Absolute Truths (95 page)

Just as I wrote in my memoir of 1937: ‘I came at last to
Starbridge ...’ so now I write nearly forty years later in the other half of the twentieth century: we
all
came at last to Starbridge, radiant, ravishing Starbridge, and we all took our seats in the
Cathedral, all of us, the living and the dead, the echoes from the
past mingling with the flesh and blood of the present to fore
shadow the shimmering possibilities of the future. We came to the
Cathedral to mourn the dead, but in our mysterious world of being
and becoming, death and resurrection are perpetually linked; the
present falls away into the past in a succession of timeless moments,
but the future opens up ahead of us even as the present dies before
our eyes.

The funeral service opens with the famous words ‘I am the
Resurrection and the Life,’ the words of the Eternal Christ of
St John’s Gospel as he begins to define the absolute truths of
human existence. We die; indeed we have to die in order to be
resurrected, restored and renewed. We die and we die and we die in this life, not only physically – within seven years every cell in
our body is renewed – but emotionally and spiritually as change
seizes us by the scruff of the neck and drags us forward into another
life. We are not here simply to exist. We are here in order to
become. It is the essence of the creative process; it is in the deepest nature of things.

‘
But no matter how firmly one believes that death is always
followed by renewal and resurrection,’ Aysgarth had written in his
funeral instructions, ‘there can be no denying it’s sad to say good
bye in this life and this sadness shouldn’t be glossed over. So please
– don’t give me one of those ghastly memorial services where
everyone exudes false jollity and behaves as if they’ve just dropped
in on a Saturday matinée! On the other hand I don’t want a
funeral which is one long dirge from beginning to end. Let’s have
a suitably sombre start, please, but let the final hymn be "Thine
Be The Glory", and before Charley gives the address let’s get the
choir to sing one of the great anthems written not for a funeral
but for a coronation – let’s rejoice in the coronation message that an ordinary man can become someone special, sanctified by God
for a new life – let’s raise the Cathedral roof with
Zadok the Priest!’

The organ began to play the anthem’s long introduction, and as I listened to the pattern of the notes forming and re-forming
the cadence which led to the mighty entry of the choir, the
Cathedral began to come alive, no longer a sinister animal from
some medieval bestiary but a radiant city from some medieval book
of hours, pointing beyond itself, as all great works of art do, to
the ultimate values and absolute truths of our being and our
becoming and our journeying into eternity.

I looked up the nave. I looked at the vaulted ceiling far above
me, but in my mind’s eye I saw the whole Cathedral; I saw the
transepts and the chapels, the choir and the sanctuary, the vestry
and the sacristy, the chapter house and the cloisters, the library
and the cloister garth; I saw the tower vault, the black Purbeck
marble pillars, the triforium, the clerestory, the pulpit, the lectern,
the high altar; I saw the statues and the carvings and the tablets
and the glass – stained glass, plain glass, dim glass, clear glass –
and I saw the arches, narrow arches, perpendicular arches, pointed
arches and most arresting of all the strainer arches, which sup
ported the great weight of the spire – and beyond the roof of the
nave, above the massive block ‘of the tower, the spire itself was
rising and rising and rising, yard after yard, foot after foot, inch after inch, upwards and upwards and upwards until at last it had
tapered to the point which supported the cross.

And as in my mind I saw the cross on the top of the spire, my
eyes saw the cross on the altar and the cross formed by the transepts
and the cross hanging on the wall behind the pulpit. Everywhere
was the cross, the intersection of the temporal with the eternal, the symbol of suffering redeemed and horrors forgiven and darkness
conquered by the Lord and Giver of all life, the Creator of all
things.

The organist was almost at the end of the anthem’s long intro
duction, and as the crescendo increased the Cathedral began to
glitter before my eyes until I felt as if every stone in the building
was vibrating in anticipation of the sweeping sword of sound from
the Choir.

The note exploded in our midst, and at that moment I knew
our creator had touched not only me but all of us, just as Harriet
had touched that sculpture with a loving hand long ago, and in
that touch I sensed the indestructible fidelity, the indescribable
devotion and the inexhaustible energy of the creator as he shaped
his creation, bringing life out of dead matter, wresting form con
tinually from chaos. Nothing was ever lost, Harriet had said, and nothing was ever wasted because always, when the work was finally
completed, every particle of the created process, seen or unseen,
kept or discarded, broken or mended –
everything
was justified,
glorified and redeemed. Then I thought, as I looked around the
Cathedral, of the pattern our creator had made of us as he had
toiled to shape the dark with the light in such a way that our
suffering was given meaning, the meaning which gave value to
our lives.

‘
Reality is a kingdom of values,’ someone had written long ago before the war, but I could not quite remember who it was (Charles
Raven? Dean Inge?) and in the past I heard Jon say more than
once: ‘Reality is spiritual.’ Then the thought of Raven and Inge
took me back to the world of the Church of England before the
war, and as I looked up into the pulpit I remembered Alex Jardine
declaiming there in 1937: "For what shall it profit a man, if he
shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"‘ I could see him clearly in my memory, and I could hear his voice too – and
the next moment I was back in his episcopal palace, in that old-
fashioned drawing-room, and my hostess Carrie Jardine was talk
ing about the weather.

The memories streamed on. I saw Carrie Jardine’s brother
Colonel Cobden-Smith; he was listening to his dogmatic wife who talked so much about India, and out of the corner of my eye I could
see Lady Starmouth, who had taken such a benevolent interest not
only in me but in Aysgarth, and beyond Lady Starmouth I saw
her husband the Earl – at which point my memory of the Jardines’
drawing-room was replaced by my memory of the Earl fishing by
the river which flowed past the end of the palace garden, and as my mind shifted from scene to scene I saw Lyle saying: ‘Dr Ash
worth? I’m Miss Christie, Mrs Jardine’s companion,’ while on a
Surrey hillside Loretta talked of a painful past – and the thought
of painful pasts reminded me then of my father, talking in his
greenhouse of his past suffering – which enabled me to see my
parents through new eyes – and the next moment I was meeting
someone else who was to be so important to me. ‘Dr Ashworth,’
said my friend Alan Romaine as we came face to face for the first
time, but before I could hear my reply the scene shifted yet again
so that I found myself confronting another stranger, and Jon,
dressed in his monk’s habit, was sweeping into the visitors’ parlour
at his Grantchester monastery to make his rand entrance into
my life.

I suddenly realised that the anthem had ended and that Charley
was standing at last in the pulpit where his father – both his fathers
– had stood before him.

"‘And we know that all things work together for good ..."‘
My memory changed gears and moved on; the recent past eased
the remote past aside, and I heard Lyle asking me why I had
formed the habit of scribbling on my blotter that same quotation
from St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. Then I heard myself repeating those words automatically in the seconds after her death, and I remembered how I had recoiled from them in horror by flinging
the bottle of whisky against the wall.

But the recent past vanished again as Charley began to speak in
Jardine’s strong, harsh voice, and again I could see only the mem
ories of 1937, the good memories still good, the bad memories
still bad, but intermingling together now to form a pattern which
had transformed my life.

‘
"And we know,"‘ declared Charley, translating the passage
just as Aysgarth had wished, ‘"that all things
intermingle
for
g
ood ..."‘

Then suddenly the pre-war years disappeared over the horizon in my mind as I saw myself officiating in 1940 at Jon’s marriage
to Anne Barton-Woods – and later Jon was giving me his blessing
before I went overseas – and after the war there he was again,
recurring in my life as the bearer of the light which would eventu
ally create a meaningful pattern out of the vile darkness of my
prison experiences – and thinking of those war years reminded me
how physically debilitated I was afterwards – which called to mind
my
visit
to a London doctor for a check-up – which in turn
reminded me of the call I had paid afterwards at the headquarters
of the Fordite monks.

I saw myself talking to Francis Ingram, meeting Aidan Lucas, hearing (of course!) about Father Darcy, and suddenly Aysgarth
was there, visiting the Fordites at the same time as I was – which
was so very odd (and I could remember the exact quality of my
surprise) because Aysgarth was such a Protestant that he normally
had no time for the monks of the Church’s Catholic wing – and
the next moment I was remembering my row with Aysgarth in
the dining-room of Starrington Manor when I had smashed my
glass in the grate ... Yet it had been Aysgarth, my enemy, who
had helped me to come to terms with God’s apparent absence in
the prison-camp by offering a denial of that absence, a denial which had made me think afresh and set me on the road to recovery.

"All things work together for good ..."‘
Charley was performing
the oratorical trick of allowing each line of thought to reach an
identical end in order to hammer home his text, but I hardly heard
him because my memory had jumped forward to 1957, the year
Aysgarth and I had received our preferments to Starbridge, and I
was meeting him again at Lord Flaxton’s London townhouse in
Lord North Street. I could remember Lady Flaxton talking about
her plants and Lord Flaxton insisting that the country was going
to the dogs – and there was Lyle, I could see her so clearly in one
of her little black dresses, and she was talking to her protégée
Venetia whose unhappiness was to generate the prayer-group.

How interlinked we all were, moving in and out of each other’s
lives – and often getting into such unchristian messes ... And I
saw myself confronting Aysgarth in 1963 as we argued about the sculpture he proposed to install in the Cathedral churchyard – an
argument which had taken me to Harriet’s studio where I had at
once decided that the sculpture was capable of a pornographic
interpretation – which I had outlined to my old friend Jack Ryder who had chortled: ‘Anti-Sex Ashworth rides again!’ – and finally
1963 flowed into 1965 so that I was again viewing sculpture with Harriet in her studio.

At that point, as I allowed my gaze to wander around the congregation, I saw Harriet herself, still remarkably alluring despite her advancing years. Chastely dressed in a smart black suit she saw me
looking at her and remained poker-faced both before and after she
had given me a wink. That sculpture of Aysgarth’s hands is gener
ally considered to be her masterpiece. Strange to think that if
Aysgarth had never renewed his friendship with her in order to
pursue his innovative fund-raising, that magnificent work of art
would never have been created.

"And we know that
ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER
FOR GOOD ..."‘