Absolute Truths. Susan Howatch

and that means pain and suffering for innocent people. What are the authorities doing, appointing a man like that to a bishopric? It’s so bad for the Church! All this liberalism’s a disaster. The whole decade’s a disaster. Let me tell you that unless we stand firm and stick to traditional moral values, we’ll all be swept down the drain into hell.’

      ‘Hm,’ said Jon, stroking the cat behind the ears.

      ‘Radbury – Leslie Sunderland – was spouting a lot of drivel which implied sexual permissiveness doesn’t matter. Sometimes I think those liberals don’t know anything about real life at all. Treating sex as no more than a handshake – and saying deviant behaviour should be regarded as normal, even when statistically it can never be normal, never be more than the preference of a small minority – well, it’s all so unreal, such a distortion of all the truth I’ve ever witnessed. When I think, of Lyle and what she went through … How can people say sexual sin is unimportant? How can they say it doesn’t matter? I’ve seen people laid waste by it. It does matter. It matters horribly. All suffering matters, whether it’s the gross kind which exists only in concentration camps or the everyday kind which exists in human relationships. Don’t tell me suffering doesn’t matter! All this liberal-radical blindness to pain makes me sick …

      ‘And talking of sexual sin, I’ve got an appalling problem which has just blown up concerning Desmond Wilton – remember me telling you about Desmond who was booted out of the London diocese after a lavatory disaster? Well, it now turns out that Desmond’s been keeping pornography again, and that ghastly woman Dido Aysgarth’s going around bleating about …’ I outlined the Desmond fiasco. ‘… and the oddest thing happened this morning after I’d returned home from the hospital,’ I said, as the cat put both paws on Jon’s chest and gazed up at him adoringly. ‘Just as I was worrying about finding a suitable locum, this extraordinary priest turns up – early forties, divorced, quite obviously big trouble – and tells me not only that he’s willing to be an Anglo-Catholic locum but that he’s set on muscling his way into my diocese to start a healing centre! Imagine that – a shady wonder-worker on the loose! But do you know what I do? Do I say “no thanks” and dismiss him in double-quick time? No, I don’t! I tell him to come back for another interview! How could I conceivably have been so soft and stupid? The only possible answer is that the Desmond crisis had temporarily deranged me, because of course I can’t possibly do what he wants, it’s out of the question. He says he’s a celibate, but he’s exactly the sort of priest who’d have a sex-life on the quiet when he wasn’t cavorting around exuding charisms in a cassock.

      ‘It’s all Desmond’s fault. If he hadn’t upset me so much – yes, yes, yes, I know he couldn’t help being the victim of random violence, I know I mustn’t be angry with him, but I was so shattered by that pornography – I mean, what can one do with a priest who keeps that sort of stuff, what can one do? Obviously he’ll have to go away and have the appropriate treatment, but I can’t take him back, I just can’t, it’s too much of a risk, and anyway I have to keep up the standards among my clergy, I can’t tolerate that sort of behaviour, it’s letting the side down in the biggest possible way, it’s too devastating for the Church. So I’ll have to sack him, but oh, the strain of it all, the sheer hell of being a bishop sometimes – it all makes me wish yet again that I’d never left Cambridge – all right, I know Cambridge was a narrow, backbiting community in some ways, but I could always escape there into my histories of the Early Church, and here I can’t escape, I hardly ever get the time to write about Hippolytus and Callistus, and I just get angrier and angrier with all these frightful people who seem determined to drive me completely up the wall … Jon, stop making love to that cat and SAY SOMETHING, for heaven’s sake, before I have an apoplectic fit and drop dead!’

      Jon carefully set the cat down on the floor. Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said one word. It was: ‘Forgive.’

      ‘Oh good heavens …’ I had been sitting on the edge of my chair but now I sank back against the upholstery with a groan. ‘It’s all very well for you to say that! You’re a hermit, but I’m out there in the real world and I just can’t afford –’

      ‘Christianity is, of course, a very costly religion,’ said Jon, ‘but I’m sorry to hear you’re finding it too expensive.’

      I groaned again, but in fact I welcomed this austere rebuke, found it bracing – as Jon had known I would. I needed a strong rod to flog me out of the pit of despair. A flimsy switch would have been of no use at all.

      I took a deep breath. The boil had been lanced and the time had come to apply some antiseptic ointment. Calmer now that I had expelled my anger I began my attempt to regard my problems with detachment.

      ‘Very well,’ I said, ‘we’ll set Desmond aside for the moment. There’s a hellish interview in store for me there but at present my task is simply to be a good pastor and ensure he’s properly looked after. I suppose I might just manage to achieve that if I can stop being so self-centred that all I think about is not Desmond’s welfare but my own discomfort. And we’ll set aside the wonder-worker for the moment too; if I employ him as a locum it doesn’t commit me to any fantastic scheme for a healing centre. The really intractable problem is – as usual – Aysgarth. What on earth do I do about that drunken menace at the Deanery?’