The Wheel of Fortune (50 page)

“Ah, I see. Do you like motors, Dafydd?” I said in Welsh, and glancing in the driver’s mirror I saw the woman stir in surprise as she realized I spoke her language.

The little boy said yes, he loved motors but he had never ridden in one before, he had only ridden on a motorbus in Cardiff and on a train to Swansea and in a wagonette to Penhale. I asked him if he had enjoyed the train journey, but before he could reply the little girl said to me, “You speak English like an Englishman and yet you speak Welsh just like we do.”

“I’m somewhat like a parrot. When. I hear strange sounds I find it easy to copy them.”

“You don’t look like a parrot,” said Dafydd.

We all laughed. I noticed that Mrs. Morgan had very white, very even teeth. I wondered if they were false. The dental condition of the working classes was notorious.

Passing the gateway of the Manor we traveled another hundred yards down the lane before swinging off onto the cart track that led to the farm.

“And how old are you, Rhiannon?”

“Six.”

“Say ‘sir,’ ” whispered her mother. “He’s a gentleman.”

“My daughter’s nearly six,” I said. “Perhaps you can come to tea in the nursery someday and meet her.”

Mrs. Morgan said in a rush, “That’s very kind of you, Mr. Godwin, indeed it is, but of course we couldn’t presume—”

“Nonsense, Marian’s always complaining that she has no little girls to play with.” I felt irritated by her humility but at the same time I realized that I would have been even more irritated if she had failed to be humble.

We reached the farmyard. As soon as I opened the door of the back seat the children scampered away, the little girl thanking me in a very well-mannered way for the ride, and I was able to lean into the car to draw out the heavy shopping baskets. Mrs. Morgan then emerged awkwardly onto the running board; setting down the baskets, I turned to offer her assistance.

“Thank you, sir.” Her hand grated against mine. The palm was clammy. It was a hot day, and I was conscious of the heat as we stood there in the sun. Mrs. Morgan was wearing a straw hat which concealed her ugly red hair and shadowed her pallid face as she glanced down at the baskets. “Thank you,” she murmured again, and when she looked up at me the sun shone in her eyes.

They were bright green in the brilliant light. I was reminded of the color of the sea by the Rhossili cliffs on a midsummer day. It was an extraordinary color, most unnatural.

I found I was still holding her hand.

I dropped it.

“Good day, Mrs. Morgan.”

“Good day, Mr. Godwin.” As she turned aside, her face immediately fell into shadow and I could see again how nondescript she was. I returned once more to the driver’s seat. She was already walking away with the baskets, but as I drove off I saw in the mirror that she had paused to stare after me. For a second her slim solitary figure remained silhouetted not against the farm buildings but, mysteriously, against some uncharted landscape in my mind, but the second passed and the next moment I told myself it had been forgotten. Treading hard on the accelerator I drove at a breakneck speed down the cart track and hurtled up the lane to the comforting familiarity of my home.

III

“We had such a nice nursery tea today,” said Blanche a week later as she put on her diamond earrings. She was wearing a white satin gown and her dark hair was coiled into an elaborate knot on the top of her head. That night we were due to dine at Oxmoon to celebrate Edmund’s twenty-seventh birthday.

“Nursery tea?” I said vaguely as I wandered in from my dressing room.

“Mrs. Morgan came with her children—what a good idea of yours that was! Marian enjoyed herself so much, and Nanny said afterwards how very well behaved Rhiannon was for a little girl of her class—and you know how discriminating Nanny is! But I wasn’t surprised the children were well behaved because Mrs. Morgan is a most superior girl, as my dear Mama used to say, so quiet and dignified and polite.”

“I’m glad the visit was a success. I must say, I did have second thoughts after I’d issued the invitation.”

“Oh, I don’t think these social differences matter much when children are young, darling. … There! I’m ready and we must go. Do you have Edmund’s present?”

I retrieved the book on rose growing, which had been beautifully wrapped by Blanche in lemon-colored paper, and five minutes later we set off for Oxmoon. It was a dull summer evening, murky and cool, and Oxmoon had a moody look as I turned the car into the drive. Though built to conform to the classical conventions of architecture popular in the eighteenth century, it somehow contrived to hint that a wild unorthodox streak lurked behind its severe well-disciplined facade, and as I stared at it I thought again, as I had thought so often before: Oxmoon the enigma, the joker in the pack. Then suddenly in a bizarre moment of self-knowledge I realized I was seeing not the house but my own reflection in stone and glass. I was the enigma, the joker in the Godwin pack, and beneath my conventional English manners lay the Welsh stranger I was too afraid to know.

Edmund came out of the house to greet us. He was looking a trifle more animated than usual but still less than half alive, and once more I was acutely aware that the war had divided me from him, just as it had severed me forever from Lion. I had been becalmed on the Home Front while Edmund had been brutalized in the Front Line, and now an abyss of chaotic emotion lay scrupulously concealed between us; our conversations represented the nadir of social banality.

“Hullo, old chap. Happy birthday and all that rot.”

“Thanks. I say, what a beautiful parcel! Almost too good to open!”

Edmund had a square face with pale blue slightly protuberant eyes and pale brown thinning hair. He had put on weight since he had been invalided home in 1918 but although his limp was now barely perceptible and his general health had improved, he made no effort to leave home. Mild, vague and chronically indecisive, he drifted from one bout of melancholy to the next, so I was particularly relieved to find that evening that he seemed to be in good spirits. Whenever I saw how damaged Edmund was, I hardly knew how to endure my guilt as a noncombatant. Egged on by Robert, who had never known a day’s uncertainty over his decision to remain on the Home Front, I had allowed myself to be persuaded that it was my duty to stay in my exempt position at the Foreign Office, but I had spent the war in such a miserable muddle that several times I had found myself wishing I could have died on the Somme with Lion. My guilt was one of the reasons why the Foreign Office had become intolerable to me; I had felt so debilitated by my self-disgust that I had wanted only to make a fresh start in a world where no one would look at me askance.

“Daphne wrote to wish me many happy returns,” Edmund was saying, uncannily mentioning our sister-in-law as if he knew I was remembering Lion dying on the Somme. “She’s coming to stay here next month with Elizabeth.”

“How lovely!” exclaimed Blanche. “Marian will be thrilled! Isn’t that good news, John?”

I agreed, although in fact I did not care for Daphne, who was one of those bouncy gushing Society girls dedicated to a vacuous life. I had heard from friends in London that she had become rather fast, but I had taken care not to mention this to Blanche.

“I’m surprised old Daffers hasn’t remarried,” said Edmund as he led the way up the steps into the house. “I know she’s’ plain but she’s tremendous fun. I like girls like that. Dash it, if I had a bean I’d marry her myself! Or is one forbidden to marry one’s brother’s widow? I bet one is. All the really amusing things in life are forbidden, aren’t they … But oh Lord, I didn’t come out here to talk of amusing things, quite the contrary, I came to tell you something awful: Robert’s worse. He’s in a wheelchair. Mama sent me out to warn you so that you’d be prepared.”

My youngest brother Thomas chose that moment to come slouching down the stairs. Fourteen is a difficult age, and Thomas, who enjoyed being difficult, was making the most of his new capacity for obstreperousness. Spoiled by doting parents who should have known better, he seemed perpetually outraged that his much older siblings and beyond them the world in general paid him such scant attention. However he behaved well to my parents, and I had come to suspect that his pose of
enfant terrible
had been adopted to counter his fear of being overlooked as the last and least important member of a large family.

He had a square face not unlike Edmund’s and a wide full-lipped mouth which he kept tucked down neatly at the corners. His golden hair and blue eyes gave a misleading impression of a cherubic nature.

“Hullo,” I said to him, and added in an attempt to demonstrate a friendly interest, “When did you get back from school?”

“Why do you want to know?”

I sighed, gave up and followed the others into the drawing room, where my parents, having yielded to postwar social change, had authorized that cocktails as well as wine might be served before dinner. This was characteristic of them. My mother disapproved of spirits and my father drank little else except champagne, but when they entertained guests they were lavish in their hospitality and no one could have accused them of being either mean or old-fashioned.

I saw the wheelchair as soon as I entered the room, and at once I was grateful to my mother for having had the presence of mind to send Edmund to warn us. The wheels with their long spokes seemed symbolic of a medieval ordeal. I felt cold with pity for Robert, then sick with relief that I myself was healthy and finally rigid with guilt that my life should be so perfect while his should be so infused with suffering.

“Johnny darling!” cried Ginevra, who was clearly far beyond her first glass of champagne. “Come and admire the chariot! Robert now rattles around at a terrific pace!”

I said the first thing that came into my head. “Ginevra, I do wish you’d stop calling me Johnny as if I were some Edwardian rake who spent his time throwing roses to chorus girls.”

“But darling”—Ginevra had acquired in America the vulgar habit of calling everyone darling much too often—“think how perfectly thrilling it would be if you were an Edwardian rake tossing roses to chorus girls!”

“Oh shut up!” said Robert, who often behaved towards his wife as if they were both back in the nursery. “Well, John? What do you think of this latest innovation?”

I thanked God for my diplomatic training. “My dear Robert, I’m sure it’s a king among wheelchairs—forgive my lack of alacrity in making an immediate obeisance, but I wasn’t prepared to encounter royalty when I arrived here tonight! Is it easy to maneuver?”

He was satisfied. All pity and sentimentality had been avoided and he could relax.

Robert’s illness was erratic, striking severely and at random but then receding either wholly or in part. The temporary improvements tended to divert attention from the steady progress of the paralysis. His right leg was immobile, his left was now weak; I noticed he had slight difficulty turning his head, although his facial muscles were untouched and he had had no visual problems for two years. He looked closer to fifty than to forty. His muscles had run to fat, but the power of his intellect, sharpened rather than dimmed by his physical weakness, was kept ruthlessly honed by his incessant reading, and he was even talking of engaging a companion, one of his old Oxford friends, who could converse with him on the classics; he knew well enough that I had closed my mind against intellectual matters after my drudgery at Oxford.

My father offered me a glass of champagne, and I accepted it with relief. I was feeling in a nervous unreliable frame of mind for reasons which were ostensibly connected with the appearance of the wheelchair but which I sensed also derived from other sources beyond analysis. I was aware of sinister changes, of a fixed world trying to slide stealthily out of control.

“I say, I’m reading
The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
” said Edmund, providing me with a welcome diversion. “You read it recently, didn’t you, John? Do tell me—who’s the murderer? I simply can’t work it out at all!”

“Edmund, you don’t ask who did the murder! You read to the end and find out!”

“I think it might be that attractive girl with the red hair …”

But I did not want to think about attractive girls with red hair. Evading him I moved over to my father, but my mother intercepted me.

“Robert looks a little better, don’t you think?” she said. “I think the unexpected mobility of the wheelchair has put him in better spirits.”

We both glanced across at Robert, and out of the corner of my eye I saw my father drain his glass of champagne and reach automatically for a refill. He too was watching Robert, and suddenly I knew all three of us were united by a grief beyond description. I had an absurd longing to say to them, “I’m here—I’ll make it up to you,” but of course the words could not be spoken, and my parents, as usual when Robert was dominating their thoughts, were oblivious of me. My old jealousy which I had thought dead now rose from the grave to sour my compassion for the brother I admired so much, and I was horrified. Chaos was approaching. At once I drew the line—and as always I felt safe and secure behind it. Consigning my vile jealousy once more to the grave, I too drained my glass and turned to the bottle of champagne for further sustenance.

The bottle was empty. My father had clearly been helping himself for some time.

“Open another bottle, John,” he said idly as he saw my plight but my mother said in a voice of steel, “I think not,” and turned her back on him.

My father, who had been lounging in his usual debonair fashion against the chimneypiece, stood up ramrod-straight and went white. At once I said, “It’s all right, I don’t think I want another glass after all.”

“Have mine,” said my father, thrusting his glass at me, and stumbled after my mother. “Margaret—”

My mother was ringing the bell to signal to the servants that we were ready for dinner.

“—only wanted to be hospitable—special occasion—Edmund’s birthday—”

“Quite.”

“… and my dear!” Ginevra was exclaiming to Edmund. “I hear from London that all women are now to look like boys and pretend to have no bosom and no hips! What on earth am I to do?”