The Wheel of Fortune (26 page)

I felt a new woman. I was even able to abandon my éclair.

“In fact,” added Bobby, “if you have difficulty explaining I’ll help you out. So even if Robert don’t accompany you when you visit the boys, you won’t have to face the difficulty on your own.”

“Robert … yes. Bobby, I’m a little worried …” But I stopped. In the vastness of my relief I had gone too far. The one thing I could never do was discuss Robert with his father.

“A capital fellow, Robert,” said Bobby as he saw my difficulty. “There’s no challenge he can’t master if he has a strong motive for succeeding so you can wager he’ll manage those boys well enough when the time comes. Look how good he was with John.”

“So he was!” I said, much cheered. I had a memory of dear little Johnny, chattering away in Welsh and English, bright as a button and delectably naughty. It was sad to think he had turned into such a boring priggish young man. “But what strong motive did Robert have for succeeding with Johnny?”

“He wanted to kill two birds with one stone—please Margaret and make Lion jealous.”

We laughed—but then the next moment the smiles were wiped off our faces as we heard Robert enter the hall.

I feel much better about Bobby now, and not just because we managed to share something that resembled a normal conversation. I feel better because I can see how desperately anxious he is to put our relationship on a tolerable footing so that we don’t inevitably go through hell whenever we see each other. He’s realized—and so have I—that my boys can provide us with a common ground upon which we can meet as two normal people instead of two people perpetually crucified by guilt. I know I shall never be fully at ease with him and I’m sure he’ll never be fully at ease with me, but at least our compulsory charade can now become more of an automatic reflex and less of a harrowing effort, and that must surely rank as an improvement.

I’m beginning to think Margaret was right when she said that the problem in future will be the relationship between Bobby and Robert. Look what happened today. Robert sailed in, shook hands with his father and was impeccably courteous throughout the remainder of Bobby’s visit, yet although no one could have faulted his behavior, the atmosphere was nonetheless subtly cold, indefinably wrong. Sometime in the future—after we’re married and can relax sufficiently to iron out all our problems—I’m going to have to talk to Robert about Bobby because I’ve come to realize that it’s much better if horrid subjects can be aired instead of being buried to fester at leisure. The one subject which I could never discuss, Bobby’s seduction, has been a terrible burden to me in the past, and the reason why I can now see this so clearly is because I feel the burden’s been eased by my confession. I shall never, never be able to recall the incident with indifference but at least now I don’t have to say to myself, “I can’t talk of that or I’ll go mad.” I can say instead, “I talked about it to Robert and stayed sane.”

Robert needs to talk to someone about that morning last month when he heard in shattering detail exactly what kind of man his father was, but the trouble is that if I suggest as much to him he’ll simply say, “Why?” Robert, I suspect, is in the deepest possible muddle over this, but that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that he doesn’t know it, and even if he does he won’t acknowledge it. Emotionally color-blind Robert has made up his mind that so long as he can adopt certain attitudes (courtesy to his father, passion to me), the past can be tied up in pink ribbon, like a legal brief, and locked safely away forever in the vault of his mind. But I’m not color-blind like Robert and I don’t think the answer to his difficulty is that simple. In fact I don’t think it’s any answer at all.

“Ginette, what the devil are these three new hats doing on your bed?”

“Oh darling, yes—well, you see—”

“I gave you fifty pounds last week to spend on essentials, not to descend on Harrods like Attila the Hun!”

“Oh, I know, darling, but it’s all right—I’ve hardly spent any of your fifty pounds yet! I saw the most charming man in the Harrods credit department—”

“Are you trying to tell me you bought these hats on credit?”

“Yes, isn’t it wonderful! I took along the letter from my bank manager to say that my trust money had been safely transferred from New York, and—”

“But you told me you’d already spent your income for the rest of this quarter!”

“True, but I didn’t think that mattered, as you were being so divinely generous—”

“Sit down, Ginette,” said Robert, “and listen to me. I think it’s time you and I had a serious talk together.”

We’ve had the most horrible row about money, quite different from any row I ever had with Conor. At least Conor never made me feel a fool and we always ended up going to bed together. Robert merely made me feel a half-wit and then he walked out and didn’t come back.

Well, maybe I deserved his anger. Maybe I
was
a fool to lose my temper and call him a cold-blooded bastard, but what else can you call a man who has just told you he now believes more firmly than ever that the law is right when it classifies married women with lunatics and children? How dare he behave as if I’m incapable of adult behavior, how dare he!

Very well, I
am
naughty about money. But I’m not stupid. In fact when I have to be clever with money I can be brilliant (think of that time when I had to pay for the boys’ clothes out of my housekeeping money because Conor had had a disaster at poker). So I don’t like being treated as an imbecile who’s not responsible for her actions. It’s not my fault I had no education. I regret it but Margaret always said the last thing any future wife and mother needed was instruction in academic subjects, so my brain was allowed to atrophy at Oxmoon with a stupid governess.

The trouble with Margaret is that she married at sixteen and coping with the resurrection of Oxmoon, the raising of a large family and the rigors of an unreliable husband has absorbed every ounce of her energy throughout her adult life. That’s why she’s never been able to imagine that an intelligent woman might like the idea of acquiring an education before she acquires a husband and children; Margaret sees education as irrelevant—as in her case indeed it was. Well, I’ve certainly never had any wish to be a bluestocking, but when Robert slings a Greek quotation at me and translates it by Tennyson’s line “Woman is the lesser man,” I’d love to be able to sling back a quotation in Latin to the effect that practice makes perfect and although God did create Adam he was more accomplished when the time came for him to create Eve.

Is Robert one of those male monsters who pride themselves on being thoroughly patronizing on the subject of masculine superiority? That’s a chilling thought, but no, brilliant, rational Robert could surely never be guilty of such stupid irrational opinions. He just wanted to show me how vexed he was by my behavior.

Yes, Robert takes what he’s pleased to call my “feminine foolishness” very, very seriously but never mind, now that I know how he feels about money I’ll be scrupulously careful, and I’ve no doubt that when we’re married we’ll never have another cross word on the subject.

We’ve just had the most divine reconciliation. On the morning after our quarrel telegrams of repentance arrived, and the florist’s boy staggered upstairs to my front door with a lavish bouquet of flowers. Fortnum’s delivered the champagne after lunch. Finally at eight Robert swept me off to dinner and a most successful evening later culminated in a most memorable night in the bedroom. It really is remarkable how much can be achieved with the aid of orchids, champagne and a heavenly dinner at the Ritz.

And now … is this the moment when I can finally compare Robert with Conor and dispose of the problem of comparisons once and for all? Yes, I think it is, because at last I feel I’ve got that particular difficulty solved. What bliss! At least there’s one bridge I’ve managed to cross before the wedding.

In that brief but nerve-racking crisis which blew up immediately before Robert and I went to bed together for the first time, I told him glibly that there could be no competition between him and Conor in the bedroom, but I said this (a) because it was obvious his confidence needed boosting and (b) because I knew that if he had crowned his romantic dreams by being impotent our affair would have been finished before it had begun.

However the awful truth remained that Robert
was
a competitor in a nightmarish trial of sexual prowess, and although Robert’s mind might have been in an uncharacteristic fog at the time my mind was (for once) as clear as crystal because I knew without a shadow of doubt that I was going to compare him with Conor. How could I have avoided it? The situation, in short, could easily have dissolved into disaster, but to my relief the gods decided to smile on us because Robert was very different from Conor in bed, and although I did make a comparison or two, I soon realized that comparisons were more meaningless in the circumstances than I’d dared to hope they might be. To compare Conor and Robert was like trying to compare “The Blue Danube” with the latest Paris tango; both compositions rank as musical entertainment but they appeal to the audience in completely different ways.

Despite Robert’s Welsh background he’s an Englishman by education and temperament, and he’s very much the Englishman in bed (contrary to what scornful foreigners think, this needn’t necessarily be a disaster). For Robert passion is a sport, like cricket or rugby football, and being Robert he’s bent his will to ensure he knows how to produce a first-class performance. If Oxford University awarded blues for passion, as it does for cricket and rugger, then Robert would undoubtedly have won his blue at passion. And because passion is a sport for him and because he’s an Englishman he obeys the rules and would never dream of breaking them. Breaking the rules wouldn’t be playing the game; only damned foreigners and cads break the rules, every Englishman knows that.

Conor was a damned foreigner and a cad. He made up all the rules as he went along and then had the most glorious time breaking every one of them in the most amusing way his limitless imagination could conceive. Robert would be appalled by such wildly disordered antics, but interestingly this doesn’t damn Robert for me. I think I enjoy him as he is first because he really is very competent and second because this rational well-ordered sportsmanship is such a novelty that I find it erotic.

This leads me inevitably to myself. What do I truly think about physical love? I’ve been truthful about my two men and now I must put myself alongside them to complete an honest picture of my private life.

I think I would like to record once and for all that I enjoy passion not because I was seduced at sixteen, but in spite of it. Men have such odd ideas about early seductions and seem to assume such an episode automatically converts a woman into a furnace of sexuality, but the truth is that I wasn’t in the least keen about passion at first. It raised too many appalling memories for me, and the chief among those memories was fear. I’ll never forget how much Bobby frightened me by turning into someone else. I’ve always thought the tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is quite the most beastly story ever invented.

I don’t believe I exaggerate my situation if I write that Conor saved me. I was very frightened when I first went to bed with him because I thought he too might turn into an evil stranger but he didn’t; he merely became more gorgeous than ever. That was the major hurdle overcome, and eventually my cure was completed (and it was by no means an overnight miracle) because Conor cared enough about me to be patient and I cared enough about him to respond to his patience. I was so lucky not just because (as I now realize) I was born with a considerable capacity to enjoy myself in bed but because at that crucial moment of my life fate presented me with a man who was able to free that capacity from its burden of fear.

I’ve been naughty about passion in the past. I can’t deny that, but all I can say in my own defense is that I’m not by nature promiscuous. When I was unfaithful to Conor it was for a variety of reasons but never because I merely fancied an exciting roll in the hay. I was unfaithful because he was unfaithful to me and I wanted to get even with him, or because it seemed an escape from problems I couldn’t face, or because I was so depressed that it seemed easier to say yes than to say no. The fact is I don’t think I
would
have been unfaithful to Conor if life with him had been less racked by ghastly crises. Conor satisfied me sexually. So does Robert. I want, I long, I yearn to be faithful to Robert. The rock-bottom truth is that I can’t stand infidelity. Such a mess, such a muddle, such hell.

Hell makes me think of Bobby again. Do I now write down what Bobby was like in bed? Or is that aspect of the subject still absolutely
verboten
despite my confession to Robert? I always thought it would remain
verboten
for the rest of my life or at the very least until I was eighty and past passion altogether (or will I ever be past it? Horrid thought!) but maybe writing down my opinion will help, just as talking to Robert of the seduction helped. But perhaps all I need say is that after I’d first been to bed with Robert I thought, Thank God he’ll never remind me of his father. Yes, that was certainly a moment for heaving a sigh of relief. Disciplined, competent Robert … Perhaps that was when I first consciously formed the judgment that Bobby was no good in bed, although of course I had always felt that the experience with him was one which I never wished to repeat. However perhaps with other women Bobby’s different; perhaps he was too disturbed when he was with me to give an adequate performance, but one thing I know for certain: sex wasn’t a sport for him. What it was exactly God only knows, but it wasn’t a game at all.

Enough. No more Bobby. No more Conor. I’ve just had the most wonderful night with the man I’m going to marry, and all that’s left for me to say is thank God we’re never likely to have a row about sex …

We’ve just had the most ghastly row about sex. At least, that’s what Robert thinks the row was about. Actually although he refused to admit it we were having a row about my previous sexual experience. The stupid thing is that Robert would hate it if I were still the miserable timid woman whom Conor acquired when he married me; Robert can’t stand the incompetent or the second-rate, and he enjoys me exactly as I am. What he doesn’t enjoy—and what he can’t face at all—is the thought of how I acquired my competence.