Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

CHARLES E. RAVEN

  THE CREATOR SPIRIT

  1

  DARROW’S REFERENCE TO A WILY OLD FOX HAD PRODUCED an image in my mind of a hunched old man with a cunning expression, but the man before me bore no resemblance to this traditional picture of the Machiavellian conspirator. He looked a trifle frail, no doubt as the result of his recent sojourn in hospital, but he was still straight-backed, still curiously ageless in that manner peculiar to people who have unusually fair complexions; such pale, almost translucent skin seems less prone to the wrinkles and pouches of old age. His left eye was covered with a white dressing thin enough to allow him to wear without difficulty the glasses which his faded blue right eye apparently demanded. It was hard to estimate the exact point in old age which he had reached, but I guessed he was in his mid-seventies, ten years older than Darrow.

  At first glance he gave the impression of being quiet and unobtrusive, not a man who would stand out in a crowd, someone who might have been a retired schoolmaster living in a cosy suburban villa with his books and his memories, a keen gardener, perhaps, someone who enjoyed listening to the cricket broadcasts on the wireless, a very English man, polite, decent and unremarkable. Yet this was the Abbot of Ruydale, the toughest house in the Order. He had dictatorial control over a wide variety of men, supervised the running of the Ruydale estate and maintained a spartan monastic rule. Here was no retired schoolmaster accustomed to book-lined studies and a companionable wireless, but an active leader accustomed to silence and austerity, a man who had stepped far beyond the conventional boundaries of clerical life in the Church of England in order to live in a manner which most churchmen would have found intolerable.

  “Good evening,” he said politely. “I’m Aidan Lucas. There’s no need for you to tell me your name. Shall we sit down?” He had a BBC accent, just like mine, the sort of accent acquired after hours of secret rehearsals in locked bedrooms. Immediately I wondered about his background, but I knew I had to overcome my curiosity before I gave the impression of being a deaf-mute.

  “It’s good of you to see me at such short notice, sir,” I said. “I’m sorry to impose on your convalescence.”

  “There’s no imposition—and no need to call me ‘sir.’ ” Effortlessly he had pinpointed the one significant word in my remark, deduced that I had been unable to address him as “Father” and was now busy smoothing away my discomfort. “Since you’ve stepped out of the world in order to see me,” he said, “why don’t we agree to abandon the worldly conventions and call each other by our Christian names?”

  “Sounds sensible.” As we moved to the table I found my glance falling again on the ornate oratory. Why did decent clergymen ordained in the Church of England have to adopt these Papist flourishes? I thought of the Protestant martyrs of the Counter-Reformation and felt indignant.

  “Florid, isn’t it?” said Lucas, instantly noting the direction of my disapproving gaze. “We do things better up in Yorkshire.” And he smiled at me.

  So Darrow had disclosed the name of my native county. Well, why not? Making a great effort I tried to relax but found I was still too nervous to return the smile.

  “May I suggest you sit with your back to that corner? Then it won’t distract you.”

  I sat down as directed and clasped my hands together on the table. As I tried to keep the clasp loose, I was tempted to hide my hands in my lap but thought I might then look even more tense, sitting bolt upright in my chair. I found I was desperate to maintain an air of untroubled normality.

  Lucas was watching me. “Which Christian name would you like to use?” he said.

  I nearly fell off my chair. “How do you know I use more than one?”

  “You’ve just told me.” He laughed before adding: “Sometimes people prefer to withhold their Christian names as well as their surnames. I merely wanted to signal to you that you could pick a name at random if you wished.”

  “Oh, I see.” I tried to respond but found the subject was so complex that I was unable to decide where to begin. I was behaving like a deaf-mute again. I tried to pull myself together. “My first name’s Norman,” I said. “That was my father’s choice. But after the christening my mother decided that she preferred my second name, so everyone called me Neville until 1942. Then I met my second wife. She decided to call me Stephen.”

  “And who are you at the moment?”

  “I don’t know.” That sounded as if I was certifiable. In panic I told myself that I really couldn’t sit in a nasty little cell which reeked of Popery and declare to an Anglo-Catholic monk that I didn’t know who I was. That would be letting the Protestant side down in an intolerably humiliating manner. “I wanted to be Stephen,” I said. “When I remarried last year I wanted to ring down the curtain on Neville and begin an exciting new life, but somehow that hasn’t happened. Stephen’s just my wife’s pipe-dream, a fantasy in clericals. I’m still Neville—I don’t want to be, but I can’t escape into Stephen. Neville won’t let me go.” I was still talking like a maniac. In a paroxysm of embarrassment I muttered: “Sorry. Idiotic. Not making any sense at all.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to apologise!” said Lucas, taking my idiocies in his stride. “I know all about having two names. I was Victor in my youth. I took the name Aidan when I became a monk, but it was by no means a smooth transition from one identity to another.”

  That was the moment when I forgot the oratory behind me and overcame any desire to behave like a deaf-mute. “Did Victor completely disappear?” I said. “Or did he and Aidan blend?”

  “It was a little more complicated than that. Aidan was actually a synthesis of two warring Victors.”

  That was the moment when I forgot I was talking to an Anglo-Catholic in a room which shouted CONFESSIONAL from all four walls.

  “Two Victors!” I exclaimed. “And fighting each other!” Cautiously I groped my way forward to the next question. “But wouldn’t you say it was abnormal to have more than one identity?”

  “It can certainly create abnormalities if the essential unity of the personality is impaired. But in fact a lot of people juggle different identities and continue to think of themselves as one person who wears a variety of masks. That’s very common. Think of the managing director who roars like a lion at the office and becomes meek as a lamb once he crosses the threshold of his home. He wears one face for his staff, one for his wife—and yet a third, perhaps, for his mistress.”

  I was unable to resist asking: “Have you ever been married?”

  “No.”

  “You remained unmarried through choice?”

  “No. Let’s not waste time on guessing games,” said Lucas kindly. “I didn’t marry because the lady in question was married to someone else and there was no hope of a divorce. I lived in sin for six years. That was in my atheist phase. Later I became a Christian, then a slum-priest and finally a monk. That disposes of my past history, satisfies (I hope) your curiosity and enables us to turn back to you, a far more interesting subject.”

  Acute embarrassment made me incoherent. “I’m sorry—none of my business—intolerably impertinent—”

  “Nonsense! Everyone who meets a monk for a confidential conversation has a right to wonder how far the monk can be expected to respond to his confidences. Indeed it’s often helpful if a monk’s been married. When Jon Darrow was counselling visitors to Ruydale he used to make great capital out of his early marriage.”

  Before I could stop myself I said: “Darrow would make capital out of anything.” Then I muttered in a fresh bout of embarrassment: “Sorry. Darrow and I aren’t very compatible. But of course he’s a good man.”

  Lucas said wryly: “Jon’s not everyone’s cup of tea,” and as he smiled I recognised the Yorkshire inflection in that homespun phrase, a faint whisper of a forgotten world far away.

  On an impulse I said: “What part of Yorkshire do you come from?”

  “My parents ran a boarding-house in Scarborough.”

  “Scarborough! We went there once f
or a holiday. I was very young but I remember walking by the sea with my father. It seemed like paradise … but then everything seemed like paradise, before my father died.”

  “That sounds as if you’re describing the first phase of your life.”

  “Yes, that was when I was the Neville who belonged to my father, the Neville who lived in—do you know Maltby?”

  “It’s near Huddersfield, isn’t it?” I could hear the Yorkshire accent clearly now. He had pronounced “Huddersfield” with the long u.

  “It’s an ugly town,” I said, “but it’s surrounded by some beautiful countryside, and my father used to take us for walks there.”

  “How old were you when he died?”

  “Seven. He died bankrupt. Then my uncle took charge of the family.”

  “Was that when the second phase of your life began?”

  “Yes, that was when I became the Neville who belonged to Uncle Willoughby, the Neville who lived in London, where my brother and I were sent to be educated. My uncle had connections there and arranged for us to attend the City of London School. It had a good reputation then in a modest way—probably it has an even better reputation now—but of course it was no Eton or Harrow. However, my uncle thought we’d have a better chance of Getting On in London than in Yorkshire, and we didn’t disappoint him. We both went up to Oxford, and it was there that I received my call to be a clergyman.”

  “Not quite what your uncle had in mind for you, perhaps.”

  “No, but that didn’t matter because he then ceased to play any part in my life and a third Neville was born. But this Neville wasn’t a synthesis of the two previous Nevilles. They wouldn’t blend. What Neville Three did was to encircle them so that they could stand side by side in harmony. That worked well enough for a time, but finally—”

  “They began to fight?”

  “I’m not sure what they began to do, but Neville Three began to have difficulty keeping order. In the end I found myself continually ringing down the curtain in my mind to blot them out, but the curtain kept trying to go up at the wrong moment.”

  “Very exhausting. And to whom did Neville Three belong? If Neville One belonged to your father and Neville Two belonged to your uncle—”

  “Oh, Neville Three belonged to my mother.”

  “What about your first wife?”

  “She belonged to me. She first met me when I was Neville Two, but she never saw that side of me during the seven years before we were married. I was always Neville One then with Grace, gentle and romantic like my father. Even after we were married, when I was Neville Three, I always felt most comfortable with her when I was being Neville One.”

  “And your mother—is she still alive?”

  “No, she died in 1941.”

  “And whom do you belong to now?”

  “Well, I thought I’d become Stephen—who of course would belong to my second wife. But the terrible thing is—and this is why I’m here—I’ve just realised that I don’t want my second wife any more and I can’t imagine how I’m going to live with her for the next thirty years. I’ve gone very, very wrong somewhere, but I’ve no idea how it’s happened. All I know is that I’ve ended up in the most appalling wasteland and my whole career in the Church is in jeopardy.”

  “Your career in the Church?”

  “Yes, I’m actually rather successful—”

  “And what about your life of service to God?” said the Abbot of Ruydale. “That surely is more important than any career in the Church.”

  I felt exactly like a dog which had been prancing along at the end of a leash, only to be brought up short by a sharp shocking tug. “Ah yes,” I said. I even had to pause for breath as if I had been winded. “Yes. Well, I still feel called to serve God to the best of my ability as a clergyman. When I spoke of my career in the Church I merely meant—”

  “In what way do you feel called to serve God as a clergyman? Is it your way? Or His way?”

  “My way is His way. I mean, His way is my way. I mean—”

  “Which Neville is it who’s called to serve?”

  “Neville Three. Well, Neville One as well—and Neville Two, I can’t do without Neville Two—”

  “You say you’re in a wasteland. Who led you there?”

  “No one. That’s why I simply can’t understand how I could have wound up like this—”

  “Was it God who led you there? Or was it the Devil?”

  I shifted, deeply embarrassed, in my chair. “I’m sorry, I’m a Modernist. I find all talk of the Devil rather—”

  “The Devil doesn’t care whether or not you’re a Modernist. You can’t ring down the curtain on the Devil by waving the word ‘Modernist’ around like a magic wand.”

  “Well, of course I recognise that evil exists, but—”

  “What about sin?”

  “Sin?”

  “Sin. S-I-N.”

  “Yes, well, of course sin exists too, as we all know only too well, but I never think it’s very helpful to harp on it. Most people are good and decent and try to do what’s right. They may have their minor faults, but—”

  “You’re describing yourself, I think. But which self?”

  “Neville Two. No, Neville Three, who tries very hard to be a good man—although I admit he makes mistakes occasionally, little slips—” I suddenly felt hot as I remembered Lyle.

  “So what you’re really saying is that none of the Nevilles is responsible for your presence in the wasteland. You’re saying: ‘The prisoners at the bar plead innocent!’ ”

  “Prisoners at the bar?”

  There was a silence. I stared at him, and as he stared back, exuding a formidable air of authority, I realised he was experimenting, just as Darrow had experimented earlier, by switching from a mild to a tough approach in order to gauge the most effective way of communicating with me. Automatically I tried to dredge up a fighting response. “Why should you imply I’m on trial?”

  “We’re all on trial. We’re all sinners. We all stand at the bar and await God’s judgement.”

  I leapt into the attack. “I’m surprised to find someone like you dabbling in that kind of Protestant neo-orthodoxy! I may be a Protestant but I’m a Liberal Protestant, and in my opinion—”

  “There you go again, pulling down the curtain and trying to hide behind theological labels!” With a speed which took me aback he then sloughed off his stern manner and became sympathetic again. The experiment had been concluded, the results noted and a new strategy planned. I was beginning to feel like a lump of clay in the hands of a skilled artist. “It won’t do, you know, lad,” he said regretfully, and as he spoke he slipped still deeper into a Yorkshire accent. “Neither Barth nor Calvin possesses any patent on discussions of sin and judgement. Christians were debating those particular matters long before anyone dreamed up the title Crisis Theology and started talking about neo-orthodoxy.”

  “Yes, but if you ignore the Liberals’ emphasis on the forgiveness and compassion of Christ—”

  “Who said anything about ignoring it? But what use are the forgiveness and compassion of Our Lord unless you repent? And how can you repent unless you frankly acknowledge you’re a sinner and try to understand why you’ve sinned?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just have no sympathy for this kind of talk. It’s alien to my intellectual approach to God.”

  “And what about your spiritual approach?”

  “Now look here, Mr. Lucas—”

  “Ah yes, you’re going to get angry with me, aren’t you? I thought you would. Getting angry would make you feel better, give you a chance to expel all the difficult emotion, a chance to ease the pain … The pain’s very bad, isn’t it?”

  “What pain?”

  “The pain you keep behind the curtain.” Without warning he clasped his hands and bent his head in prayer. To my astonishment I heard him say in a firm voice: “Lord, grant me the power to help this man and ease the suffering which has crippled him.”

  In th
e ensuing silence the concentration behind the prayer seemed almost tangible. My astonishment was rapidly succeeded first by embarrassment and then by a confused emotion which I found hard to identify. I could only think, as Darrow had thought before me: Here’s someone who really cares.

  Lucas let his hands fall and looked me straight in the eyes. In the same firm voice he had used for the prayer he said: “It’s a question of facing the pain.”

  “What pain?” I said again, but this time I was making a genuine effort to understand. “The pain of the past? Or the pain of the present?”

  “It’s all one.”

  I gasped. Time suddenly began to run backwards, like some bizarre stream cascading uphill, and as my father moved silently to my side my voice whispered: “It’s all a unity. It’s all one.”

  Some moments passed before I realised I had covered my face with my hands. Panic assailed me. I had to pull myself together, show no sign of weakness, drum up some aggression to protect myself. How had I wound up in this repulsive confessional situation? Why was I letting this old man manipulate me in the manner of a cat dedicated to unravelling a ball of wool? How dare he unmask me as vulnerable and how dare he treat me as if I was sick? Nasty, meddlesome, interfering old monk, slipping into a Yorkshire accent to slide under my skin … I was convulsed with rage and shame.

  “I’m calling a halt to this monstrous interrogation,” I said strongly, but to my horror my voice shook. “I refuse to answer any more questions!”

  “Now, isn’t that fortunate!” said Lucas without a second’s hesitation. “I was just thinking you needed a rest from my tiresome prying, and I’d decided to do something I would never normally do in this situation. I’m going to talk about myself. Not at all good practice for a counsellor, but your case interests me so much that I believe a touch of unorthodoxy would be justified. But before I begin, may I offer you the olive branch of peace in the form of a cup of tea?”

  “No, thanks,” I said shortly, but in fact I hardly knew what I said. I felt as if all my rage and shame had been soaked up by a piece of blotting paper which was now being lightly tossed into the wastepaper basket. I groped for words but could find none. I groped for a new attitude to adopt in place of the rage and shame, but I seemed to be in an emotional vacuum. All I could do was sit passively in a docile silence. Dimly I began to realise I was being tamed.