Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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doctor, but before long he was asked to leave medical school, not because he was incapable of doing the work but because he was incapable of avoiding fornication and hard drinking. Naturally I was concerned. I was also, as Lyle well knew, furious, shocked, resentful, embarrassed and bitter. She somehow managed to stop me becoming wholly estranged from Michael, and she somehow persuaded him to promise to reform. Jon suggested that I might make more time to talk to Michael, since such a move would make it unnecessary for him to behave badly in order to gain my attention, but I disliked the idea of being bullied by bad behaviour into reorganising my busy timetable, and I thought it was up to Michael to pull himself together without being pampered by cosy little chats.
‘My father never pampered me,’ I said to Jon, ‘and if I’d ever behaved as Michael’s behaving he’d have disowned me.’
‘But I thought you realised long ago that your father had actually made some unfortunate mistakes as a parent! Do you really want to treat Michael as your father treated you?’
I was silenced. Eventually, working on the theory that Michael was a muddled, unhappy young man who needed every possible support as he struggled to find his balance in adult life, I told him he was forgiven and promised to do all I could to get him into another medical school, but Michael merely said he now wanted to be a pop-singer in London.
Unfortunately by this time National Service had been abolished so I could not rely on the army to knock some sense into his addled head. I tried to control my fury but failed. There was a scene which ended when Michael announced: ‘Right. That’s it. I’m off,’ and headed for London with the small legacy which he had been left by my old friend Alan Romaine, the doctor who had ensured my physical recovery after the war. Lyle extracted a promise from Michael that he would keep in touch with her, so we were able to tell everyone truthfully that he had gone to London to find a job and we were looking forward to hearing how he was getting on.
‘I’m sure it’ll all come right,’ said Lyle to me in private. ‘What he’s really interested in is the stage, and he’s so handsome that he’s bound to become a matinée idol.’
I was too sunk in gloom to reply, but Lyle’s prediction turned out to be closer to the mark than I had expected. Michael became involved with a suburban repertory company and quickly decided that his talent was for neither singing nor acting but for directing and producing plays. He stayed a year with the company but then announced that the theatre was passé and that television was ‘where it was at’ (a curious American phrase currently popular among the young). To my astonishment he succeeded in getting a job at the BBC.
‘You see?’ said Lyle. ‘I told you it would all work out in the end.’
I found it so pleasant to be able to tell all my friends that my younger son now had a respectable employer that I decided the time had come to offer Michael the olive branch of peace, and writing him a letter I offered to take him out to lunch at the Athenaeum when I was next in London. A week later I received a card in reply. It said: ‘Athenaeum = Utter Dragsville. Take me to that bar in the House of Lords, food not necessary, I drink lunch.’
I did not like this card at all but Lyle said Michael was only trying to shock me and there was no reason why he and I should be unable to down a couple of sherries in the House of Lords bar while we tried to make up our minds whether we could face lunching together in the dining-room.
We met. Michael, who had clearly been drinking, ordered a double dry martini. I let him drink one but drew the line when he demanded another. He called me an old square and walked out. After that, relations remained cool between us for some time.
‘He can’t last long at the BBC,’ I said to Lyle. ‘He’ll get sacked for drink and wind up in the gutter.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Lyle, and once again she was right. Michael continued to work at the BBC and even obtained promotion. Obviously I needed to give our battered olive branch of peace another wave. By this time we had reached the end of 1964 and I invited – even, I go so far as to say, begged – him to spend Christmas with us. I had hoped he might telephone in response to this fulsome invitation, but another of his terse little cards arrived. It said: ‘Xmas okay but don’t mention God. Will be arriving on Xmas Eve with my bird, the one Mum met when she snuck up to London to see my new pad. Make sure there’s plenty of booze.’
‘Oh God!’ said Lyle through gritted teeth when she read this offensive communication.
Making a great effort to seem not only calm but even mildly amused I said: ‘I don’t understand the ornithological reference.’
‘It’s his latest ghastly girl. She’s American.’
‘You never mentioned –’
‘She was too ghastly to mention.’
‘Well, if he thinks he can bring his mistress here and bed down with her under my roof –’
‘Darling, leave this entirely to me.’
Michael did spend Christmas with us at the South Canonry, but the girl was ruthlessly billeted by Lyle at one of the local hotels. Michael wore no suit. He did not even wear a tie. He was never dead drunk but he was certainly in that condition known to publicans as ‘nicely, thank you’, an inebriated state which fell short of causing disruption but was still capable of generating embarrassment. My enemy Dean Aysgarth, on the other hand, was constantly accompanied to a variety of services by a veritable praetorian guard of well-dressed, immaculately behaved, respectable and charming sons. If I had not had Charley to cheer me up I might well have expired with despair.
However, Lyle had been working hard behind my back, and on Boxing Day Michael sidled up to me with a penitent expression. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just want you to know that my new year’s resolution will be not to get on your nerves. Can we bury the hatchet and drink to 1965?’
We drank to the coming year.
‘I’ve decided that 1965’s going to be a great time for the Ashworth family,’ said Michael, coming up for air after downing his martini. ‘I prophesy no fights, no feuds and absolutely no fiascos of any kind.’
Michael had many gifts but I fear prophecy was not among them.
‘I am going to set before you one of those standing themes that always ought to be preached about: the relation between the sexes … And if we achieve no other aim, we shall at least show sympathy with those who are concerned to manage the most baffling and the most ungovernable part of their instinctive nature.’
AUSTIN FARRER
Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960–1968
Said or Sung
I
Having completed this portrait of myself, my family and my professionally distinguished but privately turbulent life – having, in other words, set the scene for my third catastrophe – it is now time to describe the crises which battered me in rapid succession towards the edge of the abyss.
‘Do you remember,’ said Lyle, taking the telephone receiver off the hook one afternoon early in the February of 1965, ‘how miserable we were when we were forced to face the fact that our third child was never going to exist?’
‘Vividly.’ I was in an excellent mood for it was a Monday, and Monday was my day off. As Lyle severed our connection to the outside world, I sat down on the bed to remove my shoes.
‘And do you remember,’ pursued Lyle, drawing the curtains and plunging the bedroom into an erotic twilight, ‘how you said God might know what was best for us better than we did, and I was so angry that I hurled an ashtray at you?’
‘Even more vividly.’
‘Well,