Susan Howatch - Ultimate Prizes

In another letter she told me about her three brothers, all employed in her father’s financial empire, but I realized that since they were many years her senior they had played little part in her growing up.

‘… but I’ve always been very close to my sisters – well, we had to stick together, you see, because since Father was so busy making money and my brothers were so busy at public school learning how to be English gentlemen and Mother was so busy being retiring, no one had much time for us except Blackboard our governess (Miss Black) and even she was always wishing she was somewhere else, so Merry and Laura and I formed what we called The Triple Alliance in order to conquer the world and make everyone take notice of us. I was devastated , simply devastated , when Merry married that sporty bore Wyvenhoe, all polo and fishing and shooting thousands of poor little birds in August (I think he only married Merry to gain permanent access to Father’s grouse moor). Her marriage destroyed our Triple Alliance and I knew things would never be the same again and I was right, they never were. She lives up in Leicestershire now, although of course she has a house in London, and I seldom see her. But I recovered from losing Merry. It was losing Laura that nearly killed me.

‘Darling Laura was the light of my life , we were closer than most twins , only twelve months apart, we did everything together, everything, Merry was always the odd one out as she was two years older than Laura, three years older than me. Laura and I were presented at Court together and shared our first season, and later the Prince of Wales (I’m sorry, I know he’s the Duke of Windsor now, but for me he’ll always be our gorgeous Prince of Wales) – he said he would have danced with both of us simultaneously if he had had two pairs of arms (My dear, Mrs Simpson was simply seething !) and life was thrilling, such fun , how we laughed, and then Laura, darling Laura, fell in love with Anthony, and at first I minded dreadfully but after a while I told myself it was wicked of me to begrudge her such happiness, so I made up my mind not to be jealous of him, and once I’d done that I realized he was such a nice man, so sweet-natured, the son of a peer but really quite normal, and they got married in 1938 and they were so happy, living in London – which meant I could still see Laura every day – and then she started a baby and she was so thrilled – we were all so thrilled, even me, although I did have a little shudder at first at the thought of having to share her with yet another person – ugh! how contemptible of me, I despised myself for being so selfish! – and then …

‘Disaster, tragedy, DEATH. Why do such things have to happen, why, why, why, I cried for days, I felt as if half myself had been amputated and all the world seemed such a dark place without Laura’s special light – and when I looked back at all the parties, all the champagne and the caviar, I could only think: Death always wins in the end. Oh, what a dreadful moment that was, so black, so brutal, so absolutely terrifying – and suddenly all my party memories seemed so sinister, I seemed to see a death's head grinning at every feast, and that was the moment when I knew parties would never be the same again because I would always be thinking: EAT, DRINK AND BE MERRY FOR TOMORROW WE DIE , and the word DIE would always remind me of horrors past and horrors still to come.

‘Well, when I realized there was no escape from that terrible truth, no escape on the dance-floor, no escape in the saddle at a hunt, no escape among the cocktails at Grosvenor Square, I saw that the only thing to do was not to run away but to stand my ground and try to look Death straight in the face – and once I’d done that I knew I had to live , and when I say live I mean not frittering away time but using time profitably – I knew I had to find some way of life which was real , as real as Death, the toughest reality of all.

‘At that moment the war arrived, and as I told you I thought the answer was to join the Wrens, but that hasn’t worked out as I’d hoped. What I now find – and this is really most peculiar, in fact highly unnerving – is that the person I appear to be in public, the person everyone thinks I am, has nothing to do with my new true self. Everyone thinks – including you, I suspect, Archdeacon dear – that I’m still just a frivolous little piece of nonsense, but that old false self’s smashed to bits now, all the fragments are gone with the wind, and my current great task is to find the right life for my new true self and so make myself into a real person at last – because only when I become a real person, living in harmony with my new true self, will I be able to face that other real person. Death, on equal terms and not be afraid of him any more.

‘Well, I know that all sounds rather turgid, so I’ll spare you further soul-searching by announcing that I believe I see the first step I have to take: I must get married. (I mentioned this when we met, but now I can explain the decision in its proper context.) The plain fact of the matter is (as I more or less implied earlier) that despite emancipation and women voting and being doctors and bus conductresses and so on, our society considers any woman who’s not married is a failure, and I think that if I’m to have a meaningful life and be truly me , I’ve got to be a success. I mean, I wouldn’t be happy otherwise, and how could I live meaningfully if I was miserable?

‘Now Archdeacon dear, I know you were terribly original and said it could be fulfilling to be celibate (by which I assume you meant not only unmarried but chaste although I believe, strictly speaking, to be celibate merely means to be unmarried) but to be brutally frank I don’t think celibacy would suit me at all. I wouldn’t mind doing without sex, which has always seemed to me as if it must be quite dull in comparison with hunting – although darling Laura said it was all rather heavenly – sex, I mean, not hunting – after all, hunting’s really heavenly, no “rather” about it – and … oh bother, I’ve lost my way in this sentence, I’ll have to start again. I wouldn’t mind doing without sex (as I was saying) but I simply couldn’t bear the social stigma of being unmarried. But please don’t think I’m just enslaved by a rampant-pride. You see, the one thing I’m good at is being social, so I feel sure that God’s calling me to be a social success, but of course now I realize it can’t just be the kind of facile self-centred success I used to enjoy when I was my old false self. It must be a meaningful social success – the social success of a wife who strives to help her husband (who of course must be a really worthwhile man) in his dynamic and outstanding career. Then I could feel useful and fulfilled knowing that he was feeling useful and fulfilled and I’m sure we’d both live happily ever after.

‘It’s a glorious vision, isn’t it? Or so I think now, but when it first unfurled itself I confess I did have grave doubts because I knew very well I felt so lukewarm towards men that I couldn’t quite conceive of ever summoning the desire to marry one of them. I did tell you at the dinner-party, didn’t I, about my lukewarm state, but I wasn’t quite honest with you about my reasons for being anti-man. I said I couldn’t bear the way men regarded me as just a pair of legs, but there’s rather more to my antipathy than that. You see, I’m still recovering from being in love with the wrong man for six years. His name’s Roland Carlton-Blake. (If I tell you he likes to be known as Rollo you’ll guess at once what kind of a man he is, so I shall merely confirm your suspicions by telling you that before the war he called himself a gentleman of leisure and other people called him a playboy). Now he’s a soldier in Cairo and as he’s got some sort of desk job I doubt if he sees any fighting, but I can imagine him passing his leisure hours by riding around the pyramids and pretending to be Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik.