The Wheel of Fortune (184 page)

Pam sighed. Then she said with extreme reluctance: “Kester’s manuscripts no longer exist. Your father burned the lot.”

6

I

T
HAT WAS THE MOMENT
when I ceased to be a rationalist. If behaving in a rational manner and thinking rational thoughts couldn’t redeem Oxmoon I was no longer interested in behaving like a rational man. It was time for fanaticism, time for belief when all logical hope was gone, time to put iron in the will and granite in the soul.

“I can’t accept that,” I said to Pam. “To accept that would be to admit defeat—and I’m not interested in losing.” I felt like some general leading his men into battle against fearful odds and haranguing them to victory. “I’m going to win,” I said. “I’m going to win.”

For the first time in my life I saw Pam look rattled. She kept calm; no doubt this was a reflex developed by years of experience, but her characteristic nonchalance hardened into an expressionless immobility. She said nothing.

I said to her: “Why did my father burn those manuscripts?” but I already knew. I asked the question to force a conversation and compel her to communicate with me.

“It was Kester’s passion for the
roman à clef.
Your father couldn’t be certain that Kester hadn’t based his final master plot on a previous novel.”

“So Kester never took those manuscripts to Ireland. He left them at Oxmoon. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s right. Of course it was a relief to your father when you deduced the manuscripts were in Ireland but shied away from contacting Declan.”

“You seriously expect me to believe that Kester would have left his manuscripts—which were like children to him—at Oxmoon for my father to burn?”

“But he did, Hal. They were in two trunks in the attics.”

“Then those must have been the manuscripts that Kester was content to have destroyed. I’m sure he would have taken his most precious work to Ireland.”

“Harry spoke to Siobhan Kinsella on your behalf after Kester’s will was granted probate—after all, Kester wanted you to have his work and Declan would hardly have refused to let you have any manuscripts that were in his possession. But there was nothing in Ireland, Hal. Nothing.”

“But this is insane. I just can’t believe—”

“You’re looking back with the wisdom of hindsight. Try and see the situation in its context. When Kester left Oxmoon he had no reason to think his manuscripts were in any danger. Harry doesn’t normally behave like a book-burning fascist and how could Kester have foreseen a situation in which Harry would feel driven to destroy those manuscripts for fear they might provide the police with clues? Harry, as a talented man himself, respected the talent in Kester. Normally he wouldn’t have dreamed of destroying Kester’s work, and if Kester had feared such a destruction when he left Oxmoon in ’51 he would have been acting irrationally.”

“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” I said. “Those two men were irrational about each other. That’s the one thing that’s been proved beyond all reasonable doubt! No, I’m sorry, Pam, but I think Kester would have taken every precaution that his most precious work didn’t fall into my father’s hands, and if the manuscripts aren’t in Ireland then they must be hidden here at Oxmoon.”

There was a pause while Pam tried to figure out the best way to handle me. In the end she fell back on the most neutral question available. “So?”

“So,” I said, “I’m going to find those manuscripts. I’m going to find them even if it’s the very last thing I ever do.”

II

I went to interrogate my father.

At one point he tried to apologize for burning the manuscripts but I cut him off.

“I don’t want your apologies, I want your help. Now, think, Father, and think hard. Where’s the one place at Oxmoon where you’d never look for a manuscript?”

My father made an effort to compose himself but I could see he found me very intimidating. “The attics,” he said. “Two trunks were easy enough to find, but searching for a stray manuscript in those rooms full of junk would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.”

“Yes, but you’d be guaranteed to search there—it’s the obvious place. Try and think of some place where you’d never look.”

My father racked his brains. “Well, I suppose Kester could have taken up a floorboard somewhere—”

“Not Kester. The only thing he could do with his hands was hold a pen. How about the furniture? Do any of the cabinets have false sides?”

“The bureau in the morning room has a secret drawer but it’s not big enough to hold more than a pocket diary. Why don’t you have a look at the detailed inventory Kester drew up after the war? It’s in the library among my 1963 correspondence with the National Trust. I sent them a copy to whet their appetite.”

I withdrew to the library, and as soon as I entered the room I had such an inspired idea that I nearly swung all the way into a manic euphoria again. The one place at Oxmoon where Kester could safely have left his manuscripts was on a shelf in the fiction bays of the library. My father never read novels. In fact he had once told me he hadn’t opened a novel since he had been forced to do so at school.

I combed the fiction bays. The shelves began immediately on the right of the door and extended some way down the room. Kester had been a great fiction reader and although his preference had been for nineteenth-century novels, the authors of the twentieth century were well represented.

But there were no unpublished manuscripts there.

I tried again. I checked behind each row of books to make sure there was no cache hidden beyond the leather-bound facade. Then pulling each book forward a couple of inches I checked that it was real and not a cardboard dummy containing the missing treasure.

That all took some time.

When I had drawn another blank I sat down at the library table and contemplated the room. I still thought Kester would have favored the library. A couple of manuscripts could have been slipped in among the bays of family papers at the far end of the room and they would be impossible to spot at a glance. I decided to make a comprehensive search but first, to satisfy myself that the furniture in the house could be excluded from my attentions, I found the inventory and skimmed through it.

The morning-room bureau was the only piece with a secret drawer, and my father had known about it. Obviously I was on the wrong track there.

Replacing the inventory I rolled up my sleeves and prepared to ransack the rest of the library.

III

It took me several days to ensure I had left no stone unturned. The family papers stretched all the way back to the eighteenth century when Robert Godwin the Renovator had put his architect’s drawings of the future Oxmoon on file for posterity. Many shelves were dedicated to the records of my great-grandfather Bobby Godwin’s forty-six years as master, but although these papers occupied a considerable amount of space they were orderly; my task in sifting them was time-consuming but not difficult. However Kester’s papers were in a more chaotic state. He hadn’t been the kind of man who could be bothered with efficient filing, and in between the immaculate records which marked the period when Thomas had been in control of the estate lay an uncharted wilderness of receipts, business correspondence and personal letters, all crammed into bulging files without regard for subject matter or chronological order. The temptation was to gloss over them as soon as it was obvious that no manuscripts were concealed there, but instinct told me they might contain some kind of clue and instinct, for once, was right.

I found an invoice, dated more than a year before Kester’s death, from a publisher. The publisher was a representative of the so-called “vanity press,” a firm that specialized in printing books at the author’s expense. The invoice recorded that three novels had been printed for Kester, and on the bottom of the page Kester had noted:
Paid
2/2/51.
Spare copies to attic trunk.

I returned to my father.

“Do you remember the privately printed copies in one of the trunks?”

“Oh God, yes, although they weren’t inside either of the trunks—he’d left them in boxes on the top. They were very difficult to burn and made a terrible smell.”

“Did it occur to you to check the library to see if he’d left copies on the shelves?”

“Yes, I assumed the point of the private printing had been to enable him to place his own work alongside
The Prisoner of Zenda
and his other old favorites.”

“So you found the library copies and burned them too.” So completely did I accept this as inevitable that I didn’t even bother to inflect the statement into a question.

“Well, no,” said my father, “as a matter of fact I didn’t. I searched the entire library but found nothing.”

“That’s odd.” I stared at him. “Didn’t you think at the time that it was odd?”

“Yes, but what struck me as even odder was why he’d arranged for the private printing. He never distributed any of the copies—I asked both Evan and Richard but they knew nothing about it at all.”

“Maybe he planned to distribute the copies later—the date he paid the bill suggests he could only just have received them before you turned him out.”

“Even so,” said my father, “I still think it’s odd that he never mentioned the printing to the members of the family who were closest to him. If an author goes to the expense of having even a small number of copies of his work printed the inference must surely be that he intends to circulate them.”

“Perhaps he got cold feet about the idea. Kester was reserved about his work—and modest. In fact this whole flirtation with the vanity press is hard to understand.”

“I agree it seems out of character, but it did happen.”

“Yes—and what I’d like to know,” I said, “is what happened to those copies which he didn’t classify on the invoice as ‘spare.’ ”

I returned to the library and subjected the nonfiction shelves to the same intense scrutiny which I had given the bays of novels, but there was nothing my father had missed. Still puzzled I resumed my examination of the family papers.

Pam offered to help but I saw through that ruse and realized she only wanted to signal sympathy so that I shouldn’t become alienated from her. No doubt, anticipating the failure of my quest, she thought I was heading for a mental crash of catastrophic dimensions and she wanted to ensure that I had an easy retreat available into psychiatric care. As I drew near the end of my search of the library she encouraged me to tackle the attics. I could see her thinking that this would occupy me for at least another week and give her more time to help me find a “satisfactory adjustment” to my problem.

Despite my father’s protests I had returned to lead an independent life in the scullery, but to appease him and to show Pam that I appreciated her misguided concern for my mental health I agreed to join them for dinner each night. I also reasoned that I would function better if I were fueled at least once a day with an adequate supply of cooked food.

I abandoned the library. I began to search the attics for those printed copies of the three novels which I felt sure still existed. And in the diary I was now keeping to relieve my troubled mind I found myself once more writing,
Soldier on.

IV

I met him on my fourth day in the attics. I had never met him before because eleven years had separated his death from my birth and I had never before seen a close-up photograph of him taken in those brilliant glamorous days before he had become ill.

I met my great-uncle Robert Godwin, Robert Godwin the Winner. I met the family hero whom Kester had glorified in myth. I could remember Kester saying, “My father was this wonderful man, brilliantly clever, classically handsome, utterly charming, hugely successful, matchlessly brave—someone who always aimed at perfection, someone who had the courage and dedication to make all his dreams come true, someone who was a romantic, an idealist, a hero in every possible respect …” Kester had laid on the praise with a shovel but then he had been talking to children who liked larger-than-life heroes. Later when I was more cynical it occurred to me that he could never have known his father well; Great-Uncle Robert had died when Kester was eight. Nonetheless he had left a powerful legend behind him and the legend hinted at a powerful personality beyond the florid phrases of Kester’s hyperbole.

I had just stumbled across another trunk of Kester’s and once again I thought I’d struck gold because beneath the love letters from Anna, all bound with pink ribbon, I found two books with the name
GODWIN
on their spines. But the author wasn’t Kester; it was his father. One book was a memoir about Lloyd George and the other was an account of various murder trials in which Robert had played a starring role as counsel for the defense.

When I had recovered from my disappointment I wondered why these books hadn’t been on the library shelves but then I realized that these copies, personally inscribed to Great-Aunt Ginevra, were special. They would have been so precious to Kester, admiring his father as he did, that he would have preferred to keep them alongside his other sacred mementos of the past.

On the dedication page of the Lloyd George memoir the printed inscription merely read:
FOR MY WIFE
, but underneath this Robert had written: For
my dearest Ginette in memory of happier days
—
when we danced together beneath the chandeliers at Oxmoon while the orchestra played “The Blue Danube.
”
My love now and always, your devoted friend,
ROBERT
.

My first reaction was So they really did do it. It’s always a shock when a story that one has cynically regarded as apocryphal turns out to be true, and in this case I found it was also a pleasant surprise. It’s not often one finds documented evidence of a fairy tale. The discovery cheered me. Since I was bent on achieving a fairy tale myself it was good to know that fairy tales occasionally did happen.

The date of publication was 1921, when Kester was only two and Robert had already fallen ill, and on rereading the inscription I was struck by the curious substitution of the word “friend” for “husband.” I turned to the murder-trials anthology to see if he had been consistent and found that he had. Then flicking over the page to the photograph at the front of the book, I found myself face to face with Robert Godwin at the zenith of his legal career.