The Wheel of Fortune (104 page)

But my mother remained torn between her desire to see her shady offspring well settled and her terror of Uncle John.

“Darling, what about your religion?” (My mother was now really scraping the barrel of excuses.) “I know you never go to Mass but once a Catholic always a Catholic, and—”

“Marian’s going to turn,” said Rory proudly, “and she’s agreed—”

“My God, what’s John going to say when he hears!
”

“—and Marian’s agreed,” repeated Rory, raising his voice to drown her panic, “that the baby’ll be brought up Catholic, so that little difficulty’s quite resolved.”

“What baby?” said my mother.

The bombshell exploded. Marian was pregnant. My mother nearly had apoplexy.

“You
fool!
” she shouted at Rory.

“Hold on, Ma, no need to be hysterical, I’m going to marry her, aren’t I, and put everything right!”

“Shut up! How could you,” said my mother, running true to form by becoming glacial as her rage deepened, “how
could
you be so asinine as to seduce
John’s daughter
—”

“Well, she seduced me actually,” said Rory, “and anyway she wasn’t a virgin, so what the hell?”

“Kester, leave us, please,” said my mother, belatedly remembering my presence. (I had been attempting invisibility in the farthest corner of the room.) Outside the door I put my ear to the panels in time to hear her repeat in a stage whisper: “You fool! Are you sure the child’s even yours?”

“Oh yes, Ma! I mean … well, Christ, Marian wouldn’t do a thing like that—”

“Why else should a snobbish girl like Marian settle for a man like you when she could do so much better for herself?”

“God, Ma, you do hit below the belt!”

“Answer
me
!”

“Well, for Christ’s sake, Marian loves me, I know she does, and of course the baby’s mine, I know it is, just as I know Marian can’t wait to marry me and escape from that soul-destroying house in Belgravia!”

There was a long silence. Then my mother said without expression, “Poor Marian” and began to ask a series of practical questions about the wedding.

The marriage took place three weeks later by special license at the Roman Catholic church in Farm Street, and Uncle John, immaculate in morning dress, gave the bride away as if Rory were the best son-in-law he could have wished for, as if he were delighted that Marian had chosen to become a Catholic and as if all prospect of grandchildren were at least a year away. Aunt Constance drafted the notice for the papers, but made a hash of it by using the word “quietly”—a horrible hint, as my mother said in exasperation, that the circumstances had been abnormal. However worse was to follow for when Marian gave birth to a daughter Aunt Constance inserted the word “premature” in the birth announcement.

“Doesn’t that stupid woman realize that nobody puts that word in unless they’re trying to fight a rumor of premarital sex?” shouted my mother, but Aunt Constance, so humorless that she was unable to anticipate any cynical amusement, no doubt thought she was only doing the done thing.

Uncle John gave the couple a house in Kensington as a wedding present, found Rory a job in Armstrong Investments and professed delight when his first grandchild entered the world, but what he really thought of the disaster no one knew.

“John’s very silent these days,” remarked Aunt Daphne during an earlier visit to Oxmoon with Elizabeth. “What’s going on there, do you think, Ginevra? Does he ever talk about—”

“No,” said my mother. “We’re all absolutely forbidden to mention her name.”

“But do you think he’s happy with Constance?”

“No idea,” said my mother shortly. She would never be drawn into gossiping about Uncle John.

That visit by Aunt Daphne to Oxmoon was the prelude to yet another family crisis which was to try Uncle John’s patience. My cousin Elizabeth, perhaps annoyed that Marian had beaten her to the altar, decided to fall madly in love with the next man who interested himself in her, and by chance, during her visit to Gower, this turned out to be Owen Bryn-Davies, who was nine years her senior and a director of Suez Petro-Chemicals in Swansea. He had spent some time working for the company in the Middle East, but now he had returned home and was clearly anxious to settle down with a nice jolly girl who had a first-class social background and some useful Gower connections. There was plenty of money in the Bryn-Davies family for his father, Alun, was chairman of the board of the Madog Collieries, none of which had been closed during the slump; but Aunt Daphne, who had long since set her heart on Elizabeth marrying into the peerage, was most upset by her daughter’s plans and appealed to Uncle John for help.

“What’s wrong with Owen Bryn-Davies?” I said mystified to my mother. Good-looking, Harrow-educated, wealthy, successful Owen seemed to me to be a good catch.

“Nothing,” said my mother, “except that by Daphne’s standards he’s not out of the top drawer. She keeps blustering that Elizabeth could do so much better for herself—but where and with whom? No, I think Daphne’s being very silly, and my sympathies are entirely with Elizabeth and Owen.”

Uncle John agreed with her when he arrived at Oxmoon. “Daphne,” he said, “there are worse fates for a girl than marrying an untitled man with a Welsh surname.”

“Well, we all know that, don’t we?” said Aunt Daphne before she could stop herself. Marian had just formally announced her pregnancy.

Uncle John was silent, looking inscrutable as usual, but my mother at once rushed to his defense. “Let’s be honest, darling,” she said to Aunt Daphne. “You married an untitled Welshman yourself, didn’t you? What are you making such a fuss about?”

“At least Lion was a Godwin of Oxmoon!” said Aunt Daphne vigorously. “And at least the Godwins are listed in
Burke’s Landed Gentry!
I don’t ask the moon for Elizabeth, but if she could only follow my example—”

“If Elizabeth were to follow your example,” said my mother, maddened past endurance, “she’d end up with a titled ex-lover and no husband at all!”

A family row ensued, much to my delight. Aunt Daphne tried to walk out in a rage but Elizabeth refused to accompany her and Owen Bryn-Davies, who had been summoned by telephone, was now obliged to take part in the battle. Uncle Lion’s name was repeatedly invoked but in vain until finally Aunt Daphne had hysterics, a most interesting phenomenon which I decided to use in my next novel. Uncle John then began to exert the full force of his powerful personality until Aunt Daphne ended up consenting to the marriage and weeping in his arms; between sobs she confessed that she had never got over Uncle Lion’s death and that although they all thought she was just a silly society woman she wasn’t, she longed to get married again but no one ever measured up to Lion and she was so miserable which was why she couldn’t bear the thought of Elizabeth getting married to Owen because once Elizabeth had gone to live in Wales, she—Daphne—would be so lonely and her life would have ended at the age of thirty-nine.

A baroque family reconciliation followed, during which my fingers itched to take notes. My mother kissed Aunt Daphne on both cheeks and invited her to stay at Oxmoon for as long as she liked. (My mother was always issuing these rash invitations under stress and living to regret them.) Elizabeth wept that of course darling Mummy could come and live with her after the wedding. (Owen looked horrified.) Aunt Celia, who had somehow managed to get in on the act, said there were all kinds of compensations for not being married and had Daphne ever considered becoming a regular churchgoer. Finally Owen put everything right by kissing his future mother-in-law and suggesting that he took her and Elizabeth into Swansea to dine at the Claremont. Aunt Daphne said, “How
very
kind, especially after that ghastly scene I’ve just made,” and when she looked up at him gratefully I knew he had been forgiven for not coming out of the top drawer.

After the engagement was formally announced no one could talk of anything but the fact that Owen’s great-grandfather had been Elizabeth’s great-grandmother’s lover, and everyone turned to the older generation for a full account of what had happened.

But information was curiously lacking. Uncle Edmund said, “Oh, yes, it was an appalling scandal,” but he didn’t seem to know much about it. Thomas said, “My father used to talk about it when he was gaga—Milly and I thought him an awful bore.” Uncle John looked inscrutable and when he said he didn’t think a past tragedy was a fit subject for idle gossip, Alun Bryn-Davies, Owen’s father, instantly said, “I quite agree!” (It occurred to me then that these modern respectable Bryn-Davieses were very keen to draw a veil over their sheep-farming ancestor who had slept his way into money that didn’t belong to him.) So finally it was left to my mother to enshrine the family myth for future generations. After her third glass of champagne at the engagement party she said richly, “Darlings, the truth was it was a divine romance with a heavenly tragic ending. The poor girl had this alcoholic husband who was just the teensiest bit difficult and then when she was out on the moors one day—I mean the Downs, but it’s always the moors in books, isn’t it?—she met this handsome virile passionate sheep farmer who at once fell madly in love with her, and my dears, it was all simply too
Wuthering Heights,
but alas! Later he drowned in the most ghastly accident right before her eyes, poor darling, and she went mad with grief but Bobby and Margaret were simply sweet to her and insisted on treating her like a queen when she came home for her Christmas visit. They kept her portrait in the attics and every year they brought it down and hung it in the dining room and it was all so touching and poor old Aunt Gwyneth was so moved by all the fuss that she could hardly speak but of course we all adored her and she adored us—”

At this point my mother was interrupted because everyone was stampeding to the attics to gaze with inebriated fascination at my great-grandmother’s portrait.

“No wonder he fell for her!” said Owen Bryn-Davies at last, and as he voiced the admiration which his great-grandfather had undoubtedly shared, everyone was still. It was as if the past were echoing in our ears, not the past of my mother’s synthetic fantasies but a past where madness and death had stalked a crude violent sinister landscape.

“What a story!” said I, the writer, and added, groping instinctively for the story’s lost dimensions: “And I bet we know no more than half of it.” That seemed like a challenge to me. I wondered if I could write the story and fill in the gaps, but just as I was speculating on this delicious prospect Uncle John covered his grandmother’s portrait again with its dust sheet and announced coldly: “I can’t help feeling that all this prurient interest is in exceedingly bad taste.”

What a sober old killjoy he was! However I was now well accustomed to Uncle John’s deplorable stuffiness, and his condition certainly showed no improvement during the months that followed. By the time I was seventeen—and about to present Uncle John with his third family crisis on the subject of marriage—I thought him a huge bore to be avoided as often as possible, and when my mother insisted on taking me to see him in the January of 1937 I was very cross indeed.

“But why can’t
you
have this sensible talk with me, Mum?” I objected. “You did it so well when I was fourteen!”

“I hope,” said my mother, “that when you were an anxious child of fourteen I was able to give you a reassuring glimpse of the perfect love affair. Everything I said then still stands. But you’ve got to learn how to look after yourself while you’re traveling this road to perfection, and that’s the sort of knowledge you’ll find easier to accept from another man.”

I gave up and resigned myself to my ordeal.

II

Aunt Constance’s father the American millionaire had died three years before his daughter’s reconciliation with her husband, so there had been no obstacle to prevent Uncle John gliding back to work in the Armstrong empire. As Aunt Celia once remarked to my mother, Uncle John always seemed to fall on his feet financially. Aunt Constance saw that he was put in charge of the charitable trusts and given a seat on the board of Armstrong Investments, and presently Uncle John was busy launching a new educational trust which was aimed at giving working-class children a better education. Having resigned his Swansea directorships he soon found himself offered new ones in London, and it was generally assumed he made plenty of money in addition to his private income from his Herefordshire estate. Aunt Constance, as everyone knew, was rich as Croesus in her own right, thanks to the Armstrong fortune, and so, there was certainly no shortage of material comfort in Uncle John’s new life. In fact it would have seemed to any casual observer that he had everything a man could want.

Unlike Uncle Edmund and Aunt Teddy, who rattled around in a slapdash way between their house in London and their estate in Kent, Uncle John and Aunt Constance adhered to a meticulously planned schedule. Every May Aunt Constance would take Francesca and the governess to Boston to see her American friends and relations. Uncle John refused to cross the Atlantic, as if he feared he might start heading for Vancouver as soon as his feet touched North American soil, but he always took Aunt Constance on her own to the Riviera for two weeks every winter as if to compensate her for this spring absence from her side. The family holiday with Francesca took place in August, when they visited Aunt Daphne in Scotland for the grouse shooting. For the rest of the year they occupied themselves by dining with the right people and visiting the right country houses at weekends. Aunt Constance was good at this. In fact Aunt Constance led the model life of a rich married woman in London. She interested herself in the right charities, patronized the right arts, entertained the right guests and even attended, with Francesca, the right church every Sunday. Uncle John, who otherwise did the done thing as religiously as his wife did, never accompanied them.

The Armstrong mansion, inherited by Aunt Constance from her father, was a massive cream-colored monstrosity which in Victorian times had been inhabited by an obscure member of Disraeli’s cabinet. Behind the opulent facade the house was a monument to dreariness. Nothing was vulgar; Aunt Constance had weeded out every one of her father’s
nouveau-riche
excesses, but her scrupulous refurbishings, all technically correct, were somehow, mysteriously, disastrous. Uncle John didn’t care and even if he had he lacked the aesthetic taste which would have stopped that mansion evolving from a vulgar museum into a lifeless stately home. Formal arrangements of flowers were placed to emphasize carefully hung, meticulously lit paintings.
Objets d’art
were painstakingly grouped according to age and nationality; modern wall-to-wall carpets in dull beige screamed
ANACHRONISM
to overwhelmed groups of antiques. Some of the paintings were good; there was an excellent portrait by Sargent of Aunt Constance and Aunt Teddy as girls, but there were too many English landscapes featuring cows looking glumly over hedges. My mother thought the entire place was as cheerful as a morgue and often speculated how Uncle John managed to survive there without cutting his throat.