Absolute Truths (4 page)

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. 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 par
able 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 nine
teen 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 meditatéd 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 tri
umph of Arianism.

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 every
thing 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
chat 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 extra
ordinary 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 human
ity. 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 disci
plinarian 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 pro
vide 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 P adbury 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.