Ultimate Prizes (15 page)

Ever your most devoted disciple,
DIDO TALLENT
.

I read this communication three times before deciding that any attempt to answer it immediately would be most unwise. Then I examined the next letter. It came from Lady Starmouth, who had written:

My dear Archdeacon,
Permit me to send you a word of the most heartfelt sympathy as you endure your tragic bereavement. Your wife was clearly a most exceptional woman, and I shall always regret that I did not take advantage earlier of the opportunity to know her better, but at least I can treasure the memory of her at Starmouth Court. Please let me know at once if there’s anything I can do to help.

After doodling on the blotter to make sure the ink was running smoothly from my pen, I wrote:

My dear Lady Starmouth,
Thank you so much for your kind, thoughtful letter. The bereavement is indeed devastating. Grace and I were married for sixteen years and were acquainted for seven years before our wedding day, so I’m sure you will understand that I find it impossible to imagine life without her. Originally, I confess, our relationship was a mere youthful romance, but by the grace of God this immature affection was translated into a rich, rewarding married life which brought us both an unflawed happiness. For so many years the sun shone brightly upon us, and even now that night has fallen at last I shall remain always profoundly grateful for those unclouded skies from which the light shone so radiantly for so long.

This letter was not, as might be supposed, a cold-blooded exercise in hypocrisy. It was a method of alleviating emotions which were genuine but so complex that they could not be accurately expressed at all. It is also a fact that when all emotion is suppressed in public, writing a florid letter in private can act as a catharsis. I recalled how in adolescence I had been shy with my mother, whom I seldom saw, but how in my letters to her I was able to compensate myself for this failure in verbal communication by writing with a stylish fluency. Remembering my mother I thought how she would have enjoyed my letter to Lady Starmouth. She had always savoured the old-fashioned epistolary convention which permitted naked sentimentality to be lavishly expressed when bereavement was under discussion, and I thought that Lady Starmouth, despite her sophistication, would remember her Victorian youth and savour the convention too.

Feeling greatly fortified after this stylised emotional bloodletting, I decided I was now capable of attending wisely to my disciple, and pulling a fresh sheet of paper towards me, I wrote without hesitation:

My dear Miss Tallent:
It is hard to express on paper how deeply your letter affected me, so I hope that next time you have leave I shall be able to see you in order to express my gratitude in person. Meanwhile I can only thank you from the very depths of my being for your unstinting sympathy, your kind thoughts and your most welcome prayers.

Yours sincerely,
N.N.A
.

I read this letter through twice. Then madness gripped me. Tearing the letter in two I grabbed a fresh sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Dido,
Your letter was a lifeline. How soon can we meet? Can you return to Starbridge immediately without risk of being court-martialled for desertion? I need to see you urgently.

Yours,
STEPHEN
.

But of course this reckless piece of lunacy had to be burnt at once in the ash-tray. Finally I wrote:

My dear Miss Tallent,
Your letter meant a great deal to me and I thank you for it with all my heart. Is there any chance that you might be able to return to Starbridge in the near future? I don’t want to tempt you into going AWOL, but I’d so very much like to see you. This letter comes with all the usual good wishes and blessings from your mentor

N.N.A. (“S”)
.

She was on my doorstep by noon of the following day.

3

“I paused only to twist the authorities around my little finger,” she said as I led her into the study and closed the door, “but I got the leave so you needn’t worry about me being AWOL. Gosh, you look completely ship-wrecked! What can I do to save you from drowning?”

Insanity finally triumphed. “Marry me,” I said, and took her in my arms.

“Stephen!” She recoiled. “My God, what are you saying?”

“But you can’t be surprised! You must have known!”

“Known what?”

“Known I’m in love with you!”

“But you can’t be! And even if you are, you can’t possibly say so, not now, not so soon after your wife’s death!”

“Well, I’m saying it. I love you—and since you said at Starmouth Court that you were passionate about me—”

“But I didn’t mean it! I mean, I didn’t mean it in that way! I mean—oh God, what did I mean, what the hell’s happening, this situation’s plunged right out of control—”

“But Dido—darling;—”

“Now look here, Archdeacon dear, this simply isn’t playing the game.
I’m
the one who has to be burning in a fever of unrequited love!
You’re
the one who has to be implacably austere and deliriously unobtainable!”

“I don’t like that game any more. I’m tearing up the rules,” I thought she was going to faint but she merely collapsed on the nearest chair. In a shaking voice she said: “I don’t play any other game.”

“Never mind, you’ll soon learn the new one. After all, you did say you wanted to marry a clergyman—”

“Yes, but for God’s sake, not a widower with five children—I’m not completely insane even if you are!” Making a great effort she jumped to her feet, looked me straight in the eyes and said bluntly: “It’s not on. I’m very sorry, I know it’s all my fault and I’ve behaved abominably, but you’ve got to understand that I shall never marry you,
never
, not even if I live to be a hundred.”

There was only one answer to that. It was not an answer any clergyman should have given, but the scene had stripped aside my clerical mask to expose the rough, tough, dogged Yorkshireman beneath. “You little bitch,” I said, “I’m going to marry you even if it’s the very last thing I ever do.” And as the violent excitement blazed through every particle of my being, I saw her as the prize which I could never have endured to lose.

4

It will be clear by this time that I was in a disturbed mental state, so I shall surprise no one when I now disclose that I was mad enough to marry her. It took me over two and a half years to lure her to the altar, but in the end I got what I wanted, and in the meantime what a splendid chase this prize offered me—so stimulating, so enthralling, so nerve-racking and so addictively exciting! I chased and I chased and I chased, many times rebuffed and cast down but never for one moment abandoning hope, and ahead of me danced my prize, weaving this way and that, now drawing closer, now haring for cover, but finally allowing me to flog her down the finishing strait towards matrimony as both her early demobilisation from the Wrens (arranged, of course, by her influential father) and her thirtieth birthday loomed on the horizon of 1945.

It would be too wearisome to recount our bizarre courtship in detail, so I shall recall only one incident which will illustrate both the staying-power of my obsession and the stranglehold of her fear of marriage. I had been chasing her for a year when she summoned me to London to meet her father. Naturally I assumed this invitation boded well for my future, but when I was confronted by Mr. Tallent, a bumptious City shark the size of a minnow, I soon realised my mistake.

“If you want to marry Dido for her money, you’re wasting your time,” he said, speaking with an accent in which genteel Edinburgh wrestled with the Glasgow slums. “She’s got no money of her own and the marriage settlement won’t give you a penny.”

“How very kind of you to inform me of your financial plans for her,” I said with a truly Christian self-restraint, “but I’m motivated by love, not money.”

“Then you’re a fool!” said this charmless individual, baring some yellow teeth and regarding me with contempt. “She doesn’t give a damn about you—you ask her about Harry Harland!”

As soon as I was alone with Dido I took his advice, and immediately she burst into tears. “I told Father to put you off,” she wept, “but I never meant him to go that far!”

“Well, he did go that far and nothing could put me off. What’s all this about Harland?” I demanded, imagining some flirtatious incident in a nightclub with this heavily decorated fighter pilot—indeed as it turned out Mr. Tallent himself had imagined no more than this—but to my horror Dido now confessed that the incident had resulted in the loss of her virginity.

I said: “You pathetic, muddled-up, wretched little girl. How can you endure to wallow in this revolting emotional mess when you could be loved and cherished as my wife?”

“But Stephen, I did it all for you!”

“You
what
? I’m sorry, either I’m hallucinating or you’re certifiable. Did you actually say—”

“I thought I couldn’t face marriage because I was frightened of sex, so I said to myself: Well, if I take the plunge at least I’ll know where I stand—and now I do know where I stand: in perpetual chastity. Oh Stephen, you’ve got to stop chasing me, you’ve absolutely got to, because I can never marry you now that I’ve discovered sex is so awful—and it
was
awful, honestly it was, I hated every minute—”

“Well, of course you did, you idiotic little fool! If you lie on your back with your legs apart and let some stranger romp all over you until he violates not just the most private part of your body but the most private recesses of your inner self, how can you expect to be other than revolted? But what’s all that half-baked disgusting behaviour got to do with us? What’s that got to do with marriage? What’s that got to do with going to bed with a man who loves you and who would treat you with reverence, with tenderness, with—”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t!” shrieked Dido, almost hysterical with remorse. “You’re making me feel I want to curl up and die!”

“That won’t be necessary. All you have to do to wipe out this incident is walk down the aisle with me.”

“Oh Stephen, you’re so wonderful, so perfect, so patient, so noble that I think I really will marry you after all—”

“When?”

“Oh, very soon—but not just yet …”

And so it went on.

Meanwhile it was hardly surprising that the people who cared most about my welfare were nerving themselves to persuade me that marriage with Dido would be a disaster.

“You can’t seriously want to marry this woman,” said my brother Willy. “Archdeacons and society girls just aren’t designed by God to mix without bursts of lewd laughter erupting on all sides—think of all the ‘said-the-bishop-to-the-actress’ jokes! I simply don’t understand this grand passion of yours. How could you even consider marrying a woman who’s the exact opposite of your perfect Grace?”

“It’s because Grace was so perfect that I’ve got to marry someone utterly different. How could I tolerate a second-rate Grace who could do nothing but remind me of how much I’d lost?” I said logically enough, and when Willy remained dissatisfied I concluded that a confirmed bachelor would never understand the glorious compulsion which had enslaved me.

My next critic, however, was very far from being a confirmed bachelor. Alex Jardine, taking me to dine in London at the Athenaeum, said bluntly: “You can’t possibly marry that woman, Neville. It’s out of the question. She’ll ruin you.”

We were drinking sherry before taking our places in the dining-room; after Alex had delivered his opinion, my first instinct was to drain my glass and smash it. I did overcome this impulse to behave like a Cossack, but it cost me a considerable effort to say in a mild voice: “Aren’t you rushing to judgement, Alex? You hardly know Dido at all.”

“I know enough to realise you’re taking the most appalling gamble with your future. Obviously there’s a strong sexual attraction going on which is annihilating your common sense, and I can only pray to God that you haven’t already slipped up in the worst possible way.”

I was appalled. In fact I was so shocked that for a moment I could only wonder if I had heard him correctly. Then I realised that not only had I heard him correctly but that I had been insulted in a manner which, since we were both clergymen, was quite beyond toleration.

I heard myself say: “You can’t seriously believe I’d behave in any manner which represented gross misconduct.”

“Such things do happen.”

“Yes—to the clerical failures, but not to people like me! How can you sit there and even
think
that I’d—”

“I’m sorry.” Belatedly Alex realised he had gone too far. “I’m afraid that as a bishop I encountered the clerical failures, and even now I’m retired I tend to believe the worst on the grounds that the worst is usually true.”

Again I was appalled. “What a very cynical and unattractive attitude! And how profoundly un-Christian!”

“Listen, let’s just forget I ever said—”

“Oh no, I’m not letting you off the hook as easily as that! Now look here, Alex. I’m getting very tired of your habit of jumping to conclusions on the minimum of evidence, and when those conclusions also happen to be insulting, I think it’s time someone pointed out a few home truths to you. Don’t you realise that this rushing to judgement is actually rotten counselling? What happened to that bishop who used to pride himself on his pastoral care?”

Alex went white. At first I thought he was furious. Then I realised he was shattered. “I’m sorry,” he said numbly. “I suppose I’m too involved in your life. I’ve long thought of you as a son.”

“Well, I’m not your son and I won’t tolerate you passing judgement on me like some autocratic Victorian father. You’ve absolutely no right to interfere in my affairs like that!”

Now I was the one who belatedly realised he had gone too far. “No right?” repeated Alex as the colour flooded back to his face. “Did you say I had
no right?
I may not be your father, but who made you Archdeacon?
Who made you what you are?
What other bishop on the bench would have offered such a preferment to a draper’s son from Yorkshire?”