Susan Howatch

ABSOLUTE
TRUTHS

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1995

Copyright © Leaftree Ltd 1995

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006496885

Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780007396375

Version: 2017-05-04

From the reviews:

‘A tour de force … Susan Howatch has been likened to a twentieth-century version of Trollope. To make such a comparison is to fail to do her justice’

Church of England. Newspaper

‘Howatch writes thrillers of the heart and mind … everything in a Howatch novel cuts close to the bone and is of vital concern’

New Woman

‘Riveting … extremely moving and often very funny … She is a deft storyteller, and her writing has depth, grace and pace’

Sunday Times

‘She is writing for anyone who can recognise that mysterious gift of the true storyteller’

Daily Telegraph

‘One of the most original novelists writing today’

Cosmopolitan

‘The best female writer in Britain today’

Birmingham Evening Mail

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all my friends among the clergy of the Anglican Communion (and in particular the Church of England) with thanks for their support and encouragement. My special thanks also goes to Alex Wedderspoon for his great sermon preached in Guildford Cathedral in 1987 on the eighth chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, verse twenty-eight.

Contents

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

PRAISE

DEDICATION

PART ONE: TRADITION AND CERTAINTY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

PART TWO: CHAOS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

PART THREE: PARADOX AND AMBIGUITY

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

PART FOUR: REDEMPTION

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

KEEP READING

AUTHOR’S NOTE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BY SUSAN HOWATCH

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PART ONE TRADITION AND CERTAINTY

‘Absolute truth is a very uncomfortable thing when we come into contact with it. For the most part, in daily life, we get along more easily by avoiding it: not by deceit, but by running away …’

REGINALD SOMERSET WARD (1881–1962)

Anglican Priest and Spiritual Director

To Jerusalem

ONE

‘No doubt it would be more suitable for a theologian to be absolutely pickled in devout reflection and immune from all external influences; but wrap ourselves round as we may in the cocoon of ecclesiastical cobwebs, we cannot altogether seal ourselves off from the surrounding atmosphere.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968

Said or Sung

I

What can be more devastating than a catastrophe which arrives out of the blue?

During the course of my life I have suffered three catastrophes, but the first two can be classified as predictable: my crisis in 1937 was preceded by a period of increasingly erratic behaviour, and my capture by the Germans in 1942 could have been prophesied by any pessimist who knew I had volunteered on the outbreak of war to be an army chaplain. But the disaster of 1965 walloped me without warning.

Ten years have now passed since 1965, but the other day as I embarked on my daily journey through the Deaths Column of The Times, I saw that my old adversary had died and at once I was recalling with great clarity that desperate year in that anarchic decade when he and I had fought our final battle in the shadow of Starbridge Cathedral.

‘AYSGARTH, Norman Neville (“Stephen”),’ I read. ‘Beloved husband of Dido and devoted father of …’ But I failed to read the list of offspring. I felt too bereaved. How strange it is that the further one journeys through life the more likely one becomes to mourn the loss of old enemies almost as much as the loss of old friends! The divisions of the past seem unimportant; we become unified by the shrinking of the future.

‘Oh God!’ said my wife, glancing across the breakfast table and seeing my expression. ‘Who’s died now?’

Having answered her question I turned from the small entry in the Deaths Column to the many inches of unremitting praise on the obituary page. Did I approve of this fulsome enactment of the cliché Nil nisi bonum de mortuis est? Summoning all my Christian charity I told myself I did. I was, after all, a retired bishop of the Church of England and supposed to radiate Christian charity as lavishly as the fountains of Trafalgar Square spout water. However, I did think that the allocation of three half-columns to this former Dean of Starbridge was a trifle generous. Two would have been quite sufficient.

‘What a whitewash!’ commented my wife after she had skimmed through this paean. ‘When I think back to 1965 …’

I thought of 1965, the year of my third catastrophe, the year Aysgarth and I had fought to the finish. Bishops and deans, of course, are not supposed to fight at all. Indeed as senior churchmen they are required to be either holy or perfect English gentlemen or, preferably, both.

How we all hanker after ideals, after certainties – and after absolute truths – which will provide us with security as we struggle to survive in the ambiguous, cloudy, chaotic world which surrounds us! Moreover, although in a rapidly changing society ideals may appear to be swept away by a rising tide of cynicism, the experience of the past demonstrates that people will continue to hunger for those ideals, even when absolute truths are no longer in fashion.

Society was certainly changing with great speed in the 1960s, and when I was a bishop I became famous for defending tradition at a time when all traditions were under attack. I had two heroes: St Augustine, who had proclaimed the absolute truths till the end, even as the barbarians advanced on his city, and St Athanasius, the bishop famous for being so resolutely contra mundum, against the world, as he fought heresy to the last ditch. By 1965 I had decided that I, like my two heroes, was being obliged to endure a dissolute, demoralised, disordered society, and that my duty was to fight tooth and nail against decadence. A fighting bishop unfortunately has little chance to lead a quiet life, but I decided that was the price I had to pay in order to preserve my ideals.

In the 1960s there were three years which now stand out in my memory. The first was 1963, when I clashed with Aysgarth over that pornographic sculpture which he commissioned for the Cathedral churchyard; it was the year Bishop John Robinson wrote his bestseller Honest to God, a book which rocked the Church to its foundations, and the year I wrote in rebuttal A Modern Heresy for Modern Man. That was when I ceased to be merely a conservative bishop, underlining the importance of preserving the accumulated wisdom from the past, and became a fighting bishop contra mundum. The second year which I remember vividly is 1968. That was the year young Nicholas Darrow, my spiritual director’s son, was finally ordained after what I suspected was a very shady interval in his private life. It was also the year my son Charley became engaged and my son Michael was married, yet despite these family milestones 1965 remains the year which is most clearly etched in my memory. Not 1963. Not 1968. But 1965.

Let me now describe the man I was before my third catastrophe felled me, the catastrophe which arrived out of the blue. I had been the Bishop of Starbridge for eight years and despite a tentative start I had become highly successful. My sons were both doing well in their chosen careers, and although in their different ways they still worried me, I had come to the conclusion that as a parent I must have been doing something right; at the very least I felt I deserved a medal for paternal endurance. I was on happier ground when I considered my marriage, now almost twenty-eight years old and a perfect partnership.

In short, I was not ill-pleased with my life, and stimulated by this benign opinion of myself I travelled constantly around my ecclesiastical fiefdom, spoke forcefully on education in the House of Lords, held forth with confidence on television discussion programmes, ruled various committees with an iron hand and terrorised the lily-livered liberals of the Church Assembly. I also had sufficient zest to maintain my prowess on the golf course and enjoy my wife’s company on the days off which she so zealously preserved for me amidst the roaring cataract of my engagements. Occasionally I felt no older than forty-five. On my bad days I felt about fifty-nine. On average I felt somewhere in my early fifties. In fact I was as old as the century, but who cared? I was fit, busy, respected, pampered and privileged. Frequently and conscientiously I thanked God for the outstanding good fortune which enabled me to serve him as he required – and what he required, I had no doubt, was that I should fight slipshod thinking by defending the faith in a manner which was tough-minded and intellectually rigorous. St Augustine and St Athanasius, I often told myself, would have been proud of me.

I was proud of me, although of course I had far too much spiritual savoir-faire to do other than shove this secret opinion of myself to the very back of my mind. By 1965 I was too preoccupied by my current battles to waste much time visualising my future obituary in The Times, but on those rare moments when I paused to picture my posthumous eminence, I saw long, long columns of very dense newsprint.

God stood by and watched me for some time. Then in 1965 he saw the chance to act, and seizing me by the scruff of the neck he began to shake me loose from the suffocating folds of my self-satisfaction, my arrogance and my pride.

II

In order to convey the impact of the catastrophe, I must now describe what was going on in my life as I steamed smoothly forward to the abyss.

1965 was little over a month old, and we were all recovering from the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, an event which had temporarily united in grief the members of our increasingly frivolous and fragmented society. For people of my generation it seemed that one of the strongest ropes tethering us to the past had been severed, and ’the old order changeth, yielding place to new’ was a comment constantly in my thoughts at the time. Watching that winter funeral on television I shuddered at the thought of the inevitably apocalyptic future.

However, I had little time to contemplate apocalypses. As one of the Church’s experts on education, I was required to worry about the government’s plans to scrap the 11-plus examination and establish comprehensive schools; I was planning to make a speech on the subject in the Church Assembly later that month, and I was also framing a speech for the House of Lords about curbing hooliganism by restricting the hours of coffee-bars. My involvement in current events of this nature required in addition that I brooded on racism – or, as it was called in those days, racialism – and marvelled at the state of a society which would permit a play entitled You’ll Come To Love Your Sperm-Count to be not only performed in public but actually reviewed by an esteemed magazine.

I remember I had begun to think about my Lent sermons but Easter was late that year, Good Friday falling on the sixteenth of April, so the sermons had not yet been written. In my spare time I was working on a book about Hippolytus, that early Christian writer whose battles against the sexually lax Bishop Callistus had resounded throughout the Roman Empire; at the beginning of my academic career I had made a name for myself by specialising in the conflicts of the Early Church, and before my accession to the bishopric I had been Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

At this point may I just rebut two of the snide criticisms which my enemies used to hurl at me? (Unfortunately by 1965 my fighting style had earned me many enemies.) The first was that academics are unsuited to any position of importance in what is fondly called ‘the real world’. According to this belief, which is so typical of the British vice of despising intellectuals, academic theologians are incapable of preaching the faith in words of one syllable to the proletariat, but this is just crypto-Marxist hogwash. I knew exactly what the proletariat wanted to hear. They wanted to hear certainties, and whether those certainties were expressed in monosyllables or polysyllables was immaterial. Naturally I would not have dreamed of burdening the uneducated with fascinating theological speculation; that sort of discourse has to be left to those who have the aptitude and training to comprehend it. Would one expect a beginner at the piano to play Mozart? Of course not! A beginner must learn by absorbing simple exercises. This fact does not mean that the beginner is incapable of intuitively grasping the wonder and mystery of music. It merely means he has to take much of the theory on trust from those who have devoted their lives to studying it.

Having demolished the idea that I am incapable of communicating with uneducated people, let me go on to rebut the second snide criticism hurled at me during my bishopric. It was alleged that as I had spent most of my career in an ivory tower I was ill-equipped for pastoral work. What nonsense! The problems of undergraduates sharpen any clergyman’s pastoral skills, and besides, my years as an army chaplain had given me a breadth of experience which I would never have acquired in ordinary parish work.

I have to confess that I have never actually done any ordinary parish work. The training of priests was more haphazard in my youth, and if one had the right connections one could sidestep hurdles which today are de rigueur. In my case Archbishop Lang had taken an interest in me, and I had spent the opening years of my career as one of his chaplains before accepting the head-mastership of a minor public school at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven. Not surprisingly this latter move had proved to be a mistake, but even before I returned to Cambridge to resume my career as a theologian, I felt that an appointment to a parish was merely something which happened to other people.

I admit I did worry from time to time in the 1930s about this significant omission from my curriculum vitae, but always I came to the conclusion that since my path had crossed so providentially with Archbishop Lang’s it would have been wrong to spurn the opportunities which in consequence came my way. I was still reasoning along these lines in the 1950s when I told myself it would have been wrong to spurn a bishopric merely because I had sufficient brains to flourish among the ivory towers of Cambridge. (Indeed if more bishops had more brains, the pronouncements from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords in the 1960s might have been far more worthy of attention.)

I did not turn my back on my academic work when I accepted the bishopric. Indeed as I toiled away in Starbridge I soon felt I needed regular divertissements to cheer me up, and this was why I was nearly always writing some book or other during my spare time. I dictated these books to a succession of most attractive part-time secretaries, all under thirty. In 1965 my part-time secretary was Sally, the daughter of my henchman the Archdeacon of Starbridge, and I much enjoyed dictating the fruits of my researches to such a glamorous young woman. It made a welcome change from dictating letters on diocesan affairs to my full-time secretary Miss Peabody who, although matchlessly efficient, was hardly the last word in glamour. My wife quite understood that I needed a break from Miss Peabody occasionally, and always went to great trouble to recruit exactly the right part-time secretary to brighten my off-duty hours.

My wife and Miss Peabody kept me organised. I had two chaplains, one a priest who handled all the ecclesiastical business and one a layman who acted as a liaison officer with the secular world, but Miss Peabody guarded my appointments diary and this privilege gave her a certain amount of power over the two young men. I classed this arrangement as prudent. Chaplains can become power-mad with very little encouragement, but Miss Peabody ensured that all such delusions of grandeur were stillborn. Miss Peabody also supervised the typist, recently hired to help her with the increased volume of secretarial work, and organised the bookkeeping.

In addition I employed a cook-housekeeper, who lived out, and a daily cleaner. A gardener appeared occasionally to mow the lawns and prune any vegetation which acquired an undisciplined appearance. From this list of personnel it can be correctly deduced that Starbridge was one of the premier bishoprics, but if I had not had a private income to supplement my episcopal salary I might have found my financial circumstances tiresome, and we were certainly a long way from those halcyon days before the war when my predecessors had lived in considerable splendour. Alex Jardine, for instance, had kept twelve indoor servants, two gardeners and a chauffeur when he had been bishop in the 1930s. He had also lived in the old episcopal palace, now occupied by the Choir School, but despite the loss of the palace I could hardly claim I was uncomfortably housed. My home was a handsome Georgian building called the South Canonry which also stood within Starbridge’s huge walled Close, and from the upstairs windows we could look across the Choir School’s playing-field to the tower and spire of the Cathedral.

‘I’m glad the trees hide the palace from us,’ Lyle had said on our arrival at the South Canonry in 1957. She had lived at the palace before the war as the paid companion of Bishop Jardine’s wife, and the experience had not always been a happy one.

Lyle was my wife, and I must now describe just how important she was to me by 1965. Before the war people had joked that she ran the diocese for Jardine as well as his palace, and I sometimes thought she could have run the diocese for me. She was the perfect wife for a bishop. She solved all household problems. She appeared in church regularly. She excelled in charity work. She controlled numerous committees. She controlled the chaplains. She even controlled Miss Peabody. She monitored the wives of the diocesan clergy so skilfully that I knew about any marriage trouble among my priests almost before they were aware of it themselves. She also read the Church newspapers to keep me informed of any serpentine twist of Church politics which I might have been too busy to notice.

In addition she ensured that I had everything I needed: clean shirts, socks, shoes, every item of my uniform – all appeared as if by magic whenever they were required. Bottles of my favourite whisky and sherry never failed to be present on the sideboard. Cigarettes were always in my cigarette-case. I was like an expensive car tended by a devoted mechanic. I purred along as effortlessly as a well-tuned Rolls-Royce.

The one matter which Lyle never organised for me was my Creator. ‘You deal with God,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with everything else.’ I did talk to her about God, particularly when I needed to let off steam about the intellectually sloppy antics of various liberal-radical churchmen, but although she listened with sympathy she seldom said more than: ‘Yes, darling,’ or: ‘What a bore for you!’ Once I could not resist saying to her: ‘I sometimes feel troubled that you never want to discuss your faith with me,’ but she merely answered: ‘What’s there to discuss? I’m not an intellectual.’

The truth was that Lyle was no fool, but a skimpy education had given her an inferiority complex about intellectual matters with the result that she always played down the knowledge of Christianity which she had acquired through her copious reading. I knew her faith was deep, but I knew too that she would never be one of those clerical wives who gave talks on such subjects as ‘Faith in Family Life’. Her most successful talk to the Mothers’ Union was entitled: ‘How to Survive Small Children’, and faith was barely mentioned at all.

But by 1965 Lyle had become profoundly interested in prayer. She had even formed a prayer-group composed entirely of women, a move which I found remarkable because in the past she had seldom had much time for her own sex. My spiritual director was most intrigued and said the formation of the group was a great step forward for Lyle. I was equally intrigued and wanted to ask questions, but since my advice was never sought I realised my task was merely to provide tacit support. I did enquire in the beginning what had triggered this new interest but Lyle only said in an offhand voice: ‘It was my involvement with Venetia. When I had that lunch with her in London I realised there was nothing more I could do except pray for her,’ and I saw at once it would be tactful not to prolong the conversation. Venetia, a former part-time secretary of mine, had been Lyle’s protégée. I had seen that Lyle was becoming too involved, regarding the girl as the daughter we had never had, and I had several times been tempted to utter a word of warning, but in the end I had kept quiet, preferring to rely on the probability that Lyle’s hard-headed common sense would eventually triumph. Such pseudo-parental relationships often dissolve unhappily when one party fails to fulfil the psychological needs of the other, and it had been obvious to me that Venetia, a muddled, unhappy young woman, had been looking not for a second mother but for a second father, a quest which had had disastrous consequences. By 1965 she had moved out of our lives, but the prayer-group, her unexpected legacy to Lyle, was flourishing.

Our younger son Michael had commented during the Christmas of 1964: ‘The prayer-group’s Mum doing her own thing,’ but our other son, Charley, had said with his customary lack of tart: ‘Cynical types don’t usually become mystical – I hope she’s not going nuts.’ I gave this remark the robust dismissal it deserved, but it did underline to me how uncharacteristic this new deep interest in prayer was. I also had to admit to myself that although Charley had been tactless in describing Lyle as cynical, he had not been incorrect. ‘I always believe the worst,’ Lyle would say, ‘because the worst is usually true’ – a philosophy which was repugnant to me, but no matter how often I was tempted to criticise this attitude, I always remembered her past and abstained. A disastrous love affair in the 1930s had left her emotionally scarred. In the circumstances I felt it was a wonder she had any faith left at all.

And now, having disclosed the disastrous love affair which Lyle had endured, I must disclose just how far we were from being a conventional ecclesiastical family. Lyle had been pregnant at the time of our marriage, and our elder son was not, biologically, my son at all.

III

I hate to speak of this skeleton in the cupboard, but as I am engaged in painting a picture of my career, marriage and family life in order to set the scene for 1965, I can hardly leave a large central section of the canvas unpainted. If I did, the events of 1965 would be to a large extent incomprehensible.

So let me now turn, with great reluctance, to the skeleton.

We had a code-name for this lover who had nearly destroyed Lyle. It was Samson, a man ruined by his involvement with the wrong woman. I had chosen this sobriquet in a rush triggered by my loathing of the entire subject and had only afterwards reflected that the choice automatically cast Lyle as Delilah, a lady who has never received a good press. However, when I had voiced my misgivings Lyle had said bleakly: ‘And what right have I to receive a good press?’ – a question which had taken me back to the harrowing early days of our marriage when she had been recovering from the most destructive aspects of the affair.

Lyle was my second wife. I had been married for three years in my twenties to a pleasant, innocent girl called Jane whom nowadays I could recall with only the smallest twinge of anguish. We had been fond of each other but unsuited, and our difficulties had been unresolved at the time of her death in a car crash. Fortunately I had managed to come to terms with this tragedy before I journeyed again to the altar in 1937, but although I realised Lyle was curious to know more about her predecessor I felt no desire to pour forth a torrent of information. Perhaps it was fortunate that back in 1937 Lyle was far too bound up with her own unhappy past to spare much time to speculate about mine.

Lyle’s affair with Samson had been conducted with fanatical secrecy because he had been not only a married man but a distinguished married man. In fact – and I hate to admit this but I do need to explain why he was so vulnerable to scandal – he was a clergyman. Of course clerical failures have always existed and of course one must do one’s Christian best to be charitable to those who break the rules, let the side down and drag the Church through the mud, but I have to confess that Samson reduced my stock of Christian charity to an all-time low. I knew I had to forgive him for the damage he had inflicted on Lyle, but unfortunately forgiveness cannot be turned on like a supply of hot water from a well-stoked boiler, and this particular act of forgiveness had remained frozen in the pipes of my mind for some time.

It was not until I returned from the war that I managed to forgive him. At least I assumed I had forgiven him because I realised I had reached the point where I was seldom troubled by his memory. By that time he was not merely tucked away behind a pseudonym, categorised theologically as a sinner who had to be forgiven and thereby rendered as harmless as an exhibit in a museum; he was also dead, a fact which meant the affair with Lyle could never be resurrected. Occasionally his name – his real name – came up in ecclesiastical circles, but not too often, and as the 1940s drew to a close I realised I had consigned him to the compartment in my mind which housed other obsolete images from the previous decade: Edward VIII abdicating the throne, Jack Buchanan singing, Harold Larwood bowling and Shirley Temple dancing. The point about these people, as I told my spiritual director, was that I could think of them without pain; therefore, I reasoned, if I had relegated Samson to this harmless group, I must on some deep psychological level have forgiven him. The hallmark of forgiveness is that it enables the forgiver to live painlessly with the forgiven.

Certainly by 1965 I was satisfied that I had not only forgiven Samson but managed to convert his malign memory into a benign force in my ministry. Indeed it was arguable that my reputation as a bishop tough on sexual sin was the direct result of being obliged to pick up the pieces after a catastrophic adulterous liaison. The 1960s might have been the age of the permissive society, but thanks to my encounter with Samson at Starbridge in 1937 I was going to preach against immorality until I dropped dead or my tongue fell out. After all I had endured, nursing Lyle back to a normal life, no one could have expected me to endorse promiscuity – but no one still alive knew now what I had endured in the early days of my marriage, no one except Lyle herself and my spiritual director, Jon Darrow.

I had had no trouble forgiving Lyle herself for this affair which had already run into difficulties by the time I met her. It is easy to feel compassion for someone one loves, particularly when that someone is emotionally wrecked and verging on the suicidal. What I did find hard to endure was the fact that after we were married she could not love me as much as I loved her. This gradual realisation that she was still far more bound up with Samson than she was willing to admit became so hard for me to bear that I was more than willing to escape from my marriage once the war came. Naturally I told everyone that I was volunteering to be an army chaplain because I wanted to have a hand in Hitler’s defeat – and this was no lie – but the whole truth was rather less palatable. Nowadays, I dare say, I would have wound up in the divorce court. So much for the permissive society! Young people refuse to acknowledge that there can be rewards for enduring the dark days of a marriage; happiness is always supposed to be instantaneous and any deferral is regarded as intolerable. Was there ever such a flight from reality? No wonder the young resort to drugs to ease their disorientation! They have never been taught to face reality and endure it – or in other words, they have never been taught how to survive. The permissive society is a phantom utopia which promises perfect freedom and yet has all its adherents in chains on Death Row.

The mention of chains reminds me of the three years I spent as a prisoner of war. That experience certainly taught me some lessons about how to survive adversity, and when I returned home in 1945 I found the rewards of my long endurance were about to begin. Samson was dead, Lyle was at last ready to be devoted to me and a new era in my marriage had dawned. With relief I prepared to live happily ever after, but did I? No.

I had had a tough time as a prisoner and I returned home with my health damaged. I did manage to reconsummate the marriage, but our efforts to produce another baby failed and tests revealed my poor health was to blame, a diagnosis which did nothing for either my marriage or my self-esteem. Now it was Lyle who endured, Lyle who battled on, Lyle who was not loved as she should have been. She was saved from despair by the doctors’ belief that I would make a full recovery, but I languished, suffering a reaction from my long ordeal and reduced to apathy by the well-known syndrome of survivor’s guilt. Finally an old friend of mine, a doctor called Alan Romaine, took me aside and said: ‘You will get better, Charles, but you’ve got to work at recovery – it’s no good just sitting back and waiting for it to happen.’ He gave me a diet-sheet, listing all the unrationed, nutritious foods I could eat, and he dragooned me into taking up golf again, but I think I was eventually cured not so much by exercise and good nutrition as by his care and compassion.

Did Lyle and I then have our much-wanted third child and live happily ever after? No. Lyle was by this time approaching the menopause and our daughter continued to exist only in our imaginations. Lyle became increasingly upset. I became increasingly upset. Meanwhile the two boys were big enough to be perpetually fighting, yelling and smashing everything in sight. The marriage limped on.

The reward for our endurance of this apparently endless ordeal finally arrived when Michael followed Charley to prep school and Lyle and I found ourselves on our own for two-thirds of the year. It was then that the terrible truth dawned: we were happiest as a childless couple.

I was so shocked by this revelation, contrary as it was to all the modern Christian thinking on family life, that for a long while I found myself unable to speak of it, even to Lyle, but eventually I forced myself to discuss the matter with my spiritual director.

Jon reminded me that family life had not always been a Christian ideal. He also suggested that my duty was to be myself, Charles Ashworth, not some ecclesiastical robot who mindlessly toed the fashionable Church line on domestic matters.

I felt obliged to say: ‘But I can hardly preach on the joys of being a childless couple!’

‘You could preach on the heroism of those who feel called to bring up other people’s children.’

I denied being a hero, but when Jon answered: ‘You are to Charley,’ I was comforted. Charley’s idolising of me ranked alongside Lyle’s devotion as my reward for all I had had to endure in the early years of marriage. Moreover this hero-worship by my adopted son went a long way towards compensating me for the difficulties I experienced with my real son, Michael.

And now, having exposed the less palatable side of my marriage, I must nerve myself to describe the effect on my sons of the skeleton in the family closet. I need to explain why and how they became the young men they were at that time in February 1965, when we were all steaming forward towards the abyss.

IV

Of course I thought of Charley as my son. Of course I did. I had married Lyle in full knowledge of the fact that he already existed as a foetus, and I had accepted full responsibility for him. I had brought him up. I had made him what he was. He was mine.

Yet he was not mine. He was unlike me both physically and temperamentally. I understood early on in his life why many adopting parents go to immense trouble to find a child who bears some chance resemblance to them. They need to forget there are no shared genes. A benign forgetfulness makes life easier, particularly when the child has been fathered by one’s wife’s former lover. Even after I believed Samson to be forgiven, living harmlessly in the nostalgia drawer of my memory alongside Edward VIII, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple, I could have done without the daily reminders of that past trauma, but I taught myself to overlook Charley’s resemblance to Samson and see instead only his resemblance to Lyle.

The bright side of Charley’s inheritance lay in the fact that he possessed Samson’s first-class brain. This was a great delight to me, particularly when Charley became old enough to study theology, and it made us far more compatible than we had been during his childhood when his volatile temperament had persistently grated on my nerves.

It had grated on Lyle’s nerves too. Lyle was not naturally gifted at motherhood, and although she loved the boys she found it difficult to manage them when they were young. This lack of management meant the boys became hard work for anyone determined to become a conscientious parent – but I have no wish to blame Lyle for this state of affairs; after all, life was hard for her during the war, particularly during those years when I was a prisoner, and no doubt she was not alone in finding it difficult to be the sole parent of a family. If I appear to criticise her it is only because I need to explain why, when I returned home after the war, I soon discovered that parenthood was no picnic. Probably one of the reasons why we both became so keen to celebrate the new beginning of our marriage by producing a daughter was the belief – almost certainly misguided – that a little girl would be all sweetness and light, a compensation for the barbarity of our sons.

Another fact which exacerbated our complex family situation was that Lyle was ill-at-ease with Charley. No doubt all manner of guilty feelings were at work below the surface of her mind, but the result was that she tended to escape from this unsatisfactory relationship by idolising Michael. Charley resented this behaviour and to prevent him being hurt I found myself paying him special attention. This in turn upset Michael, who became abnormally demanding. Again, I have no wish to blame Lyle for triggering these emotional disorders; she could not help feeling guilty about Samson and muddled about Charley, but nonetheless the situation was one which even the most gifted of fathers would have found challenging.

The final fact which aggravated our troubles was no one’s fault at all and can only be attributed to the lottery of generics. Michael resembled me physically but his intellect was dissimilar to mine, and the older he grew the more incomprehensible he became to me. It was not that he was stupid. He was just as clever as Lyle, but as he grew older we found we had nothing in common but a fondness for cricket and rugger. I minded this more than I should have done, and when he embarked on a phase, common among the sons of clergymen, of rejecting religion, I minded fiercely. Meanwhile nimble-witted, intellectually stimulating, devoutly religious Charley was ever ready to compensate me for Michael’s shortcomings. Was it surprising that I welcomed this development? No. But Michael became jealous. He began to misbehave, partly to grab my attention and partly to pay me back for favouring the cuckoo in the nest. Michael thought he should come first. I greatly regretted that he knew Charley was only his half-brother, but once Charley had been told about Samson it had proved impossible to keep Michael in ignorance.

I knew all adoption agencies recommended that an adopted child should be told the truth at an early age, but I could never bring myself to tell Charley. I had convinced myself that the truth, an example of extreme clerical failure, was too unedifying to be divulged to a child, but I knew that eventually I would have to speak out and I knew exactly when that moment would come. Samson had left Charley his library, the gift to take effect on Charley’s eighteenth birthday. Samson’s widow was still alive, so Charley did not inherit the money until later, but the books were in storage, waiting to be claimed. Possibly I could have explained away this legacy as the generous gesture of a childless old man, but there was a letter. I knew there was a letter because Samson’s solicitor had spoken of it; he was keeping it in his firm’s safe for presentation along with the storage papers. Lyle said I had to get hold of the letter and give it to Charley myself. The solicitor hesitated, but after all, we were a clerical couple who could be trusted to behave properly. The letter arrived.

‘Steam it open,’ said Lyle, confounding his expectations.

We were at Cambridge at the time. It was 1956, the year before I was offered the Starbridge bishopric, and I was still the Lyttelton Professor of Divinity. Charley was away at school but due home on a weekend exeat in order to celebrate his birthday. We were breakfasting in the kitchen when the letter arrived. I remember feeling sick at the sight of Samson’s writing on the envelope, and this reaction startled me. A communication from Edward VIII, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood or Shirley Temple would never have induced feelings of nausea.

Meanwhile Lyle had refilled the kettle and was boiling some more water for the steaming operation.

I did manage to say strongly: ‘It’s quite unthinkable that I should steam open this letter,’ but Lyle just said: ‘If you won’t I will,’ and removed the letter from my hands. I was then told that after all I had done for Charley I had a right to know the contents, and somehow I found myself unable to argue convincingly to the contrary. Nausea is not conducive to skilled debate. Neither is fear, and at that point I was very afraid that my relationship with Charley – that just reward for my past suffering – would be damaged beyond repair by this potentially devastating assault from the past.

Lyle read the letter and wept.

I said: ‘It’s quite unthinkable that I should read a single word of it.’ But I did. I read one word. And another. And after that I gave up trying to put the letter down. As I read I automatically moved closer to the sink in case I was overcome with the need to vomit.

‘It’s all about how wonderful you are,’ said Lyle, unable to find a handkerchief and snuffling into a tea-towel.

‘How very embarrassing.’ This traditional public-school response to any situation which flouted the British tradition of emotional understatement was utterly inadequate but no other phrase sprang to mind at such an agonising moment. The grave, simple, dignified sentences skimmed past my eyes and streamed through my defences so that in the end I was incapable of uttering a word. I could only think: this is a very great letter from a very Christian man. But I had no idea what to make of this thought. I could not cope with it. Vilely upset I reached the signature at the bottom of the last page, dropped the letter on the draining-board and waited by the sink for the vomiting to commence, but nothing happened.

‘Well, you don’t have to worry, do you?’ I heard Lyle say at last. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

I suddenly realised that this was true. Weak with relief I picked up the letter and read it again. Samson had made no paternal claims. My role in Charley’s life was affirmed, not undermined. The writer assumed all responsibility for the past tragedy and said he quite accepted that he had been unfit to play any part in Charley’s upbringing, but he still hoped that Charley would accept the books and later the money as a gift. They came with no obligation to respect the donor. The writer realised he had no right to demand any benign response. He wanted above all to stress how immensely grateful and happy he was that Charley should have been brought up by …

I stopped reading, folding the letter carefully and put it back in the envelope. I did not want his praise. I did not want him offering Charley the kind of selfless love which expected nothing in return. And above all else I did not want him making my wife cry and reminding us both unbearably of the past.

‘Very nice,’ I said. ‘Very sporting of him not to upset the applecart.’ The dreadful middle-class banalities sounded hideously false but at least they were safe. The next moment I said: ‘He’s got no business coming back like this. He should stay locked up in the 1930s where he belongs.’ That was not safe at all. That was a most dangerous thing to say, indicative of some convoluted state which could never be allowed to see the light of day, but Lyle was coming to my rescue, Lyle was saying: ‘We’ll lock him up again. Once all this is over we’ll put him back in the 1930s where he belongs.’

And that was that.

Or was it?

V

I telephoned my spiritual director. In 1956 Jon had yet to become the recluse who refused to have a telephone in his home.

‘It occurred to me,’ I said, ‘that there’s a sound moral argument for destroying the letter. For the good of the family – and to save Charley distress –’

‘This is a very bad line,’ said Jon. ‘Could you say all that again? I don’t think I can possibly have heard you correctly.’

A long silence followed before I said: ‘I’m in such a state I can’t think straight. What on earth am I going to say to Charley?’

‘Believe me, I do understand how hard it will be for you to master all your ambivalent feelings.’

‘What ambivalent feelings?’

A second silence ensued. At last I said: ‘I don’t feel ambivalent towards Charley. He’s my reward now for responding to that back-breaking call from God to bring him up. I’m devoted to Charley. I’m proud of him.’

‘Then trust him to work out what he owes and to whom.’

‘But how much of the truth should I tell him?’

Jon said nothing.

‘Must I tell the whole truth?’ I said. The absolute truth?’

‘I’m sure you know at heart what the answers to all those questions are, Charles.’

I put down the receiver.

VI

Of course I forgot every word of my set speech. I discovered that my most important need was to keep talking – to impart the same information in a variety of different ways so that the sheer brutality of the truth was cocooned and smothered in excess verbiage. While I was speaking I was conscious that Charley, who was small and slim and looked younger than his eighteen years, was becoming smaller and slimmer, almost as if he were returning to the childhood he had so recently left. I half-thought he would interrupt me – in the end I was yearning for him to interrupt me and express all the normal emotions of incredulity, amazement and horror – but he said nothing. It was as if his volatile temperament had been frozen by the blast of an icy wind. Pale and still, he regarded me blankly with his lambent, amber eyes.

‘… and naturally you’ll want to know more about him. That’s why –’ I heard the lie coming but found myself powerless to stop it ‘– I’m glad he’s written you this letter.’ I managed to hold out the envelope with a steady hand. ‘Let him speak for himself,’ I said, ‘and then I’ll answer all your questions as truthfully as I can.’

Despite this dubious conclusion I believe in retrospect that my speech was very far from disastrous. I had reassured Charley about my feelings for him; I had said nothing adverse about Samson, and I had paved the way for the necessary question-and-answer session. However unfortunately Charley was not at that moment interested in Samson. He was much too busy trying to digest the fact that his parents had spent eighteen years deceiving him about a fundamental aspect of his identity.

Ignoring the letter which I was holding out to him he said in a voice which shook: ‘I should have been told from the beginning.’

At once I tried to adjust my approach. ‘I’m very sorry. I assure you we did consider it. But the trouble was –’

‘How could you have allowed me to believe a lie? You! The man who always preaches the importance of truth!’

‘I know how you must feel – I know how it must look – but –’

‘I think you and Mum have behaved absolutely disgustingly and I just want to go away and be sick!’

That concluded the conversation. Scarlet with emotion he rushed upstairs to his bedroom where he locked the door and refused to speak to either of us. Eventually Lyle lost her nerve and shouted: ‘I don’t care how vile you are to me but don’t you dare be vile to Charles after all he’s done for you!’ but when even this unwise reproof produced no response she turned to me and demanded, tears streaming down her face: ‘Where’s the letter? He’s got to read it.’

That was when I realised this harrowing scene must have been clearly visualised by Samson who had then done all he could to give us a helping hand. Or in other words, the clerical failure had behaved like a wise, compassionate priest, setting his own feelings aside in order to try to ensure the survival of the family, whereas I … But I could not quite work out how I had behaved. I only knew that I had always acted towards Charley with the very best of intentions.

‘The kind that pave the road to hell,’ muttered Lyle, shoving Samson’s letter under the locked bedroom door.

More agonising minutes passed. We went away. We waited. We returned. We banged futilely on the panels. We took it in turns to beg him to let us in. At last, egged on by Lyle and feeling nearly demented with anxiety, I fetched a screwdriver, opened up the lock and forced my way into the room. It was empty. Charley had made a rope of sheets and escaped through the window. The letter was lying unopened on the floor.

No mere words could describe the sheer horror of the next few hours, so I shall merely record our ordeal as tersely as possible. First of all I hauled up the sheets before they could be spotted by our neighbours. Then we began our search, but enquiries at the station and bus terminal proved fruitless.

At one stage I was in such despair that I said, ‘Supposing he’s tried to kill himself by jumping into the Cam?’ but Lyle, hiding her terror behind an ice-cool façade, answered: ‘If he leapt into the river he’d make damn sure there were plenty of people around to haul him out.’

We returned home to sweat blood and plot our next move, but we could think of nothing to do except wait by the telephone. It seemed too soon to notify the police. However as the hours passed and no contrite call came I was obliged to notify the headmaster that Charley would not be returning to school that evening. I was tempted to lie by saying he was ill, but I knew I had to tell a story which bore some resemblance to the truth in case the absence lasted some time, so I said that Charley had run away after a family disagreement. When the headmaster had recovered from his astonishment he was so kind that I had difficulty in sustaining the conversation, but I did say I would take his advice to call the police.

More appalling conversations followed. The policemen clearly felt they were being troubled unnecessarily and said they were sure Charley would turn up, probably sooner rather than later. No sooner had they departed than a neighbour dropped in, saw the uneaten birthday cake in the kitchen and demanded an explanation. The grapevine began to hum. The local paper got hold of the story. Garish headlines screamed: ‘PROFESSOR’S SON VANISHES, SUICIDE OR SNATCH?’ We fobbed off our friends’ enthralled enquiries by saying we needed to keep the telephone line open, but some of them still insisted on calling in to commiserate with us. The schadenfreude generated by a clergyman’s son who goes off the rails is massive indeed.

I was just thinking how very pleasant it would be to spend a week in the nearest mental hospital, far from this repulsively madding crowd, when Jon rang from his home near Starbridge and said: ‘He’s here. He’s unharmed. Be sure you bring the letter when you come to fetch him.’

I drove through the night with the letter in my breast pocket, and when I reached Jon’s home the next morning I found Charley sitting on the steps of the porch as he waited for me. Halting the car I jumped out and rushed over to him and when he muttered: ‘You didn’t have to drive through the night,’ I shouted: ‘What the hell else did you expect me to do?’ – not the mildest of replies, but I was almost passing out with relief. At that point Charley broke down and began to whimper, but I grabbed him and held him so tightly that both of us were unable to do more than struggle for breath. Eventually Jon appeared and announced, rather in the manner of a tactful butler, that breakfast was available in the dining-room.

When Charley and I were alone together he told me he had completed the long journey by walking and by thumbing lifts. Having little money he had slept under hedges and survived on a diet of Mars bars. ‘The whole journey was hell,’ he concluded morosely, ‘but I wanted to see Father Darrow. I thought he’d know about everything and I’m sure he does, but he said you could explain it all better than he could.’ He hesitated but added: ‘He also said I should read the letter because letters from the dead should be treated with respect.’

I handed over the letter. Charley pocketed it and embarked upon his breakfast. He ate two fried eggs, a sausage, three rashers of bacon and a fried tomato while I toyed with half a piece of toast. Eventually I withdrew to the cloakroom where I at last achieved my ambition to vomit. On my departure from the dining-room I had heard the faint noise of tearing paper as Charley at once opened the envelope.

When I rejoined him I found that the envelope had disappeared.

Charley’s careful comment was: ‘That was an interesting letter. I might let you read it one day.’

Not surprisingly, I found myself unable to reply.

‘I was thinking,’ said Charley, ‘what a useful thing it was that Mum took me to see him – I mean him – back in 1945 when I was old enough to remember him properly. If I hadn’t seen him, I might always have wondered what he was like.’

I managed to agree that this was quite possible.

‘He seemed to like you a lot,’ said Charley at last. ‘Of course he took the blame for everything, and that was right, wasn’t it? You were the hero of the story and he was … well, what was he exactly? I can’t quite make him out. Was he a villain? Or a fool? Or a tragic figure felled by hubris like Charles Stewart Parnell? Or …’ His voice trailed away.

The pause lengthened.

Eventually Charley said in a rush: ‘Of course if you’d rather I didn’t ask any questions –’

‘But of course you must ask questions!’ I said, finally summoning the strength to behave as I should. ‘And of course I must answer them as truthfully as possible!’

But I think I knew, even as I expressed this admirable intention, that the absolute truth about my wife’s lover was still quite beyond my power to articulate.

TWO

‘Bad pride is negative; it blinds us to truths of fact or even of reason …’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968

A Celebration of Faith

I

I should much prefer to say no more about this dreadful scene with Charley, but unfortunately I have to go on to record what a hash I made of it; the consequences were so far-reaching.

‘It would be uncharitable to call him a villain,’ I said to Charley as I embarked on this doomed attempt to depict Samson in the light of truth, ‘and it would certainly be inaccurate to describe him as a fool. One could, perhaps, acknowledge a resemblance to Parnell, but only a superficial one. After all, Parnell was not a clergyman of the Church of England who broke the vows he made at his ordination.’ As I spoke I insisted to myself that I should speak the truth. I also insisted that I would not let the truth be distorted by my anger. I told myself fiercely: I shall not lie.

‘He was a gifted man who had weaknesses which made him vulnerable,’ I found myself saying. ‘I felt sorry for him. At the end of his life he could be considered a pathetic figure, a man ruined by the flaws in his character – but I mustn’t judge him too harshly. That wouldn’t be right.’

I drank some tea. Eventually I said: ‘It was a tragedy that those inherent weaknesses wrecked his life and wasted his talents.’

‘When you say “weaknesses”, do you mean –’

‘I mean primarily his weakness for women. It clouded his judgement. His disastrous marriage was quite obviously an example of a sexual attraction which had soon faded … but I don’t want to be too harsh on him.’

There was a pause. As I waited for the next question I saw with dismay that Charley had lost his brave air of nonchalance. His face had a pinched look.

‘I don’t want to be too harsh on him,’ I repeated hurriedly, trying to put things right. ‘Anyone can make a mistake.’ But before I could stop myself I was saying: ‘It was just a pity his mistakes were so crucial. His weakness for women was compounded by a tendency to drink too much. Certainly he enjoyed a luxurious style of life which was quite unsuitable for a priest, and in the circumstances it was hardly surprising that his moral will was sapped so that he was unable to resist the temptation which your mother presented … although of course I don’t mean to pass judgement on him for what he did to her. All judgements must be left to God.’

Charley said unevenly: ‘I just don’t understand how Mum could ever have –’

‘Oh, the whole episode was entirely his fault. She was an innocent young woman corrupted by a sophisticated older man,’ I said, but I knew at once I could not let that statement stand unmodified. Furiously I told myself: I WILL NOT LIE. ‘No, let me rephrase that last sentence,’ I said rapidly. ‘By using a cliché I’ve made the affair sound simple and it wasn’t. It was complicated.’ But even as I spoke I was thinking: Charley wants simplicity, not complexity; he wants certainties, not ambiguities; it really would be kinder to him to sketch the story in black and white.

‘But never mind all that,’ I said even more rapidly. ‘The rock-bottom truth is that he was older than she was and should have known better. Of course I’m tempted to blame him for putting her through hell, but in fact it’s futile to assign blame since our prime task is to forgive. As I keep saying, I don’t mean to pass judgement on him for what he did.’ Realising that I was becoming convoluted, once more passing judgement and rescinding it in the same breath, I made a mighty new effort to be clear and simple.

‘You don’t have to worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought you up. I’ve made you what you are. So long as you model yourself on me you’ll never have to worry that you’ll make a mess of your life as he did.’

Charley by this time seemed to be barely breathing. His pallor had a faint greenish tinge.

‘Upbringing’s the important thing,’ I said at top speed. ‘You needn’t worry about your heredity. I often think how like me you are, sharing so many of my interests.’

‘All I ever wanted,’ said Charley painfully, ‘was to be just like you.’

‘In that case there’s no need for you to give this man –’ I could not name him ‘– a second thought. I mean, of course you’ll give him a second thought –’ I was tying myself in knots again ‘– but there’s no need for you to become obsessed by him. We’ll give him a code-name,’ I said, fastening on the device which enabled top-secret matters to be referred to with discretion, ‘and then he can be filed away. He won’t be lost or forgotten. He’ll merely be out of sight unless we choose to recall him.’

But Charley was already worrying about something else. ‘Should I refuse to accept the legacy?’

‘Certainly not!’ I was startled by this question and also, at some profound level, distressed. I remembered the sacrifice implicit in that letter, the love given without hope of any return.

‘I just want to do what you want, and if you think it would be safer for me to reject him altogether –’

‘No, no, that wouldn’t be right at all! If you reject the legacy you’re really passing judgement on him, but our business is to forgive, not to condemn.’

It was all true, of course. Yet it was all, subtly, false. Later I tried to work out how I could have eradicated the distortion, but I was never able to decide where the distortion had come from and how I could have eradicated it. Later still I did think to myself: one day Charley should know just how selflessly that man loved him. But the thought vanished, pushed aside by my enormous relief that the crisis was past. Charley had emerged from his ordeal more devoted to me than ever while I was now free to rebury Samson in the nostalgia drawer of my memory.

Telephoning Lyle five minutes later I told her we were all set to live happily ever after.

II

Did we all live happily ever after? No. As soon as Charley had returned to a stable state Michael began to cause trouble.

I told Michael about the skeleton in the family cupboard as soon as he returned home for the half-term holiday. I had had no choice. Charley’s escapade, now public knowledge, had to be explained, and with dread I steeled myself for yet another parental ordeal.

Michael, who was then sixteen and still more interested in cricket than in girls, listened with astonishment to my brief recital of the facts and afterwards appeared to be too nonplussed to offer any comment. I did stress that Lyle had been a mere innocent victim but I soon discovered that his mother’s consent to the affair was not what was puzzling him. ‘She’s still Mum no matter what she did,’ he said commendably before adding: ‘But why didn’t she go to hospital and have Charley removed when he was no more than a blob?’

I was considerably shocked by this reaction, unmodified as it was by anything which resembled a Christian morality, and as a result I found myself discussing the ethics of abortion, but Michael was uninterested in generalities, only in his mother. ‘She must have been mad to have wanted a baby in those circumstances,’ he said. ‘The older I get the more peculiar I think women are.’ And before I could comment on this verdict he asked: ‘If Charley’s not your real son, why do you spend so much time slobbering over him?’

‘I don’t slobber over him!’

‘Oh yes, you do! Mum says it’s because Charley’s small and plain and needs encouragement, but why should I be penalised just because I’m tall and good at games and okay to look at?’

‘Nobody’s penalising you! You mean just as much to me as Charley does!’

‘Why don’t I mean more? If you’re not his father –’

‘For all practical purposes,’ I said, trying to remain calm, ‘I am his father, and anyway, regardless of who his father is, he’s still your brother and I’m sorry that you make so little effort to get on with him.’

‘I don’t care who he is, I think he’s a louse.’

‘That’s the most unchristian thing to say!’

‘So what? Lots of Christians are unchristian – look at Charley’s real father! He didn’t exactly behave in a very Christian way, did he, and he was a clergyman!’

‘Well, of course he was a clerical failure. I’m not denying he was a disgrace to his profession and I’m not denying that the Church, like any large organisation, has the occasional rotten apple in its barrel, but Christians in general do at least try to live decent lives, and –’

‘Too bad they so seldom succeed!’

At that point I lost my temper and Michael lost his. The scene ended shortly afterwards when he yelled: ‘Bloody hell!’ and bolted straight to his mother to complain that I had been unfair to him. Lyle was livid. We had a row. She accused me of getting up on my Christian soap-box and pontificating; I retorted that I had a duty to draw the line when Michael started slandering the Church. Lyle then accused me of short-changing Michael; I then accused her of spoiling him rotten. Lyle said the whole grisly episode, beginning with Charley’s running away, reminded her of the parable of the prodigal son, and what a pity it was that Jesus had never recorded the feelings of the prodigal son’s mother. I said that Jesus had had no need to record the feelings of the mother in order to make his theological point, and Lyle shouted that she hated theological points and hated theologians who pulled out all the intellectual stops in order to win an argument and make their wives feel miserable. Seconds later I was deafened by the slamming of the door as she stormed out of the room.

I did look around for something to smash but fortunately no suitable object lay invitingly to hand and anyway after nearly nineteen years of marriage I knew there were better ways of resolving marital quarrels than behaving like a Cossack. I allowed Lyle time to cool off. Then I followed St Paul’s admirable advice (‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath’) and made the required gesture of reconciliation. During the cooling-off period I consumed one very dark whisky-and-soda and meditated on my heroes of the Early Church, those titans who had been obliged to abstain from marriage. How would St Athanasius, a bishop popular with the ladies, have adjusted to the wear and tear of married life? His energy reserves might well have been so seriously depleted that he would have been unable to dredge up the enormous strength required to be contra mundum, with the result that the Arian heresy would have prevailed – but no, heresy never prevailed in the end because always truth was ‘the daughter of time’. With a sigh I absolved the imaginary wife of Athanasius from ensuring the triumph of Arianism.

Later that evening Charley obliquely expressed his new anxiety about our relationship by saying to me: ‘I’m worried about Michael. Supposing he thinks you just took me on because you wanted to marry Mum? Supposing he thinks you don’t really like me at all and that secretly you regard me as a ghastly reminder of the past?’

‘He couldn’t possibly think anything so ridiculous! I decided to take you on from the moment I knew you existed. I regarded it as a very special and quite unmistakable call from God.’

‘And later you didn’t privately moan and groan and regret the whole thing?’

‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic and absurd!’

‘But –’

‘All right, no, I didn’t. What an idea!’

‘And you’re sure I don’t remind you of him all the time?’

‘Of course I’m sure! As I’ve already said, you often remind me of myself.’

‘And you’re sure that if I go on modelling myself on you everything will be all right?’

‘Absolutely certain,’ I said, now so exhausted by the demands of family life that I barely knew what I was saying, and so it was that we set off along the path which was to end so cataclysmically nine years later in 1965.

III

The interval between 1956 and 1965 seemed to pass with extraordinary speed, possibly because I had reached that point in middle age when the years go by faster and faster, but certainly because my change of job thrust me into a frenetic new world in which there never seemed to be enough time to do all that needed to be done.

In 1957 I was offered the Starbridge bishopric.

My first thought was that this was the one bishopric I could never accept. How could I take Lyle back to the scene of her disastrous love affair, and how could I myself face returning to the place which I always associated with my first catastrophe, the spiritual crisis which had almost brought my ministry to a very sticky end? Then slowly, with mounting dismay, I realised I had been manoeuvred into a position where the bishopric was the one job I could not refuse.

At first I thought the manoeuvring was being done by the Devil – or whatever one chooses to call the dark underside of creation which gives God so much trouble in achieving his plans for humanity. Then I thought the manoeuvring was an illusion and that I was the victim of blind chance. But in the end I decided that blind chance alone could never have ensured the snug fit of the metaphorical strait-jacket in which I now found myself encased, and I had to acknowledge that God was touching my life in the manner of a potter reshaping the clay on his wheel – if I may cite the analogy drawn by my Oxonian friend Dr Farrer. For some reason I was to be plucked from my ivory tower, where I was so comfortable, and dumped back in a city where I had been very uncomfortable indeed. This was such an unwelcome truth that I was reluctant to believe it, but when I realised I could not decline the appointment without incurring the wrath of that tough disciplinarian Archbishop Fisher, I accepted with a sinking heart that I was going to have to leave Cambridge. Ecclesiastical Starbridge begged, the Archbishop ordered, the letter from Downing Street arrived and the Queen smiled. I was doomed.

I had already turned down two bishoprics. Contrary to what many laymen think, not all clergymen aspire to high office, and because of my lack of parish experience and my success in academic life I had had no trouble accepting the idea that I would spend the rest of my working life as a divinity professor. However a call from God is a call from God, and since my duty was to serve my Maker, not to sulk impertinently, I made a big effort to regard the radical rewriting of my future in a positive light.

The diocese lay in the south of England, in the half of the country where I belonged, so I knew I could settle there without feeling like a foreigner. (I have never been at ease north of Cambridge.) Starbridge was set in beautiful countryside yet was only an hour and a half by train from London. There was a seat immediately available in the House of Lords, a fact which ensured I had an influential platform on which to expound my views on education, and there was even a theological college crying out in the Cathedral Close for reform by a divinity professor. (This was the main reason why I was considered uniquely suited for the job and why Archbishop Fisher told me brusquely to ‘stop bleating on and on about Cambridge’.) Indeed the bishopric was far from being an unattractive prospect and I could see the job would provide me with an exciting challenge. Yet still my misgivings remained.

‘You don’t want to go back there, do you?’ I said to Lyle when I was still agonising about the decision, but Lyle stunned me by replying: ‘Why not?’ Apparently she was now unperturbed by memories of her love affair. ‘The 1930s are another world,’ she said, ‘and we don’t live in that world any more.’ She also admitted she was only too keen to leave behind the twittering gossips of Cambridge who had thrived on the scandal of Charley’s birthday brainstorm.

‘… and then there’s the matter of the curtains,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘What curtains?’

‘I ordered the curtains for Carrie when the Jardines moved from Radbury to Starbridge in 1932. I remember fingering the material in the shop and dreaming that I was the bishop’s wife, ordering the curtains for my very own episcopal palace – and isn’t it nice to think my dream’s finally going to come true?’

I was amazed. I could quite see that there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the fact that Lyle would be returning in triumph as the bishop’s wife to the Cathedral Close where she had once been no more than a paid companion, but I was still so taken aback by her unambivalent enthusiasm that I could only say: ‘We won’t be living in the palace where you lived with the Jardines.’

‘Yes, isn’t that fortunate! No poignant memories of Alex and Carrie to make me weepy – and anyway the palace was hell to run. The South Canonry will be much easier.’

I retreated into a baffled silence.

‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ I said to my spiritual director during an emergency conference with him.

‘Is it, Charles?’

‘Well, she seems to have forgotten everything – except that she can’t have done because she talks of finally exorcising the past.’

‘I think we can acquit her of amnesia. Perhaps the truth is that she herself has come to terms with the past and hopes that in Starbridge you’ll be able to come to terms with it too.’

‘But I came to terms with it years ago! It’s all tucked neatly away in the nostalgia drawer alongside Edward the Eighth, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple!’

The conversation closed.

IV

I confess I took some time to adjust to being a bishop. In fact I even went through a phase of thinking I had made an appalling mistake and that my manipulation out of Cambridge had been the work of the Devil after all, steering me into a deep depression which would render me useless to God. I did recover from this neurotic suspicion and I did eventually settle down, but for a long while I pined for Cambridge, particularly for the intellectual companionship of my colleagues.

However, there were compensations. I found that in my new life there was less venom directed at me and more respect – in fact there was no venom at all. Although arguments between Christians can be extremely heated, people do usually refrain from being venomous to a bishop. In the bitter feuds which periodically ruffle the surface of academic life, no one is exempt from venomous attack, least of all professors of divinity whose very existence represents an affront to the atheists.

This lack of venom in my new job made committee work less tiring. I was also soothed by the deference shown to me whenever I ventured into the Palace of Westminster to attend the House of Lords or whenever I made a visit to one of the parishes in my diocese. But being a revered figurehead can be a lonely business and the dark side of all the deference was the isolation. Looking back I can see that this was when my marriage entered a new phase of intimacy and interdependence: increasingly I found that in my daily life I could only be my true self, relaxed and at ease, with Lyle. Of course I could also be myself with my spiritual director, now only twelve miles away at Starrington Magna, but Jon had become a recluse after his wife’s death in 1957, and although I did visit him regularly he never came to Starbridge. Apart from my wife I was on my own in that gilded cage of a Cathedral Close.

At last I pulled myself together. Realising that moping for Cambridge and bewailing my loneliness was all very self-centred, spiritually immature behaviour, I managed to stop thinking about myself and start thinking instead of how I could best serve God – a move which meant I poured myself into my work as I embarked on a massive programme of reform.

I started with the Theological College. It had begun life in the nineteenth century as an independent institution, cushioned by an endowment which permitted only modest fees to be charged, but in the twentieth century mismanagement and rising costs had brought it under the control of the diocese and the bishop was always one of the governors. I not only increased the diocesan grant which supplemented the now almost worthless endowment, but I also pushed the diocese into taking out a loan so that the premises could be improved and expanded. My fellow-governors, long accustomed to dozing at meetings of the board, were stunned by my activities but no one dared oppose me; they realised that no bishop of Starbridge had ever been so well qualified as I was to pump new life into that place, and besides, when I produced the evidence that showed the institution had become a moral disgrace they were so shocked that they almost fell over themselves to give me carte blanche.

I took a similar line with the diocese itself, which was also in a most sluggish and decayed state. My predecessor as bishop, I regret to say, had reputedly died of inertia. In the 1930s Alex Jardine had set the diocese alight with his dynamism, but after his retirement the authorities had taken fright and appointed mild-mannered nonentities to the Starbridge bishopric with the inevitable, enervating results. Dr Ottershaw, Dr Jardine’s successor, had at least allowed himself to be organised by an efficient archdeacon, but Bishop Flack, my immediate predecessor, had made a disastrous archidiaconal appointment and the diocese had become slothful. How quickly men become demoralised when their leaders fail to be crisp, conscientious and hard-working! At least my years in the army had taught me that particular lesson. Having woken everyone up by shaking them, metaphorically speaking, until their teeth rattled, I embarked on a plan of radical reorganisation.

All this took much time and kept me very busy. I appointed a suffragan bishop to manage Starmouth, the large port on the south coast, and I streamlined the diocesan office in Starbridge by pruning the bureaucracy which had mushroomed during the days of Bishop Flack. In addition to all this high-powered executive activity, I had to find the time to visit parish after parish in the diocese in order to preach, confirm and tend the flock in my role as spiritual leader. And as if all this activity were not enough to fell even St Athanasius himself, I was soon serving on committees at Church House, the Church of England’s London headquarters, and toiling at sessions of the Church Assembly. The last straw was when my turn came to read the prayers every day for a short spell in the House of Lords.

Dashing up to London, dashing around the diocese, dashing from committee to committee and from parish to parish, I began to wonder how I could possibly survive, but propped up by a first-class wife, a first-class spiritual director, two first-class archdeacons, a first-class suffragan bishop and a first-class secretary, I finally learnt how to pace myself, how to delegate, how to spend most effectively the time I allotted to private prayer and, in short, how to avoid dropping dead with exhaustion. After a while, when I began to reap the benefits of a more efficient diocese, life became less frenetic. But not much. No wonder time seemed to pass so quickly. Sometimes the days would whip by so fast that I felt as if I could barely see them for dust.

This arduous professional life, which became increasingly gratifying as I earned a reputation for being a strong, efficient, no-nonsense bishop, was punctuated by various awkward incidents in my private life, but fortunately Lyle and I, now closer than we had ever been before, managed to weather them tolerably well. Charley was no longer a problem. He recovered sufficiently from the agony of his eighteenth birthday to do well in his A-level examinations and I did not even have to pull a string to ensure his admittance to my old Cambridge college. He then decided to defer his entry until he had completed his two years of National Service. At first he loathed the army, finding it ‘disgustingly Godless’, but soon he was saved by his ability to speak fluent German, and he wound up working as a translator in pleasant quarters near Bonn. Having survived this compulsory diversion, he at last began to read divinity at Cambridge. Here he was ecstatically happy. Glowing reports reached me, and after winning a first he proceeded to theological college – but not to the one in Starbridge; I was anxious that he should have the chance to train for the priesthood far from the long shadow I cast as a bishop. To my relief his desire to be a priest never wavered, his call was judged by the appropriate authorities to be genuine and eventually he was ordained. It was a moment of enormous satisfaction for me and more than made up for the fact that I continually found Michael a disappointment.

Michael had not wanted to move to Starbridge. He thought it was the last word in provincial boredom, and we were obliged to endure sulks, moans and tart remarks. Later he developed an interest in popular music, already a symbol of rebellion among the young, and began to attend church only mutinously, complaining how ‘square’ it all was. Recognising the conventional symptoms of adolescent dislocation I kept calm, said little, endured much and waited for the storms to pass, but to my dismay the storms became hurricanes. Michael discovered girls. This was no surprise, particularly since he was a good-looking young man, and all sensible fathers are glad when their sons discover that girls are more fun than cricket, but I was concerned by the girls in whom he chose to be interested and even more concerned when he showed no interest in drinking in moderation.

He managed to do well enough at school to begin the training to be a doctor, but before long he was asked to leave medical school, not because he was incapable of doing the work but because he was incapable of avoiding fornication and hard drinking. Naturally I was concerned. I was also, as Lyle well knew, furious, shocked, resentful, embarrassed and bitter. She somehow managed to stop me becoming wholly estranged from Michael, and she somehow persuaded him to promise to reform. Jon suggested that I might make more time to talk to Michael, since such a move would make it unnecessary for him to behave badly in order to gain my attention, but I disliked the idea of being bullied by bad behaviour into reorganising my busy timetable, and I thought it was up to Michael to pull himself together without being pampered by cosy little chats.

‘My father never pampered me,’ I said to Jon, ‘and if I’d ever behaved as Michael’s behaving he’d have disowned me.’

‘But I thought you realised long ago that your father had actually made some unfortunate mistakes as a parent! Do you really want to treat Michael as your father treated you?’

I was silenced. Eventually, working on the theory that Michael was a muddled, unhappy young man who needed every possible support as he struggled to find his balance in adult life, I told him he was forgiven and promised to do all I could to get him into another medical school, but Michael merely said he now wanted to be a pop-singer in London.

Unfortunately by this time National Service had been abolished so I could not rely on the army to knock some sense into his addled head. I tried to control my fury but failed. There was a scene which ended when Michael announced: ‘Right. That’s it. I’m off,’ and headed for London with the small legacy which he had been left by my old friend Alan Romaine, the doctor who had ensured my physical recovery after the war. Lyle extracted a promise from Michael that he would keep in touch with her, so we were able to tell everyone truthfully that he had gone to London to find a job and we were looking forward to hearing how he was getting on.

‘I’m sure it’ll all come right,’ said Lyle to me in private. ‘What he’s really interested in is the stage, and he’s so handsome that he’s bound to become a matinée idol.’

I was too sunk in gloom to reply, but Lyle’s prediction turned out to be closer to the mark than I had expected. Michael became involved with a suburban repertory company and quickly decided that his talent was for neither singing nor acting but for directing and producing plays. He stayed a year with the company but then announced that the theatre was passé and that television was ‘where it was at’ (a curious American phrase currently popular among the young). To my astonishment he succeeded in getting a job at the BBC.

‘You see?’ said Lyle. ‘I told you it would all work out in the end.’

I found it so pleasant to be able to tell all my friends that my younger son now had a respectable employer that I decided the time had come to offer Michael the olive branch of peace, and writing him a letter I offered to take him out to lunch at the Athenaeum when I was next in London. A week later I received a card in reply. It said: ‘Athenaeum = Utter Dragsville. Take me to that bar in the House of Lords, food not necessary, I drink lunch.’

I did not like this card at all but Lyle said Michael was only trying to shock me and there was no reason why he and I should be unable to down a couple of sherries in the House of Lords bar while we tried to make up our minds whether we could face lunching together in the dining-room.

We met. Michael, who had clearly been drinking, ordered a double dry martini. I let him drink one but drew the line when he demanded another. He called me an old square and walked out. After that, relations remained cool between us for some time.

‘He can’t last long at the BBC,’ I said to Lyle. ‘He’ll get sacked for drink and wind up in the gutter.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Lyle, and once again she was right. Michael continued to work at the BBC and even obtained promotion. Obviously I needed to give our battered olive branch of peace another wave. By this time we had reached the end of 1964 and I invited – even, I go so far as to say, begged – him to spend Christmas with us. I had hoped he might telephone in response to this fulsome invitation, but another of his terse little cards arrived. It said: ‘Xmas okay but don’t mention God. Will be arriving on Xmas Eve with my bird, the one Mum met when she snuck up to London to see my new pad. Make sure there’s plenty of booze.’

‘Oh God!’ said Lyle through gritted teeth when she read this offensive communication.

Making a great effort to seem not only calm but even mildly amused I said: ‘I don’t understand the ornithological reference.’

‘It’s his latest ghastly girl. She’s American.’

‘You never mentioned –’

‘She was too ghastly to mention.’

‘Well, if he thinks he can bring his mistress here and bed down with her under my roof –’

‘Darling, leave this entirely to me.’

Michael did spend Christmas with us at the South Canonry, but the girl was ruthlessly billeted by Lyle at one of the local hotels. Michael wore no suit. He did not even wear a tie. He was never dead drunk but he was certainly in that condition known to publicans as ‘nicely, thank you’, an inebriated state which fell short of causing disruption but was still capable of generating embarrassment. My enemy Dean Aysgarth, on the other hand, was constantly accompanied to a variety of services by a veritable praetorian guard of well-dressed, immaculately behaved, respectable and charming sons. If I had not had Charley to cheer me up I might well have expired with despair.

However, Lyle had been working hard behind my back, and on Boxing Day Michael sidled up to me with a penitent expression. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just want you to know that my new year’s resolution will be not to get on your nerves. Can we bury the hatchet and drink to 1965?’

We drank to the coming year.

‘I’ve decided that 1965’s going to be a great time for the Ashworth family,’ said Michael, coming up for air after downing his martini. ‘I prophesy no fights, no feuds and absolutely no fiascos of any kind.’

Michael had many gifts but I fear prophecy was not among them.

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