Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch
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ran the diocese for Jardine as well as his palace, and I sometimes thought she could have run the diocese for me. She was the perfect wife for a bishop. She solved all household problems. She appeared in church regularly. She excelled in charity work. She controlled numerous committees. She controlled the chaplains. She even controlled Miss Peabody. She monitored the wives of the diocesan clergy so skilfully that I knew about any marriage trouble among my priests almost before they were aware of it themselves. She also read the Church newspapers to keep me informed of any serpentine twist of Church politics which I might have been too busy to notice.
In addition she ensured that I had everything I needed: clean shirts, socks, shoes, every item of my uniform – all appeared as if by magic whenever they were required. Bottles of my favourite whisky and sherry never failed to be present on the sideboard. Cigarettes were always in my cigarette-case. I was like an expensive car tended by a devoted mechanic. I purred along as effortlessly as a well-tuned Rolls-Royce.
The one matter which Lyle never organised for me was my Creator. ‘You deal with God,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with everything else.’ I did talk to her about God, particularly when I needed to let off steam about the intellectually sloppy antics of various liberal-radical churchmen, but although she listened with sympathy she seldom said more than: ‘Yes, darling,’ or: ‘What a bore for you!’ Once I could not resist saying to her: ‘I sometimes feel troubled that you never want to discuss your faith with me,’ but she merely answered: ‘What’s there to discuss? I’m not an intellectual.’
The truth was that Lyle was no fool, but a skimpy education had given her an inferiority complex about intellectual matters with the result that she always played down the knowledge of Christianity which she had acquired through her copious reading. I knew her faith was deep, but I knew too that she would never be one of those clerical wives who gave talks on such subjects as ‘Faith in Family Life’. Her most successful talk to the Mothers’ Union was entitled: ‘How to Survive Small Children’, and faith was barely mentioned at all.
But by 1965 Lyle had become profoundly interested in prayer. She had even formed a prayer-group composed entirely of women, a move which I found remarkable because in the past she had seldom had much time for her own sex. My spiritual director was most intrigued and said the formation of the group was a great step forward for Lyle. I was equally intrigued and wanted to ask questions, but since my advice was never sought I realised my task was merely to provide tacit support. I did enquire in the beginning what had triggered this new interest but Lyle only said in an offhand voice: ‘It was my involvement with Venetia. When I had that lunch with her in London I realised there was nothing more I could do except pray for her,’ and I saw at once it would be tactful not to prolong the conversation. Venetia, a former part-time secretary of mine, had been Lyle’s protégée. I had seen that Lyle was becoming too involved, regarding the girl as the daughter we had never had, and I had several times been tempted to utter a word of warning, but in the end I had kept quiet, preferring to rely on the probability that Lyle’s hard-headed common sense would eventually triumph. Such pseudo-parental relationships often dissolve unhappily when one party fails to fulfil the psychological needs of the other, and it had been obvious to me that Venetia, a muddled, unhappy young woman, had been looking not for a second mother but for a second father, a quest which had had disastrous consequences. By 1965 she had moved out of our lives, but the prayer-group, her unexpected legacy to Lyle, was flourishing.
Our younger son Michael had commented during the Christmas of 1964: ‘The prayer-group’s Mum doing her own thing,’ but our other son, Charley, had said with his customary lack of tart: ‘Cynical types don’t usually become mystical – I hope she’s not going nuts.’ I gave this remark the robust dismissal it deserved, but it did underline to me how uncharacteristic this new deep interest in prayer was. I also had to admit to myself that although Charley had been tactless in describing Lyle as cynical, he had not been incorrect. ‘I always believe the worst,’ Lyle would say, ‘because the worst is usually true’ – a philosophy which was repugnant to me, but no matter how often I was tempted to criticise this attitude, I always remembered her past and abstained. A disastrous love affair in the 1930s had left her emotionally scarred. In the circumstances I felt it was a wonder she had any faith left at all.
And now, having disclosed the disastrous love affair which Lyle had endured, I must disclose just how far we were from being a conventional ecclesiastical family. Lyle had been pregnant at the time of our marriage, and our elder son was not, biologically, my son at all.
III
I hate to speak of this skeleton in the cupboard, but as I am engaged in painting a picture of my career, marriage and family life in order to set the scene for 1965, I can hardly leave a large central section of the canvas unpainted. If I did, the events of 1965 would be to a large extent incomprehensible.
So let me now turn, with great reluctance, to the skeleton.
We had a code-name for this lover who had nearly destroyed Lyle. It was Samson, a man ruined by his involvement with the wrong woman. I had chosen this sobriquet in a rush triggered by my loathing of the entire subject and had only afterwards reflected that the choice automatically cast Lyle as Delilah, a lady who has never received a good press. However, when I had voiced my misgivings Lyle had said bleakly: ‘And what right have I to receive a good press?’ – a question which had taken me back to the harrowing early days of our marriage when she had been recovering from the most destructive aspects of the affair.
Lyle was my second wife. I had been married for three years in my twenties to a pleasant, innocent girl called Jane whom nowadays I could recall with only the smallest twinge of anguish. We had been fond of each other but unsuited, and our difficulties had been unresolved at the time of her death in a car crash. Fortunately I had managed to come to terms with this tragedy before I journeyed again to the altar in 1937, but although I realised Lyle was curious to know more about her predecessor I felt no desire to pour forth a torrent of information. Perhaps it was fortunate that back in 1937 Lyle was far too bound up with her own unhappy past to spare much time to speculate about mine.
Lyle’s affair with Samson had been conducted with fanatical secrecy because he had been not only a married man but a distinguished married man. In fact – and I hate to admit this but I do need to explain why he was so vulnerable to scandal – he was a clergyman. Of course clerical failures have always existed and of course one must do one’s Christian best to be charitable to those who break the rules, let the side down and drag the Church through the mud, but I have to confess that Samson reduced my stock of Christian charity to an all-time low. I knew I had to forgive him for the damage he had inflicted on Lyle, but unfortunately forgiveness cannot be turned on like a supply of hot water from a well-stoked boiler, and this particular act of forgiveness had remained frozen in the pipes of my mind for some time.
It was not until I returned from the war that I managed to forgive him. At least I assumed I had forgiven him because I realised I had reached the point where I was seldom troubled by his memory. By that time he was not merely tucked away behind a pseudonym, categorised theologically as a sinner who had to be forgiven and thereby rendered as harmless as an exhibit in a museum; he was also dead, a fact which meant the affair with Lyle could never be resurrected. Occasionally his name – his real name – came up in ecclesiastical circles, but not too often, and as the 1940s drew to a close I realised I had consigned him to the compartment in my mind which housed other obsolete images from the previous decade: Edward VIII abdicating the throne, Jack Buchanan singing, Harold Larwood bowling and Shirley Temple dancing. The point about these people, as I told my spiritual director, was that I could think of them without pain; therefore, I reasoned, if I had relegated Samson to this harmless group, I must on some deep psychological level have forgiven him. The hallmark of forgiveness is that it enables the forgiver to live painlessly with the forgiven.
Certainly 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