The Wheel of Fortune by Susan Howatch Page B

Swansea, but fortunately he had been dismissed that week from the bank where he had been pretending to earn a living and had already bounded back to Gower to resume his favorite occupation: the pursuit of idleness in pleasant surroundings. Justice compels me to add that Lion was not vicious, merely a young man of twenty-three with a limited intellect and an ingenuous disposition. In my opinion such people are much better suited to life in the country and should leave places like London well alone.
    However despite Lion’s absence I did not travel on my own to Swansea that day. My favorite brother John was at Paddington Station to meet me; he had recently taken his finals at Oxford and had been spending a few days with friends in London to recuperate. Term had ended, his rooms had been vacated, his possessions had been dispatched to Gower. He was, in short, in that pleasant limbo when one successful phase of life has ended and another is yet to begin, and he looked as if he had been finding the hiatus enjoyable. Having made some aristocratic friends up at Oxford he was fresh from sampling the pleasures of the London season from a base in Belgrave Square.
    “How’s the decadent aristocracy?” I said as we met on the platform.
    “You sound like an anarchist!” He laughed to show he was redeemed from priggishness by a sense of humor but I suspected he was mildly shocked. John would not have approved of anarchists. Nor would he have approved of any decadence among the members of the aristocracy, for in our family John represented the final triumph of my mother’s nouveau-riche middle-class values. With an apparently inexhaustible virtue he dedicated his life to drawing lines and doing the done thing.
    He was twenty-one, ten years my junior, better looking than I was but not so tall. Neither was he so gifted athletically and academically. This meant that jealousy would have been quite uncalled for on my part, and indeed I had never seen any reason why I should be other than benign towards this intelligent sibling who always behaved so respectfully in my presence, but occasionally—perhaps once every two or three years—I did wonder how he avoided being jealous of me. Lion did not compete. Neither did Edmund, my third brother, who was two years younger than John and a mere lackluster version of Lion. My fourth brother Thomas was at present too juvenile to take seriously but showed every sign of growing up stupid. But John had brains, and John, I knew, was ambitious, and John was just the kind of young man who might resent an older brother who always came first. However, he had apparently found some solution to this dilemma because I could tell he still hero-worshiped me. Perhaps he merely told himself that jealousy was not the done thing.
    “It’s so good to see you again, Robert! It seems ages since we last met—of course I know you’ve been uncommonly busy—”
    “I should never be too busy to deny myself the opportunity for civilized conversation,” I said at once. I felt guilty that although he had been in London for some days I had been too preoccupied with my obsessions to see him. “It’s the fools, not the intelligent men, whom I find impossible to suffer gladly.”
    John relaxed. “Talking of fools, I suppose you know Lion’s been sacked? I saw him at a ball last weekend and he told me how thrilled he was. He was rather squiffy and trying to teach some married woman the Paris tango.”
    “I trust you gave him a wide berth.”
    “The widest, yes. I spent an hour discussing the Marconi scandal with three elderly bores and praying that no one would ask me if Lionel Godwin was a relation of mine. …”
    We found an empty first-class compartment, paid off the porters and settled ourselves opposite each other while John talked earnestly of the Marconi scandal and the absolute necessity for a strict morality in politics.
    “Quite,” I said, and to steer him away from the subject of morality which so