Absolute Truths (9 page)

‘
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
skim, and I said more violently than I intended: ‘Pornography
degrades the human spirit — literally de-grades, 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 pornogra
phy 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 cer
tainly 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 dis
cuss," 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
g
ot 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 nook 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.

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 experi
ments 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 sport
ing 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 Christ
mas, 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
dinosaur who had become a father too late in life to understand
anyone under thirty. This could well have been true but no active m
an on the wrong side of sixty likes to hear himself described in
such disparaging terms. However, Michael had promised Lyle last Christmas that he would never call me a dinosaur again.

It was a pity he had not also promised to end his association
with his American mistress. Miss Kauffman, whose first name (I
cannot describe it as Christian) was Lurlene, had called herself
Dinkie at an early age as the result of misunderstanding the slurred
speech of her inebriated mother. The latter was supposed to have
held out her empty glass with the plea: ‘Dinkie darling!’ and her
offspring, obediently refilling the glass with gin, had not realised
until much later that the word ‘Dinkie’ had referred to the drink.
One always had to remember, when contemplating Miss Kauff
man, that her early life had been far from ideal.

As she stood on my doorstep on that February evening in 1965
she could have been any age between eighteen and thirty, although
she had taken care to tell Michael she was two years his junior.
She had a figure which she was careful to expose in all weathers, and as soon as she took off her coat I saw that the hemline of her tight black skirt lay well above her knees while the V-neck of her
tight black sweater plunged recklessly in the direction of her navel.
In short, she looked like the tart she was, and Michael had been
keeping her for some months at his flat in London. I had assumed
in the beginning that he had picked her up on the street, but had
learnt later to my astonishment that he had met her through his
friend Marina Markhampton, the notorious young socialite whose
grandmother, Lady Markhampton, was one of my neighbours in
the Cathedral Close. Apparently Dinkie had once had a temporary
job in the art gallery where Marina worked, and Marina, spotting
someone who would amuse her fast set, had taken a fancy to her.

After the job in the art gallery had ceased, Dinkie had made no
attempt to find other employment. Uneducated, culturally illiterate
and vulgar beyond belief, she walked
as
if parodying Marilyn Mon
roe and spoke in a purring voice which injected even the most
innocent statement with a sexual innuendo. Michael, of course,
thought she was quite wonderful.

‘
Hot news!’ he
was
exclaiming to Lyle, who by this time had joined us in the hall. ‘And I’ve gone AWOL from the Beeb for
twenty-four hours to break it to you!’

‘
We would have called you,’ purred Miss Dinkie, ‘but we wanted
it to be a lovely, lovely surprise!’

I saw Lyle’s smile freeze. I myself
was aware
of shivering lightly, like a tree ruffled by a Siberian breeze, and as the chill of under
standing smote me, Michael slipped his arm around Dinkie’s waist
and announced in triumph: ‘We’re going to get married!’

I could almost hear Lyle thinking: over my dead body. But all
she said in an emotional voice was: ‘Darling!’ This struck me as
an immensely clever response, astonished, affectionate but commit
ting her to nothing.

‘
Well, well, well!’ I said, aching with rage behind my most
charming smile. I tried and failed to utter some other banality, and
Lyle, seeing I was in difficulties, immediately made the decision to
ease me from the scene.

‘
Well, don’t just stand there, Charles!’ she said to me. ‘Plunge
down into the cellar and get the champagne! Now, Michael, take
Dinkic into the drawing-room to get warm while I go into the kitchen to inspect the deep-freeze. We must all have a lavish
dinner!’

This cunning manoeuvre enabled us to wind up together within
seconds behind the closed kitchen door.

‘What on earth are we going to do?’ I was in despair.’Don’t worry, leave this entirely to me.’

‘I just can’t understand how he could possibly —’

‘
There are two explanations: either he’s doing it to drive you
round the bend -- which doesn’t seem likely since you’ve done
nothing lately to infuriate him — or else she’s got her claws sunk
so deeply into him that he can’t work out how to shake her off
and he’s come down here for help.’

‘You mean she might be pregnant?’

‘
Good heavens, no, that type would never put her figure at risk!
But she might have made Michael think she was.’

‘
I suppose it’s just possible that she could be genuinely in love
with him —’

‘
Love?
That sort of cheap floozie wouldn’t even know the meaning
of the word! She’d think it meant having sex three times a day.’

‘
But could Michael perhaps be genuinely in love with her?’

‘
Don’t be idiotic, Charles — how could he be when he’s lived with her long enough to exhaust her very limited possibilities?
Now don’t panic — this is what we do: first of all we serve cham
pagne and exude charm. Then once the champagne’s disappeared
I’ll bear Dinkie off to my sitting-room and — oh good heavens,
there goes the doorbell again!’

‘That really must be Malcolm. Shall I —’

‘
Yes, you whisk Malcolm into your study and I’ll tackle the
love-birds single-handed. On second thoughts I can probably
handle them better if you’re not there.’

We parted, she descending the cellar steps to fetch the cham
pagne, I hurrying back across the hall. Once more I flung wide
the door to welcome my archdeacon, and once more I found myself
receiving a far from pleasant surprise.

My next visitor proved to be Dido Aysgarth, the wife of my
enemy, the Dean.