Ultimate Prizes. Susan Howatch

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СКАЧАТЬ to lose my temper. I was always mindful of the fact that Sandy could hardly have been conceived without my assistance, and if he was now complicating our lives I had a moral duty to ameliorate the situation by being a perfect husband.

      Remembering my loss of temper earlier I winced, but at least I was able to console myself by recalling my subsequent ministry of reconciliation. How wrong Alex had been to assume that I was being short-changed in the bedroom! Even after sixteen years of marriage I was never deprived in that area – except on those occasions when Grace was in an advanced state of pregnancy or suffering from migraine or too exhausted to do anything but pass out. However, those exceptions were of no consequence, since one could hardly expect married life to be one long sex romp. Even D. H. Lawrence had never tried to describe Mellors and Lady Chatterley with five children. My brother Willy had smuggled a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover into England after a holiday in Paris and I had read the book with interest, but personally I thought it was greatly inferior to Lawrence’s other work.

      Remembering that Lawrence’s own marriage had been childless I began to think of Alex again. His childless marriage was certainly far from successful, and it occurred to me to wonder how far his own marital discomfort had influenced his interpretation of my dilemma.

      Alex had said lightly that no one knew much about his marriage, but I suspected I knew all too well what had gone on. Having married his intellectual opposite after a whirlwind courtship, it seemed clear that he had long since regretted his folly. Even with no children to distract her his wife Carrie had been unable to master her increasing responsibilities as Alex had travelled rapidly up the Church’s ladder of preferment. In 1927 when he had been appointed Dean of Radbury he had even been obliged to engage someone to keep her life in order, and it had been this companion, an icy virgin with a deceptively steamy appearance and a brain like an adding machine, who had run first the deanery at Radbury and later the palace at Starbridge. The companion had eventually left to get married, much to the Jardines’ fury, and since 1937 a variety of women had been hired and fired in the unending struggle to keep Carrie organized. Even now Alex was living quietly in a small village, Carrie was incapable of running her life without help. What a burden for any husband! Alex used to joke bravely about his ménage à trois, but I thought his marriage must be the height of dreariness.

      The one redeeming feature was that Carrie in her elderly way was still pretty. It had seemed logical to assume the Jardines enjoyed something which resembled a sex life – how else could Alex have made his marriage tolerable? – but now I found myself wondering if the heart condition which had terminated his career had also terminated the intimate side of his marriage. Curiously enough he always seemed very fit, bursting with energy, but if he had been so quick to detect a nonexistent sexual frustration in my marriage it seemed logical to deduce he was no stranger to sexual frustration in his own.

      I sighed, feeling sorry for him, and with my anger finally conquered I succeeded in falling asleep.

      The next morning I was confused to discover that I still felt angry with him but for a different reason. I could accept that he had spoken out of the best of motives; I could even accept that he had been justified in feeling concern about Grace; but what I found hard to accept was the way he had conducted the interview. Displaying the delicacy of an elephant and the sensitivity of a rhinoceros he had charged around trying to impose his conclusions upon me without regard for my willingness to accept them, and although such behaviour might possibly be forgivable when displayed by some well-meaning Victorian father I thought it was quite unforgivable when displayed by a clergyman. I myself had no great pastoral gifts. My talent was for administration, but I knew enough about pastoral work to realize that when counselling someone in trouble one’s prime duty was to listen, not to make speeches, to nurture trust, not to destroy it. In some fundamental way my trust in Alex had been impaired by that bruising interview. I still admired him as a man; I still respected him as a friend. But I did not want to discuss my private life with him ever again.

      This was a disturbing conclusion, but fortunately in the early mornings I was always too busy to dwell on unpleasant thoughts. My first task was to make the tea. I always performed this chore because I felt that the least Grace deserved was a husband who delivered the early morning tea to her in bed. Having accomplished this ritual I withdrew to my dressing-room, read the Office and meditated conscientiously on the appointed verses from the Bible. Being Low-Church in inclination if not in practice – my services were carefully aimed at the middle-of-the-road moderate majority in the Church of England in order to avoid unfortunate controversy – I preferred to focus my spiritual exercises on the Bible before applying myself to my prayers.

      After this interval I shaved and dressed. Usually I wore my archidiaconal uniform, but if my engagements were informal – or if the weather was so hot that the wearing of gaiters became intolerable – I had enough courage to resort to a plain clerical suit. I’m not the kind of man who enjoys tripping around in an antiquated fancy dress.

      When I eventually left my dressing-room I headed for the nursery, where Sandy would be waking up, and put some toys in his cot to keep him quiet. By seven o’clock I had reached my study where I aimed to put in an hour’s work before breakfast. On that particular morning I caught up with my sympathy letters – after three years of war one had to take great care that the sentiments expressed sounded genuine – paid a couple of bills and studied two archidiaconal files, one relating to new gutters for a church with a persistent damp wall and the other concerning a parish quarrel over a new font. I decided it would be prudent to ask the diocesan surveyor to look at the old gutters and even more prudent to ask the diocesan lawyers to advise on whether the font was, legally speaking, a font. The outraged churchwarden was insisting that it reminded him of a lavatory.

      I yawned. The archdeaconry was quiet. No fallen steeples, no dispute about plastic flowers on graves, no rural dean suffering from delusions of grandeur, no curate going berserk with choirboys, no vicar letting off Anglo-Catholic liturgical fireworks, no verger blowing his brains out. Finding myself with five minutes to spare before breakfast I drew up a plan for my Sunday sermon and plucked a few pertinent quotations from my trusty memory. My brother Willy always said I had a mind like a vacuum cleaner; I can effortlessly absorb any information from the sublime to the ridiculous and regurgitate it, sometimes years later, with an efficiency bordering on the robotic.

      At breakfast I admired the new bow in Primrose’s hair, glanced at the headlines of The Times, read the latest letter from Christian at Winchester, answered the telephone, picked Sandy’s rusk off the floor twice and asked Alex if he intended to spend all day in the Cathedral library, where he was studying the records of his episcopate.

      ‘No, I’m having a rest from my autobiography today,’ he said, surprising me. ‘I’ve decided to take a train to Starvale St James and call on Lyle.’

      Lyle, now Mrs Charles Ashworth, was the icy companion who had run the Jardines’ household so efficiently before her unwelcome defection to the state of matrimony in 1937.

      ‘She probably won’t want to see me,’ Alex was saying as he idly applied marmalade to his toast, ‘but I thought it would be too ridiculous if I left the diocese without calling on her. I intend to arrive on her doorstep waving the olive branch of peace.’

      ‘Better late than never, but why not phone her first? Your olive branch will be wasted if you arrive on her doorstep and find she’s gone out for the day!’

      ‘I’ll take the risk. If I ring she might simply slam down the receiver – I can’t tell you what a tangle we all got into back in 1937 –’

      ‘I always thought it sounded the most grotesque storm in a teacup and I can’t believe Lyle won’t welcome the chance to end the estrangement. Do you want a lift to the station?’

      He accepted the lift. I noted with compassion that СКАЧАТЬ