The Wheel of Fortune (88 page)

“Yes, I do remember the story. Has Rudolph been crowned yet?”

“Yes, pages ago—I loved it when Black Michael was so livid!” Unable to resist the lure of the story any longer, he inclined his long nose towards the pages again.

After a moment I sat down beside him and said tentatively, “Kester, I’m so sorry about your father, but I thought you’d just like to know that at the end he—”

“No, thanks,” said Kester. “I don’t want to know at all. I’m sick of people dying all over the place.”

It was seldom that I felt nonplused by a child, but I now found I had no idea what to do next. I felt he should know about my promise to Robert, but faced with Kester’s complete lack of interest I appeared to have no chance to demonstrate my paternal concern. In the end, convinced that something should be said but unable to conjure up an attractive speech, I merely murmured: “I promised your father I’d look after you for him.”

“Oh, don’t bother,” said Kester, turning a page of his book. “Actually I think fathers should be abolished.” His pale eyes skimmed over the print. “I say!” he said excited. “I do like the villains in this book! The hero’s really rather a bore, always keeping a stiff upper lip and doing the done thing, but I’m just wild about Black Michael and Rupert of Hentzau!”

I stood up abruptly and moved to the barred window. I was remembering Ginevra’s remark, “I suppose religious people would say God moves in mysterious ways,” and as I looked back at the profoundly unattractive child for whom I was now responsible, I decided God was evidently plumbing new depths of convoluted intrigue. However as far as I could see there was nothing to be done to ease the burden. All I could do was my inadequate best, like the miscast hero that I was; all I could do, once again, was hold fast, stand firm—and soldier on.

PART FOUR

Kester
1928-1919

INCONSTANCY IS MY VERY
essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top. Yes, rise up on my wheel if you like, but don’t count it an injury when by the same token you begin to fall, as the rules of the game will require. …

Boethius

The Consolation of Philosophy

1

I

“I’M WILD ABOUT THOSE
two villains Black Michael and Rupert of Hentzau!” I said wittily, unable to resist the temptation to shock stuffy old Uncle John to the core, and Uncle John looked at me as if I ought to be in a home for wayward boys. What irked him most was that I wasn’t “doing the done thing.” A boy of eight who has tragically lost his papa is supposed to fight back his tears like a brave little fellow and whisper humbly to his sainted uncle who has just made all manner of rash deathbed promises: “Oh, sir, will you be my father now? Oh please, sir, please!” What he is
not
supposed to do is say something like “Whoopee! Daddy’s dead!” and launch into a eulogy of two villains. Uncle John clearly thought this was very low behavior, and I could see he was racking his brains wondering how the devil he was going to make a decent Godwin out of me.

Oh, heaven preserve me from my family!

At the age of eight I already knew I was the black sheep. Long before my father died in the spring of 1928, I had become aware of my family regarding me with baffled incredulity, and as I grew older I realized why they were so flabbergasted. I was the Godwin who ought to be written quietly out of the family tree but by a malign twist of fate I was also the Godwin destined to be permanently on display as master of Oxmoon. Oh, my poor family! My uncle Thomas used to look at me as if he had already gnashed his teeth to the bone and was busy grinding the stumps. My grandfather could never remember who on earth I was. Uncle Edmund used to muse occasionally, “Funny to think he’s Robert’s son, isn’t it?”—which, since my father was universally acknowledged to be a hero, was quite the most beastly comment Uncle Edmund could have made. In fact he was outdone in beastliness only by my brutal half-brother Rory Kinsella, eighteen years my senior, who used to say, “Sure Robert must have been half asleep when little Kessie was conceived!” Only stuffy old Uncle John—my “heroic” Uncle John, as my mother called him—had the sheer nobility of soul to keep his inevitable opinion of me to himself, but that was out of loyalty to my father. However my father’s opinion of me had been equally low.

“That wretched child looks like a shrinking violet—cut his hair this minute, Ginette, and
stop treating him like a girl.”

“Shut up, you bloody tyrant, shut up,
shut up
!”

My parents’ marriage—if such a word can ever describe such a desperate pain-racked association—was so far from the romantic ideal of what a marriage should be that I came to understand early in life how great a gulf could exist between fantasy and reality—and fantasy, I soon decided, was infinitely the more attractive of the two. I loved fairy tales, particularly the ones where the prince and princess fell blissfully in love and lived happily ever after in the palace of their dreams, and spurred on by my desire to escape from my parents’ bizarre relationship, I learned to read as soon as I could. Then whenever daily life at Little Oxmoon became too frightful I would dive onto my bed and lose myself thankfully between the pages of the most riveting story available.

I was not alone in this flight from reality. Gradually I came to understand that not only the whole household but all my parents’ friends and relations had joined together in a conspiracy to weave a web of fantasy around the situation at Little Oxmoon. The brutal truth was that my father was dying by inches and that my mother had to spend nine years watching him die, and that truth was so ghastly that those who knew them had to wrap it up in fantasy in order to make my parents bearable people who could be visited or discussed in a normal way. Thus my father became the dying hero of legend, accepting his disaster with a stiff upper lip and unlimited courage, while my mother was transformed into a cross between Florence Nightingale and a Fallen Woman Redeemed by Suffering.

“What a wonderful marriage! So devoted! Such heroism!” breathed the world in unstinted awe as people locked themselves up in this myth to prevent the full horror of my parents’ ordeal impinging on their sunlit daily lives, but I knew better. I was there, and with the special sensitivity of a child I absorbed every facet of the nightmare, the constant rows, my father’s rages born of frustration and despair, my mother’s drinking and hysteria, the awful nurses who pitter-pattered in and out and gossiped in corners, the wheelchair, the commode, the stench of decay—all the ghastly trappings of that more than ghastly illness. People not only had no idea how much my parents suffered; they did not want to have any idea. Neither did I, but I had no choice. My father became ill soon after I was conceived, and so the moment I was born I was pitched into this atmosphere of inexorable disintegration.

Yet now, as I look back, I can see that at the heart of this black reality lay the genesis of the legend which people found credible enough to accept. The real truth was that my parents were indeed courageous but their courage lay not in being saintly in the face of adversity (as the world yearned to believe) but in simply struggling on, day after day, and somehow keeping sane. Their devotion to each other, which the world blithely took for granted and which I as a child decided was nonexistent, was in fact, as I now see, very real. It was just that like their courage it was not obviously recognizable. They did not behave as a husband and wife, radiating the traditional marital virtues, but like a brother and sister who were forced to share a nursery under exceptionally trying circumstances, and later I realized that when tragedy had confronted them they had turned for strength not to their marriage, which was of comparatively recent origin, but to the childhood they had shared as cousins at Oxmoon.

However it took me years to reach this final judgment, and on the day my father died I was merely a child who knew his parents were desperately unhappy and who had prayed night after night for the death which could only be regarded as a liberation. By that time I had no strong feelings about my father. In the past I had dutifully attempted hero worship, but such devotion is hard to sustain unaided and my father gave me no help. At the end of his life he obviously did think more about me but even then his interest was detached, as if I were merely an unexpectedly useful pawn on his private chessboard. He was not interested in
me
at all; he never made any genuine attempt to find out what sort of person I was, but although I did go through a period of misery when I hated him for his indifference, my mother helped me over that. In fact when I look back on my childhood I can see so clearly how much ghastlier it would have been if I had been deprived of that racy, strong-willed buccaneer of a mother of mine.

“Oh Lord, pet!” she said briskly when I wept how I hated my father. “Do turn off the waterworks and brace up! Daddy does love you but unfortunately he doesn’t know how to show it because he’s hopeless with children. It’s like you being hopeless at cricket—you try hard but when you keep missing the ball you get cross and lose interest. It’s a question of having the knack, isn’t it? Well, Daddy doesn’t have the knack with you but he can’t help it, it’s just the way he’s made, so you mustn’t mind too much.”

My mother had the knack.

My mother was very fat with an enormous bosom and she had flashing brown eyes and a rich purring voice and a come-hither look. Later I decided she looked like the vamp in those marvelous Hollywood Westerns, the lady who goes hipping-and-thighing through the saloon to make all the cowboys drool at the bar. I could picture her with a glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other as she declaimed Mae West’s immortal line “It’s not the men in my life I like—it’s the life in my men!”

She didn’t love me half as much as I loved her, but I could see there was some sort of love there, and this was a great consolation to me. When she was in a bad mood I used to hate her as much as I hated my father, but if my mother ever forgot herself so far as to let me know that she considered her unwanted fourth son to be a constant source of irritation, she never failed, once Robin was dead, to make some attempt to compensate me afterwards.

“Kester, what a
beautiful
picture you’ve drawn! Darling, what a
clever
little boy you are and how
lucky
I am to have you …” All rather exaggerated perhaps, but I was easily appeased and I loved being loved—and God knows, at the start of my life there had been little love circulating in my direction; ever since I could remember the waters of affection in the parental reservoir had been channeled into the canals of adulation that surrounded my brother Robin.

I have often wondered in retrospect what Robin was really like, but suppose the answer must always be that he died too young to permit any useful analysis of his character. I thought he was a cruel beastly villain, but I was prejudiced. He used to beat me up regularly while Nanny turned a blind eye; how I survived infancy I have no idea, but I was probably assisted by my nursemaid Daisy who let me hide under her bed. No doubt the prosaic truth was that Robin, worshiped by a doting world, was very jealous of me and quite unable to adjust to my arrival in the nursery. There was considerable evidence that he was an infant phenomenon. He could read fluently by the time he was three (this nauseating achievement was regularly drummed into me during my struggles with
THE CAT SAT ON THE MAT
at the age of four), and if he had lived he would probably have excelled at games as well as academic pursuits. I can remember him skillfully wielding a cricket bat like the perfect little Godwin that he was, but when he was six and I was three and a half, he fell out of a window and, as Cook put it, “sped off to heaven to sit as an angel on the right hand of God.”

Poor God, I thought with genuine compassion, but I was delighted to have the nursery all to myself and felt sure I would now receive all the doting admiration that had been lavished on Robin. Never had I been more disappointed. I was ignored by everyone except Cook, who was a kindly soul, and my Uncle John, who, anxious to “do the done thing” as usual, arrived to rescue me from the kitchens where I had retreated after the dismissal of Nanny and Daisy. I had shed no tears for Nanny but I had been sorry to lose Daisy and now I did not want to be parted from Cook, but my parents were prostrated and Uncle John thought it best that I should be sent to Stourham Hall at Llangennith. There was a ghastly child there called Belinda, but she had a splendid Nanny who actually kissed me every night before I went to sleep. I was so impressed by this display of affection that in the end I was almost reluctant to leave Stourham Hall.

My return home was even worse than I had anticipated because my parents behaved as if they could hardly bear the sight of me. This was standard behavior for my father but I was horrified by my mother’s undisguised aversion, and retreating to the kitchens I clambered onto Cook’s lap and wept copiously against her bosom.

“Poor little soul!” cried Cook, and added knowingly to Watson the parlormaid: “I expect Madam’s wishing it was him that went to heaven and not Master Robin.”

I stowed this terrible information far away in the remotest region of my mind, but not long afterwards I concluded some childish tantrum by screaming at my mother: “You hate me because I didn’t get killed—you wish I was the one in heaven instead of Robin!”

My mother went white. Then she sank down on the nearest chair and burst into tears.

Naturally I burst into tears as well. I was hysterical with cataclysmic misery. “I’ll go and jump out of the window too!” I sobbed, heading for the window seat. “And when I get to heaven I’ll tell God I’ve come in exchange for Robin, and then you can have Robin back and you need never see me again!”