Absolute Truths (40 page)

Another long night passed.

I dreamed that although I had disembowelled Samson he had
risen from the dead and was trying to castrate me with a butcher’s knife. As soon
as
I awoke I was tormented by memories of butchery
in the concentration c
amp, and at once I turned to embrace Lyle,
who was always able to smooth those memories away, but her
side of the bed was ice-cold, and the next moment I felt as if a
glacier were grinding into the very core of my consciousness.
After a while I realised the pain of loneliness was so unbearable
that there were only two ways of easing it: I could either drink
myself into a stupor again or else I could seek a physical release – and an emotional anaesthesia – in the most obvious and pathetic
of ways. The first option I discarded; I was too afraid that Charley
might see me suffering from a hang-over. That left the second
option, the resort (as Bishop Ashworth had declared with such
certainty in the past) of the inadequate, the disordered or the
grossly immature. I did pray for the strength to avoid both options
and merely endure the pain, but in the end I decided my first duty
to God was not to avoid humiliation but to keep sane.

Ashamed of my weakness, ashamed of my disorder, ashamed
that I was so utterly unable to reason myself on to an even keel,
I felt as if I had been battered, bloodied and beaten to my knees.
I finally fell asleep at three o’clock in the morning.

I had set my alarm to ensure I awoke at the right time; I could not have allowed Charley to find out that I had abandoned my old morning routine, and when I arrived downstairs I realised I
also could not allow him to find out that I had no appetite. Care
fully I thanked him when he brought me a cup of the coffee he
had already brewed; carefully I thanked him when he made me
toast and boiled me an egg; carefully I thanked him for being so
kind and thoughtful; carefully I thanked him when he offered to
take me for a drive or play golf with me or do any shopping I
might need. Then having exhausted myself by this immaculate
behaviour I proceeded to make a very big mistake. I said: ‘Much
as
I’d like to spend time with you this morning, I have to go to
Starrington to see Jon.’

Charley flinched as if I had struck him across the
face.

‘
I’m very sorry,’ I said, panicking as I saw the size of my error,
‘I know that sounds like the rudest of rebuffs, but –’

‘
Yes, it does.’ Charley’s voice shook. He was pale with emotion.
‘I make this very special effort to come down here to look after you,
and all you can do is make excuses to escape from my company!’

‘
I assure you I —’

‘
If I were Michael you’d never dream of going to see Father
Darrow!’ shouted Charley, and rushed out, banging the door.

What was I to do? I knew I was being subjected to emotional
blackmail but I knew too that I was powerless to do other than
give in to him. I could not allow Charley to be so deeply upset. I could not allow Charley to be rejected. I could not allow Charley
to be neurotic and tormented. Charley had to be bright, happy
and successful in order to redeem the past and provide me with
my reward.

Another unacceptable section of the journal seared my memory but again I wiped the words from my mind. I could not cope with
Lyle questioning my behaviour towards Charley. All I knew at
that moment was that Charley had to be handled with kid gloves;
Charley had to be appeased and propitiated; Charley had to have
his misery removed so that he could be bright and happy again.

Having caught up with him in the hall I said rapidly: ‘I won’t go to Starrington. I wasn’t thinking too clearly. There’s no need
for me to see Jon today.’

I saw Charley’s expression of relief, but before either of us could
say another agonising word the telephone started to ring.

I
was so afraid Michael was phoning — an event which would
inevitably have driven Charley to new heights of neurotic
behaviour — that I took the call in my study, but the caller proved
to be Paul Dalton, the Cathedral Canon with whom I felt most
at ease. He asked if he could come and see me for a kw minutes.
Disappointed not to hear from Michael but guiltily grateful to
have another respite from Charley, I told Paul to come over straight
away.

Returning to Charley I said to assuage my guilt: ‘I’ve got to see
Paul Dalton for a few minutes but as soon as he’s gone we’ll go
up to the golf club and play a few holes.’ At least if I were playing
golf the need to concentrate would reduce the dialogue to a
minimum.

I saw Charley relax. ‘How is Canon Dalton?’ he asked, making
a big effort to sustain a normal conversation. ‘Is he still hellbent
on remarriage?’

‘
Very much so, yes. He currently has hopes of a young lady
who works for the Red Cross.’

‘
I can’t think why he wants to bother at his age! Why doesn’t
he just employ a woman who’ll dean the house and cook for him?’

‘
Evidently he feels he needs more than a clean house and full
stomach.’

‘
That’s amazing!’ said Charley sincerely. ‘Surely he must be over
sixty?’

I somehow managed to stop myself making a very irritable
response and reflect instead how odd it was that Charley should
still be so prone to tactlessness even though I had laboured so
hard to bring him up to be as diplomatic as I was. Then I saw
that this was quite definitely not a line of thought I wished to
pursue. I wiped it from my mind, but unfortunately my powers
of censorship seemed to be weakening, and when I remembered later that the Halls were due to dine that night at the South Can
onry, I could not stop myself heaving a sigh of relief that I was
to be spared an evening alone with Charley.

I began to feel more guilty than ever.

When Paul arrived I discovered he had come primarily not to
discuss the Cathedral’s affairs, but to moan about his love-life. It
turned out that his latest potential wife, the young woman who
worked for the Red Cross, had rejected him on the grounds of
age. I found it perversely comforting to know that I was not the
only man in the Close who was enduring a hellish morning.

‘
I’m very sorry, Paul,’ I said, ‘but I thought she always told you
the age-gap didn’t matter? What happened to change her mind?’

No idea.’ Paul was sunk in gloom. ‘I must have gone wrong
somewhere and now she’s using the age-gap as an excuse to ditch
me. I’m sorry, Charles, I know I shouldn’t be burdening you with
my pathetic minor problems when you’re grappling with a major
tragedy —’

‘Not at all, gives me something new to think about.’

‘
Honestly? Because if you feel you can’t cope, for heaven’s sake
tell me to buzz off— although I must say, I hope you don’t because
I feel you’re the one man I can really talk to about this disaster.
(Can’t talk to anyone at the Cathedral, of course.) If only I could
convince myself that Pd had a lucky escape, but I can’t. All right, I know thirty-five
was
a bit young and I might have gone through
hell when I was in my seventies, but when one’s past sixty one just wants to make hay while the sun’s shining and who knows, one may never reach seventy anyway. Am I being perverted and unreasonable?’

‘
No. But since you do concede that the lady was a little young —’

‘
Oh, I’d be quite happy to settle for something fifty-ish who dressed well and didn’t mind my passion for cricket and knew exactly how to be the ideal clerical wife, but what worries me,
Charles, is that according to my sister most women at that age arc dead keen to give up sex, and I don’t want to wind up in bed with
someone who just lies back and thinks of England. Am I being gross and self-centred?’

‘
No. But I think your sister’s exaggerating the risk. I’m sure there must be plenty of fifty-year-olds willing to forget entirely about England in those circumstances.’

‘
But how can one find out beforehand how willing a woman is
to succumb to patriotic amnesia? I mean, one can’t just ask, can
one? Or maybe, in 1965, one can. Lord, Charles, isn’t it odd
how nowadays everyone talks about sex! I met an old buffer at a
dinner-party the other day — a really old buffer, much older than us — who reminded me that before the war nobody even thought
about sex, let alone talked about it.’

‘Well, I certainly thought about it!’

‘
So did I, but the old buffer said: "Consider Archbishop Lang
— he never thought about sex and he lived a celibate life with no
trouble whatsoever!" And somehow, Charles, when he said that,
I felt in such despair that I hardly knew how to stand it. Am I being weak and neurotic?’

No. You just need to be more sceptical about the pronounce
ments of know-it-all old buffers. The truth is that even Lang must have thought of
sex
at some stage because he always said he made
a conscious decision not to marry.’

‘
Yes, but if he
wasn’t a
repressed homosexual — and even if he
was — how did he make such a success of the celibate life? All right, I know one can say he did it by the grace of God, but
nevertheless he must have organised himself into a state where the
grace could be received, and how did he do that? I started to miss
sex almost as soon as I became a widower. I know one’s not
supposed to — one’s supposed to be so knocked out by grief that
one feels no desire at all for at least six months, but the fact that I was knocked out by grief just made matters worse because I couldn’t stand the loneliness, and now I feel that if I don’t get myself organised soon I’ll go round the bend — or have I gone round the bend already?’

‘No. But are you signalling that you feel you’ve reached the point where you might do something frightful?’

‘Like what?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’m not about to go on a drunken binge like
some pathetic old dergyman who’s lost all his self-discipline! And
there’s no question of me sidling off to a red light district like a
clergyman who’s completely broken down. I think what I’m really
afraid of is that PH throw good judgement to the winds out of sheer frustration and marry a monster, just as Stephen did when
he married Dido. Ye gods, that woman! How does he stand her?’

‘
No idea. Incidentally, talking of Stephen —’

‘Oh my stars, yes, the Christie’s débâcle — that was the other
thing I wanted to speak to you about! I assume Malcolm did tell
you that we Canons knew nothing about Stephen’s machinations?’

‘
Yes, but I’m afraid I barely took it in. Lyle’s death —’

‘It was the day after Lyle died that Malcolm descended on us
like the wrath of God and demanded to know how we could
have sanctioned the Christie’s plot, but luckily our horror was so
obvious that he instantly realised Stephen had been playing a lone
hand.’

‘
Stephen himself told me that the flaunting of the St Anselm
manuscript was just a publicity stunt, but I was disturbed to dis
cover he’s genuinely keen to sell some of the minor books.’

‘
Is he? Well, of course we’d be the last to know, but don’t worry, Charles, he can’t do that without the consent of Chapter and we’ll
veto it. As far as the library’s concerned our powers are clearly
spelt out in the Cathedral statutes.’

I felt greatly relieved to receive this assurance. ‘Well, if I can
rely on you to stand up to Stephen there –’

‘
It’s easier to stand up to Stephen when we have the statutes on
our side. The real difficulty cornes what we hit the whole murky
area of twentieth-century fund-raising and encounter situations which the medieval lawyers who drafted the statutes never imag
ined. That’s when Stephen starts to write his own rules and we
Canons get left in the dark ... Honestly, Charles, what with
Stephen trampling all over us on the one hand and Malcolm
breathing fire all over us on the other –’

‘
Why do you suppose Stephen feels so driven to go to such
outrageous lengths to raise money?’

That was exactly the question I wanted to ask you. We’re all puzzled. Tommy says that since Stephen’s not a gentleman he
simply has no idea where to draw the line, but can we really write
this off as just an off-key breach of fund-raising etiquette?’

The Appeal’s not in any kind of difficulty?’

‘
Stephen always insists that it’s going wonderfully well.’

‘
But you’ve seen the accounts which confirm that?’

‘
We saw the accounts for the financial year of ‘sixty-three to
‘sixty-four, and they were first-class.’

That must have been some time ago. What’s been happening
since then?’
That’s the big question. Since then we haven’t seen any accounts.’

‘
But doesn’t Gerry, as Cathedral treasurer, get some sort of regu
lar report from Bob Carey?’

‘
Oh, didn’t Stephen tell you? He decided ages ago that old Bob
couldn’t cope with the Appeal accounts in addition to the ordinary
Cathedral accounts, so he took the Appeal accounts away from
Bob and gave them to a firm in London – and they report only
to Stephen.’

‘Which firm?’

‘
I don’t know, but they must be all right because Stephen used
them when he was a Canon of Westminster after the war and
doing all that fund-raising for the Germans.’

‘But surely you know the name of the firm!’

‘Stephen did mention it, but I can’t quite –’

‘
But there must have been letters, reports, bank statements –’
They’d all go straight to Stephen at the Deanery.’

‘
Are you trying to tell me the Chapter never now see any papers
relating to the Appeal?’

‘
All right, all right, I know how slipshod it sounds, but .. .
Look, we didn’t deliberately set out to create this situation, it just
sort of crept up on us. To begin with, there was no treasurer in
place when the Appeal was launched because Eddie Hoffenberg
had gone to London and Gerry hadn’t been appointed. That meant
Stephen was doubling
as
treasurer, in charge of all the finances,
and even after Gerry arrived Stephen thought he was too inexperienced to cope with the Appeal as well as with the Cathedral itself.’

‘
But surely you and Tommy –’

‘
Tommy and I aren’t too hot on fund-raising, Charles. That’s
the honest-to-God truth of it. So it seemed best to ask Stephen to
carry on managing the Appeal single-handed. I know that sounds
questionable in retrospect, but Stephen’s such a gifted fund-raiser,
so experienced, that we had complete confidence that he knew
what he was doing. In fact I’m still sure there’s nothing wrong
with the Appeal. There couldn’t be. It’s not possible.’

After a pause I said: ‘But surely you’ve now queried the status
of the Appeal? When was the last meeting of Chapter?’

‘
Last week. But we couldn’t agree on who was to tackle Stephen
so nothing was actually said.’

‘But my dear Paul –’

‘
I know, I know, we’ve got to do something – and we will, I
promise, but the trouble is that Gerry’s too young and Tommy’s
too old to take on a despotic dean, and I’m currently in such a
state about my private life that I can’t summon the nerve to play the hero by offering myself to Stephen to be mauled, minced and
mashed into dust. If I could only find the ideal clerical wife ...’
And he began to drone on again about his pipe-dream.

I waited with superhuman patience until he had departed.
Then I immediately telephoned Malcolm at his vicarage by St Martin’s-in-Cripplegate.