Susan Howatch - Absolute Truths

Charley said unevenly: ‘I just don’t understand how Mum could ever have –’

‘Oh, the whole episode was entirely his fault. She was an innocent young woman corrupted by a sophisticated older man,’ I said, but I knew at once I could not let that statement stand unmodified. Furiously I told myself: I WILL NOT LIE. ‘No, let me rephrase that last sentence,’ I said rapidly. ‘By using a cliché I’ve made the affair sound simple and it wasn’t. It was complicated.’ But even as I spoke I was thinking: Charley wants simplicity, not complexity; he wants certainties, not ambiguities; it really would be kinder to him to sketch the story in black and white.

‘But never mind all that,’ I said even more rapidly. ‘The rock-bottom truth is that he was older than she was and should have known better. Of course I’m tempted to blame him for putting her through hell, but in fact it’s futile to assign blame since our prime task is to forgive. As I keep saying, I don’t mean to pass judgement on him for what he did.’ Realising that I was becoming convoluted, once more passing judgement and rescinding it in the same breath, I made a mighty new effort to be clear and simple.

‘You don’t have to worry,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought you up. I’ve made you what you are. So long as you model yourself on me you’ll never have to worry that you’ll make a mess of your life as he did.’

Charley by this time seemed to be barely breathing. His pallor had a faint greenish tinge.

‘Upbringing’s the important thing,’ I said at top speed. ‘You needn’t worry about your heredity. I often think how like me you are, sharing so many of my interests.’

‘All I ever wanted,’ said Charley painfully, ‘was to be just like you.’

‘In that case there’s no need for you to give this man –’ I could not name him ‘– a second thought. I mean, of course you’ll give him a second thought –’ I was tying myself in knots again ‘– but there’s no need for you to become obsessed by him. We’ll give him a code-name,’ I said, fastening on the device which enabled top-secret matters to be referred to with discretion, ‘and then he can be filed away. He won’t be lost or forgotten. He’ll merely be out of sight unless we choose to recall him.’

But Charley was already worrying about something else. ‘Should I refuse to accept the legacy?’

‘Certainly not!’ I was startled by this question and also, at some profound level, distressed. I remembered the sacrifice implicit in that letter, the love given without hope of any return.

‘I just want to do what you want, and if you think it would be safer for me to reject him altogether –’

‘No, no, that wouldn’t be right at all! If you reject the legacy you’re really passing judgement on him, but our business is to forgive, not to condemn.’

It was all true, of course. Yet it was all, subtly, false. Later I tried to work out how I could have eradicated the distortion, but I was never able to decide where the distortion had come from and how I could have eradicated it. Later still I did think to myself: one day Charley should know just how selflessly that man loved him. But the thought vanished, pushed aside by my enormous relief that the crisis was past. Charley had emerged from his ordeal more devoted to me than ever while I was now free to rebury Samson in the nostalgia drawer of my memory.

Telephoning Lyle five minutes later I told her we were all set to live happily ever after.

Did we all live happily ever after? No. As soon as Charley had returned to a stable state Michael began to cause trouble.

I told Michael about the skeleton in the family cupboard as soon as he returned home for the half-term holiday. I had had no choice. Charley’s escapade, now public knowledge, had to be explained, and with dread I steeled myself for yet another parental ordeal.

Michael, who was then sixteen and still more interested in cricket than in girls, listened with astonishment to my brief recital of the facts and afterwards appeared to be too nonplussed to offer any comment. I did stress that Lyle had been a mere innocent victim but I soon discovered that his mother’s consent to the affair was not what was puzzling him. ‘She’s still Mum no matter what she did,’ he said commendably before adding: ‘But why didn’t she go to hospital and have Charley removed when he was no more than a blob?’

I was considerably shocked by this reaction, unmodified as it was by anything which resembled a Christian morality, and as a result I found myself discussing the ethics of abortion, but Michael was uninterested in generalities, only in his mother. ‘She must have been mad to have wanted a baby in those circumstances,’ he said. ‘The older I get the more peculiar I think women are.’ And before I could comment on this verdict he asked: ‘If Charley’s not your real son, why do you spend so much time slobbering over him?’

‘I don’t slobber over him!’

‘Oh yes, you do! Mum says it’s because Charley’s small and plain and needs encouragement, but why should I be penalised just because I’m tall and good at games and okay to look at?’

‘Nobody’s penalising you! You mean just as much to me as Charley does!’

‘Why don’t I mean more? If you’re not his father –’

‘For all practical purposes,’ I said, trying to remain calm, ‘I am his father, and anyway, regardless of who his father is, he’s still your brother and I’m sorry that you make so little effort to get on with him.’

‘I don’t care who he is, I think he’s a louse.’

‘That’s the most unchristian thing to say!’

‘So what? Lots of Christians are unchristian – look at Charley’s real father! He didn’t exactly behave in a very Christian way, did he, and he was a clergyman!’

‘Well, of course he was a clerical failure. I’m not denying he was a disgrace to his profession and I’m not denying that the Church, like any large organisation, has the occasional rotten apple in its barrel, but Christians in general do at least try to live decent lives, and –’

‘Too bad they so seldom succeed!’

At that point I lost my temper and Michael lost his. The scene ended shortly afterwards when he yelled: ‘Bloody hell!’ and bolted straight to his mother to complain that I had been unfair to him. Lyle was livid. We had a row. She accused me of getting up on my Christian soap-box and pontificating; I retorted that I had a duty to draw the line when Michael started slandering the Church. Lyle then accused me of short-changing Michael; I then accused her of spoiling him rotten. Lyle said the whole grisly episode, beginning with Charley’s running away, reminded her of the parable of the prodigal son, and what a pity it was that Jesus had never recorded the feelings of the prodigal son’s mother. I said that Jesus had had no need to record the feelings of the mother in order to make his theological point, and Lyle shouted that she hated theological points and hated theologians who pulled out all the intellectual stops in order to win an argument and make their wives feel miserable. Seconds later I was deafened by the slamming of the door as she stormed out of the room.

I did look around for something to smash but fortunately no suitable object lay invitingly to hand and anyway after nearly nineteen years of marriage I knew there were better ways of resolving marital quarrels than behaving like a Cossack. I allowed Lyle time to cool off. Then I followed St Paul’s admirable advice (‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath’) and made the required gesture of reconciliation. During the cooling-off period I consumed one very dark whisky-and-soda and meditated on my heroes of the Early Church, those titans who had been obliged to abstain from marriage. How would St Athanasius, a bishop popular with the ladies, have adjusted to the wear and tear of married life? His energy reserves might well have been so seriously depleted that he would have been unable to dredge up the enormous strength required to be contra mundum , with the result that the Arian heresy would have prevailed – but no, heresy never prevailed in the end because always truth was ‘the daughter of time’. With a sigh I absolved the imaginary wife of Athanasius from ensuring the triumph of Arianism.