The Wheel of Fortune (117 page)

A majority of people, of course, think the most exquisite pleasure is sex. Poor things! I feel so sorry for them sometimes. Of course sex is great fun, but when all’s said and done it’s just a sport, isn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with sport; it’s a pleasant way of filling in time if you’ve nothing better to do, and plenty of charming and intelligent people are dead keen on it, but … well, you don’t worry about filling in time if you’re a writer. When you’re a writer at work, there
is
no time, only eternity, because writing’s forever. Even if you tear up everything you ever do, every word you’ve ever written will still go towards making you a better writer and the better you become the more powerful the magic at your disposal, the magic that can triumph over time.

I’m a magician again. I’m waving my magic wand. I’m anyone anywhere. The ordinary rules of time and space no longer apply. The ink flows from my pen, the keys clack on my typewriter and little hieroglyphics emerge to reflect a vision which only I can see but which perhaps one day countless people can share.

Robert Godwin the Renovator dreamed in stone and glass. I dream in words. Dreams are all that really matter in life. To dream is to be immortal, to dream is to see eternity, to dream is—

“Kester?”

“Oh darling, I’m sorry I’m so far away from you at the moment but I’ll make it up to you later …”

Had Anna ever realized I could be like this? No, of course not. She was probably asking herself why she had never guessed I could be quite so peculiar.

I knew I ought to make love to her because there was still no little Christopher on the horizon, but I was emotionally spent. I could do no more than kiss her good night. I thought: When I wake up tomorrow I’ll have the energy. And I was right. I had the energy, but all I did was rush straight back to my typewriter.

Then one morning I was writing the word
OBSESSION
and I felt my father walk into my mind. Had he felt guilty when he rushed back to his mountains? Yes. How awful he must have felt, abandoning my mother mentally, emotionally and—as I now knew—sexually, but of course he would have been quite unable to stop himself. He’d had a dream, and beside that dream all else had become futile and insignificant.

Can you hear me, Robert Godwin, can you see me as I see you? My father, more than ten years dead, but I know you now better, far better, than I ever did when you were alive. I know you better than you ever dreamed was possible; you never thought when you looked at me that I’d come to know you through and through. Ah yes, I can see it all, I see how miserable you must have been in London with your glittering career—what do glittering careers matter when you’re cut off from the breath of life? And I see for the first time how lonely you must have been with my mother, my gorgeous, stormy, emotionally exhausting mother who talked so much of passion yet knew no passion but sex. I see you unable to bear your abstinence any longer, I see you looking at those mountains, I see you coming alive again while all your weeping wife can do is talk so meaninglessly of obsessions.

You shouldn’t have willed yourself to die like that. You could still have been alive, and then think how happy I could have made you, think what interesting conversations we could have had, think how glad you would have been to find that at last there was someone who understood you …

But you died.

Or did you? Yes, but I’m resurrecting you, and now once again the miracle’s happening because I’ve beaten time, I’ve beaten death and in my mind you live again. …

VII

“Sorry to disturb you again, Kes—”

“Oh Christ!”

“—but Lloyd-Thomas is downstairs. He’s looking exactly as Pontius Pilate must have looked after deciding that Christ really did have to be crucified.”

“Well, tell him to wash his hands and go away.”

I was with my people. I saw them all and heard their voices, and they were far more real to me than dim mythical figures like Mr. Lloyd-Thomas the bank manager. Inside my head, like a strip of Technicolor film, their lives evolved before my eyes.

“Kester …”

I opened my mouth to shout, “
For Christ’s sake don’t interrupt me when I’m writing
!” but then I saw it was Simon, loyal, faithful Simon who was still so anxious to help me even though he was so badly crippled and so prematurely aged. I could not shout at someone who had been such a good friend to me—and to my father. I was so close to my father now, so close, he was at my side all the time. Can you hear me, Robert Godwin can you see me as I see you—

“Kester, I’m signing the most amazing checks. I think you should look at them before they go out.”

I flicked through the checks, but I never saw them. I was with my father as he pulled on his climbing boots. I was with my eighteenth-century ancestor as he shook hands with Robert Adam. I was in my old bedroom at Oxmoon and I was in the middle of the most riveting scene I had ever written.

“Yes, it’s all right, Simon,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control.”

VIII

“Adam’s muzzled Lloyd-Thomas, Kes. All you have to do is sign this bit of paper here.”

“What is it?”

“A contract with some moneylenders. Adam says they’re really an awfully decent crowd.”

“All right.” I signed.

“And Kes—”

“No more, Ricky, not now.” I had a double bed waiting for my hero and heroine, and I was already hearing the latest lines of Noël Coward-style dialogue. (I like my passion laced with wit.) What could possibly be more irrelevant than Ricky blathering about outstanding bills?

“But Vaughan is breathing fire …”

Vaughan was the tenant of Daxworth farm.

“… some sort of muddle with Sasha …”

“Send him to Adam.”

“Adam’s at the races.”

“Then send him to the races.”

My plan for a detective story had got lost somewhere in Chapter Four. I no longer cared who had murdered the Count in the locked gun room with an African spear impregnated with curare. All I cared about was my two lovers who had turned out to be doomed. Penelope eventually committed suicide. My hero boarded a boat for Argentina. I was in such agony for him in his bereavement that I could hardly type
THE END
after the final line.

Wandering dazed through the house some unknown time later I found that work had been completed in the ballroom. It was a mirrored paradise of white and gold, and tears came to my eyes because it was so beautiful. Then because I knew Robert Godwin the Renovator was beside me I said to him, “You never saw the ballroom, did you, because it was built by your grandson Robert Godwin the Regency Rake, but look how wonderful it is, how glorious, how perfect …”

A hand touched my arm. I had not been speaking aloud but I had been so absorbed in my conversation with Robert that I hadn’t noticed Toby fluttering into the room at a brisk pace. When he touched me I jumped. Then I felt extraordinarily confused, because I knew I was in two centuries at once. I glanced out of the window and saw it was summer—but which summer? I had become so accustomed to traveling in other dimensions that it was hard for me to pin myself to an exact point in time and space.

“Dear boy,
lovely
to see you again! Someone tells me you’re about to produce a new masterpiece of English literature—God knows one was long overdue—but I wonder if we could have just the tiniest word about some payment on account?”

“What?” I said.

Ricky appeared at my elbow. “Kes, bad news. Lloyd-Thomas is on his way over here—I tried to put him off, but he hung up.”

It was the summer of 1939. Hitler was at his zenith and Europe was on the brink, but of course I had no idea. I hadn’t opened a newspaper for weeks. The remote myths of Nazi Germany had seemed irrelevant and only Jonathan and Penelope’s disastrous romance had been real.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Lowell, “but a deputation of your tenants headed by Mr. Emlyn Vaughan is in the drive and Mr. Vaughan is asking to see you.”

“Kester,” said Simon, “Adam Mowbray’s on the telephone.”

If I’d been Robert Godwin the Renovator any Mowbray I talked to would have been a smuggler and probably a pirate as well.

I went to the twentieth-century telephone.

“Kester,” said the pirate, “I’m afraid you can’t go on ignoring the writ from that London property company about the nonpayment of rent on your Park Lane flat. However, it just so happens that I’ve found another firm of moneylenders who’ll give you credit …”

Did they shoot pirates? Or did they hang them?

“Kester? Kester, are you there?”

I somehow slotted myself back into the summer of ’39. “Adam, Lloyd-Thomas is about to arrive and all the tenants are on the warpath—please,
please
drop everything and come to the rescue!”

The pirate never even paused for breath. He had sailed dangerously close to the wind and now he had to run before the storm. “Terribly sorry, old man, but I’ve got a vital appointment with a titled client and it’s absolutely impossible for me to break it.”

Half an hour later Mr. Lloyd-Thomas was telling me in no uncertain terms that there was only one man in the world who could now save me from ruin and that man was my Uncle John.

8

I

I
WOKE UP. AT FIRST I COULD
not remember where I was or what was happening. Then I saw the sweep of headlights beyond the uncurtained library windows and remembered that after my third brandy I had switched out the light because my eyes were hurting so much. I stood up, moved to the window and saw the black shadow of the Rolls-Royce drawing to a halt in the moonlight. Then I remembered everything. Eighteenth-century Robert Godwin was dead. My father was dead. Jonathan and Penelope were just secret patterns I had made with my typewriter’s keys. I was broke, humiliated and shamed, just another unstable youth of nineteen who had gone off the rails, and only Oxmoon, ravishing Oxmoon, remained to bear witness to my brief moment of glory when I had conquered time and seen eternity.

I went out into the hall. I had sent Anna to bed because I knew there would be things said which I preferred her not to hear, and after giving me a brief but loving kiss she had faded away into the shadows upstairs, my little Cinderella slipping back into her rags after her fabled evening at the ball.

I opened the front door. I was thinking how quiet it was now that all the worlds in my head had come to a stop. And how flat real life was, devoid of those extra dimensions of the imagination, how narrow, how profoundly unattractive. I felt stifled too by the straitjacket of a single personality. When one has been many people for a long time and particularly when one has been roaming casually among the centuries, the torture of reinhabiting one’s own personality at a fixed point in time resembles being shut up in a small box.

And what a box. I was Kester Godwin on July the twelfth, 1939, and I was walking out into the porch to meet a man who, unlike my father, was absolutely incapable of understanding me. This man was like my mother. The only passion he recognized was sex.

He was speaking to his chauffeur as he got out of the car: “Leave it here, Bridges, for tonight. Just bring my bag in, put it in the hall and go to the servants’ quarters.” Turning to me, he said abruptly without any preliminary greeting, “I assume arrangements have been made for my chauffeur?”

I had forgotten to remind Lowell. That was bad. Not the done thing. One always had to think of the servants. I swallowed and said, “I’m sure Lowell’s remembered.”

Uncle John said to his chauffeur, “If there’s no one waiting up for you, Bridges, come back to me. I’ll be in the drawing room.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” said the chauffeur.

Uncle John walked past me up the steps without a word and reached the threshold of the hall. Now, I thought,
now
he would see the vision which justified my folly. The marble floor glowed richly before my eyes. The jade Chinese horses reared ravishingly atop a wafer-thin Sheraton side table. Romantic pictures, mostly of beautiful women, adorned the walls, and at the half-landing on the stairs, radiant in the light from Toby’s celestial chandelier, shimmered the portrait of the most beautiful woman of all, a Welsh woman, romance personified, my doomed great-grandmother Gwyneth Llewellyn restored at last to a place of glory in the house where she had once been mistress.

Uncle John said nothing but he seemed to turn a shade paler. He walked on across the hall, entered the drawing room and paused again to survey the transformation. I saw him glance at the Gainsborough but it meant nothing to him. He looked at the exquisite walnut chairs and settees but they meant nothing to him either; no doubt he merely thought they looked uncomfortable. Still refusing to speak he moved to the marble-topped table by the window, removed the stopper from the Waterford decanter and poured some whisky into one of the heavy cut-glass tumblers. In helping himself to a drink without my permission he assumed the reins of power by little more than a flick of the wrist.

I thought: If he tries to take Oxmoon away from me I’ll kill him.

But that was a mad thought which showed how deep I was in misery. Anna would have said it was wrong. Wonderful Anna, keeping me sane by loving me so that in her love I could see myself reflected as the man I longed to be, the greatest master Oxmoon had ever known. Anna and Oxmoon were the twin pillars of my sanity, and so long as I had them I could survive even the crudest humiliation at the hands of a man who would never understand what I had done.

He turned to face me. His blue eyes had never seemed emptier, and in their emptiness I glimpsed the dark side of his personality which he had always concealed from me and sensed a hard, powerful man, disillusioned, embittered, enraged. In that second I saw beyond the myth of “my heroic Uncle John,” and just as my mother’s final request had shattered for me the myth of her second marriage, so this glimpse of a hitherto unimagined reality seemed to wipe out all the fixed points of reference that represented stability in my life. I felt all was anarchy and chaos. It was as if there were no rules, no morals, nothing. I was looking into a bottomless pit. It was a vision of hell.