Absolute Truths (94 page)

As the result of this drunken yarn-spinning, I found Lewis a new spiritual director (any priest who gets drunk in public needs
someone taking a different approach to his spiritual life) and made
a point of keeping in touch with him regularly by letter, but I
was very conscious that he needed more help than I, far away in Cambridge, could provide. The main trouble seems to be that
Lewis can never find a spiritual director who is quite right for him. In 1968 he finally met Jon, but although they had some enthralling
conversations about Father Darcy, Jon always refused to be Lewis’s
spiritual director. To me he simply said: ‘I’m too old,’ and I have no doubt he was right. Lewis seems to exhaust spiritual directors
in record time; I suspect he sets them huge tests of endurance
and then sacks them when they fail to meet his impossibly high standards. ‘No one ever measures up to Father Darcy,’ he’s said
to me more than once. Sometimes I think that eccentric old monk
has a lot to answer for.

Lewis is better at the moment. He tells me he has restricted his
drinking and is being moderate in his eating habits, but rumour
reaches me that he has been seen dining in London with a blonde
divorcée. I fear he was born to live dangerously, and indeed my
successor in the bishopric tells me he’s consumed more indigestion
tablets since he met Lewis than he had hitherto consumed in his entire ministry.

The healing centre is a success; no one disputes this. It has
helped many people, the ethical standards are impeccable and it is
a credit to the Christian ministry of healing. But the risk of scandal
is always there, the worm lurking in the woodwork, and Lewis —
dynamic, controversial, attractive to both sexes, capable of spiritual
brilliance and spiritual instability in more or less equal proportions
— Lewis lives always on a knife-edge. Malcolm Lindsay escaped, becoming Provost of Richmond, but the new archdeacon was unable to cope with that special ministry in Langley Bottom and wound up having a nervous breakdown.
"Après nous le déluge!"‘
said Malcolm when we lunched together in London shortly afterwards, and we both experienced an agreeable shiver of
schadenfreude.

Paul Dalton also moved on from Starbridge; I secretly coaxed
a brother-bishop to offer him a canonry closer to Berkshire, Paul’s
home county, because I felt sure Sheila would be as anxious as I was that she should embark on her new life at a comfortable distance from me. She did promise that she would never tell a soul
what had happened during that night I spent in Pimlico, and I
was careful to
^e
xpress sincere gratitude, but of course it was in her
best interests to ensure that Paul never knew about her little lapse.
He had married her in the firm belief that as the ideal clerical wife
she had never put a foot wrong, least of all in the company of
stray bishops, and I could well imagine her saying mildly that it would have been very unkind to disillusion him.

‘I find that nowadays I can remember Sheila almost with affec
tion,’ I said the other day to Loretta after reading an article on
the Daltons’ cathedral in the
Church Gazette.
‘In some ways she was a remarkably nice woman.’

‘
Oh yeah?’ said Loretta in the time-honoured manner of the American sceptic. (And in my memory I could hear Lyle sigh: ‘Dear Charles! Such a very Christian nature!’) ‘I think she was a
pretty tough cookie. She nearly nailed you, and she nailed Paul in double-quick time. A classic English adventuress in a twinset and
pearls!’

I retorted that of course no adventuress could be taken seriously
unless she wore a pink trouser-suit and talked with an American
accent.

‘
Isn’t it odd,’ said Loretta when we had finished laughing, ‘how
even the shadiest incidents of the past can contribute beneficially
to the present? If you hadn’t got in such a muddle with Sheila she
wouldn’t have closed in on Starbridge like a man-eating shark —
and if Sheila hadn’t come to Starbridge Paul might never have
found his ideal wife. And just think: if we hadn’t rolled around
together in the heather in 1937 —’

‘Bracken,’ I said, sotto voce.

‘
— I wouldn’t have become a Christian, and if I hadn’t become
a Christian you wouldn’t have considered marrying me, and if you
hadn’t married me I’d still be moseying around my New York
apartment in my muu-muu trying to kid myself it was fun to spend
old age alone, and if I was still alone, then we wouldn’t be having
such fun confounding all the doomsters who say old age is hell.
So in other words, our current moral Christian bliss is all due to
the fact that we fornicated amidst the
non-specific vegetation
long
ago before the war!’

Since this thesis implied that we could all eat, drink and be
merry without restraint in the knowledge that God would always
clear up the mess, I felt obliged to point out: ‘You’re forgetting
I’ve had to sweat blood to try to help God redeem my mistakes
as far as possible! And the fact that a surprising degree of redemption’s been achieved doesn’t alter the fact that my mistakes caused
a lot of trouble at the time and that I paid a stiff price for them.’

‘
But you can’t deny our happy ending!’

‘
I’m just pointing out it didn’t happen painlessly as the result of
God waving a magic wand. Besides, redemption doesn’t always
come in the form of the traditional happy ending. Look at Ays
garth. He redeemed his remote past somehow by looking after
Dido, but one can hardly say he lived happily ever after. The point
was that the redemption enabled him to live with his past and
gave his marriage meaning.’

But Loretta had been swept away on a tide of liberal optimism.
‘You’re making it all sound much too gloomy!’ she argued with
spirit. ‘I think Stephen gets a big charge out of that marriage. He
loves all that wining and dining and socialising! I’m not saying
the marriage hasn’t been a challenge, and can you really see Stephen being married to a nice little wife who caused him no trouble? He’d have expired from boredom before the first wedding anniversary!’

It was strange how Aysgarth’s name came up at that particular
time. When I opened
The Times
at the obituary page the next
morning, I saw that he was dead. Old age remains a poignant
journey, even when one travels in good health and with the best
of companions. The circle of friends contracts, the future slowly
disappears, tales of illness and suffering multiply. The fact that I believe God will enfold me when I die and that the pattern which
is Charles Ashworth will be recreated in another dimension does
not alter the fact that I have had a good life which I shall be sorry
to leave. I console myself with the knowledge that in every ending there is a new beginning, and that out of death comes redemption,
resurrection and renewal. I lived through that great truth after
Lyle died and I have never forgotten it, particularly now when I
live each day to the full and give thanks to God for his mercy and
generosity to me. Nevertheless, it’s hard when the old companions
die, and is there any companion to whom one is linked more
subtly and irrevocably than an old enemy whom one forgives and
befriends at the end? I see now before I close this memoir I must
make some final comment upon this fellow-traveller whom I mis
understood so often during our journey through the Church of
England in the twentieth century, but the right words will be hard
to find. What can one say about a heroic ecclesiastical gangster
who was addicted to taking scandalous risks? Yet I want to be as
generous to him as I know he would have been to me if I had been
the one to die first. Generous, forgiving ... but not sentimental.
I suppose in the end it’s all a question of truth.

III

How closely Aysgarth’s life was interwoven with mine, and how
important we were to each other! I cannot say we became close
friends after he resigned the deanery in 1965, but we kept in touch
and during his annual visit to Starbridge he always called to see
me. He made this annual pilgrimage to visit the grave of his three
sons who had died at birth; the first infant had died in Starbridge
and the other two were buried with him. I found it touching that
Aysgarth, that tough old warrior, should keep those lost children
of his so alive in his memory. How sad it was that Dido never accompanied him.

I hardly need reveal that he pulled off his final scandalous risk
as dean, produced immaculate accounts and was hailed as the most
brilliant fund-raiser in the Church of England. (Nigel, Malcolm
and the Chapter were all nearly felled by apoplexy when they saw
the enormous fees which had been paid to the ‘art expert’, but we
were united in agreeing that in order to keep the story out of the
press we had to have our apoplexy quietly, in private.)
On his retirement the ecclesiastical organisations queued up to
offer Aysgarth a job and he was much courted. I hear he raised
some amazing sum of money for Guildford Cathedral. Certainly
he had a busy life once he was safely installed in his lavishly modernised, tastelessly extended former labourer’s hovel in the most
picturesque part of rural Surrey. (Roses were immediately trained
to grow around the front door.) Perhaps because of the guilt caused by his extraordinary machin
ations with Harriet March, he almost worked himself to death in
his last months at the Deanery with the result that more money
was raised for the west front than was needed. This surplus has
been devotedly tended with absolute propriety by various account
ants and brokers of unimpeachable reputation, and is now set to
gladden the heart of the future Dean of Starbridge when the spire
begins to sway in the wind in the late 1980s. (The Cathedral
architect prophesied this apocalyptic event as long ago as 1963.)
In fact the present dean is so grateful to Aysgarth that he and the
Chapter have voted unanimously to place a large stone in his
memory in the floor of the nave, and apparently Dido has already
demanded that the memorial should be unveiled by the Archbishop
of Canterbury. The
Church Gazette
will no doubt squander columns of newsprint in declaring what a character Aysgarth was,
and by the turn of the century he will have gone down in history
as a great ecclesiastical hero.

‘
If they only knew what he’d got up to!
^’
I muttered to Loretta
as I ploughed through the obsequious obituary in
The Times.

‘
Assuming that God knew and forgave him,’ said Loretta, ‘isn’t
it theologically correct that the obituary writers should reflect only
the good side of Stephen’s character and allow the murky side to
be consigned to oblivion?’

I sometimes wish Loretta could have been one of my divinity undergraduates. What stimulating discussions we would have had! ‘You’re ignoring the question of truth,’ I said benignly, ‘but that’s
because the question, as you’ve posed it, doesn’t reflect what’s
actually happened. What the obituary writers are reflecting is
neither Stephen’s good side nor his bad side but his final pattern.
As Jon would have said, all the dark episodes have been penetrated
by the light so that only this extraordinary image of a rehabilitated, redeemed Aysgarth remains — but of course it only seems extraordi
nary to us because we can best remember him in the days long
before the final pattern was fixed.’

I could see this response appealed to Loretta, but being of an
independent disposition she tossed another thought-provoking
question at me. ‘How do you think God intends to redeem
Stephen’s family?’ she said, and added regretfully: ‘I suppose that’s
one piece of fancy creative footwork which we won’t live to see.’

It is a sad fact that various members of Aysgarth’s family were
felled by tragedy in the latter half of the 1960s, and not all the
disasters could be attributed to random misfortune. Loretta says
it’s obvious that Aysgarth was quite unable to ‘communicate’ with
the sons of his first marriage with the result that the family became ‘dysfunctional; she attributes this fatal dislocation to Aysgarth’s
infatuation with Dido so soon after his first wife’s death, and
theorises that Aysgarth was probably so smitten with guilt about
his behaviour that he was unable to discuss the situation ‘meaning
fully’ with the bewildered and scandalised children. Wary though
I am of some of Loretta’s more extravagant flights of fancy through the realm of psychology (complete with peculiar American jargon),
I have to admit I find this explanation plausible, particularly since
the children of the second marriage do not seem to attract misfortune in quite the same way as their older siblings. Both have their
odd side (why does Pip have no girlfriends? Why did Elizabeth
marry an elderly foreign roué when she was pretty enough to
marry a decent Englishman?) but one would hardly expect Dido’s
children to reflect the dead norm of youthful behaviour.

It has just occurred to me that now at last I can see why Aysgarth
was so devoted to those three sons who died at birth. They could
not grow old and hurt him as the other boys did; he could love
them devotedly in the knowledge that they would never disappoint
him. Strange how that continuing devotion to the dead children still has the power to move me. The fact that they had such a
special place in their father’s heart gives their brief lives meaning.

After I had read the obituary I went to my study and reread the
last letter he had written to me and which would now remain unanswered. He had been on a little holiday to Norfolk to visit Lyle’s protégée Venetia, the daughter of his best friend Lord Flaxton.

‘Naturally she was horrified to see what a battered old wreck I’ve become since my stroke,’ he had written with characteristic insouciance, ‘but she was so kind that she even allowed me to
convince her that Holman Hunt’s
Light of the World
wasn’t just
one big Victorian cliché! Flushed by this spiritual triumph (and
God knows, one was long overdue) I then became very cosy and
confidential. "My dearest Venetia," I said to her, "spare a tear for
poor old Dido and thank God
you
haven’t wound up yoked to a
decrepit old crock!" She refused to shed a tear for Dido, but she
did give me a kiss, which is a very delightful treat for a man of
my age and condition to receive, and I venture to hope that every
thing will come right for her now that she understands about
The Light of the World.
Not that I shall live to see things come
right for her, but at least now I have absolute faith that they
will.

‘
Talking of death and speaking as one clergyman to another, I
have to admit that despite my decrepit state I’m not too keen on
dying, but never mind, I can’t complain, I’ve had a good life and
despite all the difficulties and sadness I can still say with sincerity:
THANKS BE TO GOD! I only hope that when the end does
come it’s sudden and I drop straight into God’s lap. Quite what
he’ll do with me is, I realise, open to debate, but since I shall always
remain until my dying day a good Liberal Protestant Modernist,
I can’t help but be an incorrigible optimist and I believe that
God will be as merciful to me as you were, back in 1965, when
you discovered the full extent of my passion for innovative fund-raising ...’

The telephone rang on my desk just as I had finished rereading
these lines, and when I picked up the receiver I found myself speaking to Charley. He had been informed by the lawyers that there was to be a big funeral service for Aysgarth in Starbridge Cathedral, and Aysgarth himself had left Charley a letter which asked him to give the address.

‘
I suppose the situation has a certain inexorable logic,’ Charley
was saying as I struggled to digest this startling information. ‘He preached at Alex’s funeral in 1945 and he died still believing that
fable that I was Alex’s grandson. None of his sons became clergy
men. Alex was the friend and mentor who gave him a helping hand at the start of his career. Aysgarth himself always took an interest in me. The request really isn’t so surprising.’

All I said was: ‘Do you have his letter in front of you?’

‘
The lawyers enclosed it with their own letter which arrived this
morning. Strangely enough Aysgarth asks me to consult you about
the text on which I’m instructed to preach. He says you alone know exactly how he believed it should be interpreted.’

I said: ‘It’s "Romans" eight, isn’t it?’

‘Verse twenty-eight, yes. "And we know that all things work together for good ..."‘

And so- I come to the very end of my story, the third ending, the ending which will leave me with nothing more to write. For
here I am, once more, in Starbridge Cathedral, and here, at last,
is the Grand Finale.