The Wheel of Fortune (126 page)

“Father, you didn’t tell Constance, did you?”

“Good God, no!” said my father, unintentionally speaking volumes about his marriage. “I never tell her anything.”

That was the last honest conversation I had with him before I messed myself up again. Certainly I never dared ask him what he really thought when Marian messed herself up with Rory Kinsella and had to rush to the altar in double-quick time.

“But why shouldn’t I go to bed with Rory if I love him?” screamed Marian at my father in front of us all when she was obliged to confess the news of her imminent wedding. “Bronwen went to bed with you!”

My father said with great politeness, “Constance—Harry—excuse us, if you please,” and we withdrew. But he was never the same after that. I saw him become remote, detached, enigmatic. He absorbed himself in his work, and as his reputation as a businessman increased, so he seemed to withdraw behind the facade of his wealth and success. He might have been living behind bulletproof glass, and all the while I sensed he was acting, just as I was, pretending to be happy because the alternative was too terrible to contemplate.

Eventually I began to pray he might leave Constance again. I became convinced that if only we could return to Penhale Manor the bulletproof glass would shatter and I would rediscover the unpretentious hero in blue dungarees who had laughed and joked with Bronwen, but we stayed on in London, and my father remained the quiet serious stranger whom it was virtually impossible to know.

I became so desperate that in the end I tried to analyze his marriage. Was it likely to collapse or wasn’t it? What the hell was going on? I wasn’t sure, but once I started studying the two of them I began to get some bizarre ideas. I could see that Constance loved him but at the same time I sensed her simmering anger. No doubt she felt, as I did, that despite his physical presence at her side he had staged some massive mental retreat. They seemed to find conversation difficult and I thought that angered her too. After all, there she was, mastering all those interesting subjects in order to provide him with fascinating conversation, and my father obviously didn’t give a damn.

Yet he wasn’t indifferent to her. I could see she often bored him so much that he snapped at her, but he always made amends by giving her a kiss, and when I saw how much she liked those kisses—perhaps even went out of her way to needle him into giving them—I saw to my horror that he liked them too. There was no sign that he begrudged them; he could have been evasive but he chose not to be, and gradually it occurred to me that the dreary surface of their marriage might be concealing a mutually satisfactory sexual relationship. I could well imagine Constance being obsessive about sex. I could picture her studying it, mastering it and serving it up with poker-faced skill in her latest Parisian negligee.

And my father? It took me some time to work out what was going on there, but one day in the holidays the penny finally dropped. I was playing a Beethoven sonata in the drawing room and when I reached the end I thought what a miracle it was that whenever I played the piano I could so absolutely forget what I didn’t want to remember. Then I realized with an intuitive leap of the imagination that this was the only possible reason for my father’s continuing sexual relationship with his wife. He used sex as I used the piano: to forget, to escape, to enjoy himself in the way he liked best. The fact that she was Constance was probably irrelevant. Just as I could play on any piano, so he could no doubt gratify himself with any female, but naturally it was useful to him that his own wife could provide him with whatever quality and quantity of sex he needed. It saved him from the bore of looking elsewhere.

I had often wondered if he had mistresses but now I saw that he probably wouldn’t consider extramarital sex worth the effort. I doubted that my father was by nature promiscuous. Indeed everything I knew about him suggested he would fight hard against a very natural inclination to sleep with every woman he fancied. If he had a relationship with his wife that allowed him to exercise his sexuality without constraint I could quite see him thankfully drawing the line against any immoral activity and settling down to do God-only-knew-what with Constance whenever the bedroom door was closed.

What a picture that conjured up! By this time sheer biology was conquering my revulsion toward sex which had followed the disaster with Bella, and I spent a lot of time thinking of nothing but intercourse. In a paroxysm of guilt I had promised my father I wouldn’t go near a woman until I had left school at eighteen but now, reduced to pornographic visions and endless masturbation, I regretted having to live like a monk. I wouldn’t have minded supplementing my piano playing with a little sex now and then to ease the dreariness of that Belgravia jail, but of course I couldn’t have broken my promise to my father. That wouldn’t have been the done thing at all.

My liberation finally came when I was eighteen and won an open scholarship to Oxford. To make amends to my father I had slaved at Harrow, giving up all thought of specializing in the sciences and dedicating myself to mastering the classics. I mastered them. My father was thrilled and for a short precious time set aside the bulletproof glass to give me a glimpse of the man in blue dungarees who had laughed with Bronwen. Naturally I was just as thrilled as he was that I was finally turning out to be the son he wanted me to be, and it was not until I began my studies up at Oxford that I realized just what a terrible mistake I’d made.

The truth was that I had no genuine inclination towards classical scholarship, and a logical mind, a scientific preoccupation with accuracy and that old friend my trusty memory were no longer enough now to guarantee my success. I became bored with my studies. I tried to whip up interest but found there was no interest left to whip up. Unable to cope with this lassitude and its inevitable implications, unable to face the fact that I was intellectually incapable of pursuing knowledge in a discipline that did not appeal to me, I cut lectures, drank too much, started fooling around with women. My tutor spoke to me. I did try to pull myself together but I knew I was hopelessly adrift, and in the May of 1938, after taking an exam I knew I had no chance of passing, I was caught with a girl in my room, and soon after that my father received the letter which told him I was being sent down.

VII

No six cows in a field this time. Just the drawing room at Eaton Walk, a wasteland of beige carpet studded with arid groups of antiques. Outside it was raining as it can only rain in London, dirty water dripping drearily from drab skies. It had been raining ever since I’d left Oxford. Despite the stuffiness of the room I felt dank and cold.

“I don’t understand, Harry.”

“Wrong subject. Sorry. Should have specialized in the sciences at school and then read engineering.”

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

“Thought engineering wasn’t the done thing.”

“But my dear Harry—”

“I knew I didn’t have your gift for modern languages but I thought I could make it up to you by being a classical scholar like Uncle Robert.”

“But for Christ’s sake. …”

We stammered away, groping for the truth, both of us damned nearly speechless with pain, until finally my father managed to say, “You’ll please me best by being the son you are, not the son you think I want you to be. If you want to be an engineer—”

“I don’t. Not really. All I’ve ever wanted to be is a pianist.”

“But my dear Harry, there’s no money or future in that!”

“Yes, I know, silly of me, doesn’t matter, too late now anyway, concert pianists have to start young and train for years and years … But never mind, I’ll be an engineer.”

“I thought you just told me you didn’t want to be an engineer! Harry, what is it you really want to do?”

“I want to go home.”

“But this is your home!”

Silence. More ghastly truths surfaced. My father shoved back his hair awkwardly and turned aside as if he could not bear to look at me any longer.

“I want to go back to Penhale Manor,” I said.

“To farm?” He was still struggling for composure.

I had had no thought beyond returning home, but now I saw not only a life I could tolerate but a life that my father would find acceptable.

“Yes,” I said, “to farm. I want to follow in Grandfather’s footsteps and manage an estate.”

He thought about this for a moment. “Are you sure that’s what you really want?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I suppose Penhale Manor would provide you with a satisfactory training ground, and then later you can move on to a more challenging situation.”

I thought it wiser not to say that once I got back to Gower no one on earth was ever going to dig me out of it again. I kept quiet.

“Farm management could certainly provide you with an interesting career,” said my father, warming to the idea. “I often fancied it myself in the past and I’d have taken a more active interest in your mother’s Herefordshire lands if I hadn’t been so reluctant to leave Bronwen on her own at the Manor.” He fell silent, although whether this was because he had jolted himself by mentioning Bronwen’s name or because he was remembering how much he had fancied estate management in the past, it was impossible to tell. “Very well,” he said rousing himself, “I’ll give you a five-year nominal lease on the Manor, on the assumption that at the end of that time, when you’re trained and experienced, you move to Herefordshire to manage your mother’s farms there. I think that would be a very tolerable solution to your problems.”

After I had finished thanking him I put my hand impulsively on his arm. “Father … I know you’re not happy here. Come back with me to Penhale.”

He stared. For a moment he was too astonished to speak. Then he shook off my arm, said crisply, “What an extraordinary suggestion” and walked away.

Now it was my turn to stare. “You mean you’re determined to stay here?”

“Of course.” He reached the window and stood watching the rain outside.

“But why?
Why
?”

“Oh, I could never leave Constance and Francesca a second time,” said my father. “I draw the line.”

It took me a moment to control myself because every instinct I had was screaming against such a decision. “But Father, never mind Constance and Francesca—what about
you?
What about
your
life? What about
your
happiness?”

“My life wouldn’t be worth living if I left them—I’d never survive the guilt. And as for my happiness, how could I be happy in the hell my guilt would create for me? Anyway, I’m not unhappy at the moment—I’m just leading a life in which happiness, isn’t particularly important. A satisfactory life isn’t dependent on sheer happiness alone, thank God. I’m doing valuable work for the Armstrong charities. I’m looking after my wife and child who depend on me emotionally. I’m leading a civilized, reasonably interesting, not unrewarding life, and considering all the suffering I’ve caused in the past I think that’s more than I have a right to expect.”

I saw that locked up in his nineteenth-century metaphysical illusions he was unapproachable. If his peculiar fear of sin and guilt was driving him into martyrdom I was powerless to intervene.

“I see,” I said politely.

“Well, I should bloody well hope you do,” said my father, “since what we’re really talking about here is the difference between right and wrong.”

“Of course,” I said at once. “Don’t worry, Father, I do understand. You’re staying on here because it’s the right thing—indeed, the only thing—to do.”

But what a catastrophe.

VIII

At that time, the summer of ’38, Penhale Manor itself was vacant, a fact that had no doubt stimulated my old longing to go home. The vacancy was the result of Oswald Stourham’s death that spring; he had left Stourham Hall to Eleanor, who had been living at Penhale Manor with Thomas since their marriage in 1934, and for Thomas this bequest represented his elevation to the landed gentry after his years as a younger son living in houses provided by his indulgent brother. In fact there was little land at Stourham Hall but Thomas was hardly idle; in addition to supervising his pig farm, which he transferred from Penhale Manor, he was still in charge of running the Godwin estates in Gower, and even if I were to whip away my father’s lands the likelihood remained that Thomas would be running Oxmoon indefinitely. Of course no one seriously thought poor old Kester would ever be able to manage his property himself.

My father had two farms in Gower, the Home Farm of Penhale Manor and the Martinscombe sheep farm beneath Penhale Down. Both farmhouses were assigned to foremen who reported to Thomas. Bronwen’s brother-in-law Huw Meredith had moved north to the Lleyn Peninsula after her departure, and so the foreman at the Home Farm was a stranger to me. So was the foreman at Martinscombe, but that didn’t concern me since my father declared that the Penhale Manor estate would be quite enough for me to cope with at the start of my new career. The bungalow Little Oxmoon, which stood on the Martinscombe lands, also belonged to my father but had been allotted to Aunt Celia back in 1934 after her husband ran off with a Hungarian.

I prepared to return to Penhale.

Did I think of Bella while I was making my preparations? Yes. I thought I would at last have the chance to assuage my guilt by telling her how sorry I was for what had happened. Did the thought of Bella influence me in my decision to return to Gower? No. It was now five years since our pathetic childhood love affair, and I had quite accepted that she belonged entirely to the past. I had had other girls by that time; I had other sexual memories to recall. It was true no memory could match the poignancy of those summer days in 1933, but that was beside the point. Nostalgia would get me nowhere. I had to look ahead, not back. I had to move on.

I wanted to move to the Manor immediately but my father refused to allow it. In his Victorian mind a young man couldn’t expect to escape unpunished after being sent down from Oxford, so he cut off my allowance for three months, a gesture that was the equivalent of jailing me at Eaton Walk. However when he suspected I might be enjoying myself playing the piano for hours while he was out, he found me a clerical job at the headquarters of Armstrong Investments and I had to waste endless sunny days addressing envelopes for circulars appealing for money on behalf of the Armstrong charities.