Absolute Truths by Susan Howatch Read Free Book Online Page A

work of the Devil after all, steering me into a deep depression which would render me useless to God. I did recover from this neurotic suspicion and I did eventually settle down, but for a long while I pined for Cambridge, particularly for the intellectual companionship of my colleagues.
    However, there were compensations. I found that in my new life there was less venom directed at me and more respect – in fact there was no venom at all. Although arguments between Christians can be extremely heated, people do usually refrain from being venomous to a bishop. In the bitter feuds which periodically ruffle the surface of academic life, no one is exempt from venomous attack, least of all professors of divinity whose very existence rep resents an affront to the atheists.
    This lack of venom in my new job made committee work less tiring. I was also soothed by the deference shown to me whenever I ventured into the Palace of Westminster to attend the House of Lords or whenever I made a visit to one of the parishes in my diocese. But being a revered figurehead can be a lonely business and the dark side of all the deference was the isolation. Looking back I can see that this was when my marriage entered a new phase of intimacy and interdependence: increasingly I found that in my daily life I could only be my true self, relaxed and at ease, with Lyle. Of course I could also be myself with my spiritual director, now only twelve miles away at Starrington Magna, but Jon had become a recluse after his wife’s death in 1957, and although I did visit him regularly he never came to Starbridge. Apart from my wife I was on my own in that gilded cage of a Cathedral Close.
    At last I pulled myself together. Realising that moping for Cambridge and bewailing my loneliness was all very self-centred, spiritually immature behaviour, I managed to stop thinking about myself and start thinking instead of how I could best serve God – a move which meant I poured myself into my work as I embarked on a massive programme of reform.
    I started with the Theological College. It had begun life in the nineteenth century as an independent institution, cushioned by an endowment which permitted only modest fees to be charged, but in the twentieth century mismanagement and rising costs had brought it under the control of the diocese and the bishop was always one of the governors. I not only increased the diocesan grant which supplemented the now almost worthless endowment, but I also pushed the diocese into taking out a loan so that the premises could be improved and expanded. My fellow-governors, long accustomed to dozing at meetings of the board, were stunned by my activities but no one dared oppose me; they realised that no bishop of Starbridge had ever been so well qualified as I was to pump new life into that place, and besides, when I produced the evidence that showed the institution had become a moral disgrace they were so shocked that they almost fell over themselves to give me carte blanche.
    I took a similar line with the diocese itself, which was also in a most sluggish and decayed state. My predecessor as bishop, I regret to say, had reputedly died of inertia. In the 1930s Alex Jardine had set the diocese alight with his dynamism, but after his retirement the authorities had taken fright and appointed mild-mannered nonentities to the Starbridge bishopric with the inevitable, enervating results. Dr Ottershaw, Dr Jardine’s suc cessor, had at least allowed himself to be organised by an efficient archdeacon, but Bishop Flack, my immediate predecessor, had made a disastrous archidiaconal appointment and the diocese had become slothful. How quickly men become demoralised when their leaders fail to be crisp, conscientious and hard-working! At least my years in the army had taught me that particular lesson. Having woken everyone up by shaking them, metaphorically speaking, until their teeth rattled, I embarked on a plan of radical reorganisation.
    All this