Ultimate Prizes by Susan Howatch

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 realise 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