Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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I drove erratically home to the Cathedral Close.
VII
‘Can I take a peep?’ said Lyle in a voice which suggested she expected the answer ‘yes’, and when I refused to open the box she even had the nerve to exclaim: ‘Oh darling, don’t be so Victorian!’
‘If being Victorian means wanting to protect someone I love from a vile experience, then yes, I’m a Victorian and proud of it!’
We were standing in the drawing-room of the South Canonry while my indescribable haul from the vicarage sat on the coffee-table between us. Lyle had removed the malodorous dressing-gown and incarcerated it in the washing machine. Around us the comfortable armchairs and sofa, all newly upholstered, seemed so luxurious that I wanted to close my eyes to blot them out. Guilt gnawed at me again as I remembered the furnishings of Desmond’s slum, and I said more violently than I intended: ‘Pornography degrades the human spirit – literally degrades, drags it down to a sub-human level. Desmond’s a good man. I’ve just witnessed his degradation, and I don’t want you to share that experience.’
‘All right, I understand – but don’t get so upset that you lose sight of the main issue! Is this stuff connected with the assault or isn’t it?’
‘It’s only connected in the sense that an indulgence in pornography could lead on to the desire for a sexual encounter. But in my opinion …’ I delivered myself of the opinion that there was no other connection before speculating: ‘I think I can guess what happened. Desmond goes up to London every couple of months to see his spiritual director at the Fordite HQ, and I suspect that when he became overstrained he started visiting the wrong kind of bookshop. After all, he knew where to go. He’d trodden that road before.’
‘So much for spiritual directors! Obviously this one was dozing.’
‘They can’t always get it right, and if Desmond was too guilt-ridden to talk honestly –’
The telephone rang.
‘That’ll be Malcolm,’ I said at once and grabbed the receiver before Lyle could reach it. ‘South Canonry.’
‘Hullo, Dad!’ said Charley brightly in London. ‘Enjoying a quiet day off?’
‘Oh yes! Savouring every moment!’
‘Who is it?’ Lyle was muttering at my side.
‘Charley. Darling, could you mix me a very dark whisky-and-soda? I feel I need reviving.’
‘… utterly stupefied,’ Charley was saying at the other end of the line.
‘Sorry, I missed the first part of that sentence. Could you –’
‘I said I’m utterly stupefied because old Aysgarth seems to have gone round the bend.’
‘Good heavens, not again!’ This mention of my old enemy certainly diverted me from Desmond. ‘What’s he been doing?’
‘He rang me up this morning, said he was going to be in London for the day and invited me to have lunch with him.’
‘But how extraordinary!’ The Dean and I were hardly in the habit of taking each other’s sons out to lunch.
‘Wait – it gets even odder. Once we were swilling away at the Athenaeum he said he wanted to see me because it was Samson’s birthday.’
‘What?’
‘I know, I was stunned too, nearly fell off my chair. I didn’t think he knew anything about me and Samson.’
‘But he doesn’t!’
‘Well, he certainly thinks he does. He told me that when he visited Samson on his deathbed in 1945, Samson asked him to look after not only me but Michael too – that was when you were still a POW, of course, and Mum was going through her phase of thinking you were dead. Now just you listen to this: Samson told Aysgarth that Mum was his – Samson’s – daughter! I nearly passed out. I did try to speak but all that came out was a strangulated grunt – which was probably just as well as I was so poleaxed that I might have blurted out that Mum was Samson’s mistress, not his daughter – or could she conceivably have been both? For one ghastly moment I found myself wondering –’
‘No, of course Lyle wasn’t his daughter!’
‘But then why did Samson tell that whopper on his deathbed?’
‘He wanted to make sure there was a man who would take a paternal interest in you if I failed to come home from the war. That meant he had to explain why he was so involved with your welfare, but naturally he couldn’t bear Aysgarth to know you were the product of his adultery. So with your mother’s connivance he cooked up this story that she was his illegitimate daughter, the result of a wild oat sown before he was ordained, and that in consequence you and Michael were his grandsons. What exactly did you say?’
‘I stammered: “Honestly, Mr Dean, it’s a subject I never discuss,” and he said soothingly: “I’ve never discussed it with anyone myself, but I just wanted you to know that I knew.” He said he’d meant to have a chat with me ever since my ordination, but because you and he were on bad terms he’d never got around to it. Then he got sentimental – he went on and on and on about how wonderful Samson was –’
‘They were good friends. You must allow him his rose-tinted spectacles.’ To my extreme relief the doorbell rang in the distance. ‘Hold on,’ I said, and added to Lyle who was approaching with my whisky-and-soda: ‘I’ll answer that – it’s bound to be Malcolm. Have a word with Charley.’
‘Not if he’s talking about Stephen Aysgarth and that idiotic lie I let myself condone back in 1945.’
The doorbell rang a second time.
‘I’ll phone you back,’ I said to Charley and hung up. Grabbing the glass from Lyle I took a large gulp of whisky and headed into the hall where I set down the glass on the chest before flinging wide the front door.
But it was not my archdeacon whom I found waiting in the porch.
‘Surprise!’ chorused my uninvited visitors, and to my dismay I found myself confronting not only Michael but his American girlfriend, Miss Dinkie Kauffman.
VIII
Michael was by this time almost twenty-five. During the 1960s he wore his curly hair longer and longer, and by early 1965 it had begun to crawl well below his collar at the nape of his neck. Having curly hair myself I know that it has to be kept short if one wishes to appear tidy, and Michael looked, in my opinion, a mess. I had hoped his employers might order him to the barber’s, but recently there had been abundant evidence that the BBC had lost its nerve and succumbed to the anarchy of the Zeitgeist; one hardly expected all shows to be as innocuous as the film Mary Poppins but recent satirical programmes had been both tasteless and unpleasant while experimental drama had reached the point where all such experiments should have been terminated at birth.
On that evening I thought Michael’s hair was more of a mess than ever and I detested the way he underlined the mess by sporting sideboards. Lyle had said recently that they made him look sexy. I had said they made him look like a spiv, but I knew I could not voice this opinion to Michael for fear of triggering a row – and since the fragile truce engineered by Lyle the previous Christmas, we were all supposed to be living happily ever after.
Michael had dark eyes, shaped like his mother’s, and he also had her resolute, subtle mouth. Our voices had once been so similar that we had often been mistaken for each other on the telephone, but at some time during the early 1960s his voice had acquired mid-Atlantic inflections which had been enhanced when he had started to ‘go out’ with Dinkie. (How I detest euphemisms for immorality!) When I had complained about the sheer phoniness of these vocal affectations I was told I was a typical middle-class