Читать книгу Absolute Truths - Susan Howatch - Страница 53

Jon had been very tall, well over six foot, but he had begun to stoop so that we were now almost the same height; I have yet to shrink from six foot one. Apart from the stoop he had changed remarkably little since I had first met him. He possessed one of those lean, well-proportioned frames which age well, and although his grey hair was thinner it was not scanty. He had an unusually pale complexion, and this pallor made the shadows created by the angular bone structure of his face more striking. His eyes, very clear, very grey, always giving the impression of seeing everything there was to see, were quite unchanged from that day in 1937 when he had introduced himself to me at the Fordites’ house in Grantchester.

‘Take the chair by the fire, Charles,’ he said after he had ushered me across the threshold. ‘It’s cold out there tonight.’

‘I do apologise for dumping myself on you outside normal visiting hours, but …’ The few people whom Jon consented to see without an appointment were expected to arrive between four and five in the afternoon and stay no more than half an hour. When I was consulting him professionally instead of merely paying a social call to see how he was, I would make an appointment to meet him earlier in the day, and although Jon had always told me that I could call upon him at any time and without prior warning, I was careful not to abuse this privilege. Normally I would never have visited him in the evening.

Generously waving away my apologies, Jon pottered off to his kitchen to make tea.

He lived in one large room. Bookcases flanked the stone fireplace where logs were burning; a bunk-bed with a built-in wardrobe and drawers occupied one wall; a small table with two chairs stood by the window. Usually there were no pictures anywhere, but in recent months Jon had taken to displaying a photograph of his absent Nicholas on the chimney-piece. A crucifix hung on the wall above the bed. The wooden floor was uncarpeted apart from a rug on the hearth, and on this rug a large tabby-cat sat gazing at the flames. Jon was a cat-lover. I preferred dogs and could never quite understand this passion of Jon’s, but I accepted it as one of his idiosyncrasies. Unlike most cat-lovers he never behaved in a frivolous fashion with the animal but always treated it as if it were an intelligent child who could be relied upon to behave impeccably. This particular cat had been around for some time but had been preceded by other tabbies, all displaying an uncanny empathy with their master.

When he returned with the tea I offered him the armchair into which I had collapsed on my arrival, but he refused, saying he was sure I needed the comfort more than he did. Once the tea was poured out he drew up a chair from the table and sat facing me across the hearth.

At last I felt able to relax. Having taken a sip from my cup I said: ‘Can you guess what’s happened?’

‘No, of course not! How many more times do I have to tell you that I don’t experience telepathy on demand?’

I laughed. ‘But you’ve always predicted trouble on this particular front!’

‘In that case I suppose you’ve had another row with Aysgarth.’

‘Not yet. But I feel angry enough to want to beat him up.’ Every bishop – indeed every clergyman – should have at least one person to whom he can express feelings which are utterly unacceptable when expressed by a man who is supposed to epitomise all the Christian virtues. As soon as the words were spoken I felt a great easing of my tension, as if a painful boil had been lanced.

‘Hm,’ said Jon, putting aside his cup of tea in order to pick up the cat.

When I had first met him I had been so debilitated that he had been obliged to take a strong lead in our conversations; a spiritual director’s primary task when working with those who seek his guidance is to develop and nurture the life of prayer in accordance with the unique needs of each soul, but when a person is in pieces, unable to pray at all, the spiritual director’s first task is necessarily to glue the pieces together by reintegrating the personality – that is to say, by regrounding the soul in God. In my own case this had been achieved when I had first sought his help in 1937, and over the years as I had developed as a priest I found that during our meetings Jon said increasingly little while I said increasingly more. We had now reached the stage where I did most of the talking. I would set out my problems as bluntly as I liked (lancing the boil), examine them with as much detachment as I could muster (applying the antibiotic) and try to work out how I could solve the problems in a way which would be acceptable to God (healing the wound by a continuing care and attention). Jon, punctuating my monologue with the occasional sentence, would help me organise my thoughts; he would shine a spotlight on possible options, make recommendations about prayer and at the very least try to ease me along the path which led to a more enlightened perspective on my problems.

Continuing in my initial task of lancing the boil, I now embarked on a monologue. Jon listened and nodded and eventually tucked the cat under his arm as he stood up to pour me some more tea.

‘… and what am I supposed to do?’ I demanded after I had told him of Aysgarth’s current negotiations with Christie’s. ‘The man’s a disaster for the Cathedral, for the diocese – and for me as the bishop. Obviously there’s a financial mess. Maybe he’s drinking too much again as well, and maybe – though heaven forbid! – there’s some woman involved. The truth is I should have battered him into resigning back in 1963 – well, I would have done if I hadn’t been so afraid of the damage to the Church resulting from a scandal. Perhaps he thought I was soft and stupid, letting him get away with it. Maybe I was soft and stupid. More fool me. Bishops have got to be strong and adroit. If we were in the secular world … Yes, I know we’re not, but nevertheless I’m a senior executive in a big corporation and I just can’t afford not to crack down on a manager who threatens to blacken the corporate image.’

‘Hm,’ said Jon.

‘All right, all right, all right, I know you’re thinking that drawing a parallel with big business is inappropriate! But I’m talking now about the way things are, not the way things ought to be – I’m talking about the real world, the world I have to work in every day, and the truth is that people expect a strong lead from bishops. People want certainties, they need to feel that the bishops haven’t abandoned tradition and still have high standards of moral behaviour – and of course I mean “moral” in the widest sense of the word, I’m not just talking about sex. That new Bishop of Radbury – the one who succeeded my friend Derek Preston – said today he welcomed the doctrine of relativism which says there are no absolutes, he said he found it liberating, but how could he be so spiritually blind? If everything is relative, even moral standards, then we descend to the law of the jungle in double-quick time – and that means pain and suffering for innocent people. What are the authorities doing, appointing a man like that to a bishopric? It’s so bad for the Church! All this liberalism’s a disaster. The whole decade’s a disaster. Let me tell you that unless we stand firm and stick to traditional moral values, we’ll all be swept down the drain into hell.’

‘Hm,’ said Jon, stroking the cat behind the ears.

‘Radbury – Leslie Sunderland – was spouting a lot of drivel which implied sexual permissiveness doesn’t matter. Sometimes I think those liberals don’t know anything about real life at all. Treating sex as no more than a handshake – and saying deviant behaviour should be regarded as normal, even when statistically it can never be normal, never be more than the preference of a small minority – well, it’s all so unreal, such a distortion of all the truth I’ve ever witnessed. When I think, of Lyle and what she went through … How can people say sexual sin is unimportant? How can they say it doesn’t matter? I’ve seen people laid waste by it. It does matter. It matters horribly. All suffering matters, whether it’s the gross kind which exists only in concentration camps or the everyday kind which exists in human relationships. Don’t tell me suffering doesn’t matter! All this liberal-radical blindness to pain makes me sick …

‘And talking of sexual sin, I’ve got an appalling problem which has just blown up concerning Desmond Wilton – remember me telling you about Desmond who was booted out of the London diocese after a lavatory disaster? Well, it now turns out that Desmond’s been keeping pornography again, and that ghastly woman Dido Aysgarth’s going around bleating about …’ I outlined the Desmond fiasco. ‘… and the oddest thing happened this morning after I’d returned home from the hospital,’ I said, as the cat put both paws on Jon’s chest and gazed up at him adoringly. ‘Just as I was worrying about finding a suitable locum, this extraordinary priest turns up – early forties, divorced, quite obviously big trouble – and tells me not only that he’s willing to be an Anglo-Catholic locum but that he’s set on muscling his way into my diocese to start a healing centre! Imagine that – a shady wonder-worker on the loose! But do you know what I do? Do I say “no thanks” and dismiss him in double-quick time? No, I don’t! I tell him to come back for another interview! How could I conceivably have been so soft and stupid? The only possible answer is that the Desmond crisis had temporarily deranged me, because of course I can’t possibly do what he wants, it’s out of the question. He says he’s a celibate, but he’s exactly the sort of priest who’d have a sex-life on the quiet when he wasn’t cavorting around exuding charisms in a cassock.

‘It’s all Desmond’s fault. If he hadn’t upset me so much – yes, yes, yes, I know he couldn’t help being the victim of random violence, I know I mustn’t be angry with him, but I was so shattered by that pornography – I mean, what can one do with a priest who keeps that sort of stuff, what can one do? Obviously he’ll have to go away and have the appropriate treatment, but I can’t take him back, I just can’t, it’s too much of a risk, and anyway I have to keep up the standards among my clergy, I can’t tolerate that sort of behaviour, it’s letting the side down in the biggest possible way, it’s too devastating for the Church. So I’ll have to sack him, but oh, the strain of it all, the sheer hell of being a bishop sometimes – it all makes me wish yet again that I’d never left Cambridge – all right, I know Cambridge was a narrow, backbiting community in some ways, but I could always escape there into my histories of the Early Church, and here I can’t escape, I hardly ever get the time to write about Hippolytus and Callistus, and I just get angrier and angrier with all these frightful people who seem determined to drive me completely up the wall … Jon, stop making love to that cat and SAY SOMETHING, for heaven’s sake, before I have an apoplectic fit and drop dead!’

Jon carefully set the cat down on the floor. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said one word. It was: ‘Forgive.’

‘Oh good heavens …’ I had been sitting on the edge of my chair but now I sank back against the upholstery with a groan. ‘It’s all very well for you to say that! You’re a hermit, but I’m out there in the real world and I just can’t afford –’

‘Christianity is, of course, a very costly religion,’ said Jon, ‘but I’m sorry to hear you’re finding it too expensive.’

I groaned again, but in fact I welcomed this austere rebuke, found it bracing – as Jon had known I would. I needed a strong rod to flog me out of the pit of despair. A flimsy switch would have been of no use at all.

I took a deep breath. The boil had been lanced and the time had come to apply some antiseptic ointment. Calmer now that I had expelled my anger I began my attempt to regard my problems with detachment.

‘Very well,’ I said, ‘we’ll set Desmond aside for the moment. There’s a hellish interview in store for me there but at present my task is simply to be a good pastor and ensure he’s properly looked after. I suppose I might just manage to achieve that if I can stop being so self-centred that all I think about is not Desmond’s welfare but my own discomfort. And we’ll set aside the wonder-worker for the moment too; if I employ him as a locum it doesn’t commit me to any fantastic scheme for a healing centre. The really intractable problem is – as usual – Aysgarth. What on earth do I do about that drunken menace at the Deanery?’