Absolute Truths (13 page)

The hospital chaplain was ringing to let me know that Desmond
had awoken from the anaesthetic but could remember nothing
about the assault; the policewoman stationed at his bedside had
departed and the doctor had again recommended that my next visit
to the hospital should not take place until the following morning.

‘
I feel like murdering that instrument,’ said Lyle, eyeing
the
telephone as I replaced the receiver. ‘Leave it off the hook while
we have dinner.’

Before I could answer, Michael and Dinkie descended from
Lyle’s upstairs sitting-room and announced their intention of
dining at Jock’s Box, the local lorry-drivers’ cafe, before departing
for London – a statement which drew a wail of protest from Lyle
who begged him to leave the long drive until the following day.

‘
I’d like to,’ said Michael, ‘but all I can afford is Jock’s Box and
the petrol to take us home. I’m not going to let Dad buy me off
with a flash of his cheque-book after giving us such a bloody awful
reception.’

At this point I decided it would be best for all concerned if I withdrew from the scene so I retired to the cloakroom and did
not emerge until I heard the front door close. Returning to the
kitchen I demanded: Did he allow you to write the cheque?’

No, but
as
soon as you were out of the way dinner at La Belle
Époque became affordable and he said they’d bed down at the
nearest guest-house ... Where’s your drink?’

Retrieving my
glass
from the cloakroom I sat down again at the kitchen table and drank in a morose silence while Lyle cooked a
mixed grill.

Afterwards as she washed up I distracted myself by switching
on the television and staring at the news. Mr Kosygin had received
a cool welcome in Peking. Frightful things were happening
as
usual in Vietnam ... I dozed, but it was hardly surprising that I
was exhausted. Sexual intercourse was not, for a man of my age,
the wisest activity to indulge in before trying to survive a diocesan
disaster and a family débâcle.

‘Worn out?’ said Lyle as we toiled upstairs to bed.

But unfortunately my brief doze had revived me and my brain
was active again. ‘I’m so worried about Desmond,’ I confessed. ‘I
forgot to tell you that according to Dido he was seen recently in
Piccadilly Circus with a young man in black leather.’

‘
What absolute poppycock – a sexy young man in black leather
would never look twice at poor old Desmond!’

‘
Poor old Desmond ... There’ll be a terrible interview when
he’s well enough to discuss the future – if I’m not careful he’ll
wind up utterly pulverised.’

‘
Being pulverised is the least he deserves and I can’t sec why
you should wallow in agony about it. Just offer him a full pension
and boot him out on the grounds of ill-health. Personally I think
he’ll be damned lucky. In the old days he’d have been tried in the
ecclesiastical courrs and booted out with nothing.’

‘
But I can’t help feeling I’ve failed him in some way –’

‘
Rubbish! You took him on, didn’t you, when no one
else
would
touch him? If anyone’s failed Desmond it’s Malcolm, never notic
ing that Desmond was coming apart at the seams!’

‘And who’s responsible for Malcolm?’

‘
Charles, you
cannot blame
yourself for this disaster, I absolutely
forbid it! Malcolm slipped up, that’s all, but anyone can make a
mistake, even a first-class archdeacon. Now stop agonising, stop
thinking about wretched Desmond and .twitch off Shall I run your
bath for you?’

‘
Thank you,’ I said dryly, ‘but I think I still have enough strength
to turn on the taps.’

I had a long hot bath and repeated over and over to myself my
m
antra: ‘All things work together for good to them that love God’. Then I tried to think about Hippolytus and the sexually lax Bishop
Callistus, but the thought of sexual laxness only reminded me of Michael and the moral wasteland of the 1960s and the horrible changes which were being made in the name of progress. Abolishing the grammar schools, ignoring coffee-bar hooliganism,
showering publicity on gangsters like the Kray brothers, turning
bad singers into idols, embracing American culture without discrimination (and what on earth was America getting up to in Vietnam anyway?), permitting mass-mockery of distinguished
institutions, encouraging the destruction of moral standards, cam
paigning for the legalisation of homosexuality ... I started thinking of Desmond again. Hauling myself out of the bath I opened the medicine cabinet to retrieve my indigestion tablets.

In my dressing-room I said my prayers and tried to meditate on a paragraph written by St Augustine, but my attention soon wandered. How would St Augustine have dealt with Desmond? No full pension rights in those days, no financial sop to offer a fallen brother-in-Christ, but would St Augustine have flinched
from the prospect of a fearsome interview? Certainly not. Fortified
by God’s grace and supremely confident in his ability to administer
a Christian justice he would have faced Desmond without turning
a hair.

Feeling episco
pally inadequate I returned to t
he
bedroom.
‘What
was your meditation piece tonight?’ asked Lyle.
‘I chose a paragraph from
The City of God.’

‘
Splendid! That must have cheered you up,’ said Lyle with relief,
and returned to her library book, a sex-offering by Françoise Sagan.
I picked up
The Rector of Justin
by Louis Auchinloss and began
to toy with the fantasy of replacing the box in Desmond’s wardrobe
so that he would never know I had discovered his pornography.
‘Can you really read that book upside down?’ enquired Lyle with interest.

‘
No.’ I reversed the book before adding: ‘In the bath I was thinking about Hippolytus and Callistus. No doubt Hippolytus would have urged that Desmond be drummed out of the Church while Callistus would have made some excuse to keep him in.’

‘Callistus reminds me of Bishop Robinson being soppy about
sex in
Honest to God.
Incidentally one of the women in the prayer-
group said that excruciatingly boring book actually brought her to
Christianity. Yet another example of how God moves in mysterious
ways.’

I said vaguely: ‘I must hear about that prayer-group sometime,’
and putting aside my book I switched off the light on my side of the bed. ‘If Callistus were alive today,’ I remarked, ‘he’d be like that new bishop of Radbury, Leslie Sunderland. He has such an
optimistic view of human nature that he believes everyone can be
brought to Christian perfection by a rational outlook, a decent wage and the National Health Service. In fact when I see him tomorrow at my committee meeting I’m sure he’ll –’ I broke off and sat bolt upright in bed. ‘Ye gods and little fishes! I haven’t
looked at those graphs which I have to present to the committee!’

‘
Darling, SWITCH OFF. Leave all that until tomorrow – you can perfectly well study the graphs on the train to London. Do you want one of my sleeping pills?’

But I distrusted sleeping pills. They made me feel sluggish the next morning, and I needed my brain to be crystal clear from the
moment I woke up. I tried to calm myself by another silent recitation of my mantra.

But I never derived much benefit from mantras. Too often I
allowed my mind to drift away down theological avenues, and that
night I started thinking of St Paul, writing ‘All things work
together for good’ in his letter to the
Romans –
which had
prompted Karl Barth to write his great commentary – which had
led to Neo-Orthodox theology – which was a reaction to the liberal
theology which had been prevalent before the First War – in which
so much idealism had been destroyed – with the result that the
atmosphere at the start of the last war had been very different – as I had realised when I had volunteered
to be
a chaplain – who
had been captured at the fall of Tobruk – which had led to that
POW camp – and to the concentration camp – which reminded
me of Desmond – everyone degraded – cut off from God – in
hell...

I slept.

I
n my dream I was back in the concentration camp. A naked Desmond was being flogged by Nazi guards while I stood by,
powerless to stop them and hating God for not saving me from
this undeserved and unbearable ordeal. After my capture at Tobruk
in 1942 I had been confined to an ordinary POW camp, but in
1944 after I had assisted several men to escape I had been trans
ferred to a far harsher environment. I had consoled myself at the
time by thinking that at least I had not been summarily shot. Later
I had come to believe that a quick death would have been preferable
to dying by inches. But I had not died. The Allies had arrived and
my ordeal had ended. The liberators had all looked so fleshy and
pink. I could still see their appalled expressions.

I had wanted to thank God for the deliverance but the words
had refused to come; he had been absent so long – or so I had
thought – that I had forgotten how to talk to him, although of
course I had always put up a front and gone through the motions
of being a priest. That was what the army had required of me and
that was what I had to do to the end, regardless of whether my
faith was shattered or not. Later I had realised that this obstinate,
distorted sense of purpose had helped to keep me alive, and later
still I had seen that God had not been absent at all but had instead
been speaking to others through the medium of my battered
self,
but
these insights had not been immediately apparent to me.
After the war I had made sense of my suffering by classifying it
as a ‘showing’ – not of God but of the Devil. Or, to put the
matter in less emotive terms, I had seen it as an unforgettable
demonstration of what happened when men turned aside from the
truth in order to embrace a false ideology. Indeed it was this
sojourn in a world born of absolute lies which had made me resolve
to battle all the harder for the absolute truths. Such a battle, I had
reasoned, would justify my spared life, neutralise my survivor’s
guilt and simultaneously enable me to align myself with God as
he worked to redeem all the suffering which people had inflicted
on one another during the war.

So every time I now took a tough line on sin I felt I was in
some small way redeeming the horror and agony I had witnessed
in the past. My experiences in Starbridge in 1937 had given me a
particular horror of sexual sin, but it was the concentration camp
which had given me a horror of all evil. °The only thing necessary
for the triumph of evil,’ Burke had written, ‘is for good men to
do nothing.’ No one was ever going to catch
me
doing nothing.
Mocking criticism in the press might hurt, television debates might
inwardly reduce me to pulp, the scorn of the younger generation
might continually sear me, but all that was of no consequence.
What did such trivial distress matter when I recalled the appalling
suffering of those who had died in the concentration camps? To
whine that I hated being mocked for my views was unthinkable.
The fact was that I had lived while others had died, and my job
now was to bear witness to the truth no matter how much it cost
me to do so.

In my dream the Nazi guards stopped flogging Desmond and
began to castrate him. Sweating with horror I awoke just in time
to stop myself shouting out loud and waking Lyle. In my dressing-
room I switched on the light, sat down and began to shudder
repeatedly with revulsion.

After a while I stopped shuddering but my distress,
as
memories
of the camp streamed through my mind in an unstoppable tide, was so acute that I could only ease it by pacing up and down. I
was just beginning to think I would never be able to dam this
terrible cataract when Lyle looked in.

Before I could apologise for waking her she said severely: ‘All
this pacing’s very bad for you. Come back to bed instead and tell
me how ghastly you’re feeling.’

Staggering into her arms I allowed myself to be steered back
between the sheets.

‘Which nightmare was it?’

The flogging-castration. But this time the victim was Desmond.’

‘
That wretched Desmond! Poor darling,’ said Lyle, giving me a
lavish kiss.

I at last began to relax. Glancing at the clock I remarked: ‘I can
hardly believe that only twelve hours ago we were here enjoying
my afternoon off with no thought of either Desmond or Dinkie.’

‘I detest that girl.’

‘
So do I. I can’t understand why Michael finds her so attractive.’

‘
Can’t you, Charles? Honestly?’

‘
Honestly. I’ve never been attracted to stupid women.’

‘
That’s because you’re reacting against your mother.’

‘Nonsense! It’s because I want more from a woman than just sex!’

‘How much more?’

I laughed.

Lyle gave me another lavish kiss and said: ‘That was a sterling performance you gave this afternoon.’

‘
At my age I probably won’t be able to repeat it for at least two
weeks. I can’t tell you how geriatric I felt this evening when I was watching the news.’

‘
Then don’t. Words like "geriatric" bore me. And anyway, if
you’re really so enfeebled why were you pacing up and down just
now like a sex-starved tiger at the zoo?’

‘More like a mangy old lion in the first stages of senility!’

‘All right, if you’re really so past it, even after several hours’ sleep,
let’s just blot out your nightmare by having a friendly cuddle.’

‘
What a loathsome phrase!’

‘
I’d never have uttered it if you hadn’t behaved as if you were
ripe for a coffin! Honestly, British men are the limit sometimes –
any Frenchman would be absolutely panting to demonstrate his
vitality by this time!’

I tried a pant or two. I do in fact have some French
blood
flowing
in my veins as the result of a Victorian indiscretion
unrecorded in the Ashworth family tree, and Lyle had said once
that if I had been born in France and escaped my middle-class
English upbringing I might have become one of those Frenchmen
who drink for hours in raffish Parisian cafés and supplement their
long-suffering wives with a succession of pretty mistresses. My
comment on this fantasy had been: ‘I’d have missed my golf and
cricket,’ but Lyle had retorted: ‘No, you wouldn’t – you’d have
been much too busy elsewhere.’

But I could not quite imagine a life in which I was not a clergyman of the Church of England, and I suspected that if I had been
a French layman I would have long since expired as the result of
sexual exhaustion and liver failure.

‘
You’re better off married to an Englishman,’ I said to Lyle.
‘I know, but I always adore being convinced.’

I forgot Desmond and Dinkie, just as Lyle had known I would.
I forgot the pornography in the present and the putrefaction in
the past. I forgot I was a bishop. I even forgot I was a clergyman. I
had entered a world in which only Lyle and I existed, a comforting
cocoon in which I could feel secure and cherished, enfolded by a
love which excluded all pain, all anxiety and all the baffling com
plexity of my current existence.

Later Lyle said: ‘I can never resist seducing you when you get
as haggard and tormented as a nineteenth-century poet.’

‘
I must try and be haggard and tormented more often.’

We laughed, stubbing out our cigarettes, and gave each other
one last embrace before falling asleep.

But I had not reached the end of the exhausting stream of crises
which had been battering me towards the abyss, and in fact the
worst crisis was still to come.