Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch

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СКАЧАТЬ second year which I remember vividly is 1968. That was the year young Nicholas Darrow, my spiritual director’s son, was finally ordained after what I suspected was a very shady interval in his private life. It was also the year my son Charley became engaged and my son Michael was married, yet despite these family milestones 1965 remains the year which is most clearly etched in my memory. Not 1963. Not 1968. But 1965.

      Let me now describe the man I was before my third catastrophe felled me, the catastrophe which arrived out of the blue. I had been the Bishop of Starbridge for eight years and despite a tentative start I had become highly successful. My sons were both doing well in their chosen careers, and although in their different ways they still worried me, I had come to the conclusion that as a parent I must have been doing something right; at the very least I felt I deserved a medal for paternal endurance. I was on happier ground when I considered my marriage, now almost twenty-eight years old and a perfect partnership.

      In short, I was not ill-pleased with my life, and stimulated by this benign opinion of myself I travelled constantly around my ecclesiastical fiefdom, spoke forcefully on education in the House of Lords, held forth with confidence on television discussion programmes, ruled various committees with an iron hand and terrorised the lily-livered liberals of the Church Assembly. I also had sufficient zest to maintain my prowess on the golf course and enjoy my wife’s company on the days off which she so zealously preserved for me amidst the roaring cataract of my engagements. Occasionally I felt no older than forty-five. On my bad days I felt about fifty-nine. On average I felt somewhere in my early fifties. In fact I was as old as the century, but who cared? I was fit, busy, respected, pampered and privileged. Frequently and conscientiously I thanked God for the outstanding good fortune which enabled me to serve him as he required – and what he required, I had no doubt, was that I should fight slipshod thinking by defending the faith in a manner which was tough-minded and intellectually rigorous. St Augustine and St Athanasius, I often told myself, would have been proud of me.

      I was proud of me, although of course I had far too much spiritual savoir-faire to do other than shove this secret opinion of myself to the very back of my mind. By 1965 I was too preoccupied by my current battles to waste much time visualising my future obituary in The Times, but on those rare moments when I paused to picture my posthumous eminence, I saw long, long columns of very dense newsprint.

      God stood by and watched me for some time. Then in 1965 he saw the chance to act, and seizing me by the scruff of the neck he began to shake me loose from the suffocating folds of my self-satisfaction, my arrogance and my pride.

      II

      In order to convey the impact of the catastrophe, I must now describe what was going on in my life as I steamed smoothly forward to the abyss.

      1965 was little over a month old, and we were all recovering from the state funeral of Sir Winston Churchill, an event which had temporarily united in grief the members of our increasingly frivolous and fragmented society. For people of my generation it seemed that one of the strongest ropes tethering us to the past had been severed, and ’the old order changeth, yielding place to new’ was a comment constantly in my thoughts at the time. Watching that winter funeral on television I shuddered at the thought of the inevitably apocalyptic future.

      However, I had little time to contemplate apocalypses. As one of the Church’s experts on education, I was required to worry about the government’s plans to scrap the 11-plus examination and establish comprehensive schools; I was planning to make a speech on the subject in the Church Assembly later that month, and I was also framing a speech for the House of Lords about curbing hooliganism by restricting the hours of coffee-bars. My involvement in current events of this nature required in addition that I brooded on racism – or, as it was called in those days, racialism – and marvelled at the state of a society which would permit a play entitled You’ll Come To Love Your Sperm-Count to be not only performed in public but actually reviewed by an esteemed magazine.

      I remember I had begun to think about my Lent sermons but Easter was late that year, Good Friday falling on the sixteenth of April, so the sermons had not yet been written. In my spare time I was working on a book about Hippolytus, that early Christian writer whose battles against the sexually lax Bishop Callistus had resounded throughout the Roman Empire; at the beginning of my academic career I had made a name for myself by specialising in the conflicts of the Early Church, and before my accession to the bishopric I had been Lyttelton Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.

      At this point may I just rebut two of the snide criticisms which my enemies used to hurl at me? (Unfortunately by 1965 my fighting style had earned me many enemies.) The first was that academics are unsuited to any position of importance in what is fondly called ‘the real world’. According to this belief, which is so typical of the British vice of despising intellectuals, academic theologians are incapable of preaching the faith in words of one syllable to the proletariat, but this is just crypto-Marxist hogwash. I knew exactly what the proletariat wanted to hear. They wanted to hear certainties, and whether those certainties were expressed in monosyllables or polysyllables was immaterial. Naturally I would not have dreamed of burdening the uneducated with fascinating theological speculation; that sort of discourse has to be left to those who have the aptitude and training to comprehend it. Would one expect a beginner at the piano to play Mozart? Of course not! A beginner must learn by absorbing simple exercises. This fact does not mean that the beginner is incapable of intuitively grasping the wonder and mystery of music. It merely means he has to take much of the theory on trust from those who have devoted their lives to studying it.

      Having demolished the idea that I am incapable of communicating with uneducated people, let me go on to rebut the second snide criticism hurled at me during my bishopric. It was alleged that as I had spent most of my career in an ivory tower I was ill-equipped for pastoral work. What nonsense! The problems of undergraduates sharpen any clergyman’s pastoral skills, and besides, my years as an army chaplain had given me a breadth of experience which I would never have acquired in ordinary parish work.

      I have to confess that I have never actually done any ordinary parish work. The training of priests was more haphazard in my youth, and if one had the right connections one could sidestep hurdles which today are de rigueur. In my case Archbishop Lang had taken an interest in me, and I had spent the opening years of my career as one of his chaplains before accepting the head-mastership of a minor public school at the ridiculously young age of twenty-seven. Not surprisingly this latter move had proved to be a mistake, but even before I returned to Cambridge to resume my career as a theologian, I felt that an appointment to a parish was merely something which happened to other people.

      I admit I did worry from time to time in the 1930s about this significant omission from my curriculum vitae, but always I came to the conclusion that since my path had crossed so providentially with Archbishop Lang’s it would have been wrong to spurn the opportunities which in consequence came my way. I was still reasoning along these lines in the 1950s when I told myself it would have been wrong to spurn a bishopric merely because I had sufficient brains to flourish among the ivory towers of Cambridge. (Indeed if more bishops had more brains, the pronouncements from the episcopal bench in the House of Lords in the 1960s might have been far more worthy of attention.)

      I did not turn my back on my academic work when I accepted the bishopric. Indeed as I toiled away in Starbridge I soon felt I needed regular divertissements to cheer me up, and this was why I was nearly always writing some book or other during my spare time. I dictated these books to a succession of most attractive part-time secretaries, all under thirty. In 1965 my part-time secretary was Sally, the daughter of my henchman the Archdeacon of Starbridge, and I much enjoyed dictating the fruits of my researches to such a glamorous young woman. It made a welcome change from dictating letters on diocesan affairs to my full-time secretary Miss Peabody who, although matchlessly efficient, was hardly the last word in glamour. My wife quite understood that I needed a break from Miss Peabody occasionally, СКАЧАТЬ