Читать книгу Absolute Truths - Susan Howatch - Страница 10

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.