Absolute Truths (31 page)

* * *

’MEMO TO JESUS: Give us life! We’re all so crippled at the
moment that we can’t function properly. Heal Charles, heal us all,
make us whole.

‘
MEMO TO GOD: SAVE CHARLES! Or rather, help me to
save Charles, tell me how to say all that has to be said, I’ll do anything to save Charles, anything, I love him so much that I’d
even lay down my life to save him, r
^y
e been so lucky to have him
all these years, especially when I didn’t deserve such happiness, he
saved me when I was
in
extremis –
give me the chance now to save
him. Amen.

‘Afterthoughts: Oh God, please don’t let Starbridge destroy Charles
as
it destroyed Alex. Please,
please,
PLEASE.

‘
We should never have come here, never, never, never.
‘Fatal, lethal Starbridge.

‘
Demonic, destructive Starbridge.

‘So vilely, so
hideously
beautiful.

‘I HATE IT.’

* * *

There was no more. The remaining pages were blank. I dosed that
small, cheap exercise book and at once it slipped through my shaking fingers to the floor.

My- voice was saying: ‘Oh my God.’ My voice appeared
to
be operating independently of my will and it said ‘oh my God’ over
and over again. Dimly I remembered that when the black box is
recovered after a plane crash, the pilot’s last words invariably con
sist of expletives. It was the instinctive reaction to a horrific and
overwhelming shock.

After a while I had another instinctive reaction: I wanted to burn the book. I even picked it up and fumbled for my lighter.
The thought that Charley and Michael might one day know how
deeply I had failed Lyle by all my omissions, insensitivity and
neglect was unbearable, but the next moment I knew there could
be no incineration. I knew that
as
surely as I knew I had to read that journal again.

I stumbled into my dressing-room and sank down on the easy-
chair where on the mornings before the catastrophe I had read my
theology.

Later, after I had again reached the last line of the final page, I
realised why the journal had to be preserved; I realised that in
Lyle’s fragmentary record of her great spiritual journey, the journey
I had never bothered to uncover, there lay the truth — the absolute
truth — about the woman with whom I had lived for so long. Although I disagreed with her on a number of matters (had to disagree, had to, how could I live with myself if I were to agree
with every word she had written?) my disagreement was irrelevant.
What mattered was that in her words, accurate and inaccurate,
biased and unbiased, discerning and undiscerning, lay the fact that
she had offered herself to God and that in consequence her life
had been transformed. This complex woman with her chequered
past, her continuing cynicism, her persistent bitchiness on the sub
ject of her own sex, her sharp-clawed, feline personality — and yes,
I knew all Lyle’s faults as well as all her virtues — this most unlikely
woman had been singled out by God for a special prayer-life and she had not failed him. It was as if God had seen straight past the
tough layers of her personality which had accumulated over the years as the result of her unhappy childhood, her impoverished youth and her disastrous love-affair, and had shone light on the
true self which had been hidden beneath all the layers of scar-tissue
from the past wounds. I saw her finally as Christian, questing, humble and brave.

I knew I had glimpsed this true self repeatedly during the years
of our marriage, but in the end I had done nothing to help her foster it and achieve fulfilment. I had been too busy with my
theology and my bishopric. I had been too busy with my absolute
truths. I, the strong, militant Christian leader whose business it
was to steer the members of my flock towards the destiny to which
they had been called by God, had allowed the person closest to
me to struggle on alone towards her own special fulfilment of the
spirit. I had been so preoccupied with laying down God’s
laws that
I had been blind to the work of the Holy Spirit which had been going on under my nose.

I wanted to resign my bishopric.

My fingers tightened on the journal. How despicable that I had
wanted to destroy this testament of truth because I had feared it would diminish me in my sons’ eyes! And as I glimpsed this
unhealthy preoccupation with my self-image, this unhealthy dread of facing unpalatable facts and this unhealthy urge to preserve my
pride, I knew myself to be spiritually debilitated, unfit even to be
an ordinary clergyman. It was hard to know how to endure such a recognition of my inadequacy.

I remembered how I had said to Jon: ‘At least my grief’s uncom
plicated by guilt.’ And I remembered too how Jon had looked away, avoiding comment.

The full horror of my bereavement’s new dimension finally hit
me. Staring down at the final page of the journal I again confronted
the words: ‘I’d lay down my life to save him,’ and in a paroxysm
of rage, heightened by my unendurable guilt, I shouted out loud to God: ‘How dare you take her at her word!’ But no, that was
wrong, I knew that intellectually, I knew it was not God who had
killed Lyle but the blood clot. God had merely invented a world in which such hazards happened; they were side-effects of the creative process, part of the mechanism of continuous change which enabled the world to avoid atrophy and to develop.

‘
How dare you invent such a world!’ I said to God, but that
was a crazy remark, quite inappropriate for a theologian, and I knew I had to clamp down on any inclination to talk like an uneducated lunatic. I told myself I was now encountering a
phenomenon which we theologians called ‘the mystery of suffer
ing’. We wrote articles about it. We propounded theories. My Oxonian friend Dr AUSTIN FARRER

had delivered a whole series of
lectures on the subject and published them under the title of
Low
Almighty and Ills Unlimited.
I too had planned to publish such a book, but I had never found the time to do more than sketch out a few avenues to be explored: the concepts of determinism and
free will, the possibilities of spiritual growth in adversity, the per
ceptions about the teleology of the divine will, and so on and so on. I had found it soothing to reduce the mystery of suffering to
an intellectually rigorous, well-ordered pattern.

But no intellectual rigour was of any use to me now.

It’s not fair!’ I shouted to God. ‘It’s not just! It’s not right!’
Shoving the journal away from me I blundered downstairs. ‘Why couldn’t I have found the journal when she was still alive ... why couldn’t you have kept her alive long enough for me to say I was
sorry ... why couldn’t you have shown me earlier that I’d taken
a wrong turn ... why did she have to die like that ... why, why,
why...’

In the drawing-room I found that the bottle of whisky was a
quarter full. I started to drink.

Goodbye to sanity. Goodbye to a well-ordered world.
Chaos had come again.

And darkness.

And no light shone.

I drank.

THREE

‘
Pain,
grief,
and every sort of discontent put a drag on action
and drain the
colour
out
of
enterprise. Merely to resist the
deadening influence, and go on with lift at all, may be an effort almost too great’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College,Oxford, 1960-1968

Love Almighty and
Ills Unlimited

It is hard to find the words to describe my terrible awakening the
next morning. I was fully dressed, except for my jacket, and clutch
ing my pectoral cross in the manner of a baby clasping a rattle.
The cross banged against the basin
as
I vomited. It jarred against
my chest as I slumped back upon the bed. It juddered against the
bedside table
as
I scrabbled to read the dial of the electric clock.
I was now quite beyond thinking about the mystery of suffering’. My whole being was focused on the fact that I was in a desperate state and that no one must know about it. It had to be concealed
in order to preserve not merely my reputation but the good name
of the Church. I could not —
could not —
be seen to be suffering
from alcohol poisoning. I had to recover swiftly and silently with
no fuss whatsoever. That was my absolute moral duty as a bishop,
and I was going to do my duty or die in the attempt.

I did wonder vaguely if I would die, but then realised with
horror that death was a luxury I could not afford, since an autopsy
would reveal the scandalously high
level
of alcohol in my blood. The cross and I journeyed to the basin again for another round
of retching, but there was nothing left to bring up. I cursed myself
for eating so little the day before and thus compounding the cur
rent torture. I started to drink water. I drank and drank. I found the
Alka-Seltzer and mixed the stiffest permissible potion. I endured
diarrhoea. I drank still more water. I held my head under the cold
tap and finally I took a cold shower.

By this time it was nine o’clock and I could hear Miss Peabody
moving about, but that was all right, Miss Peabody was no threat,
she was hardly going to come upstairs and root me out of the
bedroom. I shaved, dressed carefully in fresh clothes and brushed
my hair so hard that afterwards it was almost straight. I had already
brushed my remaining teeth and cleaned the five false ones on
their plate, but I was worried in case my breath might provide a clue to my over-indulgence, so I swallowed some toothpaste in
the hope that its peppermint flavour would neutralise all odours. The sheer sordidness of these manoeuvres overwhelmed me. It
was a relief to escape downstairs.

As I crept across the hall I thanked God I had given the cook-
housekeeper and the charwoman two weeks’ holiday; their absence
meant I could clear up after myself, and having returned the open
bottle of whisky to the sideboard I headed for the back door with
the bottle I had emptied. Only when this was safely buried beneath
a pile of other rubbish did I begin to breathe more easily.

I had brought the journal downstairs and now I locked it in
one of the drawers of my desk. Moving back to the kitchen I had
to pause to retch by the sink, but fortunately Miss Peabody was closeted with the typist in the office and could not possibly have
heard me. I just had time to make a large pot of tea before Malcolm
arrived. As I hid behind the kitchen door I heard him say in the
hall: ‘How’s the Bishop?’ and Miss Peabody, who had emerged
from the office to meet him, replied: ‘He isn’t down yet, Arch
deacon. Such a good thing he’s at last able to rest.’

So far so good. Tiptoeing to my study with the tea I sat down
again. I was trying to work out whether the pain in my head was
more unpleasant than the queasiness in my stomach, and some
time passed as I tried to resolve this most unpleasant puzzle.

I had just finished the tea when I remembered my promise to
Jon to attend the morning services at Starrington Manor’s chapel.
‘Bloody hell!’ I muttered, too battered to mind my language. I
looked at the clock. Mass would long since have finished and
Jon would no doubt be worrying that I had had an accident.

Telephoning the Manor I asked one of the members of the Community to tell Father Darrow at once that I had been unavoidably
detained in Starbridge but would be in touch with him again soon.

I was so exhausted by this attempt to sound normal that several
minutes passed before I realised how disturbed I was by the
thought of my next meeting with Jon. Naturally I would tell him
the truth; naturally I would confess that I had temporarily lost
control over myself and indulged in a drinking bout; naturally I would tell him all that. But after careful reflection I did not think
I would tell him just yet. I needed to recover my equilibrium. I
needed to prove that I had not gone irrevocably to pieces. I needed
to reassure myself that I was still capable of displaying the sort of
behaviour which a bishop ought to display no matter how adverse
the circumstances. I decided I would behave impeccably for the remainder of the day. Then on the morrow I could go to Jon and
say: ‘Look, I’ve been a complete fool and behaved disgracefully,
but I’ve pulled myself together and now, by the grace of God, I’ll
be all right.’

Very edifying.

Or was it? Wouldn’t Jon immediately say: ‘Why didn’t you come
to me straight away? Why did you have to save face by demonstrat
ing your strength of character for the remainder of the day? Hasn’t
this in fact been a classic demonstration of pride?’

But I would reply: ‘Yes, you’re quite right, I’m sorry, I’ve been
very proud and even more stupid than I thought, and I’ll say as
much when I make my confession.’ Then everything would be all
right.

Or would it? No, not really. I was twisting around in a bog of
shame and cowardice, I could see that just as clearly as I could see
that I couldn’t face Jon that day, couldn’t, not when I was so
hung-over and humiliated, not when I felt so devastated by Lyle’s
journal, not when all I wanted to do was crawl into the nearest
corner and speak to no one.

But crawling into the nearest corner and speaking to no one
represented yet more luxuries I could not afford, because I had to
keep fighting my hang-over. Dragging myself from my study I
grabbed my overcoat and slipped out of the back door into the
icy air of that February morning.