Glittering Images (69 page)

‘No one ever emerges from a battle unscathed. I’ll return later with Lyle,’ I said, and walked out feeling bruised beyond endurance and battered beyond belief.

I presided over the final dissolution of Jardine’s
ménage à trois
later that evening. It was a sad, difficult meeting. Jardine spoke his piece but at a far more halting pace than he had achieved earlier. Lyle cried. I allowed her to embrace Carrie but afterwards terminated the meeting abruptly. By this time Jardine was ashen, beyond speech, and both women were in tears. Stowing in the car the numerous bags which had been packed for Lyle I drove off at a great pace down the palace drive and pursued an erratic course out of the Close. Lyle wept soundlessly all the way to the Staro Arms.

After the porter had brought the bags to her room I ordered brandies for us both and we sat on the window-seat in the gathering dusk. The golden light of the sunset had almost faded and I remembered Darrow talking of the darkness below the horizon which would represent the reality of marriage after the euphoria of the engagement.

As we sipped our brandy Lyle said rapidly, ‘I expect you want to sleep with me. You can if you like. It doesn’t really matter if we anticipate the wedding, does it?’

‘Yes, it does,’ I said. ‘It would be like smoking a cigarette when I was wearing a clerical collar. There are some things clergymen just shouldn’t do if they want to be respected, and if I’m ever to put right that disastrous error with Loretta –’

‘Please don’t say any more about that.’ She groped for my hand. ‘You’ve explained. I understand. We’ve forgiven each other for all the awfulness there. I only thought that perhaps –’

‘Well, of course I want to sleep with you,’ I said, ‘but let’s be realistic for a moment. You’re offering out of guilt because you’re ashamed you revealed at the palace how deeply you still care for him. If I accepted your offer I’d be accepting because I wanted to drown my insecurity by subjugating you physically, just as he did. But think, Lyle – just think! Do we really want to start our married life on those terms?’

She shook her head and gripped my hand harder than ever.

‘You want to wait, don’t you?’ I said. ‘You’ve had quite enough of quasi-marriages. You’ve yearned all these years to be a real wife, just as I’ve yearned all these years to make a second marriage, and why should we now settle for anything less than the genuine article?’

‘I thought you might want to try me out.’

‘What for? We hardly need premarital sex to tell us that at first the physical side of marriage is going to be difficult! What matters is not that we confirm this obvious fact before marriage but that after the wedding we’re prepared to try hard to overcome the problem.’ I kissed her before adding, ‘Besides, we both need time. You’re exhausted. So am I. Let’s finish our brandy, crawl into our separate beds and pass out. It may not be the most romantic ending to a gruelling day but I’m quite sure it’s the most sensible one.’

‘I don’t think it’s so unromantic,’ said Lyle, ‘I think if you didn’t love me so much the gruelling day would have an even more gruelling ending.’

But in a flash of insight I saw my behaviour in a more complex and murky light; I recognized my desire to do what was right and my anxiety to protect her from further stress, but I recognized too my secret dread of being compared with Jardine and found wanting. However that piece of self-knowledge was at present too difficult to master. Closing my mind against all troubled thoughts I embraced her in the gathering dusk, and later when I glanced out of the window I saw that although the night had fallen at last, the stars were beginning to shine.

Dr Lang married us in the chapel at Lambeth two weeks later in the presence of my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, my two nieces, my nephew and a friend of Lyle’s, an ancient charming clergyman who had been a Canon of Radbury Cathedral during the Jardines’ tenure of the Deanery. He gave the bride away while Peter acted as best man. Lang conducted the ceremony with his usual theatrical dignity and as he declaimed a short homily extolling the glories of nuptial bliss for those not called to the celibate life it occurred to me that he might have guessed rather more about my life as a widower than I had cared to imagine. The Archbishop remained the canny Scot beneath his pompous English façade, and I reminded myself that time had proved Dr Lang right in his estimate of the Bishop of Starbridge.

In the circumstances it seemed wiser not to have a prolonged honeymoon, so I decided we should go away for no more than a weekend to a small hotel which I knew in the Cotswolds. We arrived there shortly before dinner, and later when Lyle said how much she had enjoyed the simple but carefully cooked meal I knew she was trying as hard to make me believe she was happy as I was trying to be convinced. I told myself I should feel comforted that she so strongly shared my desire for the weekend to be a success, yet when we finally retired to our room I found I still needed reassurance. I heard myself saying rapidly, ‘Look, if you can’t face it, for heaven’s sake say so. We mustn’t start playacting and being dishonest with each other.’

Lyle said, ‘I want sex. And I want sex with you. And I want sex with you now. Then maybe we can put a stop to this excruciating tension.’

This was certainly unvarnished honesty and I did my best to achieve an equally candid response. ‘I feel exactly the same,’ I said, but I was hurt by her lack of warmth. I thought that if I had been Jardine she would have called me darling and held out her arms.

A long unpalatable vista opened before me into my difficult marriage, but I pulled down the blinds in my mind to blot it out. I had hardly spent seven arduous years of flawed celibacy only to be squeamish on my wedding-night, yet the demon of doubt was now crawling through my thoughts. I looked at Lyle, who appeared to be making such a brave attempt to sever herself from the past, and I wondered if she were even now secretly longing for Jardine. And as soon as this terrible thought had entered my head I was tormented by the dread that she would always have secrets which would cut me off from her, secrets which she would never reveal.

I touched my cross and asked myself instead how far it was ever possible to know the whole truth about another human being. I thought of Jardine’s final ambivalent silence about his stepmother, a silence which might well indicate not guilt but a desire to keep a cherished part of his life utterly private; no one would ever know now what had happened there, and perhaps it was right that no one ever should. I thought of Darrow saying, ‘All we can do is to pray for as much enlightenment as God sees fit to grant us,’ and suddenly I realized that Darrow was an even greater mystery than Jardine, a man who concealed all his secrets in order to disconnect himself from his past in the world. What lay behind his call to be a monk? Had he been happily married? Had he been a successful father to his children? Had Lyle been right in her intuitive conviction that the state of celibacy was unnatural to him, and if she was right was his life a continuing struggle to maintain that serenity which always seemed so unforced? The likelihood was that I would never be able to answer any of these questions, and yet my relationship with Darrow was hardly vitiated because he was in so many respects an enigma.

I saw then that Lyle would always have her mysteries, and I saw too that the way to live with them was not to torture myself in pursuit of elucidation but to accept them as a limit set on my knowledge by God for his own purpose. The demon of doubt receded, and releasing the cross I began to prepare for bed.

I was face to face at last with my secret dread that I would be unable to match Jardine’s illicit but alluring distortion of his charismatic power. Another searing vista opened into the future, and again the vista had to be blotted from my mind. I was being tormented now by that old demon my fear of inadequacy, and rolling away from Lyle I groped in the dark for the cross which I had left on the bedside table.

As I slipped the cross around my neck I remembered Darrow again. I saw us in the herb-garden, remembered how the word ‘courage’ had echoed in my mind, and suddenly without words I was able to ask for patience, for strength, for the will to endure all my difficulties and the wisdom to surmount them.

The demons departed as my mind stood open before God, and once more I passed through the strait gate to set out along the narrow way in response to my mysterious call. My new life in God’s service stretched before me; I knew there could be no turning back. I could only go on in the absolute faith that one day his purpose would stand fully revealed, and in the light of that faith the darkness of my anxiety was extinguished. The glittering image of the apparent world dissolved into the great truths which lay beyond and the truths were not a beautiful dream, as Loretta had thought, but the ultimate reality. Love and forgiveness, truth and beauty, courage and compassion blazed with a radiance which far outshone the cheap glitter of illusion, and I knew then with an even deeper conviction that in serving God man only fulfilled his need to strive to live in that eternally powerful light. St Augustine’s famous words echoed in my mind: ‘O God, thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’

At once I was at peace; my self-confidence returned, and as I claimed my wife and child at last I thought as my father had thought before me: they’re both mine now.

Afterwards I said carefully to Lyle, ‘I think you really might come to love me one day,’ and at once she said, ‘Darling!’ and held out her arms.

Without doubt some difficult hurdle had been overcome. I wondered what the next one would be.

I fell asleep and dreamed of a little boy tormenting me with his lambent amber eyes.

The character of Charles Ashworth is fictitious.

The character of Alex Jardine is based in part on the life and career of Herbert Hensley Henson (1863–1947), one of the leaders of the Church of England in the early twentieth century. Henson was the son of a self-made businessman who retired early and proceeded to live beyond his means while he devoted himself to an eccentric and gloomy evangelical religion. Young Henson’s mother died when he was six and three years later his father ‘remarried’, although no record of the marriage has ever been found. When Henson was fourteen his German stepmother finally persuaded his father to send him to school, a step which set him on the road to Oxford where he was to become a Fellow of All Souls. He was ordained at the age of twenty-three; when he became Vicar of Barking in Essex his stepmother moved to the vicarage to keep house for him. After years of obscurity during which he was obliged to support his family and was consequently too poor to marry, he received his vital preferment: he was appointed Rector of St Margaret’s Westminster and became a Canon of Westminster Abbey. Relieved at last from financial anxiety he then married Isabella Dennistoun and a stillborn son was born to them two years later. There were no living children of the marriage. Henson became Dean of Durham in 1912, and in 1916 a young woman, Fearne Booker, arrived at the Deanery to assist Mrs Henson; she remained with the Hensons for over thirty years. In 1918 Henson was appointed Bishop of Hereford but in 1920 he was translated to Durham where he remained until his retirement in 1939. His stepmother spent her final days with him at his episcopal residence, Auckland Castle. It must be stressed that no impropriety existed between either Henson and his stepmother or Henson and Miss Booker.

The personality of Lyle Christie is my own invention and any resemblance to Miss Booker is coincidental.

William Cosmo Gordon Lang was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 until 1942. In 1938 during a debate in the House of Lords on Abyssinia, Henson opposed Lang with an unprecedented degree of fierceness, but their tendency to disagree had already been revealed to the public; a year earlier during the Lords’ debate on the Marriage Bill Lang had merely adopted a position of neutrality but Henson had spoken in favour of extending the divorce laws with an eloquence which was later recorded with grateful admiration by the Bill’s author, A. P. Herbert.

Glittering Images
is the first in a series of novels about the Church of England in the twentieth century. The next novel,
Glamorous Powers
, opens in 1940 and focuses on Jon Darrow.

GLITTERING IMAGES

S
USAN
H
OWATCH
was born in Surrey in 1940. After taking a degree in law she emigrated to America where she married, had a daughter and embarked on her career as a writer. In 1976 she left America and lived in the Republic of Ireland for four years before returning to England.
Glittering Images
was written in Salisbury, where her flat overlooked the Cathedral.

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