Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  My voice said: “I was going to walk out. I would have walked out if the Abbot-General hadn’t appeared.”

  “Yes. But you would have come back.”

  “Would I?”

  “Of course. You’re not the kind of man who throws in the sponge. You’re a fighter—and it’s your fighting spirit which is ultimately going to save you. You’ll think of your Uncle Willoughby shouting: ‘Get On or Go Under!’ and you’ll battle on in pursuit of the prize of your spiritual health.”

  “That was Darrow’s verdict. I suppose a sick man should find it comforting when two specialists agree on a hopeful prognosis, but I’m beginning to feel as if I’m at death’s door.”

  “You may have to die before you can live again.”

  Subtle old serpent, feeding me the Christian message of hope by reminding me of Easter! Tightening my clasp on my bag I forgave him for his horrific assault on my equilibrium and allowed him to lead me on down the corridor towards the light at the far end.

  2

  The room which had been assigned to me was furnished with a table, two wooden chairs, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and a bed which, I discovered to my relief as I sat down on it, had a comfortable mattress; I felt in no mood at that moment for the ascetic life. On the chest of drawers lay a Bible and a Prayer Book. There were no pictures on the walls but a crucifix hung by the bed. Like the Abbot-General’s pectoral cross, the crucifix made me want to bawl: “No Popery!” at the top of my voice. Why was I being smitten by this disgusting urge to behave like a Cromwellian iconoclast? I was quite capable of exercising charity towards Catholicism in both its English and its Roman forms, even though I disapproved of it intellectually. I could only suppose in alarm that the anxieties of the present had induced me to regress to the Non-Conformist, bitterly anti-Catholic atmosphere of chapel society in Maltby.

  “I’m going to arrange for some tea and sandwiches to be brought to you while you rest for half an hour and meditate on our dialogue,” said Lucas, pulling down the black blind over the window. “It’s very important that you should be well-nourished; you need the strength to stoke up your fighting spirit.”

  It says much for my addled frame of mind that I almost answered: “Yes, Father.” Instead I said: “All right,” but that sounded much too grudging and unfriendly. Finally I succeeded in uttering the words: “Yes, sir,” and looking respectful.

  My inability to call him Aidan, as he had suggested, must have been very obvious; my confused mental state was no doubt equally plain to a skilled observer. Murmuring “There, there!” as if I were an unhappy small child, the old boy patted me reassuringly on the shoulder and said: “If you want any help while I’m gone, just go to the top of the stairs and shout: ‘Peter!’ That’s the guest-master. He’ll look after you.”

  I nodded. The old boy gave my shoulder another pat and padded away. The door closed. I was alone.

  I did try to reflect on what had happened, but it was too frightening so I stopped. I could only sit on the edge of the bed and wait numbly, just like an unhappy small child, for him to return and take charge of me again.

  3

  Ten minutes later the guest-master brought me two rounds of cheese sandwiches, an apple and a large pot of tea. I was aware of him giving me a shrewd, speculative look as if he were trying to calculate how likely I was to start climbing the walls.

  “Would you like a spot of company while you wait for Father Abbot to return?”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine.” That disposed of the guest-master. I embarked on the task of forcing myself to eat but I was still toying with the second sandwich when Lucas returned.

  “I believe I have most of the information I need,” he said, sitting down opposite me at the table. “There are only a few more questions which must be asked tonight before we adjourn. Then tomorrow morning after I’ve had the chance to think and pray, I’ll offer you my opinion and make suggestions for the future.”

  “Tomorrow morning I have to return home.”

  “And so do I. We’ll meet at five-thirty.” Lucas evidently considered this suggestion raised no problems, but when he saw my expression he added kindly: “I’ll ask Peter to wake you at five. I expect you’re worried because you haven’t brought your alarm clock.”

  Unable to think of a reply I sank my teeth into the remainder of my second sandwich and wondered what suggestions about the future could possibly be made.

  “Now let’s deal as quickly as we can with these final questions,” Lucas was saying. “First of all, would I be right in thinking that your second wife is somewhat different from your first?”

  I stopped eating. “Yes,” I said. “She is.”

  “Would you go so far as to say they were really startlingly dissimilar?”

  I abandoned the sandwich. “Yes,” I said. “I would. But what made you think—”

  “Your second wife is a clever young woman, perhaps, very charming and original, with a flair for writing fascinating letters?”

  “How on earth did you know?”

  “I have a theory, based on what you told me about your mother and your first wife. Now, Neville, you may find my next question hard to answer, but I do beg you to respond as accurately as possible. When were you first attracted to your second wife?”

  There was a long, long pause which I found I was unable to end.

  “Since you implied that you started courting your second wife fairly soon after your first wife’s death,” said Lucas, “it seems reasonable to assume you met her when your first wife was still alive.”

  “Yes.” I began to arrange the crumbs on my plate into a pattern. “I first met Dido,” I said at last, “in the May of 1942.”

  “And you were immediately attracted? Could one possibly deduce from this,” said Lucas, not waiting for me to answer the question, “that at the time you were a little dissatisfied with Grace? Forgive me, I know I’m touching on difficult, painful matters, but I’m only anxious to obtain information which will allow me, by the Grace of God, to help you.”

  I stopped arranging the crumbs into a pattern and began to sweep them into a neat pile with my forefinger. After a while I said: “I was a little restless. But I tried to beat it back. I loved Grace.”

  “I understand. Now, can you look back and pinpoint the moment when the restlessness began? Was it around the time in 1938 when your mother came to live with you?”

  “Oh no!” I said at once, relieved that I could at last speak with confidence and look him straight in the eye. “That disaster actually united us. No, the marriage only started to get awkward after our fifth child was born in March 1941. We’d only—” I bit back the word “planned” on the grounds that it might upset an Anglo-Catholic. “We’d only hoped for four children. The fifth wasn’t entirely a welcome surprise.”

  “So the restlessness began after March 1941. Directly after?”

  “No.” Again I could speak with confidence. “Newborn babies aren’t usually much trouble. They just sleep most of the time. Sandy didn’t start to wear Grace out until he was six months old, sitting up and demanding constant attention, and it was when she was worn out that I became aware of feeling restless.”

  “That takes us to the September of 1941, doesn’t it? And in the September of 1941, you said earlier—”

  “My mother died. Yes,” I said. “That’s when it all began, I can see that clearly now. Grace told me she was too exhausted to go to the funeral, she couldn’t bear to leave Sandy, didn’t want to take advantage of her best friend’s offer to look after him—and so on and so on. I remember looking at her and thinking: I don’t need a dull dreary wife like you any more. That horrified me, of course, because it was such a terrible judgement, so unfair, in fact quite unacceptable. Grace was so perfect, you see—”

  “Such a prize.”

  “Yes, such a prize, and prizes have to be perfect because if they’re not perfect they wouldn’t be prizes any more. So long as Grace was a prize I could feel happy and secure, but once
she ceased to be a prize—”

  “You didn’t want her.”

  “But I did! I adored her and she adored me and we had this perfect marriage—”

  “No, that’s not quite right, is it, Neville? That was the drama you were playing on stage. But reality—as indeed you admitted a moment ago—lay elsewhere.”

  “Well, of course I’m not denying there was a little awkwardness—”

  “No, Neville. That’s not quite right either, is it? I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down off that stage. This was no ‘little awkwardness.’ You fell in love with another woman, didn’t you, when your wife was still alive.”

  “Well, yes, but nothing happened! I fought against the attraction! I concede that I was in love with Dido, but I swear there was no impropriety!”

  “No, that’s not quite right either, Neville, is it? I’m sorry, but we really do have to face this other drama that was taking place off stage. If you fell in love with another woman while your wife was still alive, there was impropriety.”

  “But all I did was clasp her hands once and tell her I felt as if spring had arrived after a long dull winter! All right, I know that was idiotic, but—”

  “It was wrong.”

  “But it was only a little slip!”

  “It was a sin.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake! I did my best to be good and decent—”

  “You mean you went through the motions of being good and decent. But the truth was, wasn’t it, that you were harbouring adulterous thoughts and wished that you could have carnal knowledge of this woman within the only context available to you as a priest: marriage. And this desire in turn must mean, mustn’t it, that there were times when consciously or unconsciously you wished you were a widower—”

  “That’s a monstrous accusation!”

  “You mean it’s painful. Yes. Sin always is.”

  “But I didn’t do anything, I didn’t hurt anyone—”

  “No? Are you telling me your wife died in ignorance of your so-called ‘little slip’?”

  I said: “I’ll not talk about this. I refuse to discuss this any more. I won’t discuss it, I won’t, I absolutely refuse—”

  “No, it’s much, much too painful, isn’t it? It’s a torment. It’s a nightmare. But Neville, in the end you’ve got to screw up all your courage and face this pain. The road to repentance doesn’t lie, you see, in ringing down the curtain on the sin you can’t bear to face.”

  I lost control of myself. Springing to my feet, I shouted in fury: “My repentance is between me and God! I don’t have to approach God through a clergyman—through a priest—like you! I’m a Protestant, not a bloody Catholic, and I’ll not tolerate any manifestation of Catholicism—no confessionals, no celibate priests playing God, NO DAMNED MONKS TALKING DAMNED RUBBISH—NO BLOODY POPERY, NOT IN MY LIFE, NOT NOW, NOT EVER!”

  During this chaotic speech I had broken down, blundering from the table and slumping onto the bed, but I knew that this time there could be no running away; I was far beyond an escape which could have been achieved by rushing out of a room. I had no clear idea at first why I had sunk into emotional disintegration. All I knew was that the wasteland had suddenly become pitch dark. I covered my face with my hands as if I could protect myself from the horror I could not name, but as the tears streamed past my fingers I realised what had happened. I had been almost annihilated by the pain I had just faced. I thought of my Grace, that innocent victim who had been so wounded by my infidelity that she had been drained of the will to live, and at last the river of guilt which I had suppressed for so long burst its banks. In the flood that followed, Christ was absent, God had turned away His face, and I felt I could only drown in my grief and my shame.

  Then someone sat down on the bed beside me; someone stepped into my wasteland to share my agony; someone made the darkness endurable. Automatically I reached out for his hand. It was there, waiting, and as his fingers closed on mine I knew that Christ, the resurrected Christ, not the Jesus of history but the Christ of Eternity, had moved through the closed door of the room to be again at one with his disciples. He was contained in the compassion which now encircled me and in the sharing of the suffering. My tears ceased. My pain eased. A great stillness seemed to blend with the silence.

  After a long while I said: “I’m so frightened of failing, and sin means failure. But I won’t be Going Under, will I, if I now call my mistakes sins?”

  “No, Neville, you won’t be Going Under. You’ll be Getting On.”

  “And the prize I have to win now isn’t merely survival, is it? It’s the new life where I’m finally set free to serve God instead of myself.”

  “That’s it. That’s when you’ll be Going Far.”

  After an even longer while I said: “I’m not much of a clergyman. My sermons tend to resemble legal arguments. I’m awkward at pastoral work. I try to avoid the poor. I think too much about cultivating the people who matter. In fact although I’m so successful I’m really rather a failure. That’s a paradox, isn’t it?”

  “If you pursue the truth far enough you always wind up in the land of paradox. You reach a point where the apparent truth divides into two opposing truths, and then you have to try to reach beyond them to grasp the ultimate truth, their synthesis.”

  “Raven doesn’t approve of that type of Hegelian dialectic. He sees all truth as a unity.”

  “Hegel’s synthesis could be Raven’s unity. Who knows? Most ultimate truths lie beyond words altogether.”

  “That, I know, is how Catholics justify their use of elaborate ritual.” I blew my nose before saying: “Sorry about all the Protestant bigotry. Disgusting. Don’t usually behave like one of Cromwell’s statue-bashers.”

  Lucas said with a wry, dry humour which I could immediately appreciate: “That’s all right, lad, we’re all bigots here. Cuthbert Darcy used to refer to the Church of Rome as ‘Our Fallen Sister.’ ” Releasing my hand, he rose to his feet. “Sometimes I think the Church of England’s little short of a miracle,” he said idly. “Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals, the whole range of worshippers between the two extremes—it’s a wonder we all coexist as we do.”

  “We manage it because fundamentally we’re a unity.”

  “But couldn’t one equally well say we manage it because we’re a disunity, Catholics and Protestants opposing each other in a continuing dialectic which results in the synthesis of the Church?” He allowed me no time to reply but merely added over his shoulder as he moved to the door: “I’ll be back at half-past five. If you need help at any hour of the night, knock on Peter’s door—number ten at the top of the stairs—and he’ll fetch me.”

  “I’ll be all right now.”

  “Yes, I believe you will. Good night, Neville. God bless you.”

  He left, the wily old fox padding back to his lair to recuperate from his latest adventure in the tangled spiritual thickets which beset his territory, and I was left exhausted but not without hope on the cross of my guilt and my pain.

  4

  The guest-master woke me at five and returned with tea ten minutes later to make sure I had kept my eyes open. By the time Lucas arrived I was fully dressed in my clerical suit and reading the office. This semblance of normality pleased him. “Maintaining a familiar routine is important,” he said. “Comfort as well as strength can be derived from such discipline … Did you sleep at all?”

  “Not much. I hope you did. I felt worried afterwards that I might have tired you, so soon after your operation.”

  “If I could still be classed as an invalid I wouldn’t be going home today.” He smiled as he sat down opposite me at the table. “Now let’s start thinking about you again. First of all I’m going to explain what I believe is going on—but let me stress that you’re under no obligation to agree with a single word I say. I venture an opinion not because I want to impose a theory on you but because I want to help you understand the suggestions I shall be making about the future. Since these suggestions spr
ing from my interpretation of your crisis I can hardly expect you to understand them until you first grasp the essence of my interpretation.”

  “I understand. But of course I’m very anxious to hear your theory and I promise I won’t go storming out if I don’t like it.”

  “Splendid, but let me now help you keep calm by begging you not to take what I say too literally. Great difficulties arise when one tries to express complex truths in words, and although there may be several valid ways of describing what’s happened to you, none of them will be exact because we’re not dealing with a mathematical equation. Father Ingram, the Abbot-General, who’s twelve years younger than I am and very much cleverer, would talk the language of modern psychology. Jon Darrow, who’s also twelve years younger than I am and far more heavily endowed with psychic powers, would probably use the ancient symbolic language of mysticism. I’m just an ordinary old dog who doesn’t know any fancy tricks, so I shall fall back on the commonplace literary device of the metaphor, which we successfully employed yesterday when we talked of your personality as if it were a trio of people, the three Nevilles. Now, so long as we remember that we’re using a method which is an inexact way of describing a complex truth, I don’t think we’ll go too far astray. The biggest danger about techniques which employ metaphor, symbolism and analogy is that sometimes people mistake these devices for hard facts and get tied up in knots.”

  “I understand. You’ll be painting an impressionist picture, not taking a photograph, so I mustn’t get upset if some details are missing or distorted.”

  “Precisely. In fact only God is in a position to take a photograph because only God can ever know the whole truth about any human being and the circumstances surrounding his life. But what I can do here is to illuminate what we do know in such a way that what we don’t know becomes more sharply defined. Then once we grasp what we don’t know you’ll be in a better position to reach beyond the paradox to the ultimate truth which is hidden from us.” He smiled before adding: “And there you see how words break down under the strain of expressing complex matters! I’m not saying that you’ll ever know the whole truth, which is God’s truth. I’m saying that you may have a good chance of grasping that part of the truth which God has made available for you to know.”