Ultimate Prizes

by Susan Howatch

  “Any whisky in the house?”

  “None. Run along, Nanny, or you’ll miss your train.”

  Reluctantly he unfolded his tall frame, hauled himself out of the passenger seat and trailed away across the cobbled forecourt into the station.

  I drove on to the hospital.

  5

  As soon as I walked into Dido’s flower-filled room I experienced yet again that eerie phenomenon of déjà vu and saw so clearly that this was no inexplicable delusion. I felt as if the scene had taken place before because it had indeed taken place before, over and over again in the past which had so tormented me. I looked at the pathetic, tragic invalid who loved me and saw not my wife but the mother I had so hideously mistreated. And then I saw the road to redemption.

  The exhausted despair with which I had contemplated Dido such a short time earlier was now instantly erased; it was as if a blackboard had been wiped clean with the single sweep of a hand. Strength poured into me; it was as if a man dying from loss of blood had received a single mighty transfusion. I knew then—it required no reasoning, for the knowledge arrived fully formed in my mind—that I could embrace my role of husband until it became so familiar that no acting was necessary. I was reminded of how I had acquired my BBC accent. At first it had taken a conscious effort to maintain, but now I automatically spoke in that manner. All that had been required was the will to keep practising, and already, as I experienced the infusion of strength, I knew I had the will not only to accept my role but to perfect it. I had been granted the power to survive.

  “My dearest Dido!” I exclaimed, and although in one sense I was acting, in another sense—the only sense that mattered as I thought of my mother—I was painfully sincere. “What must you be thinking of me? I’m sure you’re feeling utterly deserted!”

  She burst into tears but now I could deal with them without turning a hair. I took her in my arms and kissed her and pulled the visitor’s chair close to the bed so that I could hold her hand while we talked.

  “Oh Stephen, I’ve been feeling such a dreadful failure—”

  “A failure?” I said to my mother as the past caught fire from the present and the pain was consumed by the flames. “You? Never describe yourself to me in that way again!”

  “But Stephen—”

  “You’re a masterpiece!”

  “Oh darling, how terribly sweet of you to say so, but I don’t quite see how I can be when I’m so horribly abnormal—”

  “I don’t want anyone normal. I’d be bored to death. I want a magnificent aberration from the norm …” The fire was raging in the past now. I could see the bones of all the suffering bleached white as they were purified, and still the cleansing flames burnt on and on.

  “How can I be magnificent when I produced that wretched travesty of a baby?”

  “Where on earth did you get the idea that he was a wretched travesty? Why, I was so proud and pleased that I even called him Arthur after my father …” The flames were dying at last but a great light shone backwards from the present into my memory, and when I saw my mother reading quietly on her chaise-longue I knew we were both at peace. It was a memory I could live with, a small serene cameo which I could recall without flinching.

  “… and you see, I thought that as you never mentioned him he was too horrible to speak of—and I thought that had made you angry and disappointed—”

  “I didn’t mention him because I thought it would upset you. Obviously we’ve been crucifying ourselves over an absurd misunderstanding.”

  “But if he wasn’t a wretched travesty after all … oh my God, how dreadful that I didn’t see him! How can I ever forgive myself for—”

  “No, there’s no need for you to feel guilty. You were much too ill to cope with such a bereavement, so it was my job to attend to him—and my job to remember him in detail so that I could share him with you later.” And as I thought of my mother toiling through her years of childbearing I embarked on a description not of poor little Arthur in his plain, waxen lifelessness but of Christian, perfect shining Christian with his pink-and-white skin and his long dark eyelashes and his soft brown down on the top of his small elegant head. “… and you mustn’t feel he’s been erased as if he never existed,” I heard myself say. “He has his own special grave and his own special name. You can think of him and feel proud, just as I do.”

  As the tears streamed down her face again she whispered: “So it was all a sort of success after all.”

  “Oh, no doubt about it! And what a brave thing it was for you to embark on a pregnancy after what happened to Laura! I see now I never fully appreciated your great courage—or indeed the great love you offered me in your last letter. I’ve really been very obtuse and stupid.”

  “I was beginning to think that now you’d won my love you didn’t want it any more—”

  “My dear,” I said as my mother turned over a page in her book, “when one wins someone’s love—that ultimate prize—one doesn’t tear it up and chuck it away in the nearest wastepaper basket. One looks after it and cherishes it and thinks how lucky one is to have won it. I know we’ve had a terrible first year of married life, but if we can now put that behind us—”

  “That’s what I want.” Dido’s tears had stopped. Suddenly she said: “My God, I do believe you mean every word you say—I believe the nightmare’s finally coming to an end. Oh Stephen, if you only knew how frightened I’ve been! You see, I thought I was going to wind up like my mother—”

  “Ah yes,” I said, “your mother. I’ve never asked you much about her, have I, and I can see now that was yet another big mistake of mine, but—”

  “No, I thought you were being quite wonderfully tactful. It’s not a subject I can usually bear to talk about—or if I do talk about it I turn it into a joke and talk of Mother’s beautiful retiring nature and Father’s exceptional good taste in never having a mistress in the same city as his wife—”

  “I should have realised the reality was very much more painful than the sophisticated fantasy you presented.”

  “Painful? It was unspeakable. Oh Stephen, when I grew up and saw how awful marriage could be, I didn’t want to have anything to do with it! I never wanted to give any man the opportunity to treat me as my father treated my mother. All that neglect, all that contempt, all that humiliation … Mother gave up in the end, couldn’t cope, walled herself up in Edinburgh, made up her mind to live a twilight existence as a complete failure, too stupid and feeble to keep up with her husband, too dull and common to be treated by her children as anything but a social encumbrance … Poor Mother! But on the other hand, why the hell should I feel sorry for her? She never took any notice of me. I’m sure I was a very unwelcome pregnancy. She never really cared.”

  “But your father cared, surely? He always seems to treat you with affection—”

  “Oh yes—the sort of affection a farmer will feel for a prize cow who wins him a lot of prestige in the cattle-show! The only way I ever got him to take notice of me was to become a stunning social success in that great cattle-show the London Season, but as soon as I started to get a bit long in the tooth he became vile. ‘There’s nothing more pathetic than an aging spinster with a glittering future behind her!’ he snarled at me once. ‘Oh yes, there is!’ I shot back. ‘A married woman whose husband treats her like dirt!’ He nearly burst with fury when I said that. ‘You get yourself to the altar pretty damn quick,’ he shouted, ‘or your mother won’t be the only woman I treat like dirt!’ Oh, I could have killed him! I’d tried so hard to be the sort of daughter he wanted yet I’d never managed to be more than a lump of meat on parade. I thought: I’ll show him! I’ll show the bastard I’m a very different woman from my mother! I’ll marry my Archdeacon and be a huge success as a married woman—but then I found that what I wanted to do and what I was capable of doing were two entirely different things and I became so confused, so frightened, so—”

  “I blame myself very much. If only I’d—”

  “No,
there was nothing you could have done. I couldn’t have confided in you before—I didn’t trust you not to stop loving me once you found out how imperfect I really was. I thought that once you’d found out that I could never be a second Grace you wouldn’t want me any more, and that was why, when you hardly ever came here to visit me, I felt I had no choice but to assume you were disillusioned and fed up.”

  “I don’t want a second Grace. In fact I can say with absolute truth that I’ve never wanted a second Grace. I wanted to marry someone exactly like you.”

  “Yes, but why, Archdeacon dear? I could never quite work that out, but never mind, God moves in mysterious ways and I’m quite sure that although I’m so peculiar I’m going to be of absolutely vital importance to you in your career. And that reminds me—” She paused to dry her eyes and blow her nose. “Who do you think came to see me today?”

  “About half Starbridge, I should think, judging by your battalions of flowers.”

  “Oh, most of them just arrived via the florist. But you see that really sumptuous lot over there? They were delivered in person by none other than that devoted gardener—”

  “Lady Flaxton,” I said, and found I could only watch with an appalled resignation as the future began to unfold before my eyes.

  6

  “My dear!” said Dido, recovering fast now and even becoming animated. “How guilty I feel that I implied to you she was just a garden-obsessed old hag! She was so kind to me and promised she’d invite us both down to Flaxton Pauncefoot as soon as I was better. Apparently Lord F. is running around saying you’ve got the brains to be Dean of St Paul’s.”

  “Unfortunately for Lord Flaxton, Dean Matthews isn’t considering retirement.”

  “Maybe you could be Dean of Westminster instead!”

  “My dear, I think a modest canonry would be the most I could hope for at present at either Westminster Abbey or—”

  “But wouldn’t becoming a canon be a step down from being an archdeacon? No,” said Dido, rushing excitedly on without giving me time to reply, “not at Westminster or St. Paul’s—a canonry there is inevitably the prelude to Great Things!”

  “Well, that’s not necessarily true—”

  “Oh darling, do stop quibbling! Of course it’s not necessarily true if the man’s old or boring or only moderately clever, but if the man’s young and dynamic and brilliant—”

  “Do I take this spirited defence of a London canonry to mean that you’re hankering for the great metropolis?”

  “Well … oh hell, let’s be honest! Darling, you know as well as I do that London’s where things happen because London’s where one meets the people who matter. I mean, of course I’m mad about Starbridge—so beautiful, so romantic, so historic, so spiritual, so divine, so utterly wonderful in every possible way—but honestly, Stephen, when all’s said and done … isn’t it just the teensiest bit boring?”

  “If we could somehow stifle our yawns for another two or three years, I’d almost certainly receive preferment anyway. I don’t have to move to London in order to keep travelling up the ecclesiastical ladder.”

  “Yes, but if you stay here, not meeting the people who matter, you might be posted to some ghastly place in the back of beyond simply because you didn’t go to Eton or Harrow, whereas if you’re in London and people can see for themselves how triumphantly you’ve overcome your social disabilities—”

  “How would you like to live in Geneva?”

  “Geneva?”

  “It’s a city in Switzerland.”

  “Oh Stephen, don’t be so idiotic, I know Blackboard was the most hopeless governess that ever lived, but even I know Geneva’s in Switzerland! I only repeated the name because I thought I must have misheard you. What on earth could an English clergyman do in Geneva?”

  “That’s where the secretariat of the World Council of Churches is based, and now that the war’s over everyone there’s preparing for the Council’s first meeting. Bishop Bell, as the most influential churchman in Europe, is bound to be heavily involved and that means there’ll be plenty of liaison work with the German churches—and since I speak fluent German and have the experience of working with German POWs—”

  “Yes, I’m sure that was all very interesting for you, darling, but the German POWs belong to the past, don’t they—or they will do when the horrid camp closes—and you can’t possibly chuck up your career here in order to romp around Europe with Bishop Bell.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “No, of course not—oh Stephen, do come down to earth and stop wafting along on your clouds of romantic idealism! I always did look askance at your secret passion for that dangerous saint Dr. Bell—he’s your Pied Piper, all set to lead you hopelessly astray. World Council of Churches indeed! It’ll be worse than the League of Nations, nothing but bickering and futility and grand idealistic statements that mean absolutely nothing. And Switzerland! All those cuckoo-clocks and shop-windows full of watches and men in leather shorts yodelling among the banks! It’s so terribly unstimulating, isn’t it, and just think of all the dreary exhausting problems attached to setting up house in a foreign country with all the endless difficulties about the children’s education. It would cost a fortune to shunt them back and forth for the school holidays, and where’s the money going to come from?”

  “I suppose one could say that God would provide—”

  “No, one jolly well couldn’t! Honestly, you idealists are the limit sometimes, you really are—I bet Mrs. Bell has a hard slog keeping her George on the rails! Now, darling, do try to be realistic. Apart from all the financial problems which will arise if you go skipping off to Geneva in pursuit of your Pied Piper, what’s going to happen to your future? Everyone will soon forget about you once you’re lost in Europe, and then there’ll be no deaneries, no bishoprics, no seat in the House of Lords, no invitations to Buckingham Palace, no glamour, no excitement, no simply pulsating professional fulfillment—”

  “Not for you, no.”

  “Nor for you either, darling—oh, come down out of those clouds of self-deception and be honest! If we went to Switzerland—”

  “No, let’s forget Switzerland. And let’s forget Bishop Bell. I was only toying with a passing whim.”

  “Well, I didn’t think you could possibly be serious, but knowing your divinely romantic but absolutely lethal idealistic streak—”

  “You think you could be happy and fulfilled in London, do you?”

  “Oh, of course—there’d be no end to the help I could give you! I could create such a smart home for us and cultivate all the right people and give dazzling little dinner-parties for sixteen every week—”

  “Ah yes,” I said smiling at her, “I can see it all.”

  “Oh God, Stephen, are you secretly horrified? Do you want to rush off to Switzerland after all?”

  “All I want,” I said, “is for you to feel cherished, successful and happy.”

  “Well, darling, that’s simply too noble of you and I’m on the point of soaking at least another six handkerchiefs, but our marriage won’t be worth tuppence if I wind up happy as a lark and you wind up miserable!”

  “I couldn’t be happy if I felt I was causing you to suffer in any way. I couldn’t live with myself. So in the end it’s all mercifully simple,” I said to Aidan as if he were beside me instead of far away in Yorkshire, “as clear as it was long ago when Raven spoke in Christ Church Cathedral.” And to Darrow I added in the famous words of Martin Luther: “ ‘Here I stand. I can do no other.’ ”

  Dido said: “Darling, that’s all simply too wonderful, but I confess I do feel slightly worried that you sound as if you’ve been condemned to death.”

  I laughed, genuinely amused, and as I relaxed at last I found it easy to produce the answer which might have been so very difficult to frame. “Raven once wrote: ‘All roads honestly followed lead to God: of that I am very sure,’ ” I said. “I believe that if I now go steadily on, trying to serve God by doing what I believe to be rig
ht and not looking too far ahead, then my road will eventually lead me where God intends me to go.”

  But Dido in her excitement was already peering far into the future. “Of course Westminster Abbey is more central than St. Paul’s but perhaps the houses for the clergy in Amen Court are better than the ones in Little Cloister—I must try and find out exactly what the extent of the bomb damage was … On the other hand, the Abbey’s near St. James’s Park—so nice for the children—and there’s nothing around the Cathedral except bomb-sites … And then of course one mustn’t forget that the taxi-ride to Harrods would be so much cheaper from Parliament Square than from Ludgate Hill—”

  The nurse entered the room to terminate my visit. I kissed Dido, and then leaving her still radiant at the thought of our golden future, I slipped quietly out of the brightly lit hospital into the rain-sodden twilight beyond.

  7

  Opening the door of my car I found that Darrow had once more folded himself into the passenger seat.

  “I couldn’t get on the train,” he said as I gasped in surprise. “I couldn’t have forgiven myself if you’d left the hospital and started hitting the bottle.”

  “Why should I now start hitting the bottle?”

  “Because you’ll have seen the exact nature of the hard lonely road which lies ahead.”

  I slumped behind the wheel, slammed the door shut and said: “Are you quite sure you don’t tell fortunes by appointment?”

  “My dear Aysgarth, it was moderately obvious to a detached observer that you’d feel bound to redeem your mother’s tragedy in the God-given way now available. Why else do you think I dragooned you to the hospital? But there was no clairvoyance. I merely made a deduction based on reason and experience.”

  We sat there in our makeshift metal confessional and eventually I found the words to tell him what had happened.

  Darrow said soberly afterwards: “You’ve been called to perform a very difficult task.”

  “It could be worse,” I said, and as I spoke I heard myself as if I were a stranger and saw with detachment the cool, laconic Yorkshireman, dogged and determined, wedded irrevocably to the British understatement and the stiff upper lip, despising any masculine display of emotion or self-pity, trained in the hardest of schools which had ensured he was prepared to tackle the hardest of tasks. “All that matters,” I said, “is that I’ve been shown the way to survive my marriage, a miracle which means I can continue to serve God in the Church. I should be grateful for such a reprieve. It’s more than I deserve.” I paused before adding: “I daresay we’ll become good friends in the end. At least life won’t be dull. When I left she was planning her first little dinner-party for sixteen at Amen Court.”