The Wheel of Fortune (188 page)

I thought Kester’s books deserved to sell, and sell they did, but I doubt if they would have sold on such a grand scale if I hadn’t marketed them with a fanaticism which he in his modesty could never have matched. I was helped by the fact that I had a salable product but in the end the victory was mine as well as Kester’s. I was one of the pioneers of the American belief that novels could be marketed like soap, and I conducted one of the biggest selling campaigns the publishing world had seen. I invaded the radio stations, I laid waste the television networks, I blazed like a conqueror across America, I beat that country at its own game. Projecting my selling image, crushing audience after audience beneath the power of my will, I hypnotized, I electrified and I seduced my way from coast to coast. A cold calculating performance? Certainly. But sentimentality has never been one of my strong points. I had a job to do and it was more than a job. It was a mission.

At the end of it all they said I should rest but that was out of the question. Turning down the free holidays I was offered, I grabbed a plane to London and began my conquest of Britain.

III

Years later people said to me, “Once you found the books no doubt success was a foregone conclusion,” but magic can’t operate without a magician, and being a magician can beat a man to his knees. Few people realized how difficult my life became and how hard I had to struggle to endure it. People see only the glamour of success and not the isolated drudgery beneath. I loathed the life on the road, and in the fear that I might crack beneath the increasing pressures I continued to abstain from drink and drugs; that decision ensured my survival but it made life tougher and later when I was wooing Middle America and deciding that no breath of scandal should mar the clean-cut image I was projecting my life became tougher still. Was I a hypocrite? Of course. My so-called “good life” sprang from no deep moral conviction, only from a desire to win. I was a fanatic, and as with all fanatics the end justified the means.

I had to prove my fanaticism at the start of my American visit when my cousin Geoffrey, who was by this time editor-in-chief of a major publishing house, told me Kester’s work was junk which he’d never touch.

This was a major setback. Geoffrey was my trump card. A major portion of my optimism had been based on my assumption that he would help me.

“Geoffrey, you just can’t do this.”

“Look, buster, I’ve got my living to earn. I can’t take this rubbish on just for sentimental family reasons! What do I care about Oxmoon anyway? What’s that old dump to me?”

“Oxmoon’s a symbol. It’s got a message for everyone.”

“Not for me it hasn’t! What did I ever get out of Oxmoon? Fucking all! I was a misfit in that family, I felt like a man from Mars, my American grandfather was the only guy I could ever identify with—”

“I’m not interested in your identity crisis, I’m interested in your professional judgment. How can you sit there and tell me seriously that these books are unreadable?”

“Family sagas went out with Galsworthy. Forget it. Give me a good Jewish novel any day.”

“But Geoffrey—”

“Sorry. Subject closed. Excuse me, please, I have to go to a meeting.”

I leaned forward with my hands on his desk and said, “I never want to speak to you again.”

“You think I’m going to be beating a path to any Godwin door?”

He walked away. In the outer office his British secretary, smart status symbol of every successful. New York executive, regarded me from behind a curtain of blond hair. “Hey!”

I stopped.

She smiled at me conspiratorially. “They were fabulous. I read every word.”

I classified the image required: sexual charm with a touch of class. I projected that image. I glided over to her desk. “Did you tell him?”

“Uh-huh. But he’s hung up. Can’t bear family sagas, says wasn’t it enough that he had to spend all his early life living in one.”

I smiled at her. It was my special smile, the one I reserved only for the most vital occasions. “So where do I go from here?”

“My apartment? After work?”

Those were the days before I started peddling my clean-living image to Middle America.

The next day she gave me the address of one of New York’s leading literary agents, and after typing a glowing letter of introduction on her employer’s letterhead, she signed it on behalf of my unforgiven cousin, that traitor Geoffrey Godwin.

IV

“I’ll take them on,” said the agent, “and we’ll see how the first one goes. I think family sagas could be coming back. The dialogue creaks a bit now and then but don’t worry, there’s nothing a good editor can’t fix. …”

I didn’t worry. I was too busy savoring my victory. In a town where it was hard to be published without an agent and hard to acquire an agent without having been published I had eliminated yet another obstacle on the long painful road to success.

Another editor-in-chief, a rival of Geoffrey’s, bought all three books after reading them over a weekend. Later the magazine
McCall’s
published an excerpt from the first one and the Literary Guild book club made it its Main Selection for the month of publication. At that time publication was still several months away but already the financial omens were glowing with promise and when I returned to New York for the publicity tour Geoffrey was the first to phone my hotel to welcome me back to town.

“Hal, I just couldn’t be more pleased—”

“Keep your pleasure,” I said. “You’ll need it when everyone in New York dines out on the story of how you turned down Kester Godwin.” And I hung up on him without waiting for his reply.

V

And they all came to Oxmoon, the builders and the stonemasons, the carpenters, plumbers and electricians, the sewing experts who were to restore the fabrics, the metalwork craftsmen who were to repair the wrought-iron gates. The roof was replaced, the chimneys were rebuilt, the leaning outside wall of the ballroom was shored up and underpinned. After the dry rot had been removed the timbers were replaced and after the wet rot had been conquered the damp course was introduced. Rewired and re-plumbed, Oxmoon resembled a hospital patient, wheeled from the operating theater to the intensive-care unit where it could be nursed devotedly back to life.

My father couldn’t bear the invasion of people and the constant noise of the restoration work so he retreated to a rented house on the outskirts of Swansea. Pam was pleased; she thought she might be able to coax him into group therapy once he was so much nearer the city but he stubbornly resisted, never going out, never seeing anyone, his health varying from poor to indifferent. Like many disturbed people he often gave such an impression of normality that it was hard to remember how ill he was. I often had trouble connecting the apparently rational man, who could conduct sensible conversations, with the man who was afraid to go out and had such a horror of the outside world that he refused to answer the front door. As time went on I became steadily more distressed that he couldn’t talk of Oxmoon. Pam said he didn’t dare believe in its resurrection for fear some disaster might occur at the last moment, but the more I tried to calm his irrational fears by talking of new alarm systems and caretakers, the more he seemed determined to believe in an inevitable catastrophe.

Yet I found it impossible to say nothing of Oxmoon’s progress.

“Father, all the gardeners came today, the horticultural experts, the landscape architects, the laborers—they’ve all come to Oxmoon now. They’re going to lay out the old pleasure garden just as it was in the eighteenth century and the orangerie’s going to be rebuilt—”

“I don’t want to think of it.”

“But for God’s sake, why not?”

“It’s too painful.”

“Why is it painful?”

“Because it can’t help me. You think that by redeeming Oxmoon you’ll redeem me but you won’t. I’m beyond that sort of fairy tale.”

“Well, if you want to be beyond it I can’t stop you,” I said exasperated, “but you’ve bloody well suffered and you’ve bloody well repented so why shouldn’t you bloody well be redeemed?”

“Redemption’s just a word and as I’m not a Christian it means nothing to me. If restoring Oxmoon helps you to live with what Kester and I did, then I’m glad for your sake but don’t expect it to help me.”

“People were talking about the cycle of birth, life, death and resurrection long before Christ hit the scene,” I said, playing down the religious angle to counter his argument, but of course I came to Christianity in the end. I write “of course” because it must have seemed inevitable to the people who kept hearing me speak of redemption, but it took me some time before I realized that I was in the grip of an experience which was intractable to rational analysis. I was living not on reason but on faith. No rational man would have believed that I could save Oxmoon. But I’d done it, and in doing so I had passed through some gateway of the mind into another way of looking, as Pam would have put it, at a given situation.

No doubt reformed rakes are particularly prone to religious conversion. Evan started talking to me of Donne and Sian mentioned the poet Rochester and Humphrey said religion, any religion, was the big new trend nowadays and look at the Beatles in India.

“Do be careful, Hal,” said Pam, who spent much time worrying in case my mysticism led me into murky psychiatric waters. “You’ve got exactly the right temperament to be a religious fanatic.”

“I’ll let you know when I order a hair shirt,” I said, but in fact I wasn’t fanatical about Christianity. I merely found it more intellectually satisfying than the occult, more positive than Buddhism, more British than Islam and less depressing than psychiatry.

“Maybe you’ll wind up in a monastery,” said my father gloomily, but I knew there was no possibility that I might become a monk. My feelings for Caitlin made perpetual chastity unthinkable.

I turned to Caitlin in the end, of course, and again I write “of course” because it must have seemed inevitable to those who knew me well that I would return to Caitlin just as time after time I returned to Oxmoon: to rest, to recuperate and to spend a few precious hours with my true self before continuing my crusade behind a variety of selling images. For a long time I didn’t see her, but the ordeal on the Devil’s Bridge linked her with me in my memory, and often, particularly when I was alone in some hotel room, I would remember her gentleness when she had thought I was in the grip of vertigo, her sensitivity in never pestering me for information and her intelligence which had told her when to stay silent as well as when to ask the right questions. As I battered my way across America her memory became increasingly precious to me until she became a symbol of someone unspoiled and of a normal world to which I prayed I might one day return.

She took her secretarial course and the diploma in farm management. We corresponded. Eventually we were reunited. One day at Rhossili beach she tried to teach me Welsh and as she spoke in that language I couldn’t understand I knew that she was telling me she loved me.

“Say that in English, Cait!”

“The cat sat on the mat.”

“Now teach me to say that in Welsh!”

She taught me. I said it. She blushed. We embraced. Finally I said, “I could make all manner of fine speeches but I’m too cynical about fine speeches to sound sincere.”

“I don’t want fine speeches.”

“I’m really a very simple man—”

“That sounds like the beginning of a fine speech.”

“—so all I shall say is: Will you?”

“That’s too simple. In this day and age, that sort of question can mean almost anything.”

After we’d picked the date for the wedding she said, “Did it take you a long time to get over Gwyneth?”

“Yes, but I’m at peace with the past now.”

“She was a symbol of the past, wasn’t she?”

“Yes. The past created the illusion that we were suited to each other but of course she was much too independent for me. Marriage with her would have been a disaster.”

“Does that mean you expect me to be a robot with no mind of my own?”

“Certainly not. Marriage isn’t about either independence or dependence—it’s about interdependence. I’m not afraid of a woman who wants to be a person in her own right but Gwyneth’s kind of person wasn’t my kind of woman.”

“Thank God.”

“Thank God, yes—at least that’s one self-destructive future I’ve managed to sidestep,” I said, and once more took her in my arms.

VI

And they all came to Oxmoon, magic fabled Oxmoon, they all came to see the house that was rising from the grave.

The BBC arrived to make a television documentary, and I was interviewed on the newly mown lawn of the pleasure garden as the stonemasons worked on the repair of the terrace and the painters paused on their scaffolding with the brushes in their hands. Publicity has its disadvantages. There were always tourists at the gates now and the National Trust was finding it an increasingly strenuous task to keep the hordes of well-wishers at bay. Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon it seemed that all Gower cruised down the road to Penhale for a glimpse of the miracle, and as the waiting world hovered at its bedside Oxmoon emerged from the intensive-care unit into the recovery ward on its long journey back to health from the illness which everyone had believed to be terminal.

Then one day I came home to Gower and found the fairy-tale palace of Kester’s dreams, the outer walls washed, the paint gleaming, the new roof of Welsh slate shining in the sun. The shutters were still closed for conservation purposes; the fabrics needed the minimum dose of light, but inside the house the main rooms dazzled the eye, the upholstery repaired, the furniture polished, the wallpapers cleaned, the carpets restored, every item of the collection glowing and cared for, and in the hall the cleaners were washing every crystal of Kester’s famous “celestial” chandelier. Beyond the house the gardens were trim and tended again. The orangerie had been reconstructed, and in the renovated stable block the broken-down old carriages, relics of another age, had been painted and repaired for display to the public.