The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Page A

extraordinary haste she had sailed to Ireland with her two sons within a week of Kinsella’s death, and after the funeral she had resolved to leave her sons temporarily in the care of her husband’s family while she visited Wales. She did not explain this decision in her letter to my parents. Perhaps she felt it would be better for the boys to remain with their father’s family instead of being swept off into a milieu where their father had been disliked; perhaps she had simply wanted to be alone for a while; perhaps her decision represented a combination of these reasons, but whatever her motives the fact remained that she was due to arrive alone in Swansea on the morning of Friday, the twentieth of June, and that she had begged that no one, absolutely no one, was to meet her at the docks except my father’s coachman with the family motorcar.
    I want to fulfill a dream, she wrote to me in response to the brief formal letter of sympathy I had sent to her in Dublin. I dreamt I was coming home to Oxmoon and all the family were lined up on the porch steps — it was like an old-fashioned photograph, I could even see the sepia tints! So don’t be at the docks to meet me. Be at Oxmoon with the others and make my dream come true.
    I found her letter and turned up the gas to reread it.
    So Ginette too had her dreams of returning to Oxmoon.
    The bells of St. Clement’s sang faintly again on the night air and beyond the window the sky was lightening but I could not sleep. Cicero’s metaphor of the Wheel of Fortune had captivated my imagination, and moving to the bookshelves I found the volume written by that later philosopher who had restated the ancient metaphor for the men of the Middle Ages who had known little of Cicero. From King Alfred to Chaucer, from Dante to a host of other Continental writers, all medieval Europe had been mesmerized by Boethius, writing in The Consolation of Philosophy about the sinister Wheel of Fortune:
I know the many disguises of that monster, Fortune, and the extent to which she seduces with friendship the very people she is striving to cheat, until she overwhelms them with unbearable grief at the suddenness of her desertion. …
    I thought of Ginette abandoning me for Kinsella in the ballroom at Oxmoon.
    But now Fortune herself was speaking; the monster was making her classic statement about her notorious wheel:
I was inclined to favor you … now I have withdrawn my hand. … 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. …
    I saw myself facing a new opponent in the game of life. Death had been replaced by Fortune. I was riding upwards on her wheel at last but this time when I got to the top I was going to stay there. I was going to beat that Wheel of Fortune and bend Fortune herself to my will.
    A variety of erotic images teemed in my mind. Then, thinking how appropriate it was that Fortune should be represented as a woman, I returned to bed and dreamed of conquest.
    V
    I LEFT BENNETT AT my chambers in London, just as I always did when I went home. It would have been pretentious to take a valet to Oxmoon where under my mother’s regime shirts seemed to wash, iron and starch themselves and where my father’s man was always on hand to attend to any detail that defied the laundress or my mother’s omnipresent needle. Bennett, who was a Cockney, never minded being left in London. No doubt he enjoyed the respite from ironing The Times and performing all the other minor rites which must have made life with me so tedious. As he handed me a perfectly packed bag to take to Oxmoon I made a mental note to give him an increase in wages.
    My brother Lion had threatened to accompany me on the train journey to