Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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had been captured at the fall of Tobruk – which had led to that POW camp – and to the concentration camp – which reminded me of Desmond – everyone degraded – cut off from God – in hell …
I slept.
IV
In my dream I was back in the concentration camp. A naked Desmond was being flogged by Nazi guards while I stood by, powerless to stop them and hating God for not saving me from this undeserved and unbearable ordeal. After my capture at Tobruk in 1942 I had been confined to an ordinary POW camp, but in 1944 after I had assisted several men to escape I had been transferred to a far harsher environment. I had consoled myself at the time by thinking that at least I had not been summarily shot. Later I had come to believe that a quick death would have been preferable to dying by inches. But I had not died. The Allies had arrived and my ordeal had ended. The liberators had all looked so fleshy and pink. I could still see their appalled expressions.
I had wanted to thank God for the deliverance but the words had refused to come; he had been absent so long – or so I had thought – that I had forgotten how to talk to him, although of course I had always put up a front and gone through the motions of being a priest. That was what the army had required of me and that was what I had to do to the end, regardless of whether my faith was shattered or not. Later I had realised that this obstinate, distorted sense of purpose had helped to keep me alive, and later still I had seen that God had not been absent at all but had instead been speaking to others through the medium of my battered self, but these insights had not been immediately apparent to me.
After the war I had made sense of my suffering by classifying it as a ‘showing’ – not of God but of the Devil. Or, to put the matter in less emotive terms, I had seen it as an unforgettable demonstration of what happened when men turned aside from the truth in order to embrace a false ideology. Indeed it was this sojourn in a world born of absolute lies which had made me resolve to battle all the harder for the absolute truths. Such a battle, I had reasoned, would justify my spared life, neutralise my survivor’s guilt and simultaneously enable me to align myself with God as he worked to redeem all the suffering which people had inflicted on one another during the war.
So every time I now took a tough line on sin I felt I was in some small way redeeming the horror and agony I had witnessed in the past. My experiences in Starbridge in 1937 had given me a particular horror of sexual sin, but it was the concentration camp which had given me a horror of all evil. ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil,’ Burke had written, ‘is for good men to do nothing.’ No one was ever going to catch me doing nothing. Mocking criticism in the press might hurt, television debates might inwardly reduce me to pulp, the scorn of the younger generation might continually sear me, but all that was of no consequence. What did such trivial distress matter when I recalled the appalling suffering of those who had died in the concentration camps? To whine that I hated being mocked for my views was unthinkable. The fact was that I had lived while others had died, and my job now was to bear witness to the truth no matter how much it cost me to do so.
In my dream the Nazi guards stopped flogging Desmond and began to castrate him. Sweating with horror I awoke just in time to stop myself shouting out loud and waking Lyle. In my dressing-room I switched on the light, sat down and began to shudder repeatedly with revulsion.
After a while I stopped shuddering but my distress, as memories of the camp streamed through my mind in an unstoppable tide, was so acute that I could only ease it by pacing up and down. I was just beginning to think I would never be able to dam this terrible cataract when Lyle looked in.
Before I could apologise for waking her she said severely: ‘All this pacing’s very bad for you. Come back to bed instead and tell me how ghastly you’re feeling.’
Staggering into her arms I allowed myself to be steered back between the sheets.
‘Which nightmare was it?’
‘The flogging-castration. But this time the victim was Desmond.’
‘That wretched Desmond! Poor darling,’ said Lyle, giving me a lavish kiss.
I at last began to relax. Glancing at the clock I remarked: ‘I can hardly believe that only twelve hours ago we were here enjoying my afternoon off with no thought of either Desmond or Dinkie.’
‘I detest that girl.’
‘So do I. I can’t understand why Michael finds her so attractive.’
‘Can’t you, Charles? Honestly?’
‘Honestly. I’ve never been attracted to stupid women.’
‘That’s because you’re reacting against your mother.’
‘Nonsense! It’s because I want more from a woman than just sex!’
‘How much more?’
I laughed.
Lyle gave me another lavish kiss and said: ‘That was a sterling performance you gave this afternoon.’
‘At my age I probably won’t be able to repeat it for at least two weeks. I can’t tell you how geriatric I felt this evening when I was watching the news.’
‘Then don’t. Words like “geriatric” bore me. And anyway, if you’re really so enfeebled why were you pacing up and down just now like a sex-starved tiger at the zoo?’
‘More like a mangy old lion in the first stages of senility!’
‘All right, if you’re really so past it, even after several hours’ sleep, let’s just blot out your nightmare by having a friendly cuddle.’
‘What a loathsome phrase!’
‘I’d never have uttered it if you hadn’t behaved as if you were ripe for a coffin! Honestly, British men are the limit sometimes – any Frenchman would be absolutely panting to demonstrate his vitality by this time!’
I tried a pant or two. I do in fact have some French blood flowing in my veins as the result of a Victorian indiscretion unrecorded in the Ashworth family tree, and Lyle had said once that if I had been born in France and escaped my middle-class English upbringing I might have become one of those Frenchmen who drink for hours in raffish Parisian cafés and supplement their long-suffering wives with a succession of pretty mistresses. My comment on this fantasy had been: ‘I’d have missed my golf and cricket,’ but Lyle had retorted: ‘No, you wouldn’t – you’d have been much too busy elsewhere.’
But I could not quite imagine a life in which I was not a clergyman of the Church of England, and I suspected that if I had been a French layman I would have long since expired as the result of sexual exhaustion and liver failure.
‘You’re better off married to an Englishman,’ I said to Lyle.
‘I know, but I always adore being convinced.’
I forgot Desmond and Dinkie, just as Lyle had known I would. I forgot the pornography in the present and the putrefaction in the past. I forgot I was a bishop. I even forgot I was a clergyman. I had entered a world in which only Lyle and I existed, a comforting cocoon in which I could feel secure and cherished, enfolded by a love which excluded all pain, all anxiety and all the baffling complexity of my current existence.
Later Lyle said: ‘I can never resist seducing you when you get as haggard and tormented as a nineteenth-century poet.’
‘I must try and be haggard and tormented more often.’
We laughed, stubbing out our cigarettes, and gave each other one last embrace before falling asleep.
But I had not reached the end of the exhausting stream of crises which had been battering me towards the abyss, and in fact the worst crisis was still to come.
V
Following my usual routine I rose at half-past five and made myself some tea which I