Ultimate Prizes (34 page)

He stopped speaking. It was very quiet. Neither of us moved. After a while I found I was staring at the thickening twilight beyond the window. The room was unlit, so there were no reflections in the glass, and even if I had been able to see his mirrored image I would have looked away. At last he said in the manner of a kindly teacher explaining a sum to a child who had forgotten his arithmetic lesson: “It’s a cycle. You sin. You go down into hell. You’re under judgement. You face the pain. You acknowledge your sins. You repent. You’re led out of hell. You’re shown the way forward—and the way forward signifies forgiveness as well as the chance to begin a new life, by the grace of God, in faith and in hope and in charity. Birth, death, resurrection … yes, it’s all a cycle, isn’t it, a timeless cycle far older than Christianity, but of course Christianity is a divine manifestation of eternal truths.” He began to stand up.

I said at once in alarm: “You’re not going?”

He smiled reassuringly. “I thought you might like a short interval to enable you to ponder on what I’ve said.”

“Oh, I see.” I struggled to form an opinion on the proposal.

“Perhaps you’d like me to show you to your room so that you can unpack your bag and rest for half an hour.”

“Oh, but we mustn’t waste time! I’ve hardly begun to tell you yet about my problems, and—”

“You’ve told me a great deal. And perhaps the problems which you think are your problems aren’t really your problems at all.”

“But the main problem’s absolutely unmistakable! How am I going to—”

“You’ll never be master of your future until you’re master of your past.”

“But the past isn’t a mystery as the future is!”

“Isn’t it? In that case shall we postpone the interval so that you can tell me more about your background?”

“The postponement won’t last long. In a nutshell this is just the story of a Yorkshire boy who made good, married the perfect wife, fathered five perfect children and embarked on a perfect career. Of course that’s a highly condensed summary, but nevertheless it’s the truth, pure and simple.”

“Oh yes? You remind me of the time many, many years ago in London when I saw a play by Mr. Oscar Wilde called
The Importance of Being Earnest
. At one point in the first act the young hero declared: ‘That’s the whole truth, pure and simple!’ Whereupon his friend commented: ‘The truth is never pure and rarely simple.’ ” Lucas sighed before adding: “I fear poor Mr. Wilde spoke from experience.”

I laughed but I remained wary. I knew any relaxation in my defences could be dangerous. Cautiously I said: “Exactly what do you want to know about the past?”

“I want to know more about the three Nevilles—which means, if I’ve understood you rightly, I want to know more about your parents and your uncle.”

“Well, that’s easy,” I said, anxious to create the impression that I could ring up the curtain without batting an eyelid. “But be warned! A lurid story in the best tradition of Victorian melodrama is now about to unfold …”

3

“I was born in 1902,” I said, “so I’m an Edwardian, but all the main characters in this drama were Victorians. I’ll just run through the
dramatis personae
for you: my father was the tragic hero, my mother was the noble heroine and my Uncle Willoughby was the villain of the piece. Then there are the minor roles: my brother Willy, who became the misogynist schoolmaster (he was called after Uncle Willoughby, of course—my mother insisted on that), my sister Emily, who became the spinster daughter but eventually married a shoe salesman, and Tabitha our nurse (a splendid cameo role, this), who was the illiterate working-class Yorkshirewoman with a heart of gold. Finally there was me. I was a latter-day Oliver Twist, the orphan who asked for more.

“My brother Willy and I were as close as twins, but he had poor health and couldn’t keep up with me, even though he was a year my senior. My mother had poor health too, but that was because she had so many pregnancies. My father and Emily were often ill. However, I’ve always had the constitution of an ox. My mother used to say that in health I resembled Uncle Willoughby.

“Uncle Willoughby was my mother’s brother. His full name was Herbert Willoughby Stoke, but he never used the name Herbert because he thought it was too ordinary. Uncle Willoughby always liked to stand out from the crowd. His father was just a clerk up at the mill, but Uncle Willoughby became manager and wound up Mayor of Maltby. He was always clever with money, speculating in business ventures, and became well-heeled when he was still quite young—he actually owned his big house: that was very rare in those days. He married well too. His wife was a solicitor’s daughter with two hundred a year of her own—a real lady who pressed wild-flowers and painted water-colours and kept a piano in a room she called a drawing-room.

“My mother thought she was an awful bore. ‘If Ella shows me one more dead flower I’ll scream!’ she’d say. My mother thought that drawing, painting, playing the piano—all the traditional feminine accomplishments—were a complete waste of time. She used to read—but not the books women were supposed to read; she despised the novels from Mudie’s Library. She read history, philosophy and poetry. The only novelist whose work she would consider skimming was George Eliot. She was interested in politics, always read
The Times
. People thought she was very eccentric, but my father adored her and so did Uncle Willoughby. She and Uncle Willoughby used to discuss politics together. They were both Liberals, although my mother used to flirt with socialism, women’s emancipation, all that sort of thing. My father wasn’t interested in politics but he and my mother used to discuss poetry. My mother couldn’t talk about literature with Uncle Willoughby because he didn’t read much. Too busy making money.

“My father couldn’t make money. He inherited a thriving business from his father, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was a draper’s shop, a large one—he employed six people—and it stood on the best corner of the High Street. The family had lived over the shop, but when my father came into his inheritance and knew he could afford to marry, he took a detached house on the edge of the town. The house had an acre of garden with a real lawn and real flower-beds—I mean, it wasn’t just the conventional vegetable patch or hen-run or pasture for the goat—and inside the house (
inside
, not outside) there was a real lavatory which flushed. Uncle Willoughby insisted on that. He said my mother could hardly be expected to reduce her standard of living, and as she’d been living in his house before her marriage, that standard was high. I think he was probably the first person in Maltby to have an inside lavatory. He got it because he heard all the gentlemen had them in the South.

“To make sure my mother was comfortable, my father employed a cook and a maid-of-all-work—and Tabitha, who took care of the children while my mother lay on her chaise-longue before, during and after her pregnancies and read her highbrow books. Willy and I grew up thinking ourselves very grand. We had no idea that by southern standards we were all dirt-common, but we didn’t really understand about the South. I was five when I finally realised that Yorkshire was part of England and not vice versa.

“But I was telling you about my father. He was a tall, good-looking man with a delicate look and a nervous temperament. He suffered from asthma. And he suffered from moodiness. When he was happy he was very, very happy but when he was gloomy he was morose. Normally we only saw the happy side, but at the end of his life he used to drink and then he’d be silent and withdrawn.

“I believe he was a profoundly religious man but was never comfortable with the simple-minded bibliolatrous Non-Conformism which ruled Maltby. We all went to chapel dutifully every week, but once my father took Willy and me to a Church of England service in Huddersfield so that we could hear the liturgy. My mother was very shocked. ‘You’ll wind up a Papist if you’re not careful!’ she said. ‘Liturgy indeed! Whatever next?’ But my father just said: ‘It was so beautiful.’

“That’s what he used to say when he took us for walks in the hills. ‘It’s all so beautiful!’ he’d say, and he’d talk about Beauty, Truth and Goodness and how all was sacred, all was one in God. ‘It’s all a unity!’ he’d say. ‘It’s all one!’ I suppose he was really a pantheist, although he wouldn’t have had the education to realise that pantheism, when pushed to its limits, has nothing to do with Christianity at all. Perhaps it would be kinder not to call him a pantheist but simply to say he possessed to an intense degree what Rudolf Otto called
Das Heilige
, a sense of the holy.

“Was there ever a man less suited to run a draper’s shop?

“Anyway, there he was, living far beyond his means in this expensive house and mishandling his business, when suddenly death intervened and we found out he was bankrupt. Uncle Willoughby stepped in to clear up the mess. All the servants were sacked, Tabitha was sent to the workhouse without even being given the chance to say goodbye to us, the house was reclaimed by the landlord, and the bailiffs took possession of its contents.

“Willy and I asked Uncle Willoughby if he’d lend us the money to buy back our toys from the bailiffs, but he wouldn’t. He just said: ‘You won’t need toys where you’re going,’ and shovelled us off to a spartan boarding-school run by Methodists. It was Dickensian—first cousin to Dotheboys Hall. If Willy and I hadn’t had each other, I think we’d have died or gone mad. We were even boarded out there for the holidays. We felt we had no home any more, no family, nothing. My mother did write to us, but she only said she was praying we were learning to become Christian gentlemen. We wrote and begged her to rescue us, but she didn’t. She said later that Uncle Willoughby had intercepted our letters.

“This nightmare went on for a year. Then the situation changed. My mother was advised to go south for her health, and she wound up in rooms with my sister Emily at St. Leonards-on-Sea. Uncle Willoughby then decided that we should be educated in London—not just because London was the best place for anyone who wanted to Get On but because we’d be near enough there to the South Coast to visit my mother without incurring too much expense. The visits took place three times a year but they could never last long because there was no room set aside for us; we had to take it in turns to sleep on the horsehair sofa in the parlour, and whoever didn’t have the sofa slept on the floor.

“In London we were boarded out with a doctor and his appalling wife, both Primitive Methodists, both friends of Uncle Willoughby, and eventually attended, as I’ve already mentioned, the City of London School. We were given no pocket-money on a regular basis, just the occasional hand-out. ‘That’ll teach you how to survive!’ said Uncle Willoughby. ‘Either you Get On or you Go Under, but don’t expect
me
to lift a finger to help you if you wind up a failure like your father!’ So we knew we had to Get On.

“ ‘You’ll be grateful to me one day!’ said Uncle Willoughby. I can see him now, a tough stout little man with a pugnacious chin and angry blue eyes. ‘I’m teaching you how to win wealth, fame and success—all the prizes that make life worthwhile! You’ve got to go chasing the prizes,’ said Uncle Willoughby, ‘if you want to make sure you survive.’ Oh yes, I can see him now, very smart in his expensive suit, his gold watch-chain glinting on his paunch; Uncle Willoughby the survivor, Getting On, Going Far.

“I won a scholarship to Oxford and Willy joined me a year later—his schooling had been interrupted by a long bout of glandular fever. Uncle Willoughby paid his fees, but in fact he’d lost interest in Willy by that time.
I
was the blue-eyed boy. He was in ecstasy when I won my scholarship. ‘You’ll be a real gentleman now,’ he said. He was misty-eyed. ‘I couldn’t be prouder,’ he said, ‘not even if you were my own son.’ He’d married soon after my parents’ wedding but he had no sons, only three ghastly daughters. ‘You’ll read for the bar later and go into politics!’ he said. ‘And just you make damned sure you wind up Prime Minister!’ He was so carried away by the thought of this ultimate prize that he even forced himself to part with five pounds. ‘Mustn’t spoil you,’ he said, ‘but you deserve a generous present.’ Mean old devil, he could never bear to be parted from his brass …

“I read Greats up at Oxford and enjoyed my time there very much. The only blot on the landscape was Uncle Willoughby who seemed to be constitutionally incapable of leaving me in peace—and I knew why. The old devil was living vicariously through me; I was now leading the life he hadn’t travelled far enough to lead, so whenever he had the chance—which seemed to be all too often—he’d be chugging south from Yorkshire to see me.

“Well, I was just getting very fed up with these constant visits when I received the biggest possible diversion: my call to be a clergyman.

“I must say straight away that I’m not a mystic and I haven’t a psychic bone in my body. But this call wasn’t the quiet kind, the gradual evolution which most people seem to experience. This was the road-to-Damascus call, the blinding light coming out of the blue. I heard that Charles Raven was preaching in Christ Church Cathedral and I knew at once that I wanted to hear him.

“By that time I was used to the Church of England—I’d been attending services regularly for some time. After all, if one wanted to Get On up at Oxford one didn’t go trekking off to a Methodist chapel in the wrong part of the city. One pretended one was Church of England, born and bred—and I enjoyed doing that; it seemed a pleasant way of rebelling against my chapel upbringing.

“I’d heard of Raven. I’d been told he was an electrifying preacher but I knew nothing about his theology. I didn’t know he was a biologist who took an evolutionary view of Christianity, supported the Modernists and stood in the forefront of Liberal Protestantism. But as soon as he started to speak I became aware that his thought was curiously familiar to me—I didn’t quite feel that I’d heard it all before, but I felt he was repeatedly jogging my memory.

“Then it happened. He was talking of the principle of evolution in nature and applying it to the evolution of mankind towards the Kingdom of God, when all of a sudden he stopped in mid-sentence. He flung out his arms—Raven has a whole series of dramatic pulpit gestures—and he appeared to look straight at me with those brilliant eyes of his and he cried: It’s all a unity! ‘It’s all one!’ And then I saw the light which had shone on St. Paul.