Читать книгу Ultimate Prizes - Susan Howatch - Страница 30

Collapsing on the wrought-iron garden-seat, where earlier Lady Starmouth had declared with such incomparable style how very hard it was to be a clergyman, I clutched my Bible as if it were a life-belt and forced myself to face the unspeakable. I had fallen in love. Hitherto I had believed that only irrational women could succumb to the full force of an amour fou, yet here I was, collapsed in a heap, almost asphyxiated by the reek of red roses, and shivering with desire from head to toe. This was no middle-aged inconvenience. This was a passion of the prime of life. Nothing like it had ever happened to me before. I was appalled.

Automatically I started recalling my seven-year courtship of Grace, but although I had embarked on this period of my life in a fever of calf love my feelings had matured into a solid reliable devotion and I had never experienced the suspension of my rational faculties. On the contrary, I had plotted my marriage campaign with military precision, calculating down to the last farthing when I would be able to afford the trip to the altar, scheming how I might win my future father-in-law’s consent while I was still so young, rehearsing the necessary speech to my mother until I was word-perfect. By no remote stretch of the imagination could I describe myself as having been demented with love. In fact in the light of my present madness I was almost tempted to wonder if I had ever really loved Grace at all – but that was an insane thought which only indicated the disintegration of my reason. Of course I had loved Grace. I had adored her. She had been exactly the kind of wife I knew I had to have.

‘Such a fetching girl!’ said my mother benignly in my memory. ‘So quiet and refined – and with a hundred and fifty pounds a year of her own! Darling Neville, I couldn’t be more pleased …’

The memory terminated. Wiping the sweat from my forehead I pulled myself together and resolved to fight this monstrous insanity which had assailed me. Why was I loafing amidst the nauseating stench of roses and thinking of my mother? That was hardly constructive behaviour. I had to start planning how I could cover up the disaster as efficiently as a cat burying a mess, and while I was engaged in this vital task I had to pretend to the whole world – but especially to Grace – that I was my sane, normal self.

That was the moment when I remembered our forty-eight-hour second honeymoon which was due to take place before we embarked on our family holiday. Common sense, liberally garnished with a strong instinct for self-preservation, now told me that this was not the time, in the sixteen-year-old history of my perfect marriage, to spend forty-eight hours entirely alone with my wife. My most sensible course of action was to hide from her among the children as I shored up my defences and made myself impregnable to the violent assaults of my irrationality.

Leaning forward with my elbows on my knees I clasped my hands, squeezed my eyes shut and said to God silently in desperation: ‘Lord, help me, save me, protect me so that I can consecrate myself afresh to your service.’ Then I waited, trying not to feel as if I were whistling in the dark, but I experienced no easing of my fear and anxiety. Evidently my prayer was not going to be answered in any simple straightforward way, and at last, wiping the sweat again from my forehead, I nerved myself to return to the house.