Ultimate Prizes (26 page)

“Because your favourite Harley Street lounge-lizard agreed with that poor bastard you’ve just savaged that a Caesarian wouldn’t be necessary! Now will you kindly stop flouncing around like Bette Davis on an off-day and behave like something that resembles an English lady?”

“Stephen!” Merry subsided into a shocked silence. It was only when we reached the house that she said: “You’ve got a very hard streak in your nature, haven’t you? I always thought you had. It’s that mouth of yours. It shouts
Brutal!
every time you set it in that thin straight line.”

I did not trust myself to reply. Entering the study, I slammed the door, plucked the whisky bottle from its home behind the Oxford Dictionary and poured myself a triple measure. I was just raising the glass to my lips when Merry knocked on the door.

Instantly I whipped the glass out of sight behind my desk. “Yes?” I shouted.

“Stephen”—as she came in I saw she was carrying an envelope—“I’m sorry, I should have been making allowances for you. After all, I’m sure the last few hours were torture for you as well as for me, so for God’s sake let’s have a truce now and stop screaming at each other … Do you have any whisky?”

“No, I don’t usually drink spirits. What’s that envelope you’re holding?”

“It’s a letter Dido wrote two weeks ago and sent to me for safekeeping. She wanted me to give it to you if she died.”

“Well, she hasn’t died. Tear it up.”

“
You
tear it up,” said Merry, cross that her winsome apology had failed to flush out a whisky bottle. “It’s your letter, not mine. Anyway she could still die. Laura died of that embolism four days after she gave birth.”

“Dido’s not Laura. Dido’s going to live,” I said to myself levelly after the door had banged shut. Picking up the letter which Merry had flung down, I eyed it without enthusiasm. I was hardly in a mood to enjoy reading Dido’s characteristic epistolary drivel, but nevertheless I was aware that beneath my antipathy a powerful curiosity was stirring. In fact I was probably incapable of destroying any woman’s letter unread. I always thought of letters from women as little prizes, gratifying and delicious, a just reward for my faultless behaviour, and as soon as this piece of self-knowledge floated into my mind I found myself recalling all the white envelopes which had cascaded into my life for so many years, the letters from St. Leonards-on-Sea.

I was thinking of my mother again. Pouring myself a second whisky I slit open Dido’s pale blue envelope and unfolded the letter within.

“Darling Stephen,” I read.

If I die (and I think I will) I want you to know that since our ghastly honeymoon you haven’t wasted your time by being so wonderfully good and kind and loving to me. I used to think there was nothing else for me to do but die tragically in childbirth as it would solve all my terrible problems, but as I told you once I’m not the suicidal type, and anyway now you’ve made me want to live—although of course God’s will is almost certainly that I should die as a punishment for being so awful for so long. But I want to live because love really does conquer all, and dearest, dearest Stephen, I felt I had to write you this letter because I couldn’t possibly die leaving you in ignorance of the
Great and Glorious Truth
—which is not only that you love me (a true miracle) but that
I have come to love you
. No, I’m not fibbing, not exaggerating, not pretending—I mean every word I say and I’m saying yes, you’ve done it, you’ve succeeded, you’re victorious—
YOU’VE WON YOUR ULTIMATE PRIZE
! Death really does concentrate the mind, just as Dr. Johnson said, and now I can see so clearly that you’re the most wonderful man I’ve ever met. No man has ever cared for me as you have—you’ve made me feel I really am worth something after all, and I’m convinced now that with the help of your love I could overcome my troubles, but if I never get the chance to put matters right, just remember that you did indeed win me completely, exactly as you always wanted. Darling Stephen, this letter comes to you with eternal love from your utterly devoted

DIDO
.

I finished the letter. I finished my whisky. And I finished my long descent into the black pit of my second marriage. As I finally hit rock-bottom I had no choice but to face the terrible truth: I no longer wanted her. My ultimate prize had become the ultimate nightmare. I was trapped in an empty marriage with a woman I despised and detested, trapped in a marital horror which could last another thirty years, trapped on a tightrope where one false step could terminate my career in the Church, and as I stared appalled at the new world in which I found myself, I saw that the wasteland stretched ahead of me as far as the eye could see.

PART TWO

Under Judgement

“
Most people have, at some time or another, to stand alone and to suffer, and their final shape is determined by their response to their probation: they emerge either the slaves of circumstance or in some sense captains of their souls.
”

C
HARLES
E. R
AVEN
A WANDERER’S WAY

  9  

“
I do not want to approach the subject in any morbid or sentimental mood, but it is my full conviction that until men and women individually have been into hell they are not mature.
”

C
HARLES
E. R
AVEN
THE CROSS AND THE CRISIS

1

I
T WAS VERY SILENT IN THE WASTELAND, VERY COLD AND
dark. I thought how strange it was that hell should be conventionally depicted as hot and noisy, an inferno of leaping flames and screaming souls welded together in a ceaseless roaring activity. I also thought how strange it was that the Modernists could attempt to slough off hell by defining it as an antiquated concept which could have no meaning for twentieth-century man. Hell was dereliction in the wasteland—the wasteland in which the soul was imprisoned when God was absent, the wasteland where there was no convenient exit marked
SALVATION
and no convenient signpost directing one to the spiritual presence of Christ.

I realised then that the formulae by which I lived my life were no longer working. The sword of my Liberal optimism had shattered. I had thought the horrors of the atomic bomb and the concentration camps had already tried my Liberalism to its limits, but it had survived by insisting that these evils had been an aberration in mankind’s steady evolution in accordance with God’s plans. I had of course been aware that I stood at a privileged distance from those who had suffered so grossly in the war, but I had told myself that this gave me the necessary detachment to squeeze the horrors into my theory of atonement: God had achieved an at-one-ment, putting himself at one with suffering humanity through the sufferings of Christ so that all evil might be overcome and mankind made whole, reconciled and redeemed by God’s love. It had never occurred to me that I could find myself in a situation where God appeared to be not at one with mankind at all but utterly absent, utterly remote and utterly transcendent. Even during the most difficult moments of my childhood I had always been convinced that God was on my side, rewarding all my hard work and good behaviour with well-deserved prizes. The world might often be harsh but it was rational, and because it was rational it was safe and good. God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Or as Browning, the favourite poet of the Liberal Protestants, had written: “God’s in his heaven—All’s right with the world.”

But now God was in his heaven, I was in hell and there was no at-one-ment, no sign of Christ. I was cut off from my sources of spiritual strength, absolutely alone. My instinctive reaction, as always, was to put everything right by chasing the next prize, but the only prize in sight was the prize I had won, the prize which was now poised to destroy me, and I did not see how I could survive.

I was suddenly so frightened that I had another triple whisky. That calmed me. I tried to think clearly. What did I do next? I had no idea. Slowly I realised that I would have to find someone who would tell me what to do. At that point my administrator’s brain woke up, groped its way through the fog of panic and fastened on the problem as if it belonged to someone else. When a clergyman sat around drinking triple whiskies and telling himself he was finished, he could be classified as having broken down, and when a clergyman broke down in the Starbridge diocese there were fundamentally two courses of action open to his superiors. If he was exhausted but still
compos mentis
we dispatched him to a clerical establishment called Allington Court in Devon, a hotel which had the facilities (peace and quiet, a chapel with daily services, a warden experienced in counselling) to double as a convalescent home for clergymen who needed a rest. On the other hand, if the sufferer was no longer able to function normally in the world, we carted him to the Fordite monks at Starwater Abbey. The Fordites, who were Anglican Benedictines, had a good reputation for refurbishing battered souls.

It seemed obvious that I was far beyond being helped by a little holiday at Allington Court, and anyway I could hardly wander off to Devon when my wife was ill in hospital. But I shuddered at the thought of the Fordites. Although the monks lived in my archdeaconry, the Abbey was a small independent state where my writ failed to run. The Fordites might operate within the Church of England but they formed a private organisation which answered only to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Bishop of Starbridge, who was officially appointed their “visitor,” called on the monks every year but he had no power over them, and I, as the Archdeacon, had not only no power but also no obligation to make any visits. After my appointment in 1937 I had called as a courtesy to introduce myself to the Abbot, but I had been so horrified by the stench of incense in the chapel and the appalling plaster statuette of the Virgin Mary in the visitors’ parlour that I had never returned except to unload the occasional unfortunate colleague who was undergoing a breakdown.

I thought that the monks could probably cope with me if I were to pay them a quick visit (a long visit was out of the question, of course, as tongues would start to wag), but could I cope with them? I thought I might if I could shelter beneath a cloak of anonymity, but a number of the monks would inevitably remember me; when I delivered my demented brethren I hardly dumped them on the doorstep and scuttled away in my car. I shuddered as I thought of the monks gossiping behind my back, and automatically I reached again for the whisky bottle.

At last it occurred to me that I could not continue to sit at my desk, drink whisky and shudder at the thought of the Fordites. I had to find someone who would tell me how to survive, and when one stood in the wasteland one could hardly afford to be fussy. One just grabbed the best man available and prayed for deliverance.

It was then that I remembered Darrow, the former Fordite monk. He had never lived at the Starwater house but since his return to the world he had visited it regularly, and without doubt he would know the best men there. If Darrow were to arrange an interview for me by telephone I could avoid being assigned to someone I knew, and then I would have the chance to be anonymous.

I stood up. There was no more time to waste. Carefully I put the whisky bottle to bed behind the Oxford Dictionary and carefully I hid my empty glass in a drawer of my desk. Steering myself outside, I crawled into my car and after five attempts managed to shove the key into the ignition. Was I too drunk to drive? No, but possibly the police might not agree with me. Would there be any police patrols around at three o’clock in the morning? Not once I was clear of the city. Could I drive the twelve miles to Darrow’s home at Starrington Magna without having an accident? Certainly, and if anyone tried to stop me I’d punch him on the nose.

I chugged down Canonry Drive at a speed approaching two miles an hour. It seemed hard to see where I was going but at last I realised I had forgotten to switch on the headlights. How absent-minded! I stopped the car in order to find the switch. No point in searching while I was driving—silly to try to do two things at once. The lights blazed on, full headlights, no blackout—thank God for the end of the war!—and then as the darkness miraculously dissolved I saw ahead of me the gates of the Close, shut and locked, just as they always were between eleven at night and six in the morning.

That was when I was forced to acknowledge that I was either mad or drunk or both. How could I have forgotten such an elementary fact of life in the Cathedral Close? I did have a key to the gates, but the realisation that I was drunk and/or mad made me pause to reconsider what I was doing. Then I realised not only that I was incapable of driving to Starrington Magna but that I could hardly turn up unshaven, distraught and reeking of whisky on Darrow’s doorstep at some extraordinary hour of the morning.

Struggling back to the house I abandoned my car and retreated to my study to have another big think, but in fact my next task was now so obvious that thinking was unnecessary. I had to make myself presentable. Doggedly I dosed myself with Alka-Seltzer. Painstakingly I crept upstairs, washed, shaved without cutting myself (no mean feat) and put on clean clothes. At last, satisfied that I looked no worse than any other clergyman who had almost lost his wife in harrowing circumstances, I returned to my study, drank tea, chain-smoked and waited for the time to pass.

I tried to calculate when Darrow would arrive at the Theological College. He would have to arrive before eight, when the students and staff gathered in the chapel for Matins. Pulling down my copy of Bradshaw from the bookshelf I looked up the early trains from Starrington Magna and discovered one which reached Starbridge at seven thirty-five. The station was ten minutes’ walk from the Close. By a quarter to eight Darrow would be striding through the front door.

I glanced at my watch. Then slipping out of the house for the second time that morning, I entered the Cathedral churchyard and began to plough across the vast sward to the Theological College by St. Anne’s Gate.

2

He had just arrived. As I entered the principal’s office he was hanging up his hat.

“Oh hullo, Darrow,” I said as if I had encountered him by chance at a garden-party. “Sorry to descend on you at such an early hour. Can you spare me a moment?”

“Of course.” He gave me a smile, the wintry one which combined the maximum of courtesy with the minimum of warmth, and indicated the two chairs placed at the small table by the window. “Sit down.”

“Thanks.” As we both seated ourselves I embarked on the essential preliminary explanation of my haggard appearance. “Excuse me if I look a trifle battered,” I said, “but I’ve been up all night. My wife had the baby but it was born dead.”

“I’m most extremely sorry.” His sincerity took me aback. I had expected a polite expression of sympathy, not a manifestation of genuine concern. “Was it a boy or a girl?”

I stared at him. To my horror I realised he had asked a question I was unable to answer. No one had told me the baby’s sex and I had never enquired. I had been too busy wanting to sweep the corpse under the nearest rug and ring down the curtain.

“No doubt you were so distressed about your wife that you weren’t able to focus on the child at all,” said Darrow, skilfully glossing over my embarrassed silence as he realised what had happened. “That would be a very normal reaction in the circumstances.”

I said stiffly: “It wasn’t possible for me to see the child last night. I shall see it today. You needn’t think I’m not aware of my Christian duty.”

“I wasn’t thinking of your obligation to perform a Christian duty. I was thinking of your need to come to terms with your bereavement.”

“What bereavement? For a father a baby born dead is a baby that never happened. Only the mother, who’s carried the child for nine months, can feel any emotion which could be classified as bereavement.”

Darrow made no comment but looked concerned.

“You needn’t worry!” I said dryly. “I haven’t come to sob on your shoulder about my private misfortunes! I merely told you about the disaster because I wanted to explain why I’m looking a trifle frayed at the seams.”

“I see,” said Darrow. “So you’re all right, are you?”

“Absolutely fine.”

There was a pause while I belatedly realised I had boxed myself into the most implausible corner. How could I conceivably have been so stupid as to say I was absolutely fine? He would be thinking me a monster of callousness, unmoved by the dead baby and my wife’s brush with death. Feverishly I tried to present myself in a more Christian light.

“Well, as a matter of fact,” I said, “to be absolutely honest, it really has been rather a harrowing twenty-four hours. But of course I don’t want to bore you with all the gruesome details.”

“Bore me as much as you please.”

“No, no, no, it’s really not necessary. It was just … well, to be perfectly frank, it was rather an awkward situation. They had to sacrifice the baby to save my wife. Later I was told that they had in fact tried to save it but that even if it had been born alive it would have been hopelessly damaged. So of course that makes it easier for me to come to terms with … what happened. The decision. My decision. They had to ask me, you see. Just a formality, they already knew what they wanted to do, what had to be done. But nevertheless … it really was rather awkward.”