Ultimate Prizes (57 page)

“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 right 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.”

“Amusing for her. But perhaps Lord Flaxton will fail to produce the magic preferment out of his coronet.”

“Perhaps. But on the other hand—”

“Yes, I can imagine the other hand too. I’ve been thinking again about your prospects, and I can now see that this might just be one of those rare occasions when an amateur like Flaxton finds no serious professional opposition to the scheme which allows him to flex his power and his eccentricity in such satisfying harmony. The gentlemen in authority may well think that a London canonry would give you a useful finishing polish after your years as an unusually youthful archdeacon in the provinces.”

“And to cap it all—as you may have seen in
The Times
last week—”

“There’s a canonry falling vacant at Westminster. Yes, I saw Woodhouse’s appointment as Dean of Radbury.”

We fell silent again. It had stopped raining, and the raindrops,clinging to their pattern on the windscreen, were sparkling in the light of the street-lamp. At last I said: “I spent my youth in London. I’ll soon settle down. What right have I, after all that’s happened, to go whining to God that I’d rather work somewhere else?”

“Whining, I agree, would be unattractive, but never think God doesn’t listen when you tell Him what you want.” Darrow paused for a moment before adding idly: “Of course Bishop Bell’s often in London, attending the House of Lords and dealing with his international concerns. Except for Chichester there’s no city other than London where you’re more likely to encounter him.”

Suddenly I switched on the windscreen wipers to clear the glass. The city street which had been blurred and indistinct was now clear-cut in the light from the street-lamp. “Perhaps in my spare time I could work for one of Bell’s causes,” I said.

“Of course you could.”

“So London needn’t be the end of the world, need it?”

“No, Aysgarth. London needn’t be the end of the world.”

I took a deep breath, expelled it slowly and then reached out to start the engine. “I’ll take you back to the station.”

“I still have this feeling I oughtn’t to leave you—”

“My dear Darrow, unless you get the next train home
you’re
the one who’ll wind up being left—by your long-suffering wife!”

Darrow said vaguely: “Oh, she’ll understand,” but he seemed to resign himself to leaving me. It was only when we reached the station that I realised he still had his doubts. As I halted the car he said: “You’re quite sure there’s no whisky in your house?”

“Positive. Darrow, do you really think, after you’ve so cleverly given me hope for the future, that there’s any serious risk of me winding up tonight dead drunk on the Cathedral sward and singing ‘Lili Marlene’ at the top of my voice?”

“No, but I confess your drinking does worry me. I feel it’s your Achilles’ heel.”

“I usually have it well in control.”

“ ‘Usually’ isn’t good enough. It must be ‘always.’ ”

“Very well—in future I’ll always have my drinking under control!”

“Even when you’re under intense marital strain? There’s inevitably going to be marital strain in the years ahead, Aysgarth, and since your whole future in the Church depends on your ability to survive your marriage—”

“I’ll survive. If you think I’m on the road to alcoholism, I assure you you’re mistaken—I’m not the suicidal type.”

“You don’t have to be an alcoholic to blight your service to God, Aysgarth. All you need to be is a heavy drinker, and you’ve already proved that’s well within your capabilities.” Opening the car door he unfolded himself once more from the passenger seat and stepped out into the damp evening air. “Think it over,” he said, turning to face me, “and I believe your conscience will tell you I’m talking sense when I advise you to give up alcohol altogether. Now look after yourself, please, and phone me at once if you need to talk. I’ll pray for you.”

He strode away into the station and vanished so abruptly that I blinked.

“Sinister old magician!” I muttered to myself as I put the car in gear. As I reflected on his advice I was obliged to concede it was justified, but nevertheless I felt irritable. “I rub you up the wrong way,” Darrow had said, and it was true. With my Modernist leanings I could hardly fail to be irritated by even the most benign wizard who practised white magic; I had long since made up my mind that wizards and white magic could not exist, and yet there was Darrow, bouncing along on a tidal wave of telepathy, clairvoyance and heaven only knows what else—and even creating the illusion that he could vanish in a puff of smoke at a railway station. In the old days, of course, he would have been burnt at the stake …

But then, no doubt, I would have been sorry.

8

Primrose rushed downstairs to meet me as I arrived home. She was wearing her nightdress and had obviously been keeping herself awake for my arrival. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, you’re out so much that I’ve almost forgotten what you look like!”

Dear little Primrose. She would be the one who had time for me when Dido was rushing around organising smart little dinner-parties for sixteen, but I knew this truth was far from salubrious, implying that I would come to regard my daughter as a substitute for my wife. I made up my mind to believe that Dido would in time become capable of assuaging my loneliness.

“Are you all right, Daddy?”

“Yes, fine,” I said, and at once realised with painful clarity how hard it was for me to relax my guard even when I was with those who were closest to me. The long years of acting a part with my mother had left their scar; my inclination was still to play parts, to build a protective wall around myself and keep even those who loved me at a distance which they could sense but never quite describe. In a moment of enlightenment I saw at last how I must appear to my children: kind, quiet, friendly—but never revealing myself in depth, buttoning up all my deepest feelings and unconsciously encouraging them all to participate in my emotionally maimed charade.

The rose-tinted spectacles through which I had viewed my children for so long finally disintegrated. In a moment of further revelation I saw them not as the cyphers who reflected my image in such a pleasing light, but as the troubled strangers I had been too complacent to know. I saw Christian, that astonishing glorified version of myself, torn apart by the tragedy of his mother’s death and acting the crippling role of the perfect son to the father who was so fatally remote; I saw Norman stepping into Willy’s shoes, the shoes of a boy who would never be as clever as his closest sibling, and grappling with jealousy and despair; I saw James, whose sunny-natured simplicity I had always so naively taken for granted, struggling to come to terms with his average intelligence but becoming haunted by feelings of inferiority which would cast a heavy shadow over his life; I saw Sandy, perhaps the cleverest of them all but the most emotionally deprived, grieving in later years for the mother he could not remember as he tried not to resent his stepmother’s insensitive neglect. And I saw Primrose—”

“Daddy, what are you thinking about?”

“You. I was thinking that I must try to be a much better father to my children in future.”

“You couldn’t be better. You’re perfect.”

Dear little Primrose. I gave her a hug, hung up my hat and drifted from the hall to the drawing-room. The first thing I saw as I crossed the threshold was the bottle of whisky. It was sitting boldly on the mantelshelf.

I stopped dead. “Where on earth did that whisky come from?”

“Aunt Merry bought it.”

“Merry! Good heavens, I’d forgotten her. Where is she?”

“Gone to the hospital. Didn’t you see her? She left some time ago.”

“I was talking for a while afterwards with Mr. Darrow.” Turning my back on the bottle I said to Primrose quickly: “Time you were in bed—I’ll tuck you up,” and we headed at once upstairs away from temptation.

9

When Merry arrived back half an hour later I was still talking to Primrose upstairs. I knew it was too great a risk to be on my own within reach of that bottle of whisky.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so beastly to you lately, Stephen,” Merry said as I returned downstairs to meet her, “but I was just so worried about Dido. However I now discover you’ve put everything right. Congratulations.” She unexpectedly handed me an envelope. “Here’s another billet-doux—she scribbled it after you left. Excuse the pong but before I could stop her she’d succumbed to a burst of romantic fervour and drenched the envelope with cologne … Now where did I put that hooch?”

“In a scandalous position on the drawing-room mantelshelf.”

“Oh God, so I did—sorry. I meant to put it away but I forgot. Will you join me in a quick swill? I’m sure you disapprove of women drinking whisky, but hospitals always make me want to hit the bottle.”

“Thanks for the offer, but I do actually have some work to do, so if you’ll excuse me—” I escaped.

In my study I sank down in the chair behind my desk and slit open the reeking envelope. Unfolding the sheet of paper within, I read:

Darling,
I can’t tell you how much better I feel, I really think there might be life after birth after all, and I’m so terribly glad about dear little Arthur, although of course still dreadfully sad he had to die, but it wasn’t all in vain, was it, if he’s something we can share, and when I’m better I’ll put flowers on his grave and thank God for sending him to us, although I really do think God might have let him live, but then one can’t argue with God, can one, it’s just a waste of time and energy, and now I want to devote all my time and energy to being a simply
matchless
wife to you and an
equally
matchless mother to my children, because of course I’ll have more since I’m now sure that if I can survive this experience I can survive anything and I shan’t be nearly so frightened next time.