The Wheel of Fortune (175 page)

Glancing up at the tower I remembered how Kester had donated the money to have the clock restored. He had arranged for a new chime, melodious and discreet, and the villagers, who for decades had been battered by the clanking of the old chimes, had been well pleased.

It was almost eight o’clock. I looked in the porch. There was no sign of her but when I moved around the tower I saw her at once by the Godwin graves. She was sitting by Kester’s tombstone and tugging at the grass with abrupt restless movements of her fingers. Her long brown hair, dead straight, fell like a curtain so that I could barely see her profile but as I moved towards her she looked up.

I saw the face I remembered. She sprang to her feet but I came to a halt, and above us, far above us in the belfry, the church clock began to whisper the hour.

X

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Do we shake hands or just smile at each other?”

“Neither,” she said in a voice I didn’t remember. Three years up at Oxford had eliminated all trace of her Welsh accent. “I see no point in formality and I’m not in the mood for simpering. What a very arrogant message you sent me! I suppose you’re used to women rushing to meet you whenever you toss out a summons!”

“I wanted to see you and I thought you’d want to see me—and here you are so I was right. How come you’re so uptight? I’m not interested in making it with you—I got over all that when I was sixteen.”

“Super,” she said drily. “Well done.”

We moved past Kester’s grave to the iron bench beneath the ancient yew tree.

“Are the flowers from you?”

She shook her head. “No, but there are often flowers on his grave nowadays—he seems to have become rather a cult figure. The older people regard him as a symbol of the good old days when everyone kept their hair short and went to church on Sunday, and the younger people think of him as a real cool guy who did his own thing.”

“Kester would have been tickled pink!”

“My God, yes, I believe he would!” she said, and the next moment we were both laughing.

Then we paused and took a long look at each other. I saw a woman of twenty-six, very much shorter than I was. I’m six feet two. She was no more than five feet three. She had a rich heavy curving body which she had penned up in a prim navy-blue dress with a starched white collar. Her lower lip was full but the thin line of her upper lip held it resolutely in a straight uncompromising line. She had a square pugnacious chin and a high wide intelligent forehead below the center parting of her hair. Her eyes were bright blue, just like my grandfather’s, and this eerie resemblance to one of my own relatives reminded me of the nineteenth-century connection between the Llewellyns and the Godwins. My great-great-grandfather had married her great-great-great-aunt. Kester had drawn up an elaborate family tree to show that we were fourth cousins.

It was a long time since we had last met.

After Kester died various circumstances had combined to drive us gradually apart. I was away for most of the year at school; we were both on the verge of adolescence with all its accompanying constraints; perhaps most important of all we each reminded the other of Kester and as time passed we came to shun the pain of remembering him.

Then when I was fifteen and she was a few months younger we had met by chance in Swansea. I had recently been expelled from Harrow, and my father had found a tutor in Swansea who was trying to prepare me for my O-levels. I used to meet Gwyneth in a coffee bar every afternoon when she finished school.

When we discovered how much we were still haunted by Kester we had decided to look up the report of the inquest in an attempt to face the facts of his death squarely. Singly we had never been able to drum up the courage to do this, but together we had given each other the strength.

Because of its sensational nature the inquest had been reported with exceptional fullness in the local press and we read every word we could find. By this time, three years after Kester’s death, the public had almost forgotten the tactful verdict of the coroner’s jury that Kester had died by accident and it was the firm opinion not only of the majority of my family but of hers that Kester had committed suicide. Consequently neither Gwyneth nor I seriously queried that he had killed himself. We regarded it as unarguable, and although we noted Evan’s evidence of euphoria we discarded it: Gwyneth thought Kester had been happy because he had come back to Gower in order to die in surroundings of great beauty and peace. I just thought he had been putting on an act so that Evan wouldn’t worry about him. Neither of us believed that Kester had been on the brink of beginning a new book. “He never mentioned it to me,” said Gwyneth, who had seen him on the morning of his death. “Obviously it was just something he invented to make sure everyone thought he was normal.” We both assumed that the loss of Oxmoon had been responsible for his suicide. We told each other that without Oxmoon and Anna he would have been unable to write or to see any purpose in continuing to live.

This resurrection of our mutual grief drew us still closer together, and I began to see her at weekends. Not being a virgin I was soon sure what I wanted. Being a virgin she wasn’t so sure as I was. In the end, as we were struggling together in a time-honored fashion in the nearest haystack, she lost her temper and screamed, “Leave me alone—you’ll never measure up to Kester!” and that was that. Jasper Llewellyn arrived on the scene seconds later but by that time it was all over.

Later she wrote:
I’d like to be friends with you but you make it impossible. Why can’t you be more like Kester? He was sensible about sex
—
he just regarded it as something married people do and I’m quite sure he would
never
have let it spoil a perfect friendship. If you can measure up to Kester, then I want to know you. If you can’t I’d rather we didn’t meet again.

I never wrote back. We never met again.

She did well at school and won a place at Oxford to read English. Kester would have been proud of her. When she had her degree she spent a year acquiring a teacher’s diploma, and that was the last I heard of her before little Caitlin told me of the job in the big private girls’ school in Swansea.

“I hear you’re a huge success,” she said as we sat down together on the bench beneath the yew tree. “I can’t stand that kind of music myself, but I’m glad you’re doing well.”

“I’m not doing well. And I’m not a success. But things are going to change,” I said, and I began to talk of my past and my present.

She kept a sizable space between us on the bench as she listened, her legs firmly crossed, her hands folded primly in her lap. Here indeed was the maiden of myth, a virgin bound to the stake of chastity and guarded by the magic dragon of the past.

The urge to play Saint George stole over me again. To combat it I too crossed one leg over the other and folded my hands primly in my lap. My jeans began to feel as close-fitting as a second skin.

“… and so there it is,” I heard myself say at last. “I’ve quit on drugs, booze and sex and I’m living like a hermit at Oxmoon while pursuing a career as Sherlock Holmes.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Women go mad over reformed rakes. You’ll soon be besieged—probably much to your relief.”

“Well, at least I don’t have to worry about you, do I? Or are you making it with six different guys on the grand scale?”

“Mind your own business.” She got up and wandered towards Kester’s grave.

That meant no. I followed her. “Gwyneth—”

“Oh Hal,” she said, suddenly dropping her defenses as she swung to face me, “how I wish I could help you!”

“What do you mean? Why do you say it like that?”

We stood by his grave and stared at each other.

“Do you think I haven’t tried to prove to myself it was an accident?” she said. “Do you think I haven’t been where you are now?” Tears suddenly sprang to her eyes.

“You mean—”

“It was suicide,” she said. “He really did kill himself. I know he did. I know it.”

XI

“It all began,” said Gwyneth, “when I went up to Oxford and met this man who said I was hung up on sex. I wasn’t sure he was right, but because I liked him very much I found myself being forced to think hard again about Kester, and that was the first time I’d made a serious adult attempt to analyze my feelings for him. I knew I loved him very much but since I was nineteen by that time and not stupid I had to acknowledge that my feelings were very far from unambivalent. I felt he’d betrayed me by committing suicide, and as soon as I’d faced up to the anger I felt I wondered if I’d been subconsciously venting my resentment on all the men I’d met since his death.

“Well, this amateur psychology was all very well, but just sitting around thinking wasn’t going to cure me and I knew I had to do something constructive. That was when I made up my mind to prove that Kester hadn’t committed suicide; like you I felt that once I’d proved he’d died by accident I wouldn’t have to be so angry with him anymore.

“So the next time I came home to Gower I roped in my brother Trevor and we went off to the Worm together. What I wanted to prove was that it was possible for Kester to have fallen into the sea by accident, but Hal, we spent the whole five hours between tides crawling over that bloody peninsula and we both agreed afterwards that the possibility just didn’t exist. Kester wasn’t athletic. He wouldn’t have taken any risks. There are only three places where an accident of that kind might have happened: first there’s that rough stretch between the Inner and Middle Heads, but I’m sure he would have kept clear of the edge that falls sheer to the sea; second there’s the Devil’s Bridge, and third there’s the blowhole on the Outer Head, but I can’t see him falling down the blowhole which is such a famous hazard. In fact I can’t see him ever getting as far as the Outer Head because I can’t see him making the effort to cross the Devil’s Bridge.

“You know the Bridge. There’s basically nothing dangerous about it—it’s wider than it looks from a distance—but it’s a nightmare to anyone who’s afraid of vertigo and Kester wasn’t keen on heights. I know he did cross the Bridge on our expeditions to the Worm, but it was an effort he made to show us we didn’t need to be afraid, and I think if he’d been on his own he wouldn’t have bothered. And even if he had bothered I can’t see him suffering such an attack of vertigo that he reeled into the abyss. As a matter of fact, I don’t think he’d ever actually had an attack of vertigo. His dislike of heights was debilitating but not disabling.”

She stopped talking. A few yards away the flowers on Kester’s grave trembled in the faint breeze.

I thought of Evan’s theory which I had found so plausible but all I said was “And the Shipway?”

She looked at me in surprise. “Oh, but we know he couldn’t have drowned there! Why, I don’t believe I ever raised the possibility with you when we read the inquest report—I just assumed we both knew a disaster on the Shipway was quite out of the question!”

I could feel the palms of my hands sweating as I clenched my fists. “But is it?”

“Of course! Hal, Kester would never, never have made a mistake about the Shipway. For God’s sake, don’t you remember? He crossed it, recrossed it, photographed it, mapped it and watched it sink over and over again when he was writing that novel about Gwyneth Godwin and Owain Bryn-Davies. Kester was the world’s expert on the Shipway. He could have seen at a glance exactly when it was due to go under.”

XII

There was a silence. Then I said, “Well, I suppose all investigators have their blind spots and that was certainly mine.” I groped for my notebook, found a clean page and wrote:
NO ACCIDENT.
While I was writing my voice said, “But of course you can’t rule out the possibility of a freak wave.”

“That’s true. But I’m afraid I’m not very good at believing in freak waves, especially as Kester would never have risked crossing the Shipway until it was quite safe.”

“I’m not very good at believing in suicide. Listen, Gwyneth. Both Evan and Richard are certain that Kester either had begun or was about to begin a brand-new book. Now, can you honestly see Kester committing suicide when he was on a big creative high?”

She was silent, and as I realized there was something she wasn’t telling me I felt the dread tighten my muscles once more. Her striking face with its powerful sensual mouth was in shadow. She looked away.

“Tell me again,” I said at last, “exactly what happened when you called at the cottage on the morning of his death.”

Still she was silent. Then she made an effort and turned to face me.

“I thought I could wait till the weekend to see him but I couldn’t. I cut school and cycled over to Rhossili. I wondered if he’d be working but he wasn’t—he was about to go out for a walk. He seemed pleased to see me, but at the same time he was preoccupied and finally he tried to leave. I wanted to go with him on the walk but he said as nicely as possible that he had a lot on his mind and he wanted to be alone to think. I got a bit upset … stupid of me … I suppose I was in rather an emotional state; it was just so wonderful to see him again and I couldn’t bear it when he seemed to be brushing me off. … Then he—well, he was nice. He stayed a little longer after all and when I was better he gave me some chocolate and told me to come back at the weekend with Trevor.

“I asked him if he’d be working in the morning and he said, ‘Oh no, there’s no question of that,’ and that was when I got the impression he had no literary plans at that time. I remember noticing he hadn’t taken the cover off his typewriter.

“Then I asked him if I could come alone without Trevor but he said, ‘I think a group’s more fun, don’t you?’ and so I had to tell him that I didn’t think Trevor would come as my parents didn’t want us to see him—Kester—anymore. He was very upset by that. It was awful. He said, ‘Why? What are they getting at?’ and then I became upset again too because of course I couldn’t tell him they thought he was mentally unstable. But I flung my arms around him and I kissed him and I said, ‘
I
trust you and
I
love you,’ and I showed him the locket he’d given me, Anna’s locket, and I said, ‘
I
wear this every day in memory of you,’ and then …” She stopped.