Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  Darrow, who seemed taller than ever, gently steered me across the threshold into the hall. I felt a little worried that he should be so quiet and earnest and concerned. Patients become nervous when confronted by such a sinister gravity; they begin to hanker for their healthier days, when their doctors bounced around being arrogant nuisances.

  “You present me with an interesting problem, Aysgarth,” Darrow was saying. “I’m very unwilling to offer you a drink but nevertheless I’m tempted to prescribe a stiff brandy.”

  “Yes, please. Just one. Very nice.” I looked for something new to lean on and found the bannister. “No more moonlight,” I said, “no more roses. No more angels twanging harps. But a little drop of brandy wouldn’t go amiss at all.”

  Before Darrow could comment, a door opened nearby and his wife, Anne, who had always been so kind to Grace, bustled into the hall. She was a statuesque brunette of thirty-eight, with a determined jaw and the bossy air of a successful businesswoman. Although reputed to run the Manor’s estate with a most lucrative efficiency, she was clever enough to play down this masculine skill and cultivate a somewhat eccentric femininity. She wore plain, well-cut clothes, so plain and well-cut that they probably cost a fortune, and avoided heavy make-up in order to show off her excellent skin. At dinner-parties she was notorious for wearing at least one of her large collection of diamond trinkets; the juxtaposition of the lavish stones and the lush skin was curiously alluring. Naturally I had often wondered, just as one inevitably does when one considers one’s female acquaintances, what she was like in bed, and I had long since formed the suspicion that she was probably very hot stuff indeed. After all, Darrow would hardly have bothered with a woman who was frigid. Having spent seventeen years in a monastery, he would have been certain to prefer a rocket to a damp squib.

  “Neville!” she was exclaiming as she crossed the hall towards us. “Thank goodness you’ve arrived!” She turned to her husband. “So much for your premonitions, darling! Here he is, safe and sound, and looking remarkably well, considering all the ghastliness he’s been through! Neville, I was so sorry to hear …” And she embarked on a few brisk but well-chosen words of sympathy about the baby.

  I suddenly realised that she was wearing not only a diamond necklace but diamond earrings, and as the knowledge dawned on me that I was interrupting a dinner-party I became aware of the murmur of conversation beyond the open dining-room door.

  “… and anyway, it’s lovely to see you!” Anne was saying warmly. “Come and have a drink. We’ve finished eating and the men are about to start on the port.”

  In confusion I said: “I’m sorry, I had no idea I was interrupting a dinner-party.”

  “Oh, I thought you knew! Charles said he met you yesterday. He and Lyle are staying with us for a few days before going off on holiday to Devon.”

  Before I could even gasp with horror Darrow said smoothly: “Aysgarth and I have business to discuss. We’ll give the port a miss and go straight to the library.”

  “Oh no!” I said at once, driven by all manner of complex feelings. “Of course I must say hullo to the Ashworths—what on earth would they think if I didn’t?”

  “Aysgarth—” began Darrow, but I refused to let him finish.

  “A glass of port would be delightful!” I said firmly to Anne. “Just what I need to cheer me up after a long hard day!” And turning my back on Darrow, who was shaking his head in a paroxysm of disapproval, I rushed forward, eager as a lemming, to the disaster which lay waiting ahead.

  3

  The first person I saw as I entered the room was Lyle. She was wearing her hair longer; it cascaded around her shoulders in a series of subtle waves. Her sleek black dress was unadorned by jewellery so that she appeared to be saying silently to Anne: “You can dress yourself up like a Christmas tree, but I don’t have to.” As our glances met she gave me the kind of look one would normally reserve for dead cod on a fishmonger’s slab.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Ashworth,” I said.

  “Good evening, Archdeacon.” Not even Garbo could have sounded more ravishingly aloof.

  “Hullo, Aysgarth,” her husband was saying casually as my feet carried me forward to the nearest chair. “I thought it wouldn’t be long before we met again.”

  “Congratulations on your gift of prophecy!” As I sank down in a chair on his side of the table, I was aware that he had made no move to offer me his hand, but then why should he? After a good dinner he was probably feeling too relaxed to bother with the formalities.

  “We were sorry to hear of your loss,” said Lyle, immaculately polite. “We do hope your wife’s now on the road to recovery.”

  “She is, yes. Thank you.” Having mentally flailed around for another topic of conversation, I found myself saying rapidly to the man beside me: “How are your boys?”

  “How nice of you to ask!” To my relief Ashworth was suddenly all charm. I was reminded of my first meeting with him long ago in 1940 when he had effortlessly exuded his privileged southern background, his public school education and his ecclesiastical success. I could still remember my instinctive pang of envy and resentment. I had had to fight hard for my success; Ashworth would merely have glided up the ladder. He was one of those people who quite obviously have no family problems, no career difficulties and certainly no personal crises. No matter how arduous his experience as a POW he would slough it off without difficulty and slide elegantly back into his role of the charming academic theologian marked out long since for high preferment. I could well imagine him being offered a bishopric before he turned fifty.

  “Charley goes to prep school this autumn,” he was saying in response to my enquiry, “and Michael’s still at kindergarten.”

  “They must have grown since I last saw them.” It was a banal comment but I could think of no other. I was too busy trying to avoid looking at Lyle.

  “When in fact did you last see them?” said Ashworth with interest.

  “Well …” I suddenly realised I was again on the brink of mentioning Alex.

  “I don’t remember when he last saw Michael,” said Lyle, “but he saw Charley at the Jardines’ house a few days before the funeral.”

  “Ah yes,” said Ashworth, once again producing his most charming smile, and added to me: “My wife’s now told me exactly what happened at that funeral.”

  I felt as if I had fallen off a cliff. No lemming could have experienced a longer drop.

  “That must have been such a harrowing experience, Lyle!” Anne was exclaiming sympathetically. “Both the Jardines were so devoted to you, weren’t they?”

  “They were like parents. I suppose that’s why I found it difficult to talk of the funeral afterwards, even to Charles.”

  “Well!” said Darrow, suddenly deciding to intervene. Having closed the door he now opened it again as a signal to the ladies. “Anne?”

  “Yes, of course.” She turned to Lyle. “Let’s leave the men to their port and Church gossip. Coffee in the drawing-room in quarter of an hour, Jon, and no interminable ramblings tonight, please, about Reinhold Niebuhr, D. R. Davies, ‘Uncle Tom Cobley and All.’ ”

  “Very well, darling,” said Darrow meekly. Anne was the only person on earth who could boss Darrow around and meet with no resistance. Usually I found this a fascinating spectacle, but at that moment I was in such a state of shock that I barely noticed it. I was acutely aware of Lyle ignoring me as she left the room.

  “Help yourself to port, Charles,” Darrow said, closing the door and moving to the sideboard. “Aysgarth, I think you’d prefer a brandy.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a brandy myself,” said Ashworth, effortlessly debonair.

  By this time I was trying to crawl back up the cliff by telling myself it was inconceivable that Lyle had embarked on anything so insane as a full confession. I decided to risk a cautious probe. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said to Ashworth. “I had no intention of bringing up the subject of the Jardines a second time when I know you can only find them
an awkward topic of conversation. Before he died Alex told me all about the difficulties in 1937 when—”

  “Oh, 1937’s gone with the wind,” said Ashworth carelessly. “None of that matters any more now.”

  “It doesn’t? That would have pleased Alex! He came to regret the rift very much,” I said, sure now that Lyle had kept our secret. It seemed plain that although she had been reticent about the funeral because of the old awkwardness with the Jardines, Ashworth, fresh from experiencing far greater horrors, had finally been able to write off the Jardines’ pre-war hostilities as unimportant. “Alex actually told me how glad he was that it was you she married,” I said, relaxing at last. “He liked you.”

  “Decent of him,” said Ashworth dryly, but added good-naturedly enough: “Requiescat in pace! In his own eccentric way he was without doubt a most remarkable man … Jon, where’s that brandy?”

  “Charles, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer port?”

  “Very sure. Aysgarth and I are going to get drunk on brandy together, aren’t we, Aysgarth?”

  I found this suggestion a trifle surprising but assumed it was a joke. As Darrow put our drinks on the table before us I protested lightly: “Good clergymen don’t get drunk!” but at once Ashworth exclaimed with a chilling irony: “Oh no, I forgot! Good clergymen don’t get drunk—and good clergymen don’t commit adultery either, do they?”

  I fell over my second cliff. Downing my brandy in a single gulp, I headed to the sideboard for a refill.

  “Aysgarth,” said Darrow at once, “I really think we’d better retire to the library to discuss the Theological College.”

  “Oh, no hurry!” I said. “Why are you shifting from one foot to the other like a cat on hot bricks? We haven’t had our Church gossip yet!” I reached for the decanter but Darrow grabbed it first.

  “Well, as you’re both drinking brandy,” he said, “maybe I’ll join you.” And having poured himself a couple of drops into a liqueur glass barely larger than a thimble, he incarcerated the decanter in the cupboard.

  In fury I turned my back on him. “What’s the Church gossip up in Cambridge?” I said boldly to Ashworth as the brandy rapidly built up a Dutch courage. I noticed that the port decanter was still standing on the table. “How goes it at Cambridge Cathedral? Has your Bishop finally decided whether Ezra came before or after Nehemiah?”

  “No idea. I’m having trouble settling down again in Cambridge—not that I’d expect you to understand that. You wouldn’t know anything about POWs and their problems.”

  “That’s just where you’re wrong. I’ve been ministering to the German POWs on Starbury Plain.” I was now determined to keep up appearances by pretending nothing was wrong. No one was going to catch me running away from a privileged southerner who oozed the ethos of a leading public school from every pore.

  “German POWs?” said Ashworth amused. “And how does that flabby Liberal theology of yours go down with the Nazis?”

  Darrow said quietly: “Charles,” but Ashworth, ignoring him, followed my example and knocked back his brandy in a single gulp.

  “What’s so flabby about the Christian doctrine of hope?” I said truculently. “It was hope which kept us all alive as we endured Europe’s darkest hour!”

  “May I suggest to you that only a man who endured Europe’s darkest hour tucked up in the Starbridge time-warp could preserve his nineteenth-century theology in such a peculiarly facile form?”

  “Charles, that’s offensive,” said Darrow, never raising his voice but speaking with great firmness. “I’m afraid I can’t let any guest of mine be subjected to that kind of remark.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, refilling my glass from the port decanter. “Ashworth’s got a point. He’s been through hell while I’ve been in the war-time equivalent of heaven. Where he’s wrong is to assume that it’s this fact alone which has allowed me to maintain an optimistic theology. Of course it’s fashionable now to be pessimistic—and why not, after the concentration camps and Hiroshima?—but a valid theology should be beyond mere fashion, and in my opinion Liberal Protestantism at its best is—”

  “You gloss over the horror of evil,” said Ashworth. “Your theology, in 1946, is meaningless.”

  “The best Liberal theology doesn’t gloss over anything! Obviously evil constitutes a problem but—”

  “A problem? Did you say a problem?” Ashworth leant forward, swiped the port decanter and refilled his own glass with an unsteady hand. That was the moment when I realised that contrary to my expectations he too was standing in the wasteland, a very different wasteland from mine but one which still required Darrow’s presence at the foot of the cross. “Millions of people have been tortured, starved and done to death in the most disgusting ways, whole cities have been incinerated, whole nations have been brutalised, and you write off all that as a problem?”

  “You wholly misunderstand,” I said as Darrow silently removed the port decanter. “I’m not denying the war was vile—”

  “Why don’t you use the word ‘evil’?”

  “Well, all right, if you insist—”

  “I do insist! You can’t face the reality of evil, can you? You Liberal Protestants never can!”

  “That’s grossly unfair!”

  “Is it? Then how would you describe the nice ordinary family men, just like you and me, who spent their days conducting medical experiments on children? Do you call them evil? Oh no! You call them a problem, and at once the evil’s obscenely reduced to an inconvenience!”

  “Well, of course, the obvious truth is that these evil villains weren’t nice ordinary family men just like you and me—”

  “They were human beings. They were like us. And we could have been like them—”

  “What absolute rubbish!”

  “No, it isn’t! Pontius Pilate was probably a nice ordinary family man. The people who nailed Christ to the cross were probably nice ordinary family men. I tell you, the capacity to commit evil is in every single one of us, and unless you face up to that fact—”

  “The fact you should face up to, Ashworth, before you drown in your neo-orthodox sea of doom and gloom, is that every man has the spark of the Holy Spirit in him, and against Christ all evil is powerless!”

  “Then how do you explain the situations where Christ is absent and evil rules the roost?”

  “He’s never absent. I agree that sometimes he appears to be absent, but—”

  “I’ve been in situations where he was absent—absolutely, utterly and completely absent!”

  “He couldn’t have been absent if you, a man of God, were there. The fact that you thought he was absent was your nightmare, your cross, but it was a delusion. He’s there in every private crucifixion because he’s a crucified God. Why, the very fact of the Incarnation means—”

  “Oh my God!” shouted Ashworth, suddenly slamming his fist on the table and leaping to his feet. “How can you be so blind! Can’t you see? We must face the evil in order to be redeemed! We don’t need a theology of the Incarnation, not now, not in 1946, not after all those years of global hell! We need a theology of redemption! We’ve got to repent in shame and live, not fester in guiltless optimism and die!” And seizing his empty glass, he smashed it in the fireplace before blundering blindly from the room.

  4

  Darrow said at once: “Forgive him. He’s nowhere near recovered yet from his experiences.” He was moving to the door as he spoke, but before I could attempt a reply he added over his shoulder: “Wait there—I must just make sure he’s all right.” When I was alone I moved automatically to the sideboard but found Darrow had not only locked up the decanters but removed the key. I had just given a grunt of disgust when I noticed that his own glass was still standing untouched on the table. I hesitated, remembering Aidan—and at that moment Darrow returned to the room.

  “Is he all right?” I said rapidly.

  “Yes, he sends his apologies.”

  “I’d like to send mine to him. I’m v
ery, very sorry I upset him like that. What a disaster!”

  “Not at all,” said Darrow astonishingly. “On the contrary, I suspect you both did each other a lot of good.”

  I stared at him. “How can you conceivably say that?”

  “I believe you each needed to hear what the other had to say. Of course on the surface it merely sounded like a clash between rival theologies, but underneath I seemed to hear vital messages being exchanged … Sit down, Aysgarth, and help yourself to that jug of water.”

  I sank abruptly into the nearest chair. “Well, whatever was going on,” I said, “the fact remains that I should have remembered his suffering and been more tolerant.”

  “Oh, that wouldn’t have suited Charles at all! He deliberately provoked you into argument because he wanted—even longed—to hear you stand up for the idealism which he fears the war has destroyed. And you were willing to argue because for some reason what Charles was saying had a dreadful fascination for you. I was watching your face. You could, in fact, have terminated the argument right at the start, but you were riveted. You had to let him speak his mind.”

  I poured myself some water. I nerved myself to face the pain. And I said: “I’m afraid there was much more going on than that. What you say may be true, but that’s only half the story. Ashworth wanted to lash out at me primarily because he knew I’d made a heavy pass at his wife after Alex Jardine’s funeral.”

  There was a silence, and gradually the truth dawned on me. I looked at him. He looked back calmly. In no line of his face did I see the faintest glimmer of surprise.

  “You knew,” I whispered. “You knew.”

  “Is that so surprising? I’m Charles’s spiritual director.”

  “No, I meant you knew all along. Right from the beginning. You knew.”

  “My dear Aysgarth, there’s no need to behave as if I’ve exhibited some peculiarly diabolical form of clairvoyance! The truth was fairly obvious. As soon as I saw you that morning in the Crusader I realized something had gone very wrong, and when I heard later from Lyle (who I knew was severely disturbed by Charles’s disappearance) that you and she had been alone in that house with only an exhausted widow for company—”