Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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by 1965 I was satisfied that I had not only forgiven Samson but managed to convert his malign memory into a benign force in my ministry. Indeed it was arguable that my reputation as a bishop tough on sexual sin was the direct result of being obliged to pick up the pieces after a catastrophic adulterous liaison. The 1960s might have been the age of the permissive society, but thanks to my encounter with Samson at Starbridge in 1937 I was going to preach against immorality until I dropped dead or my tongue fell out. After all I had endured, nursing Lyle back to a normal life, no one could have expected me to endorse promiscuity – but no one still alive knew now what I had endured in the early days of my marriage, no one except Lyle herself and my spiritual director, Jon Darrow.
I had had no trouble forgiving Lyle herself for this affair which had already run into difficulties by the time I met her. It is easy to feel compassion for someone one loves, particularly when that someone is emotionally wrecked and verging on the suicidal. What I did find hard to endure was the fact that after we were married she could not love me as much as I loved her. This gradual realisation that she was still far more bound up with Samson than she was willing to admit became so hard for me to bear that I was more than willing to escape from my marriage once the war came. Naturally I told everyone that I was volunteering to be an army chaplain because I wanted to have a hand in Hitler’s defeat – and this was no lie – but the whole truth was rather less palatable. Nowadays, I dare say, I would have wound up in the divorce court. So much for the permissive society! Young people refuse to acknowledge that there can be rewards for enduring the dark days of a marriage; happiness is always supposed to be instantaneous and any deferral is regarded as intolerable. Was there ever such a flight from reality? No wonder the young resort to drugs to ease their disorientation! They have never been taught to face reality and endure it – or in other words, they have never been taught how to survive. The permissive society is a phantom utopia which promises perfect freedom and yet has all its adherents in chains on Death Row.
The mention of chains reminds me of the three years I spent as a prisoner of war. That experience certainly taught me some lessons about how to survive adversity, and when I returned home in 1945 I found the rewards of my long endurance were about to begin. Samson was dead, Lyle was at last ready to be devoted to me and a new era in my marriage had dawned. With relief I prepared to live happily ever after, but did I? No.
I had had a tough time as a prisoner and I returned home with my health damaged. I did manage to reconsummate the marriage, but our efforts to produce another baby failed and tests revealed my poor health was to blame, a diagnosis which did nothing for either my marriage or my self-esteem. Now it was Lyle who endured, Lyle who battled on, Lyle who was not loved as she should have been. She was saved from despair by the doctors’ belief that I would make a full recovery, but I languished, suffering a reaction from my long ordeal and reduced to apathy by the well-known syndrome of survivor’s guilt. Finally an old friend of mine, a doctor called Alan Romaine, took me aside and said: ‘You will get better, Charles, but you’ve got to work at recovery – it’s no good just sitting back and waiting for it to happen.’ He gave me a diet-sheet, listing all the unrationed, nutritious foods I could eat, and he dragooned me into taking up golf again, but I think I was eventually cured not so much by exercise and good nutrition as by his care and compassion.
Did Lyle and I then have our much-wanted third child and live happily ever after? No. Lyle was by this time approaching the menopause and our daughter continued to exist only in our imaginations. Lyle became increasingly upset. I became increasingly upset. Meanwhile the two boys were big enough to be perpetually fighting, yelling and smashing everything in sight. The marriage limped on.
The reward for our endurance of this apparently endless ordeal finally arrived when Michael followed Charley to prep school and Lyle and I found ourselves on our own for two-thirds of the year. It was then that the terrible truth dawned: we were happiest as a childless couple.
I was so shocked by this revelation, contrary as it was to all the modern Christian thinking on family life, that for a long while I found myself unable to speak of it, even to Lyle, but eventually I forced myself to discuss the matter with my spiritual director.
Jon reminded me that family life had not always been a Christian ideal. He also suggested that my duty was to be myself, Charles Ashworth, not some ecclesiastical robot who mindlessly toed the fashionable Church line on domestic matters.
I felt obliged to say: ‘But I can hardly preach on the joys of being a childless couple!’
‘You could preach on the heroism of those who feel called to bring up other people’s children.’
I denied being a hero, but when Jon answered: ‘You are to Charley,’ I was comforted. Charley’s idolising of me ranked alongside Lyle’s devotion as my reward for all I had had to endure in the early years of marriage. Moreover this hero-worship by my adopted son went a long way towards compensating me for the difficulties I experienced with my real son, Michael.
And now, having exposed the less palatable side of my marriage, I must nerve myself to describe the effect on my sons of the skeleton in the family closet. I need to explain why and how they became the young men they were at that time in February 1965, when we were all steaming forward towards the abyss.
IV
Of course I thought of Charley as my son. Of course I did. I had married Lyle in full knowledge of the fact that he already existed as a foetus, and I had accepted full responsibility for him. I had brought him up. I had made him what he was. He was mine.
Yet he was not mine. He was unlike me both physically and temperamentally. I understood early on in his life why many adopting parents go to immense trouble to find a child who bears some chance resemblance to them. They need to forget there are no shared genes. A benign forgetfulness makes life easier, particularly when the child has been fathered by one’s wife’s former lover. Even after I believed Samson to be forgiven, living harmlessly in the nostalgia drawer of my memory alongside Edward VIII, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple, I could have done without the daily reminders of that past trauma, but I taught myself to overlook Charley’s resemblance to Samson and see instead only his resemblance to Lyle.
The bright side of Charley’s inheritance lay in the fact that he possessed Samson’s first-class brain. This was a great delight to me, particularly when Charley became old enough to study theology, and it made us far more compatible than we had been during his childhood when his volatile temperament had persistently grated on my nerves.
It had grated on Lyle’s nerves too. Lyle was not naturally gifted at motherhood, and although she loved the boys she found it difficult to manage them when they were young. This lack of management meant the boys became hard work for anyone determined to become a conscientious parent – but I have no wish to blame Lyle for this state of affairs; after all, life was hard for her during the war, particularly during those years when I was a prisoner, and no doubt she was not alone in finding it difficult to be the sole parent of a family. If I appear to criticise her it is only because I need to explain why, when I returned home after the war, I soon discovered that parenthood was no picnic. Probably one of the reasons why we both became so keen to celebrate the new beginning of our marriage by producing a daughter was the belief – almost certainly misguided – that a little girl would be all sweetness and light, a compensation for the barbarity of our sons.
Another fact which exacerbated our complex family situation was that Lyle was ill-at-ease with Charley. No doubt all manner of guilty feelings were at work below the surface of her mind, but the result was that she tended to escape from this unsatisfactory relationship by idolising Michael. Charley resented this behaviour and to prevent him being hurt I found myself paying him special attention. This in turn upset Michael, who became abnormally demanding. Again, I have no wish to blame Lyle for triggering these emotional disorders; she could not help feeling guilty about Samson and muddled about Charley, but nonetheless the situation was one which even the most gifted of fathers would have found challenging.
The final fact which aggravated our troubles was no one’s fault at all and can only be attributed to the lottery of genetics. Michael resembled