Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  “Well, if you’re quite sure you don’t want tea,” Lucas was saying, “relax in your chair and I’ll tell you the story of the two Victors who became Aidan. It won’t take long but it’ll give you a rest, and perhaps—who knows?—you may even find it instructive.”

  Wily old fox. Clever, cunning, perspicacious old masterpiece. Bound hand and foot by my curiosity, tranquillised by the benign warmth of his manner, I could only wait, a willing prisoner, for him to spin the parable which would bring me closer to the truth.

  2

  “I had a happy time as Victor One,” said Lucas, embarking on his narrative with an air of casual good humour. “We weren’t a religious family but my parents were decent hard-working people. We used to go to church once a year to hear the Christmas carols. I believed in God until I was fifteen, when I decided it would be smart to be an agnostic. Agnosticism was all the rage in those days, and I liked to think of myself as being modern and clever. I’d won a scholarship to the grammar school and so of course I had a very good opinion of myself.

  “My ambition was to go south, but my parents weren’t wealthy and I knew I’d have to make my own way. After leaving school I worked on the local newspaper, and within five years I’d reached London. The Daily Standard has been dead for a long while now, but back in the nineties it was one of the biggest newspapers in Fleet Street.

  “I was a great success in London—such a success that I decided to forget ingenuous provincial Victor One. That was when I became Victor Two, the sophisticated man-about-town. No more God, of course. God was for provincials. And no more agnosticism. Agnosticism was just for intellectuals too weak to chuck away religion entirely. I was an atheist, untrammelled by all the old superstitions. Then finally in 1901 I was appointed a special correspondent and sent out to Africa to cover the Boer War.

  “Well, that was the end of my deluded masquerade, as I daresay you can imagine. That was when I realised my life in London had nothing to do with reality at all. When I went to South Africa God destroyed my ignorant self-absorption and showed me such horrors that I knew I could never be the same again.

  “I didn’t actually see much fighting. It was mostly guerilla warfare anyway. But what I saw were the concentration camps. The British invented them, you know. It suits us now to forget that, but at the turn of the century I discovered that the greatest nation on earth, a nation which called itself Christian, was destroying innocent people on a massive scale. I wrote my horrifying dispatches. I sent report after report. But not one word was published and eventually I was recalled.

  “I remember shouting at my editor: ‘You’re refusing to expose a very great evil! You’re condoning a sin against humanity!’ But he just said: ‘You’re talking like an Evangelist, Vic, ranting away about evil and sin! Take yourself off to the seaside for a fortnight’s holiday and then we’ll put you to work on a nice cheerful subject like the Royal Family.’

  “I resigned. My mistress couldn’t understand it. ‘Why are you making such a fuss about the people in these camps?’ she said. ‘They’re only Boers.’ That was when I knew I could never be intimate with her again. I left her—and then I realised I had to leave London too, so I took the train to York. I was obliged to change trains there, but I never did go on to Scarborough. Victor One was there to meet me at York station, and when he led me through the streets to the Minster, Victor Two was vanquished at last and I saw the new life I was being called to lead.

  “I was eventually ordained—but I didn’t live happily ever after. Victor Two, who had been vanquished but not, unfortunately, destroyed, kept tugging at my sleeve, and in the end I decided that I’d have a better chance of slaying him once and for all if I battled with him on his home ground. So I returned south to London and worked in an East End mission. It was the heyday of the Anglo-Catholic work in the slums, and I felt I could use the power of Anglo-Catholicism as a suit of armour which would protect me from Victor Two whenever he laid his corrupting hand on my sleeve.

  “I worked and I worked and I worked until at last—inevitably—my health broke down under the strain and I was sent here, to the Fordite headquarters, to recuperate. That was when Aidan was conceived. I met the man who was shortly to become the Abbot-General—you’ve probably heard of him: Father Cuthbert Darcy. He died in 1940. He was an extraordinary man. At the end of his life he became very tyrannical and difficult, but when I met him in 1907 he was at the height of his powers, a man of great intelligence, remarkable charm and an uncanny intuitive perception into spiritual dilemmas. He was the monk assigned to help me find my spiritual way again. We used to sit in a little room, just like this one, and face each other across the table, just as you and I are facing each other now, and engage in battle after battle.

  “We battled because I didn’t want to face up to the truth; one never does when the truth is very painful. ‘Why were you working so hard?’ Darcy would ask over and over again. ‘Why did you have to drive yourself day and night until you collapsed with exhaustion?’ And over and over again I insisted: ‘Because I wanted to serve God.’

  “But that wasn’t true. It was myself I’d been serving. Working so hard that I had no time to think—that was my way of pulling down the curtain on truths I couldn’t face. Finally Darcy said: ‘It’s a question of facing the pain.’ ‘What pain?’ I said, but I knew. It was the pain of knowing good people could do evil deeds. But I said to Darcy: ‘I’m not responsible for the camps in South Africa! The responsibility belongs to the Government—it’s got nothing to do with me!’ Darcy just raised an eyebrow and said: ‘Whom do the Government represent?’ And when I started to protest he said: ‘We all share in the guilt of man’s inhumanity to man. We all stand at the bar and await God’s judgement.’

  “At once I said: ‘How can I be on trial? I’m a good man. Of course I’ve made mistakes in the past—little slips—but now I’m a priest and I know that by the grace of God I’m forgiven.’ Darcy just leant back in his chair and said: ‘Then why are you now in hell?’

  “I fought him and fought him. On and on we battled. And then gradually as he took me through my past life I saw all the sins I’d never faced. I was forced to recall how I’d cut myself off from my parents, never bothering to write to them. I was forced to recall the husband whose wife I’d taken. I was forced to recall all the selfish acts, all the casual cruelties I had committed in the pursuit of my ambition. Worst of all I was obliged to confront my shortcomings as a priest: the bouts of irritation towards my colleagues, the contempt and revulsion which lay behind my ostensibly noble behaviour towards the poor, the endless temptation to blot out my restless boredom by resorting to fornication … A good man? Outwardly perhaps. But inwardly? And as I began to see myself as a good man capable of evil deeds I realised that the concentration camps were only a manifestation on a huge scale of the disorder which has the power to cripple each human soul. It was all one. Evil was an ever-present reality, a reality which Christ had conquered, and when I asked myself how I could best attempt to master that reality myself, it became clear to me that I had to live in imitation of Christ; I knew then I had to be a monk.

  “However, it’s most important to stress at this point that I didn’t succeed in becoming Aidan merely by adopting a way of life which would be unsuitable for most priests. I was able to become Aidan first by facing the pain and then by transcending it so that I could finally serve God as he wished me to serve him, in honesty, with humility and by faith. Then as soon as I started serving God and stopped serving myself, the second Victor lost his power over me, and once my fear of his power was dead I found I could forgive him at last for leading me so far astray. In practical terms this meant that I could unify my personality; Victor One was able to embrace Victor Two and live with him in harmony—or, to express the matter in the familiar religious way, I felt that God had forgiven me for my sins by showing me the way forward into a new life, and once I knew I was forgiven I could be at peace with myself at last.”

  He stopped
speaking. It was very quiet. Neither of us moved. After a while I found I was staring at the thickening twilight beyond the window. The room was unlit, so there were no reflections in the glass, and even if I had been able to see his mirrored image I would have looked away. At last he said in the manner of a kindly teacher explaining a sum to a child who had forgotten his arithmetic lesson: “It’s a cycle. You sin. You go down into hell. You’re under judgement. You face the pain. You acknowledge your sins. You repent. You’re led out of hell. You’re shown the way forward—and the way forward signifies forgiveness as well as the chance to begin a new life, by the grace of God, in faith and in hope and in charity. Birth, death, resurrection … yes, it’s all a cycle, isn’t it, a timeless cycle far older than Christianity, but of course Christianity is a divine manifestation of eternal truths.” He began to stand up.

  I said at once in alarm: “You’re not going?”

  He smiled reassuringly. “I thought you might like a short interval to enable you to ponder on what I’ve said.”

  “Oh, I see.” I struggled to form an opinion on the proposal.

  “Perhaps you’d like me to show you to your room so that you can unpack your bag and rest for half an hour.”

  “Oh, but we mustn’t waste time! I’ve hardly begun to tell you yet about my problems, and—”

  “You’ve told me a great deal. And perhaps the problems which you think are your problems aren’t really your problems at all.”

  “But the main problem’s absolutely unmistakable! How am I going to—”

  “You’ll never be master of your future until you’re master of your past.”

  “But the past isn’t a mystery as the future is!”

  “Isn’t it? In that case shall we postpone the interval so that you can tell me more about your background?”

  “The postponement won’t last long. In a nutshell this is just the story of a Yorkshire boy who made good, married the perfect wife, fathered five perfect children and embarked on a perfect career. Of course that’s a highly condensed summary, but nevertheless it’s the truth, pure and simple.”

  “Oh yes? You remind me of the time many, many years ago in London when I saw a play by Mr. Oscar Wilde called The Importance of Being Earnest. At one point in the first act the young hero declared: ‘That’s the whole truth, pure and simple!’ Whereupon his friend commented: ‘The truth is never pure and rarely simple.’ ” Lucas sighed before adding: “I fear poor Mr. Wilde spoke from experience.”

  I laughed but I remained wary. I knew any relaxation in my defences could be dangerous. Cautiously I said: “Exactly what do you want to know about the past?”

  “I want to know more about the three Nevilles—which means, if I’ve understood you rightly, I want to know more about your parents and your uncle.”

  “Well, that’s easy,” I said, anxious to create the impression that I could ring up the curtain without batting an eyelid. “But be warned! A lurid story in the best tradition of Victorian melodrama is now about to unfold …”

  3

  “I was born in 1902,” I said, “so I’m an Edwardian, but all the main characters in this drama were Victorians. I’ll just run through the dramatis personae for you: my father was the tragic hero, my mother was the noble heroine and my Uncle Willoughby was the villain of the piece. Then there are the minor roles: my brother Willy, who became the misogynist schoolmaster (he was called after Uncle Willoughby, of course—my mother insisted on that), my sister Emily, who became the spinster daughter but eventually married a shoe salesman, and Tabitha our nurse (a splendid cameo role, this), who was the illiterate working-class Yorkshirewoman with a heart of gold. Finally there was me. I was a latter-day Oliver Twist, the orphan who asked for more.

  “My brother Willy and I were as close as twins, but he had poor health and couldn’t keep up with me, even though he was a year my senior. My mother had poor health too, but that was because she had so many pregnancies. My father and Emily were often ill. However, I’ve always had the constitution of an ox. My mother used to say that in health I resembled Uncle Willoughby.

  “Uncle Willoughby was my mother’s brother. His full name was Herbert Willoughby Stoke, but he never used the name Herbert because he thought it was too ordinary. Uncle Willoughby always liked to stand out from the crowd. His father was just a clerk up at the mill, but Uncle Willoughby became manager and wound up Mayor of Maltby. He was always clever with money, speculating in business ventures, and became well-heeled when he was still quite young—he actually owned his big house: that was very rare in those days. He married well too. His wife was a solicitor’s daughter with two hundred a year of her own—a real lady who pressed wild-flowers and painted water-colours and kept a piano in a room she called a drawing-room.

  “My mother thought she was an awful bore. ‘If Ella shows me one more dead flower I’ll scream!’ she’d say. My mother thought that drawing, painting, playing the piano—all the traditional feminine accomplishments—were a complete waste of time. She used to read—but not the books women were supposed to read; she despised the novels from Mudie’s Library. She read history, philosophy and poetry. The only novelist whose work she would consider skimming was George Eliot. She was interested in politics, always read The Times. People thought she was very eccentric, but my father adored her and so did Uncle Willoughby. She and Uncle Willoughby used to discuss politics together. They were both Liberals, although my mother used to flirt with socialism, women’s emancipation, all that sort of thing. My father wasn’t interested in politics but he and my mother used to discuss poetry. My mother couldn’t talk about literature with Uncle Willoughby because he didn’t read much. Too busy making money.

  “My father couldn’t make money. He inherited a thriving business from his father, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was a draper’s shop, a large one—he employed six people—and it stood on the best corner of the High Street. The family had lived over the shop, but when my father came into his inheritance and knew he could afford to marry, he took a detached house on the edge of the town. The house had an acre of garden with a real lawn and real flower-beds—I mean, it wasn’t just the conventional vegetable patch or hen-run or pasture for the goat—and inside the house (inside, not outside) there was a real lavatory which flushed. Uncle Willoughby insisted on that. He said my mother could hardly be expected to reduce her standard of living, and as she’d been living in his house before her marriage, that standard was high. I think he was probably the first person in Maltby to have an inside lavatory. He got it because he heard all the gentlemen had them in the South.

  “To make sure my mother was comfortable, my father employed a cook and a maid-of-all-work—and Tabitha, who took care of the children while my mother lay on her chaise-longue before, during and after her pregnancies and read her highbrow books. Willy and I grew up thinking ourselves very grand. We had no idea that by southern standards we were all dirt-common, but we didn’t really understand about the South. I was five when I finally realised that Yorkshire was part of England and not vice versa.

  “But I was telling you about my father. He was a tall, good-looking man with a delicate look and a nervous temperament. He suffered from asthma. And he suffered from moodiness. When he was happy he was very, very happy but when he was gloomy he was morose. Normally we only saw the happy side, but at the end of his life he used to drink and then he’d be silent and withdrawn.

  “I believe he was a profoundly religious man but was never comfortable with the simple-minded bibliolatrous Non-Conformism which ruled Maltby. We all went to chapel dutifully every week, but once my father took Willy and me to a Church of England service in Huddersfield so that we could hear the liturgy. My mother was very shocked. ‘You’ll wind up a Papist if you’re not careful!’ she said. ‘Liturgy indeed! Whatever next?’ But my father just said: ‘It was so beautiful.’

  “That’s what he used to say when he took us for walks in the hills. ‘It’s all so beautiful!’ he’d say, and he’d t
alk about Beauty, Truth and Goodness and how all was sacred, all was one in God. ‘It’s all a unity!’ he’d say. ‘It’s all one!’ I suppose he was really a pantheist, although he wouldn’t have had the education to realise that pantheism, when pushed to its limits, has nothing to do with Christianity at all. Perhaps it would be kinder not to call him a pantheist but simply to say he possessed to an intense degree what Rudolf Otto called Das Heilige, a sense of the holy.

  “Was there ever a man less suited to run a draper’s shop?

  “Anyway, there he was, living far beyond his means in this expensive house and mishandling his business, when suddenly death intervened and we found out he was bankrupt. Uncle Willoughby stepped in to clear up the mess. All the servants were sacked, Tabitha was sent to the workhouse without even being given the chance to say goodbye to us, the house was reclaimed by the landlord, and the bailiffs took possession of its contents.

  “Willy and I asked Uncle Willoughby if he’d lend us the money to buy back our toys from the bailiffs, but he wouldn’t. He just said: ‘You won’t need toys where you’re going,’ and shovelled us off to a spartan boarding-school run by Methodists. It was Dickensian—first cousin to Dotheboys Hall. If Willy and I hadn’t had each other, I think we’d have died or gone mad. We were even boarded out there for the holidays. We felt we had no home any more, no family, nothing. My mother did write to us, but she only said she was praying we were learning to become Christian gentlemen. We wrote and begged her to rescue us, but she didn’t. She said later that Uncle Willoughby had intercepted our letters.

  “This nightmare went on for a year. Then the situation changed. My mother was advised to go south for her health, and she wound up in rooms with my sister Emily at St. Leonards-on-Sea. Uncle Willoughby then decided that we should be educated in London—not just because London was the best place for anyone who wanted to Get On but because we’d be near enough there to the South Coast to visit my mother without incurring too much expense. The visits took place three times a year but they could never last long because there was no room set aside for us; we had to take it in turns to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the parlour, and whoever didn’t have the sofa slept on the floor.