Ultimate Prizes (49 page)

“Help yourself to port, Charles,” Darrow said, closing the door and moving to the sideboard. “Aysgarth, I think you’d prefer a brandy.”

“I wouldn’t mind a brandy myself,” said Ashworth, effortlessly debonair.

By this time I was trying to crawl back up the cliff by telling myself it was inconceivable that Lyle had embarked on anything so insane as a full confession. I decided to risk a cautious probe. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said to Ashworth. “I had no intention of bringing up the subject of the Jardines a second time when I know you can only find them an awkward topic of conversation. Before he died Alex told me all about the difficulties in 1937 when—”

“Oh, 1937’s gone with the wind,” said Ashworth carelessly. “None of that matters any more now.”

“It doesn’t? That would have pleased Alex! He came to regret the rift very much,” I said, sure now that Lyle had kept our secret. It seemed plain that although she had been reticent about the funeral because of the old awkwardness with the Jardines, Ashworth, fresh from experiencing far greater horrors, had finally been able to write off the Jardines’ pre-war hostilities as unimportant. “Alex actually told me how glad he was that it was you she married,” I said, relaxing at last. “He liked you.”

“Decent of him,” said Ashworth dryly, but added good-naturedly enough: “
Requiescat in pace!
In his own eccentric way he was without doubt a most remarkable man … Jon, where’s that brandy?”

“Charles, are you sure you wouldn’t prefer port?”

“Very sure. Aysgarth and I are going to get drunk on brandy together, aren’t we, Aysgarth?”

I found this suggestion a trifle surprising but assumed it was a joke. As Darrow put our drinks on the table before us I protested lightly: “Good clergymen don’t get drunk!” but at once Ashworth exclaimed with a chilling irony: “Oh no, I forgot! Good clergymen don’t get drunk—and good clergymen don’t commit adultery either, do they?”

I fell over my second cliff. Downing my brandy in a single gulp, I headed to the sideboard for a refill.

“Aysgarth,” said Darrow at once, “I really think we’d better retire to the library to discuss the Theological College.”

“Oh, no hurry!” I said. “Why are you shifting from one foot to the other like a cat on hot bricks? We haven’t had our Church gossip yet!” I reached for the decanter but Darrow grabbed it first.

“Well, as you’re both drinking brandy,” he said, “maybe I’ll join you.” And having poured himself a couple of drops into a liqueur glass barely larger than a thimble, he incarcerated the decanter in the cupboard.

In fury I turned my back on him. “What’s the Church gossip up in Cambridge?” I said boldly to Ashworth as the brandy rapidly built up a Dutch courage. I noticed that the port decanter was still standing on the table. “How goes it at Cambridge Cathedral? Has your Bishop finally decided whether Ezra came before or after Nehemiah?”

“No idea. I’m having trouble settling down again in Cambridge—not that I’d expect you to understand that. You wouldn’t know anything about POWs and their problems.”

“That’s just where you’re wrong. I’ve been ministering to the German POWs on Starbury Plain.” I was now determined to keep up appearances by pretending nothing was wrong. No one was going to catch
me
running away from a privileged southerner who oozed the ethos of a leading public school from every pore.

“German POWs?” said Ashworth amused. “And how does that flabby Liberal theology of yours go down with the Nazis?”

Darrow said quietly: “Charles,” but Ashworth, ignoring him, followed my example and knocked back his brandy in a single gulp.

“What’s so flabby about the Christian doctrine of hope?” I said truculently. “It was hope which kept us all alive as we endured Europe’s darkest hour!”

“May I suggest to you that only a man who endured Europe’s darkest hour tucked up in the Starbridge time-warp could preserve his nineteenth-century theology in such a peculiarly facile form?”

“Charles, that’s offensive,” said Darrow, never raising his voice but speaking with great firmness. “I’m afraid I can’t let any guest of mine be subjected to that kind of remark.”

“It’s all right,” I said, refilling my glass from the port decanter. “Ashworth’s got a point. He’s been through hell while I’ve been in the war-time equivalent of heaven. Where he’s wrong is to assume that it’s this fact alone which has allowed me to maintain an optimistic theology. Of course it’s fashionable now to be pessimistic—and why not, after the concentration camps and Hiroshima?—but a valid theology should be beyond mere fashion, and in my opinion Liberal Protestantism at its best is—”

“You gloss over the horror of evil,” said Ashworth. “Your theology, in 1946, is meaningless.”

“The best Liberal theology doesn’t gloss over anything! Obviously evil constitutes a problem but—”

“A
problem?
Did you say a
problem?
” Ashworth leant forward, swiped the port decanter and refilled his own glass with an unsteady hand. That was the moment when I realised that contrary to my expectations he too was standing in the wasteland, a very different wasteland from mine but one which still required Darrow’s presence at the foot of the cross. “Millions of people have been tortured, starved and done to death in the most disgusting ways, whole cities have been incinerated, whole nations have been brutalised, and you write off all that as a
problem?
”

“You wholly misunderstand,” I said as Darrow silently removed the port decanter. “I’m not denying the war was vile—”

“Why don’t you use the word ‘evil’?”

“Well, all right, if you insist—”

“I do insist! You can’t face the reality of evil, can you? You Liberal Protestants never can!”

“That’s grossly unfair!”

“Is it? Then how would you describe the nice ordinary family men, just like you and me, who spent their days conducting medical experiments on children? Do you call them evil? Oh no! You call them a problem, and at once the evil’s obscenely reduced to an inconvenience!”

“Well, of course, the obvious truth is that these evil villains
weren’t
nice ordinary family men just like you and me—”

“They were human beings. They were like us. And we could have been like them—”

“What absolute rubbish!”

“No, it isn’t! Pontius Pilate was probably a nice ordinary family man. The people who nailed Christ to the cross were probably nice ordinary family men. I tell you, the capacity to commit evil is in every single one of us, and unless you face up to that fact—”

“The fact you should face up to, Ashworth, before you drown in your neo-orthodox sea of doom and gloom, is that every man has the spark of the Holy Spirit in him, and against Christ all evil is powerless!”

“Then how do you explain the situations where Christ is absent and evil rules the roost?”

“He’s never absent. I agree that sometimes he appears to be absent, but—”

“I’ve been in situations where he
was
absent—absolutely, utterly and completely absent!”

“He couldn’t have been absent if you, a man of God, were there. The fact that you thought he was absent was your nightmare, your cross, but it was a delusion. He’s there in every private crucifixion because he’s a crucified God. Why, the very fact of the Incarnation means—”

“Oh my God!” shouted Ashworth, suddenly slamming his fist on the table and leaping to his feet. “How can you be so blind! Can’t you see?
We must face the evil in order to be redeemed!
We don’t need a theology of the Incarnation, not now, not in 1946, not after all those years of global hell! We need a theology of redemption! We’ve got to repent in shame and live, not fester in guiltless optimism and die!” And seizing his empty glass, he smashed it in the fireplace before blundering blindly from the room.

4

Darrow said at once: “Forgive him. He’s nowhere near recovered yet from his experiences.” He was moving to the door as he spoke, but before I could attempt a reply he added over his shoulder: “Wait there—I must just make sure he’s all right.” When I was alone I moved automatically to the sideboard but found Darrow had not only locked up the decanters but removed the key. I had just given a grunt of disgust when I noticed that his own glass was still standing untouched on the table. I hesitated, remembering Aidan—and at that moment Darrow returned to the room.

“Is he all right?” I said rapidly.

“Yes, he sends his apologies.”

“I’d like to send mine to him. I’m very, very sorry I upset him like that. What a disaster!”

“Not at all,” said Darrow astonishingly. “On the contrary, I suspect you both did each other a lot of good.”

I stared at him. “How can you conceivably say that?”

“I believe you each needed to hear what the other had to say. Of course on the surface it merely sounded like a clash between rival theologies, but underneath I seemed to hear vital messages being exchanged … Sit down, Aysgarth, and help yourself to that jug of water.”

I sank abruptly into the nearest chair. “Well, whatever was going on,” I said, “the fact remains that I should have remembered his suffering and been more tolerant.”

“Oh, that wouldn’t have suited Charles at all! He deliberately provoked you into argument because he wanted—even longed—to hear you stand up for the idealism which he fears the war has destroyed. And you were willing to argue because for some reason what Charles was saying had a dreadful fascination for you. I was watching your face. You could, in fact, have terminated the argument right at the start, but you were riveted. You had to let him speak his mind.”

I poured myself some water. I nerved myself to face the pain. And I said: “I’m afraid there was much more going on than that. What you say may be true, but that’s only half the story. Ashworth wanted to lash out at me primarily because he knew I’d made a heavy pass at his wife after Alex Jardine’s funeral.”

There was a silence, and gradually the truth dawned on me. I looked at him. He looked back calmly. In no line of his face did I see the faintest glimmer of surprise.

“You knew,” I whispered. “
You knew.
”

“Is that so surprising? I’m Charles’s spiritual director.”

“No, I meant you knew all along. Right from the beginning. You knew.”

“My dear Aysgarth, there’s no need to behave as if I’ve exhibited some peculiarly diabolical form of clairvoyance! The truth was fairly obvious. As soon as I saw you that morning in the Crusader I realized something had gone very wrong, and when I heard later from Lyle (who I knew was severely disturbed by Charles’s disappearance) that you and she had been alone in that house with only an exhausted widow for company—”

“Was it you who told Ashworth?”

“Don’t be absurd! I’m a priest, not the village gossip!”

“But in that case how on earth did he find out?”

“How do you think? As soon as he heard from you yesterday that she’d attended Jardine’s funeral, he asked her to tell him the whole story and she did.”

“But she couldn’t have done! She promised to treat the incident as if it had never happened—”

“Lyle came to the sensible decision that the best way out of the resulting mess was to be honest.”

“But how disastrous!”

“Not at all. With the truth disclosed, not only about you but about the funeral, she and Charles were able to sort themselves out, smooth away that old problem about the Jardines and discover that their future now looks most encouraging. I concede that Charles is still disturbed enough to want to lash out at you, but he’ll get over that; he knows now Lyle loves no one but him.
You’re
the one, I’m afraid, who won’t get over it so long as you pretend the adultery never happened.”

“There was no adultery. Not in any legal sense.”

“Aysgarth, you’re a clergyman. Shouldn’t you leave the legal definitions to the lawyers?”

“Oh yes,” I said, “I should. But I daren’t. Sheltering behind legal definitions is easier than facing up to what I did.” I drank some water and groped for a cigarette. “Not a very good clergyman, I’m afraid. In fact very flawed. Psychological problems. Dark side of the ego.” I somehow got the cigarette alight. “Must use modern terminology,” I said. “I refuse—I absolutely refuse—to talk of demons and the Devil. Outmoded symbolism. Won’t have it.
I won’t talk of demons and the Devil.
”

“No, no,” said Darrow mildly. “Quite unnecessary. Why should you?”

“Lots of people have psychological problems,” I said. “Quite normal. Nothing to get excited about. So long as one’s in control it’s all right.”

“Quite so.”

“The only trouble is: what happens when one’s not in control?”

“Very difficult. Almost frightening, perhaps.”

“Very frightening. I’m frightened,” I said, shivering from head to toe. “I’m so frightened.”

Darrow said nothing but rose to his feet, poured me some more water and sat down in the chair next to mine.

“Something terrible happened tonight,” I said. “I nearly hit my sister-in-law. I would have hit her if Primrose hadn’t interrupted me.”

“Punched her, you mean? Or just given her a slap?”

“Both. I’d have beaten her up. Wanted to. Longed to. Pleasure. Excitement. Disgusting.” I covered my face with my shaking hands and said: “I keep him locked up but sometimes he gets out. I’m so afraid of him. So afraid.”

“It’s good that you can say so out loud. It means you’re not trying to hide him behind the curtain, where he can build up his strength. It means you’re facing up to his reality.”

“It’s a question of facing the pain, as Aidan said.”

“I was going to ask you about Aidan—”

“Aidan—Ashworth—even Mellors, the poor clergyman I saw this afternoon … They all in their different ways spoke the same message, they all showed me the pattern of sin, judgement, repentance and redemption, and Ashworth said … Ashworth talked of nice ordinary family men who can do evil deeds—Ashworth insisted that we must face the evil in order to be redeemed … Yes, you were right—what he said did indeed have a dreadful fascination for me: his words were the sign telling me that I have to face my demon and exorcise him … Not that I believe in exorcism, of course. Or demons. Just speaking symbolically.”