The Wheel of Fortune (179 page)

While I was singing it occurred to me what a ragbag of culture the twentieth-century mind was, and as I meditated on my unlikely journey from Emily Brontë to Hank Williams I found myself wondering whether Kester would have liked American country music. He hadn’t been a musical snob and he would have been romantic enough to enjoy all the endless tales of lost love.

Kester had never talked of sex, only of romance. “My parents had this fairy-tale love story,” I could remember him saying. “They fell passionately in love with each other as they danced beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played ‘The Blue Danube.’ ”

That sounded like a tall story. I was just mentally chalking it up as one of Kester’s fictions when I reached the shingle beach, and pulling out my notebook I paused to jot down the time. Ahead of me Caitlin had almost reached the Inner Head. I could see her blue shirt and jeans bobbing up and down among the last rocks while her ponytail fluttered in the breeze.

She never looked back.

I toiled on.

Caitlin reached the Inner Head, scrambled up the bank, brushed down her jeans and moved on. Within minutes she was disappearing around the curving path, and although I watched her closely I could have sworn she never once looked back.

I looked back. I glanced around at the dazzling views of sky and sea, sands and cliffs which stretched away from me on all sides into the heat haze. Anyone communing with nature or sunk deep in a creative dream would surely have stopped to absorb the sights that now met my eyes. To ignore such scenery would have been unthinkable to someone who had elevated the concept of Beauty into a slogan for the Good Life.

I slithered into a rock pool, cursed, clambered out, trod on a starfish, winced and thanked God I hadn’t broken an ankle. I tried to quicken my pace but the terrain was brutal. I started cursing again.

A quarter of an hour later, hot, breathless and exasperated by my struggles, I reached the Inner Head and crawled up onto the shallow bank where the springy turf was carpeted with little pink wild flowers. In my notebook I wrote:”
11:03. I reach the Inner Head.
The view was so extraordinary that I felt I could classify it as hypnotic. I could have gazed at it for far longer than the ten seconds I allowed myself but I hadn’t toiled across that Shipway just to enjoy the view. Snapping my notebook shut I stowed it away and moved on.

I saw her soon after I had reached the southern flank. She had found the rocky spur and was perched at one end of it overlooking the sea. She was still a small figure many yards away but there was no mistaking her. Her clothes made a splash of color among the browns and greens of that treeless landscape.

I shouted: “Kester, what the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?” but she didn’t move. Several seconds elapsed before she turned her head and saw me. I waved, and after noting the time again I walked briskly down the path towards her.

“Hullo!” she said as soon as I was in earshot. “Was I all right?”

“Did you hear me just now?”

“Hear you? No.”

“And while you were staring out to sea you didn’t see me. So if you hadn’t been expecting me you wouldn’t have been aware of my approach even if I’d called out when I first saw you. … Okay. Now for the big question: Did you look back?”

“Oh yes, constantly. I kept a close watch on you all the way.”

III

NOTES ON THE SHIPWAY:

The truth is that quarter of an hour apart is a long way and although the big gestures are visible the smaller ones are not. I’m now certain that Kester knew he was being followed, and this explodes the premise on which Declan based his theory. Whatever experiments Declan and Rory conducted here after the inquest, they obviously didn’t bother to keep themselves quarter of an hour apart on the Shipway. This brings us back to Evan who was sure that Kester would have kept going if he knew my father was behind him
—
but of course Evan was assuming that Kester was innocent of any hostile intentions towards my father. Kester would surely only hang about on the Inner Head if he were masterminding an elaborate plot
—
and this brings me to my father’s testimony. So far it pans out. I’m now very tempted to believe my father when he says Kester was waiting for him on this spur of rock
—
that was the point when my father had to make his crucial decision about whether to go on or turn back, and Kester would have made an extra effort to lure him on by allowing him to catch up a little.

VERDICT:
So far so good. But what in God’s name happened next?

IV

“What do we do now, Hal?” said Caitlin as I closed my notebook.

“Just stay there for a minute.”

I walked down the spur and looked at the sea. There were no cliffs at this point. The land sloped to the rocks at the water’s edge. I was thinking of Declan again and trying to work out the conclusions he had drawn. It now seemed clear that he had visualized Kester lost in thought, gazing out to sea and utterly oblivious of my father’s approach, and bearing that picture in mind I had no trouble imagining Declan’s script: my father had come into view, seen Kester, called out but received no response; at that point he’d suddenly realized he had an opportunity to dispose of his neurotic cousin once and for all, and driven on by a paranoid impulse he had forgotten the witnesses on the Shipway earlier, crept up behind Kester, stunned him with a karate chop and shoved him into the sea.

I decided that up to this point the script was credible—just—but it then occurred to me to wonder how Declan had visualized the disposal of the body. The tide now was still falling to low-water but back on that evening in ’52 the tide had been on the rise. I knew that the currents around the Worm were fierce but so was the tide crashing up the Bristol Channel, and I thought a body ditched on the southern flank would have been almost immediately washed up again. I wondered how Declan had talked his way out of that one.

I decided that Declan’s theory couldn’t be made to work even if, against all the odds, Kester really had remained unaware of my father’s presence. And that meant I had now disposed once and for all of the evidence of Declan Kinsella.

“Okay,” I said to Caitlin as I rejoined her. “Now we’re going to play a rerun of the scene where I come into view, but this time as soon as you see me you get up and start to run.”

“Is it a race now?”

“Yes, but for God’s sake don’t break your neck, on the rough stretch that connects the Inner and the Middle Heads—in fact don’t take any risks at all. Kester would have shunned acrobatics.”

“Okay, but Hal, this never happened, did it?”

“No, my father turned back. But what I want to establish is what Kester thought might happen if my father chased him.”

Again she showed intelligence. “How can we be sure we’re moving at their pace?”

“We can’t. But I still think we can arrive at a similar result. Kester had longer legs than you but you’re more athletic. I’m younger than my father was then but he was probably in first-class physical condition. Let’s try the experiment and see what happens.”

I retreated from her sight. Then I entered the time in my notebook, nerved myself for action and once more headed towards that spur of rock.

I saw Caitlin. Caitlin saw me. She hared away, and within seconds she was out of sight, following the curve of the path away from the flank to the end of the Inner Head.

I was my father. I counted to ten to give him time to make up his mind, took a deep breath and began to run.

I was horrified by how out of training I was. I got a stitch before I reached the end of the flank and I had to bend double for a cure. My father would have done better than that. On recovering I sprinted off again, turned the corner and saw Caitlin still far ahead of me as the path led onto the connecting link between the Inner and the Middle Heads. This was a minor version of the Shipway, but set above the high-water mark. By the time I reached it, Caitlin was nearer but already halfway across.

This stretch of rough terrain was more puzzling to traverse than the Shipway although it looked easier. I made a false start and had to go back. My father, following Kester the expert, would have done better, but Caitlin was no expert and I guessed she had made a false start too.

We sweated on. Caitlin finally reached the Middle Head and hared off again along the path. She was obviously in prime condition, much fitter than Kester would have been. With a great effort of will I raised my speed to put me level with my father, and when I top reached the other side of the rocks I raced headlong down the path to reduce Caitlin’s lead.

I saw the Devil’s Bridge.

Caitlin was there, skimming across the slender arch of rock that spanned the abyss between the Middle and the Outer Heads. But she was ahead of Kester. Kester was still in the middle of the Bridge and Kester in my mind’s eye was turning to face me. I rushed on. The ground fell away on either side of the path. I was there. I was on the Bridge. I looked down. The abyss was deep, the rock face sheer, and far below the sea was a mass of roaring foam.

I stopped, and as I remained motionless I saw my world go black. The impossible had become the possible, the inconceivable had become the conceivable and there was darkness at noon.

I covered my face with my hands to shut out the horror of that brilliant morning, and then very slowly I sank to my knees, let my hands fall and once more looked over the abyss into the hell which lay churning below.

V

She thought I had vertigo. She sped back to me. Her strong sunburned little hand gripped my wrist. “It’s all right, Hal, it’s all right—
you can’t fall.
No one could possibly fall off here unless someone gave them a terrific shove—”

No coward soul is mine.

“Oh my God, my God—”

“Take my hand, Hal, hold my hand.”

I held it. I got myself together. I did it by thinking of Emily Brontë, facing death at thirty and writing her courageous poem. Struggling to my feet I walked back off the Bridge, sat down on the nearest rock, glanced at my watch and made a careful note of the time.

Of course my father had never got back across the Shipway that night. Never. Impossible.

“Hal, are you all right?”

“Uh-huh. Sorry. Stupid of me.” My pen was still poised in my hand. I began an elaborate doodle in the margin of my notebook. Nothing much happened for a time. We sat listening to the water beneath the Bridge. The sun was hot, the view idyllic. The beauty bludgeoned me. I had never before realized that beauty could be so cruel.

“I’m on a very bad trip,” I said suddenly to Caitlin. “Talk to me.”

“Oh gosh. What shall I talk about?”

“You.”

“Me? But I’m so ordinary!”

“Exactly. I want to hear someone ordinary talking about ordinary things. Tell me the story of your life. Go on. Begin: ‘I was born at the farm—’ ”

“But I was born in Swansea. Mum had to go into hospital for a Caesar. I was christened Caitlin because Mum liked it, and Dilys after Aunt Dilys in Bettws-y-Coed, who’s my godmother, but I don’t like either of those names; I’d like to be called Tracy …”

She talked on. It must have been an effort for her as she was shy but she had sensed my distress and was making a heroic effort to help. She talked about growing up at the farm as the little afterthought of the family, ignored by Gwyneth and Trevor but indulged by her parents. I heard about Aunt Dilys in Bettws-y-Coed and Aunt Olwen in Llandaff and Uncle Dai in Cardiff and her Welsh Nationalist cousins in the Rhondda Valley and her cousin Kelly-Jean in California who knew someone who knew someone else who had been in the army in Germany with Elvis Presley, and all the time I was watching the sea and thinking of Emily Brontë and trying to drum up the courage to acknowledge a truth I couldn’t face.

“… and I’m not going to university, I’m not brilliant like Gwyneth. I’ll do a secretarial course and then perhaps a course in farm administration—I’d like to run a farm with my husband and do all the paperwork for him, like Mum does for Dad. I don’t suppose I’ll find a boy with his own farm, though—that’s just a dream. I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment. I had one last year but he took up with someone else because I wouldn’t sleep with him. I wondered if I was silly not to but I don’t know, supposing I got into trouble, and anyway I didn’t want to, it all seemed too much, I just wanted someone to go to the pictures with or maybe go dancing on Saturday night; how hard life seems sometimes, how difficult it is to know what to do, although I don’t suppose you find that, do you, I expect once one’s as old as you are one knows all the answers and you’re probably thinking I’m very peculiar, not having a boyfriend and not having been to bed with anyone.”

“Rubbish. Girls like you may be an endangered species but you needn’t think there aren’t plenty of men still around who want to practice conversation.” I stood up. I could hardly go on sitting in a stupor by the Devil’s Bridge. It occurred to me then what an idiotic name that was. Was it traditional or had it been invented by some coy guidebook? I didn’t know. “Well,” I said, turning my back on the Outer Head, “that’s one place I’ll never revisit. Let’s go.”

Halfway along the southern flank of the Inner Head, she said, “Is there anything I can do to, help you?”

“No. Yes. Stick up for what you believe in and don’t go to bed with anyone just to follow the crowd. My cousin Kester used to say …”

Silence.

“Yes?” said Caitlin.

“He used to say: ‘Hold fast, stand firm. Don’t just do the done thing, do the right thing.’ ”

“That’s great,” said Caitlin. “That’s cool. I wish I’d known him.”

I was walking ahead of her so she couldn’t see my face. I was remembering my lost hero in the golden myth which reality had blackened beyond recall, but although grief nearly overwhelmed me I beat it back. I told myself that maintaining my self-control merely required the right attitude of mind, and the right attitude of mind now consisted in refusing to grieve for Kester and refusing to remember my father.