Ultimate Prizes

Grace made yet another attempt to mop up her tears but by this time her eyes were red and swollen. I realized it was going to be impossible for her to go down to tea.

‘Now,’ I said, trying to take control of the situation by adopting a brisk sensible manner, ‘the first thing we have to do is to find out why you’re so unhappy. I’m not talking about your present misery. I’m talking about the more general unhappiness which I know has been afflicting you for some time. When exactly did it all begin? Was it when we found out Sandy had been conceived and you started to worry about how you were going to cope?’

I was, of course, busy laying the foundations for an unanswerable argument that we should employ a live-in nursemaid, so I was expecting her to reply ‘Yes’ to my question. It came as a considerable shock to me when she said: ‘No, this has nothing to do with Sandy. He simply complicated a situation which already existed.’

I stared at her. ‘You’re saying this unhappiness existed before Sandy was conceived in 1940?’

‘Yes, I first became aware of it when we moved to Starbridge in ’37, but now that I look back with the wisdom of hindsight I believe the seeds of my unhappiness were sown in 1932.’

‘At Willowmead? But that’s impossible! You were so happy there!’

‘Yes, but that’s when things started to go wrong.’

‘But what on earth happened at Willowmead in ’32?’

‘You met Alex Jardine. As soon as he started taking an interest in you he was a malign influence on our lives.’

I was speechless.

‘I’ve never liked Alex,’ said Grace in a rush. ‘Never. I know you were always ambitious, but I felt he stoked up your ambition so that it blazed in all the wrong directions –’

‘What on earth are you talking about? It was his sympathetic interest which gave me the confidence I needed to make the most of my God-given abilities!’ I was now very shocked indeed. ‘My dear Grace, I can hardly believe you feel like this about Alex! He’s always admired you so much and said what a perfect wife you were for a clergyman!’

‘Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I dislike him – I always feel he sees me as no more than an appropriate accessory, like a pair of gloves. Poor Carrie! No wonder they’re unhappily married.’

‘But they’re devoted to each other!’

‘I don’t think he’s devoted to her at all. Think of all the times we’ve heard him being sarcastic when poor Carrie makes one of her stupid remarks!’

‘Well, I agree there’s a large amount of surface irritation, but I’m sure that underneath he’s –’

‘Underneath I think he’s actually a rather nasty piece of work – and I’m absolutely convinced that his influence has had a disastrous effect on our marriage.’

‘But how can you possibly blame Alex for –’

‘Very easily. It was Alex who singled you out from all the other clergy in the diocese and gave you ideas above your station –’

‘Ideas above my station? Good heavens, Grace, which century are you living in? I’m not a Victorian servant!’

‘No, you’re a Yorkshire draper’s son on the make – and Alex has been constantly encouraging you, bringing you to Starbridge, giving you grand ideas by introducing you to people like the Starmouths, spoiling you with that glamorous preferment which I often think quite turned your head when you were too young to know better –’

‘Well, of course I know you’re a cut above me socially and entitled to look down on me if you please, but I must say I find your attitude offensive and your accusations insane. But then women are notoriously irrational when they’re upset and wives are notoriously peevish when they find they can’t keep up with their husbands any more –’

‘And who put us in a position where I can’t keep up with you any more? Who turned my gentle, sensitive, shy, romantic husband into someone else altogether?’

‘Nobody’s turned me into anything. People evolve, Grace! They don’t just stand still! You can’t expect me to remain as I was when we first met on the beach at St Leonards!’

Once again she dissolved into tears of despair.

‘My dearest love …’ I suddenly realized that I too was in a state of extreme emotional distress. There was a knot of tension in my stomach and I was aware of a vague nausea which threatened to become acute. In the end all I could say in a stricken voice was: ‘You don’t really think of me as just a Yorkshire draper’s son on the make, do you?’

Still crying she shook her head and flung her arms around my neck. Eventually she managed to whisper: ‘Forgive me.’

I suddenly felt I could not bear her misery a second longer, and wanting only to terminate this truly appalling scene I said unevenly: ‘I’m the one who should be asking for forgiveness. My dearest love, tell me what I can do to make you happy again – I’ll make any sacrifice for your sake, I swear it.’

Grace screwed her sodden handkerchief into a ball and gripped it so hard that her knuckles shone white. ‘Give up your archdeaconry. Give up Alex. And give up that double-faced little bitch who’s bent on ruining you.’

I was silenced. As I automatically took a pace backwards she raised her head to look me in the eyes. ‘Well, you did say,’ she said in a shaking voice, ‘that you’d make any sacrifice.’

‘I’m sorry but in my vocabulary “to make a sacrifice” doesn’t mean “to commit professional suicide”.’ I got a grip on myself and managed to add in a calm polite voice: ‘I can’t resign my position as Archdeacon; I honestly believe I’m doing the work God’s called me to do. As for Alex, I’m sorry, but I can’t give him up; it would be the height of ingratitude after all he’s done for me. I’ll make an effort not to inflict him too often on you in future, but it’s quite unthinkable that I should ever say to him –’

‘And Dido Tallent? Don’t let’s pretend, Neville. I know you find her attractive. Wives always do know when their husbands’ attention strays in that particular way.’

‘If you think for one moment that I’ve ever done anything wrong with her –’

‘No, of course I don’t think that! I’ve lived with you for sixteen years and I know better than anyone what a very good, devout man you still are in spite of everything – and that’s exactly why this present crisis is such a nightmare. I feel you’re on the brink of going to pieces in some very profound way which I’m unable to understand.’

‘Going to pieces? Me? But my dear Grace, you’re the one who appears to be disintegrating!’

‘Yes, but I’m only disintegrating because you’re going to pieces! Neville, there’s something dreadfully wrong here, I’m sure there is, and to tell you the truth I don’t really believe our fundamental problem is my unhappiness. I think my unhappiness is just a symptom of something far more complex and sinister.’

‘You’re raving.’ Turning aside from her I replaced my collar and jacket. My Bible was lying on the bedside table. Trailing my fingers across the cover I said: ‘I’m not going to pieces. There are no fundamental problems in our marriage. The only difficulty I have to resolve is how I can make you happy again, and now, by the grace of God, I’m going to work out exactly what I have to do to put matters right.’ Picking up the Bible I headed for the door, and it was only when my fingers clasped the handle that I added casually over my shoulder: ‘Of course I’ll terminate my association with Miss Tallent. I can see clearly now that I’ve been in the wrong there, and I’m very sorry if my acquaintance with her has contributed to your unhappiness.’

I made my exit. My mind was in chaos. In the hall I got in a muddle and dived down the wrong marble passage with the result that I left the house by an unfamiliar side-door. Skirting the kitchen garden I staggered through an orchard and steered myself around a succession of high yew hedges. I was just beginning to feel like one of Kafka’s characters, lost in some nightmarish metaphysical maze, when I found myself back in the rose garden – and there by the wishing-well stood my disciple, quite alone at last, dark hair combed and curled to perfection, dark eyes glowing with a bewitchingly artless delight as I found myself propelled down the grass path to her side.

‘Archdeacon dee-ah!’ she exclaimed, mimicking the drawing-room drawl of an earlier generation of society women. ‘How too, too lovely!’

‘I think not,’ I said, reaching the well. ‘Miss Tallent, I regret to have to inform you –’

‘What a ghastly phrase! That’s the sort of jargon people in trade use when they tell a customer that some important item’s going to be out of stock for six months! Now stop being so beastly pompous, Archdeacon dear, and let me tell you that your sermon this morning was quite wonderful and I was so proud of you and I felt so spiritually uplifted that I soaked two entire handkerchiefs! Isn’t life absolute heaven?’

Without a second’s hesitation I said: ‘Yes, I feel as if it’s spring again after a long dull winter!’ And having delivered myself of quite the most reckless remark any married clergyman could have uttered to a flirtatious young woman, I abandoned my Bible on the parapet of the wishing-well and impulsively clasped both her hands in mine.

FOUR

‘Passion cannot be eliminated: it can be kept uncontaminated, be sublimated, as the jargon of today would say.’

CHARLES E. RAVEN

Regius Professor of Divinity,

Cambridge, 1932–1950

A Wanderer’s Way

I

The clasp lasted three seconds. Then, releasing her, I found myself muttering idiotically: ‘Sorry. Most unedifying. Thoroughly unseemly,’ and those adjectives, so well-worn by an earlier generation of clergymen, added an air of bathos to my horrified reaction; with a few antique words it seemed I had turned a silly slip into melodrama. Finally, to pile indignity upon indignity, I began to blush, and turning my back on Dido I grabbed my Bible from the parapet of the wishing-well. I instinctively knew that my hands should be fully occupied before they succumbed to a second catastrophic urge to wander.

‘Dearest Stephen!’ said Dido enthralled. ‘Why on earth are you apologizing? I can’t see anything wrong with an affectionate hand-clasp between friends!’

All I could say was: ‘You promised not to call me by that name.’ I was still unable to look at her.

‘Archdeacon dear, please don’t be so upset! Of course I adore you passionately, but why should sex ruin our beautiful friendship? I’d never go to bed with any man unless I was married to him, and as I can’t marry you, you’re absolutely safe. Meanwhile you can have no possible desire to go to bed with me – how could you when your wife’s so much prettier and nicer than I am? – so that takes care of beastly old sex, doesn’t it, and leaves us free to enjoy our glorious romantic friendship as you guide me along my spiritual way!’

‘Miss Tallent,’ I said, ‘before I met you I’d have thought it impossible that a woman should be both very sophisticated and very naïve. May I congratulate you on achieving such a remarkable paradox? But I’m afraid the time has come when you must set your naïvety aside.’

‘Oh, I adore it when you’re being so stern and austere! Now Archdeacon dear, stop looking as if you’d like to spank me and calm down for a moment. I’m not in the least naïve; I’m the last word in down-to-earth common sense. If I don’t misbehave with you – and I’ve no intention of doing anything which would wreck our beautiful friendship – how can you misbehave with me? Adultery’s a two-way street.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Not entirely. Theologically speaking –’

‘Oh good, I did so hope there’d be a fascinating theological angle – how delicious!’

‘Miss Tallent –’

‘Dearest Archdeacon, don’t worry. I’ll leave you alone now so that you can glue together your shattered nerves, and I shall keep a chaste distance from you for the rest of the weekend, but when you get home do write and explain all the theological aspects of adultery!’

‘I won’t have time. I’m leaving on Wednesday for my holiday in the Lake District.’

‘Will you send me a postcard?’

‘No, that would be quite improper.’

‘But you’ll pray for me!’

I said in a voice of steel: ‘I pray regularly for all the souls in my care,’ but to my horror I realized I was smiling at her.

‘Well, so long as God’s brought into the situation we can’t go far wrong, can we?’ said Dido, smiling radiantly in return.

‘I think you’d better leave, Miss Tallent, before I really do give way to the urge to spank you.’

With a laugh she danced away from me across the rose garden.

II

Collapsing on the wrought-iron garden-seat, where earlier Lady Starmouth had declared with such incomparable style how very hard it was to be a clergyman, I clutched my Bible as if it were a life-belt and forced myself to face the unspeakable. I had fallen in love. Hitherto I had believed that only irrational women could succumb to the full force of an amour fou, yet here I was, collapsed in a heap, almost asphyxiated by the reek of red roses, and shivering with desire from head to toe. This was no middle-aged inconvenience. This was a passion of the prime of life. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. I was appalled.

Automatically I started recalling my seven-year courtship of Grace, but although I had embarked on this period of my life in a fever of calf love my feelings had matured into a solid reliable devotion and I had never experienced the suspension of my rational faculties. On the contrary, I had plotted my marriage campaign with military precision, calculating down to the last farthing when I would be able to afford the trip to the altar, scheming how I might win my future father-in-law’s consent while I was still so young, rehearsing the necessary speech to my mother until I was word-perfect. By no remote stretch of the imagination could I describe myself as having been demented with love. In fact in the light of my present madness I was almost tempted to wonder if I had ever really loved Grace at all – but that was an insane thought which only indicated the disintegration of my reason. Of course I had loved Grace. I had adored her. She had been exactly the kind of wife I knew I had to have.

‘Such a fetching girl!’ said my mother benignly in my memory. ‘So quiet and refined – and with a hundred and fifty pounds a year of her own! Darling Neville, I couldn’t be more pleased …’

The memory terminated. Wiping the sweat from my forehead I pulled myself together and resolved to fight this monstrous insanity which had assailed me. Why was I loafing amidst the nauseating stench of roses and thinking of my mother? That was hardly constructive behaviour. I had to start planning how I could cover up the disaster as efficiently as a cat burying a mess, and while I was engaged in this vital task I had to pretend to the whole world – but especially to Grace – that I was my sane, normal self.

That was the moment when I remembered our forty-eight-hour second honeymoon which was due to take place before we embarked on our family holiday. Common sense, liberally garnished with a strong instinct for self-preservation, now told me that this was not the time, in the sixteen-year-old history of my perfect marriage, to spend forty-eight hours entirely alone with my wife. My most sensible course of action was to hide from her among the children as I shored up my defences and made myself impregnable to the violent assaults of my irrationality.

Leaning forward with my elbows on my knees I clasped my hands, squeezed my eyes shut and said to God silently in desperation: ‘Lord, help me, save me, protect me so that I can consecrate myself afresh to your service.’ Then I waited, trying not to feel as if I were whistling in the dark, but I experienced no easing of my fear and anxiety. Evidently my prayer was not going to be answered in any simple straightforward way, and at last, wiping the sweat again from my forehead, I nerved myself to return to the house.

III

‘Darling,’ I said to Grace as I entered the bedroom and found her struggling into an afternoon frock, ‘I feel I’ve been at fault in failing to realize how very unhappy you are when you’re separated from the children. Why don’t I start my task of making you happier by suggesting that we forget our little holiday alone together this week? Instead of leaving for Manchester on Wednesday we’ll travel north with all the children on Saturday and go straight to the cottage.’

She was pathetically grateful. ‘Well, if you’re sure you wouldn’t mind –’

‘Say no more. It’s settled.’ Having given her a kiss I eyed the frock and said: ‘You don’t really want to go down to tea, do you? I’ll say you have a migraine.’

‘Well, I know I look a fright after all those tears, but I hate the thought of putting you in an awkward position –’

‘That doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you should be happy. Are you sure you even want to go away on our family holiday? Perhaps you’d rather just stay at home and rest.’

‘Don’t be silly, I could never rest at home – there’s always so much to be done! No, I can hardly wait for the holiday – although now that we don’t have to abandon the children with Winifred I do wish it wasn’t too late to alter our plans again and go to Devon as usual.’

‘It’ll be fun to have a change.’

‘I’m not very good at changes,’ said Grace.

I thought: And not very good at fun either.

But that comment was contemptible and I despised myself for letting it loose in my consciousness.

It was then that I first began to have misgivings about our family holiday in the Lake District, but I had no premonition of disaster. I was no mystical dreamer, and as a good Modernist I didn’t believe in clairvoyance.

IV

Nine weeks after that fatal dinner-party at the Bishop’s palace Starbridge remained intact, but Canterbury had been battered as a reprisal for the RAF’s formidable raid on Cologne at the end of May. In both cities the cathedrals remained standing, monuments to hope in a world demented with the lust for destruction. Hitler, bogged down in Russia but boosted by Rommel’s victorious manœvrings in the Desert, had apparently in a fit of absent-mindedness turned over the Baedeker page which described Starbridge, but it was too soon to take our escape for granted, and meanwhile the ruins of Bath, York, Norwich, Exeter and Canterbury served to remind us of the nightmare which could still come true.

‘How wonderful it’ll be to escape from all thought of air-raids for two weeks!’ said Grace, but of course there was no real escape from the war. At the start of the school holidays, following advice from the Government, I warned the children about the dangers of playing with long metal tubes, metal balls with handles, canisters which looked like thermos flasks and glass bottles of every description. It seemed unlikely that we would come across unexploded bombs in the Lake District, but the Luftwaffe sometimes jettisoned their cargo in unexpected places, and I felt nowhere in England was completely safe.

Meanwhile on a more mundane level Grace had been struggling with the bureaucratic regulations attending the issue of the new ration-book which was to replace at the end of the month the three ration-books already in use. Rationing was on the increase. The children were aghast to hear that the supply of sweets was about to be limited, and as soon as the older boys returned from school they rushed out to splurge their pocket-money on tuppenny-ha’penny blocks of ration chocolate in defiance of the slogan ONLY ASK FOR IT IF YOU REALLY NEED IT. Neither Grace nor I had the heart to stop them. All chocolates and sweets were being removed from the automatic machines, and at fêtes and funfairs sweets were forbidden to be donated as prizes. The heavy hand of wartime government was closing upon us ever more tightly for the big squeeze. SAVE BREAD, we were exhorted and given fifty different ways of serving potatoes. IS YOUR PURCHASE REALLY NECESSARY? we were repeatedly asked, and when we arrived at the station to begin our journey north the first poster we saw was the Railway Executive Committee’s stern directive: DO NOT TRAVEL. I at once felt guiltily that we should have stayed at home after all.

To my dismay I discovered that in a new burst of austerity the restaurant car had been withdrawn from the train, but fortunately Grace – perfect as always – had foreseen this danger and packed a picnic basket. The children alleviated the tedium of the journey by guzzling biscuits which for some reason were one of the few foods still in plentiful supply.

I mention these details of life on the Home Front not merely to underline the essential dreariness of the war, punctuated as it was for us by the almost inconceivable horror of random murder by travel guide, but to show that I was living in an atmosphere of austerity and repression which drove better men than I to seek refuge in the insanity of a grand passion. I’m not offering an excuse for myself, and I’m certainly not suggesting my madness had its origins in a two-ounce sweet ration and a shortage of bread, but when deprived in one area of life human beings tend to compensate themselves in another, and if a fully accurate picture of my crisis is to be drawn, an explanation of my insanity must include the drab stress of existence on the Home Front.

A clergyman with a wife and five children can seldom afford the luxury of taking his family on holiday to a hotel, and even when the children were fewer in number I had found it less awkward as well as more economical to rent a neat, clean, spacious cottage near Woolacombe in Devon for our annual sojourn by the sea. I had discovered this idyllic retreat while exploring the advertising columns of the Church Gazette, and when in May I had embarked on a search there for a cottage in the Lake District, it had never occurred to me that I might not repeat my earlier success. Having spotted an advertisement which lyrically described an appropriate haven for my large family I had written without a second thought to the owner to secure a booking.

When we eventually arrived at this idyllic retreat after an exhausting journey on an erratic train, a bone-jolting excursion in a decrepit bus and a muddy walk up a lonely lane, I realized in rather less than three seconds that I had brought my family to a rural slum. The key lay under the front doormat, just as the landlord had promised, but no other facility matched my expectations. Fortunately, since it was summer, the evening was light; the prospect of being obliged to master oil lamps and an old-fashioned kitchen range was bad enough, but in the dark it would have been intolerable. I can never understand why people become dewy-eyed and sentimental about the past. Life without gas, electricity and decent plumbing must have been one long unromantic round of time-consuming inconvenience.

Primrose, stupefied by tiredness, began to wail that she was hungry. Christian, after a speedy reconnaissance, reported: ‘There appears to be no lavatory. Shall I start digging a hole in the garden?’ Grace said: ‘I think I have a migraine coming on,’ and sank down on the nearest chair. Sandy, who had been asleep in her arms, was woken by this abrupt manœuvre; he promptly started to scream. James said: ‘I don’t want to go to the lavatory in the garden,’ and Norman commented gloomily: ‘I wish we were in Devon.’ Setting down the heavy suitcases which I had been carrying, I dredged up my last ounce of strength, tossed off a quick prayer for divine support and prepared to perform any miracle not contrary to the laws of physics.

Grace was ordered to lie down on the moth-eaten material which covered the sofa. Christian was dispatched to make a second attempt to find something which resembled a lavatory. Norman and James were sent upstairs to make the beds. Primrose was given an apple, left over from our picnic lunch, and put in charge of Sandy. In the picnic-basket I also found a half-eaten roll which I stuffed into Sandy’s mouth to keep him quiet. Then having assembled some logs from a pile which I found outside the back door I lit the kitchen range with the aid of an old newspaper which I found on the filthy floor of the larder. As I morosely watched the feeble smouldering of the logs I tried not to remember that a mere week ago I had been dining in the height of luxury at Starmouth Court.