opera! My dear John, you can’t divide these unfortunate people neatly into heroes and villains—it’s simply not that kind of story!”

“Oh yes it is,” I said. “It’s got to be. I’ve got to have it quite clear in my mind whom to hate and whom to love or the ambiguity will tear me apart and I’ll go mad. In fact I feel I’m going mad now, just talking about it. I can’t face it, can’t cope, can’t see Papa, can’t be reminded of the past—”

“You’ve got to see him. There’s no one else. Now look here, John. You’re an intelligent man. It’s inconceivable that you can go on being irrational about this—”

“Oh, shut up, you don’t understand—”

But this was exactly the response Robert wanted. “Very well, then explain your feelings to me.”

I made a great effort. At last I managed to say: “All I know is that I can’t dismiss the past lightly as you can. I’ve suffered too much. I can’t forgive and I can’t forget, and because of this I have to blame someone for what I’ve had to endure, and I can’t blame my parents because it was always so important that they should love me, and anyway I’ve always loved them—although God knows, when you told me about Papa and Ginevra—Christ, that was terrible,
terrible,
I was so shocked—and
so angry
too, angry with him for not behaving as I needed him to behave, it reminded me of how I used to feel as a child—I used to feel so
angry
with him … and with Mama … for being prejudiced against me just because … but I couldn’t feel angry, of course I couldn’t, not really, well, I mean how could I when I loved them and I knew they loved me, I knew they did, of course they did, but oh God, how upset I was when you told me about Papa and Ginevra … But there I was, being a hypocritical prig again. I’ve now treated Bronwen and Constance just as badly as he ever treated my mother, and I’ve no right to be angry with him anymore. I’m just as bad as he is, I’m just like him, and if he now goes mad—as Grandmama went mad—two people who committed murder—all that evil—hereditary madness—oh God, I’m so frightened,
so bloody frightened,
you don’t know how frightened I am whenever I think what could happen to me in the future …” I had to stop. I could no longer go on. I rubbed my eyes furtively with the back of my hand and tried to drink some scotch.

Robert waited a moment before saying in his calmest voice: “I never used that word ‘evil’ when I was defending so-called evil people. It usually seemed more accurate to describe them as pathetic or unlucky or stupid. They weren’t fiends in human guise. They tended to be almost boringly ordinary.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’m suggesting that you should think of our parents—and of Grandmama and Bryn-Davies—as ordinary people trapped in a situation which was quite beyond them. I think that’s a lot closer to the truth than your Gothic melodrama.”

I was unable to speak.

“And try to see Grandmama,” persisted Robert, “not as a fiend lapsing into a hereditary madness for her sins, but as a sexy woman who got in a mess and in consequence had a most understandable nervous breakdown.”

I tried to consider this. A knot of tension seemed to be expanding in the pit of my stomach. “But if I see Grandmama as—as—”

“Forgivable,” said Robert.

“—how do I see our parents?”

“As two children in their teens who had to grow up fast with disastrous results. They can be forgivable too, John.”

“But if I forgive everyone, whom do I blame?”

“ ‘That Monster Fortune,’ to quote Boethius. We’re all locked to the Wheel of Fortune, John, and some of us have a rougher ride than others.”

I thought about this. Then I said, “Are you saying we have no control over our fate?”

“No. I believe Fortune gives us choices and we have to choose. But think how hard it is, John, when one has choices, to draw the right lines in the right places.”

There was no answer to that. I thought of the wrong line I had drawn when I had rejected Bronwen, and suddenly for one brief powerful moment I saw my grandmother as a pathetic old woman, cut off from those she loved by the wrong decisions which had ruined her.

I said, “If only I could believe there was no hereditary madness involved. But if Papa’s now suffering from a severe mental disturbance again—”

“That need only indicate that he too is having some form of temporary mental collapse, but as far as I know nervous breakdowns aren’t hereditary. I’m sorry, John, to deprive you of your melodrama, but the truth is real life just isn’t grand opera. It’s much more in the nature
of opéra bouffe.
”

I looked at him, a man afflicted by tragedy, and at once despised myself for my cowardice. “Hold fast,” I said aloud to myself. “Stand firm. Soldier on.” And those phrases, so reminiscent of the simple world of John Buchan where the heroes never had any trouble being as brave as lions, were comforting to me as I struggled with the complexity of my emotions. “How weak I’ve been,” I said ashamed to Robert, “and how very unheroic.”

“Ah,” said Robert, “but the real heroes of this world aren’t the men who preen themselves on how well they’re doing their moral duty. The real heroes are the men who somehow nerve themselves to face a crisis even when they want to shit with fright at the thought of where it’s all going to end.”

I took a deep breath. Then I said, “I shall be all right now,” and I set off on the road to Oxmoon on the first stage of my journey into hell.

XII

“Good afternoon, Mr. John,” said my enemy, emerging briskly into the hall as I was handing Bayliss my hat. “Would you care to come into the drawing room, sir?”