Ultimate Prizes Page 17

  “Thanks. ’Bye.” She roared off, leaving me inhaling a cloud of exhaust fumes.

  On the train I resolved that as soon as I knew the date of the funeral I would book a room at a hotel in Oxford, but then I thought of my overdrawn bank account, my sheaf of unpaid bills and my bank manager’s increasingly lugubrious expression. I also pictured myself after the funeral: worn out and fit only for an early night. Why was I so hell-bent on locking myself up in a hotel in order to preserve my admittedly dog-eared but fundamentally indestructible chastity? I didn’t even like the bitch, and besides I was incapable of gross misbehaviour because good clergymen never behaved grossly. In shying away from a hospitable invitation I was being both idiotic and irrational; in fact I could only conclude, as I resolved not to waste money on a hotel, that poor Alex’s unhinged disclosures had driven me too to the brink of lunacy.

  5

  As soon as I walked through the front door of my new home in the Close I looked hopefully around the hall for a glimpse of luggage, but there was no suitcase in sight, and upstairs in the main bedroom, which faced the Cathedral, no one lay arranged in an attitude of repentance on the virgin double bed. Returning downstairs I grabbed the telephone in my study and put through a call to Merry in Leicestershire.

  “Stephen! I was going to ring you this evening—look, it’s going to be all right, but she still needs more time. Can you keep saying I’m dying or is everyone starting to get suspicious?”

  “No one suspects anything at the moment, but—”

  “Thank God. Now don’t despair—I’ve been hammering away on your behalf and I’m sure I’m going to win. When I threatened to betray her to Father she had to face up to the fact that if she makes a mess of this marriage she’ll be labelled a complete and utter failure for the rest of her life by all the people who matter—my dear! The hysterics! She can’t bear the idea of Father thinking her a failure, although why she should still care what he thinks I’ve no idea—personally I’ve long since given up all hope that he would ever see his daughters as anything but amusing little second-rate sons, but there we are, we all have our dreams, and if Dido wants to dream that one day she’ll be as good as our brothers in Father’s estimation, who’s to say she’s not entitled to her fantasy? Anyway, Stephen, keep telling everyone I’m at death’s door, and I’ll do my best to shovel her onto the train to Starbridge some time within the next week.”

  Having concluded the call I poured myself a stiff whisky to celebrate this news, but after a while I realised I was thinking not of Dido but of Alex and his extraordinary revelations. I was wondering how far the heavy doses of morphia had undermined his grasp of reality.

  The curtain in my mind twitched as I thought of drugs, and for a second I heard my mother whispering in fear to Uncle Willoughby about the laudanum taken by my father, but then the curtain dropped abruptly, just as it always did when I found myself recalling that horrifying snatch of dialogue I had overheard, and I was able to think of Alex again. Surely the story of incest had been a drug-ridden fantasy! Terrible things could happen in families—as I knew all too well—but if Alex had been telling the truth, then not only did my experience of domestic tragedy bear no resemblance to his but the likeness suggested by our impoverished backgrounds was an illusion. I felt as if Alex had at a stroke rewritten my past relationship with him. I had believed that he was a man with whom I could identify myself, yet now it appeared he was someone who had come from a different planet.

  As I thought of my own planet the curtain drifted idly upwards, but for once I made no attempt to stop it; the memory was benign, and in recalling it I could blot out the tragedy which had later overtaken us all. I saw my father opening one of the Beatrix Potter books; Willy and I could both read, but we enjoyed our father’s evening visits to the nursery so much that we pretended we barely knew our alphabet. He liked to read to us. Sometimes we all acted the story and then we would wind up laughing so loudly that my mother, lying on her chaise-longue downstairs with her volume of Browning, would bang crossly on the ceiling with her walking-stick. “Your Pa’s such a card!” our nurse Tabitha would say, laughing with us. Being illiterate she shared our pleasure in hearing my father read aloud.

  Once when Willy and I had been washed, scrubbed, stuffed into our nightshirts and presented for our daily kiss, my mother had remarked to my father: “Don’t you think those boys should be applying their brains to something more intellectually edifying than Miss Potter’s anthropomorphic fantasies?” but my father had answered: “Time enough for that later,” and winked at us. Later I had asked him: “What’s anthropomorphic?” and he had said laughing: “Peter Rabbit in a blue coat!”

  My father liked rabbits. He liked all animals. He was constantly filled with wonder by God’s creation. “Look at the wild-flowers!” he would say to us on those fine summer Saturday afternoons when he took us for walks. “Look at the birds! And look how even the town looks beautiful from a distance, blending into the background of the hills … It’s all a unity, you see. The things that we can touch—the landscape, the flowers, the animals—and the things which we can only hold in our minds—Beauty, Truth and Goodness—they’re all a manifestation of God, all a unity, all one.” Later he added: “It’s a good world and getting better all the time. A very clever gentleman called Darwin proved that scientifically. Other very clever gentlemen, who should have known better, became upset and started saying science aimed to destroy religion, but of course they were wrong. Science is just another lens through which we look at God—and all the lenses are a unity. Beyond their dissimilarities they’re all one.”

  My father had been speaking before the First War, when Liberal Protestant optimism was at its zenith, but I thought he would have clung to his religious interpretation of evolution despite mankind’s twentieth-century regression into the barbarism of international tyranny and bloodshed. “Evolution demands wear and tear, even occasionally devastation and destruction,” he had once said, “but as it’s written in the Bible: ‘All things work together for the good for them who love God.’ ” I tried to picture him abandoning his optimistic creed and sinking, like Alex, into a pessimistic outlook which so perfectly matched the pessimistic mood of the modern age, but I could only imagine him recoiling in horror, and suddenly as I pictured my father clinging to his cherished beliefs, I felt sure Alex had been lying when he had said he had lost his faith.

  I examined my memory of the interview with care. I could accept, though with repugnance, that he might now feel genuinely drawn to express his faith in a morbid and depressing form of Protestantism; since his father had succumbed to a similar spiritual aberration it could be argued that in a time of stress the tug of heredity might have pulled Alex off the theological rails. I could also accept that he had spoken the truth about Lyle; that particular revelation certainly made sense of various minor mysteries, and although I knew Alex would never have fallen into any gross error since his ordination, I could well imagine him being tempted to sow a wild oat or two as a very young man. I could even accept that he might have been telling the truth about the incest, for unnatural evils did undoubtedly occur and Alex had always said his family life had been a nightmare. But what I could not accept, when all was said and done, was that he had ever been wholly estranged from his faith.

  I knew more than most people about the nature of Alex’s faith. Since I had been his protégé, we had had numerous theological discussions and he had spoken frankly to me about spiritual matters. His faith was Christocentric, based on a firm belief in the past, present and future reality of Jesus Christ as God Incarnate. As an intellectual churchman with Modernist leanings he might tinker with various theories about the Jesus of history; there would be various doubts, a benign agnosticism on certain matters, perhaps even an unorthodox theory or two. But no scholarly speculation on Christ’s humanity would alter his opinion of Christ’s divinity; or in other words, nothing would weaken his allegiance to the Christ of Eternity, the unique form of metaphor, myst
ery and timeless truth in which God had uniquely chosen to reveal himself to mankind. In Alex’s opinion this vision of the Eternal Christ, born of the Jesus of history but transcending the mere historical life which could never be fully known, was indestructible unless someone proved beyond all doubt that Jesus had never existed. No serious scholar doubted Jesus’ existence and probably no serious scholar ever would. So how had Alex’s particular brand of Christological faith been demolished?

  Of course loss of faith did happen among churchmen, but it was not a disaster which happened every day and it was never an overnight phenomenon. There would inevitably be a period of doubt coupled with an increasing inability to work properly, but I had seen no sign of such symptoms in Alex during 1937. Moreover, such a rock-solid faith could hardly have been lost without a good reason, and I could see no sign either, as I examined my memory, of a fateful event which might have acted as a trigger.

  I surveyed my conclusions. I had apparently reasoned myself into believing either that Alex had woken up one morning in 1937 and experienced an irrational brainstorm, or that he was lying. Neither theory was plausible, but if one assumed that the latter possibility was fractionally more credible than the former, one was immediately confronted by the mystery of why he should have invented such a story. It would seem he felt compelled to give me an explanation for his idle retirement; he had evidently been disturbed by the bewilderment I had expressed during our quarrel, and now it seemed he was anxious to provide an explanation which would stop me from jumping to certain conclusions. But what conclusions was I supposed to be jumping to? It was true I might conclude he was a lazy clergyman who had behaved badly, but I thought Alex would much rather I judged him guilty of sloth than guilty of apostasy. Reluctantly I was driven to conclude that the theory of the big lie raised more mysteries than it solved. But this conclusion, on the other hand, did not prove my theory was untrue.

  I tried to hack my way deeper into the conundrum. If the heart condition had been a fiction and the lost faith a lie, what was the real explanation of Alex’s refusal to do any church work after he left Starbridge? And—most baffling of all—why had he resigned his bishopric? I had to admit that apart from a loss of faith I could think of no reason which was remotely plausible. Since his retirement it had indeed occurred to me that he might be drinking more than was good for him, but back in 1937 he had had this weakness well in control. So there was no possibility that he might have felt morally obliged to resign because of alcoholism. Adultery, of course, was out of the question. It was beginning to seem after all that I would have to accept the explanation of the lost faith—but if I did it would be only because an alternative theory had proved untenable.

  I suddenly felt I wanted to talk to Alex again. After all, my faith too was Christocentric in a Modernist mould; I too tinkered adventurously with the Jesus of history while I held fast to the Christ of Eternity. If Alex could declare in all sincerity that the Modernist road led into a void, I wanted to know exactly how he had come to hold such a deeply disturbing opinion.

  I decided I had no choice but to pursue the matter further at the earliest opportunity, but unfortunately I soon learnt that this was a mystery which was destined never to be unravelled. Two days later I received a telephone call from Lyle to say that Alex had died that morning, peacefully, in his sleep.

  6

  Alex had requested in his will that I should on no account deliver a eulogy at the funeral, but he had asked me to address the congregation for five minutes on a text which I felt was consonant with his life and work. I thought hard about this task. Alex’s favourite text had been: “I am not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance”—words which unfortunately had a neo-orthodox ring nowadays, although Alex had always interpreted the passage in a manner which illustrated the Christian message of hope. I was certainly willing enough to preach on the theme that no matter how unworthy one was, there remained always, through Christ, the opportunity for a new life, but nevertheless I could not help but balk at that text. The word “sinners” had such a gloomy ring, and since most mourners find the funeral service deeply depressing, the least a clergyman can do to alleviate their distress is to inject a shot of optimism into the address.

  Finally, after reflecting on Alex’s stormy life which had been made smooth by his dying belief that he was “justified by faith,” I turned to St. Paul for inspiration and was unable to resist selecting the famous text: “For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

  I wanted to drive to Stoneyford because I felt that travelling by car would be less of a strain than travelling in a dirty, inevitably delayed train, but I knew I could ill afford the petrol-coupons. Fortunately, however, the diocesan office succumbed to a fit of nostalgia, and as a mark of respect to the former Bishop of Starbridge they eased my way to his funeral by allocating me some of the coupons kept for ecclesiastical emergencies. On the fatal day I reached the village in good time, forced myself to eat lunch at the local inn and ruthlessly avoided all alcohol. Then I called at the Jardines’ house to leave my overnight bag and spend a short time with Carrie. Lyle was there but not her sons; disapproving of children attending funerals, she had made a quick trip home in order to leave Charley with Michael and the nanny.

  I withdrew to the vicarage. There I was greeted sympathetically by the vicar, who had the supreme tact to abandon me as soon as he had escorted me to the vestry. I had already calculated that I would need to spend at least half an hour in solitude to drum up the necessary strength, and as soon as I was alone I willed myself to study my selected words from Romans, review my sermon and pray. No clergyman could have been more disciplined, and at last, confident that I could perform my task in a manner which would have satisfied Alex, I left the vestry to await the mourners.

  I was an old hand at surviving the unspeakable.

  7

  The sermon began. I’m no flamboyant preacher who seizes the audience’s attention by the sheer force of his personality, but I know how to hit hard from the pulpit. My “sledgehammer” technique is employed; I set up a theme—in this case the Christian message of hope in the face of death—and slam the congregation over the head with it from half a dozen different angles. I try to be utterly calm, faultlessly logical and powerfully persuasive. As my Oxford tutors always used to say, I would have made a good barrister.

  “ ‘ … who against hope believed in hope …’ ” As I punctuated the sermon with quotes from Romans, I thought of the hope that Alex had regained at the end of his life, of the hope that the world needed to regain after six years of war, of the hope that the Liberal Protestants still cherished for the evolution of a better world, of the hope that sprang from the loving, forgiving, compassionate teachings of Christ, teachings which the neo-orthodox converts were so ready, in their pessimistic rantings, to pass over. But then suddenly—was it halfway through the sermon?—I remembered that St. Paul had not, in his writings, stressed the teachings of Jesus. He had preached on the meaning of Christ crucified, and the next moment, quite without warning, my memory was regurgitating his words: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

  I stopped speaking but my memory, as if driven by an unseen force, hammered on. I tried to think of Jesus’ compassionate words about the forgiveness of sins, but in my mind’s eye I saw the other Jesus, the stern Jewish prophet who had warned: “Repent! For the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” I shuddered. The church was packed, for Alex had been famous in his day and people had journeyed to the funeral from all over England. As the silence lengthened I stared at my congregation in panic until by a miracle I caught sight of Lady Starmouth in the third row. The glimpse saved me. I knew I could never afford to make a fool of myself in front of Lady Starmouth, and as my iron will revived, my survivor’s instinct flo
gged me back on course. I had to refer to my notes but I completed the sermon fluently, and for the remainder of the ceremony, every harrowing moment of it, I was well in control of myself.

  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.”