Ultimate Prizes. Susan Howatch

children were at last able to hear the message which my fear of emotional breakdown had prevented me from giving them.

      It occurred to me that my disciple would have soaked at least one handkerchief as she listened to the Bishop, but of course I could not allow myself to think of Dido.

      I glimpsed her before the service and she spoke to me afterwards, but only the briefest of conversations was possible. After the exchange of greetings she merely said: ‘I’ll write, I promise. I was too upset to write before,’ and as she disappeared I saw her eyes shone with tears. Perhaps she was merely feeling emotional in the wake of Dr Ottershaw’s address, but perhaps too she was temporarily overcome with all manner of ambiguous feelings.

      After the concluding rites in the cemetery I continued to deal with everyone who required my attention until at last, much later, I found myself alone with my brother and sister in the vicarage kitchen as my curtain once more tried to rise. I was struggling fiercely with the hem but to my terror I realized it was sliding out of my grasp. I thought: I mustn’t look at the stage, can’t look, won’t look, no one can make me look. Then I suddenly realized I had spoken the words aloud. As Willy and Emily looked at me appalled I muttered: ‘Sorry. Mind wandering. Very tired,’ and covered my face with my hands.

      Emily said drearily: ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

      ‘For God’s sake, woman!’ exploded Willy. ‘He’s already drunk enough of your tea to float Noah’s Ark! Neville, where the hell’s the bloody whisky?’

      ‘There isn’t any. I don’t drink spirits.’

      ‘Well, all I can say is it’s about time you started!’

      ‘Really, Will!’ said Emily scandalized. ‘What would Mother say if she were alive!’

      I said: ‘I don’t want to talk about Mother.’

      ‘Neither do I,’ agreed Willy. ‘Let’s keep the old girl buried six feet deep or else I’m going to hit the bottle in the biggest possible way.’

      ‘Really, Will!’ said Emily again in her primmest voice. ‘How can you talk like that after what happened to Father!’

      I said: ‘I don’t want to talk about Father.’

      ‘Good God, Em, you don’t believe all that bloody rubbish about Father dying of drink, do you? That was just a vile slander put out by Uncle Willoughby!’

      Leaping to my feet I shouted: ‘I don’t want to talk about Uncle Willoughby!’ But then I collapsed in my chair and once more covered my face with my hands.

      Willy said: ‘I’m going to the off-licence to buy some whisky.’

      Emily said: ‘I’m going to make tea.’

      Recognizing their desire to offer comfort I was soothed by their careful avoidance of emotion, and after a while I thought I was strong enough to drag down the curtain again. But I was wrong. I was so weak that I glanced at the stage first, and there waiting for me in 1909 was Uncle Willoughby, rich, robust and ruthless as he hitched up his coat-tails to warm his backside at the parlour fire. ‘… and I’ll not say one word against your father, poor miserable idle stupid fellow that he was, because it’s not right to speak ill of the dead, even when a weak selfish thoughtless fellow with a wife and three children has the intolerable effrontery to the in penury. So all I’ll say is this: if you two lads want to save yourselves from hell and damnation –’

      ‘Here’s your tea, Nev,’ said Emily in 1942.

      ‘– if you two lads want to save yourselves from hell and damnation,’ bawled Uncle Willoughby, outshouting her in 1909, ‘and save yourselves from the miserable fate of winding up a failure in a coffin before you’re forty, you’ll work and you’ll work and you’ll work until you’ve dug yourself out of this shameful black pit, and you’ll never forget – never as long as you live – that there’s only one road to salvation and that’s this: you’ve got to go chasing the prizes if you want to stay out of the coffin – you’ve got to go chasing the prizes if you want to be happy and safe – you’ve got to go chasing the prizes in order to Get On and Travel Far …’

      ‘Poor Nev,’ said Emily in 1942. ‘You can shed a tear if you like. I’ll look the other way and afterwards we can pretend it never happened.’

      ‘For God’s sake!’ I shouted and blundered out of the kitchen into my study. Willy arrived five minutes later with the whisky and banged on the door until I let him in.

      ‘Em driving you round the bend? How her husband stands all that tea I don’t know. What a mystery marriage is, but of course I’m just a bachelor schoolmaster who observes society’s mating customs from afar … Do you remember when you said to me on the beach at St Leonards all those years ago: “I’m going to marry the perfect girl and have the perfect family and live happily ever after”? I’d never even considered getting married, and yet there you were, seventeen years old, with that misty look in your eyes, the look of the dyed-in-the-wool romantic, the look Father always wore when he read us “The Charge of the Light Brigade” –’