Free The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch

I would think, so plain, so dumpy, so unfashionable, so provincial—what did she know of life when she had barely ventured from her rural backwater since the age of sixteen? The only crisis she had had to surmount had been her mother-in-law’s determination to live in sin with a sheep farmer, and even that droll little inconvenience had been smoothed aside by my father who had played the hero and visited his mother regularly in her Swansea asylum.
    My father never did tell me the whole story about his mother and Owain Bryn-Davies, but the older and more sophisticated I became the less curious I was to hear about this amusing slice of Victorian melodrama which I felt sure by Edwardian standards would be judged tame. In my late twenties when I became involved with defending criminals of the worst type I quickly reached a state of mind in which no human behavior could shock me, least of all a little indiscreet adultery in South Wales in the Eighties, and when my father said after my grandmother’s funeral that my mother had been urging him to talk to me of the past, it was all I could do to suppress a yawn and assume a look of courteous sympathy.
    “It must be exactly as you wish, Papa,” I said. “If you want to talk then I’m willing to listen, but you shouldn’t let Mama dragoon you into a course of action which at heart you’ve no wish to pursue.”
    “Your mother thinks you could be a comfort to me,” said my father. “I feel so tormented sometimes by my memories.”
    We were strolling together across the heather to the summit of Rhossili Downs. It was a clouded winter day not conducive to walking, but after the ordeal of my grandmother’s funeral we had both felt in need of fresh air. I was twenty-eight but considered myself worldly enough to look older; my father was forty-eight but considered himself lucky enough to look younger; we had reached the stage when we were occasionally mistaken for brothers.
    “Yes, I must tell you,” said my father. “I must.”
    We paced on across the heather in silence. I waited, but when nothing happened I automatically fell into my professional role of playing midwife to the truth.
    “What were they like?” I said, throwing him a bland question to help him along.
    “What were they like?” repeated my father as if I had astonished him. “Oh, they were charming, all of them—my mother, my father, Bryn-Davies … Yes, they were all the most charming and delightful people.” He stopped to stare at the skyline and as I watched the color fade from his face he said in a low voice, “That was the horror, of course. It wasn’t like a melodrama when you can recognize the villains as soon as they step on the stage. It wasn’t like that at all.”
    “They were just three ordinary people?”
    “Yes, they were just three ordinary people,” said my father, “who failed to draw the line.”
    I suppressed a sigh at this fresh evidence of my mother’s middle-class Victorian influence over him. It was only the middle classes—and in particular the nouveaux-riches middle classes—who made a professional occupation of doing the done thing and drawing moral lines. Anyone of any genuine breeding did the done thing without thinking twice about it and left drawing lines to clergymen who were trained as moral draftsmen.
    “It was all a tragedy,” my father was saying. “My poor mother, she was so beautiful. My father wasn’t very kind to her.”
    “Because he was a drunkard?”
    “He was the most splendid fellow,” said my father exactly as if I had never spoken, “and so fond of children. I was the apple of his eye. Bryn-Davies was very civil to me too. Interesting chap, Bryn-Davies. Strong personality. Just calling him a sheep farmer gives no clear impression of him.”
    “But surely,” I said, deciding to risk a little Anglo-Saxon bluntness, “you must have resented Bryn-Davies when he took over Oxmoon after your father died of drink. Surely it became an outrage when