The Wheel of Fortune Read Online Free Page B

Ginette is now a stranger to me. Who knows what I shall think of her when we meet again? Nobody knows, it’s unknowable, and so in my opinion any attempt to answer such a question can only be futile.”
    “That’s true. But all the same—”
    “Go home and tell Mama,” I said, “that I no longer believe in fairy tales—and tell her too,” I concluded strongly, “that despite the somewhat dramatic nature of these circumstances I have every intention of behaving like a mature and intelligent man.”
    Yet all the while I was speaking in this commendably sensible manner I was listening to the voice in my mind whispering to Ginette as it had whispered so often in my dreams: “Take me back to Oxmoon, the Oxmoon of our childhood. Take me back to Oxmoon and make it live again.”
    V
    “FRIENDSHIP’S FOREVER!” SAID THE child Ginette in that lost paradise of Oxmoon when I had no rival for her affections. “I wonder if you can possibly realize how lucky you are to have a friend like me?”
    I did realize. During my first term at school I had spent many a homesick night imagining her playing with Gwen de Bracy or Angela Stourham and forgetting my existence. When one is eight and has a friend of ten one is perpetually worrying for fear one may be dismissed in favor of more sophisticated contemporaries.
    “No matter how long I’m away at school I’ll always come first with you, won’t I?” I said, anxious to quash any lingering insecurity generated by my absence.
    “Always. Here, lend me a penny, would you? I want to buy some of those boiled sweets.”
    We were in the village of Penhale, two miles from Oxmoon, and enjoying one of our regular excursions to the village shop. I remember thinking as I stood in the dark cozy interior and gazed at the tall jars of sweets that perfect happiness consisted of returning home from school and finding everything unchanged, Ginette still with the holes in her stockings and the stains on her pinafore, the jars in the village shop still waiting to gratify our greed.
    “I wish it could be like this forever,” I said as we walked home munching our purchases.
    “I don’t. I’m becoming partial to the idea of growing up and getting married, like Bobby and Margaret. They’re always laughing and behaving as if marriage was rather a lark.”
    “But think of all the babies!”
    “Maybe they’d be rather a lark too.”
    I was silent. My dislike of infants had remained unchanged, although I now took care to conceal this from my parents. I was aloof but polite to Celia. I feigned an Olympian interest in Lion. But I was still quite unable to imagine myself responding to a sibling with genuine enthusiasm.
    Then, two years after Lion was born, John arrived in the world.
    Lion was livid. That automatically pleased me, and from the beginning I patted John’s head when I made my regular visits to the nursery to inspect him. This delighted my mother but Lion was enraged and tried to block my path to the cradle by flailing his little fists at my knees. My mother became cross with him. Their discord was most gratifying.
    Finally, much to my surprise, I realized I was becoming genuinely interested in the infant. He was acute. He talked at an early age, a fact that made communication less of an effort. Although we lived in an English-speaking area of Wales Welsh was my father’s first language, and because he wanted his children to grow up bilingual my mother had followed a policy of employing Welsh-speaking nursemaids. However for some reason although we all grew up with a rudimentary knowledge of Welsh colloquialisms, John was the only one who became bilingual. This impressed me. After Celia and Lion, who were both stupid, I had not anticipated the advent of an intelligent brother. Later, as an intellectual experiment, I taught him a letter or two and found him keen to learn, but before we could advance further into the world of literacy I was obliged to depart for my first term at public