The Wheel of Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page A

school and the lessons fell into abeyance. However when I returned from Harrow for the Christmas holidays, there was John, waiting for me on the doorstep, eyes shining with hero worship.
    Here was someone who had realized, even at a tender age, that first was best. My private opinion of siblings underwent a small but telling revision.
    “I think that child might turn out reasonably well,” I remarked to Ginette as he waited on us hand and foot in the holidays.
    “Isn’t he a poppet? So different from ghastly Lion. Honestly, I can’t think what Margaret sees in that monster. If ever I give birth to something so plain and stupid, I hope I’d have the sense to drown it.”
    She was fifteen. I was thirteen. The gap in our ages was widening but I was unaware of it. As far as I was concerned she was still my own Ginette and paradise was still coming home to Oxmoon and finding her waiting to welcome me back; paradise was still riding with her over the Downs or walking to the sea or scrambling across the tidal causeway called the Shipway where long ago Mr. Owain Bryn-Davies had drowned and my grandmother had gone mad and my father had witnessed all manner of horrors which were now enshrined in local myth; paradise was laughing over such distant melodrama and saying how droll it was that dotty old Grandmama should ever have played the role of the tragic heroine. We laughed, how we laughed, and paradise was laughing with Ginette at Oxmoon while we played croquet on the lawn and paradise was suppressing laughter in church as I tried to make her giggle at the wrong moment and paradise was laughing at her latest three-decker novel which she found so romantic and laughing as she tried to box my ears and laughing as we rode to hounds with the West Gower hunt, laughing, laughing, laughing from Llangennith to Porteynon, from Penrice to Oxwich, from Penhale to Rhossili, from Llanmodoc Hill to Cefh Bryn, and paradise was the Gower Peninsula, sixteen miles of heaven on earth stretching westwards into the sea beyond the industrial wasteland of Swansea, and the glory of Gower was Oxmoon and the glory of Oxmoon was Ginette.
    It remained so clear in my mind, that paradise lost, the blue skies, the corn stubble, the lush stillness of the bluebell woods, the purple of the heather on the Downs, the brilliant sea, the shimmering sands. I remember even the golden shade of the lichen on the dry-stone walls and the streaks of pink in the rocks on the summit of Rhossili Downs and the coarseness of the grass in the sand burrows of Llangennith. I remember the cattle being driven to market along the dusty white roads and the sheep being herded across the Downs; I can hear the larks singing and the Penhale church clock celebrating a cloudless high noon. It all seemed so immutable. I thought nothing would ever change. And then in the June of 1896, shortly after I had celebrated my fourteenth birthday, my father wrote to me at Harrow.
    My dear Robert, I read, this is just a quick line to let you know we’ve had a spot of trouble with Ginevra. To put the matter in a nutshell, I can only tell you that she tried to elope with a cousin of the Kinsellas but he’s gone away now and Ginevra’s staying with the Applebys while she recovers. I’m afraid she’s cross with us at the moment, but I’m sure it won’t last so don’t distress yourself — it was really just a little storm in a teacup and no harm’s been done. I remain as always your very affectionate father, R.G.
    At first I was so stunned by this communication that I was incapable of action. I merely sat and stared at the letter. I had, of course, been aware that Ginette was growing up in various ways which were all too visible but I had long since decided it would be kindest to take no notice; I felt genuinely sorry for anyone who had to grow up into a woman. But the thought that she might now be old enough to take a carnal interest in the opposite sex had never occurred to me. I found the notion