Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch Read Free Book Online

sinking heart that I was going to have to leave Cambridge. Ecclesiastical Starbridge begged, the Archbishop ordered, the letter from Downing Street arrived and the Queen smiled. I was doomed.
    I had already turned down two bishoprics. Contrary to what many laymen think, not all clergymen aspire to high office, and because of my lack of parish experience and my success in academic life I had had no trouble accepting the idea that I would spend the rest of my working life as a divinity professor. However a call from God is a call from God, and since my duty was to serve my Maker, not to sulk impertinently, I made a big effort to regard the radical rewriting of my future in a positive light.
    The diocese lay in the south of England, in the half of the country where I belonged, so I knew I could settle there without feeling like a foreigner. (I have never been at ease north of Cambridge.) Starbridge was set in beautiful countryside yet was only an hour and a half by train from London. There was a seat immediately available in the House of Lords, a fact which ensured I had an influential platform on which to expound my views on education, and there was even a theological college crying out in the Cathedral Close for reform by a divinity professor. (This was the main reason why I was considered uniquely suited for the job and why Archbishop Fisher told me brusquely to ‘stop bleating on and on about Cambridge’.) Indeed the bishopric was far from being an unattractive prospect and I could see the job would pro vide me with an exciting challenge. Yet still my misgivings remained.
    ‘ You don’t want to go back there, do you?’ I said to Lyle when I was still agonising about the decision, but Lyle stunned me by replying: ‘Why not?’ Apparently she was now unperturbed by memories of her love affair. °The 1930s are another world,’ she said, ‘and we don’t live in that world any more.’ She also admitted she was only too keen to leave behind the twittering gossips of Cambridge who had thrived on the scandal of Charley’s birthday brainstorm.
    ‘ ... and then there’s the matter of the curtains,’ she added as an afterthought.
    ‘ What curtains?’
    ‘ I ordered the curtains for Carrie when the Jardines moved from P adbury to Starbridge in 1932. I remember fingering the material in the shop and dreaming that I was the bishop’s wife, ordering the curtains for my very own episcopal palace — and isn’t it nice to think my dream’s finally going to come true?’
    I was amazed. I could quite see that there was a certain pleasure to be derived from the fact that Lyle would be returning in triumph as the bishop’s wife to the Cathedral Close where she had once been no more than a paid companion, but I was still so taken aback by her unambivalent enthusiasm that I could only say: ‘We won’t be living in the palace where you lived with the Jardines.’
    ‘ Yes, isn’t that fortunate! No poignant memories of Alex and Carrie to make me weepy – and anyway the palace was hell to run. The South Canonry will be much easier.’
    I retreated into a baffled silence.
    ‘ It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ I said to my spiritual director during an emergency conference with him.
    ‘ Is it, Charles?’
    ‘ Well, she seems to have forgotten everything – except that she can’t have done because she talks of finally exorcising the past.’
    ‘I think we can acquit her of amnesia. Perhaps the truth is that she herself has come to terms with the past and hopes that in Starbridge you’ll be able to come to terms with it too.’
    ‘ But I came to terms with it years ago! It’s all tucked neatly away in the nostalgia drawer alongside Edward the Eighth, Jack Buchanan, Harold Larwood and Shirley Temple!’
    The conversation closed.
    IV
    I confess I took some time to adjust to being a bishop. In fact I even went through a phase of thinking I had made an appalling mistake and that my manipulation out of Cambridge had been the