Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  “Amusing for her. But perhaps Lord Flaxton will fail to produce the magic preferment out of his coronet.”

  “Perhaps. But on the other hand—”

  “Yes, I can imagine the other hand too. I’ve been thinking again about your prospects, and I can now see that this might just be one of those rare occasions when an amateur like Flaxton finds no serious professional opposition to the scheme which allows him to flex his power and his eccentricity in such satisfying harmony. The gentlemen in authority may well think that a London canonry would give you a useful finishing polish after your years as an unusually youthful archdeacon in the provinces.”

  “And to cap it all—as you may have seen in The Times last week—”

  “There’s a canonry falling vacant at Westminster. Yes, I saw Woodhouse’s appointment as Dean of Radbury.”

  We fell silent again. It had stopped raining, and the raindrops,clinging to their pattern on the windscreen, were sparkling in the light of the street-lamp. At last I said: “I spent my youth in London. I’ll soon settle down. What right have I, after all that’s happened, to go whining to God that I’d rather work somewhere else?”

  “Whining, I agree, would be unattractive, but never think God doesn’t listen when you tell Him what you want.” Darrow paused for a moment before adding idly: “Of course Bishop Bell’s often in London, attending the House of Lords and dealing with his international concerns. Except for Chichester there’s no city other than London where you’re more likely to encounter him.”

  Suddenly I switched on the windscreen wipers to clear the glass. The city street which had been blurred and indistinct was now clear-cut in the light from the street-lamp. “Perhaps in my spare time I could work for one of Bell’s causes,” I said.

  “Of course you could.”

  “So London needn’t be the end of the world, need it?”

  “No, Aysgarth. London needn’t be the end of the world.”

  I took a deep breath, expelled it slowly and then reached out to start the engine. “I’ll take you back to the station.”

  “I still have this feeling I oughtn’t to leave you—”

  “My dear Darrow, unless you get the next train home you’re the one who’ll wind up being left—by your long-suffering wife!”

  Darrow said vaguely: “Oh, she’ll understand,” but he seemed to resign himself to leaving me. It was only when we reached the station that I realised he still had his doubts. As I halted the car he said: “You’re quite sure there’s no whisky in your house?”

  “Positive. Darrow, do you really think, after you’ve so cleverly given me hope for the future, that there’s any serious risk of me winding up tonight dead drunk on the Cathedral sward and singing ‘Lili Marlene’ at the top of my voice?”

  “No, but I confess your drinking does worry me. I feel it’s your Achilles’ heel.”

  “I usually have it well in control.”

  “ ‘Usually’ isn’t good enough. It must be ‘always.’ ”

  “Very well—in future I’ll always have my drinking under control!”

  “Even when you’re under intense marital strain? There’s inevitably going to be marital strain in the years ahead, Aysgarth, and since your whole future in the Church depends on your ability to survive your marriage—”

  “I’ll survive. If you think I’m on the road to alcoholism, I assure you you’re mistaken—I’m not the suicidal type.”

  “You don’t have to be an alcoholic to blight your service to God, Aysgarth. All you need to be is a heavy drinker, and you’ve already proved that’s well within your capabilities.” Opening the car door he unfolded himself once more from the passenger seat and stepped out into the damp evening air. “Think it over,” he said, turning to face me, “and I believe your conscience will tell you I’m talking sense when I advise you to give up alcohol altogether. Now look after yourself, please, and phone me at once if you need to talk. I’ll pray for you.”

  He strode away into the station and vanished so abruptly that I blinked.

  “Sinister old magician!” I muttered to myself as I put the car in gear. As I reflected on his advice I was obliged to concede it was justified, but nevertheless I felt irritable. “I rub you up the wrong way,” Darrow had said, and it was true. With my Modernist leanings I could hardly fail to be irritated by even the most benign wizard who practised white magic; I had long since made up my mind that wizards and white magic could not exist, and yet there was Darrow, bouncing along on a tidal wave of telepathy, clairvoyance and heaven only knows what else—and even creating the illusion that he could vanish in a puff of smoke at a railway station. In the old days, of course, he would have been burnt at the stake …

  But then, no doubt, I would have been sorry.

  8

  Primrose rushed downstairs to meet me as I arrived home. She was wearing her nightdress and had obviously been keeping herself awake for my arrival. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you’re out so much that I’ve almost forgotten what you look like!”

  Dear little Primrose. She would be the one who had time for me when Dido was rushing around organising smart little dinner-parties for sixteen, but I knew this truth was far from salubrious, implying that I would come to regard my daughter as a substitute for my wife. I made up my mind to believe that Dido would in time become capable of assuaging my loneliness.

  “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  “Yes, fine,” I said, and at once realised with painful clarity how hard it was for me to relax my guard even when I was with those who were closest to me. The long years of acting a part with my mother had left their scar; my inclination was still to play parts, to build a protective wall around myself and keep even those who loved me at a distance which they could sense but never quite describe. In a moment of enlightenment I saw at last how I must appear to my children: kind, quiet, friendly—but never revealing myself in depth, buttoning up all my deepest feelings and unconsciously encouraging them all to participate in my emotionally maimed charade.

  The rose-tinted spectacles through which I had viewed my children for so long finally disintegrated. In a moment of further revelation I saw them not as the cyphers who reflected my image in such a pleasing light, but as the troubled strangers I had been too complacent to know. I saw Christian, that astonishing glorified version of myself, torn apart by the tragedy of his mother’s death and acting the crippling role of the perfect son to the father who was so fatally remote; I saw Norman stepping into Willy’s shoes, the shoes of a boy who would never be as clever as his closest sibling, and grappling with jealousy and despair; I saw James, whose sunny-natured simplicity I had always so naively taken for granted, struggling to come to terms with his average intelligence but becoming haunted by feelings of inferiority which would cast a heavy shadow over his life; I saw Sandy, perhaps the cleverest of them all but the most emotionally deprived, grieving in later years for the mother he could not remember as he tried not to resent his stepmother’s insensitive neglect. And I saw Primrose—”

  “Daddy, what are you thinking about?”

  “You. I was thinking that I must try to be a much better father to my children in future.”

  “You couldn’t be better. You’re perfect.”

  Dear little Primrose. I gave her a hug, hung up my hat and drifted from the hall to the drawing-room. The first thing I saw as I crossed the threshold was the bottle of whisky. It was sitting boldly on the mantelshelf.

  I stopped dead. “Where on earth did that whisky come from?”

  “Aunt Merry bought it.”

  “Merry! Good heavens, I’d forgotten her. Where is she?”

  “Gone to the hospital. Didn’t you see her? She left some time ago.”

  “I was talking for a while afterwards with Mr. Darrow.” Turning my back on the bottle I said to Primrose quickly: “Time you were in bed—I’ll tuck you up,” and we headed at once upstairs away from temptation.

  9

  When Merry arrived back half an ho
ur later I was still talking to Primrose upstairs. I knew it was too great a risk to be on my own within reach of that bottle of whisky.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been so beastly to you lately, Stephen,” Merry said as I returned downstairs to meet her, “but I was just so worried about Dido. However I now discover you’ve put everything right. Congratulations.” She unexpectedly handed me an envelope. “Here’s another billet-doux—she scribbled it after you left. Excuse the pong but before I could stop her she’d succumbed to a burst of romantic fervour and drenched the envelope with cologne … Now where did I put that hooch?”

  “In a scandalous position on the drawing-room mantelshelf.”

  “Oh God, so I did—sorry. I meant to put it away but I forgot. Will you join me in a quick swill? I’m sure you disapprove of women drinking whisky, but hospitals always make me want to hit the bottle.”

  “Thanks for the offer, but I do actually have some work to do, so if you’ll excuse me—” I escaped.

  In my study I sank down in the chair behind my desk and slit open the reeking envelope. Unfolding the sheet of paper within, I read:

  Darling,

  I can’t tell you how much better I feel, I really think there might be life after birth after all, and I’m so terribly glad about dear little Arthur, although of course still dreadfully sad he had to die, but it wasn’t all in vain, was it, if he’s something we can share, and when I’m better I’ll put flowers on his grave and thank God for sending him to us, although I really do think God might have let him live, but then one can’t argue with God, can one, it’s just a waste of time and energy, and now I want to devote all my time and energy to being a simply matchless wife to you and an equally matchless mother to my children, because of course I’ll have more since I’m now sure that if I can survive this experience I can survive anything and I shan’t be nearly so frightened next time.

  Talking about my parents with you this evening made me think of your parents, and suddenly out of the blue I had what I can only describe as a REVELATION. Darling, I know you’ll be thrilled when I tell you that I’ve decided to be just like your mother whom you always adored so much because if I become just like her then I can be sure you’ll always adore me too—yes, I do now believe you still love me, but I want to make certain you stay keen and I do think a wife needs to make an effort instead of lolling around in a complacent fog until she finds her husband in bed with her best friend—although of course I’d never find you in bed with anybody, such a relief you’re a clergyman, but all the same I must never take you for granted—so as I was saying, I’m going to secure your adoration by being just like your mother and having a baby every year for five years and then once we’ve got all that boring old parturition out of the way we can look forward to endless years of devoted companionship—because by that time you’ll be pushing fifty and too old to want sex much—if at all—so that little difficulty will all be quite effortlessly resolved—and as I picture our heavenly companionship, I can see we’ll have just the sort of idyllic marriage your parents must have had before that divinely handsome father of yours died at the wrong moment and transformed your fascinating mother into a sort of intellectual Queen Victoria. Now, isn’t that the most inspired and blissful REVELATION you could ever wish me to have?

  Darling Stephen, no words of mine could express how much I adore you—and I mean really adore you—and so all I can do is swear this letter comes to you with eternal love from your utterly devoted

  DIDO.

  Eventually I refolded the letter, dropped it on the blotter and decided to remove the reeking envelope before the scent could asphyxiate me. On my way back to the study from the wastepaper basket in the hall I glanced into the drawing-room. It was empty. Merry had evidently departed with her stiff drink to the kitchen in search of the cold chicken which, according to Primrose, the housekeeper had left prepared for us. The bottle of whisky had been removed from its scandalous position on the mantelshelf.

  To make sure Merry had put the whisky away in the sideboard I went into the dining-room and discovered, just as I had feared, that the bottle was standing among the decanters. Grabbing it by the neck I wrenched open the door of the sideboard, and as I did so all the glasses on the top shelf glittered in the artificial light.

  After a while—it seemed a long while but probably it lasted no more than a few seconds—I found I was thinking of scandal, the scandal of a whisky bottle on a clerical mantelshelf, the scandal of a clergyman who drank too much, the scandal of putting a career at risk by dicing with disaster. Then I told myself I really would give up drink, that scandalous risk, I really would. But not just yet.

  After all, I reflected as I uncapped the bottle and reached for a glass, I was an old hand at taking scandalous risks. Had I not told Dido long ago when we had first met that I liked to live dangerously? Born survivors could always get away with taking a scandalous risk or two, and I was born to survive.

  I mixed myself a mild whisky-and-soda, very respectable, nothing gross, and having put the bottle out of sight I withdrew once more to my study. For a long time I sat looking at my untouched drink to prove to myself how strong my will-power was. The glass was still untouched when I picked up Dido’s letter again and it even remained untouched when having contemplated my marital future I exclaimed aloud in despair: “How do I endure it?” Yet I knew the answer to that question even as I framed it in my mind. I thought of my mother saying to Uncle Willoughby: “The only prize worth winning is love!” and I knew I was being offered the prize which Uncle Willoughby had let slip through his fingers. With love all things were possible, even sexual happiness between apparently ill-assorted partners, and I saw again so clearly that by never rejecting Dido as I had so cruelly rejected my mother, I would step into Aidan’s land of paradox, that mysterious country where he who saves his life for his own sake shall lose it, but he who loses his life for the sake of Christ shall find not death but life eternal.

  With a cool rational eye I surveyed the alternative to the road I had been called to travel. I could walk away from Dido, leave the Church and settle for a life devoted to attaining material success and self-gratification, but what would be left of me after I had torn the heart out of my true self in such a fashion? I would be no more than a corpse bleeding to death. I could not have borne such a profound spiritual failure; then indeed in my despair and self-hatred I would have wound up a drunkard and alone. But my life, any life, real life, wasn’t about pursuing the prizes of materialism and practising the gospel of self-gratification. Life was about enduring adversity, about being true to oneself, about striving to do the will of one’s Creator so that one could live in harmony with all that was finest in one’s nature. The real prizes were not, as my uncle had thought, health, wealth and happiness, that facile trio which could be destroyed so easily by the first breath of misfortune, but faith, hope and, above all, love. Once these were won, the real happiness, the lasting happiness of a fully integrated personality responding to the will of God, could finally begin to unfold.

  Picking up my pen to answer Dido’s letter, I thought of St. Paul writing: “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and at once I was comforted by the image of the immanent God, loving and forgiving—that Liberal vision which for me the world’s evil could never diminish. But then I thought of the stern transcendent God of neo-orthodoxy, standing over and against a world which was under judgement and offering those who repented the chance of salvation. After my recent experiences, how could I deny this vision wasn’t equally true? God was immanent and transcendent. I was once more in the land of paradox, and as my father cried in my memory: “It’s all a unity! It’s all one!” I knew Christ had risen from the dead, just as he always did, again—and again—and again—to be at one with the disciples who were willing to sacrifice all they had in order to follow him to the end.

  It was Easter Sunday at last, and I was rising from the grave of my past to embark on my new life in absolute faith. Taking a sip of
whisky, I thought no more of failure and misery, but began to write my Christian message of hope in the most loving terms I could devise.

  Author’s Note

  Ultimate Prizes is the third in a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. The first, Glittering Images, was narrated by Charles Ashworth, and the second, Glamorous Powers, was narrated by Jon Darrow. The next book, Scandalous Risks, set in the 1960s, will look at the Church from the point of view of an outsider, Venetia Flaxton.

  NEVILLE AYSGARTH’S religious thought (though not his private life) is based on the writings of Charles Earle Raven (1885–1964). The son of a barrister, Raven was born in London and began his long association with Cambridge University in 1904 when he won a scholarship to Caius College to read Classics. He achieved a first-class honours in the Classical Tripos and followed this a year later with a first in Theology. He also devoted time during this final year to the study of biology, long a special interest of his, and became convinced that the two disciplines of theology and science should be drawn together. After some months working in a secular job in Liverpool, where he gained experience of squalid social conditions, he was ordained in 1909 and became Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, until 1914. Having spent a short time as a schoolmaster at Tonbridge, he served as an Army chaplain in France from 1917 to 1918 and experienced the horrors of war at first hand; later he was to become famous as a pacifist. After the war he resumed his duties at Emmanuel College but in 1920 he became Rector of Bletchingley, Surrey, and in 1924 he was appointed a canon of the new Liverpool Cathedral, where he won great fame as a preacher. He returned to Cambridge in 1932 as Regius Professor of Divinity, and from 1939 to 1950 he was Master of Christ’s College.