Ultimate Prizes (21 page)

It was not until afterwards that I wondered what my bizarre moment of dislocation could mean, but it seemed wisest to write the mystery off as a consequence of emotional stress and think no more of it.

That alien image of Jesus as a stern religious leader, exhorting people to repent of their sins, would take me straight to the heart of neo-orthodox country, and that was a road I was determined never to travel.

I rang down the curtain.

8

By six o’clock that evening Carrie, Lyle, I myself and the companion, Miss Jenkins, were alone at the house. Carrie and her companion had just retired upstairs. I was sinking exhausted into the depths of the drawing-room sofa.

“Whisky?” said Lyle tersely.

“I didn’t think Alex kept spirits.”

“I bought some.”

“Congratulations.”

Carrie, escaping from the companion, fluttered into the room just as the whisky had been rescued from the dining-room sideboard. “Lyle dearest—”

“What’s that wretched Jenkins up to now?”

“She keeps talking about dinner and I can’t cope. If only there was some way of getting rid of her for twenty-four hours!”

“There is. Leave her to me.” This was certainly the ruthless spirit which had ruled Starbridge’s episcopal palace in the thirties. “Help yourself to whisky, Neville, while I sort this out.”

Miss Jenkins was informed that she had to stay the night at the inn where I had had lunch. She tried to protest but Lyle was resolute, and as soon as the victim had slammed the front door in rage Carrie shed a tear of relief. “Dearest Lyle, I can’t think how I’ve managed without you all these years … Now what shall we do about dinner? I can’t quite decide—”

“Leave it all to me, darling. Lie down upstairs and I’ll call you when the meal’s ready.”

Carrie retreated, shedding another tear of relief, and five minutes later I found myself sitting at the kitchen table with a large whisky-and-soda. It was my third. (The eviction of the companion had taken some time.) Lyle, peeling potatoes at the sink, was attended by a tumbler of gin-and-tonic the size of a small goldfish bowl.

“Can I do anything?” I offered vaguely after a long silence.

“What can you do? You don’t strike me as being the domestic type.”

“You’d be surprised. I can make tea, cook eggs, serve up Spam, heat baked beans and change nappies.”

“You’re right. I’m surprised.”

“Grace needed help sometimes.”

“If I’d had five children I’d have needed a padded cell. Why don’t you darken up that whisky of yours? It looks a bit pale.”

“Well, I thought I’d better go carefully because I don’t usually drink whisky—although now and then—”

“Quite. This is definitely now-and-then time. Oh, and do smoke. I expect you do that now and then too, don’t you? Well, take off your collar and start puffing.”

“Take off my collar?”

“Doesn’t the Church still disapprove of clergymen smoking cigarettes when they’re in uniform? My husband always took off his collar,” she said, speaking very fast, “always.” And the next moment, dropping the potato peeler, she burst into tears.

Automatically I sprang to my feet and moved over to her. “Sorry—too much gin,” she whispered, still shuddering with sobs, and collapsed abruptly against my chest.

Supporting her with the efficiency of a robot and the outward emotion of a wooden plank, I prayed feverishly for the sexual responses of a eunuch.

“I was so sure he was dead,” she wept, “and I’d decided I couldn’t hope any more, I’d run out of hope, but then when I heard your address at the funeral, when I heard you saying the word
hope
over and over again, I wondered if it could be some sort of sign telling me Charles was still alive—oh, if only he could come back! I could transform the marriage now, I know I could—” She broke off uncertainly, dashing away her tears, but the hesitation lasted no more than five seconds; the impulse to tap the source of hope was too strong.

“The marriage wasn’t altogether a success,” she said rapidly. “I was so mixed up about a past love—there was a broken engagement in my twenties—and although I did love Charles I couldn’t show it properly—in bed, I mean—and then we used to sort of act and I’d become so frightened, frightened that he’d get fed up and stop loving me—and all the fear only made things worse—but now, having been separated from him for three years and missing him more and more every day, I know that if he comes back everything will be all right, I’ve been set free at last and we can finally be happy. But if he’s dead—oh, I couldn’t bear it! I keep thinking:
Surely
I’ve been punished enough for all my past sins—I mean, for not loving him properly—”

I said gently: “I never think talk about sin is very helpful. It tends to enhance a guilt which can be destructive. Why not think of yourself instead as someone who was impaired, not able to love properly, but who now by the grace of God has been cured? Think of Christ as a healer, not as a stern teacher meting out punishment!”

I’d lost her. As she made a gesture of impatience and drew away from me I sensed that the fragile line of communication, established so unexpectedly by my sermon, had been broken.

“Oh yes, yes, yes!” she said irritated. “I know all those sort of arguments! Dr. Jardine—well, I suppose I can refer to him as Alex, can’t I, now that you know I’m related to him—Alex used to trot out that Liberal stuff
ad nauseam
in the thirties. But Charles used to say that although the Liberals tried to sluice away the problem of sin, the problem refused to go down the drain and disappear into the sewer—it was always clambering up the pipe back into the sink. Charles moved right away from Liberal theology before the war. He was fascinated by Barth and Hoskyns. People used to say to him: ‘How can you, a doctor of divinity who’s made his name as a church historian, flirt with a theology that downgrades history?’ But he used to answer: ‘History deals with sin and evil. How can I believe they’re capable of being sluiced neatly away down the drain with a good dose of Liberal disinfectant when all the evidence of history tells me this isn’t true?’ Charles had faced up to sin and evil. He was so good, so brave, so
Christian
—oh, no words of mine could ever describe how wonderful he was to me, and if I never see him again …” She could say no more. Leaning against the sink, she covered her eyes with her hands and shuddered again beneath the weight of her grief.

Cursing my pastoral inadequacy, I abandoned my gentle approach and grabbed my oratorical sledgehammer in a last-ditch attempt to provide help. “You don’t know you’ll never see him again,” I said. “You can’t know that you’ll never see him again. And you won’t know that you’ll never see him again until the telegram arrives from the War Office. Of course you dread he’s dead, but what does that dread actually mean? It doesn’t mean he’s dead. It means you’re human. Don’t let your terrible torment drive you into making false assumptions and treating them as hard facts. The first hard fact here is that your husband is missing. The second hard fact is that the camps are still being liberated—which means he could still turn up. And the third hard fact is that to give up hope in these circumstances would be irrational, inexcusable, unwarranted, unedifying and absolutely unjustified. Don’t do it.”

“Gosh!” said Lyle. I had recaptured her. With great relief I watched as she dashed away her tears again, grabbed her glass and took a large gulp of gin. “What a curious mixture you are!” she said unexpectedly. “Tough as nails on the one hand and all soggy romantic Liberalism on the other! It’s as if you’re two separate people.”

“Liberalism need be neither soggy nor romantic. Modernists like me are usually very down-to-earth, keen to ring down the curtain on all the outdated theological concepts which have no relevance to the present age—”

“That’s all very well, but supposing the things you label outdated turn out not to be outdated after all? And how does ringing down a curtain achieve anything except an artificial interval in the continuing drama onstage? Can Act Two ever be entirely unrelated to Act One? And how do you know Act Three won’t revert to the themes of Act One and negate the themes of Act Two altogether?”

“Well, of course the difficulty in using metaphors is that they can be twisted into a symbolic—”

“Oh God, he’s going to give me the Modernist lecture on symbolism. Where the hell’s the bloody gin?”

“Here. Are you sure you want another?”

“Oh, shut up and have some more whisky! Sorry, I don’t mean to start biting your head off again, but if you only knew the state I’m in—”

“I promise you I do understand—”

“Oh no, you don’t! You’ve absolutely no idea of the extent of my private agony here—”

“—and you have absolutely no idea of the extent of mine! My honeymoon was a disaster, my marriage appears to be a catastrophe and I feel like climbing the walls.”

As soon as the words were uttered I looked appalled at my empty glass but Lyle said at once: “Don’t worry, I’m discretion personified. Have another drink.”

“Thanks.” I helped myself to Scotch. I was still so unnerved by my reckless honesty that I decided to drink the whisky unadulterated.

“Presumably you’re practising what you preach,” said Lyle, watching me over the rim of her replenished glass of gin, “and refusing to give up hope.”

“Of course. But unfortunately that doesn’t stop me wanting to climb the walls.”

“Neville, I honestly don’t want to be rude to you any more, but I’ve got to ask the obvious question: Why on earth did you marry her?”

“I’m beginning to wonder. Sex, I suppose.”

“Bloody sex! Nothing but trouble.”

“You mean you don’t like it?”

“I mean I’m mad about it. That’s why I said it’s nothing but trouble.”

“I’m mad about it too. But in my opinion it’s worth the trouble,” I said, and suddenly found that my arms were sliding around her waist at the exact moment that her hands were gliding around my neck. We had each set down our glasses as soon as the word “sex” had entered the conversation.

Ten seconds later—or it might have been fifteen; I’m never very numerate when engaging in a sweltering kiss—I recoiled in a burst of sanity and sagged panting against the table. Unfortunately I then returned to madness and knocked back my neat whisky in a single gulp. Or was I in fact being brilliantly clever? Perhaps I was. Grabbing the whisky bottle, I slopped another stiff measure into my glass.

“Sorry,” I mumbled at last. “Gone berserk. No offence meant.”

“None taken. So that’s what goes on beneath that virtuous exterior—how exciting! Do you go berserk often?”

“Only with my wives.”

“Lucky Dido!”

“Unfortunately she doesn’t seem to be too keen.”

“Then she must be either mad or a lesbian.”

“Maybe she’s both. That would be a challenge, wouldn’t it? I must have my challenges,” I said, knocking back the Scotch. “I must have my prizes to chase.”

“What prizes?”

“I was speaking metaphorically. Ringing down the curtain, chasing the prizes—it’s all a unity, as my father used to say, all one. Here, give us another kiss.”

“Is that a metaphor too?”

“Everything’s a metaphor,” I said, pinning her against the wall, and started to tug off her clothes.

Lyle suddenly said in her iciest voice: “This is rape. Let me go at once, please.”

“I don’t rape women, I’m a clergyman.”

“Well, if it’s not rape it’s indecent assault. Stop it this instant or I’ll scream the house down!”

“Oh no, you won’t! Don’t try to pretend you don’t want it just as much as I do!”

“Well, of course I want it!” she shouted. “But not with you!”

That was the moment when we finally lost control. I gave her a disgusted shove that sent her off balance, she deliberately pulled me down on top of her, and after that there was no more talk of rape or wanting someone else. In fact there was no more talk at all. We were like two starving prisoners suddenly presented with a square meal. Sheer excitement and a ravenous greed ignited an appetite so overpowering that all civilised behaviour was suspended. We were merely two bodies consumed by irrationality as we grabbed and clawed and heaved and sweated our way towards a steamy satisfaction.

I was eventually saved, just as I had hoped, by the Scotch. My bemused body, revved up by lust on the one hand but soused by neat whisky on the other, failed to respond to the crucial order, and I was aware of thinking: Thank God! even as I muttered: “Bloody hell.” That was when I realised my personality had split cleanly in half, and I knew—every instinct of the born survivor told me—that I had to weld those two halves together to stay sane.

Rolling away from Lyle I slammed into one of the table-legs and in a strange gesture thumped the floor very hard three times with my clenched fist. Perhaps I was trying to channel the anger out of my body, the anger with Dido for humiliating me, the anger with Lyle for pretending I was someone else, the anger with myself for violating the moral code which I had long since vowed to uphold. I felt I wanted to go on the rampage, breaking crockery, smashing windows, even picking a fight and beating someone up. The violence of my anger frightened me, and in my fear I at last regained my self-control.

Crawling upright I levered myself to my feet and tossed off some more whisky to ensure I stayed impotent. By this time Lyle had also groped her way to her feet. I was aware of her silently slipping into her knickers as I wordlessly buttoned my fly.

At last I said: “This never happened.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve kept worse secrets.”

“There was in fact no adultery,” I said. “None. No adultery without penetration. Law of England. So technically nothing happened. Nothing at all—which means we can ring down the curtain and forget about it.”

“Suits me. I’ve always been faithful to Charles. If I’d given way now, just when he might be about to turn up, I’d never have forgiven myself.”

“That sounds as if you’ve started to hope again!”

“What else could I do after you’d made that speech? I felt as if I’d been attacked by a verbal pneumatic drill! Oh God, why on earth, having started to hope again, did I—”