Absolute Truths (23 page)

PART TWO
.·

ONE

‘
Crosses and wreaths can be made to order, and that is a very
comforting thought; for when something so u
n-m
ade-to-o
rder as death turns up, it is a pathetic sort of consolation
for us to switch our attentions on to something that can be
made to order.’

AUSTIN FARRER

Warden of Keble College, Oxford, 1960-1968

Said or Sang

Dimly I began to realise that I was quite alone.

All my employees were absent from the house so no one heard
me
when I shouted Lyle’s name over and over again, and no one
saw me when I crawled off my knees after the failure of my attempt
to revive her. For some time I sat on the edge of the sofa where
she had been waiting for me. Wholly disabled by shock I could
do nothing else. The silence in the room became profound.

At last I realised I had to summon the doctor, but the act of
making a telephone call seemed beyond my power to accomplish.
I stared at the bottle of whisky, standing beside the sandwiches
which Lyle had made for me, but I was unable to pick it up. The
terrible silence went on and on and on.

In the end a primitive psychological mechanism, an antidote to
shock, began to operate in my mind. I denied the death. Telling
myself that Lyle could be revived in hospital I found I was able to summon not only my local doctor but an ambulance. Then I
poured myself a small whisky. My hand was quite steady.

The silence closed in on me again
as
I waited, and after a while
I knelt down by Lyle’s body again to see if she showed signs of recovering from her unprecedented fainting fit. I
even
took her
hand in mine as if to escort her back to consciousness. When she still failed to revive I knew I was on the brink of panic but
decided to calm myself by reciting my current mantra. Then ‘
would be in control of my emotions, in control of my surround
ings, in control of all I had to be in control of, in control of du
uncontrollable.

"‘All things work together for good,’ I said aloud, "to their
that love God."‘

The silence instantly consumed the words but they
remained
echoing obscenely in my consciousness.

All things work together for good .. .

I looked down at Lyles body and thought: what good can ever
come out of this? But God did not answer; God had slipped over
the edge of the horizon; God had been driven away by the immense
darkness which now surrounded me on all sides.

I had moved from shock to denial, but now my denial dissolved
into rage.

All things work together for good —

‘
No!’ I shouted. ‘No, no, NO!’ And seizing the bottle of whisky
I hurled it with all my strength at the nearest wall.

Of course I cleaned up the mess straight away. I cleaned it up
before the ambulance arrived, of course I did; after all, I was the
bishop, I had to behave in a certain way, the tradition had to be
upheld and I had to set an example to my community. I knew
that. I knew it
as
I swept up the broken glass, I knew it
as
I
scrubbed the carpet with a floor-cloth, I knew it as I held the
electric iron close to the wall to dry out the wallpaper. I knew it
as the ambulance men arrived, I knew it as I explained that in the
shock I had spilled a little whisky, nothing much, sorry the room smelled like a public bar, all such a shock, but never mind, I was
sure they quite understood. ‘I suppose she’s in some sort of coma,’
I said, slipping away from reality again as I struggled to endure
their presence, and I thought of the story of Jairus’s daughter and
how the Liberal Modernists had speculated that she had been not dead but deeply unconscious when she had been healed by Jesus
all those years ago in Palestine. Then I heard one of the ambulance men suggest that I should have a brandy and I realised with dismay
that I was presenting a disordered image to these strangers who
were being so helpful.

‘
I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Don’t need brandy. Didn’t have it when
I was a POW, shan’t have it now. Just get her to hospital and put
her in an iron lung or something to help her breathe.’ And as I
spoke I was remembering the concentration camp where chaos
had reigned and God had appeared absent and I had never known
from one day to the next whether I would survive. Then my
memory spun backwards beyond the war — both wars — to my
childhood when again I had lived with uncertainty and never
known from one day to the next if my strict father would decide
to beat me in order to bring me up properly. One had to have
certainties otherwise life became hideous, painful, terrifying. Order
had to be promoted and defended with tenacity. It was a question
of survival.

‘
I’m all right,’ I said later to my doctor — and indeed to everyone
who flocked to my rescue. ‘It’s a terrible shock, but I’ve got every
thing under control.’

I was floundering around in reality now, that violent world
where death tore gaping holes in the fabric of life, but fortunately
my position as bishop meant that I knew how to reduce it to
order. There were rituals to be observed, traditions to be embraced,
standards to be maintained.

Clinging to the formalities like a limpet I began to plan a faultless
funeral.

There were so many people everywhere. I behaved perfectly, saying
all the right things, but I wished the people could be somewhere else. I was surprised how fatigued I became by all those devoted
Christians, caring for me and trying so hard to help. ‘See how
those Christians love one another!’ the pagans had marvelled in
the days of the Early Church, but I discovered I did not want hordes of Christians loving me. I wanted one special Christian
loving me, but she was no longer there.

I went on behaving perfectly. I talked about how wonderful
everyone was being. I even made theological remarks about the
outpouring of grace which can result from a tragedy. No one
would have guessed how alienated I felt, how dislocated, devas
tated and adrift. No one except Jon.

Emerging from his hermitage to see
me he
said: ‘You’re
reminding me of how you were in 1937 when we first met,’ but
I refused to understand and when he saw I could not face this truth he did not press it. Meanwhile everyone was expressing
admiration for my courage in adversity and I felt pleased that I
was managing to have such a well-ordered bereavement – but of
course it was not my true self who was acting the bereaved bishop
to perfection. It was the malign alter ego which back in 1937 at the time of my spiritual crisis I had called my ‘glittering image’.
No wonder Jon had been reminded of the past! The shock of
Lyle’s death had caused such psychological disruption that now
once more the glittering image ran my life while I – I, the
real Charles Ashworth – remained dumb and paralysed in his
shadow.

‘
I’m quite capable of working,’ the glittering image said to my
suffragan and both archdeacons after they had arrived at the South
Canonry to devise a plan for managing the diocese while I was disabled. I even smiled at them, but no one smiled back and I
found their expressions unreadable. Finally my suffragan said in a
tone which I could not quite classify: ‘At least leave everything to us until after the funeral. You must have so much to do.’

The glittering image recognised at once that it would be wrong
to sound ungracious. I heard him say: ‘Very well, if you
insist,
but do please consult me whenever it’s necessary.’

Meanwhile the sympathy letters were arriving in such abundance
that I found I had no time to read them, so I told Miss Peabody
to prepare a file which I could browse through later. That was the
moment when I realised I was worried about Miss Peabody. She
seemed so hushed and docile, not herself at all.

I thought what a relief it was that in contrast to everyone around
me I had my feelings so absolutely in control.

The funeral ran
as
smoothly
as a
royal pageant. At first I had
thought I might ask one of my Cambridge friends to give the
address, but I decided in the end that an academic might be too
cerebral. I felt I wanted someone who was well accustomed to
funerals, someone who had spent his working life as a parish priest,
so I turned to one of my oldest friends, Philip Wetherall, whom
I had met in my twenties. Philip had once been the vicar of Jon’s
parish, Starrington Magna, and was now in charge of two rural
parishes in the north of the diocese after resisting all my attempts
to promote him. At the beginning of our careers we had drifted
apart, and when I had become Archbishop Lang’s chaplain I had
even been arrogant enough to pity Philip
as
he toiled in his obscure
curacy, but those days were long ago and now I could
see
so dearly that he was fulfilled and happy, being exactly the kind of priest he
had been designed to be. In fact occasionally I wondered if the
wheel had turned full circle and he was the one gripped by pity
as he saw me endure so much wear and tear in my bishopric.

I asked Philip not merely to give the address but to conduct the entire service in the Cathedral. As I was concentrating so hard on
playing my part I only heard the occasional phrase, but I knew
the address must be excellent because the silence among the
mourners was so intense. Philip was white-haired now and wore
glasses, but I could still look at him and remember him as he was
in the 1920s when we had drunk beer together and debated the
Modernist heresies of Bethune-Baker, Hensley Henson and
Hastings Rashdall on those long, hot summer evenings so many
years ago.

I was aware of women crying, but their grief did not disturb
me; women are allowed to cry at funerals. Adult males closely
related to the deceased are also allowed a quick tear or two, pro
vided that the tears are shed with discretion, but Michael, unlike
Charley, remained dry-eyed throughout the service. Judging from
the odour of brandy which enveloped him, I assumed he was too
inebriated to be much aware of his surroundings.

I myself had drunk no alcohol since Lyle’s death. Bishops never
relied on alcohol
as a
prop. Bishops merely drank as part of the
social ritual: a small glass of Tio Pepe here and there, a little claret
at the Athenaeum, a single whisky at the end of a long day. A
bishop had to be perfect, perfect, perfect, a model for his flock, a Christian hero on a pedestal – never ‘letting the side down’,
as
we
used to say at school, always ‘playing the game’.

The glittering image – being perfect, perfect, perfect – listened
to Philip reciting the traditional words about resurrection and
thought: quite so. But I –
I,
the real Charles Ashworth – thought:
what do I really believe about life after death?

Yet this was an unacceptable question because it implied uncer
tainty and uncertainty implied a disordered mind, something
which could not be permitted if I wanted to survive that funeral.
I had to think clear, simple, well-ordered thoughts from which all
doubt had been completely eliminated. That was the best way to
manage myself, the best way to lead the flock, the best way to
serve God at this particular time.

God?

In a moment of panic I looked around the Cathedral as if I
could prove his existence by
glimpsing
him
among the mourners
– what a descent into crude anthropomorphism! – but all I saw
were white strained faces registering various degrees of grief. Later
I looked around the cemetery, but there was no hint of his presence
there either and I saw only bare trees, winter skies and frozen
grass. Then I remembered how although God had seemed to be absent from my world during the war, Aysgarth had said to me
on my return home: ‘He couldn’t have been absent if you, a man
of God, were there.’ And as I remembered those words I realised
I was watching Philip as he finished conducting the service. He
was a man of God and he was undoubtedly there – which meant
that God was undoubtedly there too, but how interesting that he
should be manifesting himself not in the bishop who was so busy
‘playing the game’, not in the worldly leader who was so much at
home in the ecclesiastical corridors of power, but in a humble,
elderly country priest – and yes, there was a message for me there,
I could see there was, but I was too damaged to grapple with it.
I could only think of those words of Christ which Philip had
recited: ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, and he that believeth
in me, though he be dead, yet shall he live ...’ And for one
profoundly disorientating moment I felt as if
I
was the one who
was dead and
I
was the one being called to life – only that was a
mad thought, not rational, and had to be shoved to the back of
my mind where it could be forgotten.

The last clod of earth fell on the coffin.

Michael finally shed a tear.

I did put my arm around him, but he pushed it away and turned
aside.