Mystical Paths - Susan Howatch

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my father had been his spiritual director since 1937. There were very few people my father saw any more, but the Bishop was one of them. Uncle Charles kept an eye on my father. He had also kept an eye on me since my mother’s death, and he regularly invited me to the South Canonry, the bishop’s official residence in the Cathedral Close.

      During his Cambridge days the undergraduates had nicknamed him Anti-Sex Ashworth because of the hard line he always took against sexual transgression, but I had long since sensed, by that mysterious process so difficult for any psychic to describe, that he wasn’t anti-sex at all but a man of the world who, somewhere along the line, had encountered a sexual catastrophe which had made him feel called to hammer out repeated warnings about how dangerous immorality could be. Seeking help from a conservative bishop tough on sexual sin – the bishop who would shortly be ordaining me – might seem as suicidal as putting my head in a lion’s mouth, but I felt I needed someone morally tough to beat me into shape, just as I needed a priest who could tackle a sex-mess without flinching. I wasn’t sure how much to tell him – obviously the minimum, but how minimal was the minimum? – and I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to tell him anything, but all I knew was that I had to try.

      I called him ‘Uncle Charles’ because my father belonged to the generation who thought children should address their parents’ close friends by courtesy titles. When I reached twenty-one the Bishop had invited me to drop the title, but this had proved impossible. He was so formidably elegant and distinguished, and his date of birth in 1900 was so very far removed from mine.

      ‘Well, Nicholas!’ he said, giving me his best smile as we settled ourselves in his study after the ritual exchange of small-talk. Uncle Charles’s best smile always reminded me of a toothpaste advertisement. It flashed with great effect on television whenever he was hauled on to discussion programmes to oppose the permissive society.

      ‘Well, Uncle Charles!’ I responded warily, trying to beat back a burst of fright.

      ‘How are things going?’ enquired the Bishop, laying on the charm with a shovel in an effort to put me at ease.

      ‘Great!’ I said, feeling more nervous than ever.

      ‘Splendid!’ exclaimed the Bishop with enthusiasm.

      We eyed each other in silence for some seconds while the Bishop kept his smile nailed in place and I struggled to master my panic, but at last I managed to say: ‘Uncle Charles, I wanted to see you because, well, I thought, that’s to say, wondered if you might possibly, sort of, well, you know, help me.’

      ‘My dear Nicholas, of course!’ said the Bishop, still oozing the charm which was such a famous feature of his public persona, but beyond this routine response I could sense his real self unfolding in a spontaneous surge of concern. The Bishop had an interesting psyche where sensitivity and an idealistic nature were kept under ruthless control by his first-class intellect and his considerable sophistication. Yet this complex personality, which could have produced a divided man, was seamlessly integrated. The glittering public persona was the servant, not the master of his true self beyond; its job was not to impress people but to create a shield behind which his true self had the privacy to flourish.

      I hadn’t the experience in 1968 to put this judgement into words, but I did know by instinct that I had to ignore that toothpaste smile and the oozy charm in order to address myself to the genuinely sympathetic man beyond.

      ‘I’m sort of bothered,’ I said, ploughing on in the incoherent way fashionable among the under-thirties, but then found myself unable to express what bothered me most. With renewed panic I grabbed the next most bothersome subject on my list. ‘I mean, the Theological College seems to be useless to me at the moment, and … well, the truth is I don’t honestly think, to put the matter in a nutshell, it can help me in –’ I hesitated but forced myself to add ‘– in this muddle.’

      ‘My dear Nicholas!’ said the Bishop again, professional charm still well to the fore but his genuine concern now so strong that he quite overlooked the signpost provided by my last three words. ‘But how can the College be useless? It’s the most splendid place – I’ve entirely preserved it from the decadent spirit of the age!’

      ‘Yes, Uncle Charles. Excuse me, sir, but I think that could be the problem: it’s so well-preserved it’s dead. Of course I’m not suggesting it should go all trendy and liberal like some of the other theological colleges –’

      ‘I should think not indeed!’

      ‘– but I do wish the staff were allowed to talk about relevant things sometimes, I mean things that are relevant to Real Life – like, in a manner of speaking, sex. It seems sort of, well, weird to go on and on about Church history and dogmatics yet never once mention –’

      ‘Dear me, you young men of today with your passion for “relevance”! But tell me this: what makes you so sure that what you think is relevant isn’t instead just a passing fashion? Who makes the judgement on what’s relevant, and how is that judgement made? Subjective judgements made under the influence of passing fashion are dangerous, Nicholas. One must keep one’s gaze fixed on absolute truths, not relative values.’

      ‘Sex looks like a pretty absolute truth from where I’m standing, Uncle Charles.’

      “Well, of course it does!’ said the Bishop, shifting ground quickly in order to extricate us from the theological quicksands. ‘Don’t think I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be young!’ Suddenly he got down to business. ‘Okay, I get the message,’ he said, very trendily for a conservative prelate. ‘Girl-trouble, isn’t it?’

      ‘Yep.’

      ‘You’re strongly attracted to a girl and you want to go to bed with her.’

      ‘Um.’ The situation was now so delicate that I could only hold my breath and pray for courage.

      This is a very, very difficult problem,’ said the Bishop, finally casting aside the glittering public persona and speaking straight from the heart with profound sympathy. ‘Far be it from me to underestimate it. As you know, I wholly disapprove of fornication, but I’m also wholly aware how tempting it is to indulge in it. I shan’t regale you with all the familiar arguments because you’ll have encountered them numerous times before – you’ve read Austin Farrer on continence, I assume?’

      ‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

      ‘And Archbishop Ramsey on sex and society?’

      ‘Yes, Uncle Charles.’

      Then since Farrer and Ramsey are better priests than I am I can hardly hope to improve on what they say as they spell out the Christian point of view. So let me take a purely pragmatic – one might almost say worldly – approach. I’ve never been called to celibacy. At various times during my life this has created severe problems for me, but let me now attempt to share the fruits of my experience with you.’

      Clever old Uncle Charles, knowing perfectly well that the ruminations, no matter how truthful, of two saints like Farrer and Ramsey were of little practical use to someone battling away against maxi-erections. With bated breath I waited to sample the fruits of his experience.

      ‘Fornication,’ said the Bishop with superb self-confidence and a total lack of embarrassment, ‘is like Russian roulette – by which I mean it can be tremendously exciting. It gives you all sorts of thrilling delusions about how dashing and masculine you are, but unfortunately the reality is that you may wind up destroyed. Now, that’s not thrilling, that’s not dashing, that’s not even a boost to the masculine ego. It’s just very silly and a tragic waste. Of course you may get away with your adventure; it’s always possible to survive Russian roulette. But why be immature enough to take such a mindless risk once you’re grown up? There’s more to life than getting hooked on adrenalin –’ the Bishop certainly knew how to turn on the trendy vocabulary; moving in the world of television had evidently taught him a thing or two ‘– and smashing up your future for the sake of a night of pleasure just doesn’t make sense, not if you’ve got anything that resembles a brain.’

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