Susan Howatch - Absolute Truths

Later that evening Charley obliquely expressed his new anxiety about our relationship by saying to me: ‘I’m worried about Michael. Supposing he thinks you just took me on because you wanted to marry Mum? Supposing he thinks you don’t really like me at all and that secretly you regard me as a ghastly reminder of the past?’

‘He couldn’t possibly think anything so ridiculous! I decided to take you on from the moment I knew you existed. I regarded it as a very special and quite unmistakable call from God.’

‘And later you didn’t privately moan and groan and regret the whole thing?’

‘Oh, don’t be so melodramatic and absurd!’

‘But –’

‘All right, no, I didn’t. What an idea!’

‘And you’re sure I don’t remind you of him all the time?’

‘Of course I’m sure! As I’ve already said, you often remind me of myself.’

‘And you’re sure that if I go on modelling myself on you everything will be all right?’

‘Absolutely certain,’ I said, now so exhausted by the demands of family life that I barely knew what I was saying, and so it was that we set off along the path which was to end so cataclysmically nine years later in 1965.

The interval between 1956 and 1965 seemed to pass with extraordinary speed, possibly because I had reached that point in middle age when the years go by faster and faster, but certainly because my change of job thrust me into a frenetic new world in which there never seemed to be enough time to do all that needed to be done.

In 1957 I was offered the Starbridge bishopric.

My first thought was that this was the one bishopric I could never accept. How could I take Lyle back to the scene of her disastrous love affair, and how could I myself face returning to the place which I always associated with my first catastrophe, the spiritual crisis which had almost brought my ministry to a very sticky end? Then slowly, with mounting dismay, I realised I had been manoeuvred into a position where the bishopric was the one job I could not refuse.

At first I thought the manoeuvring was being done by the Devil – or whatever one chooses to call the dark underside of creation which gives God so much trouble in achieving his plans for humanity. Then I thought the manoeuvring was an illusion and that I was the victim of blind chance. But in the end I decided that blind chance alone could never have ensured the snug fit of the metaphorical strait-jacket in which I now found myself encased, and I had to acknowledge that God was touching my life in the manner of a potter reshaping the clay on his wheel – if I may cite the analogy drawn by my Oxonian friend Dr Farrer. For some reason I was to be plucked from my ivory tower, where I was so comfortable, and dumped back in a city where I had been very uncomfortable indeed. This was such an unwelcome truth that I was reluctant to believe it, but when I realised I could not decline the appointment without incurring the wrath of that tough disciplinarian Archbishop Fisher, I accepted with a sinking heart that I was going to have to leave Cambridge. Ecclesiastical Starbridge begged, the Archbishop ordered, the letter from Downing Street arrived and the Queen smiled. I was doomed.

I had already turned down two bishoprics. Contrary to what many laymen think, not all clergymen aspire to high office, and because of my lack of parish experience and my success in academic life I had had no trouble accepting the idea that I would spend the rest of my working life as a divinity professor. However a call from God is a call from God, and since my duty was to serve my Maker, not to sulk impertinently, I made a big effort to regard the radical rewriting of my future in a positive light.

The diocese lay in the south of England, in the half of the country where I belonged, so I knew I could settle there without feeling like a foreigner. (I have never been at ease north of Cambridge.) Starbridge was set in beautiful countryside yet was only an hour and a half by train from London. There was a seat immediately available in the House of Lords, a fact which ensured I had an influential platform on which to expound my views on education, and there was even a theological college crying out in the Cathedral Close for reform by a divinity professor. (This was the main reason why I was considered uniquely suited for the job and why Archbishop Fisher told me brusquely to ‘stop bleating on and on about Cambridge’.) Indeed the bishopric was far from being an unattractive prospect and I could see the job would provide me with an exciting challenge. Yet still my misgivings remained.

‘You don’t want to go back there, do you?’ I said to Lyle when I was still agonising about the decision, but Lyle stunned me by replying: ‘Why not?’ Apparently she was now unperturbed by memories of her love affair. ‘The 1930s are another world,’ she said, ‘and we don’t live in that world any more.’ She also admitted she was only too keen to leave behind the twittering gossips of Cambridge who had thrived on the scandal of Charley’s birthday brainstorm.

‘… and then there’s the matter of the curtains,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘What curtains?’

‘I ordered the curtains for Carrie when the Jardines moved from Radbury to Starbridge in 1932. I remember fingering the material in the shop and dreaming that I was the bishop’s wife, ordering the curtains for my very own episcopal palace – and isn’t it nice to think my dream’s finally going to come true?’

I was amazed. I could quite see that there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the fact that Lyle would be returning in triumph as the bishop’s wife to the Cathedral Close where she had once been no more than a paid companion, but I was still so taken aback by her unambivalent enthusiasm that I could only say: ‘We won’t be living in the palace where you lived with the Jardines.’

‘Yes, isn’t that fortunate! No poignant memories of Alex and Carrie to make me weepy – and anyway the palace was hell to run. The South Canonry will be much easier.’

I retreated into a baffled silence.

‘It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ I said to my spiritual director during an emergency conference with him.

‘Is it, Charles?’

‘Well, she seems to have forgotten everything – except that she can’t have done because she talks of finally exorcising the past.’

‘I think we can acquit her of amnesia. Perhaps the truth is that she herself has come to terms with the past and hopes that in Starbridge you’ll be able to come to terms with it too.’

‘But I came to terms with it years ago! It’s all tucked neatly away in the nostalgia drawer alongside Edward the Eighth, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple!’

The conversation closed.

I confess I took some time to adjust to being a bishop. In fact I even went through a phase of thinking I had made an appalling mistake and that my manipulation out of Cambridge had been the work of the Devil after all, steering me into a deep depression which would render me useless to God. I did recover from this neurotic suspicion and I did eventually settle down, but for a long while I pined for Cambridge, particularly for the intellectual companionship of my colleagues.

However, there were compensations. I found that in my new life there was less venom directed at me and more respect – in fact there was no venom at all. Although arguments between Christians can be extremely heated, people do usually refrain from being venomous to a bishop. In the bitter feuds which periodically ruffle the surface of academic life, no one is exempt from venomous attack, least of all professors of divinity whose very existence represents an affront to the atheists.