The Wheel of Fortune (85 page)

The attics were musty and still. I called, “Papa!” and waited but there was no answer. I walked down the corridor, my footsteps echoing on the floorboards, and found him where I had found him before. He was sitting by the covered portrait of his mother and this time the photograph albums were open in his hands.

He was crying quietly to himself. He barely looked up as I entered the room.

“Papa,” I said, stooping to put an arm around his shoulders, “it’s all right now, I’m here.”

But my father only went on turning the pages of the first album, and in that flickering kaleidoscope of black-and-white I saw the past recaptured, the happy laughing children of long ago, the wife he had loved and the magic house he had resurrected from the grave.

“Papa …” As I slid my hand over his, the pages of the album stopped turning and he looked up at me at last. But his watery eyes remained bewildered and all he could say was “Who are you?”

II

I

“I’LL TELEPHONE THE HOME
of the Assumption,” said Warburton.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“But my dear John, it’s the very best home in the district for mental cases—”

“He’s never going to set foot in it.”

“But what are you going to do with him?”

The district nurse arrived. I left her with Warburton and my father in the attics and ran downstairs to telephone Bronwen. By that time Thomas had returned from searching the grounds, so I sent him away in my car to fetch her.

When I returned to the attics I found the district nurse looking flushed and Warburton more troubled than ever.

“He won’t budge, John, and I’m afraid he might be violent if I try to give him an injection.”

“Wait.” I bent over my father to coax him to his feet, but he behaved as if he were stone-deaf. I tried to take the album away from him, but he pushed me off savagely and hugged it to his chest.

“John, I know this is very upsetting for you, but—”

“Shut up.”

I went on trying unsuccessfully to communicate with my father, and I was still trying when Bronwen walked in. I noticed that the district nurse immediately pursed her lips in disapproval, but Warburton said, “Mrs. Morgan, can you please convince John that his father must be taken to a place where he can receive the proper medical care?”

Bronwen said in English, “We’re going to look after him at home.” Then she said in Welsh to my father, “You can’t understand what they say, can you?”

He looked up at her. She knelt beside him and pointed to the album. “Please can I see your photographs?” she said. “Please will you come with me so that we can look at them together?”

He went on gazing at her in wonder, but very slowly his wrinkled trembling old hand slid into hers. I helped him to his feet and while Warburton and the nurse looked on with incredulity we led him downstairs and took him home.

II

“That arch-cunt Straker!” said Thomas. “How could she have walked out on him like that?”

We were back at Oxmoon an hour later. My father, still trustfully holding Bronwen’s hand in Blanche’s old room at the Manor, had allowed Warburton to administer a sedative. A day nurse and a night nurse had been requested from the Swansea agency that was providing additional nursing for Robert. Mrs. Wells had risen to the occasion with her usual aplomb and even the vicar had called with a dutiful futility; I was aware of Penhale vibrating with excitement as gossip and rumor reached fever pitch.

At Oxmoon the constable reported that the servants had named the vandals, and as he bicycled away to make his arrests I realized with a sinking heart that I now had no further excuse for delaying my investigation of Milly Straker’s reign.

“Bloody bitch,” said Thomas, kicking his heel into the carpet to relieve his feelings. “I hate all women.”

“Well, fortunately for us men not all women are like Milly Straker.”

“Sez you. Personally I’d rather fuck sheep.”

This remark, very typical of Thomas at his most disturbed, was not intended to be taken seriously so I merely said in a mild voice, “Really? I don’t think I’d care for all the wool,” and headed towards the green baize door.

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to make a preliminary survey of what I’m very much afraid is a catastrophe. I shouldn’t think for one moment that woman’s left any incriminating evidence of embezzlement behind, but we must make sure.”

The housekeeper’s room, Milly’s office on the ground floor of the servants’ quarters, proved unremarkable except for the number of unpaid bills piled beneath three large paperweights. We went upstairs to her official bedroom but it had an unused musty air. As I noted the disappearance of all her possessions, I realized she had been planning her escape for some weeks; she had gauged the hour of disaster with precision and when the train had approached the edge of the cliff she had nimbly jumped clear. Rage swept over me again but I controlled it. Rage was a luxury I could not afford. There was no time. “Thomas, I’m going to have to search Papa’s room before the servants start poking around and discovering God-knows-what. Do you want to come with me or would you prefer to wait downstairs?”

“I’ll come with you,” said my watchdog, and beyond the fierce exterior I glimpsed a shocked and frightened youth who was not yet twenty-one.

We left the servants’ wing by a door that connected with the back stairs, and moved in silence down the long passage to the other end of the house.

“The place is in a bad way, isn’t it?” said Thomas suddenly, looking at the peeling wallpaper. “Maybe there are even rats in the library, just as there were when Oxmoon went to pieces under Bryn-Davies.”

“I don’t think we’ve sunk that low this time,” I said, but a search of the bedroom soon changed my mind. I knew then that there were more repulsive symbols than rats of degeneration and decay.

“Jesus Christ!” said my innocent little brother, blithely opening a wardrobe. “What’s all this?” And we found ourselves confronted, just as I had feared, by an unspeakable collection of erotic impedimenta.

I was by that time nearly thirty-six, and the days were long since past when I had denied my sexual inclinations by adopting priggish poses, but even so I was appalled. For a moment I wished I were as ignorant as Thomas, but both before and after my second marriage I had read a great deal about sex in an effort to place my sexuality in perspective, and the result was that I knew too much to misunderstand what I now saw. My sexual relationship with Bronwen, the natural result of the extraordinary harmony of our personalities, had always been so satisfying that I had never felt the need to resort to books to learn how I might enhance the experience; but in my efforts to compensate myself for my second marriage I had felt driven to set out down many unexplored avenues, and Constance, strongly sexed herself and quite humorless enough to reduce sex to a suitable subject for research, had egged me on. However, even with Constance I had drawn certain lines. My father, in his frantic efforts to divert himself from intolerable truths, had evidently drawn no lines at all.

In a moment of revelation I saw at last why he had been unable to remain faithful to my mother. He could never have asked her to share in such perversions. He had loved her too much and would have wanted above all to protect her from such sordidness, although I thought my mother must have guessed the truth in time; her knowledge would explain her remarkable and courageous resignation which could have come only through some profound understanding of my father’s dilemma.

I then experienced a second moment of revelation as I at last perceived the conflict that had driven him inexorably toward breakdown. My father, fundamentally a good and decent man, would never have been able to forgive himself for the secret compulsions that had driven him not merely to be unfaithful to the woman he loved but to install Milly Straker at Oxmoon, a move that had ultimately led to the dissolution of his family life and the ruin of everything that had been precious to him.

Thomas was still demanding explanations but I merely ordered him to light the fire.

“But we can’t burn all that stuff, John—the rubber’ll make the most awful stink!”

“We’ll bury what we can’t burn.”

Thomas set alight the housemaid’s arrangement of twigs and coal in the grate and then tried to look at the pornography, but when I saw his expression I told him sharply to stop. “Spoilsport!” he muttered, but I knew he was thankful that he could abandon his perusal without a loss of face. More time passed. We toiled on.

“Get the pillowcases, would you? We’ll use them to cart away the stuff we can’t burn.” I went on stoking the fire.

“John, you’ve got to tell me what all this is about, you’ve got to, or else I’ll start imagining things, and imagining things is worse than knowing them—”

I knew he was right. I made a great effort to control myself but it was hard to find the right words and harder still to adopt the right unemotional manner. Shoving the last pictures of defecation into the flames, I straightened my back and said, “This is all connected with punishment. He seems to have welcomed physical humiliation.”

“Christ! Why?”

“Guilt.”

“Guilt? Oh, you mean all that mess about locking up Grandmama in the loony bin—he was always saying how guilty he felt about that. But how peculiar! Do you mean the bitch just punished him all the time with the whips and this other fantastic rubbish? Didn’t sex come into it at all?”

“The greater the punishment, the greater the sexual gratification.”

“Christ! But if he was so gratified why did he need that false cock over there?”

“Maybe it wasn’t he who needed it.”

“
Christ
!”

“Stop saying ‘Christ’ and give me a hand with the pillowcases.”

We began to stow away our unspeakable booty.

“Hope the material’s strong enough, John. The chains are bloody heavy.”

But the pillowcases stood the strain. When they were full I poked around in the grate to make sure all the pornography had been destroyed, and then we left the room to conduct the next stage of the operation.

We buried our haul in the shadow of Humphrey de Mohun’s ruined tower, covered the grave with dead leaves and retreated to the house to drink brandy. The parlormaid told me Bayliss had been taken to hospital. The glaziers were at work on the library windows. The house seemed to be slowly returning to order but the sun was now setting on the bleak landscape, and as I drank my brandy I saw the three representatives from the band of tenants trudging dourly up the drive in pursuit of justice.

So as usual there was to be no respite. Downing the rest of my brandy I told the parlormaid to show my visitors into the morning room and prepared to face still more evidence of my father’s disastrous decline.

III

After promising to review all the rents I sanctioned a delay in payment until my investigations had been completed and promised I would undertake a complete investigation of the estate so that I could straighten out the muddle which had arisen from maladministration. After the men had expressed their gratitude I told them I would see every tenant to hear each grievance, and I asked them if they knew of anyone suffering hardship that required immediate alleviation.

I was told of three old women who had no fuel and of a widow with five children who lived on bread and dripping. Noting their names, I gave an assurance that their plight would be terminated at once.

“So you’ll be master of Oxmoon now, Mr. John?” said Thornton of Cherryvale.

“My father’s master while he lives,” I said, “but I shall now be managing the estate on his behalf.”

They all said they were glad, and I saw then that they were no different from the men at the golf club; once they had realized that I could still be treated as a normal person, they no longer felt they had no alternative but to treat me as a wicked adulterer, and their moral obligation to be hostile evaporated. Taking their leave of me courteously they retired in satisfaction to Penhale.

I was still standing in the hall, still contemplating the hair-raising but stimulating challenge of managing a large rundown estate, still straining my eyes to peer into the convoluted machinery of my wheel of fortune, when Thomas emerged from the library to say he was unable to make head or tail of the estate books.

“All right, leave them, take the car, go back to the Manor, tell Mrs. Wells I want her to take charge temporarily here and then bring her back with her luggage. Oh, and bring a bag for yourself. You’re going to be the Godwin in residence while we sort out this mess. Big houses run better if at least one member of the family is present to give the servants an incentive to behave well.”

“But aren’t you going to move in here yourself?”

“Papa wouldn’t like it.”

“Damn it, you’ve saved the old bugger from the loony bin, haven’t you? What right’s he got to complain!”

“The best right in the world—the right of an owner. Now off you go, there’s a good chap, and stop making idiotic suggestions.”

I got rid of him.

Then I went to the library, where a fire had now been lit, and sat thinking for a long time. After a while I found myself remembering Robert talking of putting the magic back into Oxmoon, and a very sensible, very rational, very persuasive voice in my head said: “But
I’m
the only one who can do that.”

“… and Oxmoon will
rise again
on the Wheel of Fortune …”

I could hear Robert’s voice so clearly. But then I could also so clearly hear him say, “You’re the best brother a man ever had.”

Blotting the future from my mind I sat down at the library table, opened the estate books and once more began to wrestle with the problems of the present.

IV

I was too exhausted to make more than a cursory examination of my father’s papers, but I found his checkbook in a drawer of the table and soon discovered that every stub recorded a payment to Milly. I did stumble across correspondence from Fairfax urging financial prudence, but I stopped being grateful to him when I saw the size of his bills. I also stopped feeling grateful to my father’s accommodating bank manager, Lloyd-Thomas, when I saw the profitable size of the overdraft and discovered the existence of a mortgage.