Free Ultimate Prizes by Susan Howatch Page B

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 selfs 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 realise 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