Absolute Truths (69 page)

TWO

‘
I go to confession, and it is blindingly dear, as soon as I am dealing direct with Christ in his priest, that his love is very present, but that the perversity of my sin is very great.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford,

1960-1968

Said or Sung

Jon had acquired his method of hearing confessions from the For-
dite monks; there was an informal discussion at the table followed
by a formal act of confession before a cross. Usually he insisted that this formal confession should take place in the chapel, but
since the chapel was currently being occupied by Nicholas I knew
that on this occasion we would be staying in the cottage.

As I embarked on the narrative which would lead to our informal
discussion, the room seemed to become quieter and dimmer.
Finally I stopped. I had long since
ceased
to look at Jon and was
examining the surface of the table as I wondered, with a detached
professional interest, how he would respond. Since he would know my repentance was genuine, I was sure he would grant me absolu
tion but I wondered if he would drop a hint about taking an early
retirement. Certainly he was going to insist on a long retreat during
which 1 could sort out my problems and recover my spiritual
health. But perhaps my problems could not be sorted out; perhaps
the complete failure of my disciplined life was a symptom of the onset of senility, and I was fit only for the scrap-heap. Of course
I was no longer fit to be a bishop, I realised that; but perhaps I
was now unfit for clerical duties of any kind.

At that point I was so disabled by sheer misery that I failed to
hear the question which jon was asking and had to request him
to repeat it.

‘
I said: why do you think this incident with Mrs Preston
happened?’

‘I was demented.’

‘
Charles, if I were to ask you: ‘Why do you have a headache?" would you really answer: "Because a pain arrived in my head"?’ I apologised and tried again. ‘I hate to admit it, but Aysgarth’s
repulsive analysis was right. Obviously I was so dislocated by grief
that my normal control over all my weaknesses disintegrated.’

‘
That’s certainly a better description of what happened than
saying "I was demented", but I still don’t think it tells us anything
important about your motivation. What were you actually trying
to do here?’

‘Have sex.’

‘
Quite. Charles, you may now think I’m demented, but I suspect
a desire for sex had very little to do with what was actually going
on.’

‘
But I’ve been bounding around like a satyr — I’ve felt violently
attracted to three women in rapid succession —’

‘
All that tells us is that you’re disturbed and that this disturbance
is manifesting itself through your genitals. But what’s going on in
your brain?’

‘I’m slaughtered by bereavement.’

‘
We can certainly assume your behaviour is reflecting an aspect
of your bereavement, but what aspect is it reflecting?’

‘
Sexual deprivation. I’m incapable of leading a celibate life.’

‘I think you could lead a celibate life for a time if you had to.
I’m not saying you’d like it, but you’d manage.’

‘
All right, the other explanation is that I’m not trying to relieve
my frustration but to deaden the pain — I’m using sex as an
analgesic.’

‘
If all you wanted to do was deaden the pain, why didn’t you
settle for the far less risky course of getting drunk?’

‘
Because I like going to bed with women better than getting
drunk.’
..

‘
Very well, but if you’d reached the state where you merely
wanted a woman as a pain-killer, why not just pick up a prostitute?

After all, there you were, wearing civilian clothes, in a red-light
district a long way from your diocese. The risk would have been
minimal.’

‘And I almost took it.’

‘
But you didn’t. You could have done, but you didn’t. So could
we deduce from that, perhaps, that your rejection of the prostitutes
means you weren’t simply looking for a pain-killer? And if you
weren’t simply looking for a pain-killer, what were you looking
for?’

‘God knows.’

‘
Well, of course God knows! Really, Charles, what a vacuous reply! Now try and think intelligently as I approach the problem
from another angle. What have you actually confessed to me? You’ve said that in a short space of time you’ve felt powerfully
attracted to three women. Very well, answer me this: what do
these three women have in common?’

I remained baffled. ‘Nothing,’ I said, but realising that this could
hardly be the reply I was supposed to make I reconsidered the
question by carefully thinking aloud. ‘Not age,’ I said. ‘Harriet’s
under forty, Sheila’s probably in her early fifties and Loretta must
be nearer seventy than sixty. And not nationality; Loretta’s Ameri
can. And not class;
Loretta’s outside the English cl
ass system. And
not religion; Harriet’s a non-believer. And not sexual allure; one
couldn’t call Sheila a
femme fatale.
And not intellect; Harriet’s
clearly a clever woman and Sheila’s no fool, but Loretta’s the only one who could be described as an intellectual.’ I sighed. ‘All right,
I give up. Tell me what they all have in common.’

‘
Each one represents a certain type of woman. Sheila represents
the perfect episcopal wife; Harriet represents the
femme fatale;
Loretta represents the good friend with whom you can feel
instantly at ease. Don’t you see, Charles? Together they add up to
the woman you’ve lost. What they all have in common is a resem
blance to Lyle.’

There was a profound silence before Jon said: We’ll pause there
for a moment,’ and when I failed to reply he rose to his feet to
put another log on the fire.

By the time he returned to his chair I was able to say: ‘That’s
certainly an insight I can accept, but I don’t see how it stops me
bounding around like a satyr. Surely so long as I miss Lyle so
much I’m going to go on feeling attracted to these women?’

‘There’s no law which says you mustn’t find them attractive,
Charles; being attracted to women is a perfectly acceptable mascu
line occupation. What matters is that you shouldn’t continue to
use them to work off an aspect of your bereavement which you
still haven’t grasped.’

‘
You keep talking of an "aspect" but surely it’s the whole bereave
ment — surely I’m just missing Lyle?’

‘
The journal suggests that there’s something more specific going
on. Try this question: if I’m right and these three women do in
their different ways represent Lyle to you, what in fact have you
been doing by pursuing them?’

I said very slowly: ‘Pursuing her. Trying to find her. When I
finally embraced Sheila I felt as if Lyle had come back to me.’

‘
Now you’re getting somewhere.’

‘
I barely know any of these women,’ I said as the assorted pieces
of the puzzle began to fall into place, ‘but because I was projecting Lyle’s image on to them so strongly they seemed so familiar — and
so very hard to resist.’

‘So if you stop projecting Lyle’s image —’

‘
— they’ll all become resistible and my carver as a satyr will end.
But how do I stop projecting Lyle’s image?’

‘
You understand just why you’re so desperate to find her. Or in other words, the question you have to answer is this: what aspect
of Lyle’s loss hit you so hard that on a subconscious level you felt
you had to run around trying to find her in every woman you
met?’

There was a long, long silence. Then I whispered: ‘I wanted to
tell her I was sorry. I wanted to make love to her and put everything
right.’ And as my fingers closed at last on the journal which lay
on the table between us, the tears blurred my eyes until I could
no longer see.

‘
I needed her to be there to forgive me,’ I said after a while. ‘I felt
so ashamed of my blindness and selfishness and stupidity. I felt so
guilty that I’d driven her to set out on her great spiritual journey
alone.’

‘
Perhaps it was necessary for her to set out alone. Perhaps that
was all part of the process of finding out what God required of
her.’

‘
But I failed her by being so insensitive and making life so diffi
cult for her!’

‘
Yet doesn’t the journal show that she never stopped loving you
despite all your difficulties? And do you think she’d have continued
to pray for you with such passion if you hadn’t been fully forgiven?
She prayed for you every day, indeed it seems she prayed almost
without ceasing, she prayed for you right up to the end.’

‘
And what good did it do?’ Tears burnt my cheeks as I ·
remembered Lyle dying. ‘I can’t bear being without her,’ I said,
hardly able to speak, ‘can’t
bear
it.’

An interval followed during which Jon moved his chair around
the table so that he could sit at my side and put his hand comfort
ingly over mine. It was as if by entering the darkness of my grief he was able to absorb it and lighten the burden. At last I found I
could say: ‘I know her prayers did do good. The journal made
clear how greatly her life had changed for the better. But I didn’t
change, did I?’

‘You’re changing now.’

‘But to think she had to die in order to —’

‘
No, no, you’re misinterpreting what happened, implying her
death was a punishment for your obtuseness — all that guilt of yours
must have produced a theological amnesia! Charles, the death was
a random event. God —’

— never wills suffering,
yes,
all right, I don’t seriously believe
he decided to knock some sense into me by killing my wife, I’m
not quite ripe to be stripped of my doctorate in divinity — but the fact remains that if she hadn’t died I wouldn’t have seen the need
for change and all her prayers would have been in vain.’

‘
But can’t you see? No, obviously not — you’ve been blinded by
grief. Charles, I’m sure you’re mistaken — I’m sure everything was
set up for a big dénouement, but Lyle’s death threw a spanner in
the works.’

‘
Obviously you’re basing that opinion on the journal, but I can’t
quite —’

‘
Lyle was working herself up to confide in you — her prayers
had obviously convinced her that this was what had to be done;
she didn’t pray in vain at all; she prayed for enlightenment and it
was granted to her. She recta several times to her desire to talk
to you, but she’s held back each time because she’s sure you’ll
never believe what she has to say. In other words, she was only
silent because the rime never seemed right to speak out, but that
time would have come, I’m sure of it — and it would have come
in the form of a disaster.’

‘How can you possibly know?’

‘
Because Lyle knew. The last section of her journal is filled with
intimations of an approaching catastrophe.’

‘
I’d assumed that was some sort of eerie foreknowledge of her
own death.’

‘
That’s not impossible, I agree, but I believe that with the new
clarity of vision which prayer had given her, she was looking at
her very troubled family and making a deduction which required
no psychic foreknowledge whatsoever. Her chief fear seems to
have been that you yourself would break down in some way, but
it’s obvious tha
t she was also extr
emely worried about Charley and
Michael. When a family
is as
troubled
as
your family was — and is
— all the members become vulnerable and a disaster of some kind
is often waiting in the wings.’

‘So you’re saying that if Lyle had lived —’

‘
If Lyle had lived, she would have at last had the chance to speak
out. Disasters have a way of breaking down barriers.’

I struggled with this unpalatable vision for some time but finally
said: ‘Could the disaster still happen?’

‘
Yes, because Lyle’s death hasn’t solved the fundamental family problems. On the contrary, it will have brought them into sharper
focus and exacerbated them, but if Lyle was right, Charles, and
the disaster does happen, what will now be utterly changed is your
response to it.’

’All I want,’ I said, ‘is to make everything come right.’

‘
That would be wonderful, but it’ll be exceedingly difficult and almost certainly very painful;
as
Aysgarth reminded us just now,
the road to redemption’s no primrose path.’ On an impulse he
picked up the journal again and began to flick through the pages. ‘But don’t despair of redemption,’ he added, having administered
this dose of realism. ‘No matter how impossible it seems, one
should never lose hope. I was reminded so strongly of that when
I read Lyle’s references to her protégée.’ He found the right page
and smoothed it with care. ‘I met Venetia,’ he said unexpectedly.
‘Did I ever tell you?’

‘I don’t believe you did, no.’

‘
Possibly I felt too guilty — she was one of my failures. Nicholas
brought her here in 1963. She was very troubled but I was no use
to her. Afterwards I said to God: "Save her! Put right all that’s
gone wrong!" and I saw so clearly then how we had
all
failed
Venetia, all the churchmen who were involved with her at that
time ... And how do you think my prayer was answered? Nicholas
told me before he went to Africa that Venetia’s marriage was not
a success and that she was leading a more unsatisfactory life than
ever. How depressed I was! And how guilty I felt all over again
that I’d been unable to help her! In the end I was in such despair
that I even asked God for a sign that somehow, against all the odds,
the redemptive process was at work, but still nothing happened —
until yesterday. Then Lyle’s journal was brought to me and I
received my sign.’

He paused but when I did not speak he said: ‘I learnt that Lyle
had been
as
frustrated
as
I was by her inability to help Venetia. I
learnt that she too had been driven to prayer — and with the most
remarkable results. Her life was changed, the lives of the other
people in the prayer-group were changed, and in consequence the lives of those closest to those people will be changed — and all this
life-giving work of the Holy Spirit springs from the fact that back
in 1963 a muddled unhappy young woman made a series of tragic
decisions.’

‘But what will happen to Venetia?’

‘
I have faith now that in the end the redemptive process will
curve back to encircle her, but of course I shall continue to pray
that all will one day be well — indeed we should all pray for Venetia,
all of us who failed her in 1963... Even Nicholas is praying for
her,’ he added pleased. ‘He says he feels specially called to be her
spiritual friend.’

I made no comment. I thought it unlikely that Venetia felt the
need of a ‘spiritual friend’ and more probable that young Nicholas merely had a vague crush on a sophisticated woman some years
his senior.

Meanwhile Jon was asking me if I now felt I understood my
errors well enough to make my formal confession. With an effort
I set all thought of the younger generation aside and said: ‘You’ve
made sure that I do. But there’s still something I want to ask:
before you read the journal, did you see as clearly as Lyle did how
far adrift I was?’

‘
No. I think Lyle saw the situation with such agonising clarity
because she was the one who was actually living with you — but
having said that, I must add at once that I don’t want to make
excuses for my pastoral inadequacies here. No doubt I should have
taken a firmer line — not force-feeding you truths you couldn’t
accept, but trying to shine a stronger light into areas where you
were self-satisfied and over-confident.’

‘It’s easy to be wise in retrospect.’

‘
And it’s generous of you to let me off so lightly. Perhaps the hard truth
is
that I’m simply too old now and too fond of you to
be
as useful as I was in 1937.’

‘Nonsense!’

‘
Is it? If Father Darcy were here I’m sure he’d judge my attitude
to you to
be
hopelessly sentimental and send you at once to another
spiritual director.’

‘I shouldn’t have liked that at all!’

‘
Father Darcy wouldn’t have been in the least interested in
whether you liked it or not. He would only have been concerned
with the welfare of your soul.’

Silently thanking God that I had never been one of Father
Darcy’s monks, I prepared to make my formal confession.