Ultimate Prizes (42 page)

4

I attended Holy Communion at eight in the hope of giving my spiritual strength a boost. There was no service that morning in my own church, since I did not subscribe to the opinion that Communion should be celebrated daily, but the Cathedral, providing as always a full range of services, offered a very tolerable celebration every morning.

On my arrival I found that the Dean was absent, but the Bishop was there and after the service he immediately buttonholed me in the vestry.

“My dear Neville, how are you? You’ve been so much in my thoughts and prayers ever since I heard the tragic news …” As he talked I was touched that his concern was so obviously genuine.

I gave him a censored account of my activities because I was determined that he should never know I had been to the Fordites; such a disclosure would be tantamount to admitting, as Darrow had put it so graphically, that I had hit rock-bottom hard enough to crack cement, and I did not want my superior to know I was now existing in a cement-crack. With immense care I said neutrally: “Darrow’s been unexpectedly helpful. I spent a few hours at Starrington Manor yesterday, as I think he told you, and I feel better now.”

“I’m very glad, but of course you musn’t dream of returning to work just yet. Perhaps in a day or two—”

“No, I’d prefer to get back to work, Bishop. I really would. I’ll call on you later this morning, after the funeral.”

The Bishop almost but not quite masked his relief by asking tenderly after Dido and offering to accompany me to the cemetery. He was a good, kind old man and I was very fond of him, but when I remembered Aidan I was struck by the difference between the Bishop and the Abbot, the one able to offer a constructive help, the other able to provide only an ineffectual sympathy. It was like comparing a butter-knife with a meat-cleaver.

I thanked Dr. Ottershaw but told him I wanted the funeral to be private. Then escaping from the various clerical well-wishers who were hovering nearby in the hope of hearing the latest gossip, I went home and forced myself to eat breakfast.

5

The first person I saw as I entered the cemetery was Darrow. He was standing outside the little chapel and talking to the sexton, but as I approached he came to meet me. He looked as if he were calculating my sobriety. Despite the obvious fact that it was now in my best interests to be charming and friendly to my guide-dog, I at once found myself seething with rage.

“Relax!” I said with an iron smile. “No brandy for breakfast!”

“I thought there might have been whisky for supper.”

I could have hit him. “Do you have anything special to say to me or did you merely turn up to make sure I could walk?”

“I thought I might attend the funeral, but perhaps you’d rather be on your own. Shall I go or stay?”

“Go.”

“Very well.” He disappeared among the tombstones.

Time passed. My senior curate arrived on his bicycle. The undertakers drove up in a very large hearse with their very small coffin.

Crawshaw read the service well, with clarity and dignity, and avoided the pitfall of a lugubrious manner. Having trained him I felt proud of his professional competence. As I myself carried the little coffin to the waiting grave I tried to focus my mind on my memory of the child, but after a while I found I was thinking not of little Arthur, now being buried with such faultless simplicity, but of Christian, brilliant shining Christian, separated from me by a complex emotional abyss which neither of us could apparently bridge. Grace lay at the bottom of that abyss, I could see she did, just as I could see as the result of my meeting with Aidan that the name of the abyss was guilt, and suddenly I realised that my guilt was not only crippling my own existence but fouling my children, poisoning their lives.

Crawshaw concluded the service at the exact moment when Aidan said in my memory: “It’s a question of facing the pain.”

Somehow I managed to thank Crawshaw, and somehow, as we walked back down the path to the chapel, I managed to say to him: “I have to see the Bishop this morning, but I should be at St. Martin’s by noon. Make sure Wilson and Cartwright are there, please, because I want a full report on everything that’s been going on.”

“Yes, sir,” said Crawshaw crisply, obedient as a private in the presence of his sergeant-major.

Wilson and Cartwright were the other curates. I should perhaps explain here that I despise the namby-pamby modern habit of vicars and curates calling each other by their Christian names. When I had been Getting On up at Oxford I had quickly learnt that no man who considers himself acceptable in the higher levels of society dreams of calling another man by his Christian name unless the two of them are connected by either blood or marriage or a friendship of at least ten years’ standing. I can still recall my amazement when my mentor had asked me to call him Alex. He had retired from the bishopric by then, of course, but his request had come only six years after we had first met. (I write “of course” because I could never under any circumstances have called my superior by his Christian name, even though he himself, as my Father in God, was entitled to address me as Neville.) I had admitted afterwards to Grace that although I had been flattered by Alex’s invitation, I had also been shocked by it. It made me see why the people who mattered thought that Alex had never quite managed to become a gentleman.

Meanwhile I was realising that I ought to present some semblance of normality to Crawshaw by mentioning the parish, and hastily I delved into my memory of current parochial dramas.

“By the way,” I said, feigning a benign curiosity, “what happened in that row over the Mothers’ Union’s homemade jam? Are they going to distribute it to the families on the dole in Langley Bottom as usual or are they going to—” I broke off. I had just seen Darrow sunning himself on a bench near my car. What was he doing? Spying on me in case I produced a hip-flask? Standing by to act as a nanny in case I broke down and howled like a woman? Loafing around to glean information about my visit to the Fordites? Dismissing Crawshaw abruptly I strode to the bench and planted myself in front of it.

“Why are you still here?”

“I was hoping for a lift back to the Close. Would you mind?”

After a pause I said tersely: “Get in,” and opened the door of my car. Crawshaw was already riding away on his bicycle.

“I apologise for the ill-temper,” I said at last to Darrow when he was sitting in the passenger seat and I had started the engine, “but I thought you were spying on me.”

“I was. May I congratulate you not only on your sobriety but on your ability to function in a normal manner? In the circumstances that’s a considerable achievement.”

“There’s no achievement.” Reluctantly, knowing we had to talk, I switched off the engine. “The normal functioning’s an act. It diverts me from facing the pain.”

“Aidan’s phrase?”

“Aidan’s phrase.” I made a superhuman effort to be well-behaved and friendly. “That’s quite a technique he employs!” I commented jovially. “He broke rules, took risks—he even talked at length about himself in order to hit me over the head with the right parable. He rubbed my nose in the pain when I wanted to avoid it. He presented insights which made me howl with rage and walk out. In retrospect I find myself wondering what on earth a psychiatrist would have made of the interview.”

“But all the chances he took came off, didn’t they? The late Abbot-General Father Darcy used to say,” said Darrow, “that it was only when one had had many years of experience of working obediently within the rules that one learnt how to recognise those moments when it was safe to step outside them.”

“Aidan talked of Darcy.” I suddenly found I had exhausted my supply of friendliness; the effort of being well-behaved and sociable towards Darrow was too great to be sustained for long in my weakened state, and in despair, knowing that he was necessary to me yet feeling quite unable to ask for his help, I said abruptly: “Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk to you now. I’ve got to go and see the Bishop.”

“I didn’t come here to talk. Nor, in fact, did I come here to play the ecclesiastical nanny. My presence is more in the nature of a symbolic act.”

I had been about to switch on the engine again but now I let my fingers slip from the key. I stared through the windscreen at the tombstones, I stared down at my left hand as it clutched the steering wheel and finally I stared at my passenger. My voice said: “You’ve come to stand at the foot of the cross.”

“That’s it. Sometimes mere words are no good. Sometimes in the presence of suffering only symbols have meaning.”

I thought of Hoffenberg saying: “He’s a
crucified
God,” and again I was reminded of a law of science working automatically as soon as the right mechanisms were set in motion. When Darrow spoke, symbolically offering his hand to me as if impelled by an irresistible force, I saw the principle of atonement streaming into action. Once more God had entered into the wasteland and made himself at one with it so that all might be raised up, restored and renewed. Once more the ancient wheel of birth, death and resurrection had begun to revolve in my life after an agonising hiatus in time.

The next moment I found I had the strength to say to Darrow: “If you’re at the foot of the cross you’ll see that I’m past the ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ phase but I’m still up there, waiting to be cut down. Just realised I can’t do it myself. Need help. Bit of a problem.” I was looking at the tombstones as I spoke, but I was aware of Darrow nodding as if he had often encountered this little difficulty and knew very well how tiresome it could be.

Then I knew I could no longer avoid the crucial struggle with my pride. It was a long, hard, bitter struggle and it left me limp, battered and bruised, but when my pride had finally collapsed in a vanquished heap, I was able to say in the casual voice I used for discussing minor diocesan problems: “Could we forget for a while that I’m the Archdeacon? Rank’s no life-belt when one falls overboard, as an ex-Naval man like you might say.”

“No life-belt at all, I agree.”

“Being an archdeacon won’t cut me down from the cross,” I said. “Exercising a first-class brain won’t cut me down from the cross. Flaunting a pugnacious nature won’t cut me down from the cross. But if we could agree that I’m a limited and somewhat obtuse clergyman, while you’re the expert at rescuing the crucified, maybe we’d get somewhere.”

“Maybe we would. But of course I too have my limited, obtuse side—as no doubt you remember all too well.”

It was the olive branch of peace. Switching on the engine again I realised with astonishment that my fingers were trembling. I could only suppose I was suffering from shock after slaying the dragon of my pride with a nautical metaphor and the grace of God.

“Aidan made it plain I’m in a situation that will require the exercise of the charism of discernment,” I heard myself say, “but unfortunately I’m at present a little blind and deaf. Spiritually, I mean.”

“Very tricky.”

“If you could provide an extra pair of eyes and ears—”

“Delighted.”

“I don’t want spiritual direction, you understand. I don’t want you giving me orders about how to pray or anything like that.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

“I just want a little help with the inevitable detective work. Of course I expect we’ll still fight.”

“Oh yes, I expect so.”

“It may all be a complete failure.”

“Possibly.”

“But acting on the principle of nothing ventured, nothing gained—”

“Very sensible. Why don’t you phone me after your interview with the Bishop and then perhaps we can arrange to meet later?”

“Fine.” I drove somewhat erratically out of the cemetery and began to head through the suburbs to the centre of Starbridge. We did not speak during the journey to the Close, but as I drew up outside the Theological College Darrow said: “That was a brave thing to do, Aysgarth. You think, don’t you, that I’m seeing you at your weakest, but in fact I’m now seeing just how strong you really are.” He did not wait for a reply but got out of the car and vanished into the building without looking back.

Tears stung my eyes to remind me that despite my large step forward along Salvation’s road I was still in the same disgusting emotional state. Slamming the car furiously into gear I drove on to the episcopal palace and prayed for a cascade of urgent diocesan problems which would temporarily divert me from my pain.

6

The Bishop’s palace at Starbridge was in fact not a palace at all; the original residence, destroyed by fire in the nineteenth century, had been replaced by a country house which now wore a dark bedraggled look as it lay limply among its untended lawns. Since post-war austerity seemed destined to stretch into the remote future, Dr. Ottershaw was now talking sensibly of ceding the palace to the choir school and moving to the South Canonry, a smaller house on the other side of the Close. Mrs. Ottershaw, exhausted by dilapidated premises and interminable servant problems, could hardly wait to leave.

I parked my car beside an unfamiliar Sunbeam Talbot and walked around the house to the side door, which in day-time was left unlocked for authorised visitors. Looking in at the former flower-room, now the secretary’s office, I saw the old battle-axe who dealt with the flurry of paperwork generated by the postwar society. In the old days the secretary had been employed only on an occasional basis and the chaplain had been in charge of the correspondence, but now the chaplain had risen to loftier administrative heights as he helped his master deal with what Aidan would no doubt have called “The World.” Since Dr. Ottershaw was of an unworldly disposition, the current chaplain had far more power than Alex’s chaplains had enjoyed in the halcyon days of the Jardine episcopate before the war.

“Good morning, Miss Todd. Any news?”

The old battle-axe gave me a benign glare and retorted dryly: “That’s the question I should be asking
you
, Archdeacon. I was extremely sorry to hear about your misfortune.” The phone rang. She pounced on it, listened, said: “Mrs. Ottershaw already supports a charity for displaced persons. Good-day,” and hung up the receiver with a thud.