The Wheel of Fortune (16 page)

“No, no, Thomas,” my father was saying mildly to the child. “Glendower doesn’t like being christened with milk. Perhaps cold water, as it’s such a hot day.”

“Here come the childhood sweethearts!” caroled that idiot Lion.

“Where did you go?” called John cheerfully.

“Rhossili!” exclaimed Ginette. “My dear, that Worm’s Head! Too divine! We toiled all the way down to the Shipway—imagine! I feel exhausted!”

“Have my chair, Ginevra—”

“No, have mine—”

“Mine’s the best—”

“Darlings,” said Ginette, reclining gracefully upon the nearest proffered deck chair, “how heavenly you all are!”

“I’m sorry we’re late, Mama,” I said, sitting down next to my father.

“That’s quite all right, Robert. I hope you had a pleasant outing.” She turned to the footman. “Ifor, we’re going to need more hot water.”

“So sorry we’re late, Margaret!” said Ginette, accepting a cucumber sandwich from the butler. “I’m afraid it’s my fault—Robert didn’t realize that I’d promised we’d be home for tea.”

“That’s quite all right, Ginevra. Milk or lemon?”

“Oh, lemon would be delicious, as the weather’s so hot! In America, you know, they have iced tea—it sounds horrid but actually when the weather’s absolutely steaming …”

Settling down to join her in a bravura performance of our grand charade I began to discuss the merits of the motorcar with my father.

V

THE NEXT ORDEAL ON
the agenda was my parents’ “little dinner party for twenty-four” which, since not all the invited guests were able to come at such short notice, had turned out to be a little dinner party for eighteen. The Mowbrays were up in town and the Bryn-Davieses had a previous engagement in Swansea, but the de Bracys, the Stourhams and the Applebys all professed themselves eager to welcome Ginette home.

I was sorry the Bryn-Davieses were to be absent. My father had long ago befriended Owain Bryn-Davies the Younger, and with admirable determination had persisted in demonstrating his belief that the sins of my grandmother’s lover should not be blamed upon the next generation of the family. Owain the Younger had also suffered as the result of the debacle in the Eighties; his father had walked out on a wife and five children when he had gone to live at Oxmoon with his mistress. However later, well educated on the money his father had plundered from the Oxmoon estate, Owain the Younger had made an excellent marriage to the daughter of a Swansea coal-mine owner, and now he lived in immaculate middle-class respectability on the outskirts of Swansea. His only son Alun, a contemporary of mine at Harrow, was so grand that he barely knew one end of a sheep from the other.

“By the way,” said Lion after tea when the conversation turned to the approaching dinner party, “there’s something I want to ask.” He glanced around to make sure Ginette and the servants had retired indoors. “Do we admit Kinsella was murdered?”

“Absolutely not!” said my mother, effortlessly drawing the line. “We say he had an accident with a gun and of course everyone will be much too well-bred to make further inquiries.”

“Oh Mama, I don’t really have to wear black, do I?” begged Celia querulously. “I’ll look such a fright!”

“Well, I think navy blue
would
be permissible for you in the circumstances, dear. After all, Mr. Kinsella was not a blood relation and indeed was barely known to us. I of course shall wear black, but I see no reason why you shouldn’t allow yourself a little latitude so long as the color of your gown remains discreet.”

“My dear Celia,” I said later as we found ourselves going upstairs to change, “you’re twenty-nine years old! Can’t you make your own decisions about what to wear for a dinner party?”

“Oh, leave me alone, Robert—you’re always so beastly to me! Do you think I like being reminded that I’m nearly thirty and still living at home?”

For some reason which I failed to understand, conversations with my sister always sank to this fractious level. Celia seemed to think I despised her but I thought her worthy enough despite her plain looks and lack of intelligence. She occupied herself a great deal with charity work and was famous for her volumes of pressed wild flowers.

In my room while I waited for hot water to be brought to me I thought what a very different life Ginette had lived far away in unknown barbaric New York, and the next moment before I could stop myself I was seeing Kinsella’s rings on her finger and hearing her talk of her marital intimacy. “It brought us together in the beginning and it kept us together at the end. …” That disturbed me. I began to pace up and down. Finally I even shuddered, and when the hot water arrived it was all I could do not to cut myself as I shaved. I knew from my experience in criminal law that women, even good women, can become as addicted to carnal pleasure as many men, and it seemed to me that Ginette now sought not me at all but an opiate which would shut out her fear of the future.

I told myself firmly that I had reached the right decision on top of the cliffs at Rhossili that afternoon. I did not want to be treated as a soothing medicine contained in a bottle marked
TAKE REGULARLY AT BEDTIME
. Nor—and this was an even more horrific possibility—did I want to be treated as a substitute for Kinsella. I wanted to be wanted because I was myself, because I was the best man in the world for her, and bearing this in mind I had no alternative but to wait until she could give me the response I deserved. Any other solution was quite unacceptable.

I felt better, and congratulating myself that my thoughts on this most complicated subject were now in order, I set off briskly downstairs to the drawing room.

VI

SHE ENTERED THE ROOM
and my well-ordered mind fell apart into chaos. She wore a rich black satin gown, very décolleté and trimmed with yards of erotic black lace. A diamond pendant, sparkling against her creamy skin, pointed downwards like an arrow as if to emphasize her breasts, and her thick glowing auburn hair, piled high, was secured with a diamond clasp.

“How very fetching you look, Ginevra,” said my mother in a studiedly neutral voice.

“I’ll have to keep you away from Oswald,” said my father lightly, “or he’ll be so overcome he’ll swallow his soup spoon!”

Oswald Stourham, a great crony of my father’s, lived in an ugly modern house at Llangennith with his wife, his unmarried sister and his daughter. The daughter was too young to attend the dinner party, but his wife and sister accompanied him to Oxmoon that evening and when they all arrived Stourham, who looked like a
Punch
cartoon of an English gentleman and talked like an old-fashioned masher, predictably dropped his monocle as soon as he saw Ginette. He was a good-natured, brainless fellow who had thoroughly deserved to inherit the fortune of his father, a Birmingham manufacturer who had patented an interesting form of hip bath.

His unmarried sister Angela, a woman of about thirty-five who had once shared a governess with Ginette, was just giving her old friend a warm welcome when Bayliss announced the arrival of the de Bracys with their daughter and two sons. The evening was gathering momentum. Taking care not to look in Ginette’s direction I did my best to resume my grand charade.

Sir Gervase de Bracy, a gouty old roué who had seen better days, was already heading purposefully in my direction, jowls quivering with excitement.

“Robert, my boy—delightful to see you—heartiest congratulations on all your recent successes—”

Little Mrs. Stourham swooped down on me. “Why, Robert, how well you look—isn’t Robert looking distinguished, Sir Gervase! I declare those photographs in the newspapers don’t do him justice! Have you see the photographs of Robert in the newspapers, Lady de Bracy?”

“I only read the
Times,
Mrs. Stourham.”

Meanwhile Oswald Stourham had cornered me. “I say, Robert, uncommon clever of you to win that latest acquittal, don’t you know—I didn’t like to think of a pretty little thing like that ending up on the gallows—”

“But what I want to know,” interrupted the de Bracys’ daughter Gwen, “is how she got hold of the arsenic! I never quite understood—”

“Gwen dear, murder’s so vulgar. Must you?”

Ginette and I were facing each other across the room. Hastily glancing in the opposite direction I found myself looking straight at my mother, and my mother, I was unnerved to discover, was looking straight at me.

“—yes, yes, I
know
she was acquitted but that was entirely owing to Robert’s brilliance—”

Meanwhile Oswald Stourham had turned aside to gossip with his crony. “… and how the deuce did poor Ginevra’s husband die, Bobby?”

“Oh,” I heard my father say easily, “it was just a little accident with a firearm.”

“Margaret”—Mrs. Stourham darted between me and my mother—“I hardly expected to see Ginevra looking so
thriving
!”

“Dearest Ginevra,” said my mother, “has great recuperative powers.”

At that moment Bayliss announced the arrival of Sir William and Lady Appleby, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Ginette steel herself for new horrors.

“Dear Ginevra, you must have been quite prostrated …”

The Applebys, who had long since decided to thank God that Kinsella had saved their son from a disastrous fate, were now more than willing to inundate Ginette with benign platitudes to conceal how much they disliked her.

“Dear Aunt Maud,” said Ginette, kissing Lady Appleby on both cheeks, “how kind you are! Yes, I’m sure it’ll take me simply years to recover—”

“Are you all right, Robert?” said John at my elbow.

“No. I think I’ve got a touch of sunstroke.”

“Lord, how awkward! Tell Mama.”

“No, I’ll struggle on.”

I struggled. Gallantly I took Lady Appleby in to dinner. Valiantly I labored through watercress soup, vanquished my lobster and feinted an attack on my roast duck. Doggedly I toiled in the coils of some formidably forgettable conversation. And all the while across the table Ginette glittered in her satin and diamonds and made a mockery of my charade of indifference.

“Robert, you’re shifting around on your chair as if it were a bed of nails!” protested Gwen de Bracy on my left.

“I’m so sorry, I thought I was showing matchless stoicism in the face of discomfort.”

I was indeed in discomfort but the discomfort was of a nature inconceivable to an unmarried woman.

“Do tell us more about London, Robert!” urged Mrs. Stourham across the table. “I suppose you go absolutely everywhere—what’s it like at Number Ten?”

I duly trotted out my Margot Asquith stories and before I could be asked how much her husband drank I deflected the conversation towards his eldest son Raymond whom I had known up at Oxford; like myself he was a Balliol man.

Somehow I survived the introduction of pudding, cheese and dessert and sustained the illusion that I was still eating. My glass of claret remained untouched, an impressive monument to my sobriety, but in contrast all the other guests had become very merry indeed and I had to spend a considerable amount of energy trying to pretend I was equally carefree.

Finally to my unutterable relief the ladies retired and the cloth was drawn. I hardly dared stand up as the ladies left the room, but managed to do so with a subtle flourish of my napkin. Sinking back into my chair as the door closed I then allowed myself to hope that my physical condition would be eased now that Ginette was no longer shimmering before my eyes, but I was to have no respite. Oswald Stourham embarked on some long story about a friend of his who knew someone who knew someone else who had slept with Lillie Langtry, and the very thought of a man fortunate enough to go to bed with any woman, even an aging Lillie Langtry, was enough to make me start shifting again in my chair.

My father had by this time noticed that something was amiss. “Robert, are you quite well?”

“I think if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll retire to the cloakroom for a moment.”

More sleight of hand with my napkin followed, but everyone was much too busy talking of Mrs. Langtry to pay any attention.

I was just washing my hands some minutes later when my father knocked at the cloakroom door and called my name.

I drew back the bolt to let him in. “I’m afraid I’ve just been sick,” I said, dredging up my remaining strength to lie convincingly. “I must have caught a touch of the sun this afternoon at the Worm. Would you and Mama think it very bad form if I excused myself and went upstairs?”

Five minutes later I was sitting on the edge of my bed and wondering, amidst the ruins of my well-ordered mind, what the devil. I was going to do.

VII

ALTHOUGH I WAS BY
no means sexually inexperienced I had never before been rendered irrational by physical desire. Periodically I had felt the need to have sexual intercourse and periodically I had done so. I had always tried to behave well; I had not consorted with prostitutes; I had not made trouble with husbands; I had never had more than one mistress at a time; I had always terminated the affair as painlessly as possible when it bored me; I had done my best to be courteous, honest and kind. However it had never occurred to me before that this splendidly civilized behavior had only been possible because my deepest emotions had remained unengaged.

This uncomplicated private life had suited me well, perhaps better than I had realized at the time. I actually have very simple emotional tastes. (Someone else had commented on that recently but I could not quite remember who it was.) My prime concern when I embark on a liaison is that there should be no fuss and no mess. Naturally I expect to do what I want in bed but there again my tastes are straightforward and no woman has yet appeared to find them tiresome. Sexual athletics require skill, of course; I have no wish to imply that Burton’s translation of the
Kama Sutra
escaped me at Oxford, but in my opinion the skill is easily mastered and although I enjoy the game there are other sports I enjoy as much and more. I would put it below mountaineering, on a par with rugger and slightly above cricket in any list of sports in which a gentleman should wish to excel.