Absolute Truths (87 page)

SEVEN

‘
I should say that ... wisdom consisted of two things: know
ing how to live, in the most profound and human sense –
how to make your life what your life was made for: that was one part of the wisdom. And the other was inseparable from
it: to know those truths about yourself, and about the reali
ties surrounding you, which you must know if you are to
respond appropriately to the demands of your situation, and
so live truly well.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford,

1960-1968

A Celebration of Faith

Hall said: ‘Jardine died of cancer. You couldn’t have been respon
sible for that,’ but I answered: ‘I think he died of grief. I forced
him into an early retirement. I took away what he valued most. I deprived him of what would have been a source of great joy, a
compensation for his suffering. After that he lost all interest in life
and never worked again – he never even preached another sermon.’

‘
That was his choice, not yours.’

‘Yes, but if I hadn’t done what I did –’

‘
And what did
he
do, I wonder, to drive you into taking that
action which now makes you feel so guilty? No, don’t tell me, I
don’t need to know. All I need to know is that you’re allowing
him no responsibility for his life after his enforced retirement. He
didn’t have to waste it. He could have gone on to a new life.’

‘
Impossible. He was too demoralised, too devastated, and I was
to blame.’

‘
You speak with great authority, Bishop, but what makes you
so sure you’re right? You told me that your acquaintance with
Jardine was limited to a few months in 1937, and it’s impossible in
such a short time to know more than a few facets of a complicated
personality. How well did you really know Jardine? And what do
you really know about his final years?’

I was too confused to reply.

‘
Maybe there were other factors which contributed to his inertia,’
said Hall, ‘factors you know nothing about. Maybe he suffered from depression — a clinical depression, which would have developed even if the two of you had never met. Maybe he lost
his faith — but again, that could have happened without any help
from you. Maybe there were events in his extreme past which
fatally influenced his later life — but you can hardly blame yourself for events that happened back in the last century. You might have
been the catalyst triggering a period of great unhappiness for Jar
dine, but I doubt very much whether you were the entire cause of his malaise, and I’m quite sure you shouldn’t hold yourself
responsible just because he apparently never received or sought
the medical and spiritual help which could have transformed his final years.’

It was only then that I remembered telling Michael that it was Holly’s decision, not his, to end her life and that she might still
have committed suicide even if she had been involved with some
one else. I stared down at the dark side of the choir and thought how odd it was that one could so often see clearly what advice
should be given to others even when one was incapable of applying
that same advice to oneself.

At last I said: ‘I was so confused. I knew I had to forgive him,
I wanted to forgive him, I was so keen to do the right thing
and be a good priest, but somehow the forgiveness never quite
happened; the version of it which I produced had no psychological
reality.’

‘Didn’t Father Darrow spot this?’

‘Oh, he’s often talked to me about forgiveness, but the words just bounced off the wall I’d built around Jardine’s memory to protect myself from my guilt. I couldn’t forgive myself, I see that now, and of course if one can’t forgive oneself one can’t forgive
others.’ I sat up suddenly. It was as if I were hearing this truth for
the first time; it was as if my mind was at last sufficiently uncluttered to allow the words to resonate. I said: ‘I begin to see —’ Ibroke off, but I was thinking not of Jardine now, but of Aysgarth.

‘I don’t want to pry into your past,’ said Hall. ‘The details are
none of my business, but I wonder if you could satisfy my curiosity
on one point: why did you accept the Starbridge bishopric when you knew it would mean walking in Jardine’s shoes?’

‘
There were good sound reasons for assuming it was a call from
God — and one can’t brush aside a call from God because one’s
squeamish about a man who’s been dead for years. And Lyle thought we’d exorcise the past by coming here, but she only thought that because she herself was at peace with it.’

‘
I suppose you convinced yourself you were at peace with it too.’

‘
Yes, but I wasn’t. He was waiting for me when I got here. I
felt him sometimes, following me, watching me,
making me remem
ber ...
And when I tried to blot him out he went underground
in my unconscious, I can see that now, and got mixed up with my
own shadow side. No wonder I started to preach about the evil
of sexual sin — of course I was preaching against
him,
the bishop
who had gone wrong —’ I broke off again, shocked by the unintended disclosure, but Hall just said:

‘I’d guessed.’

After a moment I realised the disclosure had set me free to speak
frankly so I said: ‘The person I was really disgusted with was
myself. Jardine was just a good man who had made a bad mistake,
but I had to see him as an immoral villain in order to justify my
part in his destruction — and once I saw him as a villain I was able
to project on to him all those weaknesses I hated and feared in myself ... Had you- guessed all that too?’

‘Never mind what I had or hadn’t guessed. Am I right in thinking your wife’s death was like a depth-charge exploding in your
unconscious mind where these unhealed emotions about Jardine
were hidden?’

‘
Yes, I began to remember ... I didn’t want to remember but
in the end I knew he was there, pressing on my mind. He pressed and he pressed and he pressed, and this morning when I woke —’

‘
You felt you had to face him.’

‘It was almost as if I felt he was trying to tell me something. I got up and I looked at the Cathedral and ... Of course I made some excuse to myself about wanting to pray in it, but the truth
was I went there to meet him, he was willing me there, and as
soon as I went in he came to meet me. I knew he was there but
in the end I couldn’t face him — too much unacknowledged guilt — so I went to my throne and tried to blot him out by praying —’

‘
But as soon as you began to pray —’

‘
All the barriers collapsed in my mind and I saw the guilt —
festering, putrid, rank, unhealed —’

‘— which made you flail around for a cross —’

‘
— for redemption, yes, and deliverance, and
suddenly he was
there,
we were face to face at last, but it was too much for me to
bear because of the guilt. He must have understood. That was
why he vanished at once. He wouldn’t have wanted to distress me
further. He liked me in 1937. I liked him too in the beginning.
It was just that everything became so —’

‘
Diabolical,’ said Hall.

— traumatic. I had such a terrible interview with him at the end when he knew he’d lost her.’

‘
Let me just ask you this: what would have happened if you
hadn’t acted as you did in 1937?’

I thought of Lyle on the brink of breakdown, of Charley on the
brink of abortion, of the bishopric on the brink of scandal and of
the Church on the brink of shame. I heard myself say: ‘There
would have been more than one catastrophe.’

‘
And you put an end to all that? Then perhaps Jardine’s been
trying to thank you, but that demon of yours has been making so
much noise you could never hear.’

I suddenly saw not the darkness of the far side of the choir but
the brightness of the candles which separated me from it. Each
flame, small and upright, was intermingling with the darkness in
such a way that a pattern of shadows, elaborate and mysterious,
fell upon the choirstalls, while the great cross on the high altar
glowed like molten gold.

The long haunting had come to an end.

‘
Look at it this way,’ said Hall briskly in his best down-to-earth
voice. ‘There was a mess. You were given the opportunity and the
will to salvage something from it, but the job was hard work and
you wound up bruised. The bruising wasn’t anyone’s fault. It was
just a painful by-product of a rough process.’

The creative process,’ I said. The redemptive process.’

‘
Exactly. I’m sorry, I do realise I’m not telling you anything you
don’t already know — after all, you’re a bishop and a theologian
while I’m just an ordinary priest —’

I had to laugh. ‘Surely not ordinary!’

‘
— but if I can speak as a healer for a moment, I’d say your
prognosis was good. If you can only forgive yourself for surviving
the trauma of 1937 while Jardine went under —’

‘
I forgave myself for surviving a concentration camp. This ought
to be child’s play in comparison.’

‘
Every act of forgiveness has its own problems, but if you can
focus more on your role in redeeming Jardine’s tragedy and less
on your role in being a fatal catalyst —’

‘
I just wish I hadn’t made such a balls-up of the redemption.’

‘
Are you sure you’re not judging yourself too harshly? Maybe
you haven’t played your part quite as perfectly as you’d wish, but
human beings aren’t perfect, are they, and an unrealistic obsession
with achieving perfection can cause a lot of trouble.’

‘
Perhaps even my imperfections here can in the end be made
good.’ I thought of Charley, set free at last to evolve into the priest
he was designed to be, and suddenly I saw that Jardine’s tragedy
was still being redeemed because the creative process was still at
work; only the final pattern of all our completed lives would show
the full breadth and depth of the redemption, and now I had to
settle for seeing mere fragments of light, through a glass darkly.

I levered myself to my feet.

‘Feeling better?’ said Hall.

‘
Much improved.’ I shed the cope of gold and scarlet brocade
and handed it to him. ‘Put that back while I return the vase.’

But Hall took away the vase as well as the cope so I was able
to sit down again and think of Charley, whom I had lost bur
gained. In relinquishing him to Jardine I had given up the doting
son who was secretly so fearful of displeasing me; I had given up
the self-centred ‘reward’ which I had carved out for myself at his
expense. But in giving him up I had saved him, and in saving him I would gain the real Charley, my God-given reward, the son who
I knew would make me justly proud.

By the time Hall returned I was reciting aloud to myself: ‘"For
whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose
his life for my sake, the same shall save it."‘

‘
You must be feeling better,’ said Hall. ‘You’re reciting one of
your absolute truths.’

‘Hardly mine.’ I snuffed out the candle in front of me and added: ‘Where’s that torch of yours?’

He switched it on. We blew out the remaining candles. The
Cathedral was finally still.

I said: ‘He’s gone away.’

‘
Yes, but he might still be tempted to come back in a day or
two to make sure you’re all right. We’ll say a mass for him later
to provide the necessary reassurance and send him on his journey
home.’

‘
You felt his presence here?’

‘Of course.’

I suddenly realised not only that we had been talking like mad
men but that we had been talking like madmen for some time.
How could I have conceivably participated in such a demented
dialogue? Had I really forgotten my years as a professor at Cam
bridge? What on earth had happened to my highly-trained, rational
mind? Drenched in embarrassment I managed to say airily to Hall:
‘Of course all this is an extended metaphor. My description of
going to the Cathedral to meet Jardine was simply an attempt to express my neurosis by the use of poetic imagery. And just now
when I uttered the words "He’s gone away" what I was really
saying was: "The oppressive burden of this particular emotional
complex has been lifted from my mind" — and when you said you’d
felt Jardine’s presence here, what you really meant was: "Your distress arising from this emotional complex was very obvious
to me."‘

Hall adopted his politest expression and said with the slightly
laboured air of a man employing enormous diplomatic skill: ‘Well done, Bishop. Splendidly phrased.’

I did look at him suspiciously but decided in the end that further comment would be superfluous.

Outside the moon had risen and I knew that beyond the glare
of the floodlighting the Close would no longer be the landscape
of a nightmare but of a fairytale city, fine-drawn in black and silver.
I began to relax, and by the time Hall had locked the Dean’s
door I felt sufficiently recovered from my embarrassment to say:
‘I’m most extremely grateful to you. Forgive me for not inviting
you back to the South Canonry for a drink after all your hard
work, but I must go straight to Starrington Magna to talk to Jon
Darrow.’

Hall was horrified. ‘You can’t possibly do such a thing!’ he said
at once. ‘You’ve been through a huge emotional and spiritual crisis
— you should go to bed for at least twelve hours to recover!’

‘
Later.’ I began to plough purposefully across the sward.

‘
Just a minute,’ said Hall, hurrying after me.
‘Just a minute.
If you seriously think you’re fit enough to drive to Starrington, you
need to be certified,-chloroformed and taken to the nearest mental hospital!’

‘
Nonsense! I’m all right now.’

‘But why can’t you see Father Darrow tomorrow?’

‘
Tomorrow may never come. If I went to bed for twelve hours
I wouldn’t sleep because I’d be so worried that I might die before
I’ve told him that I now understand how to make everything come
right in another problem I have.’

‘
Okay, I give up. I’ll drive you to Starrington.’

‘I assure you"

‘
Bishop, if you were to crash your car and kill yourself in a wave
of exhaustion, how do you think I’d feel?’

I gave in. I was too anxious to see Jon to waste time in argument.,
Leaving the Cathedral behind us at last, we crossed the lawn to
the North Walk where Hall had left his car.