Ultimate Prizes (22 page)

“You didn’t. It never happened.”

“I suppose I was temporarily insane, all that stress, all that gin—”

“
It never happened.
”

“No, of course it didn’t, you’re right, it never did.”

We stared at each other. Then I turned away and headed rapidly for the door with the bottle of whisky tucked under my arm. “Well,” I said, “I’ll skip dinner if you don’t mind. Not hungry. In fact I’m rather exhausted. Think I’ll have an early night.”

I escaped. For one long moment I stood shuddering in the hall. Then I retired to my room and drank myself into unconsciousness.

  7  

“
It may be argued that a working parson … is not afraid to face the facts and knows the power of the latent motive and the perversions of the sexual instinct. He has studied the works of Dr. Havelock Ellis and has learnt something from Freud and Jung…
”

C
HARLES
E. R
AVEN
THE CREATOR SPIRIT

1

A
HANGOVER IS ALWAYS DISTASTEFUL
. A
HANGOVER COMBINED
with horror, guilt and self-loathing is hell on earth. As I tried to pray and failed, tried to analyse my appalling behaviour and failed, tried to ring down the curtain on the disaster and failed, I felt as damaged and degraded as if I had been defrocked.

What shocked me almost as much as the breakdown of my sexual discipline was the drinking. Having turned to whisky after Grace’s death I had allowed the innovation to become a habit because I had been confident that I would be able to keep my regular doses at a harmless level. The whisky had become a useful aid to maintaining my enforced celibacy, and it had also been a welcome treat after a hard day’s work in the diocese. But now, after the inevitable bout of vomiting, I realised I would have to take myself very firmly in hand. There must be no more whisky—and absolutely no more indecent assaults on sex-mad sirens who ought to be required by law to keep at least fifty yards from all clergymen not called to the celibate life.

Having sluiced away the vomit in the bedroom’s basin, I tried to read the morning office, but the words failed to register. Rigid with shame I applied myself to less elevated tasks, and eventually, shaved, shod, clad and feeling like death, I opened my bedroom door. Outside on the floor I found a tray bearing a glass of water and a jar of Epsom salts; the sex-mad siren had evidently undergone a miraculous conversion into a paragon of womanly understanding. Faint with gratitude, I dosed myself, visited the lavatory and staggered downstairs.

Somehow I reached the dining-room where Lyle, pale but composed, was arranged tastefully behind the coffee-pot. I guessed that her composure, like mine, had been obtained with the aid of Epsom salts. Meanwhile Carrie, looking fresh and even cheerful, was talking about nothing with her usual aplomb. I was reminded of the steady, monotonous sound of a dribbling tap.

“… and they say rationing’s going to get worse, but my neighbour has this wonderful Polish cook—a refugee, of course, but
so
clever with coupons and she can make a real English boiled pudding now, although plenty of people don’t like boiled puddings, Alex always hated them, but then Alex didn’t like any pudding much except that marvellous summer pudding Cook used to make at the palace—and talking of summer, what a mercy that the weather was so fine yesterday …”

On and on she droned while Lyle and I toyed with cold toast and drank black coffee, but at last it dimly dawned on me—rather late in the day for a clergyman, but better late than never—that this non-stop verbal haemorrhage might indicate a wound which needed dressing with something that resembled pastoral care. I made a great effort. To attempt pastoral care while labouring under a hangover seemed a hideous distortion of my calling, but I knew I must at least try to be kind to this pathetic little old lady who was so bravely trying to pretend nothing was wrong.

“I’m sorry your brother’s accident prevented him from attending the funeral, Carrie,” I interrupted when his name suddenly cropped up in the monologue, “but I’m very glad he’s invited you to live with him. No doubt he’s been lonely since his wife died—and of course you’ll be lonely too without Alex. I shall worry less about you now that I know Colonel Cobden-Smith will be keeping you company.”

“Dear Neville!” exclaimed Carrie, touched by the notion that I might be worrying about her. “How very kind you are! People who say you’re so cold and reserved don’t really know you, do they? They can’t see it’s only shyness. I’m sure Dido will be so good for you—all that vivacity—so different from poor Grace who was prone to melancholy. Alex could never bear it when I was melancholy, it irritated him so much, and I’m sure clever men like you and Alex should marry clever women to keep them amused, clever men soon get tired of someone who’s just a pretty face. Oh, I couldn’t bear it when Alex got tired of me, I’d have done anything to make him happy—well, I did do everything, and when I think of all I did—”

“Darling,” said Lyle, “we’ll talk about all that later.”

“It’s all right, dear, I was only going to say how ghastly it was for me when he invited his stepmother to live with us at the end of her life—”

“Ingrid doesn’t matter now Alex is dead.”

“Alex may be dead but I’m still alive, aren’t I, and sometimes I feel so angry and muddled when I look back over my marriage—”

“Carrie—”

“Sometimes I think: Oh, if only there was someone who’d listen while I pour out my heart—”

“There is. Me. After Neville’s gone we’ll have a long talk and a good cry and then with any luck we’ll both feel better. Now, darling, why don’t we go into the drawing-room and listen to that nice man who plays the records on the wireless? He’s always so soothing that he’s bound to cheer you up …”

They departed for the drawing-room. I drank another cup of coffee and toiled upstairs to pack my bag. When I returned to the hall Lyle was waiting.

“Say goodbye to Carrie,” she said, “and then I’ll come out to the car with you. There’s something I forgot to ask.”

I knew I should stay longer. I knew I ought to be listening while Carrie poured out her heart. But I knew too that at that moment I was too disabled to provide the help she needed. As we said goodbye all I could do was promise to pray for her.

“Dear Neville!” she said again, so pathetically grateful for this painfully conventional assurance that I realised she had not consciously intended a plea for my help earlier. “How can I ever thank you for all you’ve done?”

I was so crippled by guilt that I could barely stumble outside to my car. I even forgot that Lyle wanted to talk to me; before I glanced through the open front door and saw her waiting at the gate I had already wasted time searching for her.

“What’s this question you forgot to ask?” I said, unlocking the car and heaving my bag into the back seat.

“Who will you talk it over with? Or in other words, who’s your spiritual director?”

I stared at her. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’ve got this horrid feeling you may have the same spiritual director as my husband, and I simply couldn’t bear you telling Jon how I’ve behaved.”

“Jon who?”

“Jon Darrow of the Theological College.”

“
Jon Darrow?
That ecclesiastical buccaneer? Good heavens, nothing would induce me to confide in an Anglo-Catholic ex-monk who combines the arrogance of Napoleon with the showmanship of Houdini!”

“Thank God. If I ever thought Jon would find out about last night—”

“No one’s going to find out about last night.”

“But what about your spiritual director?”

“I don’t have a spiritual director. I’m a Protestant, not an Anglo-Catholic.”

“Charles isn’t an Anglo-Catholic either, but he believes very strongly in the importance of—”

“Well, naturally I’ve always had an older clergyman with whom I can discuss my work. At the beginning of my career my older clergyman was Bishop Hargreaves, after 1932 he was Alex, and nowadays he’s Bishop Ottershaw.”

“But don’t you find it rather inhibiting to discuss personal problems with your boss?”

“What personal problems?” I got into the driving-seat, slammed the door and wound down the window. “Goodbye—and good luck. I’d apologise except there’s nothing to apologise for as it never happened.”

“Quite.” She was gazing at me with an expression of wonder tinged with concern. “But I’m beginning to think that you’re the one who needs the good luck.”

“All I need is will-power and common sense,” I said abruptly, starting the engine. “God helps those who help themselves.” Then having delivered myself of this latest masterpiece of optimism, I drove off, still feeling like death, into the next stage of my crisis.

2

It was noon when I reached Starbridge but on entering the Close I turned not west towards my new home but east along the North Walk. At the far end stood St. Anne’s Gate, the entrance available only to pedestrians as they slipped in and out of the vast walled domain of the Cathedral. Parking the car I walked through the gateway, crossed the main road beyond the walls and entered the Crusader Hotel in pursuit of refreshment. I felt unable to face returning home and picking up the threads of my archidiaconal life until I had been fortified with another dose of caffeine.

Having given the order to the lounge waiter, I visited the cloakroom to sort out various symptoms of discomfort in my outraged intestines and dashed some cold water over my face before daring to look in the mirror. I looked very pale and very sober. Reassured that death’s door was receding I returned to the lounge and dumped myself in the nearest armchair.

Triumphing over my hangover meant that I was at last able to
think
, as Dido would have put it, instead of merely to think. I was no longer worried about Lyle; it was in her own best interests to keep quiet. But although I might succeed in ringing down the curtain with my usual masterly efficiency, I knew I had an absolute moral duty to establish why I had wound up in such an appalling mess.

It was no good merely telling myself my behaviour had resulted from the strain of the funeral and a surfeit of whisky. These factors, though not without significance in my journey over the brink of decency into lunacy, were mere irritants, exacerbating a situation which already existed. My sexual frustration was probably a more crucial factor than the strain and the drink; any man who returns from his honeymoon with his marriage unconsummated is bound to be in an unstable state. Nevertheless I felt I had to look past my sexual frustration too in order to perceive the complex problem beyond. Why, after all, had I returned from my honeymoon with an unconsummated marriage? Because I had married Dido, even though it had been patently obvious that she had profound psychological difficulties which included sexual frigidity. And why had I married her? It was no use now, at this stage of the game, to plead feebly that I was the victim of an
amour fou
. That explained nothing, and as a good Modernist I had to believe in a rational explanation.

Of course a psychologist would probably have jumped to the conclusion long since that I was a masochist, one of those unfortunate creatures who obtained sexual thrills from being maltreated by women. But the trouble with this theory was that it bore no relation to my private fantasies, which usually (since I was a good clergyman) I managed to suppress. In other words, I knew very well that if Dido and I were locked up naked together with a couple of unspeakable toys, it certainly wouldn’t be me who’d wind up chained to the bedpost and begging to be whipped. Every instinct told me that I was very far from being a masochist, but if I wasn’t a masochist, why on earth had I married Dido after all her appalling behaviour during our tortuous courtship?
I ADORE YOU
, I had declared in my recent telegram, and since I still wanted her I could only suppose this must be true, but if I wasn’t a masochist, how had this unlikely adoration managed to survive?

It was all very well to tell myself (romantically) that I was endowed with inexhaustible patience, outstanding tenacity and a truly phenomenal Christian charity; it was all very well to tell myself (cynically) that I had to adore her in order to save the marriage and rescue myself from ruin. But what in heaven’s name, I asked myself in all honesty, was really going on? Even if I pleaded that I had fallen victim to the thrill of a challenge and the euphoria of chasing a first-class prize, I would still have to ask myself why I, a born survivor, had wound up taking such a suicidal course of action.