Ultimate Prizes (58 page)

Talking about my parents with you this evening made me think of
your
parents, and suddenly out of the blue I had what I can only describe as a
REVELATION
. Darling, I know you’ll be thrilled when I tell you that I’ve decided to be just like your mother whom you always adored so much because if I become just like her then I can be sure you’ll always adore me too—yes, I do now believe you still love me, but I want to make certain you stay keen and I do think a wife needs to make an effort instead of lolling around in a complacent fog until she finds her husband in bed with her best friend—although of course I’d never find
you
in bed with anybody, such a
relief
you’re a clergyman, but all the same I must never take you for granted—so as I was saying, I’m going to secure your adoration by being just like your mother and having a baby every year for five years and then once we’ve got all that boring old parturition out of the way we can look forward to endless years of devoted companionship—because by that time you’ll be pushing fifty and too old to want sex much—if at all—so that little difficulty will all be quite
effortlessly
resolved—and as I picture our heavenly companionship, I can see we’ll have just the sort of idyllic marriage your parents must have had before that divinely handsome father of yours died at the wrong moment and transformed your fascinating mother into a sort of intellectual Queen Victoria. Now, isn’t that the most
inspired
and
blissful
REVELATION
you could ever wish me to have?

Darling Stephen, no words of mine could express how much I adore you—and I mean
really
adore you—and so all I can do is swear this letter comes to you with eternal love from your utterly devoted

DIDO
.

Eventually I refolded the letter, dropped it on the blotter and decided to remove the reeking envelope before the scent could asphyxiate me. On my way back to the study from the wastepaper basket in the hall I glanced into the drawing-room. It was empty. Merry had evidently departed with her stiff drink to the kitchen in search of the cold chicken which, according to Primrose, the housekeeper had left prepared for us. The bottle of whisky had been removed from its scandalous position on the mantelshelf.

To make sure Merry had put the whisky away in the sideboard I went into the dining-room and discovered, just as I had feared, that the bottle was standing among the decanters. Grabbing it by the neck I wrenched open the door of the sideboard, and as I did so all the glasses on the top shelf glittered in the artificial light.

After a while—it seemed a long while but probably it lasted no more than a few seconds—I found I was thinking of scandal, the scandal of a whisky bottle on a clerical mantelshelf, the scandal of a clergyman who drank too much, the scandal of putting a career at risk by dicing with disaster. Then I told myself I really would give up drink, that scandalous risk, I really would. But not just yet.

After all, I reflected as I uncapped the bottle and reached for a glass, I was an old hand at taking scandalous risks. Had I not told Dido long ago when we had first met that I liked to live dangerously? Born survivors could always get away with taking a scandalous risk or two, and I was born to survive.

I mixed myself a mild whisky-and-soda, very respectable, nothing gross, and having put the bottle out of sight I withdrew once more to my study. For a long time I sat looking at my untouched drink to prove to myself how strong my will-power was. The glass was still untouched when I picked up Dido’s letter again and it even remained untouched when having contemplated my marital future I exclaimed aloud in despair: “How do I endure it?” Yet I knew the answer to that question even as I framed it in my mind. I thought of my mother saying to Uncle Willoughby: “The only prize worth winning is love!” and I knew I was being offered the prize which Uncle Willoughby had let slip through his fingers. With love all things were possible, even sexual happiness between apparently ill-assorted partners, and I saw again so clearly that by never rejecting Dido as I had so cruelly rejected my mother, I would step into Aidan’s land of paradox, that mysterious country where he who saves his life for his own sake shall lose it, but he who loses his life for the sake of Christ shall find not death but life eternal.

With a cool rational eye I surveyed the alternative to the road I had been called to travel. I could walk away from Dido, leave the Church and settle for a life devoted to attaining material success and self-gratification, but what would be left of me after I had torn the heart out of my true self in such a fashion? I would be no more than a corpse bleeding to death. I could not have borne such a profound spiritual failure; then indeed in my despair and self-hatred I would have wound up a drunkard and alone. But my life, any life, real life, wasn’t about pursuing the prizes of materialism and practising the gospel of self-gratification. Life was about enduring adversity, about being true to oneself, about striving to do the will of one’s Creator so that one could live in harmony with all that was finest in one’s nature. The real prizes were not, as my uncle had thought, health, wealth and happiness, that facile trio which could be destroyed so easily by the first breath of misfortune, but faith, hope and, above all, love. Once these were won, the real happiness, the lasting happiness of a fully integrated personality responding to the will of God, could finally begin to unfold.

Picking up my pen to answer Dido’s letter, I thought of St. Paul writing: “It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” and at once I was comforted by the image of the immanent God, loving and forgiving—that Liberal vision which for me the world’s evil could never diminish. But then I thought of the stern transcendent God of neo-orthodoxy, standing over and against a world which was under judgement and offering those who repented the chance of salvation. After my recent experiences, how could I deny this vision wasn’t equally true? God was immanent
and
transcendent. I was once more in the land of paradox, and as my father cried in my memory: “It’s all a unity! It’s all one!” I knew Christ had risen from the dead, just as he always did, again—and again—and again—to be at one with the disciples who were willing to sacrifice all they had in order to follow him to the end.

It was Easter Sunday at last, and I was rising from the grave of my past to embark on my new life in absolute faith. Taking a sip of whisky, I thought no more of failure and misery, but began to write my Christian message of hope in the most loving terms I could devise.

Author’s Note

Ultimate Prizes is the third in a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. The first,
Glittering Images
, was narrated by Charles Ashworth, and the second,
Glamorous Powers
, was narrated by Jon Darrow. The next book,
Scandalous Risks
, set in the 1960s, will look at the Church from the point of view of an outsider, Venetia Flaxton.

N
EVILLE
A
YSGARTH’S
religious thought (though not his private life) is based on the writings of Charles Earle Raven (1885–1964). The son of a barrister, Raven was born in London and began his long association with Cambridge University in 1904 when he won a scholarship to Caius College to read Classics. He achieved a first-class honours in the Classical Tripos and followed this a year later with a first in Theology. He also devoted time during this final year to the study of biology, long a special interest of his, and became convinced that the two disciplines of theology and science should be drawn together. After some months working in a secular job in Liverpool, where he gained experience of squalid social conditions, he was ordained in 1909 and became Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, until 1914. Having spent a short time as a schoolmaster at Tonbridge, he served as an Army chaplain in France from 1917 to 1918 and experienced the horrors of war at first hand; later he was to become famous as a pacifist. After the war he resumed his duties at Emmanuel College but in 1920 he became Rector of Bletchingley, Surrey, and in 1924 he was appointed a canon of the new Liverpool Cathedral, where he won great fame as a preacher. He returned to Cambridge in 1932 as Regius Professor of Divinity, and from 1939 to 1950 he was Master of Christ’s College.

Raven was married three times. By his first wife, whom he met during his days as a Cambridge undergraduate, he had four children. After her death, in 1944, he remained a widower for some time before marrying an elderly American friend whom he had known for many years; she died soon after the wedding. In 1956 he married a Belgian who during the war had taken an active role in the Resistance. Thinking highly of women and delighting in their company, he believed it was wrong that they should be confined to a limited form of service in the Church, and he spoke out in favour of their ordination.

He never became a bishop.

In his theology Raven believed that a divine purpose operated through and in the evolutionary process, and that there was an essential unity in all created things. He had no time for a God conceived as sitting up on high outside the world. For him God was in the world, immanent, and the pinnacle of God’s creative evolutionary process was the human personality. Having placed this great emphasis on personality, Raven stressed the idea of a personal God and saw religion at its best in terms of personal communication with this divine figure. Nature, he thought, offered a design which could be attributed to God’s personal purpose, and Jesus was the manifestation of God’s personal presence in its highest form. All was a unity in this immanent, creating, loving God; all was one.

This fundamentally optimistic approach to the world meant that in Raven’s writings there was little room for paradox and tragedy, alienation and ambiguity, and when the new neo-orthodox school of theology tried to grapple with these problems, he was bitterly opposed not only to the idea of a transcendent God who stood apart from mankind but to the idea that truth could be reached through disunity, by the clash of opposing principles. For him, committed as he was to the concept of unity, it was impossible to concede that there could be an equally valid model of God based on a duality. It seemed to him that to pursue such a paradox was to pursue a policy of despair. Throughout his career he saw his theology go increasingly out of fashion, but towards the end of his life the neo-orthodox school began to wane in England, until at last in the 1960s Liberal theology, in a new and far more radical form, started to move back to the centre of the stage.

G
EORGE
K
ENNEDY
A
LLEN
B
ELL
, two years Raven’s senior, was Bishop of Chichester from 1929 to 1957. Though distressed by the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles and sympathetic to the German people in consequence, he spoke out firmly in the 1930s against Hitler’s persecution of the Jews and the Christian Churches, and during the war he urged the British Government, though without success, to support the Germans who were plotting to overthrow Hitler. He was not a pacifist, but his speeches appealing for the preservation of Christian values in the conduct of the war soon brought him into conflict with the Government’s policies, and he earned himself many enemies in high places; people often failed to understand that Bell remained passionately anti-Nazi. After the war he went to Berlin and preached the Christian message of reconciliation to the thousands who flocked to hear him. Deeply involved in the reconstruction of Christian Europe, he became a leading figure in the World Council of Churches. He was eventually awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit, with sash and star, the highest honour the Federal Republic of Germany could bestow, but he died a few hours before the news of the award arrived. Mrs. Bell received the decoration from the German Ambassador in November 1958.

About the Author

S
USAN
H
OWATCH
was born in Surrey, England. She received a law degree from London University and spent eleven years in and around New York City. She now lives in London. She is the author of six suspense novels published when she was in her twenties and seven major bestselling novels besides ULTIMATE PRIZES, all of which have been published in paperback by Fawcett.

Sex.
Sin.
Power.
Susan Howcatch bestselling
Church of England novels
.
Look for the newest edition
,
SCANDALOUS RISKS,
at your local bookstore
.
Published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf
.

And be sure to look for these Church of England novels in Fawcett paperback:

GLITTERING IMAGES

Charles Ashworth, an Anglican clergyman, is sent to Starbridge Cathedral by the Archbishop of Canterbury on a discreet mission: to observe the Bishop Alex Jardine’s household and give warning of a potential Church scandal.

GLAMOROUS POWERS

Anglican monk Jonathan Darrow is gifted with psychic powers. He receives a shattering vision and knows he must leave the monastery. He is afraid that once he leaves this stage on which he has painfully managed to triumph over his weaknesses, his lethal pride and ambition could revive to lead him dangerously astray.

Also by Susan Howatch:

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

The #1 bestselling novel of Oxmoon, the rambling Welsh estate which is the dream, downfall and destiny of the Godwin family. Raised on tales of glittering parties where young lovers waltzed to “The Blue Danube,” they are ensnared by the family legacy of madness, murder and doomed romance.

SINS OF THE FATHERS

This is the world of the Van Zales: servants and country houses, European summers and Bar Harbor clambakes, polite marriages and discreet affairs. But this world suddenly begins to fall apart and we see this glamorous sphere for what it really is—rife with ruthless, power-hungry men, fortune hunters, secret sex, blackmail, and violence.

THE RICH ARE DIFFERENT

Dinah is young enough to be Paul Van Zale’s daughter. She is a very ambitious and beautiful woman with her eye on Van Zale’s tremendous fortune. She doesn’t count on falling in love. Paul finds himself attracted to Dinah as her vitality and her sensuality consume him. With her he can forget his past, his wife, his enemies, even his empire.

CASHELMARA

Three generations of love, passion and turmoil in 19th century Ireland, at Cashelmara, home of the aristocratic de Salis clan. A half-century of encounters between unforgettable characters, in a great, colorful novel.

Susan Howatch

PENMARRIC

Set against the stark Cornwall landscape, this is the saga of a family divided against itself. At the center is the great mansion, Penmarric, where Mark Castellack brings Janna, his bride. The first act in a tempestuous drama spanning three generations.

CALL IN THE NIGHT

In the heat of a New York summer, a telephone call from England shatters Claire Sullivan’s life. “I’m in terrible trouble—please, please come,” begs her sister Gina before the line went dead. When Scotland Yard cannot trace Gina’s whereabouts, Claire arrives in London to find Gina herself.

THE DARK SHORE

Jon Towers’s first wife died under tragic circumstances, but this time Jon is determined to protect his bride, Sarah, from the danger that plagues his home. But as friends and family ensnare the newlyweds in a web of deceit, it seems that nothing will keep Sarah from the fate that befell the first Mrs. Towers.

THE DEVIL ON LAMMAS NIGHT

He was irresistable—his eyes hypnotic, his voice compelling. When Tristan Poole cast his spell over Nicola Morrison, she forgot everything—including her engagement to Evan Colwyn. As Tristan uses Nicola to strengthen his cult’s power, it seems that Evan alone is left to battle the Satanic forces.

Susan Howatch

APRIL’S GRAVE

Karen Bennett tried to forget her marriage to Neville and his affair with her twin sister April. But where was April now? Had she really run away as everyone believed? Karen returns to Neville, whom she still loves. At their home in Scotland, Karen uncovers reasons to suspect the unthinkable.

THE WAITING SANDS

“I feel so strongly as if everything is waiting. The house, the shore, and now these sands are waiting.” Rachel, too, had been waiting, for an end to the nightmare that had already taken two lives. Someone had turned the handsome old Scottish mansion into a place of horror.

THE SHROUDED WALLS

When Marianne Fleury wed Axel Brandson, it was no love match. Axel needed an English wife to satisfy his father’s will. Axel’s father was murdered by Rodric, his half-brother, who was killed in an accident soon after. But now strange occurrences were plaguing Haraldssyke. Was Rodric still alive? And was he stalking his next victim?