The Wheel of Fortune (127 page)

Meanwhile, as I toiled away at my office desk in secret and sordid disgrace, poor old Kester, poor old sod, who I had always assumed was incapable of a wet dream, was staging a glorious elopement well worthy of Hollywood at its sloppiest. I could almost hear the soaring violins as he walked away into the golden sunset with that nice intelligent little girlfriend of his who was so very much too good for him. The one redeeming feature of the situation was that at least someone other than me would now receive the full blast of my father’s disapproval, and this comforting prospect enabled me to go on addressing envelopes with tranquillity while I waited for my father to annihilate him.

But the annihilation never happened. Poor feeble old Kester had somehow trounced my formidable father and gone walking on into the golden sunset. What was more, my father even came back impressed from the confrontation at Gretna Green. I couldn’t believe it. Then when I did believe it, I didn’t like it. In fact, to be frank, I hated it.

“I’ve underestimated that boy,” said my father. “I think he may well turn out to be the most remarkable young man. How well he argued his case! He even reminded me of Robert.”

Uncle Robert was the family hero. With his story enshrined in myth and his memory bathed in a perpetual glowing light, his name was synonymous with colossal success in life and superhuman courage in adversity. To say that Kester recalled a memory of Robert was the highest compliment my father could ever pay his nephew. I felt as if a knife were revolving in my gut; somehow I managed to say casually, “Good for Kester—I hope he lives happily ever after,” but it was no good. I couldn’t resist adding: “Of course I wouldn’t be seen dead at the altar before I was twenty-five.”

Famous last words.

Six weeks later Aunt Ginevra died at Oxmoon and we all gathered for her memorial service at Penhale. The church was full. I was with the rest of the family in the front pews, but as we all stood for the first hymn I looked over my shoulder at the pews across the aisle and the next moment I saw Bella, sullen and luscious, looking back.

IX

She at once buried her nose in her hymnbook and looked more sullen than ever. I realized then that the child I had known and perhaps loved in my own childish way had gone forever and was never going to come back. All the women I had loved had gone away and never come back: my mother, my old nanny, Bronwen—and now Bella, replaced by this unknown young woman of eighteen who was obviously determined not to acknowledge my existence.

As the clergyman droned on I felt my anger towards women surfacing, the anger that had prompted me to play around at Oxford without caring whom I hurt. I had had no affairs, just a string of incidents. To have affairs was impossible because I knew I had to leave a woman before she could leave me. The alternative was to risk suffering a pain I was no longer prepared to endure.

So I turned my back on Bella, who was clearly so determined to abandon me, and told myself that even if she had shown interest I would have rejected her. But the rest of the service still passed in a haze of misery.

There was to be a family lunch afterwards at Oxmoon before Kester departed for Ireland with his brothers, but outside the church I heard Eleanor say to Anna, “I’m afraid Bella’s feeling frightful—will you excuse her if she goes straight home?”

I tried to slip past but directly ahead of me Thomas had paused beside his wife. I turned aside—and there I was, face to face with Bella again, and my father no more than a pace behind me with Constance.

Speech was impossible. I tried to say hullo, but nothing happened. Bella stared furiously at the nearest tombstone. Around us, people chatted in muted voices of inanities.

“Hullo, Bella,” said my father politely.

She didn’t answer but tugged her brother-in-law’s hand. “Thomas, take me home.”

“All right, old girl,” said Thomas kindly enough, and they moved away together through the crowd.

“What a very rude unattractive girl,” said Constance disapprovingly. “I feel sorry for Thomas and Eleanor having to give her a home.”

We all went to Oxmoon for lunch. Damned Kester sat in our grandfather’s great carved chair and gave a gala performance as master of Oxmoon—dry eyes, stiff upper lip, the lot. In fact, he was positively glittering in his role of the perfect Godwin of all time. Why had I never realized that Kester looked like Uncle Robert? He had those same pale clever eyes and that fine-drawn jawline which somehow, by a trick of the bone structure, gave an impression not of delicacy but of strength. Of course he was still plain as a pikestaff with that large nose and womanish hair, but all the same … plain people can be striking. I felt too dark, as saturnine as a stage villain, and profoundly unattractive. When we all stood up at the end of the meal I was very conscious that he had wound up taller than I was. I’m five feet eleven. Of course I tell everyone I’m six feet. Kester
was
six feet. He might even have been six feet one. In fact that day I even wondered if he could be six feet two.

I couldn’t stand it. I got out of the house, cut across the lawn and plunged into the woods. The jackdaws in the ruined tower were still saying “caw-caw,” and I still knew that what they were really saying was “dispossessed, dispossessed.” I thought: I have been here before—miserable, alone and in retreat.

I walked on. I could have stopped, but I went on. I left the grounds by the door in the wall, crossed the road and set off across the heather to Sweyn’s Houses. There were no wild ponies browsing nearby this time, but the sky was just as blue and the light wind still had that faint tang of salt from the sea.

I reached the summit of the ridge and there on top of Rhossili Downs I saw the dazzling view exactly as it had been five years before, the waves streaming languidly over the golden sands, the sea a glittering hypnotic blue, the Shipway about to sink beneath a wide arc of white foam.

I looked along the ridge but there was no one in sight; history never really repeats itself. Finding the fuck rock I stood looking at it. I smiled as I remembered how we had shaken hands politely after our first encounter, not knowing how else to confirm our new friendship, and suddenly I was touched by our extreme innocence. I sat down on the rock as if I could no longer remain upright beneath the weight of my memories, and it was directly after this, as I looked once more along the ridge, that I saw her running towards me from Llangennith.

I leaped to my feet. She never stopped but she waved. I ran and ran and she ran and ran too; she ran all the way into my outstretched arms.

“You came back,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “You went away—but you came back.”

I took her in my arms and promised her I’d never go away again.

X

“Oh Harry, it was so awful, I was so unhappy and so frightened, I can’t tell you how frightened I was, and Aunt was beastly,
beastly
—”

“Shhh. Don’t think about it. Just don’t think.”

“I can’t help it. I have nightmares—”

“So do I. What was the baby like?”

“I never saw her. That was awful too. In fact that was the most awful thing of all. They gave me an injection because I was screaming so much, and when I came round it was over and she’d been taken away. I wanted to see her but they said in the circumstances it was better not and anyway she was ill and then she died and I still wanted to see her but they said no, it would only upset me more. I asked, I begged, I screamed, I wept, but they said I might get emotionally disturbed, it was better not, and now I get these nightmares when I’m looking and looking for her and digging up cemeteries—”

“We’ll have another baby. We’ll get married and have another. I’ll put everything right.”

Shoving aside her cigarette, she stubbed it out in the earth beneath the short grass and burrowed blindly into my arms. A muffled childlike voice said, “You don’t have to. I don’t want you to do it just to make it up to me.”

“I want to.”

We were sitting on the fuck rock. Below us the holidaymakers, scattered dots on the vast beach, were enjoying the rarity of a perfect summer day. Away to our right a party of people on horseback were moving towards us along the top of the Downs, and beyond them we could see hikers and a child flying a kite. The sea gulls soared in the wind currents. The surf murmured in our ears, and beyond the cliffs at Rhossili the Worm’s Head was cut off once more by the white water as the Shipway went under.

“I want to make love to you,” I said.

“Fuck, you mean?” she said doubtfully, and at once she became the child of thirteen again to whom fuck was just another four-letter word like skip or jump without any offensive connotations. “Oh, Harry, I couldn’t, not without being married. I’d be too afraid of it all happening again.”

“That’s exactly why I said ‘I want to’ instead of ‘I’m going to.’ ” I had a quick think. I had brought no sheaths with me to Gower; one hardly sets off for one’s aunt’s memorial service armed to the teeth with contraceptives. There was now a chemist in Penhale, but if I went there to buy what I needed the whole village would know in less than an hour that Harry Godwin was up to no good. I wondered wildly if my father used contraceptives but thought it unlikely. A family rumor had long been in circulation that Constance was anxious for another child.

I groaned in frustration. Bella looked anxious. I explained the problem to her.

“Maybe Thomas has some!” was her bright response. “Bobby’s nearly two now and Eleanor hasn’t got pregnant again.”

That settled that. I jumped up. “Come on, we’re off to Stourham Hall!”

We dashed off hand in hand along the path, both of us laughing, and suddenly the world seemed dazzling to me and I knew what it was to be happy. Stourham Hall lay about a mile away where the Downs sloped to the sand burrows. We sneaked into the house by a side door. Thomas and Eleanor might still be out but there was always the danger of a wandering servant.

“Supposing Thomas and Eleanor come back?”

“No, I’d say we have at least two hours—they’ll wait to see off Kester and Co. who are leaving for Ireland. I heard Thomas mention that to my father this morning.”

We invaded the marital chamber. It was a plain, no-nonsense room large enough to swallow up several vast pieces of Victorian furniture. There was a good view of the sea beyond the burrows.

“Lord, I hope we’re right about this!” I muttered. “It’d be just our luck if he went in for
coitus interruptus
instead.”

“What’s that? If it’s awful I bet he’d do it. He’s so peculiar.”

I was too busy hunting to give this remark the attention it deserved. The drawer of the bedside table was empty. I ransacked Eleanor’s dressing table. Bella looked under the mattress. We were giggling all the time.

“Oh heavens, Harry, supposing we don’t find any? I’ll burst with frustration—I’m wild for it!”

“Wild? I’m berserk.” I ripped open the door of the wardrobe and saw a dressing gown. There was a bulge in the pocket. “Eureka!” I shouted.

“Oh, thank God!”

We rushed to her bedroom, locked the door and hurtled into each other’s arms.

XI

“I called the baby Melody,” said Bella, “because I knew you were so fond of music. But beastly old Aunt said it wasn’t Christian and she told them to put Jane on the birth certificate. There had to be a birth certificate because the baby did live a few hours. Aunt had your name put on it as the father. She said she did it to relieve her feelings but it wouldn’t matter because no one we knew was ever going to go hunting in the birth records at Geneva. Oh, Aunt was cruel to me, so cruel and hard and cold—”

“Shhh.” I began to make love to her again to blot out all the terrible memories. Vaguely I wondered what Thomas would think when he found not one but two of his sheaths were missing, but perhaps he wasn’t the kind of man who always knew how many he had in reserve. All I could do was wish him a touch of amnesia.

Bella was only approximately the same shape as she had been at thirteen because now there was more of her, and the additional weight was so strikingly distributed that within seconds of ejaculation, or so it seemed, I was once more in a state of chronic sexual excitement. She had long lissom legs, slim hips, a narrow waist and a bosom that had to be seen to be believed. I saw it and still didn’t believe it. With perfect truth I told her she was the sexiest girl I had ever seen in my life.

“How many have you seen?” she said jealously at once.

I saw no point in lying about this. “Well, of course I had a few girls up at Oxford—I thought I was never going to see you again. But they didn’t mean anything. They were just good for a quick fuck.”

“Lucky old you. I wouldn’t have minded some quick fucks, but I was too frightened, and anyway there was no one to fuck. Aunt watched me like a jailer too. Oh, the relief when Daddy died! He left me money, you know, so I thought I’d be able to get away at last, but the money’s all tied up till I’m twenty-five so here I am, still stuck with Eleanor and Thomas—and oh God, he’s so
peculiar
!”

This time I took notice. “In what way?”

“He gives me peculiar looks.”

I sat bolt upright in bed. “My God, are you trying to tell me—”

“Oh no, he’s crazy about Eleanor; in fact he’s keener on her than she is on him. It was the other way around before they were married, but—”

“Then what are you trying to say?”

“I think he amuses himself by imagining all sorts of peculiar things he’d like to do to me—only of course he never would because he’s so mad about Eleanor.”

I sagged back appalled on the pillows. “When did all this begin?”

“Oh, about a month after they started living here this spring. I couldn’t sleep one night so I set off for the kitchens to make myself some tea, and I was just passing their bedroom door when I heard them snorting around like a couple of pigs so I stopped to listen, I don’t know why, maybe because I’ve never been able to imagine Eleanor doing it. Anyway, suddenly a mouse ran over my foot and I screamed and a moment later Thomas came charging out and yelled that if ever I listened at the door again he’d beat me—well, he just said that, he didn’t mean it, it was just a way of letting off steam, and then suddenly he looked at me as if he were thinking, ‘Hullo, that’s an interesting idea—’ ”