Free The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Page A

he lived openly with your mother and kept you from your inheritance.”
    “It was all a tragedy,” repeated my father. “A tragedy.”
    I gave up. We walked on across the Downs.
    “And afterwards,” said my father, “after Bryn-Davies had had his little accident with the tide tables and drowned on the Shipway, it was all so difficult with my mother but Margaret was wonderful, such a tower of strength, and she found out all about the Home of the Assumption where the nuns were so kind to the insane. Sometimes I wondered if my mother should come home more often but Margaret said no, only at Christmas. Margaret drew the line and of course she was right—because terrible things happen,” said my father, his face bleached, his lips bloodless, his eyes seeing scenes I could not begin to imagine, “when people fail to draw the line.”
    I said nothing. The silence that followed lasted some time, but at last he thanked me for listening so patiently and said he was so glad he had talked to me.
    But as he and I both knew perfectly well, he had still told me nothing whatsoever.
    II
    When I related this incident to Ginette in my Christmas letter she wrote in reply: Poor Bobby, but what defeats me is why he and Margaret make this big mystery out of the past when it’s quite obvious to anyone of our sophistication, my dear, what was going on: the drunken husband developed a penchant for beating the wife, the wife dived into a grand passion in sheer self-defense and the lover, being both naughty and greedy, grabbed not only the wife but all the money he could lay his hands on when the husband obligingly died of liver failure. Heavens, such sordid goings-on happen all the time everywhere — and as always in such frightfulness, the people who suffer most are the poor innocent children. Really, it’s a wonder some of them survive at all and if they do survive they’re lucky if they’re not scarred for life by their experiences!
    And it was then, as I read this passage in her letter, that it first occurred to me to suspect that my father was not a flawless hero but a deeply damaged man.
    III
    I WAS DAMAGED MYSELF although at that time I did not admit it. I had enjoyed so much worldly success that the prospect of private failure was inconceivable; it never even crossed my mind that anything could be amiss.
    It would be immodest for me to record my achievements at Harrow so I need only say that it was taken for granted that I would achieve a first when I went up to Oxford to read Greats. This made life a little dull; success loses its power to charm if insufficient effort is involved in its acquisition and after I had demonstrated to my contemporaries, my tutors and the various females of my acquaintance that whatever I saw I conquered, I acknowledged my boredom by looking around for a new challenge that would make life more amusing. I had just finished my second year at Balliol when a friend invited me to stay with him in Scotland and for the first time in my life I saw the mountains.
    There are plenty of mountains in Wales, but the spectacular ones are in the north, and since my parents never took holidays I knew little of Wales beyond the Gower Peninsula and little of England beyond Central London, Oxford and Harrow. There are no mountains in Gower, only the smooth rolling humps of the Downs, and although I had long been attracted to the spectacular cliffs by the sea, these were so dangerous that my father had always forbidden me to climb them.
    However I was now presented with a challenge that no one had forbidden me to accept, and I knew I had to climb those mountains. I had to get to the top. I had to win. I was enslaved.
    During the next few months I drove my parents to despair, nearly ruined my career at Oxford and almost killed myself. That was when I first realized something had gone wrong with my life; it occurred to me that when my desire to win had been channeled into academic excellence the compulsion had formed a benign