Mystical Paths. Susan Howatch
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dolly-bird typist.
Naturally I went to great lengths to cover up this behaviour which was so very unacceptable for a would-be priest. Knowing my father would be wondering if I’d picked a successor to Debbie, I created a smokescreen by running a platonic romance in tandem with my sex exploits; this meant that I took a nice girl home and introduced her to my father so that he could see how virginal she was and deduce how well I was behaving. I need hardly add that I didn’t take home girls called Doreen, Angie and Tracy. I took home girls called Celia, Lavinia and Rosalind, girls I met from time to time at the tedious upper-class parties that for some reason people expected me to enjoy.
At the beginning of 1968, the year of the Christian Aysgarth affair, the year I was due to be ordained, I was sleeping with Tracy and taking home Rosalind. ‘Sleeping with Tracy’ meant a quick swill at the Adam and Eve in Starbridge’s Chasuble Lane, a quick binge at Burgy’s on the Market Place and a quick retreat to her bed-sit which, like Debbie’s, was down at Langley Bottom by the railway station. (It was actually quite difficult to find working-class girls with bed-sits; they tended to live at home with Mum unless there were family problems.)
On the other hand, ‘taking home Rosalind’ meant a leisurely stroll through Starrington from her house to the Manor, a leisurely listen to my Beethoven records and a leisurely call on my father in his cottage by the chapel. Sometimes we would dine at Starbridge at The Quill Pen in Wheat Street and attend a performance at the Starbridge Playhouse. Hands were held. A goodnight peck on the cheek became part of the routine. There was the occasional friendly letter. It was all light years away from the world where I bucketed around the bed-sits of Langley Bottom.
This may sound to some people as if I had my private life in perfect order, but as an ordinand to whom religion was not just a dead letter but a vital part of life, I knew the apparent order masked a dangerous chaos. I found it spiritually exhausting to lead a double life, and this knowledge that I was becoming increasingly debilitated made me realise how far off-course I was. In other words, I knew that what I was doing was not only objectively wrong, violating a moral code which I planned to devote my life to upholding, but subjectively wrong in that it was preventing me from being integrated, dividing me from my true self. Why then, it may be asked by the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure, didn’t I pull myself together and abandon this disgraceful behaviour which was so utterly unworthy of an ordinand?
Why indeed.
But I think at least two of the great saints of the Church would have sympathised with me. ‘For the good that I would I do not,’ St Paul wrote, ‘but the evil which I would not, that I do.’ ‘Lord, give me chastity!’ St Augustine had pleaded to God. ‘But not just yet.’ I bet those two knew all about how tempting it is to use sex to escape from one’s problems, and of course they would have understood that ordinands aren’t supermen, automatically sanctified by their calling. Ordinands are only human; I knew I wasn’t the only student at that College who scooted around on the quiet in his spare time, and if the moral stalwarts and the sexually pure are now flinging up their hands in horror and gasping: ‘Surely not!’ may I remind them that this was the 1960s when the Church was being shaken to its foundations by the permissive society.
If the Church had become the idol of the scared traditionalist die-hards who ran the Theological College, then sex without doubt had become the idol of the secular world which existed beyond the walls of the Cathedral Close. The Theological College staff thought they could avoid one form of idolatry by turning to embrace another, but they were wrong. You don’t beat idolatry by holding fast to idols. You beat idolatry by holding fast to God, but that’s easier said than done.
I lived my double life for over a year. Then in 1968 my nerve finally snapped and I asked Rosalind to marry me.
There were several reasons propelling me towards this proposal. The first, obviously, was that I could stand the strain of a double life no longer. The second was that I had begun to suspect my father had intuited what was going on with the result that he was becoming ill with worry about me – and I just couldn’t risk him getting sick; he was now at an age when any illness could kill him. The third reason was that my ordination was looming on the horizon and I knew that once I was a priest no more dabbling with Debbies and Doreens would be possible. And the fourth reason was that I had just had a bad fright when a condom had broken and Tracy had mused: ‘It might be kind of fun to be pregnant.’ This remark horrified me so much that I even felt it was a call from God to reform. I prayed feverishly for the grace to alter my life, and on the morning of the day when I was due for my next chaste date with Rosalind I opened my eyes, sat bolt upright in bed and thought: I’ll do it.
So I did. I proposed and was accepted. Happy ending. Or was it?
The best thing about Rosalind was that I had known her all my life and found her familiarity relaxing. She was the granddaughter of a certain Colonel Maitland, now dead, who had been a friend of my mother’s and who had owned the largest house in Starrington Magna apart from the Manor. Rosalind still lived at this house with her parents. She was a church-goer, musical, intelligent and good-looking in that slim, slightly equine way which is such a recurring feature among the English upper-classes. She had a part-time job doing special flower-arrangements for a Starbridge florist, and was beginning to receive freelance commissions to plan the floral side of weddings. Kind, friendly and a good organiser, she clearly had all the right attributes for a clerical wife, and I could now look forward to living happily ever after.
‘There’s one big favour I want to ask you,’ I said. ‘Could we keep the engagement unofficial at the moment? I’d like to announce it on the day of my ordination.’
Now, why did I say that? I didn’t like to think. But Rosalind, perfect Rosalind, said what a super idea, we’d then have a double reason to celebrate, what fun it would be tossing back all the champagne.
‘Do we keep absolutely mum?’ she added. ‘Or do we let the cat out of the bag to a favoured few?’
I was anxious to set my father’s mind at rest. ‘Okay, a favoured few – but no notice in The Times yet.’
Rosalind’s parents were delighted. Rosalind’s best friend was delighted. Rosalind’s favourite godmother was delighted. My father professed himself delighted but went right on being crucified by an anxiety which was invisible to the eye but searing to the psyche.
A week later I wound up in bed with Tracy at Langley Bottom.
At that point, being twenty-five years old and no fool, I realised that unless I got help in double-quick time I was going to crash into the biggest mess of my life. I couldn’t talk to my father. He might have died, finally tortured to death by his anxiety. I couldn’t talk to Aelred Peters. Resourceful though Father Peters was in treating the problems caused by abnormal psychic activity, I felt that mopping up something so prosaic as a sex-mess would be beyond him. But there was still one man who I thought could help me.
I made an appointment to see the Bishop of Starbridge, Dr Charles Ashworth.
VII
Bishop Ashworth was the main reason why the Theological College was a dead loss, but in my hour of need I didn’t let that prejudice me against him. In his pre-episcopal days he had been a distinguished professor of divinity at Cambridge. That was the problem. It’s dangerous to let divinity professors out of their ivory towers to roam unfettered through the Church of England; the temptation to convert theological colleges into minor outposts of major universities is apparently irresistible, but theological colleges are supposed to train priests for the priesthood, not intellectuals for the groves of Academe.
To be fair to Uncle Charles I have to admit he was a good bishop, and I have to acknowledge that at least he had had the guts to come out of his ivory tower and shoulder a top executive position in the real world. It wasn’t his fault that he got his kicks out of an academic approach to religion. That was just the way he had been designed by God. The important thing was that this intellectual kink hadn’t prevented him from being a devout Christian who had no hesitation in standing up for what he believed in. I wasn’t sure I believed all he believed in – he