Ultimate Prizes - Susan Howatch

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acquired immense self-control in sexual matters. As a young man I was earnest, idealistic and chaste (more or less; one really can’t expect adolescent boys not to masturbate). Grace had been my first and indeed my only woman – apart from a disastrous lapse before my marriage when I had been an undergraduate up at Oxford. Embarrassment prevents me from disclosing much about this incident, so I shall only say that it followed my introduction to champagne and that the female was a shop assistant at Woolworth’s. From that day to this I can never cross the threshold of any branch of Woolworth’s without experiencing a small secret shiver of shame.

      The truth is that on moral issues I hold views which are currently held to be old-fashioned. I believe fornication is degrading to women, who should be treated with the utmost reverence as befits their unique contribution to humanity as wives and mothers. Adultery I look upon not merely as a moral error but as a crime, breaking sacred promises, destroying trust, poisoning love, wrecking the lives not only of the guilty but of the innocent. Sex is like dynamite. If it is used in the right place and at the right time the results can be beneficial, but unless the proper regulations are observed there can only be a disastrous explosion. Those people who indulge in sexual activity as casually as they would down a couple of cocktails are always the sort of people who would find it amusing to play with matches in a bomb factory. As a clergyman I would be guilty of a most unchristian lack of charity if I bounded around yelling ‘Stupid!’ at all these fools, but I do find it an effort sometimes to treat the perpetrators of such mindless incidents – as a Modernist I won’t use that Victorian word ‘sinners’ – with compassion.

      My strict attitude to sexual licence extends to the human race’s other pastime which causes so much trouble: drink. The Primitive Methodists of my childhood used to thunder away on that subject with as much verve as they devoted to sexual immorality, so it was hardly surprising that I became a most abstemious young man. In fact my catastrophic initiation into the pleasures of champagne up at Oxford shocked me so much that not another drop of alcohol passed my lips until the day I told Uncle Willoughby that I was going into the Church, but contrary to what the preachers had always proclaimed, this benign brush with whisky failed to consign me to perdition. I was much too poor to afford whisky regularly, and moreover as soon as I became a clergyman I knew I had to be careful in my drinking habits. Successful clergymen never drank spirits. Even as time passed and my tastes became more sophisticated I always made it a rule to drink moderately, and although I concede that on the evening of my meeting with Dido I bent this rule by tossing off an extra glass of port, this was an exceptional, not a commonplace, lapse.

      I never drink twice a day. I do smoke, I admit, but never in public and only in my bedroom, usually after sexual intercourse. I like eating, but only wholesome food such as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. I was brought up to believe that frivolous snacks, such as chocolate, stimulated the sin of gluttony and constituted an unforgivable extravagance. It was only when I was a young man courting Grace that I finally dredged up the nerve – and the money – to rebel against this austerity. I took Grace to the cinema and bought a box of chocolates. I can still remember the fearful guilty thrill of watching Clara Bow oozing ‘It’ as I sank my teeth into a sumptuous peppermint cream.

      Now, no doubt, I’ve created the impression that I’m not a rake worthy of defrocking but a prig worthy of a kick on the bottom. How hard it is to get the balance of a self-portrait right! Let me stress that I try very hard not to be priggish. Christ came into this world to be at one with us, not to stand apart and look down his nose at our antics, and as a Liberal Protestant who believes strongly in the centrality of Christ I can hardly ignore the example he set. Certainly, despite my strict views on morality, I never feel morally superior. How can I, when every time I pass a branch of Woolworth’s I remember that I’m as prone to error as anyone else? Moreover although I have strict moral standards I don’t consider myself strait-laced, and I suggest that anyone who does consider me a trifle on the sober side has no idea what being strait-laced is all about.

      Being strait-laced, as anyone brought up among strict Nonconformists knows, means not only spurning extra-marital sex, chocolates and the demon drink but avoiding the theatre, the cinema, the wireless, playing cards and novels. I have insufficient time and money to go often to the cinema or the theatre nowadays, but I enjoy playing cards with the children and I never miss the broadcast of ITMA, that most perfect of comedy programmes. I also read modern novels for relaxation. I may not read about sex in the News of the World; that would be dabbling with prurient trash. But I do read about sex in the work of D. H. Lawrence; that, I submit with all due respect, is keeping abreast of modern literature.

      Grace enjoyed reading in the old days, but by 1942 her life as an archdeacon’s wife and the mother of five children barely allowed her enough time to open a book. At this point I must state unequivocally that Grace was the most wonderful woman in the world and the best possible wife for a clergyman and I adored her. I do want to make that absolutely clear. For sixteen years we had enjoyed the most perfect married life without a single cloud marring the marital sky. At least, if I’m to be entirely accurate, I have to admit little wisps of cloud did occasionally appear but they seldom lasted long. Even the most perfect marriages have to suffer little wisps occasionally. One is, after all, obliged to exist in real life and not between the pages of a romantic novel.

      Garnishing my perfect marriage, like gilt lavishly bestowed upon the gingerbread, were my perfect children. I know that as their parent I may be judged hopelessly prejudiced, but people outside the family did constantly comment on my offsprings’ good looks, good manners, high intelligence and remarkable charm, so I venture to suggest I can’t be entirely deluding myself. Needless to say, it was a matter of the very greatest satisfaction to me that I had succeeded in winning two of the ultimate prizes of life: a perfect marriage and a perfect family.

      Now I suppose I sound smug, worthy of another kick on the bottom, so let me add honestly that family life did have its ups and downs. However the problems never seemed insuperable and the children never seemed intolerable. My favourite was Primrose, who I thought quite beautiful, although I know men always view their daughters through rose-tinted spectacles, particularly when they have only one daughter to view. Grace and I had called her Primrose in memory of the first flower I had given Grace many years before at St Leonards-on-Sea, the genteel resort on the Sussex coast where my mother had spent her widowhood in the company of my sister Emily. My brother Willy and I had never lived at St Leonards; we had been boarded out in London in order to receive our education, but three times a year, at Christmas, Easter and in the summer, Uncle Willoughby had given us the money for the train journey to Sussex, and it was on one of these seaside holidays that I had met Grace, who was visiting cousins. I was seventeen; she was two years younger. When I gave her the primrose she kept it, pressed it, framed it and finally gave it to me on our wedding night seven years later. Even now the memento still hung over our bed. In view of this flagrant – but not, I suggest to any revolted cynic, unusual – sentimentality, it was hardly surprising that we should have decided to call our first daughter Primrose, and finally after the advent of Christian, Norman and James, Primrose made her grand entrance into the world. Our perfect family was now complete. All that remained for me to do was to work out how I was going to pay for the public-school education of three sons.

      It was at this point that one of those little wisps of cloud appeared in the sunlit marital sky, and unlike all the other little wisps in the past this one failed to fade away. Grace and I discovered to our shock that Primrose had not after all completed our perfect family, and in 1941 Alexander (named after my mentor Bishop Jardine) arrived at the vicarage.

      When I had finished accepting the will of God, just as a good clergyman should, I decided I would have to adopt a much more rigorous approach to contraception. This subject, I need hardly add, is one of the most awkward matters with which a clergyman can ever become involved. As far as I can gather, everyone in the Church practises contraception, even bishops, but no one in a clerical collar will ever admit to such behaviour because the Church can never surmount its ancient conviction that interfering with procreation is a bad thing. The last Lambeth Conference had barely softened this negative attitude, and a vast amount of hypocrisy had attended the debates on married life. It was noticeable that those bishops who thundered most eloquently on the evils of contraception were always the celibates. The married bishops with their neat little

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