Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  “Well, there I was in 1923, charging down to St. Leonards as soon as I realised how she’d paid me back by never mediating as she’d promised, and we had a big row, the biggest row we’d ever had; it was over a year before we started writing to each other again. The row was all about you, of course. She told me I’d monopolised you for quite long enough. ‘You keep out of his life in future!’ she said. ‘He’s mine now!’ We might have been back in the nursery and squabbling over a favourite toy. ‘Neville’s my success!’ she said, eyes shining. ‘Neville’s redeemed the past and made sense of all the suffering. Even if I’ve done nothing else in my life,’ she said, ‘I’ve produced Neville—so clever, so charming, so attentive, so absolutely devoted to me!’ That was when I realised she’d transferred all her most intense love from me to you, and I couldn’t help it, I just had to give her a word of warning.

  “ ‘You be careful!’ I said. ‘That boy won’t stand for being smothered, least of all by a woman who neglected him when he was young—don’t you be as possessive with him as you were with me!’

  “It was a prophetic warning, wasn’t it? Oh, I knew it would all end in disaster—I saw the disaster coming a mile off! When she wrote and told me in 1938 that she was going to live with you, I straight away invited her to return to Maltby to live with me; Ella had just died and I was on my own, but Adelaide wrote back, all pride, to say that nothing would induce her to live with me again, thanks very much, and she was all set to enjoy a golden old age with her darling boy.

  “After you’d booted her out I called to see her at Emily’s nasty little house in Balham. At first she wouldn’t talk about what had happened, but she told me everything in the end. Adelaide always did tell me everything … everything … Poor Adelaide. Tragic … She never realised, you see, that you couldn’t stop yourself behaving towards her as you’d behaved towards me … It was your way of paying us back, wasn’t it, for all the misery you went through after Arthur’s death? I understood. I’d worked that out years ago. Poor little lad, not even able to buy back his toys from the bailiffs … ‘He can’t help himself,’ I said to Adelaide. ‘He was a victim, just as we all were, of that bloody awful muddle.’ But she only said: ‘You don’t understand. I’ve lived all these years under an illusion. There was no belated success with a child after all, no redemption, and I shall die a failure. I don’t want to go on living any more,’ she said weeping. ‘What’s the point of living if one’s hated by the people one loves?’

  “Well, I couldn’t let her say a thing like that. I put my arms around her straight away and said: ‘I don’t hate you! I still love you just as much as ever—which means that I’m now going to insist that you live with me in Maltby. No, don’t argue!’ I said, very masterful and confident. ‘I’ll not listen to any arguments this time! You’re going to come back to Maltby and live happily ever after with me at last!’

  “But she recoiled. ‘You!’ she said in fury. ‘You rejected me and forced me into exile in order to ensure you became Mayor of Maltby and rich as Croesus—you love no one but yourself! You and your prizes!’ she said bitterly, hurling the words at me as if they were arrows dipped in poison. ‘The only prize worth winning is love—and just you remember that when you’re a lonely old man trying to comfort yourself with your bank balance and your fading memories!’

  “And I’ve remembered. I’ve come here and I’ve remembered. Of course I tell myself how lucky I am. I’ve got my health and my wealth and I’ve even got an unmarried daughter to look after me. It would be wrong to be ungrateful. But Mercy irritates me. She’s a silly woman, just like her mother—and so’s Hope in Leeds. Faith was like me, but she was killed in the Blitz. No sons. One niece who sends Christmas cards but wouldn’t care much if I died tomorrow. Two nephews who don’t want to know me. My best friends all dead … But one mustn’t complain, must one, and of course I’m a big man up in Yorkshire. I often remind myself of that when I’m feeling melancholy. I sit in my grand house and I look around at all the mementos of my past, all my prizes, and I think: What a success I was! How wonderfully well my life turned out and how wonderfully fortunate I still am … But after a while I begin to hear that silence, that long, long silence you hear when you’re all alone in a large grand room, and then I think of your mother and I think of you and I know with a terrible certainty that the only prize worth chasing is the prize I’ve managed to lose.”

  He stopped talking. Gradually I became aware of the hum of the sea-wind beyond the tall windows, and the distant drone of other conversations on the far side of the room.

  At last he said: “I’m sorry I didn’t give you the money to buy back your toys, Nev.”

  And I answered: “It’s all right, Uncle Will. The toys don’t matter any more.”

  Then I poured the remainder of the champagne into our glasses and we sat for a while in silence in that long room which faced the sea.

  6

  Before he could recover himself sufficiently to start talking about lunch I told him I had to return to the diocese. “I’ve taken time off from work to come here,” I said, “and also my wife’s expecting me to visit her in hospital.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  I failed to summon the strength to give him a precise answer. “Female troubles. But she’s getting better.”

  “You look ripe for the hospital yourself. Did I give you the help you wanted? It looks more as if I’ve done you in.”

  “You gave me the help. I’m profoundly grateful to you, Uncle Will, more grateful than I can say.”

  “In that case,” he said as we left the lounge, “perhaps we might drink champagne here again next year if you’ve nothing better to do.”

  “Oh, you’ll see me long before then.”

  “I will? When?”

  “August, when I take my holiday.”

  “You mean you’ll come back to Yorkshire?”

  “Well, I’m hardly likely to bump into you in Devon, am I?”

  “If you think I’m going to die and let you off the hook—”

  “You’re going to live to be a hundred, remember? Start fattening the next calf.”

  He shook with mirth. Then he shoved out his gnarled old hand for me to shake and added with a masterly attempt at nonchalance: “It was a grand fattened calf, wasn’t it, lad?”

  “Champion!” I said, discarding my BBC accent. Then leaving him beaming in the hotel porch I stepped out into the stormy wind, which was sweeping east up the Channel, and struggled down the Esplanade beside the ragged roaring sea.

  7

  As I entered the station the storm broke and rain began to stream from leaden skies. It was still raining when the train reached Starmouth. I ran as fast as I could to the car park but got soaked. Glancing into the driving-mirror I experienced the fleeting illusion that my face was streaked not with rain but with tears. I looked as white and drawn as someone who had bled to death.

  I have little memory of my drive to Starbridge, but the motoring conditions were so unpleasant that the journey must have taken longer than usual. It was after five when I parked my car outside the Theological College. On my right the walls of the Cathedral rose in a vast wet cliff from the sodden sward and disappeared into the mist which hid the spire. Lights glowed in the windows of the ancient houses to combat the murk of the afternoon. The Close was at its most timeless. Only my car anchored me to the twentieth century.

  Stumbling through the rain again I entered the modern world of the Theological College, all well-washed linoleum and white walls and bright electric light, and was informed by the secretary that although Darrow was chairing a meeting in the staff-room he had left instructions that I was to wait in his office. I spent ten minutes sitting at the table by the window and watching the Cathedral. It was in one of its inanimate moods, utterly silent, utterly still. No organ music played within and no sunlight flashed upon the glass. The Cathedral might have been waiting, just as I was, waiting for the infusion of life, waiting for the light to shine.
Good Friday had passed. It was Easter Saturday, and the Sunday of the Resurrection had still to dawn.

  At twenty minutes past five Darrow walked in.

  “Well?” he demanded as soon as he saw me, and without hesitation I said: “I want to confess.”

  19

  “But what is wanted is a worthy object to which the individual can devote his whole energies, which shall grip and unify and inspire; only as he can see and occupy himself in relation to a single large purpose will he find peace and power.”

  CHARLES E. RAVEN

  THE CREATOR SPIRIT

  1

  “I DID an evil thing,” I said. “It was a very great sin. I destroyed someone.”

  Beyond the window, across the sward, someone switched on the lights in the Cathedral.

  Without speaking Darrow sat down, and as I faced him once more across the table the bell began to toll for Evensong. “It wasn’t my uncle,” I said. “As I discovered today he’s indestructible. And not only did he prove indestructible when I tried to destroy him all those years ago, but he even managed to understand my behaviour and forgive me. I never thought he would. That’s why I had to distance myself from him—first physically, by never going back to Yorkshire, and then mentally, by calling him a villain. But deep down I knew he wasn’t the villain of the piece at all. It was I who was the villain, and pushing the villainy onto him was the only way I could live with my guilt.

  “I performed similar psychological contortions with my mother’s memory. You remember that when we talked of Hedda Gabler I got upset by your suggestion that she could have been a victim and a monster as well as a femme fatale? You were right, of course, but I couldn’t bear to think of my mother being a victim. Yet she was. She was my victim. And I couldn’t bear to accept Willy’s definition of her as a monster either, because that raised too many questions about the way I chose to remember her. How could I have got on so well with a monster? What could have driven me to do such a thing? I didn’t want to answer those questions, so I had to say she wasn’t a monster at all. I had to develop a portrait which was acceptable, a portrait I could bear to live with, so I played up the fact that she was a witty charming woman who adored me. But what I could never face—until today when it was rammed down my throat—was the fact that it was this adoration which enabled me to destroy her.”

  I stopped speaking, unsure which direction to take next. Then I said: “I hated my mother.” I was unable to look at Darrow. I could only stare at the glowing windows of the Cathedral.

  Darrow said casually: “Did you always hate her?” He might have been asking me if I had always taken sugar in my tea.

  “No,” I said, thinking hard of Emily’s teapot and sugar-bowl, “in the beginning I was fascinated by my mother and so was Willy. She was so extraordinary, lying on her chaise-longue all day and reading books. No one else we knew had a mother who did that. Father said she was very special. That was why we had to be kept out of her way—she was so special that she had to have peace and quiet in order to think. ‘Keep those stupid noisy boys out of my way so that I can think!’ she said once to Tabitha. That was when I made up my mind to become very clever and quiet so that she would want to see more of me. That was when I realised … well, all that withheld love was such a prize, you see, such a prize, and I felt I could never rest in peace until it was won.

  “Later, after my father died and Uncle Willoughby talked to us for the first time about winning the prizes, I felt I’d always known exactly what he meant. The prizes consisted of winning the attention of the people who mattered, and the ultimate prizes consisted of winning their love and approval. Father, Mother, Uncle Willoughby … they all offered prizes, but Mother’s ultimate prize, her love and approval, was the most fascinating—the most enslaving prize of all. Those visits to the parlour for the daily kiss, those occasional pats on the head, those rare smiles … Whenever I won a smile I felt fit to burst with pride. Ah, what a chase it was for that prize, so addictive, so compulsive, so endlessly exciting …

  “Then Father died and everything changed. No more kisses. No more pats on the head. No more smiles. No more Mother. We weren’t even allowed to live with her in the school holidays. Of course now I know she was having a nervous breakdown—now I know she was a poor, pathetic, muddled, unhappy woman not responsible for her actions—but at the time I could only put her alongside Uncle Willoughby and think: I’ll never forgive them, never, and one day I’ll make them pay.

  “Well, I got over that. Or at least I thought I did. After a while I realised that I couldn’t go on living in a white-hot fever of misery; it was too debilitating, and I needed all my energy to Get On, Travel Far and stay out of the failure-pit; I didn’t want to end up like my father who (so I wrongly thought) had deliberately abandoned me. So Uncle Willoughby had to become the hero, even though he was the villain, treating us so cruelly, and Mother had to become the heroine again, even though she was the villainess, rejecting us after Father’s death. It was the way to survive, you see. I had to keep in with the people who mattered. My true feelings had to be buried, the curtain rung down on the past. I was acting for my life on a new stage, and I couldn’t afford to let anything impair my performance.

  “My mother became better in St. Leonards. I told myself it wasn’t her fault that Willy and I could only see her occasionally. She had to be by the sea for her health and we had to be in London to Get On. It was no one’s fault. It was just the way of the world, the luck of the draw.

  “I was always making excuses for her—but then one always does make excuses for the great prizes, and my mother had become a prize again, I was back in pursuit of her love and attention, back in pursuit of my big addiction as if that hellish period of detoxification had never happened. What a quest it was, what a challenge! I wrote and I wrote and I wrote to her. I saved and I saved and I saved so that I could bring her a present on every visit—there were always second-hand books that I could pick up cheaply in London, and how gratified she always was, how enchanted! I’d be in a haze of pleasure afterwards for hours.

  “Willy thought my behaviour was disgusting. ‘It makes me sick,’ he said, ‘to see the way you fawn on that awful woman.’ That was after his illness, after he’d stopped chasing the prizes and no longer cared about winning her love and approval, rie just wrote her neglect off as unforgivable and went his own misogynist’s way.

  “But I remained addicted, and—as I can now see so clearly—the chase for the prize became in a bizarre way more exciting than the prize itself. The real truth was I was happiest when my mother and I were at a distance from each other; it was easier to sustain the fantasy of devotion. All those delectable letters to write, all those delectable expeditions to find the right present, all those delectable day-dreams when I would imagine our next witty dialogue down to the last comma—yes, then I was in ecstasy. But the actual visits themselves were hard going. Her rooms at St. Leonards were unsuitable for visitors. She remained awkward with children. I was shy with her. There was a perpetual atmosphere of constraint, but matters improved when I was old enough to engage in sparkling intellectual discussions. The meetings were exhausting but at least I felt I was making progress. Of course I can see now why they were so exhausting; it wasn’t just because they required intellectual stamina. It was because although we were dazzling each other with this glittering mother-son relationship, none of the emotions were real. She was just trying to assuage her guilt by playing the devoted mother, while I … well, I still hated her. That was the truth of it. I’d never forgiven her for all that neglect and rejection when I was a child.

  “I used to feel very violent emotions towards women when I was growing up. The normal women I found tolerable; the devoted wives and mothers were good, they were the way women were supposed to be, but as for the rest … Up at Oxford when I lost my virginity I started to beat the woman up afterwards. That shocked me. I told myself it would never have happened if I hadn’t been drinking, but I knew the drink had only und
erlined feelings which were already present. I thought: There’s a demon who has to be locked up. So for years I drank very sparingly and I became a clergyman, keeping my demon clamped down beneath a clerical collar, and I married a wife whom I could put on a pedestal and revere … She was safe there, you see, up on her pedestal, the perfect marital prize. I couldn’t have harmed her there … Oh, how hard I worked to sew up my demon in a straitjacket so that I’d feel safe, and in the end I did feel safe, I thought I’d mastered him, I thought I had everything under control.

  “But I didn’t. He was just waiting for the right opportunity to burst free and take possession of me again, and in 1938, when my mother came to live with me, his moment finally came.

  “I’m not sure when my mother genuinely began to love me. Sometimes it’s hard to know when fantasy ends and reality begins, but I first knew beyond doubt that the love was real soon after Emily had announced her engagement. I said to my mother: ‘Of course you’ll come to live with me—how wonderful that we can be together at last!’ And when her eyes filled with tears of happiness I knew I could say to the child I had been long ago: ‘There! You’ve done it! You’ve won your ultimate prize!’