Susan Howatch - Absolute Truths

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 episcopally inadequate I returned to the 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.

In 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 transferred 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.’