Absolute Truths (93 page)

I retired in 1970 (I think a bishop has a moral duty not to cling
to office once he has lurched into his eighth decade) and after the
inevitable holiday in America we indulged ourselves by settling down in Cambridge. I had forgotten that the winter wind comes
straight from Siberia, but Loretta, with masterly American effi
ciency, solved that problem by installing the very latest gas central
heating system in our house on Maid’s Causeway, keeping the
thermostat permanently at seventy-five (this would have horrified
Lyle, always a thrifty housewife) and sealing the windows by a
process known as ‘double-glazing’. First of all I thought I would suffocate but then I found I was thriving like a hot-house plant.

Loretta says: ‘I’m sure British men have a certain reputation
only because so many of them spend so much time being half-dead
with cold,’ and I find myself bound to agree with her. All the
heat certainly did wonders for my rheumatism and ensured my
continuing agility. I still play a little golf, but not too much. Loretta
said: ‘The other mistake Englishmen make is to waste too much energy on outdoor sport,’ and once again I find myself bound to
agree with her.

Life in Cambridge is most stimulating. We write our books, do
our research at the University Library, enjoy the theatre, the
cinema, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the dinner-parties with my old
friends, the guest-nights at my old college. I still preach occasion
ally. I suppose I do miss my life as a senior churchman, but not
very often. I miss Lyle sometimes, but that’s natural. Loretta
understands. Lyle and I were married for over twenty-seven years
so of course I am going to think of her now and then — and
particularly on our wedding anniversary and on her birthday and on that terrible day when she died. But the day of her death was
the day I began my journey to my new life. I never forget that.
It’s why I can now recall her death with sadness but without
bitterness or anger. In the end, in my new life — because of my
new life — acceptance of her absence came.

Loretta enjoys her own new life immensely, particularly now
that we have left the provincial ways of Starbridge far behind us.
Settling in Starbridge was the sacrifice she made when she married
me, but I made it plain from the start that she was to lead the life
she wanted and that I did not expect her to convert herself into a
stereotypical Mrs Bishop. I thought of Lyle and said: ‘I don’t want
you to sacrifice your life to the task of keeping me going’ — and
indeed, after I had resolved the hidden problems which had so
debilitated me, I had more than enough energy to do my job
without being constantly propped up.

The fact that I encouraged my wife to lead her own life was felt
by some members of the Starbridge clerical establishment to be somewhat shocking, and more than one person hinted that I was
behaving strangely for a traditionalist bishop. Gossip even circu
lated that I had been so undermined by this foreigner that my
mind had been affected, and when I declared robustly during a
visit to the Deanery that it was the height of sanity to acknowledge
that everything changed, even the role of bishops’ wives, Dido
was so infuriated that she declared the marriage would all end in
tears. (‘As I’m famed for my candour, Charles my dear, I consider
it my absolute moral duty to tell you ...’) Before the Aysgarths
left the Close she even had the impertinence to lecture Loretta on
how to be the wife of an eminent clergyman.

‘
Poor little Dido!’ said Loretta with a Christian charity which I
myself was quite unable to summon. ‘Of course she’s jealous of
me because I’m free to be myself while she feels she has to break
herself over and over again to be something she’s not cut out to be
— a clerical wife. Perhaps if I were to find her a really understanding therapist ...’

Having spent years in analysis, Loretta is very keen on psy
chology and the highest compliment she can pay people is to
pronounce them ‘well integrated’. I love being married to an
American. My command of modern phraseology has expanded enormously.

Jon remarked with interest that although a man tends to marry
the same type of woman on repeated trips to the altar, I had proved
to be the exception to this particular trend; not only was Lyle
quite different from Jane, but Loretta was quite different from
either of them. For the first time I am now married to my intellec
tual equal, although I believe I had to reach my mid-sixties before
I felt ready to take on this challenge. In fact if I had married
Loretta in the 1930s I doubt if I could have lived comfortably with either her intellect or her independent disposition. It was
during Lyle’s life that I travelled towards the emotional maturity
which marriage to Loretta required, and it was certainly during
the aftermath of Lyle’s death that I saw my shortcomings as a
husband sufficiently clearly to want to redeem my mistakes.

Loretta says that for a privileged Englishman of the old school
I have come a long way and that I am to be greatly commended
for achieving this rare degree of modernisation; of course, she
adds, my consciousness will never be
‘fully
raised’ but this is with
out doubt a good thing because if I became wholly perfect I would
bore her. Curiosity compels me to ask what I would have to believe
in for my consciousness to be
fully
raised’, and when I receive the
reply: ‘The ordination of women,’ I launch myself into a long and
learned speech explaining why this most intriguing ecclesiastical
step is quite impossible to take.

Loretta just laughs.

I throw a cushion at her but wind up laughing too. Loretta can
always make me laugh. What fun we have together! I must say, I
never in my wildest dreams imagined that old age would be so
amusing.

Jon said to me before he died in 1972: ‘I’m very glad you’re so happy in your marriage, Charles.’ I still miss Jon more than I can
say. With his guidance I think I did finally make a success of that
Starbridge bishopric — a spiritual success instead of merely a
worldly one. In worldly terms it was said that I went soft, lost my
edge, became fuzzy on dogma, but in fact all that happened was
that I stopped proclaiming the absolute truths of Charles Ashworth
and started proclaiming the absolute truths of Jesus Christ. This
annoyed the liberals, since they felt that now I was less authori
tarian I should join their ranks, and it annoyed the conservatives
even more because they felt I had sold out to the liberals, but
when I found I could live very happily with myself as a conservative
liberal — or should I say a liberal conservative? — Jon suggested
that God was not annoyed at all, and that God, in the end, was
the one who mattered.

I daresay I shall still go down in history as a thoroughly tra
ditionalist bishop, but in a decade as radical as the 1960s even the mildest conservative is going to look like a hardened reactionary. Certainly they continued to think of me as a traditionalist at the
Theological College, that jewel of my episcopate, but I still tell
myself that an ultra-conservative hand at the helm was the making
of that place. Or was it? Jon’s son young Nicholas shocked me in
1968 by calling the College ‘dead’, but Nicholas in those days was
such a very odd young man. I am relieved to report that although
he is by no remote stretch of the imagination a conventional priest,
he has settled down well and is currently rated a success as chaplain
of the Starbridge General Hospital. I do wonder sometimes if he
is any more talented than Jon at the delicate art of being a family
m
an, but at least he and his wife have known each other since
childhood so she must have realised exactly what she was taking on. I tell myself I must stop worrying about Nicholas, so instead
I pray regularly for his welfare and hope for the best.

And that, I fear, is also all I can do for that other unconventional priest, Hall — whom, since we have grandchildren in common, I
nowadays call Lewis. Desmond Wilton has long since retired;
oddly enough although I always visualised that Lewis would look
after Desmond, the reverse proved to be the case and in the end
it was Desmond, with his prayerful life and basic spiritual stability,
who looked after Lewis. Once Desmond had retired, Lewis’s
behaviour became more erratic and in 1973, when Rachel had
barely recovered from her nervous breakdown, he turned up dead
drunk at the small family dinner-party which Charley had organ
ised to celebrate her birthday.

By chance I was there on my own (Loretta was recuperating in
Cambridge from a cold) and in the disruption which followed
Lewis’s arrival it was I who rescued him, took him to the club in
London where I was staying and sat up with him in my bedroom
until he passed out. Amidst all the inebriated nonsense he talked
(he even insisted that Father Darcy was possessing him in revenge
for Lewis’s decision not to become a Fordite monk!) he embarked
on a story which I soon realised was the story Charley refused to
tell me, the story of the ‘violent death’ which lay at the root of
Rachel’s breakdown.

I think it quite unnecessary for me to recount this florid tale. It
is far more important to state that I did not for one moment
believe it. Some violent incident happened, I have no doubt of that, and whatever happened was dreadful; I have no doubt of
that either. Obviously Rachel had been traumatised and Lewis was
now beside himself with guilt because he had decided to cover up the disaster in the mistaken belief that this would be the best thing
for his daughter, but evidently the whole episode was so dreadful that even in his very inebriated state Lewis was unable to tell me
the truth. He said Rachel had been visiting a country church and
had disturbed a drunken tramp who had committed suicide by
cutting his throat in front of her. Of all the improbable stories!
And Lewis could not even remember the name or location of the
church! However, summoning all my pastoral skill I told myself
that the facts of the case were at that moment unimportant; all
that mattered was that I had been presented with a distressed man
who needed help in easing his guilt.

Firmly I said: ‘You did what you sincerely believed to be ethically
justifiable at the time. None of us can do more than that when we
have to grapple with an appalling crisis, and the instinct to protect
our children from further pain after they’ve suffered greatly is very
strong. You may now feel that the price you and Rachel have paid for your decision was high, but that still needn’t mean the decision was wrong; any decision in such an agonising dilemma was likely
to prove costly.’ And I told him of my days as a prisoner of war
when I had learnt that a situation could be so difficult, so riddled
with moral dilemmas, that a strict legalistic solution was inad
equate. ‘So don’t judge yourself too harshly,’ I urged. ‘Offer the
incident to God, offer your repentance for your part in it, and
then let your guilt go before it corrodes you any further.’

To my relief Lewis found this approach helpful, but when he had sobered up he was horrified that he had disclosed even a
fantasy version of the great trauma, and I have no doubt he regret
ted confiding in me. By that time I was wondering if the incident might have arisen from an exorcism which had gone horrifically wrong. I had forbidden Lewis to conduct the exorcism of people without my permission, but I thought he might well have disobeyed me for some reason which had seemed overwhelmingly
right at the time. A botched exorcism would certainly have
explained his extreme guilt about Rachel — but what on earth had
Rachel been doing at any exorcism, botched or otherwise? I did
tentatively say to Lewis later on: ‘If there’s anything else you’d like
to tell me about the disaster in 1968...’ but he looked so appalled
by the suggestion that I knew I would never learn the whole truth.
And perhaps that was just as well.