Ultimate Prizes (16 page)

“I don’t deny you’ve been very good to me, Alex. All I’m saying is—”

“I suppose now that I’m just a retired bishop, someone who can no longer further your career, you feel I can be rebuffed and discarded! Well, all I can say is that you’d better take care you don’t wind up among life’s losers—a young clergyman who ignores his mentor’s advice usually comes to a sticky end!”

“And who are you to talk of losers?” I demanded, finally throwing all restraint to the winds. We were tucked away in a secluded corner of the room, but I was aware of the distant heads turning as I sprang to my feet. “During the five years you spent at Starbridge you succeeded in upsetting every other bishop in the House of Lords—why, you even insulted the Archbishop of Canterbury!—and when your ill-health forced you to retire, the Church of England’s collective sigh of relief equalled the velocity of a hurricane-force gale!”

Alex jumped up so violently that he overturned his glass of sherry. “No man talks to me like that!”

“Then it’s about time someone tried! And while we’re on the subject of you winding up a loser, why the deuce have you frittered away your retirement scribbling an autobiography—which never gets finished—in between visits to London to drink too much at the Athenaeum? I know you’ve got a heart complaint, but surely there was no need for you to be quite so idle! Why haven’t you preached the occasional guest-sermon—or offered to help out in a neighbouring parish where the vicar’s absent in the Army? Even our
bête noire
Jon Darrow had the grace to do that!”

“Obviously we’ve come to the parting of the ways,” said Alex in his bitterest voice. “I’d wish you well, but I fear I’d be wasting my time. It’s quite clear you’re hell-bent on ruining yourself.” And he walked out of the room.

Within minutes I was regretting my violent verbal assault, but although I later wrote more than once in an attempt to repair our friendship, he stubbornly refused to reply.

5

“My dear Archdeacon,” said Lady Starmouth just before the engagement was announced, “I wonder if I might take advantage of my numerous years of seniority and talk frankly about a matter which you may well prefer not to discuss. I refer, of course, to your attachment to Dido.”

By this time Lady Starmouth had been my devoted benefactress for over two years. She had found me a paragon of a housekeeper and a saint of a nursemaid, both possessing not only experience of clerical households but a remarkable tolerance of my inability to afford lavish salaries. She had invited me regularly to Starmouth Court; she always called at the vicarage whenever she was in the Starbridge area, and she had persistently introduced me to a succession of eligible church-going women who were all quick to proclaim their devotion to children. This benevolence was by no means unprecedented, since Lady Starmouth was renowned for her kindness to clerical protégés, but the fact that I was not the only pebble on the Countess’s privileged beach hardly altered the fact that I was under an obligation to listen to her, even when she declared herself on the brink of proffering unwelcome advice.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said pleasantly. “You’re afraid I’m going to echo Alex Jardine’s opinion that marrying Dido would be disastrous for your career, but in fact I don’t agree with Dr. Jardine. Dido may be … shall we say eccentric? But she’s no fool and she does have this ambition to be a successful clerical wife. Why shouldn’t she realise this ambition if she marries an able man who’s devoted to her? No, I concede her effect on you may be beneficial. But I’m less optimistic about her effect on your children.”

“Dido shares your doubts, Lady Starmouth. For some time now she’s been using the children as an excuse to avoid the altar, but I’m personally convinced that the duties of a stepmother in this case wouldn’t be too arduous. After all, the older boys are away at school for two-thirds of the year, and since Sandy and Primrose have their nanny—”

“All children require an appropriate amount of care and dedication from their father’s wife,” said Lady Starmouth, “and I very much doubt whether Dido has the ability to meet such a challenge. Her background militates against her—think of that pathetic mother in Edinburgh and that frightful father in London! In Dido’s world if you’ve neither the time nor the desire to care for children properly you palm them off on someone else and hope to be relieved eventually of your responsibilities by a series of useful marriages.”

“But Dido’s by no means indifferent to children—in fact she’s very keen to have children of her own—”

“Of course—she’ll see them as little mirrors reflecting her own success. But Grace’s children? They’ll simply be mirrors reflecting the rival she’ll never quite manage to forget.”

I said at once: “Dido doesn’t seem to see Grace as a rival.”

“If she’s convinced you of that she’s been very clever—or maybe she hasn’t yet faced up to the reality which will be waiting for her if she marries you.
I
was a second wife, Mr. Aysgarth. I know all too well how easily first wives can be idealised, not only by their husbands but by their numerous friends as well, and it can be very hard to live in the shadow of a paragon. Dido may well profess to admire Grace, but I suspect that deep down her attitude borders on jealousy, resentment and dislike.”

The silence which followed this statement lasted until Lady Starmouth added abruptly: “You could do better for yourself, Archdeacon—and better for your children too. Think on what I’ve said and ask yourself if you don’t have a duty to look elsewhere.”

Naturally I promised her I would reconsider my position. Then I plunged straight back into the pursuit of my prize.

6

It might be thought that my work would have suffered from my obsession, but in retrospect I can see that between the summer of 1942, when Grace died, and the spring of 1945, when I remarried, I reached my zenith as an archdeacon. Possibly the sublimation of an inflamed sexual desire produced the unprecedented energy which I channelled into my work at this time; as a Modernist I can never ignore the theories of psychology, but personally I look askance at psychologists who produce a sexual explanation even for an innocent act such as tieing one’s shoelaces. The truth was that I was violently in love, even when Dido was at her most intolerable, and this peculiar form of insanity made life so relentlessly thrilling that I approached my work with a zest generated not (with all due respect to the Freudians) by physical frustration but by mental euphoria.

I’m not claiming that my genitals were unaffected by this mental intoxication; a grand passion combined with an enforced chastity hardly results in a eunuch’s detachment. But I had no hesitation in resuming the habits of adolescence in order to maintain a tolerable degree of tranquillity. So much rubbish has been talked in the past about this sort of behaviour that rational statements by clerics are almost nonexistent, but personally I believe masturbation need be no more sinful than contraception. It entirely depends on the intent of the perpetrator. If one adopts contraception merely to neutralise the risks of fornication, then of course it must be wrong; if one adopts it to preserve one’s wife’s health, then it must be right. A similar distinction can be made between masturbating in order to avoid a healthy relationship with the opposite sex and masturbating to save oneself from sliding into dementia while battling towards the altar, and if anyone thinks I’m behaving like a Modernist heretic when I state this fundamentally moral opinion, all I can say is: too bad.

Did I spend much time thinking of Grace while all this feverish activity was going on? I did not. One of the most useful aspects of my grand passion was that it blotted out all I could not bear to remember. On the first anniversary of my bereavement I forced myself to go alone to the cemetery and lay flowers on the grave, but I found the experience so unendurable that although Nanny took the children to the grave occasionally, I never accompanied them. At first the children mentioned Grace’s name often, but this spontaneity ceased when they discovered I was unable to talk of her. I had to remove her photograph from my study. I sent our double bed to the Red Cross and slept on the divan in my dressing-room. I could never even enter the bedroom we had shared. Once I heard Nanny say to Primrose: “It’s the grief,” but she was wrong. It wasn’t grief which paralysed my tongue and put parts of the vicarage out of bounds. It was the guilt I was unable to face.

Fortunately grand passion and hard work created a continuous diversion from past tragedy, and soon the war became another welcome distraction as the tide began to turn against the Nazis. After the fall of Tobruk came the victory at El Alamein. After the losses of D-Day came the capture of Berlin. It was then, as Churchill entered the bunker of his adversary and sat at last in Hitler’s battered chair, that my hidden ministry began to take an unprecedented amount of my time, the ministry I seldom mentioned because I feared it might taint my career: my work among the German prisoners, bitter and despairing, cynical and demoralised, at their camp on Starbury Plain.

The camp had been opened early in 1943 to house officers graded as C (Nazis) and C+ (Super-Nazis); contact with British civilians was forbidden. However, after the Normandy invasion in 1944 the huge influx of prisoners meant that the camp had to be reorganised. The Super-Nazis were sent north to Caithness, officers were admitted from Grades B (seemingly neutral but possibly still Nazi) and A (Pro-Allies), and a contingent of Other Ranks (all grades) was also admitted to act as orderlies. Still no contact was permitted with British civilians, but after the lynching of a Grade A man it was admitted that the Grade C’s were out of control, and a second reorganisation took place.

Three Grade C’s were hanged for their part in the lynching, while the culprits who escaped the gallows were shipped off to Caithness. Then a new commandant was appointed to run the camp, and by chance he happened to be not only a devout Christian but a friend of Dr. Ottershaw.

Colonel Laker was immediately faced with the fact that there were no qualified German priests or pastors among his prisoners. These pre-war clergy, serving in an atheist army, had been unable to be chaplains in any acceptable sense, but once in the camps many of them proved keen to revert to their calling. However at Starbury Plain the intake of prisoners had never included a Catholic priest, and of the four Protestant pastors one had died soon after admission, one had been sent to Caithness after the riot, one had had a nervous breakdown and one had lost his faith. As Colonel Laker remarked to Dr. Ottershaw during a visit to the palace, the flock was quite untended. A usable German pastor had been applied for, but sane, devout non-Nazis were highly prized by their captors and the commandants tended to hang on to them. In the interim (proposed Colonel Laker) could the Bishop possibly send an English clergyman who could hold a service for the Grade A’s and the few Grade B’s who might deign to turn up? (It was assumed no Grade C would go near an English clergyman.) War Office permission had been sought, and in these difficult circumstances a refusal was not anticipated.

Since the other Archdeacon, Babbington-French, was still saying that the only good German was a dead German, I was asked, just as I had always feared, to play Daniel in this den of German lions.

I hated it. I did my best, but my best seemed abysmal, and I found it hard to bear the humiliation of having my weakness for pastoral work so brutally exposed. Here I could no longer hide behind my talent for administration; it no longer mattered that I was a successful archdeacon, because now I was in a situation which required a missionary, someone with the guts to fight for Christianity right in the front line. There were times at the beginning when I used to be physically sick before I visited the camp. Could any reaction have been more cowardly and inadequate? I despised myself. Later I fought off the nausea but used to shiver from head to toe. Revolting! I continued to despise myself. Later still I conquered the shivers and stopped wasting emotional energy despising myself, but I went on thinking what hell it was to be quite such a failure. I felt as if my nose was being repeatedly rubbed in the mud.

Eventually to my relief a new German pastor turned up, but he proved useless and Colonel Laker out of kindness transferred him to Featherstone Park, the camp which had just begun to specialise in retraining the German clergy; after their years as Nazi soldiers even the good men tended to be disorientated and demoralised, no matter how much they wanted to return to their calling. Again the camp on Starbury Plain was without a pastor. The Commandant asked me to keep calling. The Bishop asked me to keep calling. The War Office extended my pass. There was no way out.

I slogged on.

After a while I got involved with the men and didn’t mind so much. The Grade A’s in fact became very civil and as the war drew to a close the Grade B’s began to abandon their sullen neutrality. Finally when the war ended I found myself even talking to the Grade C’s, not only the ones who tried to commit suicide but the ones who went mad, clinging to the belief that the German surrender was a lie, a product of the Allies’ propaganda machine. But as the British pored over the photographs of the cheering crowds in Whitehall, of the Royal Family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, of the great London landmarks floodlit after six years of darkness, of the service of Thanksgiving at St. Paul’s, all the Germans were shown pictures of their ruined cities, the captured U-boats, the vast enclosures of prisoners and the surrender at Lüneburg Heath. Arrangements were also made for them to see film of the concentration camps. The Grade C’s said the film had been made in Hollywood. The Grade B’s were silent. Only the Grade A’s, it seemed to me, could make any attempt, no matter how inadequate, to articulate the sheer pulverising horror of being German in that May of 1945.

“So it’s finished,” said my favourite, Hoffenberg, a very plain young man, awkward and ungainly but with a quick mind which deserved a university education. “Führer, Fatherland, Fantasy—all finished, nothing left, nothing but ruins and shame and guilt and hopelessness—no, don’t try to console me, Mr. Aysgarth! We’re in the darkness where your Christian light doesn’t shine, and there’s no Englishman alive who could possibly understand how we feel.”