The Wheel of Fortune (113 page)

Since guilt prevented me from watching Uncle John and repulsion made me recoil from Thomas, I turned my attention to the third member of the trio. Cousin Harry, evidently bored by Thomas’s ravings, had wandered away until he was standing in the center of the gravel sweep before the porch, and as I watched, taking care to shelter behind the curtain, he paused to light a cigarette. Then he started to look at the house. He looked and looked and looked until at last I suspected he was not seeing the house at all but was sunk in some profound reverie which I could not begin to imagine. This awareness that his mind was a closed book to me I found both novel and intriguing. What went on behind that polished facade? Harry had always been such a myth of perfection to me, but I had seen some very long-standing myths exploded in recent weeks, and I was no longer prepared to accept a myth without questioning it.

What, I now asked myself, was really happening in Cousin Harry’s life? What were his secret fears, miseries, obsessions and loathings? I had no idea, but I did know that it was very, very odd that he should have come down from Oxford after only one year. This was in stark contrast to Harry’s image of unflawed perfection and most definitely not the done thing at all. Could he conceivably have been sent down? No. Not possible. His open scholarship made the chance of academic failure nonexistent, and of course he would be much too clever to get into trouble of any other kind. No, I had to accept that he had come down voluntarily, but nevertheless … what a disappointment for Uncle John! But Uncle John, running true to form, was glossing over the incident by keeping a stiff upper lip and standing by Harry just as he had earlier stood by Marian. Or was this just wishful thinking on my part? Perhaps Uncle John had been delighted by Harry’s decision to cast aside the irrelevant study of Latin and Greek and adopt the life of a gentleman farmer. After all, as Harry himself had pointed out, such a life was exactly in my grandfather’s tradition. In fact now that I really thought about his decision I could see it was absolutely the done thing after all.

I might have known Harry would never put a foot wrong. His was the one myth I’d never be able to crack, and now this paragon, this monster of virtue, this truly insufferable hero was about to move into my life lock, stock and barrel to form a mirror image, a reflection in which I would always find myself wanting.

That was not only a vile thought. It was a sinister one. I shuddered and tried to pull myself together. I would still be the first man in the parish. Oxmoon was bigger and better than Penhale Manor. All I had to do was run Oxmoon to perfection and then I would easily outshine Cousin Harry—in fact, once I started making Oxmoon a shrine to Beauty, Truth, Art and Peace I would soon be, to coin that most peculiar phrase, the cynosure of all eyes. Very well, I thought, let him come back to Gower! I’d make him writhe with jealousy until in the end, unable to stand the sight of me flourishing so sumptuously at Oxmoon, he’d gnash his teeth and slink away to try his luck elsewhere—in Northumberland, perhaps, or East Anglia. I supposed it was too much to hope that he would emigrate.

I laughed, and as I turned away from the window at last I saw my wife running up the stairs to meet me.

“Kester, what on earth’s going on?”

“Ah, Anna—I won, I won!” I whirled her in a dervishlike dance all the way across the landing into the largest guest room which we were using until my mother’s room could be refurbished, and amidst gales of laughter we collapsed upon the bed.

“Tell me everything!” she gasped.

“Later!” I was so excited that I couldn’t undo my trouser buttons, and in a paroxysm of joy I gave up and ripped open the flies. “Whoopee!” I shouted.

“Heavens, what will the tailor think when he does the repairs?” said Anna, and as we almost passed out with laughter she pulled me into her arms to celebrate my mighty victory.

VI

After this triumphant severance of my leading strings, I received two letters. The first, a surprisingly neat missive in a bold upright handwriting, read:
Kester, you’re a bloody fool and what Oxmoon’s done to deserve you I’ll never know, but when you get in a hole (and you will
—
a deep one) you’d better tell me so that I can dig you out. This isn’t my idea of having a good time, but John says you’ve got to know there’ll always be someone nearby who’s prepared to help in an emergency, and as far as I’m concerned John’s the boss of this family and will be till he drops dead (and God help us all when he does). So I’m obliged to obey orders.
THOMAS.

I made no reply to this childish effusion, but the second letter I received was far less easy to forget. Uncle John wrote with exquisite politeness that it grieved him I was so bitter towards my family, and that he personally had taken my attitude very hard as he had always tried to do his best for me; he begged me to remember that he and my father had been the most devoted of brothers, and added that whatever happened I would always have a special place in his affections.

This made me feel very mean. Furious with him for crucifying me with guilt and furious with myself for permitting the crucifixion I wrote in an effort to crush these chaotic emotions:
My dear Uncle John, Thank you for your letter. I know it was more civil than I deserved. I’m sorry about the row but I must lead my own life now and it seemed impossible to convince you of this without resorting to plain speaking
—
which, as I now realize, obliged me to treat you with an unkindness you’ve never merited. Of course I’m aware how much I owe you and I’ve no wish to appear ungrateful, but when we meet in the future (as of course I hope we shall) it must be on my terms. I remain now and always your very affectionate nephew,
KESTER.

This fawning effort to assuage my conscience by appeasing him seemed so nauseous that I could hardly bear to reread it, but I did feel better afterwards and Uncle John evidently felt better too. He replied by return:
My dear Kester, I was very pleased to receive your letter and of course I understand and forgive your natural desire to attain the independence which is yours by right. I wish you well, and I hope that if ever you need help or advice in the future you’ll remember that you can always come straight to me. Your devoted uncle,
J.G.

In other words, to paraphrase the letter with a crudeness which diplomatic Uncle John would always have eschewed, he too suspected I was going to make a cock-up of my independence, but he was prepared, for lack of a better alternative, to sanction my efforts to go my own way. So much for Uncle John—and so much for bestial Thomas. I was determined to prove myself, but meanwhile I had to try to work out what on earth I was going to do without them.

VII

My first concern was for Anna. She had to have a housekeeper. My mother, unorthodox as always, had run her various establishments herself with the aid of a succession of henchmen who had each in turn been referred to as “My Devoted Factotum,” but when we left Little Oxmoon, her current Devoted Factotum (the parlormaid Watson) had stayed on there to keep house for Thomas. However my mother had never let my father’s nurse Bennett slip through her fingers, and after my father’s death she had retained him as a butler, a position he had filled in London before my father became ill. When she moved to Oxmoon Bennett came too as the new Devoted Factotum which meant that he and my mother between them had assumed the household duties formerly undertaken by Mrs. Straker.

However, shortly after my elopement Lowell the butler and Bennett had had “words” and Bennett, a Cockney, had decided the time had finally come when he had to move back to the sound of Bow Bells. My mother, who would willingly have sacrificed Lowell, bribed, bullied and cajoled but to no avail. Bennett departed. Probably he had only stayed on in the hope of playing gentleman’s gentleman one day to the master of Oxmoon; but having been brought up in more modest surroundings than my father and belonging to a postwar, not a prewar generation I considered a valet would have represented an intolerable intrusion on my privacy.

My mother had been interviewing candidates for the role of Devoted Factotum before I returned from my honeymoon, but fortunately no one suitable had been found. I knew that a Devoted Factotum, who liked to live a life of vicarious glamour in the service of a flamboyant personality, was no answer for Anna; she needed a quite ladylike conventional housekeeper like Mrs. Wells, who had been Uncle John’s housekeeper at Penhale Manor before Bronwen’s departure, and if Mrs. Wells had still been in the neighborhood I would have offered her the job but she had taken a new position and disappeared into the Home Counties. How did one find a similar paragon? I wrote the word
Housekeeper
on my note pad and sat looking at it anxiously for some time.

Eventually it occurred to me that I might consult Cousin Elizabeth who employed a housekeeper herself and was bound to be full of useful advice. I had become fond of nice cheerful down-to-earth Cousin Elizabeth since she had become a neighbor in Swansea, and although Owen was an awful bore, besotted with
The Financial Times
and rugby football, he was always civil and good-natured to me. In fact if I had to have relations living nearby I could hardly have asked for more agreeable ones than the Bryn-Davieses, who treated me with friendly respect, never turned up at Oxmoon without a prior invitation and telephoned once every three months as a courtesy to check that I was still alive. If more relations were like that I was sure there wouldn’t be nearly so many unhappy families in the world.

Having considered the problem of finding a housekeeper I then considered the far more crucial problem of finding a first-class estate manager to replace Thomas. Although I was sure I could learn enough to supervise the administration of my property eventually I was hardly competent to do so at that moment, and besides I had to write. I couldn’t spend all my time going to market with my foremen or plotting the substance of next year’s ley (I wasn’t even sure what a ley was). How did I find the ideal estate manager who would relieve me of such time-consuming matters?

I decided to seek the advice of my solicitor Mr. Fairfax, the senior partner in the firm of Fairfax, Walters and Wyn-Williams. Uncle John had fired both Mr. Fairfax and my charming bank manager Mr. Lloyd-Thomas when my grandfather had had a bout of being completely incompetent, but my grandfather had later reinstated them, and Uncle John, who could so easily have quashed this sentimental decision by a flick of his power of attorney, had raised no objection. Uncle John had always been exceptionally kind to this pathetic old parent of his, and besides he probably thought it was sufficient that he had frightened Fairfax and Lloyd-Thomas out of their wits by temporarily depriving them of the Oxmoon estate. After their reinstatement they had never failed to grovel to him at all times.

As I thought of Mr. Fairfax I remembered that he had told me (creepily) that I should make a will, and although I still recoiled from this macabre suggestion I knew that as a married man in sole control of a large estate I now had what Uncle John would have described as an absolute moral duty to live up to my responsibilities. I wrote on my note pad, Estate
manager—ask Fairfax;
but as I wrote I was thinking of my will. Who, out of all my ghastly relations, was worthy to inherit Oxmoon? The obvious answer was Christopher Godwin Junior but he hadn’t arrived yet and until he did I was obliged to look elsewhere. I thought with affection of Declan but I really couldn’t leave Oxmoon to a British-hating Irish patriot. One had to draw the line somewhere.

I surveyed the next generation, or in other words the babies of my acquaintance. I eliminated Thomas’s small son Bobby; he was automatically damned by his parentage. Then I ruled out Declan’s offspring, attractive and delightful though they were, because they were certain to grow up into British-hating Irish patriots like their father, and I ruled out Rory’s two daughters who showed signs of growing up like Cousin Marian. Anyway Godwin girls didn’t inherit; it wasn’t the done thing (although why not? Actually I’m all for girls inheriting everything in sight, think of those hugely successful estate managers Queens Cleopatra, Elizabeth and Victoria). However any daughter of Cousin Marian’s was bound to fall far short of these shining examples of womanhood so that left me face to face with the last baby who had Godwin blood, Cousin Elizabeth’s son Little Owen, who was now a year old. But could I really leave Oxmoon to someone called Owen Bryn-Davies? What a laugh! Uncle John would have apoplexy. I couldn’t resist it, and anyway it would be only a temporary measure until I had a son of my own. But I had to take that temporary measure because whatever happened I had to avoid dying intestate and leaving Oxmoon in the lurch.

I wrote on my notepad,
Little Owen
—
see Fairfax,
and as I wrote I thought idly: What
would
happen to Oxmoon if I were to die intestate? I wasn’t sure of the answer but I thought it likely that Uncle John might tell himself it was his moral duty to buy it, and after Uncle John was dead …

Cousin Harry.

Never.

I shuddered, drew a highly symbolic line on my note pad and went downstairs to telephone Mr. Fairfax.

“You couldn’t possibly be pregnant already, could you, darling?” I said to Anna that night. “After all, we’ve been married for several weeks now and we haven’t exactly stinted on the copulation. Heavens, in novels a nice girl has only to lose her virginity and she instantly sets out on the road to motherhood!”

“I expect it’s a little different in real life,” said Anna with a sigh.

It was. If I could have written my life instead of being obliged to live it, I would have mastered the estate in a week and run it single-handed while I tossed off best-selling novels in my spare time and prepared for imminent fatherhood. In real life fatherhood was still a dream, my last novel was once again returned with a rejection slip and Mr. Fairfax told me he didn’t know of any first-class estate manager except Thomas Godwin. I recognized this as a criticism and almost fired him, but decided my life was quite complicated enough already without dismissing the family solicitor.