Glittering Images (18 page)

I was surprised by the question but I answered easily, ‘No, she and my father are both still flourishing in Surrey.’ Setting aside the copy of
Ivanhoe
I selected Dorothy Sayers’
The Nine Tailors
from the bottom shelf.

‘What sort of man is your father?’

This time I was no longer merely surprised but astonished. I said abruptly, ‘Why do you ask?’ but Jardine only laughed.

‘Since you’ve been making various deductions about me,’ he said, ‘I’ve decided to make a deduction or two about you. Lady Starmouth remarked on your evasiveness about your family. Miss Christie commented how profoundly you seemed to sympathize with me when she touched on my difficulties with my father. Naturally I’ve been wondering if you too have a parent who’s a heavy cross to bear.’

‘My father did disapprove of my ordination,’ I said, ‘but we get on very well now.’

‘I used to say that when people asked me about my father,’ said Jardine. ‘It was less painful. However perhaps your father’s a great deal less incomprehensible than mine was.’

‘Incomprehensible?’

‘Isn’t lack of understanding responsible for much of the misery in family relationships? I spent years trying to understand my father, but it was only at the end of his life that I finally realized what had been going on.’

I said before I could stop myself, ‘Did that make a difference?’

‘Of course. With understanding, forgiveness becomes possible … You do have trouble with your father, don’t you?’ said Jardine, but I only answered, ‘No, we got over all the trouble a long time ago.’

We were silent, locked in an enigmatic curiosity which lay beyond my powers of analysis, but at last Jardine said unexpectedly, ‘Sit down for a moment, Dr Ashworth. I’m going to do something I never normally do. I’m going to talk about my father, because despite all you’ve said I think you may find my story relevant to that private life which you seem so determined to conceal.’

‘My father was the son of an impecunious Cheshire farmer,’ said Jardine. ‘He ran away to London when he was sixteen with the idea of training to become a clergyman, but he soon discovered that neither the Church of England nor the respectable Nonconformist churches wanted to know a penniless working-class boy with ideas above his station. Finally my father said to himself in a disillusioned rage: to hell with all ecclesiastical organizations and to hell with the priesthood.

‘To assuage his sense of rejection he joined an obscure sect where there was no formal priesthood and everyone took it in turns to preach hellfire and damnation. That was when he discovered he had a God-given talent for preaching. Before long he was preaching in the open air on summer evenings, and eventually a rich widow offered to build him a chapel. Later he managed to marry her for her money. My poor father! Since his arrival in London he had been earning his living as a porter in a Putney warehouse but he knew he had no prospect of promotion; in those circumstances was it any wonder that he came to see his gift for preaching as the passport to the gentleman’s life which he felt so strongly that a man of his intelligence deserved?

‘I wonder if you’ve ever read
Elmer Gantry.
It’s a novel about an American itinerant preacher who … well, it’s a study of the seamy side of evangelism, the side we orthodox churchmen are ashamed of. It’s the story of a preacher who uses his power over women to raise money not for God but for himself …

‘No doubt you can imagine what happened. My father was without spiritual counselling and of course he fell into the grossest errors. He had this gift from God, the ability to preach, but you know as well as I do, Dr Ashworth, what a dangerous charism that can be. That’s why I myself never, never preach extempore. The moment one departs from the written word one’s tempted to sway one’s audience by playing on the most dubious emotions.

‘My father never wrote down a word and he knew just how to keep the richest women fainting with excitement in their pews – and he also, I regret to say, knew exactly how to revive them afterwards in the vestry. Sir Thomas More has a word for it in
Utopia
: waywardness. My father was intolerably wayward with women. His first wife was an infirm old woman who could satisfy only his financial needs, and I’m afraid he convinced himself that all things would be forgiven him so long as he preached the word of God as fervently as possible.

‘However when his wife died he did turn away in shame from his old life; he felt he could well afford to retire on the money she’d left, and he decided to devote himself to the study of theology. By that time too he had an additional motive for turning over a new leaf because he’d just met my mother, who was a young girl from a very respectable family, and he knew he’d never be allowed to marry her unless he could offer her a life of absolute propriety.

‘I’m sure the marriage was a success, not only because I can remember the happy home my mother created but because I can so clearly remember how he went straight to pieces after she died. He’d seen my mother as a reward from God for good behaviour, poor man, and that was why he felt her death was a judgement; he was at once convinced that he hadn’t been forgiven for his past sins after all.

‘His guilt now began to crucify him. Is there any guilt worse than that of a man who has used a gift from God in the Devil’s service? For a long while he shut himself up in his house and wouldn’t go out. He wouldn’t speak. He spent the whole time praying. He became wholly obsessed with his past sins, and from there it was but a short step to becoming obsessed with the sins of the world – the world which by rejecting him had set him on the road to corruption.

‘You can imagine the effect on eight children of such behaviour. Eventually things came to such a pass that even my father, mentally ill as he undoubtedly was, realized that something would have to be done. By that time he had begun to preach again – though not for money; he thought the least he could do to appease God was to serve him as honestly as he could in the pulpit, so he returned to the chapel of the obscure sect where he had first made his name, and one Sunday he noticed a newcomer, someone who had attended the service out of curiosity, someone who was apparently quite unmoved by his sermon, someone utterly different from all the women who fawned on him afterwards in admiration.

‘It was my stepmother. She was employed as a companion to an old lady. She’d taken the position after her husband, a commercial traveller named Ashley, had been so inconsiderate as to die leaving her penniless. She hadn’t the money to go home to Sweden but she was saving up for the fare.

‘My father persuaded her to remain in England, but heaven only knows how she found the strength to stay once the initial attraction to him had worn off. My father was very, very difficult, far too difficult for any of my brothers to endure. They all left home as soon as they could to earn their living across the river in London, and I was all set to go too – when I was thirteen my favourite brother found me a position as an office-boy in the firm where he was a clerk, but the position fell through and as soon as the news reached us my stepmother turned to my father – I can see her now – and said, “You always said you needed a sign from God before you could allow that boy to go to school. Well, there’s your sign, and either that boy goes to school or I walk out of this house and never come back!”

‘I went to school. I hated it. I wanted to leave but she wouldn’t let me. She was very tough, very ruthless. She said, “Do you want to end up like your father or don’t you?” and of course there was only one answer to that. She said: “You’re going to lead the life your father never had. You’re going to open all the doors which were slammed in his face and you’re going to be what he was never allowed to be. And then all the suffering will be redeemed,” she said – she was a deeply religious woman – “and all the pain will be smoothed away and everything will make sense and he’ll look at you and be so proud and happy at last.”

‘It was a magnificent dream, wasn’t it? But I couldn’t see how it was ever going to come true. My father soon became extremely jealous of me – he couldn’t bear to think I was leading the life he hadn’t been allowed to lead. He was hostile and belligerent. What rows we used to have! How unhappy we made each other! Yet every time I wanted to give up and emigrate to Australia my stepmother would say fiercely,
“You’ve got to go on!”
and I knew I could never walk away. Besides, by that time I’d seen the truth – I’d seen I was locked up in a dark room and my stepmother was trying to drag me out into the light. So I endured all the appalling scenes, all the endless unpleasantness, and I clawed my way to freedom, but I certainly didn’t do it so that his suffering could be redeemed. Oh no! I did it for myself, I did it for her, but as for my father he could have rotted in hell for all I cared. Towards him I was rude, unkind, contemptuous, impatient, angry, bitter, resentful, unloving and once or twice downright cruel. Could any son with a mentally ill father have been more unChristian? I think not. And even after I was ordained I merely covered up my unacceptable emotions with a pious expression and observed my filial duties with gritted teeth.

‘So when at the end of his life my father went senile my first reaction was to hope he died quickly. In fact I couldn’t understand why God was letting him live. It seemed quite pointless.

‘But then he became a little better. He became lucid, lucid enough to know he was near the end, and then he began to talk to me. At first he would only talk about theology, but at last he began to review his life and suddenly I sensed his great urge to tell me every detail of his past – all the pathos, all the futility, all the waste – so that my present would take on a new meaning. And at last as my father talked to me with such painful honesty the miracle of communication occurred and I was able to understand the full dimensions of his tragedy. Then forgiveness was easy, and once I’d forgiven him I no longer saw him as a monster but as the father who had given me a Christian upbringing, no matter how bizarre, and who now wanted to heal our long and terrible estrangement before it was too late.

‘He had a favourite text. It was “I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance”. He kept urging me to preach on that text but I didn’t care for it; I thought it was so typical of my father with his immense preoccupation with sin, but he was so insistent that at last, to keep him happy, I assured him I’d do as he wished. But I didn’t. The next Sunday I preached on another text, and then when I came home I knew he was dead because I saw the blind had been drawn across the window of his room.

‘Immediately I felt guilty. I thought: if only I’d preached on that text! And then before I knew where I was, I was feeling guilty about all my cruel words in the past, all my unfilial behaviour, all my appalling lack of understanding and love – indeed I felt so absolutely pulverized with guilt then that I hardly knew how to bear the burden, but what I did know beyond any shadow of doubt was that I had to preach on that text which now seemed to speak directly to me. I felt that
I
was the sinner called to repent, and that a true repentance, a true turning away from my past errors, lay in struggling to become a far better clergyman than my ingrained rage against my father had ever allowed me to be before.

‘So that became my own special text, and over the years I preached on it again and again – until when I finally stood as a bishop in Starbridge Cathedral and said, “I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance!” I knew the past had been redeemed, and that although my father had died when I was an obscure chaplain he lived again whenever I said those words as the vicar, the Dean and the Bishop he had never managed to become. The most moving aspect of that entire ceremony at Starbridge was that my stepmother was still alive to see me sit on my episcopal throne. But there were no hugs and kisses afterwards, no gush of sentiment, no emotional tears. She wasn’t that kind of woman. She just said casually to me, “I knew it would be worth it all in the end” and I said equally casually, “Thank God you could never afford the fare home to Sweden”.

‘Now, Charles Ashworth, this isn’t a sermon, and half-past two in the morning is hardly the hour to embark on heavy moralizing so I shall say only one sentence more: put your relationship with your father right because the longer you let it remain wrong the more guilty you’re going to feel when he dies …’

Jardine stopped speaking. We were sitting facing each other across his desk, and behind him the books rose in well-ordered tiers from floor to ceiling. The surface of his desk was crowded but not muddled; on either side of the blotter piles of papers lay neatly pinned beneath glass weights, while beside the silver inkstand pens and pencils were arranged with precision in a tray.

‘Thank you, Bishop,’ I said. ‘It was extremely good of you to take me into your confidence like that and I regard it as the highest possible compliment.’ I suddenly realized that in my inspection of his desk I had been looking for an item I had failed to find, and the next moment I was unable to resist inquiring, ‘Do you have a photograph of your father and stepmother?’

‘Of course. Every respectable couple in Putney had their picture taken to mark their engagement.’ Opening the bottom drawer of his desk he extracted a photograph and handed it to me. It was a studio portrait of a middle-aged man, bearded but still recognizable as a Victorian version of the Bishop, and a young woman of about thirty, good-looking and sultry with blonde hair, pale eyes and a resolute mouth.

‘How attractive she was!’ I said startled. ‘Somehow I’d expected someone plainer.’