The Wheel of Fortune (103 page)

Finally in December shortly before Anna was due home, Uncle John said to me, “You’re a little young to single out one special girl for attention, Kester. Perhaps you should try seeing other girls as well.”

“Oh, let him be, John!” said my mother good-naturedly. “They’re not getting up to any mischief! It’s just an innocent romantic friendship and I think it’s splendid!”

Uncle John merely looked at her as if he could not believe she could be quite so foolish. I was becoming very tired now of this stuffy Uncle John who had emerged, like some malign butterfly from a tainted chrysalis, after his reconciliation with Aunt Constance. Fortunately he seldom came to Oxmoon, but when he did he always made me ride out with him to visit my tenants and he always gave me boring lectures about how it was my moral duty to take an interest in their welfare. This annoyed me. I was fully prepared to take an interest but not when it was so unappetizingly described as my moral duty. In fact when the tenants united that November to protest against a rise in rents I coped so well, riding out to meet them and promising that all their demands would be met, that my mother proudly declared I had proved myself a true chip off the Godwin block, but Uncle John said I had no business making rash promises and that the tenants’ demands should be the subject of a prolonged negotiation. He then proceeded to wreck my liberal and humane
tour de force
by revising the settlement in a most conservative and autocratic manner.

I was now sixteen years old, quite old enough to resent having my authority undermined in such a fashion, although not quite bold enough to tell him so to his face. For Uncle John, grave intimidating Uncle John, was no longer the man who had laughed and joked with Bronwen. Proud, dignified and impeccably correct, he would demolish my self-confidence merely by raising an eyebrow; in his presence I became a little boy again, and I hated it. By this time I was six feet tall and still growing. I had irregular but thrilling encounters with a razor. My voice had finished breaking and, by one of those curious quirks of heredity, was now as deep as Uncle John’s. (Harry was a tenor.) In short I was almost grown up, and every time Uncle John glided down to Oxmoon in his Rolls-Royce to treat me like a child, I was livid.

I was particularly maddened when he suggested I should stage some form of retreat from Anna because by that time I was working myself into a frenzy as I planned my first kiss. Anna was coming to lunch on Christmas Eve, and the only problem was where to hang the vital mistletoe. I tried out half a dozen places before settling for the doorway of the music room, where the gramophone was kept, and then I shaved, dressed in my best suit and tried not to chew my fingernails while I waited. Eternity passed. The Steinbergs arrived. Detaching Anna, I hustled her down the corridor to the music room.

“Gosh, look at the mistletoe!” said Anna, forestalling my carefully prepared remark about the stunning relevance to modern life of ancient pagan customs. “How pretty!”

I muttered some wild inanity like “Got to kiss—no choice,” and for one infinitely precious second my lips touched her cheek before I sprang aside and headed dazed for the gramophone. My euphoria was so overpowering that the “Ode to joy” section of Beethoven’s
Ninth
nearly wound up smashed on the floor.

“My mother thinks I’m seeing too much of you,” said Anna at the end of the Easter holidays.

“Has she been talking to Uncle John?”

“Heavens, no, she wouldn’t dare! She thinks he’s sure to disapprove of us.”

“Well, he might, but if Uncle John was anti-Semitic he’d never, never show it. It wouldn’t be the done thing.”

“I wasn’t just referring to us being Jewish. I meant that he’d disapprove of us for being foreign and middle-class and having only one live-in maid and not enough lawn for a tennis court.”

“But that’s ludicrous! Who’s going to choose their friends according to the size of their lawns?”

“Mutti thinks
you
will in the end. She says it’ll all end in tears and you’ll fall in love with some smart aristocratic English girl who’s been presented at court—”

“Like Cousin Marian. God, what an awful fate!”

“—and anyway, she thinks I ought to start being nice to Lester Feinstein.”

“Lester who? Oh, you mean that wet rag I met at your house the other day!”

“Yes, but he’s Jewish and I’m supposed to like him—it’s the done thing, as you’d say—”

“This is exactly the sort of adult madness which makes one wonder if it really is worth growing up. As far as I’m concerned all men are equal—Christians and Jews, the County families and the middle classes, the aristocrats and the workers—and if they’re not equal they ought to be!”

“Yes, I know and I do so agree, but meanwhile, what am I going to say to my mother about Lester Feinstein?”

We resolved to placate all these demented adults by behaving even more immaculately than before, and for some time after that we slaved away at being spotless. I took trouble with Mrs. Steinberg and gave her flowers on her birthday. (That was the end of her preference for Lester Feinstein.) I invited the Steinbergs to dine at Oxmoon with the more rational members of my family (Uncle Edmund, who would cheerfully have dined with cannibals if the claret was good, and Aunt Teddy, who always radiated a splendid American tolerance). Apart from her parents Anna had no relatives in Wales, but I did meet some of the Steinbergs’ friends and tried hard to give a good impression.

This behavior was all very admirable and our critics were duly soothed but being spotless is a very boring occupation and to console ourselves we fell into clandestine habits which we confided to no one. That summer I wrote to her every day, although I told everyone I was still writing only twice a week. I sent her sonnets, books, sweets and cuttings from
The New Statesman.
She sent back inspiring excerpts from
The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
and pressed wild flowers which she had gathered during walks on Beachy Head. When the holidays eventually came, we fell into the habit of organizing secret trysts so that no one would guess we met almost every day. Gallons of fizzy lemonade were consumed in countless tea shops. We haunted the Market; we languished beneath the castle walls, we wandered along Wind Street, we meandered up and down Kilvey Hill, we met in the Library, the Royal Institution, outside the Grand Theatre, at the conservatory in Victoria Park. When we had more time to spare we took the Mumbles Railway around the curve of Swansea Bay or the bus to Rhossili where we could walk hand in hand along the romantic lonely beach. Once we even clambered across the Shipway to the Worm’s Head, and as we gazed dreamily into the beautiful rock pools I told her how my great-grandmother’s lover, Owain Bryn-Davies, had met his tragic fate more than fifty years before when the Worm’s Head had been almost unknown and the Gower Peninsula had been a mere secret wilderness beyond Swansea.

“A grand passion!” said Anna. “How thrilling!”

That seemed a good moment to kiss her so I did. I only kissed her very occasionally, however, because I was nervous of displaying some gross physical reaction which would have alarmed Anna and marred the perfection of our friendship.

Before she went back to school I gave her a red rose and told her I loved her. We were in the summerhouse at Oxmoon, and when Anna blushed I thought it was the most romantic place, a haven which might have been specially designed for two people who had to hide their love from a tiresome and thoroughly unsympathetic world.

Two months later I was seventeen, and it was soon after this, when Anna returned for the Christmas holidays, that I began to talk casually of marriage.

First of all I made remarks like “Later when we’re married we can go to London every month,” and when she gave no hint that marriage was unthinkable to her, I became bolder and began to speculate whether we could have two weddings, one in a church and one in a synagogue. This was heady stuff indeed, and driven on by the urge to bring our dreams closer to reality, I borrowed some money from my mother to buy Anna an antique garnet ring for Christmas. She said she would wear it secretly until we made our engagement public, and at that point we began to wonder when we dared make the announcement. We knew everyone would say we were too young, and although I did not tell her, I trembled at the thought of Uncle John.

“It seems to me,” I said at last, “that the best plan is to wait another ten months until I’m eighteen. Then I inherit Oxmoon, and if I’m old enough to do that then by God, I’m old enough to get engaged! Who knows?” I added, carried away by this stirring vision of independence. “If our parents consent to the engagement we might even be married immediately! I know Mum will be on our side—she adores romance. In fact I suspect she can hardly wait for us to get married and live happily ever after!”

Never in all my life had I been quite so catastrophically mistaken.

VI

“… so I think Anna and I will get engaged next November,” I announced, “and then we can be married as soon as possible afterwards!”

I had just arrived home after seeing Anna onto the Swansea bus and had found my mother enjoying her first pink gin of the evening. The drawing room, still swathed with the Christmas holly and paper chains, was alluringly warm but the warmth seemed to fade as my mother gave me a long cool look. Then she knocked back the remainder of her pink gin and rose to mix herself another.

“Sit down, please, Kester.”

“Why, what’s the matter?”

“Sit down!”

I sat down.

“Now,” said my mother, “let me say this: I like Anna enormously. I’m delighted you’ve had this girlfriend for two years. But of course there can be no question of getting engaged or—God forbid!—married when you’re only eighteen.”

“But Mum!” I said shattered. “You said marrying at eighteen was all right!”

“I said sex at eighteen was all right,” said my mother. “Or rather, to be accurate, I said that no one younger than eighteen should indulge in sex—by which I meant that in certain circumstances sex can be acceptable after one’s eighteenth birthday.” She poured a generous helping of gin into her glass. “But I never,” she said, “
never
either said or implied that marriage would be acceptable at that age. You should wait till you’re at least twenty-five.”

“Twenty-five?”
I shouted.

“Twenty-five,” said my mother implacably, saturating the gin with bitters.

“But look here!” I said, outraged. “You can’t sanction sex and not marriage! That’s all the wrong way round! You can’t expect me to have sex with Anna without being married to her! Good heavens, what sort of a villain do you think I am?”

“Of course I don’t think you’re a villain, darling! You’re just a nice young man who’s led such a secluded life that he has no idea what goes on in the world.”

“Another insult! Now listen to me, Mum. Anna’s the love of my life. I knew as soon as I first looked into her eyes at the Blue Rabbit—”

“Kester, this is real life. You’re not in Ruritania now.”

“I
know
it’s real life. But this sort of situation isn’t confined to Ruritania! What about my father?”

Silence. No reply. My mother was suddenly very still.

“Well, he fell in love with you when he was about my age, didn’t he?” I pursued triumphantly. “And didn’t he love you till the day he died? And didn’t you always tell me that this was a grand passion and just like a fairy tale? You’ve certainly always given me the impression that you would have lived happily ever after if that illness hadn’t plunged you both into hell!”

My mother tried to speak, made a mess of it, halted, drank some pink gin and fumbled for a cigarette. She was unable to look at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said at once. “I know it must be so painful for you to be reminded how your glorious romance was ruined by that tragedy, and you know I’d never do it unless I was desperate, but—”

“Kester,” said my mother unevenly, “your father didn’t marry at eighteen. Nor did he spend his twenties yearning for me chastely. He had affairs with other women—and that was as it should be. All men need a love affair or two to help them grow up into mature people who can master the challenge marriage presents, and believe me, darling, your father would be the very first person to tell you that if he were alive today.”

“Very well, I concede he married when he was a mature man of thirty-one. But he obviously felt exactly the same at thirty-one as he did at seventeen, and so shall I, because this is no adolescent dream, Mum, this is grand passion, and if you refuse to acknowledge that then you just don’t understand the situation at all!”

“Oh yes I do!” said my mother, speedily recovering her equilibrium. “I understand all too well! We leave for London tomorrow, pet. I think it’s time you had a good long sensible talk with your Uncle John.”

4

I

U
NCLE JOHN HAD BEEN HAVING
a trying time with his family during the three and a half years that had elapsed since Bronwen’s departure, and accordingly my passion for Anna must have seemed to him to resemble the straw that broke the camel’s back. The first family crisis had arisen less than a year after his reconciliation with Aunt Constance when Marian and Rory had decided to get married. (This was the direct result of the grand Easter Reunion at Oxmoon when they had danced the Charleston together and Rory, mindful that my mother wanted him to settle down like Darling Declan, had inquired furtively about Marian’s fortune.) From my mother’s point of view, there was in theory nothing wrong with this match—quite the reverse, since she must have despaired of Rory ever marrying a rich man’s daughter—but in practice she was horrified. She disliked Marian and realized that the marriage could only lead to awkwardness between herself and Uncle John who was naturally appalled that his daughter wanted to marry a penniless rake like Rory.

“Darling, marry anyone but John’s daughter!” she begged him, and added distractedly: “Surely you can’t love her!”

“I most certainly do!” said Rory with indignation, and indeed I think he was fairly keen. It would take a man of Rory’s stupidity to find a girl like Marian attractive.